How the line of succession looks now

The new royal baby is immediately seventh in line to the British throne.

The first six places remain unchanged – the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, Prince Louis and then Harry – with his baby son entering the line of succession below him.

(PA Graphics)But the youngest member of the Windsor family has now bumped Harry’s uncle, the Duke of York, from seventh place down into eighth.

Andrew was once the spare to the heir, and was second in line when he was born in 1960.

Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie move into ninth and 10th place, and the Earl of Wessex – the Queen’s youngest son – drops out of the top 10 for the first time to 11th in line.

The Princess Royal, the Queen’s only daughter, who is often dubbed the hardest working royal, is now 14th in line behind Edward’s son and daughter.

The new royal baby will not in future require the monarch’s permission to marry.

For hundreds of years, the Royal Marriages Act 1772 required descendants of George II to seek the sovereign’s consent before they wed, otherwise their marriages were deemed invalid.

But this law was repealed through the Succession to the Crown Act.

It restricted the consent to just the first six people in the line of succession, but as the new baby is seventh in line, they will never need to seek a monarch’s approval to wed.

King George III, George II’s grandson, had ordered the now repealed 1772 act after his younger brother the Duke of Cumberland secretly married Lady Anne Horton, deemed to be a highly disreputable widow of a commoner.