I always believed that, officially at least, certain personages, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, have since then been required by law to witness every royal birth to ensure that we do not have foisted upon us a monarch who is not of the royal blood.
I assumed there was some residual formality involved in this, but have been unable to track down the details.
The last time there was an attempt at a symbolic witnessing was at the birth of the late Princess Margaret.
"So the Home Secretary, J R Clynes, a former organiser of the Lancashire Gasworkers' Union, had to be present when the child was born.
Although the Home Secretary was no longer obliged to be in the room, as Sir James Graham had been (behind a screen) when Queen Victoria's eldest son arrived, the fear that a substitute heir might appear in a warming pan was still officially maintained.
The baby was a fortnight late. So the wretched Clynes was lodged in the neighbourhood for weeks on end. This tradition was subsequently abandoned"
I was thinking about all this after hearing a tour de force lecture on “Newfangled families” given by Professor Lisa Jardine at the Gateshead Freethinking Festival & broadcast last night on Radio 3. One of the audience used our adherence to the idea of royal descent by blood to challenge the ideas put forward.
Starting from the examples of Erasmus & Sir Thomas More, Professor Jardine pointed out that in the past family has not necessarily meant blood, & blood has not necessarily meant family; it was instead a more fluid concept of mutual obligation, care, support & living together, far broader than our modern idea of a tight nuclear family or even one that is broken & reconstituted.
Our current obsession with the idea that family (& identity) come (only) from shared DNA together with the availability of ever more techniques of assisted reproduction will cause dilemmas & emotional problems, but she ended with a ringing “I hope we can avoid allowing the genetic connection to trump all other models”
