I was just thinking about, who will be the next in line to be king/queen of Great Britain when HMS Queen Elizabeth 2 passes away. And please explain to me how Great Britain monarchy works. P.S: provide your answers with evidence
Royalty - 3 Answers
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1 :
Male preference. So the throne goes the monarch sons and their heirs then the Monarchs daughters and their heirs. 1. Prince Charles 2. Prince William 3. Prince Harry 4. Prince Andrew 5. Princess Beatrice 6. Princess Eugene 7. Prince Edward 8. Viscount Severn "Prince James" 9. Lady Louise Windsor "Princess Louise" 10. Princess Anne
2 :
HMS? She's not a ship LOL! And what you really mean is the United Kingdom - Great Britain is just the name of the island that England, Scotland and Wales are on. The United Kingdom includes Northern Ireland as well. Anyway, English common law, which governs this, provides that the line of succession to the throne goes by "male-preference primogeniture" which means eldest child comes first, and boys come before girls. Queen Elizabeth II is only Queen because she was the first-born child of the previous King and had no brothers. How that works out now is, to put it as simply as possible, the next in line is HM Queen Elizabeth II's eldest child, males first. That makes the heir apparent to the throne her eldest son, Prince Charles. He has two children (Princes William and Harry) so they are the two next in line. If Prince William has a legitimate child, that moves Prince Harry further down the line. If somehow all 3 of them and any further children they have get killed off, next in line after that is the Queen's second son, Prince Andrew, Duke of York, and then his 2 daughters Beatrice and Eugenie. And so on - you just keep going to the next nearest relative, males first. The full line of succession (so far as anyone has worked it out) is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_succession_to_the_British_throne How the monarchy in the UK actually works in terms of how the UK is governed is that it is a constitutional monarchy, meaning that the monarch is the head of state but the actual powers they have are restricted by law. What actually happens for real is that it works like European republics do, except we have a Queen instead of a President (and that saves the cost of presidential elections!) The UK is quite unusual in that we don't actually have a written constitution, so a lot of how it works is just because "everyone knows how it's supposed to work" and the Queen knows that the monarchy wouldn't last much longer if she didn't "play by the unwritten rules". So... the British governmental system. Parliament consists of the House of Lords (mostly appointed people, like the Canadian Senate) and the House of Commons, which is elected in exactly the same way as US Congressmen. The Queen can appoint whoever she likes as Prime Minister but in reality she only ever appoints the leader of the party that wins in an election for the House of Commons. (She'd lose her job if she didn't!) If no one party gets more than half the seats, she will wait until the politicians sort it out between themselves who should be Prime Minister, and appoint whoever they choose. That happened after the general election on 6 May 2010 - no party got more than half the seats, and after negotiation, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats worked out that they could form a government together. So now we have a Prime Minister who is a Conservative, a Deputy Prime Minister who is the leader of the Liberal Democrats, and a Cabinet with a few Lib Dems amongst the Conservatives. It's working amazingly well, at least so far. If both Houses of Parliament pass a Bill, it has to go for Royal Assent but this is never refused (the last time was over 300 years ago). General elections have to take place at least every 5 years but usually what happens is that the Prime Minister asks the Queen for one (only the Queen can dissolve Parliament and call an election and naturally she never refuses the Prime Minister's request) when he/she thinks the opinion polls are going their way, usually after about 4 years. The last Parliament was an unusual one - it nearly ran the full 5 years and Gordon Brown, the last Prime Minister, only called it for 6 May because many local elections were due on the same day and it's cheaper to run 2 elections at the same time. In many ways it's indefinable but most of we Brits like it as it is - we have democracy insofar as a country of 60 million people can be, and also the wonderful pageantry of royal events. This all comes together every year at the State Opening of Parliament, when the Queen travels to Parliament in a horse-drawn coach, sits on the throne in the House of Lords, summons the Commons to attend her and reads a speech declaring what "My Government" intends to do in the coming year. BUT the speech is written for her by the government and she just reads it out with a totally straight face. http://www.parliament.uk/ will give you plenty of evidence.
3 :
Read the other questions on this site. This has been DONE TO DEATH. Or, alternatively, you could look it up for yourself. It's really not that complicated: first son of the current monarch.
