'How Dare Those Americans Want To Marry Above Their Station!' Those Frowned Upon Upstart American Girls Seeking Royal Alliances In Turn Of The Century Europe!

With all the press that is surrounding the upcoming nuptials in both Great Britain and Monaco, the question has been raised whether or not an American would be considered acceptable to grace the throne of a foreign country large or small and reign as a consort to alongside their royal partner?

Surprisingly over the years there have been a few here and there that have contracted such alliances with success.  Namely Alice Heine and Grace Kelly in Monaco!  They emerged from a mere miss into Her Serene Highness Princess Alice and Her Serene Highness Princess Grace respectively. Granted, Monaco is far from a super power, yet the fact remains that these two American transplants were recognized as full consorts to a reigning prince of a foreign country.  Lisa Najeeb Halaby, who was born in Washington D.C., eventually transformed into Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan. 

Starting in the late 18^th century continuing up until now, countless numbers of American women, heiresses, actresses, or otherwise placed, have flooded the shores of Britain, Continental Europe, and Asia. To this day, their influence and lineage can be traced through many European Royal Houses, for instance Princess Diana was descended from New York heiress Frances Work, and the mediatized House of Croÿ is lead by the grandson of an American heiress.

Despite protestations to the contrary, Americans have always been fascinated by titles, whether royal or noble, and prior to the massive influx of American girls in the late Victorian era, there was a little wave of Anglo-American matches in the colonial and Federal eras (1780s-1830s). In 1798, a daughter of the Governor of Pennsylvania married the Marquess de Casa Irujo, the Spanish minister to the United States, and John Jay, the first US Chief Justice, had two granddaughters who married successively, the 6th Viscount Exmouth. Three Caton granddaughters, descendants of a co-signer of the Declaration of Independence, married the 7th Duke of Leeds, the 8th Baron Stafford, and the 1st Marquess Wellesley, brother of the Iron Duke, respectively, and the first royal-American match was made between Betsey Patterson and Jerome Bonaparte, future King of Westphalia.

For many American girls, the hunt on the Continent yielded better results: one could become a Princess; and so, the princely and noble titles of Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy and Spain were also blessed by Providence with restored coffers and manor houses. Russia was not for the feint of heart. If one wished to brave the bracing weather, and cold Romanov court, princely titles abounded and some even related to the Romanovs–though if one aimed too high, as in the case of Harriet Blackford, who wished to marry Grand Duke Nicholas, the Imperial Family was apt to deal harshly with both parties.

As mentioned above, before, Grace Kelly, there was another American Princess of Monaco: Alice Heine of New Orleans and widow of the Duc de Richelieu. Alice married His Serene Highness, Prince Albert I of Monaco in 1889. To their marriage she brought a strong business acumen and worked hard to change the reputation of the principality from that of a gambling den to a place of culture. It was she who established the Opera house and installed a director who brought the world’s greatest operas to Monaco. Alice and Albert’s relationship cooled soon after their marriage, and she took a series a lovers, the most notorious being Isidore de Lara. Fed up with his wife, Albert made public their break when he slapped Alice in the face at the Opera when she stopped to whisper to her lover. She packed her bags in 1902 and left Monaco forever.

One American heiress who held all the cards was Anita Rhinelander Stewart. In 1909 she met Prince Miguel de Braganza, whose father was referred to as the Pretender to the Portuguese throne, and three months later, they were engaged. At first it was announced that the marriage would be morganatic, but Anita refused to accept anything less than the title of princess. And she got it: Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary, who extended hospitality to the exiled Braganzas, created the tenacious American the Duchess Vizeu & Princess de Braganza in her own right.

Beyond the names mentioned above there were a few other American women who in their own way trail-blazed a path for their American sisters of later generations to make such alliances with less resistance and a bit more success.

The New York Times article below recounts just how different the climate was a little over a century ago when a brash American forget her place and aimed higher than her prospects allowed. In some instances, their influence went a long way and in some circles it is intimated that in their own way they changed the course of history!

AMERCIAN WOMEN AND ROYAL MARRIAGES

There Is A Long List Of Such Unions And

Strange Are The Romances Developed From Them

The New York Times

December 6, 1908

The American woman has gone everywhere and become everything by marriage. There is not a nobility in the world, excepting China’s, that has not its American woman in it. But royal families have been of necessity more exclusive when wives are to be chosen for their scions, and royalty has generally evinced little predilection for those outside of equally exalted families, even in Europe.

