The Crown in Right

The Crown in right is the legal doctrine under which the monarch of the personal union holds fourteen Crown capacities: thirteen separate legal persons, each answering to the ministers of its own realm and to no others, and in Malaya an office of protectorship that is not a Crown. A Crown in right of a realm owns that realm’s Crown property, makes its contracts, prosecutes in its courts and acts only on its ministers’ advice, and it is distinct in law from every other Crown held by the same person.

The doctrine was created for one realm in 1783 and extended to the others as they entered the union. It is applied below the level of the realm as well: the American polities, the provinces of New Albion, the states of the West Indies and several other units hold Crowns in right of their own, which are separate legal persons inside the Crown of the realm and not further capacities of the King. Fourteen capacities remain fourteen however many Crowns lie beneath them.

This article sets out the doctrine, the house that carries it, the working of each of the fourteen Crowns in the order in which they joined the union, the Crowns below the realm, and the question of what the Crowns do when the person who holds them cannot act. It then compares the Crowns on the matters where comparison is possible: assent, public appearance, honours, crisis and republicanism. The names, styles and succession of the Crowns are the subject of Styles and Titles of the Crown, and the arrangements for the King’s death are in Plans for the Death of the King.

The doctrine

The fourteen capacities

George V, who succeeded his father Ernest V on 31 October 2028, holds fourteen capacities: eleven kingdoms, two duchies and one empire. Thirteen are counted as sovereign, which is an internal constitutional term and not a claim of independent statehood: it describes a Crown held in its own right under the law of the realm concerned. The fourteenth, the Duchy of Normandy, is constituent, a Crown held inside the French Empire. Hanover and Brunswick are sovereign in this sense and remain constituent states of the German Empire.

One of the fourteen is not, strictly, a Crown. In Malaya the Crown is the elected Yang di-Pertuan Agong’s, and the King holds the office of Protector, an external guarantee in which he performs no act within the Federation. The union counts it among the fourteen because it is written into the style and bound by the succession rules, and the count is retained in this article for that reason. Malaya is the one capacity that is an office and not a Crown.

Each Crown is an office that is always occupied. The doctrine treats it as a corporation sole: the person dies, abdicates or is incapacitated, and the office continues, so that what lawyers call the demise of the Crown is the change of its occupant and not an interval in which there is no Crown. A governor-general’s commission is issued to the Crown and not to the man, which is why it survives incapacity and, in most realms, the demise.

The advice rule

In each capacity the King acts on the advice of the ministers of the realm concerned and of no others. A British minister has no standing in a Philippine question, an American minister none in a Hanoverian one, and a New Albion minister none in the Raj. The rule is the load-bearing principle of the whole arrangement and the form it takes is practical. Each Crown has its own seal, its own Privy Council or equivalent, its own papers and its own ministers’ audiences, and the Royal Household keeps one Private Secretary to the King and a separate secretary for each of the fourteen Crowns, who keeps that realm’s papers apart from the others and sits in the room only while that realm’s business is done.

Where two realms’ ministers advise the King differently on the same question, the King does not resolve the conflict, and the ministries settle it by negotiation, as the governments of independent states would. There is no rule that says what the King does if he is asked to sign two instruments that contradict each other. The question is set out in Styles and Titles of the Crown and has not arisen in acute form.

Exceptions to the advice rule

The rule has exceptions, each written into the constitution of the realm concerned, and they are few.

The Philippines. The Constitution of 1952 provides that when both Houses of Congress, each by two thirds of its whole membership, address the King praying for the removal of the Lakan, the King removes the Lakan. The King acts on the advice of a legislature, directly, in the one place where the doctrine permits it because the Philippine Constitution says so. It has been done once.

Normandy. French ministers advise the Duke directly where a reserved French act requires ducal participation, such as joint defence appointments and assent to the compact; it is a narrowly bounded channel, and no advice crosses into any other Crown capacity. The Duke also selects the Lieutenant of Normandy personally. The appointment does not require ministerial advice, though he normally consults the President of the Norman Council and the Chief Justice. It is the only appointment in any capacity that is made on no one’s advice.

Ireland. The President of the Executive advises the King on honours, commemoration, the Irish language and the King’s conduct in Ireland; the Taoiseach advises on the government of the country. If the two advices conflict, the King decides. The provision exists by accident, because the Convention of 1937 divided the advisory function without writing a rule for collision. It has never been invoked and has come close on perhaps four occasions, each resolved by officials before it reached him.

Jersey and Guernsey. A committee of the British Privy Council, the Committee for the Affairs of Jersey and Guernsey, advises the King on whether to assent to the laws of the Channel Islands, so the Crowns in right of Jersey and of Guernsey take another realm’s ministers’ advice on legislation. The committee has not refused a Jersey law in living memory and last did so in the eighteenth century. The King’s other Jersey acts are done on the Chief Minister’s advice.

Malaya. The Protector acts on no advice because he performs no act. The protectorship instrument forbids him to assent to any law, make any appointment save his High Commissioner, command any force or exercise any prerogative of mercy.

Louisiane. The rule binds the Crowns of the polities too, and one of them departs from it. When a bill of the Assemblée is laid before the Grand-Duc, article 81 of the Constitution of Louisiane allows him four courses and no fifth: assent, return to the Assemblée for reconsideration, referral to the judges for certification, or withholding assent for the session. The First Minister advises assent, and in ordinary practice the Grand-Duc gives it in the name of the Crown in right of Louisiane. Whether to take one of the other three courses is his choice alone, made on no minister’s advice. It is the one discretion in the grand duchies that no minister advises, and because thirty days without a course counts as assent, it cannot become a refusal by doing nothing.

Hawaiʻi. The King of Hawaiʻi gives assent on the Kuhina Nui’s advice, but the Kingdom’s honours, the Royal Order of Kamehameha and the Order of Kalākaua, are in his personal gift and are conferred on no minister’s advice.

The King’s own sphere. A small number of things belong to no realm: the Household, the appointments to it, the order in his personal gift (the Royal Household Order of Ernest) and his private estate. They are the King’s in his own person. Everything else that he does is done in one of the fourteen capacities.

Personality, property and proceedings

A Crown in right is a separate legal person. It owns its realm’s Crown property, which is distinct from parliamentary appropriations, from private property and from the monarch’s personal estate. The King’s private estate is the Welf patrimony, the family’s estates in Lower Saxony and Austria, which belong to the house and not to the Hanoverian Crown; the Crown estates of the fourteen realms are separate, and the King has no personal title to any of them.

A Crown can be sued in its own courts by statute, in contract and in tort, under Crown proceedings acts that differ from realm to realm. No court issues an injunction against the Crown itself, only against its officers. Prosecutions run in the Crown’s name in the federal and unitary realms, and in the American polities a case is reported by the name of the polity (“Ohio v. Smith”), the Crown’s name appearing on the writ and the indictment.

A realm’s Crown does not inherit the liabilities of the government it replaced unless a statute says so. When Ireland’s Crown acknowledged the Famine in the name of “the office that holds the responsibility”, the acknowledgement was moral and not legal, and Irish counsel said so on the afternoon it was made.

Disputes between Crowns

A polity Crown and the Crown of its realm are separate persons, and the Royal American Supreme Court has original jurisdiction over a suit between them. The King does not appear on both sides, because he does not, and the court says so whenever it is asked. State of Wyoming v Royal Parks Service, on the Greater Yellowstone compact, is the pending example.

Realms cannot sue one another in any realm’s courts. A dispute between two realms’ Crowns can reach the League of Nations’ court only by the consent of both, which has happened twice: the Machias Seal Island dispute between the United Kingdom of America and New Albion, and a fisheries dispute in the Straits of Malacca between the Raj and Malaya. In practice the ministries negotiate. The prime ministers of the fourteen meet every second year at the Conference of Realms, which has no powers, issues no communiqué and seats its members alphabetically in the language of the host.

Treaties between realms

A treaty between two of the King’s realms is signed by the King once for each realm, under that realm’s seal, on that realm’s ministers’ advice, and the two signatures are witnessed by different officers. He does not sign for a realm that has not advised him to. The instruments are lodged at the Royal Archives at Hanover, which keep the union’s register of recognition and succession notices.

Allegiance

Allegiance runs to each Crown separately. A Filipino in Britain owes allegiance to the King of the Philippines and only a local allegiance to the British Crown while there. The recognised status that citizens of one realm hold in another, the mobility arrangements and the portable qualifications, rests on treaty and not on any shared allegiance to the King’s person. No doctrine of common allegiance has been adopted by any realm.

The doctrine without a name

No statute, charter or judgment has ever defined the Crown in right. The Charter of 1783 created a separate American Crown without using the phrase, and the doctrine was worked out afterwards in the ordinary disputes over who advised the sovereign on appointments, pardons, instructions to officers and Crown lands. The phrase is a term of art in every realm and a term of law in none. It is used in statutes and judgments as though it had been defined, and it is still technically not named.

The House of Hanover

The dynasty

The dynasty is the House of Hanover, and there are no Windsors. The Hanoverian sequence runs George III, George IV, William IV and Victoria, and then turns: Victoria was assassinated in 1840, three years after Hanover was severed from the British Crown under Salic law, and the succession passed to the Ernestine branch. The Hanoverian crown was reunited with the British and American Crowns in the person of Ernest I, and the three have been held together since.

The repeated Ernests give the modern monarchy its naming rhythm and its public continuity. The house also has a second trait: its kings live and reign unusually long, and their heirs arrive late. Ernest II reigned from 1851 to 1878; Ernest III acceded at 28 and reigned to 86, from 1878 to 1936; Ernest IV acceded at 36 and reigned to 72, from 1936 to 1972; Ernest V was born in 1947 and acceded at 25. Each king’s heir was born well into his father’s reign, and Prince Frederick, born in 2013, arrived when Ernest V was sixty-six. The pattern has produced a recurring constitutional anxiety, which is not whether the Crowns will endure but whether the next heir will arrive in time to inherit them as an adult. On 31 October 2028 it was realised in a form the house had not prepared for: Ernest V abdicated, and his heir acceded at fifteen.

