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The Royal and Parliamentary Titles Act, 1927 was a significant landmark in the constitutional history of the United Kingdom and British Empire. The act had two concequences. The first was to change the full name of the United Kingdom to The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the former The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. This reflected the fact that the Irish Free State had been created in 1922. Historians generally retrospectively date the coming into being of the modern United Kingdom to December 1922, even though in this case the formal change did not occur for another five years.

The second consequence was a modification of the King's title. In changing the title, it replaced the concept of a single crown ruling the the British Empire with multiple crowns with each dominion as a separate kingdom, all worn by the common monarch.

Thus before 1927, King George V reigned as king in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Irish Free State, South Africa, etc., each of these states, in effect, as dominions, amounting to a subset of the United Kingdom. After 1927, he reigned as King of Australia, King of New Zealand, King of Ireland, King of South Africa, etc. The form of use in the royal title as issued by King George V did not mention the dominions by name, except 'Ireland', which changed from being referred to as Great Britain and Ireland to Great Britain, Ireland, indicating that it was no longer part of the United Kingdom, but a separate state of which the monarch was now directly the head, rather than through linkage with Great Britain. Though unnamed, except through reference to the 'British Dominions beyond the Seas', the ground-breaking move shattered the previous concept of the shared monarch to one of multiple monarchies, all held by the one monarch.

Though this principle was implicit in the Act and in the King's new titles, and came out of a Commonwealth Conference, neither the British government nor the dominion governments seemed initially to grasp its significance.

The independent-minded Irish put the principle into effect immediately by assuming the right to select their own Governor-General, to demand a direct right of audience with the King, and to accept credentials from international ambassadors to Ireland, something no other Dominion up to then had done. Following the Statute of Westminster in 1931 (which granted Dominons the power to enact any legislation to change any legislation, without any role for the British parliament which may have enacted the original legislation in the past), the Irish Free State excluded British ministers from Royal audiences, abandoned the use of the British Great Seal of the Realm and replaced it with the Great Seal of the Irish Free State, which the King awarded to his Irish Kingdom as King of Ireland, and requesting that he sign international treaties in his capacity as King of Ireland.

Other dominions were much slower to go down this path, and when they did so, they were faced with determined, though ultimately futile, attempts to block such evolution in London. Often the change is status was not codified by the Dominions until the acession of Elizabeth II.

An interesting consequence of the act was that Edward VIII's abdication required legal acknowledgment in each Commonwealth state. In the Irish Free State, however, that acknowledgment, in the External Relations Act, occurred a day later than elsewhere, leaving Edward technically as "King of Ireland" for a day, while George VI was king of all other Commonwealth Realms.

• British laws