It was only for the monarch. If there’s no male heir, the title is extinct.
It would be much more complicated to change for peerages because there are ~800 hereditary peers and different types of legislation will affect them in different ways. The monarchy was easy because it was all hypothetical. No woman had been displaced by her younger brother in over a century, and none was in place to have it happen again any time soon, so they could just draw a line in October 2011 and say that sex doesn’t matter for people born after that date. With peerages you have elderly peers who want their existing daughters to succeed them, presumably some families where people don’t want to upset the existing arrangements, lots of women who have already been passed over, peerages that went extinct some time ago and might have multiple claimants who want it reanimated in their favor, etc.
I just looked and the Dukedom of Sussex was recreated for him. There was one previous in the early 19th Century. Couldn’t they have made it female heirs allowed from the get go?
Yes, as far as I know it’s completely possible to draft the letters patent that way. Why that didn’t happen, I don’t know, but I suspect that if there was an active decision made at all (rather than just using the existing form), there wasn’t any appetite for it being more likely that it would continue to exist. A few years later, in this reign, Prince Edward was made Duke of Edinburgh for life only. The new thing may just be no heirs at all.
I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole. The first Sussex was a son of George III. He married a Protestant in a COE ceremony and had a son. He however didn’t ask his father’s permission to get married so the marriage was illegitimate and the Dukedom died.
I may have asked this before, but does being Duke of Kent (or whatever) get you any cash money? A current list of English duchies does not include all that many…
At least an English dukedom is a real thing, as opposed to those people who claim to be Polish/French/Russian/whatever nobility.
I remember when Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip were alive and younger, they and others in the royal family spent a lot of their time attending ribbon-cutting ceremonies, charity dinners, or serving as the ceremonial patron of organizations. (I imagine this sort of thing sounds silly but I expect that having a royal attending an event helps with ticket sales.) When Phillip passed, I saw an article that said he was involved with literally hundreds of organizations. I think that’s changing now that there are fewer royals to do the work (with Harry and Meaghan out of the country, Andrew not involved and so forth). So perhaps that model of public service will change.
Of itself, no. The monarch may provide something from the Sovereign Grant to support expenses in carrying out public duties, and/or from private funds for whatever private reasons seem appropriate. Plus, as with anyone else, whatever’s inherited from parents or earned. For example, the present actual DofK served in the Army for decades and presumably has a pension from that, and inherited his parents’ house.
The monarch can create special rules for inheritance of a peerage.
For example, Mountbatten had no sons, so when he was created Earl Mountbatten, the patent provided that he would be succeeded by his older daughter, who would be succeeded by her eldest son, etc.
If the line of the older daughter’s sons ever fails, the next heir would be the male line descendant of Mountbatten’s second daughter.
Lord Nelson had a special inheritance rule as well. As Baron Nelson, his successor was his elder brother, a clergyman, who would be succeeded by his sons.
The earldom was created for Nelson’s older brother, after Nelson died at Trafalgar.
My understanding is that titles in the peerage of Scotland are more fluid than the English ones, and women can inherit in their own right, depending on the terms of the original grant.
In ancient Scotland inheritances were to the eldest son but still traced through his mother, sort of a sem-matrilineal I suppose. I have read one historian commenting it was because who his mother was, was known – the father not so much.
Yes. It’s entirely possible that Harry’s dukedom will turn out to be the last hereditary royal dukedom ever created.
For the last hundred and fifty years or so, new dukedoms have only been created for (a) sons of the monarch, or (b) (in one instance, in 1889) a husband of a daughter of the monarch. The last new ducal title to have been created for someone simply for being fabulously wealthy and somewhat politically influential, the traditional criteria creating a non-royal duke, was the Duke of Westminster title, created in 1874.
Hereditary titles haven’t been created for non-royals, for decades now. It had already died out when Thatcher delivered a political coup de grace by giving her husband not just a knighthood (even her opponents thought Denis deserved some recognition, if only for loyally putting up with her) - but a baronetcy, thus allowing for her egregious son to get a (totally undeserved, even in her friends’ opinion) honour.
Britain is a very class-conscious society, and a title of nobility is confirmed membership of a particular class. So, not empty bragging rights, but very much real.