The royal family is British, formed in Great Britain, and lived in London until 2028; since 31 October 2028 the King lives in New Westminster. The Hanoverian house is the Crowns’ common holder and not a family of any one realm, and the Atlantic realms use the name Hanover for it where Welf appears chiefly in German and heraldic usage. Ernest V’s sister, Queen Caroline of Hanover, is the mother of Alexander I, German Emperor and King of Prussia, who is George V’s first cousin.

Ernest V

Ernest V was King of Great Britain, of the United Kingdom of America, of Hanover, of Ireland, of New Albion, of New Wessex, of South Africa, of the River Plate, of the West Indies Federation and of the Philippines, King and Protector of Malaya, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Brunswick and Emperor of Raj from 1972 until his abdication took effect at six in the evening in London on 31 October 2028. He lived in London. For most living citizens of the realms he was the only monarch they had known, and his length of reign became a form of authority in its own right: the one fixed point across successive ministries in all fourteen realms. He was created His Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland by the first British instrument of his son’s reign, and remains in hospital in New Westminster.

His public role differed by realm. In Britain he was present: he granted assent himself and held the weekly audience of the Prime Minister. In the Realm and the other realms with a governor-general he was represented, and reigned through a commission. In Ireland he had no representative and his acts travelled to him. In Malaya he was Protector and performed nothing.

George V

George V, born Prince Frederick on 2 May 2013 in Stockholm, Ernest V’s only child, succeeded to all fourteen Crowns at once when the abdication took effect, at six in the evening in London on 31 October 2028, which was two in the afternoon in New Westminster, where he was in a geometry class. The Realm was the last of the realms to give the abdication effect, by an Act that passed both Houses that morning and to which the Regent assented at 11:42, since a representative cannot perform an instrument that touches the succession. He was fifteen. Under the common terms Queen Christina is Regent for him in thirteen realms until his sixteenth birthday on 2 May 2029, when he reigns in his own right in every realm at once. The oaths a sovereign takes on his accession wait for that day, and a coronation in Great Britain has been announced for after it. He is the first sovereign of the house to reign under a name he was not christened with.

He is also the first sovereign of the union to live in the United Kingdom of America. He lives at Columbia Palace in New Westminster in the school year and is to finish at Ellicott High School with his year. The Governor-General’s commission, issued to the Crown and not to the man, continues unchanged, and in each realm the Regent acts for him on that realm’s advice alone. Through his mother, Queen Christina of Sweden, he remains Crown Prince of Sweden and Duke of Öland, a Crown held wholly apart from the personal union; the inheritances meet only in his person.

Before his accession he held six heir’s dignities, of which the senior was Prince of Wales, the others being Prince of Columbia, Prince of Good Hope, Prince of Patagonia, Prince of the Antilles and Prince of Wolfenbüttel, together with the Duke of Cornwall, the historic male-only estate dignity of the British heir, which is distinct from the civic Duchy of Kernow. All of them merged in the Crown at the accession and wait for an heir apparent; none passes to an heir presumptive.

He has no brother or sister, and the line behind him passes from Ernest V’s descendants to his sister’s: to Queen Caroline, born in 1966, the heir presumptive, and then to her children, Alexander I, German Emperor and King of Prussia, and Princess Charlotte, in that order, the realms’ move to absolute primogeniture having been made after both were born and drafted, like Prussia’s, to run only forwards. Caroline is next to the fourteen Crowns with no dignity in any of them. That the second in line is the sovereign of the German Empire, in which Hanover and Brunswick lie, is a question no instrument of any realm answers.

As heir he was paid for by Britain, which met the cost of his household, and by the Duchy of Cornwall, which met his private costs, and the Realm paid for his residence and security in New Westminster. How the costs of a sovereign who lives in the Realm are to be divided has not been announced.

The Household

The Royal Household is formally shared among the fourteen realms and is in practice overwhelmingly British. One Private Secretary serves the King, and a secretary for each Crown keeps that realm’s papers apart from the others. The Household keeps the rota of the King’s visits. Britain bears the common costs through the Civil List, the grant it receives in exchange for surrendering the revenues of the Crown Estate to the Treasury. Each other realm pays only for its own representative, its own grant for the Crown and the visits made to it. No realm pays for another’s Crown, and the King’s private means are the Welf patrimony.

The Household also keeps one honour that belongs to no realm. The Royal Household Order of Ernest, founded by Ernest III in 1895, has a single grade, Companion, and is in the King’s personal gift. Citizens of every realm may accept it without a ministerial recommendation, and it is the only honour in the union that does not come from a realm’s government.

Rules that bind the house

Marriage. The marriage of the heir requires the consent of the King in his British capacity alone, as the older British law has it. The other realms are informed.

Religion. Only Great Britain makes a religious test of the sovereign, who must be in communion with the Church of England. Other realms have no test, and the Raj has no established faith. The ecclesiastical dignities of the Crown are set out in Styles and Titles of the Crown.

Succession. The Interrealm Succession Compact binds thirteen of the fourteen Crowns to follow a single line of succession, and Malaya’s constitution follows Britain’s. The Compact does not cover regency law, which is each realm’s own.

Coronation. There is one coronation, at Westminster, as King of Great Britain. In every other realm the accession is marked by a proclamation and an oath sworn in that realm’s own form, and by an acclamation, and not by a coronation of its own.

The King’s time and the King’s words

There is no rule about how the King divides his time. The Household keeps a rota, the realms count the days, and the shortfall is a standing complaint in the smaller ones. Ernest V spent most summers at a plain lodge in the Laurentian hills of New Albion and came to Ireland more often than any of his predecessors.

The sovereign’s formal addresses follow a convention: each is made in one named capacity and countersigned by that realm’s ministers. Ernest V’s address to the American people on 1 May 2006 was made from London in his American capacity, and his address on the pluralist settlement in the Raj was made in his Raj capacity and countersigned through the Raj Crown office. The convention is observed for formal addresses and loosely for informal remarks, and the Household’s press office has been criticised for the looseness. A remark that names no capacity is a private word of the man.

The fourteen Crowns

The Crowns are taken in the order in which they joined the union. Each section follows the same six heads: how the Crown is held, its personality and property, its representative, assent and the reserve powers, honours and the forces, and what is peculiar to that Crown. The union has no order of precedence among the realms, and the order here is one of date and not of rank.

Great Britain

How the Crown is held. The Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain is the oldest of the fourteen capacities, held by the Hanoverian kings since 1714 and long before the Charter of 1783. Ernest V succeeded to it in 1972 under British succession law and lived in the realm; George V, who succeeded on 31 October 2028, is the first King of the house to live outside it. England, Scotland, Wales and Kernow are constituent nations that share the one Crown. There is no Crown in right of any of them, and the devolved governments and the Duchy of Kernow act in the name of the Crown in right of Great Britain.

Personality and property. The Crown in right of Great Britain owns the Crown Estate, whose revenues Parliament surrenders to the Treasury in exchange for the Civil List, the grant that pays for the Crown. Britain pays for the Crown alone, and it bears the common costs of the Household that the other realms share in form. The Crown dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man are not part of Great Britain. Jersey and Guernsey hold Crowns in right of their own, treated with the Crowns below the realm; the Isle of Man is the King’s Lordship of Mann, a lordship and not a Crown in name, though a Crown in every legal effect.

The Crown’s representative. There is none. There is no Governor-General at Westminster, because the sovereign was in the capital, and there is no Lord Regent and no standing commission empowered to act in his absence. Since 31 October 2028 the King lives in New Westminster, and the Regent acts for him in Britain until his sixteenth birthday; what Britain does for a sovereign of full age who lives abroad has not been settled. The omission is settled and not disputed: Britain’s rule is that the King’s presence is the whole of the design, and that a regent is legislated for only when he cannot act.

Assent, prerogative and reserve powers. The King grants assent in person, appoints the Prime Minister, opens Parliament and holds a weekly audience of the Prime Minister. The royal prerogative is wholly unwritten and has never been codified. Ministers exercise most of it in the King’s name, and the personal prerogatives, assent and the appointment of a Prime Minister, rest on convention. Assent and the other personal acts require the King, and when he is out of the realm they are held until he returns. The regency legislation allows his functions to be delegated only when he cannot act, never because he is away.

Honours and forces. The principal order is the Order of the Garter. The highest award for gallantry is the Ernest Cross, created in 1856 under Ernest II. The Prime Minister recommends honours, and British Prime Ministers take peerages routinely, which American premiers decline and each country finds the other’s habit vulgar. The British armed forces swear to the Crown in right of Great Britain.

The resident King. What is peculiar to this Crown is that its holder is present. The weekly audience obliges a head of government to explain the week’s decisions in person to someone who cannot be dismissed and cannot be briefed against, and the discipline has no equivalent in the realms that are represented. It is the one Crown in which the doctrine is not tested by distance, and the one in which the King’s personal conduct is most visible to the ministers who advise him.

Hanover

How the Crown is held. The Kingdom of Hanover is the ancestral Crown of the house. It was held with the British Crown from 1714, raised from an electorate to a kingdom in 1814, severed from the British Crown in 1837 under Salic law and reunited in the person of Ernest I in 1840, which makes it the only Crown in the union ever separated and recovered. Hanover was never annexed by Prussia, and it is a constituent kingdom of the German Empire, ruled by the House of Welf.

Personality and property. The Crown in right of Hanover holds the Herrenhausen palaces and the Royal Archives for the kingdom. The Welf patrimony, the family’s estates in Lower Saxony and Austria, belongs to the house and not to the Crown, and the settlement of 1866 that separated the two is still argued over in the law reports. Hanover’s economy, defence, citizenship and external relations are German, and the Crown acts only in the fields the Empire leaves to it.

The Crown’s representative. Hanover has none. The King signs everything in person, wherever he is, and his acts travel to him by courier. The Hanoverian Crown Office handles the formal royal functions, a Minister-President leads the government and answers to the unicameral Landtag, and neither is the King’s deputy.

