With Charles and Camilla set to tie the knot in April, Britain and Australia, as well as many other parts of the world, can expect a wave of royal trivia that the gossip magazines have missed since the end of the Diana hysteria. But whether Charles and Camilla can capture in this country the outpouring of affection given to those other prominent royals Fred and Mary is open to conjecture. I think Fred and Mary are in front.
I have to admit I'm not one to go into raptures where the British royals are concerned, but the interest of so many people has already ensured widespread newspaper coverage.
And in those hundreds, thousands, of newspaper columns some comparisons have been made. They compared Camilla with Diana and they made comparisons with other royal marriages. In those comparisons, one word kept jumping out.
That word was morganatic, sometimes apparently with the misspelling of morganic.
For instance, Alice Thompson in London's Daily Telegraph said the marriage could be morganatic, Helen William in the Daily Record talked about "this halfway house to a morganatic marriage" and Roy Hattersley in The Times delved into history to talk about a morganatic marriage. Just about every columnist found a reason to include morganatic.
Camilla's status in a royal marriage is one that has been discussed for a long time, certainly well before the recent announcement of an engagement. In 1936 a morganatic marriage was proposed as a means of overcoming the fact that Mrs Simpson was a divorcee, but this idea was rejected and Edward abdicated.
A morganatic marriage was said to be a German custom.
My big Oxford quoted a 16th century passage as explaining a morganatic marriage as "a marriage by which the wife and the children that may be born are entitled to no share in the husband's possession beyond the morning gift".
Before your imaginations starts to run wild, I should explain that the "morning gift" seems to be the literal translation from the Latin matrimonium ad morganaticam, based on the sixth century German morganegiba. The morning gift was said to remove any further legal claim the wife or children might have on the husband's possessions. A more detailed dictionary explanation was that in such a marriage when a man of exalted rank took a wife of lower station the provision was that she remain in her former rank and the issue of the marriage have no claim to succeed to the father's possessions, not that anybody is expecting any "issue" from this marriage.
A morganatic marriage is sometimes called a left-handed marriage, because in the ceremony the groom gives the bride his left hand instead of his right as a mark of the so-called unconventional nature of the marriage.
A cynical view of a morganatic marriage came in Eliezer Edwards' 1901 dictionary. After referring to optical illusions in the Arabian deserts, he said of a morganatic marriage: "Though it involves no immorality, and has always the full sanction of the church, it is, as regards the wife and children an illusion and a make-believe".
Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary of 1911 said the word morganatic was "pertaining to a kind of marriage between a man of exalted rank and a woman of low degree by which the wife gets nothing but a husband, and not much of a husband".
Make of that what you will.
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