Photograph by Henrie Manuel, Paris.The Infanta Eulalia
Photograph by Henrie Manuel, Paris.The Infanta Eulalia
Photograph by Henrie Manuel, Paris.
The Infanta Eulalia
mind attracts mind. He became the head of a Liberal party—subsequently called the “Orleans” party, because he was of the House of Orleans—although he always declared that he had neither desired nor tried to organise any following for himself. Men like the famous writer, José de Echegaray, gathered around him, and his palace became a centre for the dissemination of Liberal ideas. He was antagonistic to the Conservatives, who were chiefly Clerical; and he was much feared and opposed by the priests. He wished to improve the conditions in Spain. He wished, as he used to say, humorously, “to make it habitable.” But I do not think that he had any personal ambition to rule; for, although he had distinguished himself for bravery in the French army, and was a general in the Spanish army, he made no attempt to use his influence with the army or with the politicians, in order to obtain the throne for himself when it went begging after my mother lost it. He had not expected, he told me, that the reformers contemplated interfering with the ruling family. He supported the Liberals and gave them money, in the hope that they would correct the abuses and corruptions of misgovernment in Spain. And when no good came of it, he assisted the movement to call my brother to the throne.
My brother was as devoted to him as I was, and held to his intention of marrying the Duc’s daughter in spite of all the intriguing and the opposition of people who feared the Duc’s influence, and the warnings that this was a new attempt of the Duc to get back into political power by putting his daughter on the throne of Spain. It was a love match purely—the only one I ever knew in Royalty. For royal love matches are usually marriages between persons of royal birth who are enthusiastic because they find they have no positive aversion for each other.
The Duc, even in Sevilla, had planned to marry me to one of his sons, Antoine d’Orléans, whom I liked as a cousin, but had no other affection for. I said “No.” When I came to Madrid this was still talked of, as such things are discussed in families, but I paid no attention to it. My engagement to the archduke ended it for a time; but when I grew melancholy at the thought of going to Austria my brother would say, “Well, then, why not marry Antoine, and we shall never be separated.” And ifyou have to marry some one who will be more or less indifferent to you—and you foresee that in one choice your father-in-law, at least, will be charming—and that choice will keep you near a beloved brother whom you might otherwise lose—well, why not? Besides, I did not have to decide immediately. I could not marry any one yet. I let it drift—and drifted with it.
The Duc, to encourage me, perhaps, told me the story of his own marriage; and I think it is unique even in the annals of royal alliances. It was, of course, an affair of State, arranged for him. His bride, my aunt, was only fourteen years of age, and she could not speak a word of French. He spoke no Spanish. When they had been married—in great pomp at a double wedding with my mother and father—he was left alone for the first time with his wife, and the poor child was so frightened that she began to cry. He did not know what to say to reassure her, since he could not say anything that she could understand; and, looking around the room despairingly, his eye was caught by a movement of the curtains in the far corner of the bed-chamber. He looked more intently and made out the plumeof a head-dress showing between the hangings. He rushed across the room and dragged out a lady-in-waiting! His exasperation at his bride’s sobs and his own inability to quieten her broke in fury on the head of the unfortunate woman. She explained as well as she could that they were afraid the bride would be too frightened if she were left alone with him, and they had agreed to conceal one of her ladies behind the curtains to give her secretly a sort of moral support. The Duc put her violently out of the room.
I suppose that the Duc had a strong influence on both my brother and me—on our opinions and our points of view—yet it must have been the influence of personality unconsciously exerted, for he always refrained from giving opinions about public affairs, even when he was asked for them. “No,” he would say, “I have learned not to express my opinions. They are always brought back to me—so transformed that I can not recognise them—and presented to me as my own. Look at the revolution.” He conformed in matters of religion to comfort his wife, who was very devout; but he never went to confession, and he required that when he attended Massthe priests should not take more than twenty minutes for it. He would keep an eye on the clock, and when the twenty minutes had elapsed he would say, “Watch him now,” and cough with peremptory impatience. The priest would immediately begin to race through to the conclusion of the service, and every one would be anxious for him to finish, as if the Due’s impatience were some terrible threat to be placated. Yet, for a man so feared, I never knew any one less fearsome.
He was very patriarchal-looking when I knew him—white-bearded, heavily-fleshed, and benign. To his receptions in the evening came all the clever people, of whatever opinion, and whenever bores arrived he pretended that they had come to see his wife, and had them ushered to her apartments, and said, contentedly, “There now. They will pray together and enjoy themselves.” It was the one thing that he asked of life—not to be bored. Imagine how that would appeal to one in the atmosphere of a Court. For the plague of Courts is ennui.
Princesses are peculiarly subject to it. A king or a prince has usually some work to do, some power to exercise. A princess is as much more idle thana young lady as a young lady is more idle than a working girl. In an attempt to keep up an exercise of my brain, I continued my studies during the whole ten years of my unmarried lite in Spain—studying languages, the piano, singing, the harp, painting—and keeping myself occupied with reading and writing as well as I could. People tell me that princesses are stupid. I wonder that we are not all idiots. During my life in Madrid, almost my only public duty was to help lay corner-stones. I helped lay enough to pave the city. Whenever nothing else could be found to justify our existence, the authorities would say, “Come, let them lay a corner-stone.” I can not believe that any other stones were put on top of them. It is not possible. There were too many. If the buildings had all been completed, there would not be room now, in the town, to walk. And the Te Deums that I listened to were numerous enough to exhaust the ears of Heaven.