Assent, prerogative and reserve powers. The King assents to the Landtag’s laws on the Minister-President’s advice. His only distinct competence is the Crown Exception, which permits the kingdom to handle a defined class of Crown-to-Crown instruments, including recognition, succession notices and archive authentication, without sending them through the imperial foreign ministry as ordinary foreign affairs. Berlin accepted the arrangement because the alternative would have forced a Hanoverian Crown capacity through German foreign policy.

Honours and forces. The Royal Guelphic Order, founded in 1815, is the kingdom’s order, and a Cross of Merit recognises civil gallantry in fire, flood and rescue. Hanover has no military decorations of its own, because defence is German and Berlin gives them. There is no Hanoverian armed force to swear to the Crown.

The register of the fourteen. What is peculiar to this Crown is that it keeps the union’s records. The Royal Archives at Hanover hold the one authenticated register of recognition instruments and succession notices for all fourteen Crowns, because the Archives are the only office the union could agree to trust. The Crown Relations Office administers it. It is a modest Crown, and every other Crown’s succession papers eventually reach it.

The United Kingdom of America

How the Crown is held. The Crown in right of America was created by the Charter of Union of 1783, which King George III signed twice on its last page with a marginal notation of the two capacities: in right of Great Britain and in right of America. The second signature was the first act ever done in the name of the new Crown. The Charter’s 1783 text never uses the phrase, and the doctrine was named afterwards. George Washington was created the first Duke of Mount Vernon as part of the settlement.

Personality and property. The Crown in right of America is the federal Crown. It owns the Realm’s federal property, the District and Loreto, the arsenals, the ports of entry and the Royal American Parks System, which it holds as trustee and not as owner. The polities own the land within them by default, under their own Crowns. Prosecutions for federal offences run as “The King v. Smith”. The Crown owns Pan American World Airways, a public corporation wholly in its hands, which holds no royal warrant. The Rights Act binds this Crown, as the section on its peculiarity explains.

The Crown’s representative. The Governor-General, at present Michelle Lujan Grisham, who succeeded Sonia Sotomayor, represents the Crown in the Realm. The King appoints on the Prime Minister’s advice, for a term of roughly eight years by convention, and without parliamentary confirmation. The office is non-partisan, its holders are drawn from public life outside party, and the commission survives the King’s incapacity. The detail of the office is in the Governor-General article.

Assent, prerogative and reserve powers. The Governor-General grants assent, commissions the Prime Minister and reads the Speech from the Throne at the State Opening of Parliament, except that the Sovereign reads it in person when he is in the Realm. The reserve powers have been used twice, in 1943 and after the May Day Bombings in 2006. On 30 September 2028 the five officers named in the Regency Act 1811 declared the King incapable and the Queen became Regent by operation of the Act, and the office’s day-to-day business was carried by the commission throughout.

Honours and forces. The principal order is the Order of the Charter, created by statute in 1859, with five grades from Companion to Knight or Dame Grand Cross. The Royal American Armed Forces swear to the Crown in right of America, and the polities may keep guard formations only under federal standards and federalisation on proclamation. The George Cross was awarded collectively to the medical teams of the May Day Bombings in 2007 under special letters patent.

The federal definition. What is peculiar to this Crown is how the Realm limited it. The American Rights Act of 1866 defined a public authority as the Crown in right of the federal government and excluded the government, legislature, courts, officers and bodies of any polity, so that the Act bound the federal Crown and left the 46 polity Crowns unbound. No operative section was altered to achieve this. The present section lists more than twenty named bodies, drafted in 1962 so that the definition could not be narrowed by construction. For three generations the Act was described as the Realm’s bill of rights without the sentence that limited the description being read aloud.

New Albion

How the Crown is held. The New Albion Act 1867, passed by the British Parliament at the colonies’ request, came into force on 1 July 1867 under Ernest II and brought the Crown of New Albion into the union as a distinct capacity. London retained for two further generations a power to amend the Act, which it seldom used. Appeals to the Judicial Committee in London were later abolished and the Supreme Court of New Albion became the final court.

Personality and property. The Crown in right of New Albion is the federal Crown. Each of the eight provinces holds a Crown in right of itself, and property, contracts and litigation run in the name of “the Crown in right of Ontario” and the others; the three territories are held by the federal Crown through commissioners. The Hudson’s Bay Company surrendered Rupert’s Land to the Crown in 1869, and it passed to New Albion in 1870 as a single province.

The Crown’s representative. The Governor-General, at present Michèle Lavallée, since 2026, lives at Rideau Hall in Ottawa and is appointed by the King on the Prime Minister’s advice. Each province has a Lieutenant-Governor appointed by the Governor-General.

Assent, prerogative and reserve powers. The Governor-General exercises the royal prerogative, summons and dissolves Parliament, appoints the Prime Minister and gives assent, and acts as the practical head of state for all domestic constitutional purposes. The commission carries the Crown’s business. When Parliament made the Queen Regent on 6 October 2028 the Bloc Québécois and a few others voted against the Act on the ground that the Governor-General already exercised the Crown’s powers and the Act was unnecessary, and said that their vote was a point of principle and not a word against the Queen.

Honours and forces. The Order of New Albion is the principal order, and the Star of Courage and the Medal of Bravery recognise gallantry. The Albian Armed Forces swear to the Crown in right of New Albion.

The Crown in right of Quebec. What is peculiar to this Crown is the provincial Crown that carries a country’s argument. Quebec holds a Crown in right of itself, inherited through the Quebec Act of 1774, which guaranteed the French civil law and the Catholic religion, and through the Code that Confederation preserved. Sovereigntists argue that this Crown proves Quebec to be a distinct society within the realm. The federal reply is that every provincial Crown sits inside the Crown in right of New Albion and cannot be separated from it. The dispute is lawful and unresolved, and the King’s summers at a lake in the Laurentians, where he fishes and speaks French, have made it harder for Quebec’s republicans to be republican about him. About a quarter of Albians support a republic, more in Quebec but falling.

Brunswick

How the Crown is held. The Duchy of Brunswick is a constituent duchy of the German Empire, created in the thirteenth century and divided among Welf princes until the line of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel became the state’s own. Duke William died in 1884 without legitimate children. Because Hanover was never annexed and the Welf line still reigns, the house law pointed directly at Ernest III, whose accession as Duke of Brunswick was automatic and lawful, with no imperial bargain and no special compact. Brunswick authorities certified the succession and the Landtag recognised the new duke.

Personality and property. The Crown in right of Brunswick is a separate legal person from the Crown in right of Hanover. The two states keep separate budgets, civil services, courts, churches and Landtage, and a paper valid in one capacity cannot be transferred into the other by convenience. A few enclave estates are held by one Crown inside the other’s territory, a survival of the Welf partitions, and the two Crowns’ lawyers argue over them at every boundary review.

The Crown’s representative. The Duke is represented by a Landesverweser, at present Hans-Jürgen Eilers, appointed on Brunswick ministerial advice and held at ducal pleasure, who opens the Landtag, receives oaths, completes the appointment of the Minister-President in the Duke’s name and appears at civic and church occasions. The office has no guardian power: it cannot refuse a ministry that holds confidence, veto legislation or dismiss the Landtag. The Duke signs assent and the great instruments himself, wherever he is, by courier, and receives two sets of papers. The German title avoids importing the Governor-General model, because Brunswick is a constituent state and not a realm.

Assent, prerogative and reserve powers. The Constitution establishes responsible parliamentary government. The Duke appoints the ministry through constitutional forms but cannot maintain it against the Landtag’s confidence. The Landtag is unicameral, of 60 members elected by regional single transferable vote, and Thomas Rehbein leads the government. Brunswick ministers advise the Duke, Hanoverian ministers advise the King, and neither may advise in the other’s capacity.

Honours and forces. The Order of Henry the Lion, founded in 1834, is the duchy’s order, and the Black Brunswicker Medal, named for the volunteer corps of 1809, recognises civil courage. Defence is German.

Two seals. What is peculiar to this Crown is the discipline of holding two Crowns that sit side by side. The same man receives two sets of papers, uses two seals and completes two chains of approval, and officials have built routines for the duplicate audiences, appointments and records. Personal union became an administrative discipline in Brunswick in 1884, and the enclave estates are the places where the discipline is tested on the ground.

The River Plate

How the Crown is held. The Crown of the River Plate was created by the Act of the Centenary on 25 May 1910, the hundredth anniversary of the May Revolution, under Ernest III. The country was conquered by Britain in 1813 and governed as a colony under a Viceroy, a title Britain kept deliberately so that the colony would understand its new government as a continuation of the old. The Treaty of Córdoba of 1820 and the grant of responsible government in 1856 preceded the Act of 1910, which made the realm sovereign and provided that the King should reign in it and be advised in its affairs by his ministers of the River Plate and by no others.

Personality and property. The Crown in right of the River Plate is the federal Crown. Under the Treaty of Córdoba the provinces keep elected legislatures and their own affairs, and each holds a Crown in right of itself, represented by a Lieutenant.

The Crown’s representative. The Viceroy, at present Julio César Mackinlay Zapiola, lives in the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires. The King appoints on the advice of the President of the Council from a shortlist of three agreed by both Houses of Congress, for a term of about five years. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, appointed in 1868, was the first Viceroy born in the country.

Assent, prerogative and reserve powers. The Viceroy appoints the President of the Council, summons and dissolves Congress on advice, gives assent and holds the Crown’s reserve powers. Their use in three crises defines the office. In 1930 the Viceroy refused to dismiss a ministry at the army’s demand, and the garrison would not move against the Crown’s representative. In 1955 the Viceroy stayed at his post and swore in the army’s President of the Council. In 1976 the Viceroy refused to sign the junta’s decrees and was held under house arrest in the Casa Rosada for seven years. The first is taught as the model, the second as the argument about what a Viceroy is for, and the third as the Crown’s finest hour in the Plate.

