LEGITIMACY. As a law term °legiti macy') is employed mainly to describe the status of children born in lawful wedlock. The mean ing of the term will be best understood by the condition of illegitimate with that of legitimate children. A child born out of wedlock is nut/us fi/ius; it has no legal parents. Neither its mother nor its putative father have any parental obligations toward it, and, when the public authorities intervene to compel a parent to support his or her illegiti mate offspring, the action is taken in the pub lic interest, to prevent the child from be coming a public charge, and not because of any inherent legal right of the bastard. Primarily the authorities look to the mother to provide for the child, but where the mater nal parent lacks ability to support it the puta tive father may be proceded against. In some countries the law will not inquire into the paternity of a bastard, however. An illegiti mate child is incapable of inheriting either from its mother or putative father or, from the collateral relations of either; in the eye of the law a bastard has neither ancestors nor next of kin. Another child born to its parents, whether in or out of wedlock, stands in no legal relation toward it with respect to prop erty. Nor do its own parents inherit any thing from an illegitimate child which dies in testate. Only the legitimate descendants of persons born out of wedlock inherit from them by law; if they have no descendants their prop erty escheats to the State. In other respects the civic status of a person is not affected by illegitimacy. He can hold and acquire prop erty by gift or by will and dispose of the same like any natural person; and, though titles and estates of inheritance do not descend to him by law, he can become the founder of a family and become the possessor of a name in his own right. The bar sinister, which heraldry re quired illegitimate sons to blazon on their escutcheons, was often borne by great men, conscious of their own worth, without a sense of disgrace; and to be This own ancestor') was the pride of more than one of tbe heroes of history.
A child born in wedlock is presumably legitimate, though evidence that husband and wife had not lived together for a period so long as to preclude the possibility of the former having been the father would rebut the pre-. sumption. Under the common law the pre sumption of legitimacy was conclusive unless the father was shown to have been "beyond the four seas° for more than nine months prior to the birth of the child; if, during that time he was within the kingdom, the presump tion of his fatherhood could not be combated even by proof that he was continuously absent from his domicile. This hard and fast rule has now been relaxed, and in England, as every where, fatherhood may be disproven by any competent evidence. Children of marriages which are found to have been nullities because of leg-al impediments are illegitimate, just as are children resulting from illicit intercourse.
The harshness of this rule has been ameliorated to some degree by the doctrine of marriage.° One party to an annulled mar riage having been unaware of the disqualifying impediment, that party and the children of the marriage are entitled to all the rights that would have been theirs if the marriage had been valid. The children of the union are to be regarded as legitimate. This canon has become a rule of equity. In England legitimacy may be established by proceedings in court under the statute (21 and 22 Victoria chap. 93) passed in 1858. It was under this law that an ignorant butcher from the antipodes tried to prove his title to the Tichborne estate; and he found many believers in his claim, includ ing the mother of the real heir.
Proposals were frequently made by the mediaeval church to the lay authorities that children born out of wedlock be legitimized by the subsequent marriage•of their parents. In 1235 the English bishops, in their capacity of lords spiritual, endeavored to make the pro posal a law. In the record of the Statute of Merton (20 Henry III, chap. 9) the repudiation of the principle by the lords temporal is set forth as follows: The bishops having stanted the lords that they would consent that all such as were born afore matrimony should be legitimate as well as they that be born within matrimony, as to succession of in heritance, forasmuch as the church accepteth such as legitimate . . . all the earls and barons answered with one voice that they would not change the laws of the realm which had hitherto been used and approved.° The law of England remains unchanged in this re spect, and the rule was also followed in the United States as part of the common law. By statute in most of the States a child born out of wedlock is now legitimized by the mar riage of its parents. This is, and has long been, the rule in practically all countries in habited by people of European race. In politi cal history legitimacy has reference to sovereign successions by "divine right .° Legitimists re gard all breaks in the right line of descent as usurpations of sovereignty, particularly when the breaks have been caused by parliamentary depositions of kings and revolution. According to the Almanach,' published up to recent times, the Comte de Chambord was Louis XIX, king of France, Don Carlos was king of Spain; Sicily, Naples, Modena, Parma and other parts of Italy were still under their former Bourbon kinglets, while Maria Theresa, Duchess of Este and late con sort of former King Ludwig III of Bavaria., was known as the "White Rose Queen° and regarded by the Jacobites as the legitimate sov ereign of Great Britain, Ireland and the do minions beyond the seas, she being a descend ant of the elder and deposed branch of the Stuarts.