By Denis Fahey
When a British monarch dies, an Accession Council, consisting mainly of members of the Privy Council, assembles to proclaim the successor, and so, on 10 September 2022, Prince Charles was declared to be king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of his other realms and territories. The procedure has changed little over the years since the practice began in 1603, except for variations in the royal title, but in 1952 his mother’s proclamation was less specific. And there was a reason for the vagueness. Under British law, Elizabeth was, like her father, monarch of Great Britain, Ireland, etc., and would remain so for 373 days, but any reference to the fact would have created a diplomatic incident with the Republic of Ireland.
The background to the story could be traced to 1177, when Henry II appointed his ten-year-old son John as lord of Ireland, or to 1541, when the Irish parliament declared Henry VIII king of Ireland, but perhaps it may be more convenient to fast-forward to 1801. On 1 January, when the legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland came into force, George III was proclaimed king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the appellation remained unchanged for his successors (apart from Victoria, who was queen) until 1927.
At the imperial conference in London in November 1926, the Irish Free State delegation argued successfully that the title was no longer appropriate and should be changed to king of Great Britain, Ireland etc., and the British parliament passed the necessary legislation in the following April. The démarche is usually attributed to Minister for Justice Kevin O’Higgins and became known as the ‘O’Higgins Comma’.
This legislation remained in place, in respect of Ireland, when the state formally became a republic on 18 April 1949 and left the Commonwealth. As a result, the letter of credence from George VI which the Indian High Commissioner in London, V.K. Krishna Menon, presented to President Seán T. O’Kelly on 30 July 1949, when he was appointed ambassador to Ireland, was signed by someone who was still the nominal king of Ireland.
The incongruity was ignored, however, and it was ignored again on 29 July 1950 when Sir Gilbert Laithwaite, the ‘British Representative to the Republic of Ireland’, as he was titled, was promoted to the rank of ambassador and presented a similar letter of credence to the president. Laithwaite, a Foreign Office official, was an unusual choice for the post. He had been born in Dublin and educated at Clongowes Wood College, and was a first cousin—through his mother Mary Kearney, a native of Castlerea, Co. Roscommon—of the IRA’s Ernie O’Malley.
Matters rested there until 6 February 1952, when the king died unexpectedly and his eldest daughter inherited his titles. As her coronation wouldn’t take place until 4 June 1953 there was time to update the titles legislation, but the more immediate need for the Accession Council to proclaim her queen presented a problem. On 12 December 1936 her father had been proclaimed ‘by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the seas, King, Defender of the Faith’ and, although the legislation had remained unchanged, the use of the same form of words was no longer possible without denying the existence of the Republic of Ireland. And so, on 8 February, the Council proclaimed her queen ‘of this realm and of her other realms and territories, Head of the Commonwealth and Defender of the Faith’, a clever form of words which didn’t fall foul of the legislation but didn’t offend anyone.
In the Dáil on 21 February, however, Seán MacBride, who had been the minister for external affairs in the previous government, became exercised about a recording broadcast on the BBC of proclamations in some Commonwealth countries which included Ireland in the queen’s title; his successor, Frank Aiken, brushed off a suggestion that he should protest. The proclamation made in London was the one that counted. He also reminded MacBride that he, as the previous minister, had been happy to accept letters of credence signed by the late king despite the outdated nomenclature. And there the matter ended.
The 1927 act was finally updated in April 1953, and a consequent proclamation on 28 May, a week before her coronation, styled the monarch ‘Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’.
Apart from MacBride’s umbrage in the Dáil, the failure of the British authorities to update their titles act for Ireland in 1949, as they had amended the act for India in 1947 when it became independent, doesn’t seem to have caused any annoyance. In any case, there was an interesting precedent in history for their dilatory attitude. English kings had claimed to be rulers of France from the fourteenth century; even after they lost Calais, their last outpost in France, in 1558, English and later British monarchs continued to keep France in their titles for almost another quarter of a millennium. Ironically, the decision in 1800 to finally remove what Prime Minister William Pitt called a ‘harmless feather’ didn’t come from pressure from the actual French monarchy, which had ceased to exist with the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793, but during the rule of the Consulate led by Napoleon Bonaparte.
Denis Fahey is the author of A factbook of Irish history: from earliest times until 1969 (3 vols, Thorn Island Publishing, 2023).