Honours and forces. The Order of May is the principal order, named for the Revolution that the Crown commemorates as a loyal anniversary, and the Cross of the Plate recognises gallantry. The armed forces swear to the Crown in right of the River Plate.

The Falklands. What is peculiar to this Crown is that it was at war with its own King’s other Crown. The junta of 1976 governed without the Crown. Ernest V refused to recognise it, Britain and the Realm broke off relations, and the Viceroy was under arrest. The Crown of the River Plate therefore had no ministers to advise it when the junta invaded the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982, and the King acted on British advice alone in the war that followed. It was a war between two realms of the same King only in the sense that one of the two governments was not his, which he said in terms. His statement grieved for his soldiers on both sides. The restored Congress renounced the claim to the islands in 1984, recording that no government of the Plate had claimed them between 1813 and 1982.

South Africa

How the Crown is held. The Union of South Africa Act brought the Cape, Natal, the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony into one Crown realm on 31 May 1910 under Ernest III. The King of South Africa was from the beginning a separate legal office. The founding was a compact among white powers, which restored self-government to the defeated Afrikaner political class and left African rulers recognised and subordinated. South Africa never became a republic: a white-only referendum in 1960 retained the Crown by 51 to 49.

Personality and property. South Africa is a unitary realm with one Crown. The provinces are statutory bodies of it, each with an elected legislature, a Premier chosen by that legislature and a ceremonial Provincial Administrator appointed by the Governor-General on the Premier’s advice, and none holds a Crown in right of its own. The traditional authorities hold by recognition from the Crown in right of South Africa, which the 1994 settlement kept and which gave the Zulu monarch a national kingship with cultural and customary authority and no executive power. The kings and chiefs treat that source as both an insult and a protection and say so.

The Crown’s representative. The Governor-General, at present the retired Constitutional Court judge Naledi Mokoena, is nominated by Parliament by a three-fifths joint vote and appointed by the King. The Governor-General normally opens Parliament and reads the ministry’s Speech from the Throne, and appoints twelve civic senators on Cabinet advice.

Assent, prerogative and reserve powers. Where a grave and demonstrable danger threatens democratic inclusion, intercommunal peace or the negotiated order, the Governor-General may delay a measure for no more than ninety days, summon mediation, require reconsideration and refer constitutional questions. Under apartheid the laws received assent. Ministers with parliamentary authority tendered advice in the South African capacity, Governors-General warned ministers, preserved their objections in the record and referred disputed questions, and a King who dismissed ministers because he abhorred their programme would have substituted personal rule for responsible government.

Honours and forces. The Order of Good Hope is the principal order, and the Cross for Courage recognises gallantry. The armed forces swear to the Crown in right of South Africa.

The separation that sheltered the injustice. What is peculiar to this Crown is what the doctrine cost it. The constitutional separation that kept South Africa sovereign also kept every other realm’s conscience from becoming authority within it. British ministers could not intervene, and American ministers could not intervene, and the laws of apartheid were assented to under the same advice rule that the union defends elsewhere as its main virtue. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission found the monarchy legally constrained, at times a significant internal dissenter, and nonetheless implicated through assent, honours and ceremony. Ernest V accepted that finding and apologised to both Houses of Parliament in 1999. The African National Congress did not make republicanism the condition of liberation, and no government since 1994 has put the question to a vote.

Ireland

How the Crown is held. Ireland entered the union in 1919 under the Easter Settlement, which recognised Irish sovereignty as a constitutional fact and not a concession and gave the King the capacity of King in right of Ireland, acting on Irish advice alone. The settlement also promised an elected national figure, which was constituted only in 1937, the year after Ernest III died. The Governor-Generalship was abolished by the Constitution of 1937 and no successor office was created.

Personality and property. The foreshore, the minerals and treasure trove vest in the Crown in right of Ireland, as the older law gave them, and the Oireachtas has never moved to change it. The Crown’s Irish seat is Dublin Castle.

The Crown’s representative. Ireland is the only kingdom in the union in which the monarch has no representative. There is no viceroy, no Lord Lieutenant, no Governor-General and no commission of state. When the King is out of Ireland, which is most of the year, the offices he would perform in person are either performed by the President of the Executive or are not performed at all. If the presidency falls vacant the King resumes its functions until a successor is inaugurated, and if the King is absent or incapacitated nothing in Ireland acts for him, an asymmetry that republicans cite whenever it operates.

Assent, prerogative and reserve powers. The King assents to legislation under the sign manual wherever he is, and the bill is carried to him and recorded in Dublin. Assent cannot be deemed: an Irish bill waits for the King’s hand, however long, and the queue is a standing complaint in the Dáil. The President then promulgates the Act, in a second act on a second day. The King appoints the Taoiseach on the nomination of the Dáil, but does not open the Oireachtas, does not deliver a speech from the throne and does not command the defence forces, which the Constitution places under the President. Where the President’s advice and the Taoiseach’s conflict, the King decides.

Honours and forces. The King confers honours in his Irish capacity on the President’s advice, and most Irish people regard the system as an anachronism. The Order of St Patrick, founded in 1783, is the senior royal order and is rarely awarded, and Irish peerages, which are rarer still, require the concurrence of both the President and the Taoiseach. There is no Crown award for gallantry. Ireland also maintains a civic honours system conferred by the President, including the President’s Medal, and the two systems run in parallel without coordination. The defence forces are under the President’s supreme command.

The Crown without a representative. What is peculiar to this Crown is the thing it lacks. Ireland enforces the advice rule more strictly than any other realm, because it regards the separate Crown as the whole substance of what was won in 1919 and treats a lapse as a constitutional injury and not an administrative error. The Crown’s Irish acts follow the King, and Irish officials travel to him. The inconvenience is acknowledged and has never been seriously proposed for reform, since the absent Crown cannot be locally impersonated and so cannot govern. The question of whether to abolish the monarchy was put to the Irish people in 1989 and defeated by 58 per cent to 42.

New Wessex

How the Crown is held. The Crown of New Wessex entered the union in 1919 and 1920 under Ernest III, with the Sydney Articles of Federation, which joined the Commonwealth of Australia and New Zealand into one federal realm after the First Great War. The Articles set out the three-capital settlement, the Crown’s position in the federation, the treaty obligations that New Zealand carries into the federal structure and the division of powers between the federation and the two founding countries.

Personality and property. New Wessex has three levels of Crown. The federal Crown in right of New Wessex stands over the Crown in right of Australia and the Crown in right of New Zealand, each a founding country with a Governor of its own, and the Australian states hold Crowns in right of themselves under the Australian Governor. The Crown in right of New Zealand, the country Crown and not the federal one, remains the party to the Treaty of Waitangi, and the iwi therefore deal with a Crown that is not the federal one. It is the most layered Crown in the union.

The Crown’s representative. The Governor-General of New Wessex, appointed by the King on the Prime Minister’s advice, lives at Admiralty House in Sydney and keeps a residence in Canberra and another in Wellington, with a rule that a third of each year is spent in each, so that the Crown’s presence is shared like the capitals.

Assent, prerogative and reserve powers. The Governor-General exercises the royal prerogative and serves as the practical head of state for federal constitutional purposes. The commission carries the Crown’s business, and Parliament made the Queen Regent on 3 October 2028 by an Act passed in a single day.

Honours and forces. The Order of the Southern Cross is the principal order, and the Cross of Valour recognises gallantry. The armed forces swear to the Crown in right of New Wessex.

Three levels and a treaty. What is peculiar to this Crown is that its lower Crowns are older than it. New Zealand’s Crown and the Australian colonies’ Crowns existed before the federation and were preserved by it, and the federal Crown in right of New Wessex was built on top of them in 1920. A republic has been put to the electorate and lost narrowly, in a referendum in the 1990s on a model for appointing a head of state that republicans themselves could not agree on, and the question returns each decade.

Normandy

How the Crown is held. The Duchy of Normandy is a constituent capacity inside the French Empire. In 1944, as the country was liberated, municipal councils and resistance committees issued declarations recognising Ernest IV as provisional Duke. They did not make a national referendum, and the settlement treated them as insufficient to bind later generations. The Treaty of Versailles, the postwar French Constitution and the Norman Constitution of 1948 confirmed him as hereditary Duke by referendum. The Emperor of the French embodies common French sovereignty in defence, foreign affairs and reserved matters. The Duke heads the autonomous domestic order.

Personality and property. The Crown in right of Normandy is a constituent Crown. The Estates of Normandy, 72 members elected by regional single transferable vote for four-year terms, make the law, and the Bank of Normandy and the Norman Supreme Court sit at Rouen. The Channel Islands are not part of Normandy and remain British Crown dependencies.

The Crown’s representative. The Lieutenant of Normandy, at present Justice Luc Morel, represents the Duke in Rouen when he is absent. The Duke selects the Lieutenant personally, and the appointment does not require ministerial advice. The Lieutenant opens the Estates when directed, completes routine appointments, receives oaths and transmits formal messages, and cannot exercise a reserve power unless the Constitution expressly delegates it during incapacity.

Assent, prerogative and reserve powers. The Duke retains substantial reserve powers, most of which are subject to joint constitutional review. The Guarantee Council reviews a dismissal of the President of the Norman Council unless immediate action is needed to protect life or institutions, and the Supreme Court may review its legality. Ernest IV did not intervene in sentences, and the restraint became an early precedent limiting the political use of the Duke’s authority although the Constitution did not remove the powers of mercy.

Honours and forces. The Order of the Liberation is Normandy’s principal honour, recommended by an independent council with the Duke as its formal head. The Order of the Leopard, for the two gold lions on the red flag, is the Duke’s own, and the Cross of the Resistance recognises gallantry and is now given mainly to the families of the veterans of 1944. Defence is French.

