THE KING'S GUESTS.

Press, Volume LIX, Issue 11347, 9 August 1902, Page 14

THE KING'S GUESTS.

ARRIVAL OF THE ROYALTIES IN LONDON. UTBO— OTJB BPSC-AI. -OMUSSPOND—- -.) LONDON, June 27. The general ncene of the arrival of foreign royalties last Monday in order to be present at the Coronation ceremonies is thus picturesquely described by "One who was there." | ""What the rush of Royalties at Victoria station must have meant in the way j of organisation to the officers of the Royal Household only they can know. And tbe Royal horses must be tired this evening, for they can hardly have had so much work to do before. As the first Royal special of the day arrived, the Prince of Wales was there, ready to go into the saloon to greet the Crown Prince of Denmark, with whom travelled Prince Waldemar. The Crown Prince, looking younger than his 59 years, has got the Order of the Garter and the Oxford degree of D.C.L. for his English honours. He is General of the Danish Army, and has a Russian Dragoon and a Prussian Hussar, Regiment. Prince Waldemar, his brother, is 44, and has taken the naval side, being commodore of the Danish fleet. But they came in mufti, and the whole day's proceedings rather lacked the interest of strange uniforms. By the same train came the Grand Duke of Hesse, a rather short man of 34. He is. of course, a grandson of the late Queen Victoria. He is one of the Kaiser's generals, being attached to the Ist Foot Guards of Prussia, besides many cavalry regiments, and he has the Garter among his Orders. "The Prince of Wales had a brief interval, then, before he was back on the platform, this time on the Brighton railway side of Victoria, to meet Prince Henry of Prussia and the Crown Prince of Portugal, who came up together from Portsmouth, arriving at 1.30. Prince Henry, the Kaiser's brother and the hero of the recent visit to America, is tall, sunburned, and handsome, with his great brown beard. He stepped into has carriage to a quite human touch on the arm from the Prince of Wales, who had returned from greeting the Crown Prince of Portugal. The latter, who is only fifteen, has been distinguishing himself lately in his own land by rebelling against the perpetual presentations of dull addresses in his first State journeys. Prince Henry of Prussia .drove to Whnborne Arlington street, and the Crown Prince to a house in Grosvenor Gardens, where tlie crowd was afterwards hugely interested in the sentry-box and the Guardsman suddenly planted down on the footway. It even drew off some of the waiting people round Victoria, a crowd who were glad enough to get a rest from decorations and increased bue-fares, and cheered tentatively, knowing nothing of what it was cheering beyond what the Royal liveries driving in and out told them.

"Tho Prince of Wales changed his grey frock coat for a black one before he reappeared on the S.E.C.R. side of Victoria to meet the next spatial. Really his appearance began to be a kind of conjuring trick, but as it turned out this -was the last one for tho day. While he was still in the Royal -waiting-room a little comipany gathered, talking French with the occasional soft gutturals of Russian, on the red carpeted enclosure before the palms and flowers about the door of the room, to meet, the Tsar's brother and heir, the Hereditary Grand Duke ilichael. There were Baron de Staal, the Russian Ambassador, and Mme. de Staal, Princess Demidoff, a beautiful tittle lady, and a different Grand Duke Micbale, the ona who is married to the Countess Torby, and is often in England with her. But.still no uniforms, for all these arrivals seemed to be more or less informal, with no guards of honour, and only frock-coats and top-hats —certainly very immaculate one*. About 3.50 the train came in, and the Hereditary Grand Duke appeared—a tall young man, with a little moustache, his hair brushed back from his forehead, and a half-oon-cealed bewilderment in his eye as he shook hands among the bare-headed group. A grim little officer, in a black uniform with silver facings and many Orders, gave a really Russian look _> the scene, with his round black Astrakan. cap. "After an hour a whole batch of Royalties was due. The red carpet labels, with Royal and Imperial and Serene names on them, looked rather comical, but they were useful enough to the little groups who had come to receive their various representatives. The top-hats this time covered in one group smiling Siamese faces, all lookI ing exactly the same age, and the station authorities in a supreme effort bad hung j among the flags above them a piece of red bunting with the white elephant of Siam painted on it. The arrival of the train made a surging sea of the platform as the Royalties and their suites got put. for no fewer than six envoys had come together. In the first saloon was the Prince of Asturias, representing Spain. His marriage, in 1901, with the Princess of the Asturias, the young King's sister, will be remembered as having caused a great deal of comment and some difficulty in Madrid. Next to him travelled the Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria., the nephew of the Austrian Emperor, a man of nearly forty. Then came the Crown Prince of Sweden and Norway, a tall, thin man, with a short, dark beard. In the next saloon was the Crown Prince of Siam, well enough known in England, and round the next carriage a voluble company surrounded Vice-Admiral Gervais, the envoy of France elderly and grey, and somewhere roust have been M. Grozier, Director of the ProtocoJ The representatives of the Pops were standing patiently by the next saloon, Monsignor Merry del Val showing his violet skull cap oddly from under the back of his tophat, and wearing a big golden cross on his breast. He is a youngish man, but* one of his company was a very venerable eld priest, with a worn, tired face. "The Duke of Connaught drove up just in tune to meet the Archduke, and all these arrivals had moved away when suddenly there appeared the most remarkable trroun of the day, with (broad grey slouch hats, a turban or two, and voluminous, rather tmtidy wraps of a coarse white calico, and the darkest of dark faces. So to a . the trim frock-coa _ came the envoys of Kinz .Menelik of Abyssinia, with a dignity quit! beyond the extraordinary primitiveness of it all. A grey old man bore a silver sceptre behind the great Ras Meritonen, who led the way in a black robe. Their arrival had been uncertain, and in the Rova! -wait-mg-room *s they passed on one" heard a worried official say. They must be got off somehow; here's .the second tram.' In a moment the platform again surged with If? _rl° r th f J™ ei « ht Princes came. Duke Albert of led this train and next to turn, was Prince Albert of Bel- _ _"* P*? I*™1 *™ «* &*Z Leopold, a most elaborate with curly hair. Prince Leopold~-o-U;p___ia and the Prince ci < _- C _?£*?fc ether » iie rei * saloon, and tw__B__£me was the -fest strange dress of the feeain, worn by the Persians. Red fes__} further down showed where Prince Moltaxaed Ali, Egypt's representative, and brother of the Khedive, was alighting and Rri»ce Philip of Cc'burp and Prince Danilo c. Mortsuegro had already hurried off. "Royal footmen came and went, and were pomt-i to the labels on ih-e cd..; t »f t"h> platform, and threaded their scarfet in and cut of the crowd. And somehow everyone i was got away. But, all the time, there in | the Royal -waiting-room, were patiently sitting on the deep leather-covered lounges the Abyssinian envoys. Ras Merkonen, 'Menelik's Commander-in-Chief, who beat ! the Italians at Adowa, sat rather grim in Jos vaMeoee, on* thought, He locks quite

