Sovereign ideas
March 31st, 2009
A letter to the Times which was published on 31st March 2009.
William Rees-Mogg (Comment, Mar. 30th) perpetuates two common errors about the Act of Settlement and its possible amendment. The Act stipulates that British sovereigns shall be “heirs of the body of the Electress Sophia of Hanover, being Protestant”. The Act thus excludes from the throne all those who are not of the Protestant (Christian) religion, not just Roman Catholics.
If any amendment of the Act were seriously contemplated, it would not require “the whole of the Commonwealth to agree”. It would require the agreement of only those countries which retained the British monarch as their head of state at the time of the change (16 at present).
Headship of the Commonwealth itself is a quite separate matter; there is no formal provision for that post to be filled by the British monarch after the present Queen.