I have already spoken of the audiences that we gave. They were stupid beyond words. One received strangers under conditions of formality that made them more strange, asked silly little questions of the women—“Are you married?” “How manychildren have you?”—smiled politely, and waited for the next one. It is the sort of thing that you might expect from the Chinese. And the purely Court receptions were even worse. There you had not even strangers, so you could not ask them whether they were married. You knew—or you were expected to know—all the dignitaries, statesmen, officials, aides, and diplomats who make up the Court circle; you met them again and again, for a perfunctory moment, said something innocuous, and passed on—until you met again.
The problem was to think of something to say each time. Once after a Royal chapel—when we always had to make a circle of a roomful of officials lined up around the walls—I noticed, as we approached one officer, that he wore black gloves with his uniform. It is a sign of deep mourning. The others of the Royal Family, preceding me, made the usual conventional attempts to say a little of nothing as if it were something worth saying; and so, when I came to him, although I had no idea who he was, I said, “I was deeply sorry to hear of your bereavement.” The others, overhearing me, were mortified that they had not offered him their condolences too;and when the reception was over they spoke to me about it. Whom had he lost? How had I remembered it? And when I explained what I had done, without knowing who the man was, even the King was envious. It was so difficult to have anything to say, and a Royal Family is always so haunted by the problem that my little ruse quite made a reputation for me. And, if you can believe it, the officer was deeply touched and gratified, poor soul, by my knowing of his grief. It is on such trifles that a king makes his personal popularity. But what a life!
When my brother married the Duc’s daughter, Mercedes, we had that beautiful and charming creature added to our circle; but they were such lovers and so happy together that we had our brother less, though we had Mercedes more. By this time I had quite lost interest in the daughters of the grandees whom my brother invited to Court to make companionship for us. They could play no game more active than croquet, which they played languidly. When I drove them behind my four ponies they wanted always to go to the parks, where they could look sidelong at the young men; and I preferred thecountry drives with more freedom. I soon wearied of a conversation that was all holy water and fiancés.
And before long the Spanish young men came to bore me as much as their sisters. They had only one conversation for a woman—the romantically sentimental, exaggerated to the point of foolishness. It was too silly. If they were not pretending that they were blighted with melancholy because of your unearthly charms, they were assuring you that they would shed their blood for you. I did not want to see their blood, but their brains; and they either had none or did not consider it necessary to use them in their conversation with a princess.
In the evenings I often went to the opera, but my brother had no ear at all for music; he could not tell the Royal March when it was played; and he complained that the singing depressed him like the howling of a dog. So I went with my sisters and some older chaperon. One night, on our way to the opera, we had an adventure that could happen only in Spain. There, whenever the priest is summoned to attend the dying, he takes the sacrament and sets out on foot, accompanied by an attendant with a little bell. The first carriage that he meets, even ifit be a hired hack, is stopped at the sound of the bell and he is invited to ride. If the hack then meets a private carriage of more luxury, it is the privilege of the owner to take the priest into his vehicle. And if the Royal carriage is met, the Royalty not only take the priest with them, but they are expected to follow into the house of the dying, and kneel in the death-chamber while the last rites are being performed.
On this night I was in our carriage with a princess who was most gorgeously arrayed in a bright green evening gown ornamented with silver, with a great display of jewels on her corsage, and on her head a huge rayed ornament of diamonds in the shape of a diadem. Her hair was prematurely grey and rather wild. She had been riding in the sun, and her face was flushed. She was an enormous woman—so large that she had to give up horseback-riding because it became impossible to find a horse capable of carrying her.
We were scarcely well away from the palace when we heard approaching us the bell of the sacrament, and I said to her, hurriedly, “We can’t go to a death-bed in this finery. I’ll make the driver turn round.” But she was very religious. It was a sacrilege to her to turn our backs on the Host. In spite of my protests, we met the priest, took him into the carriage, and drove him to his destination. There the princess and I followed him into the death-chamber, devoutly, though with very doubtful feelings on my part.
We found a man dying of some sort of fever, lying on his back in bed, with a holy candle burning on his forehead—to improve his temperature, no doubt. He opened his eyes at our entrance; and when he saw the unearthly apparition of the princess in bright green, with the hair and face of a soul in purgatory and a blaze of glory about her head; he sat up in bed with a shriek, pointed his shaking hand at her, and cried “Booh!” That was all I saw. I got down on my knees, helpless with hysterical laughter, and covered my face with my hands. When the ceremony was over, I hurried out as best I could and went to pieces in the carriage. The man died that night.
One would think it was not very sanitary to be making such visits to fatal cases of disease. And it was not. We went once to the death-bed of a smallpox patient and knelt on pillows that had been under his head. But the Spanish people seem to have a vitality that is proof against infection; and in the South of Spain particularly they live to incredible old age.