The Lieutenant as caretaker. What is peculiar to this Crown is the one executive duty of its representative. If the Presidency of the Norman Council becomes vacant, the Lieutenant becomes caretaker President and completes the term, preserving ordinary government and avoiding appointments or commitments that can await an elected successor. The rule exists to avoid a contest during a death, resignation or removal. The Lieutenant may not stand in the election that follows, and the Duke cannot use the appointment of a new Lieutenant to manufacture a caretaker. Normandy is also the realm in which two monarchs reign over one territory, the Duke for the domestic order and the Emperor of the French for the reserved matters.

The Philippines

How the Crown is held. The Philippines declared itself a republic in 1898, fought the United Kingdom of America for three years to keep it, lost, and was held as a Territory of the Realm until 1946, governed from New Westminster and represented in nothing. It was then elevated into the personal union under Ernest IV, as a kingdom. The monarchy was neither chosen by Filipinos nor imposed on them. It was the available instrument, and the Filipino negotiators took it because it ended the Territory in 1946 and not in 1952, and because a Crown could be filled with whatever content they later chose. The convention of 1952 kept the Crown and built a presidential republic underneath it.

Personality and property. The King holds the Crown in right of the Philippines. The Lakan exercises its executive power in his name and is therefore the Crown in action, which is why the Crown can be prosecuted through the Lakan’s officers and why a Lakan can be removed without touching the Crown. The Philippines is a unitary realm, and the sultanates of Sulu and Maguindanao, which never fell to Spain, are recognised by treaty as ceremonial sultanates under the Philippine Crown and hold no Crown of their own.

The Crown’s representative. The Lakan, at present Amihan Salazar, is the King’s representative and also the head of government, the two functions being held by one person because the Constitution of 1952 fused them. The Lakan is elected directly for a single six-year term, appoints the cabinet, directs the executive, commands the armed forces in the King’s name, conducts foreign policy on ministers’ advice and may veto legislation subject to a congressional override. The title is pre-colonial, the style of a paramount ruler among the Tagalogs, and the convention chose it over Governor-General, Viceroy and President because it belonged to none of the three powers that had governed the islands.

Assent, prerogative and reserve powers. Royal assent is the King’s: a Philippine bill awaits the sovereign’s assent, and the Lakan’s veto, subject to a congressional override, is a separate constitutional step before it. The King also visits and is the fount of honours. The office of Lakan has a limit that no other Crown representative has:

It has been used once. Lakan Restituto Zamora, elected in 1973 and barred from a second term, suspended Congress in 1975, detained members of the opposition and announced that the term limit would not apply in an emergency. The address reached London in 1978. The King’s position, taken on advice, was that he had no discretion, and Zamora ceased to hold office on the day the instrument was signed. The process has been initiated twice since, in 1994 and 2016, and on both occasions the Lakan’s conduct changed before the second House had voted.

Honours and forces. The Order of Lakandula, named for a pre-colonial ruler as the Lakan is, is the principal order, and the Gold Cross recognises gallantry. The King confers what the Kingdom’s own council recommends. The armed forces swear to the Crown. Asked privately in 1978 whether it would prevent the removal of a Lakan, the officer corps declined to be involved on the ground that nothing unlawful was happening, and that refusal is taught as the institution’s founding act.

The removable executive. What is peculiar to this Crown is that the King is the means by which a presidency is ended. The Philippine Constitution supplies what a presidential republic cannot supply for itself, an office wholly outside Philippine politics that can end a presidency without ending the constitution. The Crown is not worth capturing because it holds nothing else, and the whole apparatus sits outside the country, which foreigners find strange and Filipinos find reassuring. The Crown is popular for practical reasons: the shared monarchy gives Filipino nurses, seafarers, engineers and teachers a recognised status, transferable qualifications and portable pension rights across the realms.

Raj

How the Crown is held. The Empire of Raj took its sovereignty in 1947 under the Raj Constitution, which prevented Partition and united the territories of present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma beneath one federal Crown, Ceylon being excluded. Ernest IV became Emperor of Raj. Jawaharlal Nehru formed the first ministry and Muhammad Ali Jinnah became the first Governor-General, a choice that was the settlement’s most visible proof that the new Raj was not Congress India extended over unwilling Muslim provinces. Jinnah died in 1948, the year Gandhi was assassinated. The Emperor holds one durbar-style assembly of provinces and princes in each reign, recast in 1947 as a Constitution Day assembly.

Personality and property. The Crown in right of Raj is the federal Crown, and Burma, a permanently united and deeply autonomous realm with its own parliament, ministry and law, holds a Crown in right of itself, with a Governor of its own. The provinces hold none and act under the federal Crown. The princes of the princely unions stand outside the doctrine. They hold in their own right, recognised by the Raj Constitution, and hold nothing in right of any Crown, which makes the Raj the place with a monarchical tier more extensive than anywhere else in the world. Its defenders say the princes entered the Constitution instead of fighting it, and its critics say it protects inherited privilege from the equality promised at independence. Both are right.

The Crown’s representative. The Governor-General of Raj, in Delhi, is the permanent resident Crown presence because the Emperor resides outside the Raj. The office commissions the Prime Minister, opens the Imperial Parliament, authenticates federal law and exercises narrowly defined reserve powers in constitutional emergencies. It is not the Viceroyalty revived: the Governor-General represents the Raj Crown, where a viceroy once represented an external imperial government.

Assent, prerogative and reserve powers. The Governor-General authenticates federal law, and the Crown is bound by the Constitution, which a supreme court at Calcutta interprets. The Crown has no established faith in the Raj and is neither supreme governor of an Indian church nor the ritual head of any tradition. Delhi governs and Calcutta judges.

Honours and forces. The Order of the Star of India is kept, as the Viceroy’s Star flag is kept, because no coalition agreed a successor, and the Param Vir Chakra recognises gallantry. The armed forces descend from the British Indian forces, swear to the Emperor in right of Raj and operate under civilian authority, with a command balanced across provinces, communities and Burma’s autonomous structures. The Raj maintains one of the largest military establishments in the world and an independent nuclear deterrent.

The Emperor’s speech. What is peculiar to this Crown is how it behaved in the present crisis. A national-majoritarian government controls the House of the People but is checked by the Imperial Senate, the concurrence clause for Muslim members, the provinces and Burma, and the supreme court. In a prepared address delivered in his Raj capacity and countersigned through the Raj Crown office, the Emperor described the protected compact as the means by which independence became possible and said that no citizen’s belonging could depend on conformity to a majority. He has not dismissed a ministry, refused an ordinary bill or invented a reserve power. Supporters regard the speech as the Crown doing what it exists to do, and critics regard it as a King saying what the Constitution means. Republicanism in the Raj is negligible, and every party has accepted the Crown since 1947.

Malaya

How the Crown is held. Malaya is the one capacity in which the King is not head of state. In 1957 the nine rulers of the peninsular states would not accept a Protestant British king as head of state of a Muslim federation and made one of their own, and the Federation of Malaya took the Crown-realm exit on their terms. Britain accepted the formula rather than lose the Crown link. The Crown of Malaya is the Yang di-Pertuan Agong’s. The King holds the office of Protector, which the union counts among the fourteen capacities because it is written into the style and bound by the succession rules, and Malaya is the one capacity that is an office and not a Crown.

Personality and property. The Crown in right of Malaya is the Agong’s. The Protector holds none. The nine rulers reign in their own states, which are older than the Federation, and stand outside the doctrine: they hold nothing in right of any Crown. The Yang di-Pertuan Agong is chosen for five years by the Conference of Rulers, from among the nine, by a settled order of rotation, and keeps his own throne while he reigns, so that for five years one man is a constitutional figurehead in thirteen states and the ruler of one. The present Agong is Sultan Yusof Iskandar of Johor, since 2026.

The Crown’s representative. A High Commissioner of the Protector sits at Carcosa, in Kuala Lumpur, in the house the British Resident-General built for himself. The Protector appoints on the advice of the Malayan Prime Minister and on that advice alone, though Kuala Lumpur by an unwritten convention consults London first. He signs no Malayan law.

Assent, prerogative and reserve powers. The protectorship instrument provides that the Protector shall perform no act within the Federation. He assents to no law, makes no appointment to any office of the Federation save his High Commissioner, commands no force and exercises no prerogative of mercy, and no oath of allegiance taken within the Federation runs to him. The Agong assents to Malayan law. The Protector’s role is external: to undertake the defence of the Federation against attack from outside, which has never been invoked, and to be consulted on any treaty of common defence.

Honours and forces. The Agong confers the Order of the Crown of the Realm, and the Star of Valour recognises gallantry. The Protector confers nothing. His style is written after the Agong’s in every Malayan document, and the Yang di-Pertuan Agong receives him on a visit, which solves the protocol difficulty of a king who is not head of state.

An office and not a Crown. What is peculiar to this capacity is that it nearly has no content. Most Malayans could not say what the protectorship is for, and the instrument that creates it is one that everybody agrees not to read too closely. A rename of the Federation was proposed when Sarawak and Sabah joined in 1963 and dropped, because the protectorship instrument names Malaya and so does the clause of the Malayan constitution that names whoever is King of Great Britain as Protector, and reopening either document would have invited an argument nobody wished to have. Ending the protectorship is not a live question: no Malayan party proposes it, and the instrument is left alone. It is the one capacity for which Queen Christina is not Regent, because the King performs no act in it.

The West Indies Federation

How the Crown is held. The West Indies Federation was established on 3 January 1958, when Ernest IV became King of the West Indies Federation in a capacity separate from his other Crowns. It was the last capacity added to the union. The title was not a British title applied overseas, and West Indian ministers advised the Crown from independence. The Federation has sixteen states, from the Bahamas and Jamaica through the Lesser Antilles to Trinidad and Tobago, Guiana, British Honduras and Porto Rico, and survived the frictions that might have broken it.

Personality and property. The Crown in right of the West Indies is the federal Crown, and each of the sixteen states holds a Crown in right of itself. The states keep their own flags and their own state songs, and the King has a separate West Indian standard, used only when he is present in his West Indian capacity.

