daughter, or mother was. This appears to be clear by the decision in the well-considered case of Reg. v. Chadwick, and Reg. v. St. Giles, in which the several statutes and authorities prior to Lord Lyndhurst's Act, 5 & 6 Will. IV., c. 54, are commented upon and considered. It was always deemed as being within the prohibited and Levitical degrees; but, from the peculiarity that the question of the validity of marriage (with reference to this objection of being within the Levitical degrees) was matter of Ecclesiastical cognizance, and cognizable in the Spiritual Court alone, it could not be questioned after the death of either party, for it could not be dissolved by the Court then, as death had already dissolved it; nor could the issue be bastardized, though the survivor might be visited with the ecclesiastical censures. But the marriage was still an unlawful and forbidden marriage, and the issue really was born illegitimate, though the validity of the marriage and the legitimacy of the issue could not be questioned in the country of domicile, by reason of the rules of the peculiar law, which made these matters cognizable in one tribunal only in that country. The marriage would be good in one sense, because it could not be set aside, and the issue would be legitimate in that sense, because there were no means provided by the English law to deprive them of the rights belonging to legitimate issue; but such marriages were all forbidden at the time of contracting them, all illegal, all capable of being set aside, as void ab initio, on account of their illegality; and the comity of nations cannot require them to be held valid in another country, where there exist no means of setting them aside."
