Cool! The wife and I officially registered our marriage at a Bangkok district office on an April 29, although her family did not consider us married until the ceremony the following June 17, which is the date we use for our anniversary.
Odds are that it’ll be Duke of Cambridge.
Tempted to “faire le pont” and book the three intervening days off. An eleven-day break for the price of three vacation days!
Oh yes. You, me and about 20 million other people! I can hear the CBI tutting from here.
Yes, this was my first thought as well, although I also suspect everyone else in full-time employment in the country is having the same idea…
Given the precedent of the revival of the Earldom of Wessex, I’d suggest something really ancient sounding like Duke of Mercia.
Perhaps they are trying to encourage as many people as possible to opt out of being in the area altogether?
Suppose the UK goes it alone anyway - would the House of Mountbatten-Windsor then become ineligible for the monarchies in the other countries, who would have to turn elsewhere?
Who would then be Australia’s William and Mary? And I just can’t wait for the War of the Canadian Succession …
I rather suspect that either the other countries would shrug and just go along with what the UK did to avoid a fuss, or else there’d suddenly be a lot more republics among the Commonwealth nations. Probably some relatively minor diplomatic kerfuffles as a bonus.
Yes, I think it’s very unlikely that there would be any objection from any of the Commonwealth countries to anyone in the current line of succession, unless you got as far down as the King of Norway – and he’s a long way down! (The objection would not be to him as a person, but to sharing the monarchy of Canada, Australia, etc., with that of Norway.) They just would want to be consulted because of their status as independent monarchies.
No, you’d eventually run into a situtation where Prince William’s hypothetical firstborn becomes Queen Mary III of the UK while her younger brother becomes King Edward IX of Canada/Australia/Belize/etc. In reality you’d just get more Commonwealth Republics (Australia’s likely to go after the Queen dies anyway, Canada will stay a monarchy as long as the UK does).
I didn’t read the previous posts. I only dropped in to say that I’m already sick of hearing about the upcoming wedding.
I wish them well and truely hope they have a story book marriage and all that. But I don’t know these people, will never get to know them, and don’t especially want to know them as we would have nothing in common.
It’s just that the whole thing has no relevance to me. If they had never met it would not change my life (other than writing this) an iota. If they marry and are miserable it isn’t important to me.
Enough already.
Incidentally, Prince William has said, through a Palace flack, that he has no intention of leapfrogging over dear ol’ Dad to land on the throne: AOL - News, Politics, Sports, Mail & Latest Headlines - AOL.com
This is a lot easier said than done, as the Australian referendum on abolishing the monarchy showed.
The difficulty is that it requires a substantial re-write of the Constitutions. You can’t just strike out “Queen” and put in “President”. You always have to answer at least two major questions: how do you select the President? and what powers do you want the President to have? Those points of detail are the difficult ones.
For example, in Canada, the Queen has extensive constitutional powers, both prerogative and written. If you want to keep the focus of the Constitution as a system of responsible government, with the new President as a figurehead, and real power resting with the Prime Minister, you have to have a system of election that does not give the new President the political legitimacy to use those enormous powers. You also likely have to define the principles of responsible government much more carefully in a written constitutional instrument, rather than relying solely on constitutional convention, because now you would have two different politicians squabbling over power, rather than the unelected representative of a hereditary monarch deferring automatically to the elected Prime Minister.
But if you want the President to be popularly elected, or to have real powers, then it’s even more difficult - that would be a wholesale change to the constitutional and political system. Those types of fundamental constitutional changes are typically not easily made. The most difficult is to combine popular election with the system of responsible government - you might end up with a completely hybrid system, more akin to the French or Russian governments.
The difficulty in switching from a constitutional monarchy to a republic is well-illustrated by this comment in the wiki article:
(My emphasis.)
In short, abolishing the monarchy and switching to a republic is easy in theory, hard in practice. So I’m not convinced that as soon as Her Majesty is no longer with us, you’ll have a rash of Commonwealth Realms suddenly going republic.
You must know some very strange girls then, even back that far it was a horrible dress and time has done it no favours at all. Let’s hope Kate has more sense with hers since we’ll be subjected to endless speculation about it. And as for recycling the ring? How tasteless. That’s enough to put a curse on the marriage before it’s even happened. If Wills had an ounce of sense in that balding head of his, he’d have used the jewels to make something else and give the poor girl a ring of her own.
Yup, I was 17 at the time of Charles and Diana’s wedding, and I seem to recall thinking her dress was - as we say around here - bogging. And very, very badly crushed when she got out of the carriage.
As for the ring - I have to agree. “Here darling, have my dead mother’s ring from her failed marriage”. “Eh, thanks Wills. I think…”