Can the sovereign abdicate?
Britain does not allow unilateral abdications. “In a monarchy, succession to the throne is a matter not of choice but of duty.” (The Monarchy and the Constitution, by Vernon Bogdanor, Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) Parliament sets the conditions under which the monarch reigns. Parliament, when it passed the Act of Settlement in 1701, included language that states the Throne is to go to the Electress Sophia and the heirs of her body. Parliament did not say, in that Act, that the Throne is to go to the heir of the body of the Electress Sophia only if the said heir of the body wants it. Parliament requires the Throne to go to the heir of the body of the Electress Sophia and to nobody else. In the case of King Edward VIII, he succeeded because he was the heir of Electress Sophia of Hanover, and Parliament made her the heir in the 1701 Act of Settlement. Parliament, in 1936, altered the Act of Settlement by removing Edward VIII and accelerating the success
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