Lord Chancellor of England, Lord Campbell,
declared, "The evidence which has been given
to us of the Roman law, uncontradicted as it is,
would prove that a marriage at Rome of
English Protestants, according to the rites of their
own Church, would be recognised as a marriage
by the Roman law, and therefore would be a
marriage all over the world. But when we
come to the Royal Marringe Act, it seems to
me that there is an insuperable bar to the
validity of the marriage." Such was the unanimous
opinion and decision of the Peers; annulment,
by this most immoral law, of a Protestant
marriage between British-born subjects, which
even the Romish Church would recognise.

The Duke of Sussex, long after the death of
his first wife, entered into a second marriage
with the Lady Cecilia Letitia Gore, the widow
of Sir George Buggin, who, during her widowhood,
had assumed her mother's name of
Underwood. Her second marriage with the royal
duke being also without the previous assent of
the crown, she never claimed or assumed the
title of royal highness. Her majesty, however,
in 1840, during the lifetime of her royal husband,
raised this lady to ducal rank as Duchess
of Inverness, according to her husband's title.
The restrictive measure which we have
arraigned exceeds in the cruelty of its pressure on
the innocent the marriage act of the most
despotic of English sovereigns. Henry the
Eighth imposed the penalties of treason upon any
person contracting an unauthorised marriage
with one of the king's children. One of the
first acts of the promising reign of his yonng
successor, Edward the Sixth, was to repeal that
enactment. The clandestine marriage in 1560
of the Lady Catherine Gray of the royal blood—
—heir presumptive to the crown under the will
of Henry the Eighth, if the Princess Elizabeth
should die without issue—would accordingly
have been valid. The Star Chamber did
arbitrarily imprison the earl, but the children, if
any, would have been legitimate. The same
would have been the result with the issue of the
secret marriage between the Lady Arabella
Stuart and William Seymour, although it sent
them both to the Tower. Until this German
custom was engrafted upon English law, we
find no edict which visits with perpetual
degradation the innocent and unborn offspring of
parents professing the same religious creed,
whose hands had been solemnly joined by a rite
recognised as sacred.

Before the days of the Royal German Marriage
Act, a daughter of England was never thought
unworthy to be the wife of an English prince.
Three of the six sovereigns of the house of
Stuart, and three of the four sovereigns of the
house of Tudor, were born of royal marriages
with subjects. William the Norman, from
whom the long line of English royalty deduces
its descent, was even proud of the plebeian birth
of his mother Arlotta, the daughter of a tanner.
Henry of Monmouth, the Fifth of England, the
hero of Agincourt, was the son of a subject,
Mary Bohun, daughter of the Earl of Hereford.
John of Gaunt, "time-honoured Lancaster,"
son of Edward the Third, accepted Catherine
Swinford, then a widow, as his third wife. Thus
he and Chaucer married sisters. The founder of
the royal line of Tudor was the son of Edmund
Tudor, Earl of Richmond, and Margaret
Beaufort, only child of John Duke of Somerset.
Horace Walpole, in his Historic Doubts,
describes the marriage of Henry Tudor with
Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry the Fourth,
as an alliance between an illegitimate branch
of the house of Lancaster and an illegitimate
branch of the house of York. Two negatives
making an affirmative, a legitimate heir to the
throne was thus obtained. Margaret, the
eldest daughter of Henry the Seventh, had
married first the King of Scotland, and secondly
the Earl of Angus, and from these two marriages,
James the First, the son of Henry Darnley,
a subject, derived his title to the united
crowns. Edward the Sixth was the son of Jane
Seymour, an English lady. Elizabeth, whose
reign is surrounded with glorious associations,
contrasting so strikingly with that of her sister
of foreign and royal birth, in the maternal line
traced her lineage through her mother, Anna
Boleyn, to a citizen of London.

The consorts of foreign birth and royal blood
of the three succeeding sovereigns of the house
of Stuart acquired only the hatred of the nation.
To Henrietta Maria of France, the haughty and
intolerant daughter of Henry of Navarre, may
be traced many of the calamities of civil war,
and perhaps the ultimate fate of her vacillating
and treacherous husband Charles the First. His
profligate son Charles the Second, expressed his
readiness to wed an English wife, if one
sufficiently wealthy could be found to satiate his
avarice. Ultimately, his corrupt acceptance of
age and ugliness was purchased by the rich
dowry of a royal and foreign bride, Catherine
of Braganza, a union without honour and without
offspring. The first marriage of his brother,
James the Second, when Duke of York, with
Ann Hyde, an English girl, the daughter of a
barrister, then in the Temple, although afterwards
ennobled by the title of Clarendon, gave
to the nation two queens, Mary, whose alliance
with William of Orange made way for our
happy revolution, and her sister Anne. The
traditional name of the "good Queen Anne," is not
yet forgotten in England, and while the comeliness
of her person attested the homeliness of
her birth, it was her constant boast that she was
"entirely English." The weak and bigoted
Mary Este, the second and foreign consort of
the worthless father of Queen Anne, was the
source of a long and unbroken series of
calamities to the Stuarts and to the country.
Strongly marked was the contrast between the
worthless offspring of the foreign union with
royal blood and the son of the English mother.

The dynastic difficulties which arose from the
rival claims of remote or collateral lineals in the
days of the Plantagenets are gone; the
conspiracies which deluged England with blood in
those of the Tudors, in our altered social and