John Watson: A real 'who's your father?'

John Watson

We all enjoy the drama of the law courts - the Somerset case which was regarded as abolishing slavery in Britain; the Bloody Assizes of Judge Jeffries; the Lady Chatterley trial; the Oscar Wilde libel case.

We like the best lines, too. That great reply - "Well, he would, wouldn't he?" - when good-time girl Mandy Rice-Davies was told that a minister of the Crown denied her version of the facts.

It is all grist to the mill of public entertainment and sometimes it changes our lives, too.

Seldom, however, has there been a case with more potential to cause chaos than that of the Pringle baronetcy, which is being decided by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

Unusually for an important case, there is no money or property at stake. There is no divorce and no crime. The litigation is simply to decide whose name should be entered on the Official Roll as the rightful heir to the Baronetcy, Pringle of Stichill.

The trouble started in 1683 when Charles II granted the baronetcy to Robert Pringle "and his male heirs from his body".

All went well for 332 years. Pringle followed Pringle in orderly succession until Sir Steuart Pringle, Commandant General of the Royal Marines during the Falklands war, was registered as 10th Baronet.

Sir Steuart died in 2013 but, before he did so, he seems to have lost his head completely because he allowed his DNA to be taken in a survey of the family history. Oops, it wasn't Pringle DNA at all. Oh dear, it seemed that his father was illegitimate and thus not from the body of the original Robert Pringle.

When his son applied to be entered on the Official Roll of Baronets he discovered he had opposition from his legitimately descended cousin.

The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which is to decide the case, is made up of seven Supreme Court judges and one can quite see why it is a popular assignment. However, if the Judicial Committee rejects Sir Steuart's son on the basis of DNA evidence, the consequences will be startling.

No loyal Englishman (or New Zealander, for that matter) could doubt that the succession to the Crown has been beyond reproach, after all, they probably only have to go back to George I, but what about all those dukes and earls whose claims go back to the Middle Ages?

Say you were a 20th earl, have there really been 19 loyal wives in succession? Are the aristocracy to be stalked around London by pretenders trying to get bits of their DNA for comparison purposes?

It will be like Gilbert and Sullivan's HMS Pinafore, where it turns out that, but for a mix-up of babies, the captain would be the able seaman and the able seaman would be the captain.

Worse still, the process will be a continuing one because you would only just have proved the 15th earl to have been illegitimate, you yourself being descended from his younger brother, when someone else would pop up alleging that the 10th was illegitimate, too, and that he is descended from the ninth. There would hardly be time to try the coronet on.

When they are in a real fix, judges discover a new law. They don't invent it, of course, that is the prerogative of Parliament, but, under the common law system, they simply decide that it has always been there and it is just that up until now nobody has really noticed it.

We are going to need something of that sort here. Perhaps a long-overlooked rule that where someone is treated as a son in the belief that he is a son, well then after a set period he should be regarded as being a son after all. There would be something similar for daughters.

It would be nice if Gilbert and Sullivan were here to do the drafting, because they could have set it to music.

-John Watson is the editor of UK weekly online magazine The Shaw Sheet - www.shaw sheet.com - where he writes as "Chin Chin".