THE marriage of the Prince of Wales to Camilla Parker Bowles is open to challenge in the courts because of the Lord Chancellor’s blundering, according to an expert on family law.

The episode has damaged the rule of law, says Stephen Cretney, who fears that the marriage’s validity could be challenged by people trying to prevent the Duchess of Cornwall becoming Queen or inheriting from the Royal Family. He accuses Lord Falconer of Thoroton of overturning advice that, by law, the Royal Family may not have civil weddings in England.

The Oxford-based academic suggests that ministers tried to cover up that the Duchess would become Queen, by waiting six weeks from the wedding announcement to confirm her future status. “The handling of these legal and constitutional questions seems to me to have been lamentable,” Dr Cretney said, “and to have had damaging consequences in terms not only of the uncertainty and distress caused to the two individuals immediately concerned but also of public respect for the legal system and the rule of law.

“The Lord Chancellor has a special responsibility for upholding the rule of law,” he told the Family Law Section of the Society of Legal Scholars, in Keele. “You may share my doubts whether the spirit of that tradition was conspicuously respected.”

Errors began with the announcement that the wedding, in April last year, would be at Windsor Castle. The castle had not been approved as premises for weddings and the venue was schanged to a register office.

Dr Cretney said: “If ‘someone had blundered’ on an issue which could have been clarified by brief reference to a textbook, how truly ‘expert’ were those on whose advice the authorities relied?” Since 1836, the Royal Family has been excluded from marriage Acts allowing civil weddings in England, and, over the years, the law officers have confirmed this ban. But Lord Falconer rejected previous advice as “overcautious” and claimed that the Human Rights Act put the issue “beyond doubt”.

Dr Cretney disagreed. Although the legal validity of the marriage was “now most unlikely to be successfully challenged”, doubt remained. Were the marriage not valid, the Duchess could not become Queen and might lose entitlement to property settlements.

Clarence House had said that the Duchess would be called Princess Consort when Charles became King. Yet Edward VIII had had to abdicate when Stanley Baldwin told the Commons that the King’s wife necessarily becomes Queen “by the fact of her marriage to the King”.

The “long delay” in a government statement being made on the Duchess’s future status “and the lack of conviction and clarity apparent when a statement was finally made, almost suggested that there had been something to hide or at least not to make overly clear”.

Mr Baldwin and, later, John Major, had made statements in the Commons when such issues arose. “Mr Blair confined any statement of the Government’s views to a message of congratulations and a discussion on Richard & Judy,” Dr Cretney said.

The Department for Constitutional Affairs said: “The Lord Chancellor’s statement did not overturn any judicial decisions. The Human Rights Act requires all statutes to be reinterpreted, if possible, to respect the right to marry. The wife of a king is queen, but does not have to use the title.”

Clarence House said that four legal sources had “agreed that there was no bar to members of the Royal Family marrying in a civil ceremony”.

dkennedy@thetimes.co.uk

Explore Law

• Columnists

• Law Panel

• Law Reports

• Student Law

Times Recommends

• The best legal yarns this Christmas
• Legal school 'earned £1m by exploiting bar course'
• Axe may fall on 5,000 more City lawyers