It's no secret that Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are expecting their first child together. The highly-anticipated baby Royal is due sometime in the spring of 2019, and while the pair couldn't be more excited to be hands-on parents, they won't actually have legal custody of this child - or any future children they have. In fact, the Queen will be the one to have full legal custody. Why? It's all down to a centuries-old law that was concocted by King George I in 1717. It turns out that families were just as complicated back then as they are today.

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According to a royal expert, George I didn't have the best of relationships with his son, the future King George II. When the Prince had children of his own, George I wanted to have a godparent that he approved of, however it didn't work out that way. Young Prince George went against his father's wishes and picked one of his own, so George I decided to do something about it, calling on Parliament to "come up with something." And thus, the law was born. Any future children were then under the legal custody of the reigning monarch. Although the law went by pretty much unheeded for the next couple of hundred years, it did rear its ugly head in 1994, during Prince Charles and Diana's divorce.

At the time, Diana wanted to take the young princes, William and Harry, to reside quietly in Australia, away from the prying eye of the paparazzi that hounded their every move. Unfortunately, the Princess couldn't do any such thing because of the restrictions of the law. The formal record of the law states that the monarch has the "right to the care of the marriage and education of the children of the royal family," as well as "the care of the royal children and grandchildren and the presumptive air to the crown."

With that being said, it's not only Harry and Meghan's children that are under this law but all three of William and Kate's children, too. However, in this day and age it's highly unlikely that the Queen would interfere - after all, this is 2018.

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