'SOPHIA-ADELAIDE.'

Bruce Herald, Volume XIX, Issue 1933, 17 February 1888, Page 4

'SOPHIA-ADELAIDE.'

Very recently it was reported that a woman, claiming to b 3 the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, had appeared in New York, Now comes a book of 200 small pages purporting to give a true and sufficiently full account of her life and of the circumstances under which she and the Princess Victoria, wife of the Crown Prince of Germany, were ' mixed up ' as babies by the * Little Buttercup ' who attended the Princess in her infancy. The story in brief is that prior to his marriage with the i outhful Queen of England, Prince Albert had contracted a morganatic connection with a German Countess de Carolatz. Her daughter and the Princess Royal were born about the same time. Under the fear of exposure her morganatic spouse induced the Prince to consent to the changing of the children to gratify the insane ambition of the Countess. The latter's infant was reared as her Royal High ness the Princess Victoria, while the real daughter of the Queen, under the name of Sophia- Adelaide, was knocked about from pillar to post through Europe, North and South America, and the isles of the ocean ; always well cared and provided for, and sometimes visiting or visited by her father, known to her only as ' Uncle Edward.' A devoted Lady Anna Crawley was her friend and governante in all her wanderings. A certain German Count de Lenz took the Countess de Carol itz off Prince Albert's hands by marrying her. She died three months after her confinement, and the Count was murdered some years lator in the forest of St. Germain, on the borders of which ' Sophia-Adelaide ' was then living with the Lady Anna. Her younger brother, George de Lenz, then at Prince Albert's instance, took charge of the young lady, accompanied her in all her wanderings, died of the cholera in the Ohio town of D ,in 1855, but on his death-bed disclosed the secret of her birth to ' Sophia- Adelaide,' furnishing her with a lot of documentary evidences, subsequently lost in a steamboat disaster, and married her in his lasc moments to give her a more assured legal status. She lived for a while with friends in New Orleans ; was asked to return to England by Prince Albert, but fearing immurement in a convent, or being spirited away somewhere as a matter of State policy, she declined, married a Mr M. G. de L j was divorced from him in 1868 ; returned to Europe and lived there in a wandering way sereral years, always in receipt of a liberal but mysterious money allowance through an English bank, until 1876, when it was shut off. J ohn Brown, the Queen's well known factotum, visited her, befriended her, and on the occasion of a severe illness of his Royal mistress brought ' Sophia-Adelaide ' to Windsor Castle, to be at hand in the event of a final termination. Since his death in 1882, she has been 'utterly forsaken.' Witnout enlightening her readers 33 to how she has lived in the meantime, she makes this appeal to the sympathy of the public. In a brief preface she swears on the faith of a Christian that her story is absolutely and literally true. A portrait of the author shows a decided resemblance to Queen Victoria which is helped out by imitating her style of dressing her hair. ' Sophia- Adelaide ' has succeeded in writing a story whose ingenuity and vrai-setnblance are somewhat inferior to its absurdity.