§ Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.
THE LORD CHANCELLORexplained the objects of the Bill to be, inter alia, to make the Scotch Courts more scrupulous in decreeing divorces, to guard against collusion, and to give married women increased rights in respect to dower and other matters. It also provided that no person should apply to a Scotch Court for a divorce, unless the parties were so domiciled in Scotland as to be under the Scotch law of succession, and that a divorce decreed by a Scotch Court should be operative throughout the United Kingdom. Hitherto, a divorce granted in Scotland was without force in England; and there was a case in which a man having obtained a divorce in Scotland and afterwards married again in England, was tried before an English jury, convicted of bigamy, and sentenced to transportation for life. This state of the law was most alarming to families of great wealth and of great antiquity; and it was 180 most desirable that that state of things should not longer continue. At that time by the law of England marriages were indissoluble; they could only be dissolved by the Legislature. A person might at this moment be entitled to an English earldom and not entitled to his deceased father's Scotch title. The object of the Bill was to assimilate the law in the two countries.
LORD BROUGHAMsupported the Bill, which was calculated to remove many of the anomalies which existed in the law of the two countries. At present a sentence regularly pronounced in Scotland dissolving a marriage had no effect whatever upon a marriage subsequently contracted in England. He perfectly remembered the case mentioned by his noble and learned Friend, where a person divorced from his English wife in Scotland, returning to England and there intermarrying with another woman, had been found guilty of felony, sentenced to transportation for life, and actually in part underwent the punishment, thus paying in his own person the penalty of the conflict of law between the two countries. Not only so, but the issue of the second marriage, if there had been any, would have been held to be illegitimate in England, although in Scotland they would have been as legitimate as any one of their Lordships. A man might be legitimate in Scotland but bastard in England—legitimate if he claimed in England personal property, illegitimate if be claimed landed property. All these anomalies were sought to be removed by the provisions of this Bill. He thought it a great improvement to have the interposition of the Lord Advocate for the purpose of preventing fraud and collusion.
§ LORD REDESDALEsaid, he thought it a most unfortunate thing there should be such a difference in the law of the two countries; but he did not think it a desirable change to introduce into the law, by which a person in England might go to Scotland and by domicile there obtain a divorce on very different terms from what obtained in England.
§ Motion agreed to; Bill read 2a accordingly, and committed to a Committee of the whole House on Monday next.