Royal Marriages Act 1772 - Farran Exemption

Farran Exemption

In the 1950s, Charles d'Olivier Farran, B.C.L., M.A., Ph.D., Lecturer in Constitutional Law at Liverpool University, theorised that the Act could no longer apply to anyone living, because all the members of the immediate royal family were descended from British princesses who had married into foreign families.

Many of George II's descendants in female lines have married back into the British royal family. In particular, the Queen and other members of the House of Windsor descend (through Queen Alexandra) from two daughters of George II — (Mary, Landgravine of Hesse and Louise, Queen of Denmark) — who married foreign rulers (respectively Frederick II, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, and King Frederick V of Denmark), and through Queen Mary from a third (Anne, Princess of Orange, consort of William IV, Prince of Orange). Moreover The Prince of Wales, his issue, siblings, and their issue descend from yet a fourth such marriage, that of The Princess Alice, a daughter of Queen Victoria, to Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse.

This so-called "Farran exemption" met with wide publicity, but arguments against it were put forward by Mr Clive Parry, Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, and Farran's interpretation has since been ignored. Consent to marriages in the Royal Family (including the distantly related House of Hanover) continues to be sought and granted as if none of the agnatic descendants of George II were also his cognatic descendants.

As Clive Parry pointed out the "Farran exemption" theory was further complicated by the fact that all the Protestant descendants of the Electress Sophia of Hanover, ancestress of the United Kingdom's monarchs since 1714, had been entitled to British citizenship under the Sophia Naturalization Act 1705 (if born prior to 1949, when the act was repealed). Thus, some marriages of British princesses to continental monarchs and princes were not, in law, marriages to foreigners. For example, the 1947 marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, by birth a Greek and Danish prince but descended from the Electress Sophia, was a marriage to a British subject even if he had not been previously naturalised in Britain. This would also mean theoretically, for example, that the present royal family of Norway is bound by the Act, for the marriage of The Princess Maud, a daughter of King Edward VII, to the future King Haakon VII of Norway, was a marriage to a "British subject", since Haakon descended from the Electress Sophia.