"It's Bad Enough that I have deal with the stigma of being A Bastard Son!!"

 PARADISE CITY - Season 1 Official Trailer

"It's Bad Enough that I have deal with the stigma of being 

A Bastard Son!!"

Clark Kellogg: 

You had A Choice - 

NOT to turn me in.

Dwight Armstrong,

 Clark's Step-father: 

If it was Your Son, you would have...

Clark Kellogg: 

If it was My Son, I would have treated him like he was My Son.

If he was My STEP Son, I would have treated him like My Son.

Dwight Armstrong, 

Clark's Step-father: 

Clark, that animal...

Clark Kellogg: 

Dwight, Good Night. 

It is difficult to imagine an illegitimate person ascending the throne when, under the common law, a bastard was filius nullius, or “child of no one.” Bastards could not inherit real property,7 let alone kingdoms.8 Otherwise, bastards had the same rights as other free persons.

 

The common law of bastardy and the ecclesiastical, or church, law were often in conflict. Church courts decided disputes about the validity of a marriage; but the common law, or secular, courts decided disputes about the inheritance of real property, which were often intertwined with decisions about the validity of marriages.

 

Under church law, children of adulterous relationships were bastards. The common law, however, had a strong presumption that a child born to a married woman was legitimate, even if the child was the result of an adulterous affair. For example, a legal standard often used to determine legitimacy was the “Four Seas” test:

as long as the husband was not impotent and he was in The Kingdom at any time at all during the pregnancy then the child was legitimate.

Shakespeare’s Richard III, in fact, refers to the “Four Seas” test when Richard, then still Duke of Gloucester, argues his claim to the throne based on the theory that his late brother, King Edward IV, had actually been a bastard:

Tell them, when that my mother went with child
Of that insatiate Edward, noble York,
My princely father, then had wars in France. 10


It is significant that Richard points to the time when his mother “went with child,” which covers the whole pregnancy, not merely when she was got with child, which would refer only to Edward’s conception. In order for Edward to be a bastard under the “Four Seas” test, his father would have had to be out of The Kingdom for the entire pregnancy, not just the time of conception — biological facts be damned. Richard methodically establishes the other significant fact necessary to make his brother illegitimate by saying that their father “had wars in France” during the pregnancy: in other words, he was outside the kingdom.

A 1406 Year Book, an early collection of law reports, memorably summarized the ramifications of the “Four Seas” test as “Whosoever bulleth my cow, the calf is mine.” The test was abandoned in 1732, however, “on account of its absolute nonsense.”12 Paradoxically, the church law, which so strongly disfavored the legitimacy of children of adulterous unions, allowed for “special bastardy,” which was the legitimizing of a bastard child after the fact, if his parents should later marry. The common law, however, still held such a child illegitimate and incapable of inheriting real property.

But the common law did not consider a child illegitimate if the parents had married in good faith and the marriage later had to be annulled because of the discovery of consanguinity (a blood relationship) or affinity (a familial relationship through marriage) between the parents.13

A possible basis for bastardy under the common law was that the parents’ marriage turned out to be invalid due to a “precontract,” such as those found in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. One kind of “precontract” was an oral agreement between a couple that they would marry at some time in the future. This agreement was binding on both parties and neither one could marry someone else without first obtaining the agreement of the original betrothed to dissolve the contract.14 Measure for Measure contains two examples of precontracts: one between Claudio and Juliet, who are engaged and living together while awaiting their dowry; and another between Angelo and Mariana, which Angelo had managed to dissolve through a legal loophole, namely, Mariana’s alleged lack of chastity.

The principle that a valid precontract nullifies a later marriage was yet another legal tool that became useful to Richard III on his way to the throne. Richard argued that when Edward IV married his queen, Elizabeth Woodville, Edward was already precontracted to another woman. This would make the children of the marriage illegitimate. In the Titulus Regius (Title of the King), an act passed by Parliament in 1484, Richard received after-the-fact legislative blessing on his kingship based on Edward’s invalid marriage and the consequent bastardy of Edward’s sons:

[A]t the time of the contract of the same pretensed marriage [to Elizabeth Woodville] . . . King Edward was and stood married and troth plight to one Dame Eleanor Butler . . . with whom the said King Edward had made a precontract of matrimony . . . . Which premises being true, as in very truth they been true, it appears and follows evidently, that the said King Edward during his life, and the said Elizabeth, lived together sinfully and damnably in adultery, against the law of God and his Church . . . . Also it appears evidently and follows that all the issue and children of the said King, been bastards, and unable to inherit or to claim anything by inheritance, by the law and custom of England.15

This proclamation is grounded in the longstanding common law principle that illegitimate children could not inherit real property, including, of course, The Kingdom