Prohibited Relationships?

Dr Luke Evans has presented the First Cousins (Prohibited Relationships) Bill, which would ban not only marriage and civil partnerships between first cousins, but also sexual relations between them. At last, someone in this debate has got to the point.

Cousin marriage is unconditionally legal in 18 of the United States plus the District of Columbia, and conditionally legal in a further six. Proponents of a ban here should ask themselves why there was not one already. There did used to be. Until the Reformation, the Late Roman ban on marriage to the fourth degree of consanguinity had obtained, extended to affinity because in marriage, “the two shall become one flesh”. Catholic Canon Law has therefore always banned cousin marriage, at one time to the seventh degree, although with possibilities of dispensation since the ban was not in the Bible.

Such dispensations did the Hapsburgs no good, but our own Royal Family would agree with NHS England that cousin marriage, not least where one party was an immigrant, had “benefits” that included “stronger extended family support systems and economic advantages”. Queen Victoria and the immigrant Prince Albert were first cousins. By descent from that marriage, the King’s parents were third cousins, while they were also second cousins once removed through a different line. Prince Philip was not only an immigrant, but an asylum-seeker who took refuge in Britain because he had relatives here, one of whom he married. Britain intervened militarily in his native land to restore his family to the Throne. Talk about bringing their troubles to our door.

It was not a happy marriage between Victoria and Albert’s granddaughter, Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and their grandson, Grand Duke Ernest Louis of Hesse and by Rhine, although rather more successful was the union between Ernest Louis’s sister, Princess Irene of Hesse and by Rhine, and another of Victoria and Albert’s grandsons, Prince Henry of Prussia, even if two of their three sons were haemophiliacs. The other one did not die until 1978. Did Queen Elizabeth II never meet him? At any rate, cousin marriage was the most uncompromisingly Protestant thing about her public life. Ernest Louis and Victoria Melita were known in the Royal Family as Ernie and Ducky, but she was not the only ducky in the marriage, which was dissolved after only six years in 1901.

That brings us to the fact that the legality of marriages between first cousins was a product of the Reformation. Its prevalence until the First World War, and as recently as that, was a badge of Protestant honour, since Henry VIII had legalised it when he had wanted to marry Catherine Howard, who was Anne Boleyn’s first cousin, and since although William and Mary never had children (there’s that Ducky thing again), the intention had been that they would, and they were first cousins whose marriage would not ordinarily have been possible in the Catholic Church. Does the Orange Order, named after a fruit, now wish to ban a marriage such as William of Orange’s? Would the four stripes of Northern Irish Unionist in the House of Commons vote for that ban? We may be about to find out.

This seems to be about the Two Cultures. Although Charles and Emma Darwin were first cousins who had 10 children, and although Albert and Elsa Einstein were both maternal first cousins, and paternal second cousins such that her maiden name was Einstein, the mere thought of this practice is profoundly shocking to scientists. But to people formed by the study of literature and history, then, while that is where it belongs, that is where you will find it routinely. Mainstream British society was educated out of it, and not very long ago, so that can obviously be done. South Asians are hardly unreceptive to education.

Anglo-Saxons and Scotch-Irish still regularly marry their first cousins in several of the parts of the United States that voted for Donald Trump, and they did so as a matter of course into the very recent past. But if the argument is that this was something that certain other ethnic groups did, then , much as I would still vote for this Bill since it was available, it may be better to treat the matter as one of health education rather than of criminal law. After all, that was what worked with everyone else. Nineteenth-century novels are full of marriages between first cousins as the most normal thing in the world. In HMS Pinafore, Sir Joseph Porter marries his adoring Cousin Hebe. Between 1979 and 1981, the makers and viewers of To the Manor Born took it as read that Audrey fforbes-Hamilton’s late husband had been her cousin. Although Coronation Street does not, both Emmerdale and EastEnders still feature such arrangements between white characters whose families were supposed to have lived in Emmerdale or Walford since time out of mind, and that seems to raise no eyebrows. Still, the King is a last great hurrah of that sort of thing. His mother was one of the least inbred monarchs ever, and his son and grandson are not at all inbred. Educate people, and it will mostly or entirely die out. That worked with everyone else. Even the Royal Family.

Yet since the intention would apparently be to prevent genetic defects, which is not the only reason to oppose cousin marriage, then it would be pointless without the criminalisation of sex between first cousins. So be it, but we have already raised the age of marriage to two years above the age of consent, a literally preposterous arrangement. It is now legally impossible to do the decent thing, but not to do the indecent thing. Pity poor Imam Ashraf Osmani of Northampton, who in January was handed a suspended sentence of 15 weeks’ imprisonment for having performed a nikah, which has no legal status whatever, so that two 16-year-olds could have a perfectly lawful sexual relationship without sinning. The second time as farce.

Something similar applies to polygamy. As you could marry your cousin my nikah, with no legal standing, and the two of you could then have children perfectly legally as you could have done anyway, so you can take three more wives alongside your legal one by nikah, with no legal standing, and have children with all of them. Or you could take all four wives by nikah alone. In fact, any man can have children with four different women simultaneously if they will let him. Doing so with two, often in arrangements that lasted decades, has never been especially uncommon, and nor has sending the bill to the DWP or its predecessors. Whatever else that may be, it is certainly not un-British.