NO TECHNICAL BARRIER

Evening Star, Issue 22441, 11 September 1936, Page 3

NO TECHNICAL BARRIER

KING CGULD MARRY A COMMONER When rumour selects a wife for King Edward VIII., always a Royal princess is nominated. Yet there is no technical reason why the King should not marry a commoner. When, as Prince of Wales, ho visited the United States in 1924, the possibility of his marrying an American girl was .often discussed. Had he wished to do so, he could have found adequate precedent in the history of England’s Kings. ' The conception of the King as a man. apart from his people, a member of a segregated Royal house permitted to marry only into another Royal house, is not an English one. It is a German idea, imported into England by the Georges. The old British ideal of kingship sees in the King simply the supreme representative of the nation’s manhood, closely related to other Britons by blood, ideals, and habits. In AngloSaxon times the King was chosen by Parliament, It was not essential to choose the heir of the previous monarch, though this was often done. Royal ancestry was not necessary to kingship. Thus Harold the Second was made King, though he was not related by blood to the Royal House, and other claimants to the throne were. William the First was the son of a free-booting soldier and a tanner’s daughter. Yet his cousin, Edward the Confessor, made him heir to the Throne of England. Stephen ofßlois, who was not Royal on his father’s side, was chosen as King in preference to

Matilda, daughter and heiress of Henry the First. The first Tudor King, Henry the Seventh, was the grandson of an ordinary Welsh gentleman, Owen Tudor. James the First of England was the sou of Lord Darnley, descendant of a lino of plain Scotsmen called Stuart. These early Kings very often married women not of the Royal blood. Edward the-Fourth married a woman who was born Miss Woodville, and later became Airs Grey. Their daughter Elizabeth was the mother of Henry the Eighth, who married into so many non-Royal English families that his daughter,. Queen Elizabeth, had a great number of commoners for cousins. Henry's second wife was plain Aliss Anno Boleyn, his third Aliss Jane Seymour, his fifth Aliss Katharine Howard, his sixtli Aliss Katharine Parr—commoners all. Richard the Third married Anne Neville, daughter of Lord Warwick. The wife of James the Second was Aliss Anno Hyde. Her father, Air Edward Hyde, an obscure commoner, thus became the grandfather of Royal Queen Anne. At the same time, the Royal princes and princesses, sons and daughters of England’s Kings, married outside the Royal family so freely that, according to one estimate, toclav there are at least 65,000 ordinary English people with the blood of Plantagenct Kings in their veins, and many more descended from Norman, Tudor, and Stuart ancestors. , It was the Georges, with their German idea of the awfnl majesty of Kings, who changed all this. They established the tradition that Kings were a breed apart, permitted to intermarry only with the daughters of Kings. To-day wo have returned to an earlier and more valid concept of kinghood. King Edward the Eighth, as his father before him, is not regarded as a man mystically divided from his people. Ho is the chief of a big family of Britons, typical ot them all. It is largely because of this that the monarchy in England stands- foursquare in a changing world. The marriage of the King to a girl not of Royal blood would only strengthen the rents of the monarchy in the hearts of the British people. And if King Edward married an American, it would he a gesture of tremendous importance in the consolidation of Anglo-American goodwill. Neither ’of these courses would run counter to the ancient traditions of England’s Throne.