I supposethat no one who has not lived at a Court will believe how narrow in its interests the royal life can be. It is the life of a little family isolated by an impervious etiquette from the immensities of life that are about it. One can read, and hear, and be aware of the life of the nation at second hand; one can not approach it intimately. And the little family revolves upon itself, with its own gossip, its own scandal, its own jealousies and ambitions, its own jokes, and its own quarrels, in a kind of royal cloister, surrounded by invisible walls. During those first years of my brother’s reign, laws were passed, debates were conducted, the Liberals and Conservatives struggled together for office, elections were held, revolts were put down. I heard nothing of it. Or if I did, it made so little impression on my interest that it made none on my memory. I remember that now the famous Premier Sagasta would be at the palace daily, and now his famous rival, Canovas;but that was politics merely; and politics were to us princesses what business would be to the daughters of an American millionaire.
The entourage that surrounded us in the palace of Madrid went with us to the mountains when the Court removed to the summer palace of La Granja, which is the Versailles of Spain, and modelled after Versailles. There we fished and hunted and rode and made excursions like a house-party at an English country seat. And when we went to Santander for the sea-bathing, it was the same. The same people accompanied us, the same routine of life engaged us, the same round of interests confined our minds.
Contrary to the popular tradition about Courts, there was very little of the scandal of which the “secret memoirs” of ladies-in-waiting have so much. Conditions in Spain did not encourage such stories, particularly among the aristocracy that came to Court. A Spanish lady would not even receive a call from a man if her husband were not at home; she could not walk alone in the streets; and, there being no divorce possible—and the jealousy of the Spanish husband so deadly—if she were foolish enough to engage in any love intrigues, the act wouldhave to be too secret ever to become a matter of gossip.
And there was nothing but such aristocracy at Court. We did not see—as one would at a French Court, for example—judges, or lawyers, or academicians, or artists, or professors, or great engineers of public works, or even many military or naval officers, except the King’s aides. Such men might be presented at audiences, but did not enter into our social life. Nothing but aristocracy. These had few interests, and therefore few topics of conversation. They shot rabbits and partridges, but did not hunt. They did not talk of sports, since they played no games—except card games that went on interminably, afternoons and evenings. Sport, in those days in Spain, was an affair of the lower classes wholly. They were fond of music, so we hadmusicales—and, of course, dances. When we had clever foreign visitors who talked entertainingly, the aristocrat was bored; the expression of ideas wearied him. He had manners, presence, dignity, but no activity either of body or mind.
The diplomats we had always with us, and they make one of the traditionally brilliant circles ofCourt life; but I found, of all men in modern Courts, the diplomats the most absurd. If the kings have had their powers curtailed, the Court diplomats have lost theirs altogether. They are a useless survival of the days when the relations between nations depended on the feelings between Sovereigns, and the diplomats intrigued and flattered to some purpose, by smoothing over misunderstandings or exasperating offence. Nowadays, a Court diplomat has no power except to deliver the message of his home Government. He is not entrusted with secrets, any more than an errand-boy. And he is usually stupid. If a family of position has a son who is not quite bright, they say, “Put him in the diplomatic service.” He goes to a foreign Court and devotes himself to attending royal funerals and christenings and weddings and church services and Court functions, as the “representative” of his Government—and, if he is a Russian or a Southerner, he spends the rest of his time flattering the ladies whose husbands have Government authority, in an attempt to obtain information from them which their husbands have let fall.
Like the public warning, “Beware of Pickpockets,” in places of public resort, the drawing-rooms ofCourt society should put up the sign, “Beware of Diplomats.” The English representatives and the Scandinavians are not so fond of intrigue, but too many of the others are the official eavesdroppers and detectives of their Governments, and it is chiefly simple women who are their victims—women who can be blinded by pretended admiration and led into confidences that are indiscreet. It is not an occupation for a clever man, and few clever men remain in it long. The majority of those whom I have known were total idiots who would swallow absurdly wrong information without blinking and convey it eagerly to their home Governments without suspicion. I have tried it, to find out. And I found the typical conversation of diplomats all in one key of vanity: an assurance that when they were at one Court the king showed them “special favours,” and when they were at another Court, the same. It is a conversation that would weary a mistress of the Robes. It can not add much intellectual stimulus to the life of royalty. I could never see that it added any to mine.
Nevertheless, whether with diplomats or what not, these days moved along for us very brightly. Weyoung and active. My brother and his wife were idyllically happy in their married life; and their happiness was reflected in all around them. He was working with the prospect of greater success to come with greater experience, living simply, taking healthful exercise, using tact and patience, and keeping a cheerful hope. Then, in the sixth month of his marriage, the heart was cut out of it all by the death of his young Queen after a miscarriage that resulted in blood-poisoning from some bungling of the doctors. They treated her for typhoid fever and blundered about for weeks, till a putrefaction had set in that no treatment could retard.
She was buried in the Escurial, and my brother would not leave the palace. Every day he would shut himself up, for hours, in the crypt where her tomb was; and when we tried to coax him away he would not speak to us. It was midsummer and the heat was extreme, but he would not leave her body to go to La Granja. He would not do anything but grieve, in a silence that worried us more than the wildest outburst, neglecting himself and his duties, taking no exercise, sunken in a mood of passionate despair that seemed to have put him beyond ourreach. He did not sleep. We coaxed him to come out for a little fresh air in the early mornings about five o’clock, and again in the evenings after sunset, but it was months before I succeeded in getting him to ride on horseback. The Spaniards do not understand a grief that is silent. He did not care. He seemed to have lost interest in life entirely; and, as the months passed, we were afraid that his health would be destroyed.