The Crown’s representative. The Governor-General, at present Dame Althea Mohammed, a retired Trinidadian constitutional judge, resides at King’s House in Kingston and is appointed on the Prime Minister’s advice. The office is not selected by Britain or by another realm. The Governor-General opens Parliament and delivers the ministry’s speech, completes appointments, receives oaths and accredits diplomats, under a federal law and convention that require a geographically broad programme. In each state the Crown’s powers are held by an elected state Governor who holds a royal commission.

Assent, prerogative and reserve powers. The King formally appoints the Governor-General, assents to federal law and appoints ministers and judges, and is formal Commander-in-Chief, though operational command belongs to ministers and authorised officers. The written reserve powers concern the appointment of a Prime Minister, the refusal of a dissolution where another ministry can clearly command confidence, the protection of lawful supply, the referral of legal questions and temporary procedures expressly authorised by the Constitution. The Governor-General cannot maintain a ministry that has lost the House’s confidence, impose policy or exercise a permanent veto. The Governor-General has convened a constitutional conference and paused the relocation backstop for a single ninety-day period.

Honours and forces. The Order of the Antilles, named for the heir’s West Indian dignity, is the principal order, and the Federal Cross of Valour recognises gallantry. The armed forces swear to the Crown in right of the West Indies.

Elected Governors. What is peculiar to this Crown is that its representatives in the states are elected. The sixteen state Governors are chosen by the people of their states for a four-year term, with a limit of two terms, and then commissioned by the Crown through the Governor-General, which makes them, with the Philippines’ Lakan, the most unusual representatives of the Crown in the union. The Crown is also deliberately without a single seat. The Caribbean Supreme Court sits at Port of Spain, federal departments are distributed across the states, and royal visits are spread across all sixteen so that the Crown’s presence does not become an institution of Kingston or of the larger states. The monarchy is broadly popular, associated with the federal state’s survival and with the Crown’s distance from ordinary party competition. Republican movements are lawful and represented in federal and state politics, their support varies by state and generation, and the party system does not treat the question as urgent.

Crowns below the realm

Below the level of the realm the doctrine repeats. A polity, province or state may hold a Crown in right of itself: a separate legal person that owns its own property, makes its own contracts, sues and is sued, and acts on the advice of its own ministers. These lower Crowns are not capacities of the King. They sit inside the Crown of the realm, and the King still holds fourteen capacities however many Crowns lie beneath them.

The American polities

Forty-six of the Realm’s 49 polities hold a Crown in right of themselves. The three republics do not. The 46 are the 16 States, the 15 Provinces, the 7 Commonwealths, the 4 Grand Duchies, the 2 Kingdoms, the March of Arizona and the Free City of Philipsburg.

The Crowns of the Provinces are the oldest. They descend from the colonial Crowns in right of each colony, which are older than the Realm’s own and were preserved by the Charter. The States, Commonwealths and the other polities received theirs by their Acts of Admission or Separation, and the difference has legal consequences for property and charters. The best-known example is Pennsylvania, whose Crown holds its property, makes its contracts and conducts its litigation as a legal person separate from the Crown in right of the Realm and from the Crown in right of the Lower Counties on the Delaware, notwithstanding that one Lieutenant-Governor represents both. The shared office dates from 1790. Pennsylvania’s Lieutenant-Governor acts in right of Pennsylvania when acting there, and in right of the Lower Counties when acting in Dover.

Representatives, seals and property

A Governor or Lieutenant-Governor is appointed by the King on federal advice after consultation with the polity’s Premier, for a term of years, and then acts for the polity’s Crown on the polity’s ministers’ advice alone. The appointment is the one federal act inside a polity Crown. Colorado and Pennsylvania are named exceptions, where the polity’s own advice is taken, and California is another: its Governor is appointed on the standing nomination of the State Chancellor, approved by the Crown and confirmed by the voters of California. The polity articles describe the other local forms. Each polity has a Great Seal of its own, kept by the Governor or the equivalent officer, and the Great Seal of America authenticates only the Realm’s instruments. A forged polity seal is a polity offence.

The polity Crown owns the land within the polity by default: its courthouses, roads, parks, escheats and ungranted land. The Realm’s Crown owns only what the Charter reserves, which is the Columbia District, the federal reservations, the arsenals, the ports of entry and the Parks System, which it holds as trustee and not as owner. A case between a polity and the Realm is heard at first instance in the Royal American Supreme Court, and a case against a polity is reported by the polity’s name.

Only Hawaiʻi, Alaska and the grand duchies confer honours of their own, because their Crowns are held by a house. Other polities recommend names to the Realm.

A polity may abandon its Crown and become a republic by its own referendum and an Act of Parliament. No polity has done so. In Alaska the Kingdom’s own amendment may also end the house’s tenure, with the consent of the House of Nations, since the tenure touches the accession settlement. Whether the two steps could overcome Article XI of the Treaty of Honolulu, which bars the repeal of the Hawaiian Crown, is unsettled.

The two kingdoms and the four grand duchies

Hawaiʻi. The Kingdom joined in 1898 by the Treaty of Honolulu, which preserved its Crown, its legislature and its constitutional personality. The King of Hawaiʻi is the Crown in right of Hawaiʻi, and there is no Governor, no Lieutenant-Governor and no Crown representative of any description. The Realm’s business goes through a Resident Commissioner, a civil servant with no constitutional position, and the Kingdom’s permanent presence in New Westminster is the King’s household and not a government office. The Hawaiian King is sovereign in the Kingdom under the Treaty. He swears no oath to the American Crown, because the Treaty is one between equals, and takes only an accession oath to the Kingdom’s own Constitution, which confers nothing. He gives assent on the Kuhina Nui’s advice, and the Kingdom’s honours are in his personal gift. A dispute between the Kingdom and the Realm under the Treaty goes to the Royal American Supreme Court; what the Treaty means in Hawaiian law is for the Hawaiian Supreme Court. The civil list is split between the Kingdom and the Realm.

Alaska. The Kingdom was bought privately by the Prince of Liechtenstein in 1867 and admitted in 1884. Its king, Hans-Adam II, who is also Sovereign Prince of Liechtenstein, holds a Crown in right of Alaska, and the Kingdom holds of the American Crown for land and defence. Defence, foreign affairs, the American pound and the high court belong to the Realm. Its terms are the accession settlement of 1884 and the Constitution of Alaska adopted for the deposit of 1889. There is no Governor-General in Alaska to sign for the king, so every act of the Landtag waits on the royal signature, given by post from wherever the king is, and since 2004 by his regent, Hereditary Prince Alois; a Keeper of the Great Seal at Juneau seals the act when the signature returns. The Premier is elected by the House of Assembly and commissioned by the regent, and the Kingdom’s Order of the Midnight Sun is conferred on the Premier’s advice. The King of the Alaskans swears no oath to the American Crown.

The grand duchies. In Michigan, Wisconsin, Louisiane and Minnesota the Grand Duke is the head of the duchy and acts in the name of the duchy’s Crown: he gives assent to the legislature’s Acts and issues instruments in the name of the Crown in right of Michigan, or of the other duchy, on his First Minister’s, Premier’s or Minister-President’s advice. Louisiane is the one exception: its First Minister advises assent, but whether to take any of the other courses article 81 of its Constitution allows is the Grand-Duc’s choice alone. There is no separate representative of the American Crown in any of them. The present Grand Dukes are Justin of Michigan, Wolfgang of Wisconsin, Ferdinand III of Louisiane and Olav of Minnesota. Michigan has had a regency since 2027, when Grand Duchess Diane took over from Grand Duke Justin, and it is the nearest precedent to the regencies of 2028.

The republics, the territories and the nations under treaty

Vermont, Texas and Florida joined the Realm as republics, and their constitutions made no provision for the Crown and have no representative. The republic itself is the legal person and a case is reported as “Vermont v. Smith”. The Crown acts there only through federal officers.

The Columbia District and the Territory of Loreto belong to no polity, and the Realm’s Crown holds them directly. The Navajo Republic is a treaty state outside the 49, and its treaty is with the Crown in right of America. Section 1 of the Treaty Relations Act 1978 settled that every treaty with a nation of the Realm is a treaty with that Crown, and no one disputes it now.

The lower Crowns of other realms

New Albion has eight provincial Crowns, each with a Lieutenant-Governor appointed by the Governor-General. The three territories are held by the federal Crown through commissioners. New Wessex has three levels: the federal Crown, the Crowns of Australia and of New Zealand, and the Australian states. The River Plate has provincial Crowns under the Treaty of Córdoba, each with a Lieutenant. The West Indies has sixteen state Crowns with elected Governors. Burma holds a Crown in right of itself within the Raj. Jersey and Guernsey hold distinct Crowns in right of their own under the British King, and the Isle of Man is his Lordship of Mann, a lordship that acts as a Crown without the name; each has a Lieutenant-Governor and none is part of Great Britain. The Channel Islanders drink the health of “the Duke”, which means the King as the old Duke of Normandy, an office Jersey insists is not the same as the one he holds in the mainland duchy; the Manx drink to “the King, Lord of Mann”.

Some realms have no lower Crowns. Great Britain’s constituent nations share its single Crown. South Africa is unitary. Hanover and Brunswick have none, and the Philippines is a unitary realm. The princes of the Raj and the rulers of Malaya reign in their own right and are outside the doctrine altogether.

When the King cannot act

Absence, incapacity and demise

The doctrine distinguishes three conditions. Absence is the ordinary state of a Crown whose holder is elsewhere, and the representatives exist to meet it. Demise is the change of the Crown’s occupant by death or abdication, and because each Crown is an office that is always occupied, it is not an interval. Incapacity is the awkward third condition: the office is occupied by a person who cannot exercise it, and the law of each realm must say who does.

The law of regency is each realm’s own. It lies outside the Interrealm Succession Compact, which binds thirteen of the Crowns to a single line of succession and says nothing about who acts for a sovereign who is alive and unable. Fourteen capacities therefore carry fourteen answers.

What a representative cannot do

A Governor-General’s commission is issued to the Crown and not to the man, so it survives the King’s incapacity. In the realms that have one, the Governor-General’s commission carries almost all of the Crown’s business whatever happens to the King. Three acts are outside it. A representative cannot appoint or recall a Governor-General, cannot accept an abdication, and cannot perform an instrument that touches the succession or the Compact. Those acts need the King or a Regent.

It follows that a regency in a realm with a Governor-General changes little in practice. What it settles is a question of principle: by whose law the Crown is acted for. This was the point of the Realm’s regency in 2028, and the Bloc Québécois made the same point from the other side in New Albion, voting against the Act as unnecessary.

The regencies of 2028

The King’s aircraft, Kittyhawk, was lost east of Newfoundland on 25 September 2028. He was found alive in a life raft on 29 September, unconscious, and was taken to New Westminster General. Britain delegated his British functions to Queen Christina in the early hours of 26 September, on the bare fact that he could not act. The Realm waited until its own physicians in its own capital had certified his condition, and then acted under the Regency Act 1811, which had been used once before: on 30 September the five officers named in the Act declared the King incapable and the Queen became Regent in the Realm by operation of the Act. The other realms followed in turn.

Queen Christina was Regent for Ernest V in thirteen of the fourteen realms, and from 31 October 2028 is Regent for George V in the same thirteen. Malaya needs no Regent, because the King performs no act there. The Michigan regency of 2027, in which the Grand Duchess Diane acts for the Grand Duke Justin, was the nearest recent precedent and was cited in the Commons debate, though the legal basis of the Realm’s regency remained the Act of 1811.

Thirteen endings

The regencies end in different ways: by three of the five officers in the Realm, by both Houses in Britain, by the Governor-General’s proclamation in the Raj, by the Viceroy’s proclamation in the River Plate, by a resolution of the Estates in Normandy, and so on. The Speaker’s note that the Realm’s regency should end when the King wakes is the only one that says so, and the others are silent on it. The King woke on 20 October, and no regency ended. The five officers resolved that morning that the Realm’s declaration stands until his physicians certify that he can act, the Speaker concurring that by wakes he had meant able to act. Each of the other twelve realms left its regency in place the same day, on its own law and by its own statement, and Britain said that its own physicians must certify before its declaration can end. The realms never had to settle what would follow if one found the King able to act and another did not. Thirteen Crowns can answer a fact thirteen ways, which is what separate Crowns mean. In the event the regencies for Ernest V ended together, at the demise of 31 October 2028, and each realm’s Act giving the abdication effect gave the Queen the same office for George V, to end in every realm on 2 May 2029.

The King’s question

On 25 October 2028 the King asked his Private Secretary to find out, in each of the fourteen realms, what an abdication would require. His physicians certified that he understood the question and could give that instruction, and said in the same sentence that the Realm’s declaration stands. The question touches every part of this doctrine at once. An abdication is a demise and must be given effect in each realm’s own law, and under the Compact the thirteen cannot do it differently; Malaya follows Britain. No sovereign of the Realm has ever abdicated, and it has no statute for it. A representative cannot accept an abdication, only the King or a Regent, and the doctrine has never had to say which of them acts when a Regent is acting for the King who wishes to go. If he went, the heir would be fifteen, and the Realm’s Act of 1811 was written for a King who cannot act rather than for one who is a child. Britain’s Prime Minister said the same day that Britain would act with the other realms and not before them.

On 30 October the King told the peoples of his realms, in a short written message, that he had decided to give up the Crown, and the thirteen governments of the Compact adopted, in one statement from London, common terms drafted by Britain. The abdication takes effect in every realm on the day the last of them gives it effect, so that the successions never differ, and Malaya follows Britain by its constitution. The King signs his declaration and the Regent accepts it, which answers for this case the question of who accepts an abdication while a Regent acts. The heir will reign as George V. The age at which a sovereign reigns in his own right, and at which an heir may act as Regent, becomes sixteen in every realm, and the terms name Queen Christina Regent for her son until his sixteenth birthday on 2 May 2029, so that the question whether the Act of 1811 reaches a King of fifteen does not arise. The King is to be created Duke of Cumberland, the title Ernest I held before 1840. In the Realm the bill is a private member’s bill, brought by the Father of the House so that the ministry stays within its written terms, and giving effect in identical terms keeps the American succession the same as the British under Article II.8.

The accession of 31 October

On 31 October 2028 each realm gave the abdication effect by its own instrument, the thirteen Compact realms by their own Acts and Malaya by following Britain under its constitution. The Realm acted last: His Majesty’s Declaration of Abdication Bill passed all its remaining stages in both Houses in one morning, the Commons sitting at eight and the Lords at ten, and the Regent assented to it at Columbia Palace at 11:42. The Governor-General did not, since the assent touched the succession.

The common terms took effect at six in the evening in London on 31 October, the hour that fixed their phrase “on the day the last of them gives it effect”. London was four hours ahead of New Westminster that week, so that in the Realm the reign of George V began at two in the afternoon, while he was at school. The Crowns passed at the same instant and the successions never differed. Britain and the Realm both date the reign from 31 October, as Raj does, where it was half past eleven at night; in New Wessex, the Philippines and Malaya the local date was already 1 November.

The Privy Council met at Columbia Palace at six and proclaimed the accession in the Realm, the King attending after school and the hospital, and the Clerk of the Council read the proclamation from the steps of the palace at half past six. The first British instrument of the reign, sealed on the British Prime Minister’s advice in London on the evening of 31 October, created Ernest V Duke of Cumberland. Queen Caroline had become heir presumptive at the demise, at two.

Ages of majority

The Realm’s Act fixes full age at eighteen. Before the common terms of 30 October 2028 that was the whole of the Realm’s answer: the heir to the fourteen Crowns was fifteen, so the Queen became Regent in the Realm by operation of the Act, and Prince Frederick would have taken the regency from his mother at eighteen, on 2 May 2031. The draft bill leaked in Britain on 28 September 2028 would have lowered 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, and so allowed Frederick to act from his sixteenth birthday on 2 May 2029. That bill was introduced and sat in committee without a date.

The gap this left was the most serious unsolved problem of the Compact. Fourteen ages of majority were possible. A King who could reign in one realm and not in another has never existed, and the law has nothing to say about him. The foreign offices of the realms opened talks on a common age, with no outcome, and three realms said they would not move from eighteen. The King’s nephew, Alexander I, became the first minor sovereign of the modern constitutional era earlier in the same year, acceding to the German and Prussian thrones at fourteen under a Regency Council of nine, and the King advised him on minority. On 30 October 2028, as part of the common terms for the King’s abdication, the thirteen Compact realms agreed a common age of sixteen, the three that had held out among them.

Royal Assent and reserve powers

Royal Assent is the act by which a bill passed by a legislature becomes law. In ordinary practice it is the formal completion of the legislature’s act, and the Crown completes the Act without owning the policy. The reserve powers are the Crown’s rare powers, used when ordinary ministerial advice cannot safely govern the situation, and they exist to preserve responsible government and not to replace it. The Realm’s detail is in the Governor-General article. The Crowns differ as follows.

The three acts that a representative cannot perform are the appointment or recall of a Governor-General (or equivalent), the acceptance of an abdication, and any instrument that touches the succession or the Compact. They need the King or a Regent.

The Crown in public

The Crown’s public face varies with its representation. In Britain the King was present under Ernest V: he opened Parliament and granted assent in person. Since 31 October 2028 the Regent acts for George V, who lives in New Westminster. In the Realm the Speech from the Throne is read at the State Opening of Parliament by the Governor-General, or by the King when he is in the Realm, written by the ministry and read as the Crown’s voice without being its personal views, and the Gentleman Usher of the Ebony Rod summons the Commons to the Lords. In South Africa the Governor-General normally opens Parliament and reads the ministry’s speech, and in the West Indies the Governor-General does the same. In Ireland the King does not open the Oireachtas and delivers no speech from the throne. In Malaya the Agong is head of state and the Protector is not present at all.

The royal anthem is God Save the King in every realm but one: in Normandy the ducal anthem is God Save the Duke. Each capacity has its own royal standard, flown only where the sovereign is personally present in that capacity and lowered when he departs, and none is flown for a representative. The standards are described in Styles and Titles of the Crown.

Honours

Each realm’s fount of honour is separate. A Prime Minister of one realm cannot recommend an honour in another, and the honours of one realm confer no precedence in another. The King’s own order, the Royal Household Order of Ernest, is the single exception and belongs to no realm. Most realms recommend honours through ministers. The Realm’s process runs through departmental nominations, independent advisory committees and ministerial recommendation to the Governor-General, and is designed to be non-partisan although honours are periodically contested on political grounds.

The Realm’s Order of the Charter, created by the Parliamentary Reform Act 1859 and the only order founded by statute, has five grades, from Companion, the most numerous, to Knight or Dame Grand Cross. Its two senior grades carry the prefix Sir or Dame, though American use of the titles is more restrained than the British, and many recipients decline the prefix. The George Cross, the highest civilian gallantry award, has been given to a group as well as to individuals: the medical teams who answered the May Day Bombings received one collectively in 2007, under special letters patent. Ireland keeps two systems side by side, a civic one conferred by the President and the King’s honours in his Irish capacity on the President’s advice, with overlapping purposes and no coordination, and a merger has been proposed four times and has failed four times. Of the polities, only Hawaiʻi, Alaska and the four grand duchies confer honours of their own.

The Crown in a crisis

The Crowns are tested by events in which the advice rule, the separate Crowns or the person of the King come under strain. Seven are recorded here.

1804. The Realm recognised Napoleon as Emperor and Britain did not. A French minister was received at New Westminster and accredited to the Governor-General. It was the first occasion on which two ministries gave the same King opposite answers on the same question, and the shared Crown came very near to breaking.

1837 to 1840. Victoria’s accession severed Hanover under Salic law, and the capacities diverged for three years. Victoria was assassinated in 1840 and Ernest I succeeded in Great Britain, America and Hanover, reuniting them. It remains the only occasion on which a Crown was separated and recovered.

