Staying Impartial

Salmond and Prime Minister David Cameron have both met with the 88-year-old monarch in the past month as polls showed the Yes campaign was gaining ground. The queen remained silent on the issue dividing the nation.

“The sovereign’s constitutional impartiality is an established principle of our democracy,” a spokesperson for Buckingham Palace said. “As such, the monarch is above politics and those in political office have a duty to ensure that this remains the case. Her majesty is firmly of the view that this is a matter for the people of Scotland.”

As well as the monarchy, the nationalists plan to keep the pound, a seamless border with the rest of the U.K. and the Bank of England. The opposing Better Together campaign has said those arrangements don’t add up to independence, while the main U.K. political parties have said a currency union won’t work.

“We meet in a week that could change the United Kingdom forever,” Cameron told an audience in Aberdeen yesterday. “Indeed, it could end the United Kingdom as we know it.”

Scotland would become the 17th country with the queen as head of state, alongside places such as Australia and Canada as well as Tuvalu and the Solomon Islands.

Not Unique

“The position of Her Majesty The Queen and head of state will form an intrinsic part of the constitutional platform in place for independence in 2016,” the Scottish government says in its blueprint for a new state. “For two independent states to share the same monarch is not a novel or unique situation.”

The question of whether an independent Scotland will wish to retain a monarchy may arise as the new nation crafts a constitution, and the question of the Queen’s successor arises, said Hazell at University College London.

The Scots would also have to decide whether they wished to sign up to the current succession rules, which bar a Roman Catholic from taking the throne. Those rules date from before the union, and were designed to protect the Protestant reformation in England. The monarch remains the head of the Church of England as its “supreme governor.”