We knew that he was tubercular. It was hereditary in our family, and my own lungs were affected; but royalty is not allowed to be ill, and we had to struggle with the situation privately, in a way to keep the knowledge of it from spreading beyond the inner circle of officialdom. My sister Pilar, who was always delicate, had developed symptoms of what was supposed to be some sort of skin disease, and the doctors ordered her to a resort in the mountains, to take the baths. Soon after our arrival there she became unconscious, and died, two days later, of meningitis. For all this I now blame the state of medical practice in Spain. In a country where education is wholly in the hands of the religious orders, and the hospitals in the hands of thenuns, there will be neither a good supply of medical students nor opportunities for them to perfect their studies under conditions that are good. We had to pay the penalty with the rest of Spain.
My brother never really recovered from this blighting of his life. He took up his work again, at first listlessly and then as an escape from himself; but the young and happy part of him was gone with his young wife, and he had nothing left but the care and activities of his position. He was only twenty years of age, though he seemed older. Since there was no heir to the throne, the Government began immediately to talk of arranging another marriage for him. He said he did not care, so long as he was not bothered about it, and negotiations were at once begun. It was a sad life for a charming man. He would have been much happier if he had never been a king.
Meanwhile, he returned to us for companionship, and I began to hear a great deal from him of his work and his plans. He had come to recognise that the day of the warrior king was over, and he was occupied with attempts to promote the industrial development of the country. He never wore a uniform except when he attended the army manœuvres or took part in some such military display, and he laughed at the kings who went about as soldiers, always on parade. He saw to the founding of arsenals for the manufacture of munitions of war, and he struggled to correct the dishonesty in the expenditure of appropriations for the army and the navy, but he was not in love with the show of military pomp.
He tried to persuade the grandees’ sons to enter the army as officers—on the theory, as he said, that “occupation is the salvation of a man”—but without success. The aristocracy of Spain is landed, but too indolent even to oversee the administration of their estates; and they called the Duc de Montpensier, contemptuously, “the orange-man,” because he directed the exporting of his orange crop to England, instead of letting it rot on the ground. Like so many aristocracies, they would do anything for money except work for it. They were content to take wealth and honour from the nation without making any return. In common with the Court diplomats, they had almost lost their reason for being.
All the mines and many of the large manufacturing industries of Spain are in the hands of foreigners, because the natives have no training for such occupations. They have a hatred of foreigners that prevents them from learning, and the King was always arguing against this hatred and trying to devise means of overcoming it. He set the example himself of going frequently abroad to study the improvements in foreign countries—getting the sanction of the Parliaments for his journeys by the simple expedient of letting them know, good-humoredly, that if they did not give it he would go without it—and he came back with ideas which he tried to apply. Spain was sadly lacking in railroads, and he had maps and plans drawn up for building them, and worked to finance them, but I do not recall with what success.
The great enemy of all such public works is the official dishonesty in Spain, and with this my brother was always at war. I am told that the corruption was not as bad during his reign as it was before. He fought it particularly among the Customs officials and tax-gatherers, and such collectors of the Government income, and he made himself much feared among them. He worried about the excessive criminality in Spain, interviewed judges, and tried to find out and ameliorate the conditions that produced the crime. His influence was potent, because Spain will accept a great deal from a Sovereign. I used to tell him that it was lucky he looked like a Spaniard, for he had not the brain of one; and if he had had my colouring, his ideas would have aroused antagonisms that would have defeated him at every turn. He was, as I have said, supremely tactful, and he had a patience that was incredible to me. He had not my habit of saying what is in one’s mind, inopportunely. He could wait, and speak in better time.
The arrangements for his second marriage he had left wholly in the hands of my sister Isabel and her advisers, who were, of course, Clerical. It was considered impossible for the King of Spain to marry a Protestant princess; and, of the Catholic Royal families, the Italian princesses were eliminated from the choice because of the quarrel between the Italian Court and the Vatican. Negotiations were opened, therefore, with the Court of Vienna, and a marriage was arranged between my brother and the Austrian Archduchess Maria Cristina. It was celebratedabout a year after the death of his first wife. He had two daughters by this marriage—both of whom have since died in childbirth—and a posthumous son, the present King, born six months after my brother’s death.
He died in November, 1885, but it was not until the previous month, October, that we had any idea he was seriously ill. It seemed impossible that a man so active could be unwell. He had an energy both in work and recreation that wore out everybody else. He lived with the most healthful simplicity, from habit, eating in moderation, drinking no wine, enjoying exercise without weariness, and taking cold baths that one would not have thought a consumptive could endure. He showed no signs of fever that I knew of. The doctors, if they had noticed any alarming symptoms, did not speak of them to us; and we were only vaguely aware that he had to be careful of himself. But in October he complained of weakness, and the physicians suddenly told us that his lungs were very bad. Even so, the matter had to be kept secret—for fear of unnecessarily disturbing the business of the State. We went to the Pardo to give him rest and treatment. And before
Courtesy of Collier’sAlfonso XIII of Spain
Courtesy of Collier’sAlfonso XIII of Spain
Courtesy of Collier’s
Alfonso XIII of Spain
we had really accepted the thought that he was an invalid, he was taken with a hæmorrhage of the lungs, cried out that he was choking, and died almost with the words.
He was buried in the Escurial—where we had laughed together at the tombs of the Infantas—among all the kings, who had become now only the names of kings—no longer brothers, husbands, fathers—just dead kings—as he had become.
