Morganatic Marriage

Morganatic Marriage (perhaps from Goth. morgjan, ‘to limit’; perhaps Ger. morgengabe, a gift given by the husband to the wife after marriage; Littré suggests morgen, ‘morning’—a wedding celebrated privately in the morning), sometimes called Left-handed marriage, a lower sort of matrimonial union, which as a civil engagement is completely binding, but fails to confer on the wife the title or fortune of her husband, or on the children the full status of legitimacy or right of succession. In Germany it came in very early times to be accepted as a principle that Ebenbürtigkeit, or equality of birth between husband and wife, was essential to a proper marriage. The lower nobility were of course not Ebenbürtig with the higher nobility, nor the best born commoners with the lower nobility. Now the rule only concerns reigning houses and the higher nobility. But still members of German princely houses entering into marriages of this kind with their inferiors in rank (as frequently happens) contract merely morganatic unions. The marriage, for instance, in 1851 of Prince Alexander of Hesse to the Countess Julie von Hauke, from which sprang the Battenberg family, was a morganatic one. Handfasting (q.v.) in Scotland had a certain resemblance. The Royal Marriage Act, 12 Geo. III. chap. 11, reduces to a position somewhat like that of morganatic unions every marriage in the royal family of Great Britain not previously approved by the sovereign under the Great Seal, provided the prince entering into it is under twenty-five, and every such marriage of a prince above twenty-five which is disapproved by parliament. Thus, peerages and most biography books make no mention of the Duke of Cambridge's marriage with Miss Farebrother, an actress (died 1890); their children bear the name of Fitzgeorge. See ROYAL FAMILY.