It was further muddied by morganatic marriages being unknown in common law and was unacceptable to the other Commonwealth monarchies, too.
Assuming no changes, Queen Elizabeth II of course. Edward VIII died in1972, the Duke of York would have died in 1952 so his elder daughter would come to the throne. As it happened a morganatic marriage would have made no difference as David and Wallis had no children.
No changes is a big assumption. The Queen Mum always blamed the Abdication and being King all through the war for Bertie’s premature death. One of the reasons for the longstanding feud.
This American finds this type of reasoning hard to understand. I have confidence in my father as a source of much reliable advice, but I don’t slavishly do everything he tells me. Neither of us is planning to disown the other.
So, the fact that I might decide to not heed my father’s advice on one occasion does not strike either of us as a statement that I have no confidence in him as a father. I have, in fact, not followed his advice on several occasions and it hasn’t hurt our relationship.
But there’s an important difference. Your father offers you advice in relation to your own affairs. The PM offers the king advice in relation to public and constitutional affairs.
If the king is not acting on the advice of a PM with the confidence of parliament then, quite simply, the UK ceases to be a democracy. This is not acceptable to parliament, and puts the king on a collision course with parliament.
One way I think about the nature of the relationship with, and role of, the monarch is to remember that the whole idea of a monarch stems from an almost mystical/divine nature of a monarch. The king is not just a person - he is in some ways the divinely anointed embodiment of the governance of the land. In some ways you can regard the king not as just a person, but being the country itself. This allows the king to create a fixed point in the nature of the law. From the king stems the right of the parliament to make law, and for officers of the government to have executive authority. Other systems embody the creation of this authority in different means, usually rooted in a constitution (the source of the authority of the constitution being an interesting question in itself - and the manner in which many constitutions obliquely rely upon some form of royal assent or history of royal power that is subsumed is telling.) For many countries in the Commonwealth the root of law still resides in the monarch. But the monarch’s job is to embody this authority. It is their choice whether they want the job, but they don’t get to choose how they will discharge the responsibilities of the job.
Well, in the real world Edward and Wallis did marry and were childless. His heir therefore would be the next oldest of his brothers, Bertie, AKA George VI. Next in line would be the little Princess Elizabeth of York, aged 10 in 1936, AKA Elizabeth II.
In the real world George VI died in 1952. Though there were clearly things wrong with his healtn toward the end, he maintained an active lifestyle up through the day preceding the night of his death, and the late Queen Mother always attributed his relatively young death to the stress of becoming King, especially during the War years. Windsor survived until 1972.
So set two hypotheses. in both one brother dies in 1952 and the other in 1972. If the QM’s belief is correct and it was the stress of kingship that killed George VI, then in Nonabdicanian Britain, it is King Edward who is taken out by royal stress in 1952, and George VI reigns from 1952 to 1972, when HM E2R becomes Queen. If on the other hand it were a matter of their individual healths, the Duke of York dies young and HM king Edward reigns from 1936 to 1972, uceeded by his niece E2R.
Restrictive clause. “…a constitution that circumscribes…”
Which the Australian Constitution does, not in the sense of the Charter, but in terms of the federal structure, as set out in this summary of the role of the Australian High Court: