Kittyhawk
Kittyhawk was the call sign of the Royal Air Force flight that carried King Ernest V from London towards Ottawa on 25 September 2028, on a private visit to New Albion. East of Newfoundland, at about 5:47 p.m. Eastern, the flight transmitted a distress call that ended after its own call sign, and nothing more was heard from it. The aircraft was a long-range executive jet of the royal squadron, carrying the King, four members of the Royal Household including his Private Secretary, and a crew of three. A storm grounded the search for most of the second day. On the third day, in clear weather, the search found part of the aircraft in the sea, which confirmed that it had gone into the water, and found no one. On the fourth day, 29 September, a crab boat heading home to Newfoundland found a life raft well outside the area being searched, with the King and four others alive in it. Both pilots had been killed when the aircraft came down, and the King’s valet had died in the raft. The King, who had a serious head injury and was unconscious, was flown to New Westminster that night and admitted to New Westminster General. He remained unconscious there until the early hours of 20 October 2028, when he woke. On the evening of 20 October he was awake for short spells, knew his family and was very weak. On 24 October his physicians said that his speech and parts of his memory may not recover fully, and that they could not yet say whether he would be able to resume the functions of the Crown; the Prime Minister told the Lords the same day that the declaration stands and that the regency will continue for as long as the evidence requires.
The loss produced no demise of the Crown, because nobody could say whether one had occurred, and each of the King’s fourteen realms was left to decide separately what, if anything, followed. Within hours Great Britain delegated the King’s British functions under its regency legislation to his consort, Queen Christina of Sweden, who then flew to New Westminster to be with their son, so that from 26 September the functions of the British Crown were held in the capital of the United Kingdom of America by the reigning Queen of another state, who signed the first British state papers there the next day. On 27 September Britain also opened its plans for the King’s death, Operation Tower Bridge, as a precaution, and the press reported it. On 28 September, after the wreckage was found, the British Prime Minister said that Britain would consider the question of the King’s death once the search had been formally ended, and a British draft bill that would let the heir act as Regent, or reign in his own right, from the age of sixteen was leaked the same day. On 29 September, when the King was found alive, Britain closed Tower Bridge and stood down Overstudy. On 2 October, on the same medical evidence on which the Realm had acted, Britain’s Parliament declared him incapable by an Act passed in a single day and made the Queen Regent of Great Britain, and three British privy counsellors flew to New Westminster to swear her at the British High Commission, so that she need not leave the hospital.
The Realm did not follow. The Governor-General, Michelle Lujan Grisham, stated on the night of the loss that the King was missing and that her commission continued. Parliament was recalled the next day. The Prime Minister, Caleb Whitlock, Lord Whitlock, a peer who cannot sit in the House of Commons, made his statement from the bar of that House, the first time a Prime Minister had answered there, and the Commons referred to the law officers the question whether anything that had happened engaged Article II.8 of the Charter of Union, which makes the American succession follow the British one for as long as the two remain the same. On the second day the Realm did not open its own plan for the King’s death, Operation Chain Bridge. On the third, answering Britain, the Prime Minister made his first statement outside Parliament: that the Realm would reach its own conclusion in its own time. It was read in London as a rebuke. On the fourth day the King was brought to New Westminster General, the first time the Realm’s hospitals had treated its King. On the fifth, when his physicians certified that he would be unconscious for weeks, the five officers named in the Realm’s Regency Act 1811 declared him incapable, and the Queen, who is Regent under the Act because the heir is not of full age, was sworn before the Privy Council. The Realm had moved before Britain, which had delegated his functions to the same woman on the first night and had gone no further, and London read it as a race to be first. Nobody in New Westminster denied it. Britain followed on the Monday, by an Act of its own Parliament, close enough behind to look like following, which London minded.
The heir, Prince Frederick, who is fifteen and lives in New Westminster, remained at Columbia Palace and attended prayers for the King at Columbia Cathedral on the morning of 26 September. On the second day he stayed out of sight at the palace, and his friend Theo Hartigan was photographed arriving at its gates. On the third day he went to school at his own request, his mother told him there that wreckage had been found before it was announced, and in the evening the household issued his first public words. On the fourth day his mother told him that the King had been found alive, the household issued a second statement that he had written himself, and that night he met his father’s aircraft on the airfield with the Governor-General. On the fifth he sat at the Privy Council table when his mother was sworn as Regent, as an observer without a voice, under a clause of the Regency Act that had never been used. On 2 October he went back to school.
The King woke at about 3:40 a.m. Eastern on 20 October and knew the Queen when she was brought to him. His waking did not end any regency. The five officers of the Regency Act met that morning and agreed that the declaration of 30 September stands until his physicians certify that he is capable, and the Speaker, whose note of 30 September had said that it should end when he woke, wrote that by waking he had meant able to act. Each of the twelve other realms in which the Queen is Regent kept her in place by its own statement in the course of the day, Britain adding that its own physicians must certify before its regency could end. The Prime Minister told both Houses that the Article II.8 reference to the law officers remains open.
On 30 October the King told the peoples of his realms that he had decided to give up the Crown, and the thirteen Compact governments adopted common terms. On 31 October the last of his realms, the Realm itself, gave the decision effect, and at six in the evening in London, two in the afternoon in New Westminster, his son became King as George V, in a geometry class at his school, with the Queen as Regent until his sixteenth birthday on 2 May 2029. The King who had been lost became the Duke of Cumberland, in the hospital where he had woken.
Background
The King’s travel
The King is flown by the Royal Air Force, under arrangements that predate the privatisation of British Airways and were not altered by it. The airline carries the royal household, its baggage and the advance parties of royal occasions, but it has never carried the sovereign, and in the Realm he is carried by the Royal American Air Force instead. When he travels privately he travels with a small party, and the royal squadron supplies an aircraft sized to it.
The household that travels with him is formally shared across his fourteen capacities and is in practice overwhelmingly British: British-staffed, London-based and organised around a British court calendar. Its senior officer, the Private Secretary, is the channel through which the governments of all fourteen realms reach the sovereign. That the advisers to fourteen Crowns are drawn almost entirely from one of them is a complaint that surfaces at intervals in New Westminster, Ottawa and Delhi, and reform has been proposed and has not happened (see Great Britain).
The succession
Ernest V was eighty-one. He has reigned since 1972 and holds fourteen legally distinct Crowns, and the governing principle of his reign has been that no realm’s ministers may advise him on another realm’s affairs and no Crown may borrow another’s authority. His only child, Prince Frederick, was born on 2 May 2013, so the succession across all fourteen capacities, and to the Kingdom of Sweden through his mother, rests on a single life. The household is continuously conscious of the fact, and it governs the heir’s security and travel.
Thirteen of the fourteen successions are held together by the Interrealm Succession Compact, under which no realm that is party to it may change its rules of succession unless all thirteen agree and each legislates, so that the realms cannot come to have different heirs. The fourteenth, Malaya, follows Britain by its own constitution, which names as its protector whoever is King of Great Britain. The Compact governs rules. It was not written for a disagreement about facts, and nothing in it prevents one realm from concluding that its King has died while another has not.
In the Realm the succession is governed by Article II.8 of the Charter: “The succession in America follows the succession in Great Britain, so long as the two remain the same; and if they differ, the Parliament of the Union shall determine it.” The clause was thought a formality for a century and a half and is now the most discussed provision in its Article, because it contemplates in plain words that the two successions might part. It says nothing about a sovereign whose fate is unknown. The Charter makes no provision for a regency at all. The Realm’s own Regency Act 1811, passed by its Parliament for the last illness of George III alongside the British Act of that year, remains in force and provides for a sovereign who cannot act, and it says nothing about one who is missing.
The Realm has faced the sudden loss of its sovereign once. When Queen Victoria was assassinated in London in 1840, it was not clear whether the American Crown passed separately and automatically, and the answer was improvised within a month by the Governor-General, the Chief Justice and the ministry acting together. The improvisation became the rule and has never been legislated (see The Dominion Era).
Earlier the same year the King’s nephew, Alexander I, had acceded to the German and Prussian thrones at fourteen on the sudden death of his father, the first minor sovereign of the modern constitutional era, and a Regency Council of nine had assumed his Crowns’ functions. The King had advised him on minority.
The visit
The flight was a private visit to Ottawa, the capital of New Albion, one of the King’s fourteen realms, where he is represented by the Governor-General of New Albion. Its purpose was not announced beyond its being private, and the household did not add to that on the first day. No member of the royal family and no minister of any realm travelled with him.
The flight
Departure
Kittyhawk left RAF Northolt, in west London, at 6:05 p.m. on 25 September 2028, which was 1:05 p.m. Eastern, on a direct routing across the North Atlantic. It was due in Ottawa at about 8 p.m. Eastern. The crossing was handed from the eastern oceanic control area to the western one in the ordinary way, and the flight’s position reports were routine.
The distress call
At about 5:47 p.m. Eastern, east of Newfoundland and a little over two hours short of Ottawa, the flight transmitted on the oceanic frequency to Gander: “Mayday, mayday, Kittyhawk.” The transmission ended there. It gave no position beyond what the controllers already held, no nature of emergency, no intention and no number of persons aboard, and no further transmission was received from the aircraft. Its position reports stopped with it.
The call is the only information about what happened to the aircraft, and it contains no cause. No government suggested that the loss was anything other than an accident.
Those aboard
Eight people were aboard. The King travelled with four members of his household: his Private Secretary, Sir Edmund Stanier; his equerry, Major Thomas Fenwick; his valet, Graham Pearce; and an officer of his personal protection, Inspector Daniel Mensah. The crew of three were from the royal squadron: the captain, Squadron Leader Claire Holloway; the co-pilot, Flight Lieutenant Owen Price; and the steward, Sergeant Megan Tranter. For the first two days only the names of the King and the Private Secretary were released, the others being withheld at the request of their families. On 28 September the Royal Air Force and the household released the names of all seven with their families’ consent.
The search
Coordination from Halifax
The loss fell within New Albion’s search and rescue region, and the rescue coordination centre at Halifax took charge of the search within the hour. Aircraft and ships of New Albion began searching the area around the flight’s last reported position that night. They were joined by aircraft of the Royal Air Force and ships of the Royal Navy and, at New Albion’s request, by the Royal American Navy and the Royal American Air Force. The search continued through the night and was widened at first light on 26 September.
The first day
By the evening of 26 September nothing had been found: no wreckage, no debris, no survivors and no signal from any emergency beacon. The search continued.
The second day
An autumn storm crossed the search area on 27 September and grounded the search aircraft for most of the day. Ships remained on station where the sea allowed, and the air search resumed in the evening over the area already planned. By the evening of 27 September nothing had been found.
The third day
The weather cleared on 28 September and the search went back out in strength. In the middle of the morning a search aircraft sighted floating wreckage close to the area that had been planned before the storm, and in the afternoon ships recovered part of the aircraft, which its markings identified as Kittyhawk. The finding confirmed that the aircraft had gone into the sea. It was announced from Halifax an hour after the household had been told, the announcement having been held at the household’s request. No one aboard was found, and the finding was widely taken to mean that no one had survived. The search continued through the afternoon and evening around the place where the wreckage had been found, and by the evening of 28 September nothing more had been found.
The fourth day
The search did not find the King. In the late morning of 29 September a crab boat from Bay Bulls, south of St John’s, which was heading home from the crab grounds and was not part of the search, came upon a life raft well outside the area being searched, with five people alive in it. The rescue centre at Halifax ended the search for survivors that afternoon, and ships stayed on the site of the wreckage to recover what they could of the aircraft.
The raft had been found where the search was not. A raft riding high on the water is driven by the wind, and wreckage lying low in it by the current, so that the raft, blown by the storm of 27 September, had left the area planned for the search while the wreckage had not, and the search had concentrated on the place where the wreckage was found. Whether it should have been widened after the storm was asked within hours of the rescue and has not been answered.
The rescue
The Kathleen Marie
The Kathleen Marie is a crab boat of Bay Bulls with a crew of five. At about 10:20 a.m. Eastern on 29 September, heading home from the crab grounds, its crew sighted the raft, and a few minutes later its skipper radioed the rescue coordination centre at Halifax. The crew took the five survivors aboard, and with them the body of the King’s valet. At about 12:40 p.m. a helicopter of New Albion’s search and rescue service lifted the survivors from the boat and flew them to St John’s. The Kathleen Marie brought the valet’s body into Bay Bulls that evening, and people waited on the quay for it.
The raft
What is known of the three and a half days in the raft comes from the survivors’ first accounts to their rescuers. The aircraft came down on the sea in the dark on the evening of 25 September. Both pilots, Squadron Leader Claire Holloway and Flight Lieutenant Owen Price, were killed when it struck the water. The King was hurt and could not help himself, and Inspector Daniel Mensah, his protection officer, got him out of the aircraft as it sank. Sergeant Megan Tranter, the steward, whose training covers exactly this, got the raft launched and ran it for the three and a half days that followed, through the storm of 27 September. Graham Pearce, the King’s valet, reached the raft injured and died in it on the second night, during the storm.
Nothing was known on 29 September of what caused the aircraft to come down. The survivors’ accounts described the landing on the sea and not its cause, and the investigation had not reported.
The survivors
Five survived: the King; his Private Secretary, Sir Edmund Stanier; his equerry, Major Thomas Fenwick; Inspector Mensah; and Sergeant Tranter. The King had a serious head injury, taken when the aircraft struck the water, and was unconscious when he was found. The other four were suffering from exposure and two of them had broken bones; all four were conscious, and all four were kept in hospital at St John’s.
St John’s and New Westminster
At St John’s the King was treated for several hours at the city’s main hospital. His physicians’ first bulletin, issued in the late afternoon, said that he had a serious head injury, was unconscious, and was stable enough to be moved. The decision to take him to New Westminster rather than to London was the physicians’, because the flight was the shorter by several hours, and the Queen’s, because she and their son were already there; London was told and made no objection. An aircraft of the Royal American Air Force, which carries the King within the Realm, was sent to St John’s in the afternoon fitted as an air ambulance, and it left with the King and his physicians at about 7:40 p.m.
It landed at the capital’s military airfield at about 10:50 p.m. Prince Frederick was on the apron with the Governor-General when the aircraft came in, and the photograph taken there, of the boy standing beside the Governor-General as the aircraft’s door opened, went round the Realm within the hour. The Queen had gone ahead to New Westminster General, the national teaching hospital of the National Health Service of America, and was there when the King was admitted shortly before midnight. It was the first time the Realm’s hospitals had treated its King. No standard was raised over the hospital, the household judging that one would draw crowds.
The constitutional response
Great Britain
Britain acted first. Its regency legislation allows the sovereign’s functions to be delegated when he cannot perform them and never merely because he is away, which is why British business waits when the King leaves the realm. In the early hours of 26 September in London the British government treated a missing King as a King who cannot act, the first time the legislation had been used so, and the King’s functions in right of Great Britain were delegated to the Queen. The heir is a minor, and the Queen was the one adult to whom the functions could be given. Britain said nothing about presuming the King dead, and the delegation was not framed as a step towards a succession.
The Queen accepted the delegation in Stockholm and then flew to New Westminster. From the afternoon of 26 September, therefore, the functions of the British Crown were held in the capital of the United Kingdom of America by the reigning sovereign of Sweden, and British state business was sent to her there. On 27 September she signed the first of it at Columbia Palace, the first British Crown instrument signed in America, and nobody made anything of it on the day. Sweden and the personal union had until then met at one point only, in the person of their son. They now met at a second.
On 27 September the British government also opened its plans for the King’s death, Operation Tower Bridge, as a precaution, and placed on standby Operation Overstudy, its standing plan for bringing home a sovereign who dies abroad, since the King had been lost at sea and outside every realm. The press reported the step that afternoon. The officials who opened Tower Bridge found that its first step belonged to a man who was aboard the aircraft: on the King’s death the Private Secretary telephones the head of government of each of the fourteen realms with that realm’s own code phrase, in an order that is fixed and has never been published.
On 28 September, after the wreckage had been announced, the British Prime Minister, Alistair Rennie, said in London that Britain would consider the question of the King’s death once the search had been formally ended. He gave no date, since nobody could say when the search would end, but he named the event on which Britain’s decision would turn, and Britain was the first of the fourteen realms to do so. It was the pressure Article II.8 of the Realm’s Charter had been written for: a British conclusion, on a British timetable, that the Realm would not control and might not share.
The same day a British draft bill was leaked to the press in London. It would lower from eighteen to sixteen both the age at which a sovereign reigns in his own right and the age at which the heir may act as Regent, so that Frederick could act for a King who could not, or reign in his own right if he came to the throne, from his sixteenth birthday on 2 May 2029. It had been in preparation since the night of the loss. Regency law is each realm’s own and lies outside the Interrealm Succession Compact, so the draft bound no other realm, and none had published anything of the kind by the evening of 28 September. It was called the minority bill at once.
On 29 September, when the King was found alive, Britain closed Tower Bridge and stood down Overstudy, and the question the British Prime Minister had named the day before no longer arose. The delegation of the King’s British functions to the Queen continued, since a King who is alive and unconscious cannot act, which is what the delegation had assumed from the first.
On 30 September the Realm declared the King incapable under its own Act and swore the Queen as its Regent. London read it as the Realm racing to go first, and nobody in New Westminster denied it. The British delegation to the Queen continued, and the British government said nothing that day about any step of its own.
The Regency Act 2028
On Monday 2 October, the first working day after the Realm acted, Britain turned its delegation into a regency. Its regency legislation provides for delegating the King’s functions when he cannot act and for nothing beyond that: it names no Regent, and the heir is fifteen. Parliament at Westminster, recalled from its recess for the purpose, did what it had done in 1811 and made the provision itself. The Prime Minister, Alistair Rennie, introduced a bill of four sections in the House of Commons in the morning, London time, and laid with it the certificate of the King’s physicians at New Westminster General, the evidence on which the Realm had acted two days before. The bill passed all its stages in the Commons by the early afternoon and in the Lords before evening, without a division in either House. Members in both Houses asked whether the reigning Queen of another state should be Regent of Great Britain, and the Act answered them by naming her.
1. (1) Parliament declares that it is satisfied, upon the evidence of physicians, that His Majesty is by reason of infirmity of body incapable for the time being of performing the royal functions.
(2) Those functions shall be performed in the name and on behalf of His Majesty by Queen Christina as Regent.
2. (1) The Regent shall not act as Regent until she has taken and subscribed the oath set out in the Schedule to this Act before not fewer than three members of the Privy Council, whether within the United Kingdom or elsewhere.
(2) Upon her taking the oath, the delegation of the royal functions made on the twenty-sixth day of September 2028 shall cease to have effect.
3. The Regent shall perform the royal functions on the advice of His Majesty’s ministers in the United Kingdom, and shall not assent to any Bill for changing the order of succession to the Crown.
4. The regency shall end when each House of Parliament has resolved that His Majesty is again capable of performing the royal functions, or upon the demise of the Crown.
The Act received the royal assent at about six in the evening in London, one in the afternoon in New Westminster, by a commission that the Queen signed there under the delegation of 26 September, which was still in force. She thus gave the royal assent, as the King’s delegate, to the Act that made her his Regent, and it was the first Act of the British Parliament to be assented to in America.
Three British privy counsellors, the Lord President of the Council and two other members of the Cabinet, had left London in the morning on a Royal Air Force aircraft. At six in the evening, New Westminster time, they swore the Queen at the British High Commission there, the first time the oath of a British Regent had been taken outside Britain, and the delegation ended with it. She came from the hospital and went back to it afterwards. The ceremony was private and no photograph was taken. Prince Frederick, who has no part in Britain’s regency law, was not there.
Moving the bill, Rennie had told the Commons that Britain was making provision for its own Crown in its own Parliament and was following nobody. It was read in London, and reported in the Realm, as Britain following the Realm by two days on the word of the Realm’s physicians, which was the reading London had wanted to avoid. Charter House made no statement.
The United Kingdom of America
The Governor-General made the Realm’s first statement from Government House on the night of the loss.
The aircraft carrying His Majesty from London to Ottawa has been lost off the coast of Newfoundland. The King is missing.
A search is under way under the direction of New Albion, and ships and aircraft of this Realm are taking part at New Albion’s request.
My commission continues. The Crown’s business in the Realm will be conducted tomorrow as it is on every other day.
I ask for your prayers for the King and for those travelling with him, and for the crews who are searching for them tonight.
The Realm did not follow Britain’s delegation, and had no need to. Almost all of the Crown’s functions in the Realm are exercised by the Governor-General under her commission, which does not lapse while the King lives, and nobody could say that he did not. The few functions that belong to the sovereign in person, chief among them the commissioning of a Governor-General, were not required on the first day. To have treated a British delegation as effective in America would also have made the Queen of Sweden the acting head of the American Crown, on British authority, which is the borrowing between Crowns that the doctrine of the King’s reign exists to prevent.
The Prime Minister asked the Speaker on the night of 25 September to recall the House of Commons, and both Houses sat at two in the afternoon on 26 September. Caleb Whitlock, Lord Whitlock, had been commissioned on 11 September, fifteen days earlier, at the head of a ministry of five parties whose written terms require him to answer to the House of Lords weekly and to attend the bar of the House of Commons monthly, standing, by leave of the Speaker, since a peer cannot be questioned from within a chamber he may not enter. His first monthly appearance had not yet fallen due. He made his statement first in the Lords, of which he is a member, and the Lords agreed a motion of loyalty and of prayer for the King and those with him. He was then admitted to the bar of the Commons by leave given for the occasion, on a motion moved by the Leader of the House of Commons, Priya Raghunathan, and he was questioned there for an hour. It was the first time a Prime Minister had answered at the bar of the House (see Caleb Whitlock and The Commissioning).
When he had withdrawn, Raghunathan moved a motion. Alternative for the Realm called for a division and could not produce its tellers in time, and the motion was agreed without one.
That this House, having heard the statement of the Prime Minister on the loss of the royal flight Kittyhawk, refers to the law officers of the Crown the question whether anything that has occurred in consequence of that loss, in this Realm or in any other realm of His Majesty, engages Article II.8 of the Charter of Union, and requests their opinion.
The question the House referred was prospective. No realm had concluded that the King was dead, and none had moved to proclaim a successor. What the House wished to know was whether a British conclusion reached before an American one would be a difference in the two successions within the meaning of Article II.8, and so hand the American succession to the Parliament of the Union, or whether the clause reaches only a difference in the rules. The law officers already had before them a question on the royal charters of the film studios, on which no opinion had been published in five years, and they gave no indication of when they would answer this one.
That evening the leaders of the five parties in the ministry, whose written terms confine its business to the Territory of Loreto and supply, signed and published a supplementary note of a single sentence: “The business of the ministry under paragraph 3 includes the King’s affairs, for so long as they require it.”
On 27 September the Realm did not open its own plan for the King’s death, Operation Chain Bridge, named like each realm’s for a landmark of its capital, in this case a bridge on the Potomac. Asked about it, Government House repeated that the King was missing.
On 28 September the Governor-General held her weekly audience of the Prime Minister, their third, and told him that she would call at Columbia Palace. She went in the early evening, without him, and saw the Queen and Frederick together. The call was private, and no statement was made about it.
In the evening, after Britain’s statement, the Prime Minister issued one of his own from Charter House, the first he had made outside Parliament since the loss. It said that the Realm would reach its own conclusion in its own time. It was read in London, and in most of the Realm’s newspapers, as a rebuke to the British government for naming its threshold first. He also wrote privately to the families of the seven people aboard with the King, through the British High Commission in New Westminster. The Cabinet asked the Attorney-General for America, Nicholas Fairley, privately for a note on the Regency Act 1811.
On 29 September the Governor-General had the news first, from Ottawa, and telephoned Columbia Palace before it was announced. Her statement followed the announcement.
The King has been found alive. He is being taken to St John’s, in New Albion, where he will be cared for.
Four of those travelling with him were found alive with him. Three have died: Squadron Leader Claire Holloway, Flight Lieutenant Owen Price and Graham Pearce. I ask for your prayers for them and for their families.
On behalf of the Realm I thank the crew of the Kathleen Marie, who found them, and everyone who searched.
The Realm’s part in the day was the King’s journey. At the Defence Secretary’s order, with the Prime Minister’s agreement, the Royal American Air Force sent an aircraft to St John’s to bring him to New Westminster, and the capital’s hospital received him. In a statement from Charter House the Prime Minister gave thanks for the King’s life and for the crew of the Kathleen Marie, spoke of the three who had died, and said that the Governor-General would act on the advice of the King’s physicians. Operation Chain Bridge had never been opened. The question the Commons had referred to the law officers, which had turned on the King’s death, was not withdrawn, and the law officers said nothing.
The House of Lords
The House of Lords was recalled with the Commons and sat on 26 September. The Prime Minister made his statement to the peers in person, Lord Whitlock being a member of that House and leading it himself, on the same day that the Commons had to have a procedure improvised for it in order to hear him at all. The Lords referred nothing to the law officers. Its Constitution Committee announced that it would examine the Regency Act 1811.
The five officers of the Regency Act
The King’s survival did not end the constitutional question. It replaced it with a different one, because a King who is alive and unable to act is the case the Regency Act 1811 was written for. The Realm has had it once before. The Act was passed in 1811 for the last illness of George III, and the Prince Regent acted in the American capacity under American law for nine years, until the old King died.
Under that Act the incapacity of the Sovereign is declared by five officers of the Realm, by a majority, on the evidence of physicians: the Governor-General, the Chief Justice of the United Kingdom of America, the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Lord Speaker and the Prime Minister. As matters stood on 29 September 2028 that was the Governor-General, Michelle Lujan Grisham; the Chief Justice, Nathaniel Brooks; the Speaker, Mark Kelly; the Lord Speaker, Aubrey Fenn, Earl of Rathmore; and the Prime Minister, Caleb Whitlock. The Prime Minister is one of the five, which has been criticised since and was not raised at the time.
The five met informally on 29 September, and did not act. The Governor-General called the meeting and it was held in the Speaker’s rooms at Parliament House, on the ground that those rooms are neither Government House nor the ministry’s. It was announced the same day, in a line from Government House naming those present and stating that no declaration had been made, the reasoning being that five officers meeting in secret about the King’s capacity would be discovered within a day and would look like a conspiracy for having been secret.
What they resolved was to resolve nothing. The physicians would not use the word permanent, and the Act requires evidence of incapacity rather than of injury; until the physicians said more there was nothing to declare and no lawful basis on which to declare it. They agreed to meet again if the evidence changed and on no other occasion. No formal note was taken, and one of the five is understood to have kept a private record, which has not been produced.
The Speaker made a statement to the House on the fact of the meeting that evening, from the chair, undertaking to report every occasion on which the power was exercised and declining to answer questions about it.
The declaration of 30 September
The evidence changed overnight. The King’s physicians at New Westminster General examined him through the night of his arrival, and in the small hours of 30 September they certified that he would remain unconscious for some weeks and could not in that time perform any function of the Crown. They would still not say whether the injury was permanent, and the Act did not ask them to: it asks for incapacity, and a King who will be unconscious for weeks is incapable. Their first bulletin from the hospital was issued through the Royal Household in the morning.
The King was admitted to New Westminster General shortly before midnight on 29 September. He has a serious head injury. His condition is stable.
The King is unconscious, and is expected to remain so for some weeks.
A further bulletin will be issued this evening.
The Governor-General called the five together again for ten o’clock, in the Speaker’s rooms, as before. The physicians’ certificate was put before them, and two of the physicians attended to answer questions. The Act needs three of the five. All five signed, and the Speaker wrote a note beneath his signature. The declaration was delivered to the Clerk of the Privy Council, who enrolled it, and Government House published it at noon with the note, on the reasoning that had governed the first meeting: that a declaration about the King’s capacity would be read in any case and had better be read whole.
We, the persons named in section 2 of the Regency Act 1811, declare that we are satisfied, by evidence which includes the evidence of physicians, that His Majesty is by reason of infirmity of body incapable for the time being of performing the royal functions in right of America.
Michelle Lujan Grisham, Governor-General
Nathaniel Brooks, Chief Justice of the United Kingdom of America
Mark Kelly, Speaker of the House of Commons
Rathmore, Lord Speaker
Whitlock, Prime Minister
Beneath the Speaker’s signature:
I sign because the King is unconscious, and for no other reason. This declaration should end when he wakes.
The note has no force in law. The Act ends a regency when three of the five declare the Sovereign capable again, and it says nothing about waking. It was read at once as the Giffords rule, that no Crown office may be withheld for an incapacity that reasonable accommodation can meet, which the Realm wrote down when Gabrielle Giffords was commissioned Lord Marcher of Arizona; her husband had put it on the record on the regency’s first morning. The Speaker undertook to report the declaration to the House at its next sitting.
The Regent
The Act makes the heir Regent if he is of full age, which it fixes at eighteen, and otherwise the Sovereign’s consort. The heir is fifteen, and so the Queen became Regent in the Realm by operation of the Act and not by anyone’s choice. The distinction was the one the Realm had drawn on the first night. It had declined to treat Britain’s delegation as effective in America, because that would have made the Queen of Sweden acting head of the American Crown on British authority; it now made the same woman Regent on its own authority, under its own statute, and borrowed nothing.
The regency began with the declaration, but under the Act the Regent may not act until she has taken the oath in its Schedule before the Privy Council. The Council met in special sitting at four in the afternoon, in the Privy Council Chamber at Parliament House. The Governor-General presided, as she presides at every sitting, and the Lord President presented the business. The Queen took and subscribed the oath, and the Clerk enrolled it. Prince Frederick sat at the Council table as an observer, without a voice, under the clause of the Act that provides for the heir during a regency, which had never been used. The Prime Minister sat at the same table, the first time the two had met since he called at the palace on 26 September. The sitting was private and no photograph was taken. The Queen said nothing beyond the words of the oath and made no statement afterwards.
She is styled Queen Christina, Regent: her own name and her own crown first, and the regency second.
The Act is short, and most of it was written in 1811 for a case that had not yet arisen.
2. (1) If the Governor-General, the Chief Justice of the United Kingdom of America, the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Lord Chancellor and the Prime Minister, or any three of them, declare in writing that they are satisfied, by evidence which shall include the evidence of physicians, that the Sovereign is by reason of illness or infirmity of mind or body incapable for the time being of performing the royal functions in right of America, those functions shall be performed in the name and on behalf of the Sovereign by a Regent.
(2) Every declaration under this section shall be delivered to the Clerk of the Privy Council, who shall enrol it.
3. (1) The Regent shall be the heir apparent or presumptive to the Crown, if of full age; and if the heir be not of full age, the consort of the Sovereign; and if there be no such person able to act, such person as Parliament shall by Act appoint.
(2) A person is of full age for the purposes of this Act at eighteen years.
4. (1) The Regent shall not act as Regent until the Regent has taken and subscribed before the Privy Council the oath set out in the Schedule to this Act.
(2) During a regency under this Act the heir apparent, if not the Regent, may sit at the Privy Council as an observer, without a voice in its proceedings.
5. The Regent shall perform the royal functions on the same advice, and subject to the same law and conventions, as the Sovereign; and nothing in this Act shall affect the commission of the Governor-General or any other commission or office held of the Crown.
6. A regency under this Act shall end when it is declared in the manner provided by section 2 that the Sovereign is again capable of performing the royal functions, or upon the demise of the Crown; and if the heir attains full age during a regency in which the consort is Regent, the heir shall become Regent in the consort’s place upon taking the oath.
Schedule. I, A.B., do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty, his heirs and successors, according to law; that I will perform the royal functions in right of America according to the Charter of Union and the laws of the Realm, on the advice of His Majesty’s ministers in America; and that I will restore them to His Majesty, or to such other person as this Act requires, when it requires it. So help me God.
The Act still names the Lord Chancellor among the five. When that office was abolished in the 1990s its functions as presiding officer of the House of Lords passed to the Lord Speaker, and the seat among the five went with them; no amendment to the Act was drafted, and the Lord Speaker signed in the Lord Chancellor’s place. Section 5 is why the regency changes little in practice. Almost all of the Crown’s business in the Realm is done by the Governor-General under her commission, which continues, and what passes to the Regent is the small number of functions that belong to the Sovereign in person, chief among them the commissioning of a Governor-General. Section 6 means that if the King is still incapable when Frederick turns eighteen, on 2 May 2031, the regency passes from his mother to him.
New Albion
The loss fell within New Albion’s search and rescue region and on the way to its capital, and New Albion’s government directed the search. Its Governor-General and its Prime Minister made statements on the night of 25 September. New Albion took no constitutional step on the first day. The search it directed found the wreckage on 28 September. On 29 September its search and rescue service lifted the survivors from the Kathleen Marie and flew them to St John’s, where the King was treated before he was flown to New Westminster, and the search was ended that afternoon. On 6 October 2028 Parliament at Ottawa passed a Regency Act of its own, in a single day, making Queen Christina Regent of New Albion.
The other realms
The governments of the King’s other realms made statements on 25 and 26 September. None acted formally on the first day, and none presumed anything. Whether any of them opened its own plan for the King’s death on 27 September was not made public, and by the evening of 28 September none but Britain had said when it would consider the question of his death. By the evening of 2 October nothing had been published of any decision on his capacity by a realm other than the United Kingdom of America and Great Britain.
Malaya, the one realm in which the King is not head of state, needs no regency for a King who cannot act. Its elected king, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, carried on as head of state throughout, and the Crown’s residual part in Malayan defence and foreign affairs waits until the King can act or his heir succeeds.
After 2 October
Between 3 and 12 October every other realm except Malaya made the Queen its Regent, each by its own Act and none copying another: Ireland and New Wessex on 3 October, South Africa and the Philippines on 4 October, the West Indies Federation and the River Plate on 5 October, Raj on 9 October, Hanover and Brunswick on 11 October and Normandy on 12 October. She took the thirteen oaths in New Westminster, the last four on 12 October. The question of whether each realm would decide for itself was answered in ten days, under thirteen separate instruments: the Realm’s own Regency Act 1811, which names the consort, eleven new Acts, and a resolution of Normandy’s Estates. Her part in them is set out under Queen Christina.
The royal family
The Queen
Queen Christina left Stockholm on the morning of 26 September on a Swedish government aircraft and flew across the North Atlantic to New Westminster, where the Governor-General received her in the afternoon. She went to Columbia Palace to be with her son. She arrived as a head of state, as the holder of the British Crown’s delegated functions and as the King’s wife, and the Realm’s arrangements for her had to accommodate all three at once. She made no public statement on the first day, and had made none by the evening of 2 October.
When the wreckage was found on 28 September the household asked for the announcement to be held for an hour, and in that hour the Queen went to her son’s school and told him herself. In the early evening she received the Governor-General at the palace, with him.
On 29 September the Governor-General telephoned Columbia Palace with the news that the King had been found alive, and the Queen told their son. Neither of them went to Newfoundland. In the evening she went ahead to New Westminster General to be there when he arrived.
On 30 September she became Regent in the Realm under its Regency Act 1811, the heir not being of full age, and was sworn before the Privy Council in the afternoon, going there from the hospital and returning to it afterwards. She now held three offices in one city: the Crown of Sweden, which she continues to govern from Columbia Palace by papers and by video; the delegated functions of the British Crown, on British authority; and the regency of the American Crown, on the Realm’s.
On 2 October she became Regent of Great Britain as well, by an Act of the British Parliament that named her, after giving the royal assent to it herself as the King’s delegate. She was sworn by three British privy counsellors at the British High Commission in the evening, going there from the hospital and returning to it, and the delegation ended with the oath. From that evening she was Regent of two of her husband’s realms under two Acts of their two Parliaments, made two hundred and seventeen years apart, and Queen of Sweden in her own right.
Prince Frederick
The heir remained at Columbia Palace, where he lives, on the night of 25 September. Moving him was not proposed: the household judged that nobody would put the only heir on an aircraft over the same ocean the next morning, and he has in any case lived in New Westminster since his schooling began.
On the morning of 26 September he attended prayers for the King and for those travelling with him at Columbia Cathedral, the national seat of the Church of America. He was photographed arriving and leaving, and said nothing. Nothing was issued in his name.
On 27 September he stayed at the palace and was not seen. His closest friend, Theo Hartigan, a fellow pupil at Ellicott High School, was photographed arriving at the palace gates in the afternoon. He came as a friend and as nothing more: the household has declined to give him any appointment, on the ground that a boy who holds nothing cannot lose it.
On 28 September he asked to go to school as usual, and his mother let him. He was at Ellicott High School, where he is enrolled as Frederick Hanover, when the wreckage was found, and the Queen told him there, in the principal’s office, before it was announced. By noon the press knew where he was, and the school, as always, said nothing. In the evening the household issued the first words in his name since the loss: “I want to thank everyone who is searching for my father and for the people with him.”
On 29 September his mother told him, at the palace, that his father had been found alive. In the afternoon the household issued a second statement, which he had written himself: “I don’t know how to thank the crew of the Kathleen Marie enough, but I want them to know we will never forget what they did.” That night he went to the airfield with the Governor-General and was on the apron when his father’s aircraft landed.
On 30 September he sat at the table of the Privy Council when his mother was sworn as Regent, as an observer, without a voice, under section 4 of the Regency Act 1811, a clause written for an heir who is not of age and never used before. The Prime Minister sat at the same table. The sitting was private, and nothing was issued in his name.
On 2 October, a Monday, he went back to Ellicott High School and was photographed arriving, and the school said nothing. Britain’s regency law gives the heir no part, and he was not at the British High Commission that evening when his mother was sworn as Regent of Great Britain.
His own account of the week, from the first telephone call to the school lunch of 2 October, is set out under Prince Frederick.
The Royal Household
The Private Secretary’s office
The Private Secretary was aboard, and on the first day his office was run by his deputies. With the King missing, the office had no one to convey the realms’ advice to. On 26 September its work consisted of receiving the realms’ messages and sending Britain’s business to the Queen in New Westminster. On 28 September it released, with the Royal Air Force, the names of all seven people aboard with the King. On 29 September the Private Secretary was found alive and was kept in hospital at St John’s, and his deputies went on running the office. The household opened Operation Holdfast, its plan for a King who lives and cannot act, for the first time. On 30 September the office issued the physicians’ first bulletin from New Westminster, and under Holdfast began to send the Realm’s business that needs the Sovereign in person to the Queen as Regent. From the evening of 2 October it sent Britain’s business to her as Regent as well, rather than as the King’s delegate. On 20 October, when the King woke, the Private Secretary was still convalescing and his deputy was still running the office, and it was the office that issued the physicians’ bulletins of that day.
The flag over Columbia Palace
The national flag has flown over Columbia Palace since the night of 25 September. The palace flies the standard of the most senior member of the royal family present, which with the King away is ordinarily the standard of the Prince of Columbia. That night the household struck it and flew the national flag at full staff instead, having decided that no personal standard should fly while the King was missing. It was not a lowering.
The King wakes
The waking
The King woke at about 3:40 a.m. Eastern on Friday 20 October 2028 at New Westminster General, where he had been unconscious since he was admitted on the night of 29 September. The Queen was at Columbia Palace. She was sent for at about 3:50 and was at his bedside at about 4:20, and he knew her when she came. The Household has said that he spoke a few words, and has not said what they were.
The order of telling
The Queen was told first, by being sent for. Prince Frederick was brought from Columbia Palace at about 5:15, and the Governor-General came to the hospital at about six. At about 6:30 the Prime Minister, Lord Whitlock, and the British Prime Minister, Alistair Rennie, were told by telephone. From about seven the Regency Office at Columbia Palace sent messages to the other realms, and at eight the physicians issued their bulletin. The Household did not say in what order the realms’ messages went.
His Majesty woke in the small hours, knew the Queen, and spoke a few words. The Governor-General, the Queen and Prince Frederick were sent for and have been with him.
It is too early to say how complete his recovery will be. He is not to receive Ministers or perform any function of the Crown.
A further bulletin will be issued this evening.
The five officers
The five officers of the Regency Act 1811 met the same morning. The Act ends a regency when three of the five declare, on evidence that includes the evidence of physicians, that the Sovereign is again capable of performing the royal functions. The physicians had certified nothing of the kind, and their bulletin said that he was not to perform any function of the Crown. The five resolved that the declaration of 30 September stands until the physicians certify that the King is capable, and that the Queen continues as Regent in the Realm until then.
The Speaker, Mark Kelly, whose note beneath his signature on 30 September had said that the declaration should end when the King wakes, concurred, and wrote beneath the resolution.
I wrote that the declaration should end when the King wakes. By wakes I meant able to act. I concur.
The second note, like the first, has no force in law. It settled what the Speaker had meant, and it did not settle when the Realm’s regency will end.
The Prime Minister
Lord Whitlock made a statement in the House of Lords in the afternoon and then at the bar of the House of Commons. He said that the reference to the law officers on Article II.8 of the Charter would stay open, because the question it asked survived the King’s survival. The reference had been made when the King was missing and turned on his death. What it asked, whether a difference between the realms on a question of fact could engage the clause, was still capable of arising, since each realm in which the Queen is Regent would decide by its own rule when the King could act again.
The twelve other regencies
Each of the twelve other realms in which the Queen is Regent left its regency in place, each under its own law and each by its own statement in the course of the day. The statements were not coordinated, and no realm waited on another; it was a coincidence of twelve decisions and not one decision. Malaya, which has no regency, had nothing to decide.
Britain’s statement went further than the others. The British government said that the King’s capacity must be certified by its own physicians before either House could be asked to resolve under section 4 of the Regency Act 2028 that he was again capable, and that a certificate from the Realm would not do for Britain. Britain’s Act of 2 October had been passed on the certificate of the King’s physicians at New Westminster General.
Prince Frederick and the Queen
Prince Frederick was at the hospital before dawn. Later in the morning the Household issued a third statement in his own words: “My father is awake. He knew my mother and he knew me. Thank you for waiting with us.” He then went to Ellicott High School for the afternoon.
The Queen remained at the hospital. She is Regent in thirteen realms, and nothing she held was changed by the King’s waking.
The evening bulletin
The physicians’ evening bulletin was the first account of the King’s condition beyond the fact that he was awake.
His Majesty has been awake for short spells during the day. He knows his family. He speaks in short sentences, and he is very weak.
He remembers being in the water. He remembers nothing of the aircraft striking it.
It is too early to say how complete his recovery will be.
The Household
Sir Edmund Stanier, the Private Secretary, is still convalescing, and his deputy runs the Private Secretary’s office. The messages to the realms went from the Regency Office at Columbia Palace, which was set up on 4 October under the Deputy Private Secretary to serve the Queen as Regent.
Public response
Crowds gathered at New Westminster General and at the gates of Columbia Palace from the morning, and the bells of Columbia Cathedral were rung. There was no official observance. No flags had been lowered while the King was missing or unconscious, and so none were raised.
Reaction
Crowds gathered on the night of 25 September at the gates of Columbia Palace, whose forecourt and gardens stand partly open to the public under the capital’s unbarricaded convention, and at Buckingham Palace in London. Churches of the Church of America opened for prayer that night and the next day. The American Broadcasting Corporation carried continuous coverage from the evening of 25 September, and did not report that the King was aboard until Government House had confirmed it at 9:40 p.m., sixty-nine minutes after the Continental Network had; its record of the search and the rescue is reproduced as The Search for the King, its record of 2 October, the day of Britain’s regency, as The Regency, and its record of 20 October, the day the King woke, as The King Wakes. No flags were lowered on the first day, since nobody could say that anyone had died, and none had been lowered by the evening of 28 September. When the wreckage was announced on 28 September the crowds at the palace gates in New Westminster and in London grew again, and the churches that had opened on the first night opened again that evening. When the rescue was announced on 29 September the crowds were larger than on any day since the loss, and the bells of Columbia Cathedral were rung. They were rung again on 20 October, when the King woke.
Unresolved questions
As at 31 October 2028:
- The King’s recovery. He woke on 20 October and is in New Westminster General with a serious head injury. He is awake for short spells, knows his family, speaks in short sentences and is very weak, and he remembers being in the water and nothing of the aircraft striking it. On 24 October his physicians said that his speech and parts of his memory may not recover fully, and that they could not yet say whether he would be able to resume the functions of the Crown. When, or whether, he will be able to act is not known. On 25 October, on his physicians’ certificate that he could give the instruction, he asked his Private Secretary to find out, in each of his fourteen realms, what an abdication would require; the regency stands. On 30 October he told the realms in a written message that he had decided to give up the Crown, and the thirteen governments of the Interrealm Succession Compact adopted common terms drafted in London: the abdication takes effect in every realm on the day the last of them gives it effect, Prince Frederick will reign as George V, the age of majority is sixteen in every realm, Queen Christina is Regent for her son until 2 May 2029, and the King is to be created Duke of Cumberland.
- When the regencies end. (Answered on 31 October: each realm’s regency for the King ended with his abdication, and under the common terms the Queen is Regent for her son in every realm until 2 May 2029.) The Realm’s Act ends its regency when three of the five declare the King capable again, and Britain’s Act ends Britain’s when each House of Parliament resolves that he is. The Speaker’s note of 30 September said that the Realm’s should end when he wakes; on 20 October he wrote that he had meant able to act, and the five resolved that the declaration stands until the physicians certify capacity. Britain has said that only its own physicians’ certificate will do for it. Each of the thirteen regencies ends by its own realm’s rule, and nothing requires them to end together or on the same evidence.
- A Regent who reigns elsewhere. The Realm’s Act makes the Sovereign’s consort Regent and says nothing about a consort who is a sovereign in her own right. Britain’s Act settled the question for Britain by naming her.
- Whether each realm will decide for itself. (Answered by 12 October: every realm but Malaya acted, each under its own Act. See the note under The other realms.) The Realm and Britain have each declared the King incapable and made the Queen Regent, by different routes, two days apart. Each of the other realms must decide under its own law whether its King can act, and nothing binds them to the same answer or the same date. Malaya alone needs no regency, its elected king being its head of state.
- Whether a difference of fact engages Article II.8. The question referred to the law officers turned on the King’s death, which has not happened, and it has not been withdrawn. The abdication was given effect in identical terms in every realm, so the successions did not differ. On 20 October the Prime Minister told both Houses that it would stay open, because the question survived the King’s survival. The law officers have not said when they will answer.
- Whether the search should have been widened. The raft was found outside the area being searched, by a boat that was not part of the search.
- Whether the Interrealm Succession Compact reaches facts. The Compact binds the realms’ rules of succession. Whether it has anything to say when they agree on the rules and disagree on whether the rules have been engaged has never been asked.
- Whether the Queen may act for the British Crown. Whether the reigning Queen of Sweden may lawfully exercise the functions of the British Crown, and from outside Britain, was answered in London on 2 October by an Act of Parliament that made her Regent by name and let her be sworn wherever she was. It had not been answered in Stockholm by the evening of 2 October.
- Who would make the fourteen calls. The plans for the King’s death begin with calls by the Private Secretary, in an order that has never been published, and they made no provision for his absence. He is alive and still convalescing, and his deputy runs his office.
- Whether a Lutheran Regent may exercise the Supreme Governor’s functions. The Queen is a Lutheran. She exercises the constitutional functions of the office, on ministers’ advice, and none that is liturgical, and both Archbishops have said that they are content; whether the churches’ own law would say the same is not asked.
- The age of sixteen. Britain’s leaked draft would let the heir act as Regent, or reign in his own right, from sixteen, on 2 May 2029, and no other realm had published a draft. Under the Realm’s Act as it stands he would take the regency from his mother at eighteen, on 2 May 2031. The British bill has since been introduced and is in committee, and the foreign offices of the realms have opened talks on a common age.
Failings
The King and the head of his office travelled together. The Private Secretary is the channel between the sovereign and each of his fourteen governments. British Airways ordinarily carries the private secretaries with the rest of the household, and on this private visit the Private Secretary travelled in the King’s own small aircraft instead. When Britain opened its plans for the King’s death on 27 September, their first step turned out to belong to the Private Secretary as well. The household governs the heir’s travel on the ground that the succession rests on his life alone, and it had no comparable rule keeping the King and the principal officer of his office apart. The loss removed both at once. The responsibility is the Royal Household’s.
The Realm did not legislate after 1840. The question whether the American Crown passes separately on a sudden loss of the sovereign was improvised in 1840 and has never been written into law, and nothing at all was written for a sovereign whose fate is unknown. Parliament has had since 1840 to make provision and has not made it, and on the first day the Realm had a clause on succession that nobody could say applied. The responsibility is Parliament’s.
Assessment
The first day tested machinery built for other occasions. Britain had legislation for a sovereign who cannot act, treated a missing King as one, and used it within hours, and the price was that the functions of the British Crown passed to the reigning Queen of another state and were exercised from the capital of a third. The Realm had a Governor-General whose commission does not lapse while the King lives, so that nothing needed to happen in America on the first day, and nothing did: the Crown’s business was conducted from Government House as on any other day.
What the Realm lacked was a rule for the question the day actually posed, which was whether the King was alive, and it referred that question rather than answering it, which is how it has handled most hard constitutional questions since 1783. The separateness of the fourteen Crowns, which the Realm has long treated as the guarantee of its equality with Britain, meant on the first day that there would be fourteen separate decisions about one missing man, and that nothing bound them to agree. On the second day Britain opened its plans for the King’s death and the Realm kept its own closed. On the third the wreckage made his death look likely, Britain named the event on which its decision would turn, and the Realm answered that it would decide in its own time, the first public sign that the two might not decide together. By the evening of the third day none of the fourteen decisions had been taken.
On the fourth day the question the first three had been organised around disappeared, and the plans built for it were closed. The King was alive, and he was in the Realm, in its capital and in its hospital. The question that replaced it, what is to be done for a King who is alive and cannot act, is one the Realm’s law does answer, in an Act of 1811 that it had used once. As at the evening of 29 September 2028 it had not been used again.
On the fifth day the Realm did what it had declined to do on the first. Britain had acted within hours on the fact of absence; the Realm waited until the King was in its capital and its hospital and its own physicians had certified what was wrong with him, and then acted in a morning, under an Act of its own Parliament whose machinery had waited two hundred and seventeen years to be used, naming the same woman Britain had named but on its own authority. In practice the regency changes little, since the Governor-General’s commission carries almost all of the Crown’s business in the Realm. What it settled was a question of principle, by whose law the American Crown is acted for, and London’s reading of it as a race was not wrong.
On 2 October Britain arrived by another road where the Realm had arrived two days before. It had been first on the first night, acting within hours on the bare fact that the King could not act, and it came second at the end, on the evidence of the Realm’s physicians in the Realm’s capital, by an Act of its own Parliament made for the occasion as in 1811. The two realms now had the same Regent under two statutes, neither borrowing anything from the other, and London minded that it looked like following, because it was. The British oath was taken in an American city because the Regent would not leave the King, and the assent to the Act that made her Regent was given by her own hand as his delegate.
On 20 October the King woke, and nothing that the regencies rested on changed. Every one of the thirteen had been made for a King who cannot act, not for one who is unconscious, and a King who is awake for short spells and very weak is still one who cannot act. The Speaker’s note of 30 September had seemed to tie the Realm’s regency to the waking, and on the morning it was tested he wrote that by waking he had meant able to act. The twelve other realms kept the Queen as Regent on the same day, each by its own decision, and Britain used the day to say that the end of its regency would turn on its own physicians, although its beginning had turned on the Realm’s. The separateness of the fourteen Crowns had first meant fourteen decisions about whether the King was alive; it now meant thirteen about when he could act, and nothing bound them to agree.
Chronology
Times are Eastern.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 11 September 2028 | Caleb Whitlock, Lord Whitlock, is commissioned as the thirty-eighth Prime Minister |
| 25 September, 1:05 p.m. | Kittyhawk leaves RAF Northolt for Ottawa with the King, four members of the Royal Household and a crew of three |
| 25 September, 5:47 p.m. | East of Newfoundland, the flight transmits “Mayday, mayday, Kittyhawk”, and nothing further |
| 25 September, evening | The rescue coordination centre at Halifax takes charge; aircraft and ships of New Albion, Britain and the Realm join the search |
| 25 September, 9:40 p.m. | The Governor-General states from Government House that the King is missing and that her commission continues |
| 25 September, night | The Prime Minister asks the Speaker to recall the House of Commons |
| 25 September, about 10 p.m. | Britain delegates the King’s functions in right of Great Britain to the Queen, in the early hours of 26 September in London |
| 26 September, early morning | The Queen leaves Stockholm |
| 26 September, morning | Prince Frederick attends prayers for the King at Columbia Cathedral |
| 26 September, 2 p.m. | Both Houses sit. Caleb Whitlock, Lord Whitlock, makes his statement in the Lords and then at the bar of the Commons, the first Prime Minister to answer there |
| 26 September, afternoon | The Commons refers the Article II.8 question to the law officers without a division; the Queen arrives in New Westminster and is received by the Governor-General |
| 26 September, evening | The search continues. Nothing has been found |
| 27 September | An autumn storm grounds the search aircraft for most of the day; ships stay on station where the sea allows |
| 27 September | The Queen signs the first British state papers at Columbia Palace |
| 27 September, afternoon | The press reports that Britain has opened Operation Tower Bridge and placed Operation Overstudy on standby. The Realm does not open Operation Chain Bridge |
| 27 September, afternoon | Theo Hartigan is photographed arriving at the gates of Columbia Palace |
| 27 September, evening | The air search resumes over the planned area. Nothing has been found |
| 28 September, morning | The weather clears and the search goes back out in strength. Prince Frederick goes to Ellicott High School at his own request |
| 28 September, mid-morning | A search aircraft sights wreckage close to the area planned before the storm; the announcement is held for an hour at the household’s request |
| 28 September, late morning | The Queen tells Frederick at his school; the finding is announced from Halifax. No one aboard has been found |
| 28 September, afternoon | Ships recover part of the aircraft. The names of all seven aboard with the King are released. Alistair Rennie says Britain will consider the question of the King’s death once the search is formally ended. A British draft bill on the regency is leaked |
| 28 September, afternoon | The Governor-General’s third weekly audience of the Prime Minister; the Cabinet asks the Attorney-General for a note on the Regency Act 1811 |
| 28 September, early evening | The Governor-General calls privately on the Queen and Frederick at Columbia Palace |
| 28 September, evening | The Prime Minister states that the Realm will reach its own conclusion in its own time. Frederick’s first public words are issued. Nothing more has been found |
| 29 September, about 10:20 a.m. | The crab boat Kathleen Marie, of Bay Bulls, finds a life raft outside the search area with the King and four others alive; the King’s valet has died in it |
| 29 September, about 11 a.m. | The Governor-General has the news from Ottawa and telephones Columbia Palace; the Queen tells Frederick that the King is alive |
| 29 September, midday | The rescue is announced from Halifax; the Governor-General’s statement names the three who died |
| 29 September, 12:40 p.m. | A helicopter lifts the survivors from the boat to St John’s |
| 29 September, afternoon | The search for survivors is ended. Britain closes Tower Bridge and stands down Overstudy; the Royal Household opens Holdfast. Frederick’s second statement, in his own words, thanks the crew of the Kathleen Marie |
| 29 September, late afternoon | The five officers of the Regency Act meet informally in the Speaker’s rooms at Parliament House and do not act; Government House announces the meeting |
| 29 September, early evening | The Speaker tells the House of the meeting from the chair and undertakes to report every exercise of the power |
