Did/can members of the Royal family (Charles, Andrew, Margaret, etc) obtain divorces through the same court process as ordinary Britons or do royal divorces require a private act of parliament? If the sovereign wanted to divorce his/her consort would s/he be able to go to court or would that take an act of parliament too?
A divorce by a reigning monarch is essentially unprecedented. The last English/British monarch who did that was Henry VIII, and both divorce law and the powers of the monarch are completely different now. So the answer to the second question would be that no one knows.
I certainly remember seeing references in the papers to the decrees nisi and absolute when Charles and Diana got divorced. It seems that the normal, ordinary legal processes are followed. Some searching brought up the following:
For the Duke of York
Cunctator has it. Charles and Diana’s divorce was a quiet civil proceeding; their names appeared among several other dozen others, all far less famous, on the divorce docket that day, IIRC. I don’t even think they actually appeared in court. If Queen Elizabeth II, King Charles III or King William V decided to get a divorce, it would probably take an act of Parliament to make clear the respective rights of the parties, and confirm the right (or lack thereof) of any offspring to succeed to the throne in due course.
True, but George IV tried to divorce his wife by an Act of Parliament: the Pains and Penalties Act 1820, which passed in the Lords but was not introduced in the Commons, because the Government considered it would not pass.
I don’t think there will be a King Charles III. I seem to recall reading that he will assume the title King George VII at his coronation. It’s happened at least once before, Prince Albert, assumed the title King George VI when he was crowned in 1936.
A common misconception. Henry did not divorce any of his wives. He asked for annulments to his marriages to Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves.
For Catherine, it’s complex. The original grounds for annulment were that Henry’s marriage to Catherine was incestuous. Catherine was the widow of Henry’s older brother Arthur, and, in the thought of the day, for her to marry Henry was incest. However, Catherine swore that the first marriage was never consummated, so the Pope gave her dispensation to marry Henry. When Henry wanted a new queen, he argued that Catherine actually did consummate her marriage to Arthur (Arthur had evidently bragged about it), so there Pope’s dispensation had been granted on false pretenses. The Pope (who was a relative of Catherine’s father), did not agree. Henry then disputed the Pope’s authority and broke with the church, and finally got his annulment.
Anne of Cleves was simpler. Henry took one look at her (the marriage had been arranged and agreed to before he had ever seen her) and decided she wasn’t for him. He never consummated that marriage, so an annulment was easy.
I know that’s been discussed, but it seems unsettled as yet. We shall see.
That’s right, since divorce and remarriage was impossible within the Catholic Church and the Church of England, and Henry VIII’s big problem was that he wanted a male heir, so when each wife failed to produce a son that survived, he believed that he needed to marry a new one. However, the annulment of the marriage to Catherine of Aragon was a real stretch, and (of course) the reason why the Church of England left the Catholic Church, since the Pope refused to annul the marriage.
If a future king or queen of the UK wanted to divorce, the consequences might not be so far-reaching, but the process is unlikely to be easy – certainly not as easy as Charles and Diana’s divorce was.
It wasn’t that uncommon in the 19th and 20th centuries for a monarch to reign under a name other than their first given name. In addition to George VI (Albert Frederick Arthur George), Edward VII was Albert Edward; Victoria was Alexandrina Victoria.
It’s even more complicated than that, because in addition to arguing that Arthur and Catherine had consummated the marriage, Henry also argued that the pope didn’t have the authority to waive the “Don’t marry your brother’s widow” rule regardless of whether the previous marriage had been consummated or not.
And Catherine wasn’t related to the Pope (he was one of the Medici). However, she was the aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor, who had, a few years before the annulment matter came up, had sacked Rome and held the Pope prisoner for six months, and was threatening to do so again if the Pope acted against his aunt.
And, of course, logically there was a further difficulty for Henry. As you state, he argued that Catherine’s first “marriage” to his brother Arthur had in fact been consummated, thus creating an impediment to any subsequent marriage between himself and Catherine (Leviticus 20: 21). Since this impediment was of divine origin, Henry said, it could not be dispensed by the Pope. Of course that line of argument led to further problems because Henry wanted to ditch Catherine for Anne Boleyn, whose sister Mary had earlier been Henry’s mistress. In other words, the same non-dispensable impediment that Henry claimed had existed between him and Catherine also existed between him and Anne.
Right, but the difference is, he and Mary Boleyn were never married, and scripture doesn’t say “You shall not marry your mistress’s sister.”
I know about that, but at that time every couple in England (Scotland had divorce) needed a private act of parliament to dissolve their marriage.
I was responding to Giles’s comment that Henry VIII was the last monarch to get a divorce. That’s true, but George IV tried it, so it’s not completely unprecedented for a monarch to seek a divorce, even if for political reasons, it didn’t go through in George’s case.
But under canon law at the time, the affinity arose from the act of sexual intercourse, not from the marriage itself. Henry himself acknowledged this when he sought, and got, a dispensation from the Pope for the affinity between himself and Anne arising from his sexual relationship with Anne’s sister. In other words, Henry was so anxious to marry Anne that he asked the Pope to exercise a dispensing power that he (Henry) was simultaneously arguing that the Pope did not possess. As I noted, this was not a particularly logical approach.