From what I’ve read many years ago, the government was never involved in marriages of common people. Only the elite had marriage contracts (between high-born men and women) drawn up to pass along kingdoms to the kids.
The common people went to the priest or preacher who then married them in church and entered it in the church records. If there was NO clergy handy, the two made a public declaration of living together as man and wife, then later when a clergyman came by they and their kids would go to the church and get religiously married.
Then some politician found he could bring in MONEY by demanding a government license to get married.
I don’t believe there is an instance of two men getting married other than the pervert NERO. I believe the historians noted it only because it had never been done before.
It’s very difficult to authenticate due to the way records were kept prior to Hardwicke’s act codifying the way things could be done, but actually there are lots of instances where women married women and men married men using the “by declaration” method, all the way through British history.
Hardwicke’s act - a political law - ensured ALL marriages not involving Anglican, Quaker or Jewish ministerial oversight had to be conducted in Anglican parish churches / chapels, by an Anglican minister.
In fact it was mainly because unorthodox, “clandestine” marriages, bigamous marriages, forced marriages, marriage for financial fraud, and YES EVEN same sex marriages were going on, that Hardwicke was motivated into drafting that Act.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and this was a classic example of that. Hardwicke gave the State the unprecedented ability to impose all kinds of restrictions on marriage that had NEVER existed before - such as imposing an age restriction that said people had to be over 21 to marry without parental consent.
And that set a dangerous precedent because from then on, in the UK and in America, politicians have thought it’s their business to define the parameters for who can and can’t marry.
Of course, what happened in the 18th Century after the Act came in was, people who were minded to do stuff without state interference - including 18 year old couples - did one of two things:
1. They eloped to Gretna Green, across the border in Scotland, to get married in the old way of marriage by declaration.
http://www.gretnagreen.com/lord-hardwicke-1754-marriage-act-a746
2. They sailed across the Atlantic, to the New World, and endured decades of hardship, and participated in the long struggles that eventually led to American independence and a Constitution with a First Amendment that ought to ensure there is no government interference EVER in religious matters, or promoting one Christian denomination’s opinions over any other’s.
So here’s the issue.
1. SCOTUS has basically said that there really shouldn’t be any barriers to anyone getting married to anyone else in any part of the USA (which in any practical sense is no different to enshrining the Scottish “marriage by declaration” principle in federal law)
Bizarrely,
2. The Christian right is arguing that doing this at the federal level is wrong, and it would be more constitutional to have Hardwicke Acts at the states level
But Chancellor Hardwicke’s mistake was thinking it’s the job of ANY politician to not just be seen to observe a certain set of religious principles and canon laws in his own own private life, but legislate to promote them so that all other people with different Christian beliefs have to abide by them also.
I would not want to live in any state that thought the least statist thing to do is have politicians have ANY role in telling churches who it must marry, so no pro-gay politician should ever have a mandate to tell any church it must wed gays.
But equally I would not want to live in a state where a crowd-pleasing Baptist politician thinks he has a mandate to tell a small Quaker church who CANNOT get married in it.
Statism is statism, and I don’t give a hoot if statism for the evangelicals at the states level sounds like a good idea while statism for the commies at the federal level is a bad idea. They’re both wrong.
It should be up to a church to decide who it can and can’t marry, nobody else. That’s what the constitution says. That’s what the Pilgrim Fathers sailed for. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom hit the nail on the head:
“That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time”