The Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act 1907 (7 Edw. 7. c. 47) was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, allowing a man to marry his dead wife's sister, which had previously been forbidden. This prohibition had derived from a doctrine of canon law whereby those who were connected by marriage were regarded as being related to each other in a way which made marriage between them improper.
Legal background
Prohibited degree of kinship for marriage included relatives by blood (consanguinity) to prevent incest, and extended to relatives by marriage (affinity) apparently reflecting an analogous taboo, or the idea that a married couple were "one flesh". Originally, marriage was a matter of canon law in the United Kingdom and its predecessor kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Before the Reformation, the affinity rules of Catholic canon law applied, which since the Council of Elvira had regarded a deceased wife's sister as within the prohibited degrees, which could be exempted only by matrimonial dispensation from the pope. The Reformation saw all three kingdoms replace the Catholic prohibitions with ones based on the incest prohibitions of Leviticus 18: in England by the Marriage Act 1540 and Matthew Parker's 1563 "Table of Kindred and Affinity", both later adopted in Ireland, and in Scotland by the Marriage Act 1567, the Scots Confession 1560 and the Westminster Confession of Faith 1646.
In Scotland, while the Confession absolutely prohibited marrying one's deceased wife's sister, the 1567 Act did not, causing some uncertainty. In 1889 Arthur Elliot introduced a bill to clarify this but it was defeated as superfluous, since the Confession had been adopted by statute.
In the Church of England and Church of Ireland, a marriage within the prohibited degrees was not absolutely void ab initio but it was voidable at the suit in ecclesiastical court of any interested party. Matthew Boulton married his deceased wife's sister in 1760. He advised silence, secrecy and Scotland, although they married in London; the marriage was opposed by her brother. Similarly Charles Austen, the younger brother of Jane Austen, married his deceased wife's sister in 1820 and remained married to her until he died in 1852.
1830s changes
As long as both spouses of a voidable marriage lived, their children had the uncertain prospect of being made bastards by the voiding of the marriage. This prompted John Copley, 1st Baron Lyndhurst to introduce "Lord Lyndhurst's Act" (later the Marriage Act 1835), which hardened the English and Irish law into an absolute prohibition, so that from then on such marriages could no longer take place in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and colonies at all. However, such marriages which had already taken place were validated.
After 1835 a marriage between a widower and his late wife's sister was still recognised in the United Kingdom if it took place abroad where it was lawful. For example, the painters William Holman Hunt and John Collier married the sisters of their deceased wives in, respectively, Switzerland and Norway. However, this was only possible for those who could afford to travel abroad; moreover, in 1861 the House of Lords ruled in Brook v. Brook that one spouse had to be domiciled in the jurisdiction of the wedding. While the Marriage Act 1836 allowed for civil marriage in a register office, the prohibitions of affinity remained unaffected.
An 1848 parliamentary inquiry concluded that the 1835 Act had not appreciably diminished the number of putative marriages within the prohibited degrees. Its survey of part of England found 1364 such marriages since 1835 — more than 90% with a deceased wife's sister — compared with only 88 planned marriages prevented by the Act, of whom 32 couples remained in "open cohabitation".
Campaigns
In 1842 a Marriage to a Deceased Wife's Sister Bill was introduced, and defeated by strong opposition. "Although seemingly a minor skirmish, [it] had far-ranging implications and was fought on the political scene almost annually for most of the Victorian period". Peter Ferriday observed in his biography of Edmund Beckett, 1st Baron Grimthorpe: "Was there a single eminent Victorian who did not at some time or other announce his views on the 'deceased wife's sister'? She was the teething ring of all Victorian controversialists...".