QUEEN WILHELMINA.

Evening Star, Issue 11511, 30 March 1901, Page 3

QUEEN WILHELMINA.

According to a correspondent of the Ba)ti« more ‘American,’ Queen Wilhelmina’s husband, is the least handsome of the noted brothers Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Gossip whispers that the Duke was taken by surprise when Wilhelmina singled him out of all the princes at the German Court, and yet it was not the first time that he had been admired by Royal ladies. It is said that the .pretty. Princess Helena of Russia .suddenly broke her engagement with Mas of Baden because she hoped to, persuade her parents to let her many the stout, blonde youpg duckling whom Wilhelmina has selected; and the youngest daughter of the Duke of Edinburgh has loved the Duke in .vain. In short, Heinrich of Mecklenburg-' Schwerin is a good deal of a lady driller, and he knows it. Fat and plain of face and (for a Royal person) distinctly poverty-stricken, he. has a fascination for womankind—the sort ,of fascination that there is no use trying toexplain, because it is not perceptible to any. but the persons fascinated. One of the men' who possessed this faculty to a most surprising degree was .Napoleon Bonaparte’s rival in the affections of Mario Louise, the infamous and all-powerful Ncipperg. Ho was an ugly, pne-oyed creature, with small abilities, and yet smaller fortune, and he had broken , many hearts about tho Austrian Court before Marie Louise saw and fell furiously in love with him. With everything to lose and nothing to gain by her encourage-' ment of the man, she left no stone untamed until she was able to make herself Neipperg’s wife. In the eyes of tho world it was a terrible degradation for the widow of the French Empdror to become the wife of an Austrian count, but she cared not a whit what the world said, as was the case with the woman who ran .after the ugly spendthrift: Wilkes and the mad Due De Richelieu. .Wilkes was famous in bis day all over England, not only as Lord Mayor and Chamberlain and a very loud-talking patriot, hut as the ugliest man of his time, um the most admired by the women. He flouted and ill-treated all of them, with tho exception of his daughter, but it had not the desired effect of cooling their affections. As to the Due De Richelieu, though men could not tolerate him, when he was shut up in the Bastille crowds of women, old and young, rich and poor, used to collect everv day at the hour when he took his exercise on the parapets, and adore him from a distance, and deplore the incarceration of so charming a person.