His death was, I think, a great loss to the country, for the King of Spain has much power under the Constitution, if he has the ability to handle the instruments of his authority in a way to have his orders carried out. And my brother had that suavity of will that wins its way almost affectionately and puts stubbornness firmly aside when it can not be won. Such a king, placed above the temptations of wealth, could protect the poor from an industrial oppression from which they are too often unable to protect themselves. And being of a liberal mind in his religion, he could prevent the religious orders in Spain from using their pulpit and sacred office for political ends.
His death seemed like the end of my own life to me. I had no longer any interest or happiness inSpain. I had no friends there, except the Duc de Montpensier and our little family. I found myself always a foreigner when I went outside the palace. I could not understand the popular religion, which is not Catholicism as it is known in other countries, but only the outward form and name of Catholicism filled with superstitions and fetishisms divorced from the moral purposes of religion.
They have, for example, in Madrid, a popular feast called “La Cara de Dios” (“The Face of God”), when there is exposed under glass, to be kissed by the people, the handkerchief with which Christ is supposed to have wiped the bloody sweat from His face on His way to Calvary, and thereby to have imprinted on the fabric a portrait of His features, which has been miraculously preserved. In front of the church where this relic is set out, booths are erected and an all-night debauch of drinking and dancing and brawling is begun. Between carouses the people go to kiss “the Face of God,” return to their excesses, and only interrupt them to make another pilgrimage to the relic. It seemed to me that the whole religion of the common people was a sort of feast of “La Cara de Dios,” that profited nobodybut the keepers of the shrine. I could not turn to such a religion for consolation in my grief. I could not look forward to any happiness in a Court where only my love for my brother had made the stupidities of our days endurable. I wanted to get away.
But I could not get away unmarried. That was impossible. I was still engaged informally to the Duc de Montpensier’s son, Antoine d’Orléans; but now that my brother was gone I wished to break the engagement, because I had only entered into it with the idea that such a marriage would keep me near to him. My determination aroused an amazing alarm. Members of the Government came to plead with me to hold the Duc’s interest to the throne by marrying his son; if I refused, they were afraid that he would enter politics again, to the extent even of making another revolution. That was absurd. But it was not absurd that I was as fond of the Duc as if he had been my father, and he wanted me for a daughter-in-law. It was considered a necessity of State that I should marry at once in order to protect the succession. I felt as my brother had felt after the death of his first wife. I did not care.
In December, 1885, just a month after his death,the date of my wedding was fixed, by Royal decree, for the following February. I remember that soon afterwards I received a visit from a girl friend of my own age who had come to say good-bye to me because she was entering a convent; and I thought, as I spoke to her, how much happier she was than I. I felt very sad, very depressed. I declared that I would only be married in mourning. They cried out against it, that it would bring me bad luck. What worse luck was left for me, I asked, except to die?—and I should not mind that. They yielded to me; February 26th was set for my wedding-day; but in the middle of the month I was taken ill of a fever that proved to be diphtheria, and on the 26th I had been for several days at the point of death; so I had a reprieve. It was a brief one. On March 5th, I was well enough to be taken into the big sitting-room in the evening, to sign the marriage contract before the necessary witnesses; and on the following day, still very weak, I was married in the Royal Chapel, with all the company dressed in deep mourning, and the church draped in black as for a funeral. I went away on our honeymoon, miserable, to the palace of Aranjuez; and, for once, I welcomedthe Court etiquette that required us to be accompanied by a lady and a gentleman-in-waiting, since their presence saved me from atête-à-têtewith my husband, for which neither of us had any inclination.
One reads a great deal, in histories, of the immoralities of kings. What is one to expect of a man married in aversion to some foreign princess whom he is forced to take into his life for reasons of State that do not make her either beautiful to look at, or intelligent to talk to, or congenial to live with? If people will not allow a king to enjoy even the ordinary temptations to be virtuous, why should they exclaim if he seeks, outside of marriage, the happinesses of personal intercourse that are denied him in a wife? The fault is not in the kings. It is in the conditions that have required kings to be more than human beings and content with less than human beings. With the unfortunate queens it is different; they are raised in a guarded confinement of etiquette from which they can not easily escape; and they usually turn to religion and the hope of a happier world to console them for the stupid cares and gilded miseries that afflict them in this.
I was not religious, but fortunately I was not aqueen, and when we returned to Madrid I began to assert my freedom as a married woman by getting clear of the formalities of Royalty. We did not return to the palace, but took a small house, with a garden; and there I felt less depressed, being occupied with domestic arrangements that were as strange and exciting to me as Robinson Crusoe’s housekeeping—although much of it was in the hands of thegrand maître, of course. I found that I had not the traditional Bourbon inaptitude for practical affairs, nor my mother’s inability to understand the value of money.
I was told a story of her that amused me very much. Once, to reward some service, she ordered one of her Ministers to pay a vast sum of money. “But, your Majesty,” he protested, “it is a great deal.” “Not at all,” she said. “See that it is paid.” So the Minister secretly sent out instructions that the sum should be brought to him in coin, and he stacked it on the Queen’s writing-table in piles. She asked, “What is all this money for?” “That,” he said, “is the money that your Majesty has ordered me to pay to So-and-so.” She cried, “Good heavens! Not all that. You are givinghim a fortune. Here; this is enough.” And she took one of the piles and gave it to the Minister, and the rest was sent back.
As soon as we were settled I got rid of the constant company of the lady-in-waiting; I did not have her to live in the house; and this created a sensation. I was the first Princess of Spain who had ever demanded such liberty. I did not mind. I had the solitude of my little garden to myself, and I could walk and read there in a happiness that all the princesses would have envied if they could have known how pleasant it was. Some of my other attempts at informality were not so successful. One afternoon, while out walking with my husband without either carriage or escort, I felt so ill that I could not walk back. There was no vehicle to be had but a passing tramway-car, so we got into that. We were recognised. All the passengers rose and stared and became so excited that the driver—not knowing what accident had happened—stopped the car. It was some time before we could make our explanations, get the people seated, and get the car to go on; and the ride home was too uncomfortable to be even amusing. I was indignantly scolded for havingbeen taken ill in such circumstances; and I never tried again to ride in a tramway-car in Madrid. Silly nonsense!
We were still attending Court functions and receptions, and going to dinners and luncheons at the palace; and on May 17th we were summoned there to hear the official announcement of the “Capitan-General” that “the King of Spain” had been born. It was at first intended to name him Ferdinand, to avoid the unlucky XIII., but for the sake of his father’s memory the name of Alfonso was demanded, and he was inscribed as “Alfonso XIII., Leon Fernando Mario Isidro Santiago Pascual y Anton.” (My mother complained that the names were too few. She had been accustomed to give us at least a dozen each!) A month later the Queen-Regent presented the King in the chapel, and then offered him to the Blessed Virgin, in an extraordinary ceremony at the church of Atoche, with Te Deums and Salves, and a Royal parade.
It was now almost midsummer, and I was resolved to get away. I had hoped to return to Paris, but the Duc de Montpensier brought us word that the Orleans family might be expelled from France, inwhich case we should go to Switzerland for our summer. I was sorry for more than selfish reasons, for I had had visits from my new relatives, and found them charming. Late in June the good news came that, though the Comte de Paris had been expelled and his property confiscated, the Government would go no farther; and early in July my husband and I started with the Duc and my mother-in-law to go through Paris on our way to join the Comte and Comtesse de Paris in Tunbridge Wells.
I was leaving behind me many happy days, but many also that were so unendurably sad that I was eager to be gone from the scenes that recalled them to me. I was no longer a prisoner of State. I was still, if you wish, “a ticket-of-leave man.” But no convict, released on good behaviour, ever went out with more relief, even though he was still to be subject to some State surveillance, and perhaps never to be wholly free of the instinctive timidities of the mind that has been guarded.
Therenow began for me an interesting experience. I had started out to travel and see the sights of Europe, a bride of twenty-two, with a mind in some ways older than my age, as inquisitive as youth, but, perhaps, not so subject to youth’s self-deception; as interested as youth in my own observations (rather than in any general view or philosophical explanation of society), but sceptical, and with no youthful tendency to illusions either romantic or royal. The European travels of such a young lady could not have much interest, ordinarily. But, for ten years and more, I went from Court to Court, rather than from country to country, in that huge family of Royalty whose members have been intermarrying for so many generations that all the occupants of the thrones of Europe have become cousins, and a princess can visit from palace to palace as if from house to house among relatives in a countryside. And it was an interesting experience, I say, because Royalty is notof semi-sacred caste that in one country will be accepted as quite holy and God-given, and in another will be merely allowed to live pensioned—like vergers in some fine old cathedral after its worship has been abolished and its altars removed—and in yet others will be existing in all the intermediate stages between these two extremes; honoured by this faction and attacked by that, reformed and reconstructed and embellished and defaced.
It was interesting, as it had been in Spain, to discover the anomalies and false appearances and thin lava-crusts on which we seemed to live so securely. Being well aware of how I saw myself in my own mind, it was interesting to study what was in the minds of other royal personages—to see how they regarded themselves and how they thought they were regarded—and to learn what real credit we had and what actual appearance we made in the minds of the people who saluted us with such varying degrees of curiosity and respect.
In Paris, where we went first, Royalty has no problems. Being for ever dispossessed of its claims in France, it is accepted there without awe and without enmity. It flees to Paris from the dulness ofits official life in every monarchy of Europe; and at times it seems that more royalties are there than in all the other capitals of the Continent together. Paris has become a holiday rendezvous for them; and it needs them as little as it does its tourists. They can meet and dine and gossip, unobserved even by the Press. They can find circles of aristocracy in which they will be received as formally as they would be in their Courts. Or they may enjoy, if they can, on terms of some human naturalness, the life of salons and studios. And if they desire the crowded solitude of the streets, they will rarely find any one to stare. Paris is freedom, even for princesses. It was, for me, on that first return, an old home of childhood that I was revisiting; and I went to the convent to see the nuns who had taught me, and hunted up some of my playmates to recall myself to them after the nine years that seemed a lifetime that had passed. Then, in a week, we set out for England; and there we were Royalty again.
