A hypothetical question: the 2nd Duke of Whatever acceeds to the throne through his mother, Jane Doe, but he also holds the Dukedom which he inherited from his father, John Doe. I assume the Dukedom is merging with the crown the moment he becomes King? Is it absolute and cannot pass to anyone? What about a situation when he has a daughter only, who succeeds him in the Crown but cannot inherit the Dukedom. Will it pass to his younger brother or is it already extinct because of its merge with the Crown and the brother needs to be given a new dukedom (re-creation)?
Or when the said King, former 2nd Duke, has only one son, who changed his religion and became Catholic, thus losing his rights to the throne. He cannot inherit the throne but what about the Dukedom? I assume the Dukedom needs to be re-created for him, if the King wants it to be passed on to the next generation. But maybe I'm wrong?
British law currently requires no religious test to succeed to peerages. In fact, there are well-known Catholic peers, e.g. the Dukes of Norfolk. If an ordinary duke becomes king, the peerage merges with the Crown. If the king wanted to pass it on to his son, he could recreate it for him by new LPs. At that point, it would become a royal dukedom though as the king's son would be a prince with the style of Royal Highness even if he were Catholic; his only legal "disability" would be that, as a Catholic, he could not succeed to the Crown.
The latter is actually an important point: being out of the line of succession to the Crown does not cancel the dignity of prince of the United Kingdom, which is based, under the 1917 LPs, only on kinship to a British sovereign. That is different for example from the practice in other countries like Denmark and Sweden where, in the past, princes who were excluded from the line of succession for unequal or unconsented marriages ceased to be princes and HRHs.
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