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Royal succession: Robert Hardman on the law that would have made Kaiser Bill our king

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Well that didn’t take long, did it? For more than a year, the governments of all the Queen’s 16 realms around the world have been too busy to bother with that curious royal document lurking at the bottom of their in-trays.

Yet no sooner had they heard the happy news from Kensington Palace than they couldn’t sign up fast enough.

From Papua New Guinea to Barbados, no one wanted to be accused of delaying the constitutional prospects of the Cambridges’ future first-born.

Changes: Had the law already been in place Queen Elizabeth, seen with the now pregnant Duchess of Cambridge, would not be on the throne - Friederike von Reiche would

As a result, the UK Government has now received all the necessary ‘formal consents’ for the creation of a new Succession to the Crown Bill which will end the age-old discrimination against female heirs and Roman Catholic spouses.

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Once it has been fast-tracked through the Houses of Parliament, the Bill will then be passed through the parliaments of all the other realms.

But what if this law was in place already? What sort of monarchy would we have today?

The answer is that Britain would still have a Queen – but she would be Friederike I. And the current heir to the throne would be her daughter, a Berlin-based marketing manager of an online furniture store. Oh, and the world might also have been spared the First and Second World Wars.

For those who dismiss the issue of royal succession as an anachronism or an irrelevance, it is worth indulging in a moment of ‘what if’ retrospection.

'Kaiser Bill': Had the new succession arrangements been in place the British Crown would have passed to Kaiser Wilhelm II in the 19th Century

Indeed, there was just one such moment in the House of Commons only the other day as MPs were discussing the slow progress of these reforms to the royal pecking order.

Up popped the veteran Tory MP, Sir Peter Tapsell, to remind the House: ‘But for our law of male primogeniture, the German Kaiser would also have become King of England.’ Sir Peter was not wrong.

Had the new succession arrangements been in place in the 19th Century, then Queen Victoria’s heir would not have been Edward VII, but her eldest child, Princess Victoria. She was a bright and artistic woman – some say she would have made a better monarch than Edward VII. She married Friedrich III of Prussia but was widowed in 1888 and died within months of her mother.

Thereafter, the British Crown would have passed to her son, Kaiser Wilhelm II, thus fusing the British and German empires.

Not unreasonably, it has been suggested that this might have averted the Great War on the grounds that ‘Kaiser Bill’, however idiotic, would not have gone to war against himself.

With no First World War, some historians argue, there would never have been the  conditions which gave rise to Hitler and  the Second World War.

That debate can run for eternity.

What is not in doubt is that the German and British crowns would have passed to the Kaiser’s eldest son, Crown Prince Wilhelm and, in turn, to his son, Prince Wilhelm. Although he had been forced to renounce his German titles when he married a commoner in 1933, that would have made no difference to Prince Wilhelm’s claim to the British throne.

Fast-tracked: The Succession to the Crown Bill is expected to be rushed through Parliament in the wake of the announcement that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are expecting their first child

His heir, in turn, would have been a Hamburg economist called Felicitas von Nostitz-Wallwitz who died in 2010 at the age of 75.

As a result her daughter, Friederike Thyra Marion Wilhelmine Dorothea von der Osten – who goes by her married name of Friederike von Reiche – would now be our Queen.

‘I can imagine myself as Queen in an abstract way, yes,’ said the 53-year-old homeopathic doctor and mother of three in a recent interview with the Mail.

Her family lost almost everything after the Second World War when their ancestral estates were swallowed up by communist East Germany.

Today, she lives near the East German town of Bad Lauchstaedt where her husband’s family used to have a large estate.

‘I was brought up as a proper Prussian schoolgirl, with all the notions of duty to family, church and state just like the Queen,’ she explained, in flawless English.

While she has never met the Royal Family, she is a huge admirer of the Queen and has a very British love of Earl Grey tea (albeit without milk).

Had she inherited the throne, Mrs von Reiche’s heir would, in turn, be her  26-year-old daughter, Felicitas, a marketing manager for an online furniture store.

‘When people find out, some will ask me about it and some won’t,’ she said recently.‘But I am very easy-going about my family history, so most people treat me normally.’

It is worth noting that we would also still have a dog-lover on the throne – but no  corgis at the Palace. Mrs von Reiche prefers St Bernards.



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