I recently discovered, to my surprise, that many Irish leases and trusts set out their perpetuities period with reference to heirs and descendants of "his Brittanic Majesty, George V." The perpetuities period runs, in other words, 21 years past the death of the last heir of the King. Or, at least, I think that's right. 1L was a long time ago.

Before I get to the main point of this post, I should say that "His Brittanic Majesty" is my favorite of the royal sobriquets, with "The Most Christian King" (for France, and even better in French, Le Roi Tres Chretien), a close second, and "his Most Catholic Majesty", for Spain, trailing a distant last. I always regret that we've been stuck with the grandiose, but not especially interesting, "leader of the free world." Especially when it's somewhat unclear what it means, or why people still use it.

Anyway - back to the surprise - why, precisely, would an Irish lease entered post independence reference George V and not some hero of Ireland? Of course, further research uncovers that some leases and trusts do exactly that:

"The second possibility is that a life may be expressly and specifically selected as a measuring life. For example, in a limitation to 'such of A's lineal descendants as shall be born within 21 years of the death of X,' X is the measuring life. This is fine despite the fact that he has no inherent relationship with the terms of the disposition. In practice, the most common example of express measuring lives involves the descendants of some specified British monarch, a device known as a 'Royal lives' clause. In Ireland, the practice of referring to the lives of descendants of some specified monarch has occasionally been forsaken in favour of referring to the family of Eamonn de Valera."

So why do some documents do the equivalent of using George III to set an American perpetuity period? The obvious answer is that it's extremely easy to trace a kingly line. As the Law Reform Commission notes, "among practitioners, there is a strong feeling that a Royal Lives clause carries the considerable advantage that the dates of the births and deaths of the 'lives' involved are readily ascertainable in authoritative works, such as Burke's Peerage."

But I would add to the Commission's notes that one might choose a king because, in some sense, a king's only job is to reproduce. In the end, a normal person might have no children, and be perfectly content (one hopes, at least). But a childless King is a dangerous failure, and so there are relatively few of them. It is a contractual advantage to adopt George V as your guide. That it's somewhat inconsistent with your history, I suppose, ought not stand in the way.