| 29 September, 7:40 p.m. | The King leaves St John’s in a Royal American Air Force aircraft fitted as an air ambulance |
| 29 September, 10:50 p.m. | The aircraft lands at the capital’s military airfield, with Frederick on the apron beside the Governor-General |
| 29 September, shortly before midnight | The King is admitted to New Westminster General, the first time the Realm’s hospitals have treated its King |
| 30 September, small hours | The King’s physicians at New Westminster General certify that he will remain unconscious for some weeks |
| 30 September, 8 a.m. | The physicians’ first bulletin from New Westminster General |
| 30 September, 10 a.m. | The five officers meet again, and all five sign a declaration that the King is incapable; the Speaker adds a note that it should end when he wakes |
| 30 September, noon | Government House publishes the declaration. The Queen is Regent in the Realm by operation of the Act |
| 30 September, 4 p.m. | At a special sitting of the Privy Council the Queen takes the Regent’s oath. Frederick attends as an observer, the first use of the clause, and the Prime Minister sits at the same table |
| 30 September, evening | London reads the Realm’s declaration as a race to be first. Britain’s delegation to the Queen continues |
| 1 October | The physicians’ bulletin says that the King’s condition is unchanged |
| 2 October, early morning | At Westminster, recalled from its recess, Alistair Rennie introduces a regency bill and lays before Parliament the certificate of the King’s physicians at New Westminster General. Three British privy counsellors leave London for New Westminster |
| 2 October, morning | Prince Frederick goes back to Ellicott High School. The bill passes the House of Commons without a division |
| 2 October, about 12:20 p.m. | The bill passes the House of Lords without a division, at about 5:20 p.m. in London |
| 2 October, about 1 p.m. | The Queen signs the commission at Columbia Palace as the King’s delegate, and the royal assent is announced in the House of Lords at four minutes past, 6:04 p.m. in London |
| 2 October, 6 p.m. | The three privy counsellors swear the Queen as Regent of Great Britain at the British High Commission in New Westminster, and Britain’s delegation ends |
| 2 October, evening | Britain’s regency is read in London and reported in the Realm as Britain following the Realm by two days. Charter House makes no statement |
| 20 October, about 3:40 a.m. | The King wakes at New Westminster General |
| 20 October, about 3:50 a.m. | The Queen is sent for from Columbia Palace; she is at the bedside at about 4:20, and he knows her |
| 20 October, about 5:15 a.m. | Prince Frederick is brought from Columbia Palace to the hospital |
| 20 October, about 6 a.m. | The Governor-General comes to the hospital |
| 20 October, about 6:30 a.m. | Lord Whitlock and Alistair Rennie are told by telephone |
| 20 October, from about 7 a.m. | The Regency Office sends messages to the other realms |
| 20 October, 8 a.m. | The physicians’ bulletin: the King has woken, knew the Queen and spoke a few words; he is not to receive Ministers or perform any function of the Crown |
| 20 October, morning | The five officers of the Regency Act resolve that the declaration of 30 September stands until the physicians certify capacity; the Speaker writes that by wakes he meant able to act, and concurs. Frederick’s third statement is issued |
| 20 October, afternoon | Frederick goes to Ellicott High School. Lord Whitlock makes a statement in the Lords and at the bar of the Commons and says that the Article II.8 reference stays open |
| 20 October, in the course of the day | Each of the twelve other realms in which the Queen is Regent keeps her in place by its own statement; Britain says that its own physicians must certify the King’s capacity. Crowds gather at New Westminster General and Columbia Palace, and the bells of Columbia Cathedral are rung |
| 20 October, evening | The physicians’ bulletin: the King is awake for short spells, knows his family and is very weak; he remembers being in the water and nothing of the aircraft striking it; it is too early to say how complete his recovery will be |
| 24 October | The physicians say that the King’s speech and parts of his memory may not recover fully; Lord Whitlock tells the Lords that the declaration stands and the regency continues for as long as the evidence requires |
| 25 October | Prince Frederick announces at Columbia Palace that the King has asked what an abdication would require in each of the fourteen realms, quoting him: “I cannot speak for them now.” The physicians certify that he can give the instruction, and the regency stands |
| 30 October | The King’s written message: he has decided to give up the Crown. The thirteen Compact governments adopt Britain’s common terms from London; Malaya follows Britain |
| 31 October | The Realm, last of the realms, gives effect to the abdication; the Queen assents as Regent at 11:42 a.m.; at 6 p.m. in London, 2 p.m. in New Westminster, Prince Frederick becomes King George V; that evening his father is created Duke of Cumberland |
✎ Editor's Note · Why this article is written a day at a time, and what was ruled
The article records what was known and done by the evening of 20 October 2028, the day the King woke, together with the physicians’ warning of 24 October, the King’s question of 25 October, his decision and the realms’ common terms of 30 October, and the accession of 31 October, and nothing after. The King was missing for three days, was found alive on the fourth, was declared incapable in the Realm on the fifth and in Great Britain on the seventh, and woke on 20 October, and every present-tense statement about him is anchored to that evening so that it remains a true record as the story moves. Later developments belong in later revisions, and the places across the Register that state the King’s condition are listed in CANON.md so they can be revised together.
Jake ruled the shape: the King is missing, not dead; only the King and his household were aboard; the flight was from London to Ottawa on a private visit; it was lost the night before the article was written; the distress call was the call sign and nothing more; there was no foul play; the loss was off Newfoundland, in a small RAF executive jet, with the Private Secretary aboard; the heir stayed at Columbia Palace and went to church; the Queen flew to New Westminster; Britain moved first and delegated to the Queen; and the Realm recalled Parliament and referred the question. For the second day he ruled a storm that grounds the search, Britain opening its plans for the King’s death and the press finding out while the Realm pointedly does nothing, Theo Hartigan visiting Frederick, and the Queen signing British papers at Columbia Palace. The names of the plans, a set for all thirteen realms of which Tower Bridge and Chain Bridge are two, were proposed as a list and approved. For the third day he ruled that the search finds part of the aircraft and no one, that Britain’s Prime Minister says Britain will consider the King’s death once the search is formally ended, that the Governor-General calls privately at Columbia Palace, that the names of the seven are released, that Frederick goes to school and is told there by his mother, that his first words are issued, that the palace has flown the national flag since the first night, and that Britain’s draft minority bill leaks. He also ruled two corrections that the third day carries: Britain may delegate the King’s functions only for incapacity, never for absence, and the Realm’s regency law is its own Regency Act 1811 and not a clause of the Charter. For the fourth day he ruled the rescue: a crab boat of Bay Bulls, the Kathleen Marie, not part of the search, finds the raft after the storm had carried it out of the searched area; Inspector Mensah got the King out of the aircraft and Sergeant Tranter kept all five survivors alive; both pilots were killed when the aircraft struck the sea and the valet died in the raft on the second night; the King has a head injury and is unconscious; he is flown to New Westminster that night and treated at New Westminster General; the Governor-General has the news first, from Ottawa, and the Queen tells Frederick; Frederick’s second statement is his own; and he is on the airfield with the Governor-General when the aircraft lands. The names of those aboard, the times, the crew, the search participants, the texts of the statements and the motion, the hours of the third and fourth days, the helicopter, the survivors’ accounts as the source for the raft, the other survivors’ injuries, the valet’s body brought ashore, who decided to take the King to New Westminster, the air ambulance, the Prime Minister’s words, the closing of Tower Bridge and the opening of Holdfast are this article’s inventions and can be overruled. For the fifth day he ruled the regency: the Realm moves first, on the Saturday, because the physicians were clear; all five officers sign, and the Speaker adds a note that he signs because the King is unconscious and for no other reason and that the declaration should end when he wakes; the Act makes the heir Regent if he is of full age and otherwise the consort, so that the Queen is Regent by law and not by choice; she is styled Queen Christina, Regent; the Privy Council swears her, with Frederick at the table as an observer and the Prime Minister at the same table; she governs Sweden from New Westminster while she is Regent; and London reads it as a race that nobody in New Westminster denies. He also ruled that the Speaker’s statement on the first meeting of the five was made on the fourth day. The text of the Act, the bulletin, the hours, the physicians at the second meeting, the wording of the declaration and of the note, and the Queen’s silence are this article’s inventions and can be overruled. For 2 October he ruled Britain’s regency: Parliament at Westminster declares the King incapable and makes the Queen Regent by an Act of its own, as in 1811, and British privy counsellors fly out and swear her at the British High Commission in New Westminster, so that she does not leave the hospital; and Frederick goes back to school that day. The text of the Regency Act 2028, the recall from recess, the hours, the absence of a division, the assent given by the Queen as the King’s delegate, the three privy counsellors, Rennie’s words, Frederick’s absence from the oath, the bulletin of 1 October and the reading in London are this article’s inventions and can be overruled. For 20 October he ruled the waking: the Queen sent for from Columbia Palace and known to him; the order of telling, from the Queen and Frederick to the Governor-General, the two Prime Ministers and the other realms through the Regency Office; Frederick at the hospital, a third statement in his own words and school in the afternoon; the Speaker’s concurrence at the five officers’ meeting, the declaration standing until the physicians certify capacity; Whitlock in the Lords and at the bar, keeping the Article II.8 reference open; Britain requiring its own physicians; twelve separate decisions to keep the Regent; the bells and no official observance; the Private Secretary still convalescing; and the King’s words never published. The times of the night and morning, the text of Frederick’s statement, the text of the Speaker’s note, the detail and wording of the evening bulletin (including that he remembers nothing of the aircraft striking the water) and the reasoning attributed to Britain’s statement are this article’s inventions and can be overruled.