It was then I first saw Queen Victoria, and I shall not easily describe what a surprise it was. She had been for a long time the great Queen in my thoughts, on the throne of an empire beyond imagination in
Dowager Queen Alexandra of England, Queen Maud of Norway and Prince Olaf, Crown Prince of Norway
Dowager Queen Alexandra of England, Queen Maud of Norway and Prince Olaf, Crown Prince of Norway
Dowager Queen Alexandra of England, Queen Maud of Norway and Prince Olaf, Crown Prince of Norway
wealth and power, and ruling so many millions of the most civilised people devoted in their loyalty. I had formed a mental picture of I do not know what majesty and grandeur for her. We came to her from the City of London (so impressive after Paris) to have luncheon with her in Windsor Castle, that is so noble a seat of sovereignty; and when I entered the room in which she waited to receive us, I had a shock of pity and dismay. She was so small that I thought at first she must be sitting down. And she was not only feeble with age, but evidently ill, her eyes dulled, her hands swollen, her face as if feverish. Her merely human aspect of infirmity was increased by the black dress of mourning and widow’s cap that she wore; and standing with her two Indian servants behind her, leaning on her short cane, in that magnificent apartment that would have dwarfed a giant, holding out a tired hand to you vaguely as if she did not clearly see you—it brought a lump to the throat. Here was Royalty then! The greatest and most famous of us all! Queen Victoria!
My father-in-law and she had known each other many years, and at the luncheon table he sat beside her and kept up a conversation with her. She saidvery little, and with her eyes most often on her plate, like a person who is polite, but distracted by illness, and incapable of rousing the mind. The English Royal Family has the sensible habit of dining without the ladies-in-waiting, who take their meals in another room; so we wereen famille; and the conversation was that of intimate domestic interests and the little social happenings of the day. One could hardly find a family more charming, more serene, more simply happy.
And the explanation of this air of the English Court is easily found. England is a country of accepted classes, of which each class makes no infringement on the rights of the class above it and fears none from the class below. There are even upper and lower servants in a household. And each class receives servility from the class below it to reimburse it for the servility that it pays to the class above. Royalty is just a final upper class, neither envied by an aristocracy which cannot aspire to it, nor feared by the lower classes over which it has no authority. It is a social ornament of government, a symbol of national majesty.
The aristocracy is almost equally ornamental, withcertain appearances of power that are allowed it by the sufferance of the rest. The real government is the commerce and industry of the nation. It is a commercial empire, ruled by considerations of trade, but disguising itself, even to itself, by forms of administration that are aristocratic, with an established church in a nation largely nonconformist, a military power that in the main engages in wars for the extension or protection of commercial interests, and an ideal of empire for humanitarian ends—at the same time making it pay. You will always hear, for example, of the devoted self-sacrifice of the British rule in India, which carries the peaceful blessings of civilisation to natives incapable of self-government; but if India were being held at a continual loss to the British tax-payer—if he had to pay out of his own purse, without return, to protect the natives from their own incapacity—I wonder whether the British Empire in India would last a year. It is this faculty of almost honest self-deception which makes the Englishman so insoluble a puzzle to the foreigner.
It makes the English Royal Family the most popularly revered in Europe, even though it has, of all the royal families, the least governmental power tocompel awe, and has no English blood in it to endear it to the nation, and is allowed not even a pretence of leadership in peace or war to make it picturesque. When I attended Queen Victoria’s jubilee, about a year after my first meeting with her, it seemed as if the whole nation had poured itself into the streets of London to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of her succession to the throne. And if one were sceptical, it might be said that they were only to come to enjoy the spectacle and to rejoice in the display of their own national magnificence. But the celebration had all the evidences of a personal tribute, and it was undoubtedly so accepted by the Queen and her family.
King Edward, who was a man of the world not easily deceived, always seemed to have this conviction of his importance in the eyes of his people. I do not know to what extent he interested himself privately in the problems of their government, from which the Royal Family is so jealously excluded; certainly, in years of familiar acquaintance with him, I never once heard him refer to them. Yet he was a man whose intellect would have been of value to his country, for he was one of the cleverest sovereigns of Europe, a striking personality, genial and shrewd.It seemed a pity that such a brain should be wasted in the idleness of royal life after it had succeeded in developing itself in spite of the restrictions that make most royal brains so dull.
Coming first to England from the animations of the South, I thought the people looked as stupefied as if they were all just recovering from a fit; and I felt the same general blank of reserved dulness among the aristocratic and official circles that surrounded the Court. It seemed a country that was not ruled by intelligence but by property. Property is a blind master, and great masses of the people were already rotted out by a poverty and industrial oppression from which any governing intelligence would have protected them. It took the fiasco of the Boer War, and the strikes and internal disorders of the last few years, to awaken the nation from its stupor of imperial complacency. Since that time there has been a great appearance of revolt and reform; and I have been interested to hear the foreign speculation on the probable fate of the throne in the final issue of the upheaval. I should like to know what power the British throne still has of which the country could deprive it, or what liberty the people could acquireby its abolition! They would gain as little as if, by a popular uprising, the citizens of London killed the lions in their Zoo. There may have been a time when lions were dangerous in England, but the sight of them in their cages now can only give a pleasurable holiday-shudder of awe—of which, I think, the nation will not willingly deprive itself.
There was then beginning the great industrial and commercial rivalry between England and Germany that before war came led to so much talk of it; and this rivalry was paralleled by an antipathy between the Kaiser and King Edward that was as frank as the enmity between the nations. Neither sovereign made any disguise of it even when they were together, and I always felt that it did them both good—for a strong hostility is often as potent as a strong affection to make character.