On the Continent, in fact, it is practically true that only those sheep blackened, or at least sunburned, by the fierce light that beats upon a throne have married non-royal persons. Those who have made morganatic but perfectly honorable marriages, like Grand Duke Michael of Russia, are very rare.

Yet there are now living a countess, widow of a King whose love for the Boston born girl changed the course of nineteenth century history; an American princess who actually shared a throne, or at least a palace – is still alive; and another, a New Yorker born, is aunt by marriage of the German Empress.  Prince Leopold of Lippe-Biesterfeld, who died a few months ago, nearly lost his principality of Lippe-Detmold because his grandmother was a Philadelphian.  Feminine citizens of the United States have reached the dubious positions of unofficial consort of a King of Holland, wife of a throne less Bonaparte who had to give up his American spouse to enter royal ranks; and, by way of jest, it was a daughter of John H. Flagler of New York, who was wife of the first and only ‘King’ of Trinidad, the self-styled James I of the island.

This is a remarkable list when the conditions and barriers to be burned or pushed away are kept in mind.  The mere fact that every royal family is subject to its own laws by which misalliances are viewed in as serious a light as are criminal acts under the laws of the non-royal is only the smallest obstacle to be overcome.  In most European countries the Salic law prohibiting the inheritance of the throne in the female line is recognized, and accordingly there is less supervision of the love affairs of a Princess than a Prince and a corresponding care in selecting wives for the latter.  Even for royalty – albeit youthful – to defy royalty is not a small matter, and scions of ruling houses like Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, who succumbed to the charms of a non-royal woman, must needs be only morganatically married.  But Princess Hohenberg’s rendering of the Archduke’s heart captive was a comparatively simple matter, she having been a lady-in-waiting at court and so virtually one of the family royal circle. But the American woman can enjoy no such advantage if she sets her cap for a Princeling.  Female citizens of the Republic, thousands of them, have been years abroad and only glimpsed an occasional royal personage.

The Countess Of Edla

Wife Of King Ferdinand

With all these difficulties to overcome and with those of very humble birth and poverty added, the Countess of Edla, who yet makes her home at a chateau near Lisbon, became the wife of King Ferdinand and inspire a love the affected dynasties and may have, changed the map of Europe.  She is now in her seventy-second year, and for two decades has been a widow, but her life has been exceedingly full of romance.

Born in Boston as the daughter of a German immigrant tailor, who kept a shop and lived in a mean street, Elise Fredericka Hensler was a determining cause of Alfonso XIII, now sitting on the throne of Spain and of Germany, securing the Province of Alsace-Lorraine.

As a girl she showed vocal ability, and at an early age sang in a Boston church choir, finally being fortunate enough to find her Maecenas and to be sent abroad to continue her musical education.  She studied at Paris and Milan, and made her debut in grand opera at La Scala, whence the New York Metropolitan Opera Company went for its new director, Signor Gatti-Casazza.  Her first American appearance was at the Academy of Music, New York, followed by her singing the role of Linda in ‘Linda di Chamounix’ at the Boston Theater in January, 1855.  A longer engagement immediately afterward in Philadelphia brought her American tour to a close.  She returned to Europe, and became an established favorite in opera.  That she was precocious is amply attested by her being only nineteen when she came to America to sing.

She went to Lisbon.  Dom Fernando, dowager King Consort, so to speak, was an accomplished musician and a steady patron of opera.  Whereforce grew up a friendship that soon ripened into love between songstress and royal scion.

Dowager King-Consort

Dom Fernando

And who was Dom Fernando? Well, he began life as a member of the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha family, and consequently was cousin of Queen Victoria’s and her husband.  He became the husband of Maria da Gloria, Queen of Portugal, who had come to the throne in the troublous times at the age of 15.  Immediately on her accession in 1835, she married Augustus de Beauharnais, Duke of Leuchtenberg, who lived but two months.  A year later she took Prince Fernando of Coburg to husband and the royal couple were happy till her life’s end, in November, 1853.  For two years thereafter, until the coming of age of his son, Pedro V, on September 17, 1855, Dom Fernando ruled Portugal as regent.  Pedro died six years later, and his brother succeeded, both of the sons having been greatly indebted to Dom Fernando for guidance and advice.  Luiz ruled until four years after the death of his father, who therefore never again had the duty of being King of Portugal.

King Alfonso of Spain, however, has Dom Fernando’s love for the American singer to thank for his position to-day, and it is probable that the same ‘affaire du coeur’ made possible that Franco-Prussian War of 1870.  For in the spring of 1869 the Spanish throne went a begging.  Queen Isabella’s dissolute life had led to her dismissal from the throne, and old Gen. Prim was hunting one who might be King.  Dom Fernando was among the first asked, being deemed fittest by temperament and experience as a former regent of a kindred people to assume the duties from which the Spanish Queen had been ousted, and which she was seeking by every means in her power to transmit to her son, Alfonso, afterward twelfth of his name.

She was reduced to a Queen in being in February; Dom Fernando had already met and loved the fair American. But the proud Cortes of Portugal halted at granting him permission to wed her.  There followed negotiations, futile until the Spanish search for a King came to the ex-regent’s aid.  The Spanish people wanted Fernando most particularly and he was not loath to go, especially since then the attractions of his heart would have rather a better chance of fulfillment. Acceptance of the throne meant dynastically that Fernando’s son Luiz, the then Portuguese ruler would inherit the Spanish realm and the Iberian peninsula be once more united under a single ruler, with the seat of government this time at Lisbon.  Nevertheless, the Portuguese liked not the prospect of losing or sharing the man who had made their way straight.  Nor was he ambitious – except in love.  And so he held up to the Cortes the alternatives of his marrying the woman of his heart’s desire or of his accepting the rule over Spain.  The Cortes chose for him as he elected, voting that a wife was more meter for the former King Consort, than a throne.  On June 10, 1869, at Lisbon, Elise Hensler of Boston became Countess of Edla in the nobility of Saxe-Coburg and morganatic spouse of Dom Fernando.

Had Dom Fernando not hearkened to his love, undoubtedly he would have taken the Spanish throne.  In that event it would never have been offered to Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen and the historical excuse, if not the event, of the Franco-Prussian War would have been lacking.

Happiness Of Dom Fernando’s Marriage

Be that as it may, the married life of the curiously assorted couple was extremely happy.  Fernando was satisfied that his American bride was well worth a throne in Spain.  They lived together in unclouded felicity for sixteen years in the beautiful Pena Castle, near Lisbon, and on Dom Fernando’s death he left the castle, where she still makes her home, to his wife, as well as a considerable portion of his property.  At the age of 72 she is the step-great-grandmother of young King Manuel II, to stretch relationship a bit.

Fürst Leopold IV zu Lippe-Detmold, who died in January, and his father, Count Ernst, who was regent before him, were respectively grandson and son-in-law of an American, who, beginning life as Miss Mathilda Halbach-Bohlen of Philadelphia, closed her career as Countess Leopold von Wartensleben. The throne of Lippe-Detmold is now occupied by the Biesterfeld branch of the Lippe family, and Count Ernst throughout his term as its ruler, and Count Leopold during two years, were denied the dignity of being its prince, because their American forebear was not deemed of good enough birth to be the ancestress of the sovereign prince of a minor German State.  The outcome, however, rather justified origin on this side of the Atlantic, and should give those girls of the United States who dream of crowns some hope.

It is a difficult story to tell plainly, but it begins with the marriage of Miss Halbach-Bohlen to Count von Wartensleben of the Magdeburg Uradel at Mannheim, in 1841.  Of that union a daughter, Caroline, was born, who at the age of 23 married Count Ernst of Lippe-Biesterfeld in 1869.  This was a perfectly proper marriage in the eyes of the German experts on nobility.  Prince Alexander of Lippe, who had then been confided for twenty-three years as a lunatic in the Castle of St. Gilgenburg, bear Baireuth, came to the throne of Lippe-Detmold in 1895, on the death of his father.  A regent was necessary.  Then there was talk of deposing Alexander altogether and of giving the throne to Count Ernst of the Lippe-Biesterfeld branch, and this proceeding was favored by Prince Bismarck, who, though in retirement, recognized that the move would serve as a fine precedent when the question of who was to rule in Brunswick should become acute again, as it did in 1907.  But the Prince of Schaumburg-Lippe, married to the Kaiser’s sister, Princess Victoria of Prussia, came forward as a claimant, and the whole question of who was to be regent was submitted to King Albert of Saxony for arbitration and award.  Two years later he decided that Prince Alexander should continue to beat the titles that fate had bestowed on his crazy intellect and that Count Ernst of the Biesterfeld branch should act as his regent.  Germany was judicially committed to the opinion that half-American blood was no bar to a woman’s being the wife of one of its ruling regents.

A Quarter-American Count Becomes Regent

Prince Alexander died in 1905, as his thirty-third year of confinement was nearing completion.  Regent Count Ernst had predeceased him by a few months. The quarter American Count Leopold succeeded his father in the regency and set up the claim that he was de jure successor of Prince Alexander to the throne.  The Kaiser’s impulsively wrote a letter to his Minister of State forbidding the proffer of the allegiance of the troops to Count Leopold, and this, together with the complicated claims to the succession, served t put Lippe-Detmold into the scareheads of the German newspapers about four years ago.  Prince Alexander was the last of the direct princely line, and, the question of ancestor’s rank aside, Leopold was his rightful successor.  But wasn’t the democratic the democratic American blood in his veins good cause for this debarment from a ‘real’ throne? asked Germany.  Both the Schaumburg and the Wiessenfeld branches of the Lippe family claimed that It was, Count George of the latter entering the lists and putting his hand against every man concerned in the case by alleging that his own self was the only member of the entire family who had observed due care in choosing his ancestors.  And both the opposing branches of the family raked up the fact that Count Leopold of Biesterfeld’s great-grandmother also had been of unnoble birth.

The people who were to be ruled over after the smoke of battle cleared away at last found a voice, and in October, 1904, held a demonstration during which they swore in writing their unalterable loyalty to Count Leopold, and, by way of sop to other interested parties, to the ‘hereditary reigning house.’ Clearly whatsoever King should reign would have his people with him by this diplomatic attitude.  Then there came to light an agreement of 1886 between the Prince of the Schaumburg and the Agnates of the Wiessenfeld branches of the Lippe family, by which it was clear that the scions of the Biesterfeld line were to be opposed by the two others.  Lippe-Detmold public opinion rather resented this and lost some of its fence-straddling posture as a consequence. The people retorted to the publication of the treaty with a declaration that Count Ernst had won their sympathy and passed a very tardy resolution on the late regent’s death.

Hanoverian And Brunswick Succession In Danger

Germany from end to end was pretty well stirred up by this time, and the newspapers of the empire began to advise the Government that if it insisted too strongly on the legitimist principle the cases of the Hanoverian and Brunswick successions were likely to be taken up again, and the little fire might become a conflagration.  And, to end arguments, it was unearthed that a declaration of Prince Waldemar, penultimate Prince of Lippe-Detmold, at the time chief of the family, had provided that any marriage of the reigning dynasty should be considered regular if the espousing Agnate had applied for and obtained the consent of the head of the house. This declaration had the validity of family law.  Count Ernst had fulfilled its requirements before marrying his half-American wife.

The Lippe-Detmold Diet was first given an opportunity to decide the issue.  The necessary two-thirds vote for Count Leopold was not obtained, but Imperial opinion had in the meantime so been changed by the flood of knowledge and the pressure of sentiment that Leopold was allowed to be inaugurated as regent.  In November the Federal Council of the Empire determined that the regency was his by right, and that the question of the succession should be left to a court of arbitration, beyond whose decision there should be no appeal.  The Supreme Court of the Empire, which sits at Leipzig, sat as the Court of Arbitration, and favored Count Leopold’s claims.  He became Leopold IV, Fürst zur Lippe, on October 25, 1905, and there was ‘joy and enthusiasm indescribable’ in Detmold.  The good people of that principality must have been sincerely glad to be able to express their feelings about their ruler without the necessity of mollifying the feelings of two or three possibilities for the job at the same type.  Germany was judicially committed to the decision that one-quarter of American blood was no bar to possessing a throne.

That is as far as the country is likely to go along that line, for at present no American woman are concerned, even in a post-mortem way, in the successions to the Fatherland’s thrones.

It required no judicial decision at all to make a New Orleans girl a ruling Princess in Monaco.  Only she could not endure the dignity long on account of the Prince she had to take along with it.  She who was known in the Louisiana metropolis are Miss Marguerite Alice Heine not only possesses the distinction of being the only person of New World birth who has shared a genuine realm with a ruler, but also is the only Jewess every legitimately married to a reigning Christian Prince.  Her marriage to Prince Albert of Monaco was not morganatic. For thirteen years she was a real and not a titular Princess, and now she retains the predicate.

Her father was a cousin of Heinrich Heine, the great German lyric poet, and her own cousin married a nephew of Napoleon III’s finance minister. She herself, as most of her family, is not of the Jewish faith.  As Miss Heine, daughter of the New Orleans banker, who, after making his money there, retired to Paris to live, she married Armande, Duc de Richelieu, who died.  Prince Albert of Monaco, the present Prince, who is best known for his work as a hydrographer, had been married to Lady Mary Hamilton, but she had secured a divorce.  On October 31, 1889, at Paris, he married the widowed Duchess de Richelieu and the famous old Grimaldi palace at Monte Carlo was the scene of great festivities when he brought his bride home.  The whole four square miles and a half of the principality were bedecked with Venetian masts and triumphal arches and a cantata was performed in the Cathedral in her honor.  Such was the reception of the bride. In 1902 she secured a judicial separation from the Prince and still enjoys her freedom.  The son of Prince Albert, who is his heir, is not her son, but the offspring of Lady Mary Hamilton, now the wife of Count Tassilio Festetics of Hungary.

How An Ohio Woman Enthralled A King

A plebian Ohio woman for years held the passions of a King in thrall, and Mme. Musard is, I believe the one case of the kind in the annals of the New World. On the other hand, shameless European adventuresses who have fascinated monarchs have been many.  The story is now forty or fifty years old. Mario Musard, a Frenchman or Belgian, was the leader of an orchestra in Paris in the heyday of his career.  He made a flying trip to this country and took back with him a wife who was a native of a small Ohio town and was named Eliza Parker. He himself was at best an adventurer and she his willing assistant.  While he was engaged in a professional capacity at Baden-Baden he succeeded in throwing his wide-awake, ambitious, and pretty wife in the way of the austere William III of Holland in such a manner as completely to captivate him.

The relations of King and beauty were for many years a scandal, but they had made her of independent means.  For one day William III, drew from his writing table a package of old mortgages on some lands in Pennsylvania and gave them as a souvenir to the fair Eliza, who, with all her flaunting propriety, had a good head for business.  She promptly fore-closed the mortgages and became possessed of some of the richest petroleum lands in the world in the days when kerosene was just beginning to be recognized as an extremely valuable natural product.  She thus became one of the richest women of Europe.  All of this happened about 1860, and Mme. Musard promptly set up an establishment in Paris without bothering to separate herself from her legal husband, who forthwith dropped from sight in an exceedingly obliging manner.

She purchased a sumptuous hotel, built palatial stables for her eighty magnificent horses, and entertained with sybaritic lavishness.  Her palace was the mecca of high society during the Third Empire.  Her splendor equaled her profligacy.  At a dinner in honor of the Prince de Chimay she wore a dress embroidered with over 3,000 pearls.  Her stables were marvels of equine luxury, and tickets of admission were issued to them as to great art collections. She was accustomed to give elaborate breakfasts in them, at which such notables as Arsène Houssaye, Théophile Gautier, and the painters Chaplin and Zeim were guests.  The table service at these repasts was performed alternately by three coal black negroes and three white men, all in her own special livery.  Her equipages were more magnificent even than the Empress Eugenie’s.  Her entertainments in the Avenue d'Iéna and at her country seat, the Château de Villequier, were on a superb scale, and enthusiastically do bon vivants of that time recall them, and declare that never since have their like been seen.

Mme. Musard Nearly Throws All Europe Into A War

When Mme. Musard’s edifice of dishonor collapsed it was with a startling suddenness.  First the favor of the Dutch sovereign was lost to her and Europe was nearly plunged into war thereby.  In 1867 she betrayed her royal lover’s negotiations with Napoleon III, for the sale of Luxemburg to France.  The King was in need of money, while his paramour was enjoying the height of luxury as a result for his gift.  Luxemburg was his and he thought to sell it, thus violating the treaty guaranteeing its neutrality.  In March the treaty of cession to Napoleon was drawn up.  William confided the contemplated act to his Egeria.  Mme. Musard betrayed the fact, some day to the German Ambassador, others to the Marquise de Paiva, a woman of her own ilk.  The disposition of the sovereignty of the duchy had been settled thirty years before by a concert of the powers.  Germany was furious over the plotted scheme and war was only averted by the calling of a conference in London which settled Luxemburg’s neutrality and decreed that it should remain in the possession of the house of Orange-Nassau. Egeria had lost her Numa.

Nemesis followed hard after.  The indiscreet talk of madam lost her royal friend, but she was wealthy, and one report had it that she had divulged the secret negotiations for hard cash, was, in fact, a gilded spy in the pay of Germany in addition to her other infamies.  Her joyful like as the adulated of all adulators bade fair to last long. But one night in her box at the opera she was suddenly seized with a paralytic attack.  Her left eye was so affected she was never able to open it again. She soon lost her mind; a few months later she became a raving maniac and tried to kill Chaplin, the painter.  She was shut up in the asylum of Dr. Blanche, the famous specialist, and died shortly, leaving what remained of her fortune to her American relatives.  The parasites who had hovered about her made off with a good portion of her money, and it is needless to say that the heirs of the obliging Musard put in a claim that had to be fought in the courts. So ended in oblivion the glittering course of the fair American who became queen of society and mistress of royalty.

Through the contemporary records of her meteor like Mario Musard plays the part of ghost as he did in life.  It was not even known whether he was French or Belgian in origin.  The nearest an assiduous American could come to writing his history fifty years ago was the sixth words: ‘He leads orchestras: that is all.’ The sentence was written in 1858, when Musard was in New York and was expecting to inaugurate there Saturday evening masked balls similar to those which had become so popular under his direction at Paris that the enthusiastic chronicler declared that Guizot, the then strongest man in France, might he billed without creating a tenth part of the demonstration that would follow the death of Musard by violent means.  The fiddler bore an unenviable reputation even then.  While New York’s curiosity was piqued to see him, the town was not ambitious to behold his activity.  Witness the contemporary account:  ‘If we have masked balls here they will be scene of such immorality and profanity and disgrace of all kinds as even this vicious city has never known before.’

Some Pretty Bits Of Royal Opera Bouffe

There is opera bouffe equal to any on the comic stage, as well as love and trouble and infamy, in the history of American women who have become queens. One, for instance, ruled a kingdom that existed only in the mind of her husband.  The Baroness James Harden-Hickey, daughter of John H. Flagler and cousin of Henry M. Flagler of the Standard Oil Company, was Queen of Trinidad for a space of time after his fashion.  Her husband was a crack-brained eccentric of American origin, French citizenship, and strong royalist leanings. His title was a papal one, and after being educated at French military schools he began to publish a rabid royalist newspaper in Paris which caused his speedy expulsion from the republic.

He had a fortune of his own, and imagined that he was destined to conquer worlds and rule all he conquered.  Leaving France by governmental invitation, he was shipwrecked on Trinidad, and conceived the kingdom he was afterward to establish for a minute or two.  The next year he married Anna Flagler in the United States, but marriage, instead of quieting his restless spirit, seemed only to incite his romantic disposition.  The Odysseys he performed were as startling as that of Maximilian to Mexico, which was then fresh in the mind of the world, and without any manner of excuse excepting his own perverse desire. He roved over the world, and always encountered adventures that had no place in the life of a nineteenth century citizen and should have lived in the days of the three musketeers or earlier in the crusading times to have been entirely at home with his period.

It was in 1894 that he set out in a yacht with his wife. They were wrecked off Trinidad, and the baron set up the government he had planned six years before. At least he began along those lines, and got as far as taking the title of James I for himself and awarding that of Queen Anna to his wife.  His rule was so short-lived that he did not even have opportunity to get his extravagant plans out of his head even on to paper.  The big island off the Venezuelan coast was discovered by Columbus on this third voyage, and for a century before King James proclaimed himself had belonged to England.  At the time it had a British governor and 200,000 inhabitants. King James therefore speedily encountered John Bull, and as quickly as the exchanges of the information regarding his usurpation could be made the London Government dispatched a cruiser to deal with this brand new problem of Colonial control.

King James and Queen Anna, at the time constituting all the royal government, were exported to Key West.  And the King died as King for want of a place to rule.

Harden-Hickey finally shot himself, and the baroness brooded over his death until she became insane, and last summer was committed to a Connecticut asylum.  She is not violent, but the nurses declare that when first brought there she continually posed as a sovereign.  She compels them to robe her in stately gowns and issues orders as Queen of Trinidad.

The present widowed Countess Albert von Waldersee, whose husband was the famous German Field Marshal, is an aunt by marriage of the German Empress. She acquired the relationship by her previous marriage to Prince zu Noer.

NR

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