legitimacy which it might be proper to accord to the issue of the polygamous unions nor upon the rights or obligations in relation to third persons which people living under the sanction of such mions may have created for themselves. All that is intended to be here decided is that as between each other they are not entitled to the remedies, the adjudication, or the relief of the matrimonial law of England."
The only case in which the rights of the offspring of a polygamous union have come before the English Courts is that of In re Bethell, Bethell Hildyard, L.R. 28 Ch. Div. 220, but unfortunately in that case counsel for the issue of the union made the admission that if the union was held to be polygamous there was an end to his client's ease. Again, as will be seen, it was not a case of two members of a polygamous race marrying according to their own rites but of an English Christian making a union with a woman of a polygamous race.
Christopher Bethell left England for the Cape of Good Hope in 1878 and never returned: he was killed in Bechuanaland fighting as a trooper in the mounted police in an encounter between his force and the Boers. In 1883 he had gone through a form of marriage at Mafeking according to the custom of the Baralong tribe with a girl named Teepoo by whom he had a child. As he was the legatee of property in England under his father's will it became necessary for the English Court of Chancery to decide whether in the eyes of the law of England this child was legitimate, and an enquiry by the Chief Clerk of the Court was ordered. This Official certified that the Baralongs had no religion nor any religious customs and that polygamy was allowed in that tribe. He also certified that Christopher Bethell's domicile at the time of his marriage was English.
The evidence before the Chief Clerk showed that amongst the Barolongs "each male is allowed one great wife and several concubines who have almost the same status in the home as the great or principal wife" and the chief of the tribe in his evidence said there are those who have two, three or four wives but the first is the principal wife."
Mr. Justice Stirling, as he then was, agreed that upon this evidence the Chief Clerk was right in finding that the Barolongs were polygamous: and he held that the law of England could not recognise the union. All the miserable infant got was its costs out of the estate! This is not the place to discuss the judgment, though it may he observed that the learned Judge held himself bound by the decisions of matrimonial Courts, in particular, by Hyde v. Hyde and Woodmansee, and that he made no mention of the saving clause already quoted at the end of the judgment in that case.
This case, however, was really the only one that the appellants in the Six Widows' Case could rely on as being in any way on all fours with the case which they were arguing.
