National Post

THE TALE OF THE TWO BARONETS

- Colby Cosh

As the Old Country enters the final hours of its bruising Brexit debate, word arrives of a final resolution in another British controvers­y — one that, while overlooked, may technicall­y have more enduring consequenc­es. I speak, of course, about the exciting dispute over the Pringle baronetcy of Stichill. The material stakes in this legal affray, mind you, are small — indeed, nonexisten­t. No property or money is attached to the contested title.

Baronets are the most awkward part of the structure of British hereditary honour. They are not formally peers, nor are they knights, though they are addressed as “Sir So-and-So” and they get to append “Bart.” or “Bt.” to their names in documents. They linger on, mostly because an enterprisi­ng courtier of James I stumbled upon their existence and recommende­d to His Majesty that new baronetcie­s be distribute­d generously in exchange for cash. This program was part of the monarchy’s ceaseless search for extra- parliament­ary revenue — a struggle that eventually got James’s son beheaded, and which lives on in our own British-derived Constituti­on.

Baronetcie­s, then, are an institutio­n with origins both autocratic and mercenary. The sense that they are a device of history’s losing side clings to them like a funk. But the baronetcy of Stichill, a picturesqu­e little village on the border of England and Scotland, is apparently still worth fighting over.

The accepted eighth baronet was Sir Norman Robert Pringle ( 1871-1919), who died of tuberculos­is in France after serving in the First World War. He was succeeded by what his wife insisted was his eldest son, Sir Norman Hamilton Pringle ( 1903- 61), an Royal Air Force squadron leader in the Second World War. The accepted 10th baronet was that man’s son, Lt.- Gen. Sir Steuart Pringle (19282013), who rose to be commandant of the Royal Marines. No one ever challenged any link in this chain as the title passed down, but there were whispers within the family about the eighth baronet’s marriage.

Onto this scene arrives Norman Murray Archibald MacGregor Pringle; we will, following the court, just call him Murray. Murray, an accountant who lives in Buckingham­shire, is the senior descendant of the eighth baronet’s supposed second son, Ronald. Murray has an interest in genealogy. A cynic might suggest that he developed one after hearing about the unanswered questions in the family’s background.

While the 10th baronet, Gen. Steuart, was still alive, Murray approached him in a friendly way to participat­e in a project to map the family’s DNA. The 81-year-old general played along, but made a prescient joke in a letter to his younger cousin: “What happens when (if ?) a male cuckoo enters the nest?”

Perhaps the old fellow suspected something. He and his eldest son proved to have descended from a different male line than the other Pringles, and further investigat­ion showed that the ninth baronet was biological­ly unrelated to his acknowledg­ed father, the eighth. Murray, with unseemly speed, informed the general of the logical consequenc­e: that he, Murray, was the true “male heir of the body” of the Pringle baronets of Stichill.

This raised a question never before settled in the law of the U. K. or any of its components: can DNA evidence be used to overthrow an accepted line of titular inherit- ance? This clash of modernity and tradition required the services of a judicial institutio­n whose name every Canadian historian knows, but which has lapsed into neartotal desuetude in the modern world: the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ( JCPC). The JCPC was Canada’s highest court of appeal until 1933. It profoundly influenced the country’s constituti­onal history and still plays that role for a few small Commonweal­th countries and other knickknack­s of empire like the Channel Islands. Under a 19th-century statute, it can also be called upon personally by the sovereign to settle tricky matters of titular succession.

The DNA, everyone agreed, was firmly on Murray’s side. The laws of Scotland and England had always recognized that an inherited title can be shifted if a better claim appears, no matter how long someone else has been in unchalleng­ed possession of it. This left Gen. Steuart’s unfortunat­e son Simon without a leg to stand on before the committee, which ruled in Murray’s favour on Monday.

We know how this sort of thing works from old romance novels, in which victims of imprisonme­nt or kidnapping return from distant lands to reclaim purloined blood rights. It just did not happen much in the real world before paternity testing came along. Without science, the law usually had to defer to what husbands and wives professed about the genes of their children. Interestin­gly, it is not just DNA that worked on Murray’s behalf, but new values in British family law. The right of a child to know and benefit from his true paternity are now given great deference, whereas in an older Britain, the stability of the patriarcha­l structure was deemed more important.

Certainly one imagines our titled forerunner­s recoiling in horror at a world in which the cruel fiat of the double helix take precedence over polite, long-accepted untruths. But the law, the JCPC’s ruling points out, takes DNA seriously as a decider of fact when there has been a murder or a sexual assault; it cannot reasonably be set aside when a title is at stake. The Pringle case has been referred to in the press as a “can of worms.” As of Monday, those worms are free to wriggle around, perhaps to gnaw at the roots of Britain’s great families.

A QUIRKY CASE OVER WHETHER DNA EVIDENCE CAN BE USED TO OVERTHROW AN ACCEPTED LINE OF TITULAR INHERITANC­E MAY HAVE MORE ENDURING CONSEQUENC­ES THAN THE BREXIT VOTE.

 ?? THENATIONA­LSCOT ?? Lt.- Gen. Sir Steuart Pringle (1928-2013), left, and his son Simon Robert Pringle.
THENATIONA­LSCOT Lt.- Gen. Sir Steuart Pringle (1928-2013), left, and his son Simon Robert Pringle.
 ?? HANDOUT PHOTO ??
HANDOUT PHOTO
 ??  ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Canada