young yet, with Ms black, curly bair and beard. The grey old man had wrapped his sceptre up in his white garment, and leaned bis elbow. on his .knees. Now and -then on© of them would look up at the marble and gilding of the room, but they looked as if they knew they had to whit. _ti__ge names they have, which pne_ o* | them, young and bright, in a flannel shirt, an old blue serge suit, and a battered straw hat, —rote down for n»e in quite good English characters. At last the hard work was over, and at Victoria alone eighteen princes and foreign envoys, with suites that one certainly could not count in the rush, had been added to London's Coronation visitors. More had been coming to Charing Cross. Quite early Baron Tictema de Grove-tins, Maitre de la Cour to Queen Wilhelmina, had come to represent Holland. "It was not until tho afternoon that the sight of the scarlet liveries on half a dozen Royal carriages driving into Charing Cross station drew <juite a little crowd out of the streets, where it would hardly _c missed, into the station, where there was already crowd enough in the ordinary way of passengers and loiterers.- Inside the gates an army of railway porters made a fearful dust with brooms, and laid down a crimson carpet. When a special train came in, twenty minutes later^—that is, at four o'clock —the dust had settled dow_ again, and the crimson carpet was prettily checkered with footprints, which were those, amongst others, of the Greek Archimandrite and his assistant (in their robes and quaint inverted silk hats, with the brim where the crown ordinarily is), the Greek Minister, the Danish Minister, and a knot of Consuls and' Secretaries of Legation. From the train descended the Crown Prince of Greece, the Duke of Sparta, the Crown Princess Sophie, Prince George of Greece, and Prince Andrew. Prince Ndcholas, who is four years the junior of the Crown i Prince, and ten years the senior of Prince Andrew, was not of ithe party, as had been expected. Also, from the train descended Admiral Sir Henry Stevenson, X.C.8., who, commencing his duties as chief in attendance upon the Crown Prince, had gone down to Dover to meet them. There was much handshaking—of a rather hurried and 1 bewfldered kind—and the Duke and Duchess of Sparta, with Prince George, drove away in an open carriage, followed by Prince Andrew and tbe suites. The Crown Prince, who is thirty-four, is nejphew to Queen Alexandra, first cousin to the Tsar, and brother-in-law to the Kaiser. He can decorate his breast .with the insignia of many orders —amongst them the Elephant, the Annunciation, the Seraphim, the Black Eagle, and the Cross of St. Andrew. He is Commander-in-Chief of the Greek Army: He is tall, and looks his age. His brother George, only one year his junior, looks younger than he by nearly a decade. He stands \tell over six feet, is broad in proportion, has a countenance of a pleasant Teutonic type, and has the reputation of being—what he looks—a very amiable person. On December 21st, 1898, Prince George became High Commissioner for the Powers in the unhappy island ot Crete, now fallen on happier days. It is probable that the crowd outside the gates hardly knew whom they were welcoming with a British cheer, for one good woman was heard to express surprise at the German Emperor being such a big ma_,' by which she was understood to refer, not to the august positcon of the Kaiser, but to the stature of Prince George, which enables him 'to 'look a very imposing personage even when sitting in a carriage."