But let me leave the sovereigns for a moment and turn to the people. The English impressed and baffled me in many ways. To the foreigner of Latin blood and temperament, the English character indeed presents an almost insoluble enigma. Often just when we feel that we are really beginning to understand it, we are faced with some contradictory traitthat completely baffles us. Certainly when we saw the country, apparently seething with internal dissensions, lay aside its family quarrels and present a united front to the enemy, we realised more than ever what a complex thing the English mentality is.
I must confess I thought that it would be hard for England to rise to any great national emergency, not so much because things seemed to have reached the breaking point in Ireland or because her colonies seemed bound to her more by self-interest than by real loyalty, but on account of the devastating habits of ease and luxury that had spread like a disease among her aristocracy. But now we know that these corrupting influences had not vitally affected the upper classes. Unlike the extravagances of ancient Rome that had eaten to the heart of the nation’s energies, England’s hurt was only skin-deep.
We can have no doubt of this when we see great ladies facing unfamiliar hardships and risks at the battle front, others dismantling their huge country houses and transforming them into hospitals and others freely giving their whole time and activities to the great relief organisations for the war’s sufferers.The English aristocracy’s ingrained sense of responsibility to the nation remains untouched by all its latterly acquired taste for luxury and over-indulgence in sports.
I say “latterly acquired,” because it is undoubtedly true that this love of extravagance has grown enormously during the last decade or so. From the pomp and lavishness displayed nowadays in certain smart establishments, I should never realise that I was in the same circle whose courtesy and simplicity used to delight me so in the England I learned to love years ago.
It was, as I have said, as a young married woman that I had my first experience of English life. The Comte and Comtesse de Paris, my husband’s relatives, had been exiled from France and had been living for some time in Tunbridge Wells. I spent many months with them there, and, through their large circle of friends, I became acquainted with all sorts and conditions of people, and soon found myself accepting the hospitality of these newly-made friends. When I made it clear to my host and hostess that I desired them to forget that I was an Infanta and to be treated as an ordinary individual,etiquette was banished, and I was able to do as I liked.
Life in the country houses always pleased me best. In those days it was the custom for the family and guests to breakfast together, and I loved the informality of it all undisturbed by the ministrations of liveried lackeys. Often, when there were children in the house, they were allowed to come to the table too, and we all had very jolly times over the porridge.
We often went bicycling for the whole day, carrying our lunches with us and eating them in some pleasant grove by the wayside. Sometimes we went on coaching expeditions and lunched in some old thatch-covered inn. When my children were little, I seldom missed passing some time in England each summer, so that they too could enjoy the freedom of the open-air life.
It did not take me long to appreciate the charm of the English home and country, which are vastly different from anything abroad. In Spain, people never live all the year round in the country if they can possibly avoid it, and they seldom visit their estates unless they wish practically to retire from the world. On the rare occasions when they do snatchthemselves from the conventional round of gaieties in the cities or the big watering places, they shut themselves up in their big, bare castles, receiving no one and seldom venturing outside their own properties. It is almost a time of penance.
They are simply incapable of understanding the English love of life in the open air, with its many exhilarating and ingenious pastimes which appeal so strongly to me. More than that, they are inclined to look upon such taste as rather ill-bred. For instance, only the humblest Spaniard would dream of eating his cold lunch by the roadside, and I am sure that the true aristocrat would never appreciate the charm of seeking out some picturesque spot and having tea from a tea-basket. No Spanish lady of quality would even allow herself to walk hatless in her own garden, and reclining in a hammock or on the grass would be ruthlessly banned by her traditions and upbringing.
One summer day Queen Cristina came to me with a look of sheer consternation on her face.
“Eulalia,” she said, “I have just seen an appalling sight: an Englishwoman lying on the grass in the park.”
The culprit was a lady-in-waiting, who had been brought to Spain by an English princess visiting the Court. I had some difficulty in convincing the Queen that such an action would not be considered such a shocking breach of etiquette in England as she imagined.
In France, country life in the Smart Set is more animated than in Spain, but it still lacks the spontaneity and freedom of the English out-of-doors. The châteaux are occasionally thrown open to visitors, but the guests are content to undergo the same routine as in Paris—the only difference being that it is adapted to another setting. Of course, there are hunting meets, and, of late years, garden parties, but much of the entertaining takes place indoors—dinner-parties, theatrical performances, afternoon receptions, etc. The French have not yet learned how really to live in the country, to relax and to change their entire mode of thought and activities.
There is hardly a county in England that I am not familiar with. I have spent many weeks in Cornwall, Devon and Yorkshire, and have returned again and again to Brighton, Tunbridge Wells and Richmond. Curiously enough, during one visit toRichmond I received a message from the Duchess of Teck that her daughter, then Princess of Wales, had just given birth to her first boy. I went at once to White Lodge to offer my congratulations, and I fancy that I was the first, outside the immediate family, to hold the future Prince of Wales in my arms.
What to me is convincing proof of the change in latter years from simplicity to lavish display is the difference in the way of living I have remarked amongst many of my friends. Each time I have visited England recently I have been struck with this.
One thing that used to delight me so was the informality of the English tea. It was invariably servedsans cérémoniein the drawing-room. After the servants had brought it in they retired and left us to our own devices. Neighbours frequently dropped in without warning, and often, as we gathered round a big blazing fire and ate those wonderful home-made delicacies unknown to Continentals, there was a charming feeling of expansiveness and intimacy that we never had at other times of the day.
Of late years I have noticed that the custom has