I just saw an article on Yahoo News today that Queen Eliz gives her blessing to Camilla to become Queen Consort when Charles becomes King. The article explains the difference between Queen Consort and Queen Regent, for the benefit of us Murcans who don’t know these things:
But a few paragraphs later:
Am I just reading this wrong, or is this a mistake in the article? What kind of a queen will Catherine become?
(Okay, Discobot, you’re almost right for once. This question does seem similar to some earlier thread about Henry VII’s wives, sort-of. But nothing to do with some old thread about refinancing mortgages. )
Mistake in the article, I’m pretty certain. Not only is Kate not in the royal bloodline, but she was born a commoner. A queen regnant rules the kingdom (and her husband is a prince, not a king); a queen consort is the wife of the ruler (a king).
Would she be a bona-fide Queen if she were in the royal blood-line? (Say, for example, if she were a great-grand-daughter of Czar Nicholas or something like that?)
She’ll be a bona fide queen if her husband becomes king, regardless; she just won’t be a queen regnant. Great Britain has only had a handful of queen regnants – one can only become queen regnant if one is a woman who is first in the line of succession for the throne, and that’s by birth and bloodline, not by marriage.
Elizabeth II became queen regnant because she was next in the line of succession when her father, King George VI, died, as she was George’s eldest child.
Next, perhaps a lesser nit-pick: The article uses the phrase “queen regent”. @kenobi_65 uses the word “regnant”, which is the word I’ve always seen in this context. Are these synonyms, or simply just two variants of the same word?
The word “regent” seems to refer to an adult to runs a kingdom on behalf of a child-king/queen until said child comes of legal age to be king/queen.
I’m inclined to think that it’s another error in the article, and the copy writer didn’t know to use the word “regnant.” Or got “regnant” from a press release or Wikipedia article (because they had to look up what “Queen Consort” means) and thoughtfully made the “correction.”
I suspect this. I looked up other articles by the same author – From the list of headlines I saw, she is apparently a Yahoo writer specializing in the celebrity circuit, and mostly about American things. So I don’t think the article was written by a British news writer.
Looking at the other stories on Yahoo by the article author, it looks like she writes about celebrity news, not England or English royalty; I suspect that you’re right, and she just wasn’t familiar with the proper usages of “regnant” and “regent.” (Edit: @Senegoid and I came to the same conclusion!)
No, they are stating this wrong. A “queen regnant” is a woman sovereign/monarch, as at present. A regent would be someone - usually a close adult relative- performing the duties of the monarch if a child inherits or the monarch is incapable (as with George III).
Ordinarily, a king’s wife automatically becomes queen and, IIRC, is also formally crowned in the coronation ceremony, but the title “Queen Consort” isn’t customarily used as a title, rather than a description. The distinction here is that in the sensitivity over Charles’s remarriage, they had to invent titles for Camilla that avoided looking like what would otherwise have applied to Diana, so they “let it be known” that Camilla would be “Princess Consort” rather than “Queen”. Now they obviously feel the heat’s gone out of the issue, but whether this is a signal that she’ll have this as a special title but won’t be in the coronation ceremony, I don’t know.
Only if, by dint of some other ancestor of hers, she was also Queen of Bauchberg-and-Trottenherd-on-Dürmfeldt or some other hypothetical archaic monarchy.
This is a nitpick, and I suppose you mean the right thing, but the reason why Elizabeth became queen regnant was not simply that she was the eldest child of George VI; it was, importantly, that she didn’t have brothers. Even a younger brother would have outranked her in the line of succession.
This was true then, but not now as the succession passes to the eldest child.
This change was adopted in 2011 when the leaders of 16 British Commonwealth countries voted unanimously to alter the centuries-old rule of succession. The ban on the monarch being married to a Roman Catholic was also lifted.
“Queen Regent” would only make sense if the Queen Consort were to be widowed, and her underage child with the former King was the next in line of succession, and even then it wouldn’t be automatic, nor necessarily the title used.
Unless the queen consort was herself next in line of succession after her child (which would have some truly unbecoming implications), then that wouldn’t be the case. UK law provides that the regent be the next sound-minded adult in line after the underage/infirm person; so, for instance, if some catastrophe were to result in Liz, Charles, and William all passing on, and the young Prince George becoming king, then Harry would become Prince Regent until George came of majority.
If that were, hypothetically, the case, she would probably have been urged to renounce her rights to that title before marriage, as it would cause all sorts of constitutional and diplomatic complications if the wife of the British king were also, in her own right, queen of some other monarchy. Philip had to renounce his claims to the thrones of Denmark and Greece, where he was in the line of succession, when he married Elizabeth.
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