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Royal Marriages and Succession to the Crown (Prevention of Discrimination) Bill

Well I do, yes. However, my period ends with the restoration. In a spirit of full disclosure, I should say that I prefer the settlement of 1649 to that of 1688. My cards are now on the table. I do not wish to spend a great deal of time on the history, and I would be stopped if I did, but it is important, and for this reason: it shows the distance that we have covered and the journey that we have made over the past three centuries and more. I shall read out a brief paragraph about the Act of Settlement from the "Oxford History of England". Discussing the passage of the Act that we now seek to repeal or amend, it says:""Despite the hopes of Jacobites and republicans, settling the succession upon the House of Hanover encountered remarkably little public opposition; indeed, in the Commons only one MP spoke against it. Further, Catholics were once again explicitly debarred from the throne. The Bill passed both Houses without division, and as in 1689 urgency was again the order of the day. Nothing could more clearly show the continued commitment of parliamentarians to the Protestant succession and their willingness to break with strict hereditary rights. As in 1689, a foreign, Protestant King was deemed preferable to a Catholic one: 'it is better to have a prince from Germany than one from France.' It was not, however, altogether such plain sailing."" It goes on to mention that as a consequence of the passage of the Act of Settlement, and given that the legislature covered only England, Ireland and Wales at that time, Scotland, which still had its own independent legislature, resisted the matter""as yet another example of English presumption, arrogance indeed imperialism. The call of Scottish independence was soon heard loud and clear."" So some things do not change all that much over the years. The net effect of that rebellion in Edinburgh was the Act of Union in 1707 and the loss of Scottish political independence, a decisive moment in the creation of a unitary state in Britain.