The Act of Settlement provided that the throne would pass to the Electress Sophia of Hanover – a granddaughter of James VI of Scotland and I of England, niece of Charles I of Scotland and England – and her Protestant descendants who had not married a Roman Catholic ; those who were Roman Catholic, and those who married a Roman Catholic, were barred from ascending the throne " for ever ".

Since the passage of the Act of Settlement, the most senior member of the Royal Family to have married a Roman Catholic, and thereby been removed from the line and later lines of succession, is Prince Michael of Kent, who married Baroness Marie-Christine von Reibnitz in 1978 ; he was fifteenth in the lines of succession at the time of his marriage.

The current most senior living descendant of the Electress Sophia who is ineligible to succeed due to the act is George Windsor, Earl of St Andrews, the eldest son of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, who married the Roman Catholic Sylvana Palma Tomaselli in 1988 ; he would now be 29th in the lines of succession if he had not lost his place.

More recently, Peter Phillips, son of Anne, Princess Royal, and eleventh in line to the thrones, married Autumn Kelly ; Kelly had been brought up as a Roman Catholic, but she converted to Anglicanism prior to the wedding.

Excluding those princesses who have married into overseas Roman Catholic royal families, only one member of the Royal Family ( that is, with the style of Royal Highness ) has converted to Roman Catholicism since the passage of the act: the Duchess of Kent, wife of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent.

Norman Spector called, in The Globe and Mail, for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to address the issue of the act's bar on Catholics, saying that Phillips ' marriage to Kelly would be the first time the provisions of the act would bear directly on Canada – Phillips would be barred from acceding to the Canadian throne because he married a Roman Catholic Canadian.

( in fact, the Earl of St. Andrews had already lost his place in the line of succession when he married the Roman Catholic Canadian Sylvana Palma Tomaselli in 1988, but St. Andrews ' place in the line of succession was significantly lower than Phillips '.

On December 30, 1918, Capone married Mae Josephine Coughlin, who was Irish Catholic and who, earlier that month, had given birth to their first son, Albert Francis (" Sonny ") Capone.

One further oddity in his writings is that in one of his works, the Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles, he writes in a manner that gives the impression he was married.

More recently, married clergy who have converted from other denominations have been ordained Roman Catholic priests without becoming celibate.

The Eastern Catholic Churches ordain both celibate and married men.

Certain Latin-Rite Catholic priests may receive a dispensation to be married before ordination, and all Eastern Catholic priests outside the United States are also permitted to be married, provided they are so before ordination.

During the Warsaw Uprising ( 1944 ), a Poles | Polish couple, members of an Armia Krajowa resistance group, are married in a secret Catholic chapel in a street in Warsaw.

His failure to successfully aid Protestant forces during the Thirty Years ' War, coupled with the fact that he married a Roman Catholic princess, generated deep mistrust concerning the king's dogma.

His father died when Fawkes was eight years old, after which his mother married a recusant Catholic.

Among Eastern Rite Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, which permit married priests, bishops must either be unmarried or agree to abstain from contact with their wives.

Ballet flowered in Italy during the next hundred years, and about 1550 was carried to France when the Italian princess, Catherine De Medicis, married the King of France.

Israelites of course abstained from pork, but Ahab was married to a Phoenician / Tyrian princess Jezebel, who was one of the most " powerful and notorious women of monarchic times " yet who died of a similarly seemingly random death like her husband, and his capital of Samaria was said to follow Canaanite gods.

He also married a Greek princess named Ladice daughter of King Battus III and made alliances with Polycrates of Samos and Croesus of Lydia.

Since King Valdemar II of Denmark was married to the Portuguese princess, Berengária of Portugal, it is not unthinkable that the origin of the story, if not the flag, was the Spanish tale or a similar tale, which again might have been inspired by an even older legend.

Still, Otto formed marital ties with the east, when he married the Byzantine princess Theophanu.

Catherine II, the Great, was a German princess who married the German heir to the Russian crown.

The Jutish king Ethelbert of Kent married the Frankish princess Bertha and introduced Christianity into parts of Britain.

The King's brother Johan married the Polish princess Catherine Jagiellon.

According to the former, he married a Greek princess, Damodice daughter of Agamemnon of Cyme, Aeolia, and traded extensively with the Greeks.

He was succeeded by Virginio, whose heir Paolo Giordano II married the princess of Piombino and was created Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.

Alphonse's son Fruela married Munia, a Basque princess from Álava, while his daughter Adosinda married Silo, a local chief from the area of Flavionavia, Pravia.

He was married to a Telugu-speaking Nayakkar princess from South India and was childless by them.

It is generally thought that Chandragupta married Seleucus's daughter, or a Macedonian princess, a gift from Seleucus to formalize an alliance.

