“I’ll tell you,” said Vimes. “A monarch’s an absolute ruler, right? The head honcho–”
“Unless he’s a queen,” said Carrot.
Vimes glared at him, and then nodded.
“OK, or the head honchette–”
“No, that’d only apply if she was a young woman. Queens tend to be older. She’d have to be a…a honcharina? No, that’s for the very young princesses. No. Um. A honchess, I think.”
Vimes paused. There’s something in the air in this city, he thought. If the Creator had said, “Let there be light” in Ankh-Morpork, he’d have got no further because of all the people saying, “What color?”
Okay, this is in incredibly petty nitpick, but: if you’re writing a fantasy setting with same-sex marriage, a same-sex noble or royal couple typically would not have titles of the same rank - e.g., a prince and a prince, or two queens.
It depends on which system of ranking you use, of course (there are several), but in most systems there’s actually a rule covering this scenario: in the event that a consort’s courtesy title being of the same rank as their spouse’s would potentially create confusion over who holds the title by right and who by courtesy, the consort instead receives the next-highest title on the ladder.
So the husband of a prince would be a duke; the wife of a queen, a princess; and so forth.
(You actually see this rule in practice in the United Kingdom, albeit not in the context of a same-sex marriage; the Queen’s husband is styled a prince because if he were a king, folks might get confused about which of them was the reigning monarch.)
The only common situation where you’d expect to see, for example, two queens in the same marriage is if the reigning monarchs of two different realms married each other - and even then, you’d more likely end up with a complicated arrangement where each party is technically a princess of the other’s realm in addition to being queen of her own.
You’ve gotta keep it nice and unambiguous who’s actually in charge!
Okay, I’ve received a whole lot of asks about this post, so I’m going to cover all of the responses in one go:
1. The system described above is, admittedly, merely one of the most common. Other historically popular alternatives include:
The consort’s courtesy title is of the same rank as their spouse’s, with “-consort” appended to it: prince and prince-consort, queen and queen-consort, etc. This is how, e.g., present-day Monaco does it.
The consort is simply styled Lord or Lady So-and-so, and receives no specific title. I can’t think of any country that still does it this way, off the top of my head, but historically it was a thing.
(Naturally, your setting needn’t adhere to any of these, but it would be highly irregular for it to lack some mechanism for clarifying the chain of command.)
2. The reason why the consort of a prince is historically a princess even though those titles are the same rank is basically sexism. This can go a couple of ways:
In many realms, there was no such thing as being a princess by right; the daughter of a monarch would be styled Lady So-and-so and receive no specific title, so the only way to be a princess was to marry a prince.
In realms where women could hold titles by right, typically a masculine title was informally presumed to outrank its feminine counterpart. So, e.g., kings outrank queens, princes outrank princesses, etc.
In either case, no ambiguity exists.
(Interestingly, this suggests that in a more egalitarian setting where masculine titles are not presumed to outrank their feminine counterparts, or vice versa, you’d need to explicitly disambiguate rankings even outside the context of same-sex marriages. Food for thought!)
3. It would also be possible to have two kings or two queens in the same marriage without multiple realms being involved in the case of a true co-monarchy. However, true co-monarchies are highly irregular and, from a political standpoint, immensely complicated affairs. If you’re planning on writing one of those, be prepared to do your research!
4. The next rank down from “countess” is either “viscountess” or “baroness”, depending on which peerage system you’re using.
(Yes, that last one actually came up multiple times. Apparently there are a lot of stories about gay countesses out there!)
apparently the queens jubilee is worth £823 million. its just a wild guess but im sure if you divided that to every low income household then the cost of living crisis would be solved. but no apparently the Queen who was born into her position and stayed that way for 96 years is more important than people being able to afford food everyday, for children to have a decent education and for vulnerable elderly people to have heating in the winter
The “cost of living crisis” is larger than you’d think. If you split that up among the 22% of UK residents living in poverty, they’d each get only £56. Republic claims that the total annual cost of the royal family as a whole is £345 million, which ups that individual split to £79 for this year.
However,wage theft in the UK amounts to £35 billion a year, and the military budget has risen to over £50 billion a year, making the UK the world’s third-largest military spender despite having less than 1% of the world’s population. That’s enough to give the poorest 22% £5,748 each every year, or enough to give a family of four living in poverty an extra £23,000 a year.
Although the royal family is indeed wasteful and extravagant and should not be allowed to have the money they do, there are much larger wastes of money in the UK.
ALT