1930, 1955 and 1976. The Viceroy of the River Plate refused in 1930 to dismiss a ministry at the army’s demand, stayed at his post in 1955 and swore in the army’s nominee, and refused in 1976 to sign the junta’s decrees and was held under house arrest for seven years. In the Philippines, the Lakan Restituto Zamora suspended Congress in 1975 and was removed in 1978 on an address of both Houses. The two realms use their Crowns in opposite ways to the same purpose: to keep the army out of the constitution.

South Africa under apartheid. The laws received assent. The separation of the Crowns kept the other realms’ ministers from intervening, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found the monarchy legally constrained, at times a significant internal dissenter, and implicated through assent, honours and ceremony. Ernest V apologised to both Houses in 1999.

The Falklands, 1982. The junta that governed the River Plate without the Crown invaded the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982, and Britain sent a task force. The King acted on British advice alone, because he had refused to recognise the junta in 1976 and the River Plate Crown had no ministers to advise it. About 650 River Plate and 255 British servicemen were killed. The King’s statement grieved for his soldiers on both sides and said that one of the two governments was not his. It was a war between two realms of the same King only in the sense that one government was not his.

May Day, 2006. On the evening of 1 May 2006 the King addressed the American people from London in his American capacity. He named the dead and their families, thanked the emergency services, affirmed that lawful government was functioning and said nothing about policy, blame or retaliation. The Governor-General issued a Continuity Proclamation to confirm that constitutional government was operational. The five-element protocol that emerged, formalised in a post-crisis review in 2007, is to mourn the dead without claiming to own grief, to confirm that constitutional government is functioning, to refuse to use the crisis to advance policy, to honour responders and survivors, and to close with the language of endurance and not vengeance. The republican reply is that the most significant emotional communication in the Realm’s modern history came from a Crown that is not elected, and the monarchist reply is that this is the point. The argument has not been resolved.

Kittyhawk, 2028. The loss of the King’s aircraft produced thirteen regencies in twelve days, each under its own law. It is treated in Kittyhawk and in the section above.

Republicanism

Republican criticism of the Crown is lawful in every realm and serious in several.

The United Kingdom of America. The Republican Movement of America encompasses several organisations, from soft republicans who want a directly elected head of state while keeping the monarchy’s cultural elements to hard republicans who want separation from the dynasty and the personal union. Republican politicians sit in both Houses of Parliament, and the position is constitutionally lawful and electorally viable in certain polities. The core arguments are that hereditary office is incompatible with democratic equality, that the monarch’s residence in Britain creates an alienation from American civic life, that reserve powers in a non-elected figure are a democratic anomaly, that the personal union subordinates American interests to dynastic arrangements the citizens had no part in making, and that May Day showed national grief being mediated through a royal address and not through elected representatives. The Crown’s defenders reply that a non-partisan voice is more trustworthy in a crisis than an elected figure who might exploit it. The arguments are not resolved, and the Register does not resolve them.

Ireland. The question of abolishing the monarchy was put to the Irish people in 1989 and defeated by 58 per cent to 42. The campaign to retain the Crown was not mainly monarchist. It argued that the shared monarch was the thread holding the island together, that the northern communities’ consent to the Irish state rested on it, and that the settlement was a single fabric that could not have one thread pulled from it safely. The campaign to abolish it argued that the President already performed the civic functions of a head of state, that the Crown added ceremony and entanglement and nothing else, and that a country independent for seventy years should not still explain its constitution by reference to a minority’s anxieties.

South Africa. The 1960 referendum joined Afrikaner sovereignty, resentment of British cultural power and the desire to end the last symbolic restraint on the nationalist state; its opponents defended the Crown by habit, English identity, commercial confidence and, among a smaller group, the belief that the monarchy was one of the few institutions capable of speaking beyond the ruling party. The African National Congress did not make republicanism the condition of liberation, and distinguished the Crown, which had sometimes received petitions and spoken in universal language, from the ministries that enacted racial rule.

New Wessex. The referendum of the 1990s asked a model of appointing a head of state that republicans themselves could not agree on, and lost narrowly. The result left the question open and the model unsettled.

The River Plate. The republican movement has been weak since 1976, when the King refused to recognise the junta and the Viceroy chose house arrest over its decrees, and a Crown that had been associated with the British conquest became associated instead with the refusal of the dictatorship. Loyalty to the Crown is a loyalty to that record and to the King who made it. His age is part of the argument, and few in Buenos Aires expect a republic while many wonder what the Crown will be for afterwards.

New Albion. The King’s summers at a lake in the Laurentians make it difficult for Quebec’s republicans to be republican about him, but the question is lawful and a quarter of Albians favour a republic.

The West Indies. Supporters emphasise constitutional separation and federal continuity, and republicans argue that no new advice stream can remove the Crown’s older association with colonial government. Both positions are lawful and present in public education, and constitutional amendment could replace the monarchy, though the ordinary party system does not treat that question as urgent.

Brunswick. Republicanism exists, especially among citizens who see no need for one person to hold so many inherited offices, but it has not become a dominant movement. The monarchy’s church role is among the most substantive republican arguments against it.

The Philippines. The Kingdom flies the flag of the Republic unaltered, a republican emblem designed by the government the Realm went to war to destroy, and no Lakan has ever proposed changing it. The Crown is not loved for its dignity. It is valued because it is worth money to ordinary families and because it supplies a mechanism that stopped a strongman.

Failings

The Register states the following plainly rather than leaving them to be inferred.

The separation sheltered an injustice in South Africa. The doctrine that kept South Africa sovereign also kept every other realm’s ministers from intervening, and the laws of apartheid received assent under the same advice rule that the union defends elsewhere. Honours were conferred, ceremonies continued and Governors-General opened Parliaments that excluded the majority. The Crown was neither the author of apartheid nor an institution untouched by sustaining it.

The Philippines were held without a Crown and then left off the list. The Philippines were a Territory of the Realm from 1898 to 1946, governed from New Westminster and represented in nothing. They were then given a Crown, and the enumeration of the Crowns omitted them for eighty years. The omission has been corrected, and the Register declines to describe it as random.

The apology for the Famine was moral and not legal. The Crown in right of Ireland acknowledged in the name of the office that holds the responsibility that the Famine was a failure of the Crown’s ministers. A realm’s Crown does not inherit the liabilities of the government it replaced unless a statute says so, and Irish counsel said on the afternoon of the speech that the acknowledgement created none.

There is no rule for conflicting advice. Where two realms’ ministers advise the King differently on the same question, he does not resolve the conflict, and the union’s method of managing the problem is to hope the hardest case does not arise. It has not arisen. That is a fact about the last two centuries and not a property of the system.

Fourteen ages of majority and thirteen regency endings. The law of regency is each realm’s own and lies outside the Compact. The regencies of 2028 for Ernest V could have ended in thirteen different ways, and the King could have woken in one realm’s law and not another’s; in the event the abdication ended them together. Until the common terms of 30 October 2028 the heir, who was fifteen, could have acted at sixteen in Britain had the pending bill passed and at eighteen elsewhere; the terms set sixteen in every Compact realm, and regency law otherwise remains each realm’s own.

The treaty Crown is disputed. The treaties made with the Crown by the Indigenous nations of New Albion were made with a Crown whose holder now holds fourteen. The nations argue that the treaties bind the person of the King across every realm, and the courts have held only that they bind the Crown in right of the realm concerned. The question of the other Crowns has never been put squarely, and the claimants take different views. The Realm’s own nations are outside it: section 1 of the Treaty Relations Act 1978 settled that their treaties are with the Crown in right of America. In New Zealand the party to the Treaty of Waitangi is the country Crown and not the federal one, which settles which Crown the iwi deal with and leaves the same question about the King’s person unasked.

Assessment

The Crown in right is an arrangement that ought not to work and has worked, in successive forms, since 1783. Its achievement is that fourteen countries share a head of state without sharing a government, and that the Crown’s holder has been unable to become an instrument of any one of them against another. Its method is the rule on advice, which converts a shared monarch from a mechanism of empire into a mechanism of association.

The doctrine has multiplied as it was used. A Crown that began as one separate capacity in 1783 now has 46 American polity Crowns, eight in New Albion, sixteen in the West Indies and others in several realms beneath it, each a separate legal person and none a further capacity of the King. The multiplication has kept the Crown close to the places where law is made, and has made it harder to describe: there is no document that lists every Crown, and the count depends on what is meant by one.

What it has cost is legibility, and what it has not bought is symmetry. The Crowns are equal in law and unequal in attention, and the largest realm’s Crown has been described at greater length than any other. The doctrine rests on a rule about who may give advice, and on the restraint of a person who has been asked for fifty years to be fourteen things and never all of them at once. Where it has been tested, by the Napoleonic recognition, the severance of Hanover, the Falklands, the apartheid laws and the loss of the King’s aircraft, it has held, and in several of the cases it has held at a cost its defenders do not dispute.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Styles and Titles of the Crown, the styles, the Compact and the order of the Crowns
• Plans for the Death of the King, the fourteen plans
• Kittyhawk, the loss of the King’s aircraft and the thirteen regencies
• The Governor-General, the American representative of the Crown
• Ernest V, who held all fourteen from 1972 to 2028
• George V, who has held them since 31 October 2028
• Queen Christina of Sweden, Regent of thirteen of the realms
• The Charter of Union, which created the first separate Crown in 1783
• Treaty Nations of the United Kingdom of America, the nations whose treaties are with the Crown in right of America
• The Executive of the Kingdom of Ireland, the Crown without a representative
• The Privy Council of the United Kingdom of America
• The Royal American Supreme Court
• The Province of Pennsylvania and the Lower Counties on the Delaware, the shared Lieutenant-Governor
• The Kingdom of Hawaiʻi and the Kingdom of Alaska
• The Union of South Africa, the Kingdom of the Philippines and the Federation of Malaya

Categories

Institutions · The Crown · The Personal Union · Constitutional Law