The Malay prince was married to a Khmer princess who had fled an Angkorian dynastic bloodbath.

While there is doubt about the level of Songtsän Gampo's interest in Buddhism, it is known that he married a Chinese Tang Dynasty Buddhist princess, Wencheng, who came to Tibet with a statue of Shakyamuni Buddha.

According to a Tibetan legendary tradition, Songtsän Gampo also married a Nepalese Buddhist princess, Bhrikuti.

The Chinese princess Jincheng Gongzhu (: zh: 金城公主 ) (?- 739 ), the " real daughter " of the king of Yong, and an adoptive daughter of Emperor Zhongzong of Tang ( r. 705-710 ), was sent to Tibet in 710 where, according to most sources, she married Mes-ag-tshoms, who would have been only six or seven years old at the time.

In the nearby Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman emir Orhan married Byzantine princess Theodora as part of an alliance between her father John VI Kantakouzenos and the Ottomans.

Clovis had previously married the Catholic Burgundian princess Clotilde ( later canonized as St. Clotilde ), and, according to Gregory of Tours, as a result of his victory at Tolbiac ( traditionally set in 496 ), he converted to her Catholic faith.

The Aeacids allied themselves with the increasingly powerful kingdom of Macedon, in part against the common threat of Illyrian raids, and in 359 BC the Molossian princess Olympias, niece of Arybbas of Epirus, married King Philip II of Macedon.

Albert himself descended from Béla IV of Hungary through his daughter Ilona whose descendant was a princess of Brieg who became Albert's ancestress the countess of Hainaut and Holland, and from a younger sister of Queen Elisabeth of Bohemia, thus descending from both Constances of Hungary, and also from King Géza II of Hungary through his daughter Elisabeth who married Bedrich of Czech, their daughter being an ancestress of Albert's maternal Bavarian line.

At the end of 985, probably at the instigation of Boleslav II the Pious, Bolesław I married an unknown Hungarian princess with whom he had a son, Bezprym.

Subsequently, Leopold V's younger son, Leopold VI, also married a Byzantine princess ( Theodora Angelina ), as did his youngest son ( by Theodora ), Frederick II, who married Sophia Laskarina.

His daughter Elinor married Quiney's son Adrian in 1613, and his son Henry married Mary Lane of Stratford in 1609.

In 1852, he married Mary Hewitt of Baltimore.

Her two children by Philip II, Philip, count of Clermont ( died 1234 ), and Mary, who married Philip I of Namur, were legitimized by the pope in 1201 at the request of the king.

The couple were married for 50 years and had five children: Martha ( 1828 ), Charles ( 1830 ), Mary ( 1832 ), Robert ( 1834 ), and Andrew Jr. ( 1852 ).

In 1930, Capone's sister Mafalda married John J. Maritote at St. Mary of Częstochowa, a massive Neogothic edifice towering over Cicero Avenue in the Polish Cathedral style.

Potter and Heelis were married on 15 October 1913 in London at St. Mary Abbots in Kensington.

In 1832, Lyell married Mary Horner of Bonn, daughter of Leonard Horner ( 1785 – 1864 ), also associated with the Geological Society of London.

In 1684, Defoe married Mary Tuffley, the daughter of a London merchant, receiving a dowry of £ 3, 700-a huge amount by the standards of the day.

He married Alison Mary McNair on 20 July 1964.

In 1757, he married Mary ( Polly ) Howard ( 1740 – 1770 ).

In 1782, Mary Sr ( the governess ) married Joseph Day ( 1745 – 1811 ), a Birmingham merchant, and moved away.

Lucy Jr. married John Hardcastle in Derby in 1792 and their daughter, Mary, married Francis Boott, the physician.

He also married Mary Brownson, a woman five years his senior, from the nearby town of Roxbury, in July 1762.

Both proved unenthusiastic, and in 1565 Mary married Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, who carried his own claim to the English throne.

Shortly afterwards, on 15 May 1567, Mary married Bothwell, arousing suspicions that she had been party to the murder of her husband.

Mary Catherine Williams and Elias Boudinot, Sr. were married on August 8, 1729.

Elizabeth Hastings later married Edward Somerset, while Mary Hastings died unmarried.

Mary and Bertie were married sometime before March of the following year.

She used a pseudonym Mary Pollock for a few titles ( middle name plus first married name ).

After meeting and staying with Nathan and Mary Johnson, they adopted Douglass as their married name.

Francis Drake married Mary Newman in 1569.

His great-grandfather Charles Blair was a wealthy country gentleman in Dorset who married Lady Mary Fane, daughter of Thomas Fane, 8th Earl of Westmorland, and had income as an absentee landlord of slave plantations in Jamaica.

The following year he married Mary Jo Powell.