Was the marriage in 1893 of Princess Marie of Edinburgh, Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the future King Ferdinand of Romania the first time in history when the 1701 Act of Settlement and 1772 Royal Marriages Act converged in Great Britain? I thought it might have been the 1978 marriage of Prince Michael of Kent and Baroness Marie-Christine von Reibnitz. But it struck me that there was an earlier example.
The question is: did Marie actually request and receive the consent of the sovereign, who at the time was her paternal grandmother, Queen Victoria? After all, she was subject to the RMA, as a dynastic member of the British royal family. Obviously she would not have been eligible for the Farran exemption (which applied to descendants of King George II through princesses who had married foreigners: the legality of their marriage was subject to their own jurisdictions).
If, however, a British princess married a foreigner, and then a descendant of that union married a Catholic, then the Farran exemption and the 1701 Act of Settlement would have cancelled each other out. By which I mean: the consent of the British sovereign would have been unnecessary and irrelevant, since the 1701 Act would have removed the dynast from the line of succession, anyway. Moreover, assuming that all children born to the union were raised as Catholics, they would have been excluded as well.
On the other hand, if a British dynast was a national citizen, and hence a subject of the sovereign, then consent was required for his marriage to be legal and dynastic -- even though he stood to forfeit his own place in the line of succession, should he marry or convert to the Catholic faith.
As it was, the man we know in history as King George IV married, while Prince of Wales, a Roman Catholic widow (Mrs. Maria Fitzherbert) in contravention to the RMA. So his own place as heir apparent to the throne was protected, while any hypothetical children born to the union would have been illegitimate -- just like the children sired by King Charles II through his mistresses. It was a moot point, since this illegal marriage turned out to be childless, while his legal marriage to Caroline of Brunswick did produce one child.
Does anybody know what exactly Princess Marie did, on the occasion of her marriage? That she lost her own place in line to the throne is a given. The question is whether she nonetheless sought and received consent for her marriage, so that her children would still be dynasts. We know that they, like Lord Frederick and Lady Gabriella Windsor, were not raised as Catholics.
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