36 Saturday May 28 2022 | the times
Comment
dissolute prince the equivalent of £20 million to pay off
his debts and make improvements to his home at
Carlton House. The Whig leader Charles James Fox
argued that the prince, known as Prinny, was
automatically entitled to exercise sovereignty since his
father was no longer capable of doing so. William Pitt
the Younger, the prime minister, maintained that
without parliamentary approval “the Prince of Wales
had no more right... to assume the government than
any other individual subject of the country”.
The Regency Bill was passed in the Commons. It
authorised the prince to act as regent with restrictions:
he could not sell royal property or appoint peers who
were not sons of the king. The prince was enraged,
insisting that a curb on his powers was a recipe for
“weakness, disorder, and insecurity in every branch of
the administration of affairs”. Before the Lords could
pass the bill, George III recovered and resumed his reign.I
don’t want to be alarmist, but there is a possibility
Dominic Raab could dethrone Elizabeth II and
install a regent to reign over us. According to
Section 2 of the 1937 Regency Act, the officials
responsible for deciding if the monarch is no
longer capable of discharging her regal functions are
the Speaker (Lindsay Hoyle), the lord chief justice
(Lord Burnett of Maldon), the master of the rolls (Sir
Geoffrey Vos), and the lord chancellor... who is Raab.
Raab famously said he would only “take the knee”
for the Queen or his wife. That he is now in a position
to decide on Her Majesty’s fitness to rule is one of the
odder quirks of our constitution. It is not going to
happen, of course. In order to install Prince Charles,
the next in line of succession, as Prince Regent, at
least three of these designated officials would have to
be “satisfied by evidence, which shall include the
evidence of physicians, that the sovereign is by reason
of infirmity of mind or body incapable for the time
being of performing the royal functions”.
The Queen is 96 and though she may be
experiencing “episodic mobility
problems” she remains in full
command of her mental faculties. She
is slowing down but she shows no sign
of wanting to step down.
And yet, as the nation prepares to
celebrate her Platinum Jubilee
marking 70 years on the throne, a
constitutional debate is quietly
humming: as the monarch inevitably
grows frailer, when do her heirs take over
the reins of her reign? And in what formal
or informal capacity?
The most visible and dramatic evidence of a
downshift came this month with the state
opening of parliament: the Queen was
represented by the imperial crown, placed on a
cushion on the sovereign’s throne, flanked by
the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cambridge.
Prince Charles read the speech from the consort’s
throne, an inch lower than that of the sovereign.
This was the first time in history the monarch has
delegated the “gracious speech” to another member of
the family. The moment was solemn, sightly wistful
but also distinctly odd: princes who will eventually be
kings, exercising the rituals of sovereignty, but without
the full panoply of monarchy.
There are calls for Charles to be appointed Prince
Regent to enable him to exercise all the constitutional
functions of kingship while his mother retains the
title. The Queen would remain monarch under the
coronation oath, while Charles would exercise the
powers and prerogatives of sovereignty, signing acts of
parliament, appointing prime ministers and dissolving
or proroguing parliament. He could fulfil all the
Queen’s quasi-constitutional functions that, at her age,
must be exhausting, boring or merely irritating:
meeting the prime minister every week, formally
agreeing to appointments and commissions, signing
orders of the privy council, greeting ambassadors,
‘Prinny’ is no
role model for a
regent Charles
appointing ministers and knighting footballers.
Establishing a regency to allow the Queen to take her
foot off the regal pedal in her twilight may sound like
a simple constitutional fix but it is fraught with
complications, not the least of which is that she clearly
does not want to abdicate any royal responsibility or,
for that matter, abdicate.
Regency has a long and complex history in this
country. On many occasions, others acted as head of
state because the incumbent or heir apparent was
debilitated, ill, insane, a minor, absent abroad or
otherwise unable to rule. Usually such regents were
members of the royal family, sometimes politicians or
courtiers. A few have been merely pretenders to the
throne, using the regent’s role to usurp power. The
question of regency has tended to arise because the
heir was too young to rule; today, we have the converse
issue, a monarch who may, eventually, be too elderly
to function in the way she has for seven decades.
Henry VIII’s first and last wives, Catherine of
Aragon and Catherine Parr, acted as regents
when he was away fighting in France. William
Longchamp, the grandson of a peasant, stood
in while Richard the Lionheart was busy
crusading. In Scotland, William Wallace
claimed to be acting as regent on behalf of
the deposed King John.
The Hanoverians used regents as
temporary royal stand-ins: Lord Parker
acted as regent following the death of
Queen Anne, while the future
George I was making his way from
Germany to take up the crown; the
Prince of Wales filled the role while
his father was away, as did the
Regency Council; when George II
was absent in his homeland as
elector of Hanover, his wife Queen
Caroline became temporary regent
in preference to their son Frederick,
whom the king detested. But the last
time a Prince Regent stood in while the
monarch was still in place occurred in 1811,
when the then Prince of Wales took over the duties of
his incapacitated father, George III. It is not a precedent
either the Queen or Prince Charles would relish.
Historians debate whether the “madness of King
George” was brought on by bipolar disorder or a
disease of the liver, porphyria: the latter theory formed
the basis of Alan Bennett’s play, The Madness of
George III, adapted for film starring Nigel Hawthorne.
A study of the king’s hair samples has revealed high
levels of arsenic, a possible trigger for the disease.
Whatever its cause, by 1788 George III’s mental
illness was sufficiently acute to provoke a constitutional
crisis. That November the monarch was too deranged
to speak at the state opening of parliament. George’s
eldest child, the Prince of Wales, was then 26 and a
very different character to his sober father, living a life
of extravagant dissipation, drinking, gambling and
affairs. A year earlier parliament had granted theMain picture: Prince
Charles standing in to
deliver the Queen’s
Speech earlier this month.
Above from left, Brighton
Pavilion, the film of The
Madness of King George
and the James Gillray
caricature of the then
Prince of Wales. Left from
top, Henry VIII’s wives
Catherine Parr and
Catherine of Aragon both
took care of royal duties
in the king’s absenceweekend essay
As the Queen continues to hand over sovereign powers to her
eldest son, Charles will be hoping to fare better than the vain
and spendthrift heir to George III, writes Ben Macintyre
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