Listening to Raymond Arroyo today as he narrates a visual tour of Westminster Abbey during the Holy Father’s visit: Odd, he seems to think it is, that so few people visit there. All the English monarchs are buried there.
Well, not exactly.
The current reigning family is not royal. At the time of her murder, Mary Stuart was actually queen of England, Scotland, and France. Elizabeth, illegitimate, had no claim to the throne, though the Pope recognized her until she had steeped herself in so much Catholic blood that he had no moral choice but to excommunicate her. (Since Mary was the rightful queen—and a Catholic—all Catholics were “traitors” as far as Elizabeth was concerned.)
So, in 1701, England’s Parliament passed the Act of Settlement, declaring that no Catholic could ever be line for the throne. Well, that cut off the royal family. Forever. But they had to pass the law, of course, because the royal family, the Stuarts, would have sat on the throne and they were (gasp!) Catholic. Not only that, but they refused to convert. That wouldn’t do. But the English do love all the pomp and stuff of monarchy, so they just ordered up a protestant from Germany, William, and made him their king.
A while back some young member of the current reigning family got engaged to a Canadian Catholic girl. Dilemma. Since he was about 37th in line for the throne, you wouldn’t think it should matter. But English law is English law. Gordon Brown, noting that the law violated the First Commandment of England (Thou shalt not discriminate), thought it should be removed from the books. Worse dilemma. If the law were repealed, then the law of succession—also still on the books—would necessarily have deposed all the English monarchs since 1688 and placed someone named Franz von Bayern, a Catholic, on the throne. He lives in Bavaria (a countryman of the Holy Father—there’s that troublesome Catholic connection again), where the family has lived in exile for the past couple centuries or so. The blood descendant of Charles I, the royal family of England, he’s known by royalists as King Francis II—though the family has long denied any pretensions to the English throne, calling the whole thing “a British matter”.
So, yes, there are many monarchs buried in the Abbey since then, but none of them are royal. The royal family of England are not buried in the Abbey. They are all buried in St Peter’s in the Vatican. The family is still Catholic.
A friend has just pointed out the redundancy of “more preferable” and I make this comment on the post to (a) defend the semantic nuance in view of the post’s subject, but (b) far more importantly, to prove that there are people who are more pendantic than me (I).
Now, Elizabeth, is that mo’ better?