GREAT BRITAIN: Nobody’s Children

Though William the Conqueror was touchy about being illegitimate, some of his successors in the centuries when England was abuilding were notoriously careless on the subject. William IV had no fewer than ten illegitimate children, and the present Dukes of Grafton and St. Albans are descended from two of Charles II’s twelve bastards. In 1728, Poet Richard Savage, who proclaimed himself to be the illegitimate son of a countess and an earl, eulogized the bastard as “no sickly fruit of faint compliance he,” but one “stampt in nature’s mint of ecstasy.” Yet poor Richard himself died in debtors’ prison, for stampt in nature’s mint of ecstacy or not, most of Britain’s filii nullius (children of nobody) had no rights whatever under British law.

It was not until 1926 that Parliament passed a bill declaring that children whose parents subsequently married could become legitimate.* But the status of the offspring of adulterous unions was not changed, and 31,000 out of 34,000 bastards born each year in Britain remain so to the end. Last winter Labor M.P. John Parker introduced a bill to change all that. The bill whizzed through Commons, but last week it lay badly battered from a debate in the House of Lords.

Though the Archbishop of Canterbury backed the bill on humanitarian grounds, the Bishop of Exeter thought it a threat to the institution of monogamy. The Lords hit upon a compromise, patterned on Scottish practice, that if one of the adulterous partners thought the other had only honorable intentions and was unmarried, the child could become legitimate. Still, many a noble Lord was worried. “Suppose,” said Lord Denning, “a bold, bad baronet or one of your lordships should have a succession of daughters and wished to have a son and heir. All he has to do under the clause is to deceive a young woman into matrimony by pretending he is single, and then, if he has a son by his bigamous wife, that son will be legitimate.”

Before they got through, the Lords gutted the bill. They did so even after the Lord Chancellor gave his colleagues something to think about. After all, said Lord Kilmuir pleasantly, the Third Earl of Huntly, who died in 1524, was the eldest son of a void marriage. Then, gazing benignly about him, the Lord Chancellor added: “From a general look around, I think there must be 30 descendants of that void marriage who are now in your Lordships’ House.”

* Though they have no automatic right to an inheritance and are barred from inheriting a title. As in the U.S., a bastard may inherit property on legal parity with any other named beneficiary.