4 - Amendments Enacted and Reform Deferred, 1855–1872

Summary

The Marriage and Registration Act 1856 responded to a number of specific grievances, making changes to civil preliminaries and allowing those in charge of registered places of worship to decide who could marry there. It also provided that Anglican clergy could no longer be compelled to marry a couple after civil preliminaries, prohibited the inclusion of a religious service in register office weddings, and allowed the West London synagogue to certify its own secretaries and those of other Reform synagogues. Other reforms in this period allowed Anglican clergy to refuse to remarry any person who had been divorced on the basis of their adultery, opened Quaker weddings to non-Quakers, and removed the restriction that only Christian places of worship could be registered for weddings. Even wider-ranging reform was considered by a Royal Commission in the 1860s; had its recommendations been enacted, there would have been a uniform marriage law for the whole of the United Kingdom and Ireland, organised around the person conducting the marriage rather than the place of marriage, and the subsequent history of marriage law would have been very different.