The constitutional design rests on a gap the Register already contained. The Interrealm Succession Compact keeps thirteen realms from having different rules of succession, and Article II.8 hands the American succession to the Parliament of the Union if the British and American successions differ. Neither was written for a sovereign whose fate is unknown, which is a disagreement about facts rather than rules. The Realm’s Governor-General, whose commission continues while the King lives, is why nothing had to happen in America on the first day, and it is also why the Realm could afford to refer the question rather than answer it.
Trivia
- In-Universe The last transmission from the flight was its own call sign. It gave no cause, no position of its own and no number of persons aboard, and nothing was heard afterwards.
- In-Universe Caleb Whitlock, Lord Whitlock, became the first Prime Minister to answer at the bar of the House of Commons on 26 September 2028, fifteen days after he was commissioned, to report that the King was missing. His first scheduled monthly appearance had not yet fallen due.
- In-Universe On 27 September 2028 the reigning Queen of Sweden signed British state papers at Columbia Palace under a delegation made in London, the first British Crown instrument signed in America. Nobody made anything of it on the day.
- In-Universe Each of the King's fourteen realms keeps its own plan for his death, named for a landmark of its capital, and the code phrase to almost every capital is that its bridge is down. Britain's is Tower Bridge. The Realm's is Chain Bridge, on the Potomac.
- In-Universe The first step of Britain's plan for the King's death is a telephone call by his Private Secretary. When the plan was opened on 27 September 2028, the Private Secretary was missing with the King.
- In-Universe The order in which the Private Secretary would telephone the fourteen realms on the King's death is fixed, has never been published, and is the most argued-about thing in the plans.
- In-Universe The search for the King was led by New Albion, the realm he was flying to, because the loss fell within its search and rescue region.
- In-Universe Earlier the same year the King's nephew, Alexander I, became the first minor sovereign of the modern constitutional era, and the King advised him on minority. The King's own heir is fifteen.
- In-Universe The King is never flown by British Airways, which carries his household and its baggage. The Royal Air Force flies him in Britain and across the Atlantic, and the Royal American Air Force flies him in the Realm.
- In-Universe The law officers to whom the Commons referred the Article II.8 question had a question about the film studios' royal charters before them already, on which no opinion had been published in five years.
- In-Universe Nobody proposed moving the heir. The household governs his travel on the ground that the succession across fourteen Crowns rests on his life alone, and on the morning after the loss he went to church in the city where he lives.
- In-Universe Prince Frederick was told that wreckage of his father's aircraft had been found by his mother, who went to his school to tell him herself, in the principal's office, an hour before the finding was announced.
- In-Universe The first words issued in Prince Frederick's name after the loss, on the third day, thanked everyone who was searching for his father and for the people with him.
- In-Universe On the night of the loss the household struck the Prince of Columbia's standard over Columbia Palace and flew the national flag at full staff, so that no personal standard flew there while the King was missing. It was not a lowering.
- In-Universe Britain's regency legislation allows the King's functions to be delegated only when he cannot act, never because he is away. A missing King was treated as one who cannot act for the first time on 26 September 2028.
- In-Universe The King was found by the crew of a crab boat, the Kathleen Marie of Bay Bulls, which was heading home from the crab grounds and was not part of the search.
- In-Universe Sergeant Megan Tranter, the aircraft's steward, ran the life raft for three and a half days, through a storm, and brought all five survivors through it.
- In-Universe On 29 September 2028 the King was admitted to New Westminster General, the first time the Realm's hospitals had treated its King.
- In-Universe Prince Frederick's second statement, issued on the day his father was found, was written by himself: 'I don't know how to thank the crew of the Kathleen Marie enough, but I want them to know we will never forget what they did.'
- In-Universe All five officers signed the declaration of 30 September 2028, although the Regency Act 1811 needs only three. The Speaker, Mark Kelly, wrote beneath his signature that he signed because the King was unconscious and for no other reason, and that the declaration should end when the King wakes.
- In-Universe When the King woke on 20 October 2028, the Speaker wrote a second note, beneath the five officers' resolution that the declaration stands: by 'wakes' he had meant able to act.
- In-Universe The Regency Act 1811 still names the Lord Chancellor among its five officers, an office the Realm abolished in the 1990s. The Lord Speaker signed the declaration of 30 September 2028 in his place.
- In-Universe Prince Frederick sat at the table of the Privy Council at fifteen, on 30 September 2028, as an observer without a voice, under a clause of the Regency Act 1811 written for an heir who is not of age. It had never been used.
- In-Universe On 30 September 2028 Queen Christina held three offices in one city: the Crown of Sweden, the delegated functions of the British Crown and the regency of the American Crown.
- In-Universe On 2 October 2028 Queen Christina, as the King's delegate in Great Britain, gave the royal assent in New Westminster to the Act of Parliament that made her his Regent. It was the first Act of the British Parliament assented to in America.
- In-Universe The oath of a British Regent was taken outside Britain for the first time on 2 October 2028, before three privy counsellors at the British High Commission in New Westminster, because the Regent would not leave the King's hospital.
- In-Universe From 2 October 2028 Queen Christina was Regent of two of her husband's realms under two Acts made two hundred and seventeen years apart, the Realm's of 1811 and Britain's of 2028, and Queen of Sweden in her own right.
- Real-World The call sign is taken from real practice, in which Kittyhawk identifies an RAF flight carrying the British sovereign.
- Real-World Under the real Regency Act 1937 the sovereign's spouse is a Counsellor of State, the sovereign may delegate to the Counsellors when he is abroad, and a Counsellor who is out of the country is left out of the delegation. The setting's Britain delegates only for incapacity, never for absence, and lets the Queen act from New Westminster.
- Real-World Under the real Regency Acts a sovereign reigns in his own right from eighteen, and since 1943 the heir may act as Regent from the same age. The setting's leaked British draft lowers both to sixteen.
- Real-World In 1811 Parliament at Westminster declared George III incapable by resolutions of both Houses and made the Prince of Wales Regent by Act. The King being unable to give the royal assent, it was given by a commission sealed on Parliament's authority. The setting's Britain did it again by an Act on 2 October 2028, and its Queen gave the assent herself as the King's delegate.
- Real-World Under the real Regency Act 1937 the sovereign's incapacity is declared by any three of five: the sovereign's spouse, the Lord Chancellor, the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Lord Chief Justice of England and the Master of the Rolls. The setting's Realm names the Governor-General and the Prime Minister where Britain names the spouse and the Master of the Rolls.
- Real-World The real Britain names its plans for royal deaths after bridges. Elizabeth II's was London Bridge, with Operation Unicorn for a death in Scotland, which is where she died in 2022, and Operation Overstudy for a death abroad.
- Real-World The rescue coordination centre at Halifax and the oceanic control centre at Gander are real, and between them they cover the part of the North Atlantic where the flight was lost.
- Real-World A life raft and floating wreckage drift differently, the raft with the wind and debris with the current, which is why search planners model them separately. Bay Bulls, south of St John's, is a real fishing harbour.
- Design The article records each day as it arrives and nothing beyond it. For three days the King was missing rather than dead, so that the fourteen realms could reach different conclusions about the same facts, which is the question the Register's constitutional machinery was never built to answer. The fourth day replaced it with a question the machinery does answer.
- Design The Interrealm Succession Compact stops the realms having different rules of succession. It says nothing about realms that agree on the rules and disagree on whether they have been engaged, and that is the gap this event opens.
See also
- Ernest V, the King, found alive on the fourth day, declared incapable in the Realm on the fifth and in Great Britain on 2 October, and awake since 20 October
- George V, his son and heir, fifteen and resident in New Westminster, who succeeded him on 31 October 2028
- The Crown in right of America, the capacity in which he reigns over the Realm
- The Charter of Union of the American Colonies, whose Article II.8 was referred to the law officers
- The Governor-General, whose commission continued
- Caleb Whitlock, Lord Whitlock, the Prime Minister, who answered at the bar of the House
- The Prime Minister and The Commissioning, for the office and the bar of the House
- George III, for whose last illness the Realm passed the Regency Act 1811
- The Privy Council, before which the Regent was sworn
- Mark Kelly, the Speaker, one of the five officers of the Regency Act
- The Speaker of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, whose presiding officers are two of the five
- New Albion, the realm he was flying to, which directed the search
- Great Britain, which delegated his functions to the Queen on the first night and made her Regent by Act of Parliament on 2 October
- The Scandinavian Union, within which Queen Christina reigns as Queen of Sweden
- British Airways, which does not carry the sovereign
- The Dominion Era, for the improvisation of 1840
- The May Day Bombings, the Realm’s last emergency of the Crown
- Theo Hartigan, Frederick’s closest friend, who came to Columbia Palace on the second day
- The National Health Service of America, whose New Westminster General received the King
- The Search for the King, the ABC’s transcripts of the four days and its report of the rescue
- The Regency, the ABC’s transcripts of 2 October, the day Parliament made the Queen Regent of Great Britain
- The King Wakes, the ABC’s record of 20 October, the day the King woke
- Plans for the Death of the King, the fourteen realms’ plans, among them the Realm’s Operation Chain Bridge, which it did not open
Categories
History · The Crown · Personal Union · United Kingdom of America · Present Order