Bishops In House of Lords Oppose British Monarch Marrying A Catholic - Maybe They Are Right

Saw this in the Daily Mail  Now Church attacks plan to change laws of succession: Senior bishops share same worries as Charles over 'rushed and risky' proposals .

The article does not go into my major concerns that as a believer in a strong Anglo Sphere in world affairs that I have. The Cramner blog in the past has explored the can of worms that would be opened several times.


This week, at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Australia, David Cameron went where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did not dare: he chipped away at the Act of Settlement 1701. He announced the end of male primogeniture in the Royal succession, and of his intention to lift the ban on the Monarch being married to a Roman Catholic. As His Grace has previously pointed out, such a change will require a raft of historic legislation to be amended. The BBC mentions the Bill of Rights (1689) and the Royal Marriages Act (1772). To these, we must add the Coronation Oaths Act (1688), the Crown in Parliament Act (1689), the Accession Declaration Act (1910) and the rather more sensitive Act of Union (1707), Article 2 of which specifies that Roman Catholics may not ascend the Throne of the United Kingdom. The Treaty of Union 1707 is the founding charter of the United Kingdom. Tamper with this, and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.




Scottish unionist politicians have never wanted this truth out. They have feared the day Scots became aware that the United Kingdom is the creature of a treaty between two equal parliaments: a living, legal document, capable of amendment and adjustment to contemporary needs. These are the unspoken ‘constitutional ripples’ which so haunted Donald Dewar, and the reason successive prime ministers of the United Kingdom and unionist Scottish secretaries of state had no intention of ending the ban on the Monarch either being a Roman Catholic or married to one: they were quite happy to let historically-ignorant politicians continue banging on about the Act of Settlement 1701 when, all along, the hurdle was the Act of Union 1707.

In other words for such a likely symbolic change all sort of mischief might occur that could hurt United Kingdom as to power , influence, and internal integrity.

To put this in American terms imagine a Constitional Convention was convened for just one purpose. But in reality what is stop them once convened from tinkering with much more with our founding doucment and how we are governed.