THRONES REGAINED

Evening Star, Issue 22272, 25 February 1936, Page 11

THRONES REGAINED

RETURN Of MONARCHS THREE KINGS-IN-WAITING ENGLISH EXPERIENCES Within a few months of his son’s return to the throne, it is announced, King Constantine of the Hellenes is also to come back to Greece—for reburial in the family tomb at Tatoi (writes E. D. O’Brien, in the ‘Daily Telegraph’). This act of filial piety on the part of King George 11. will complete the restoration of the Greek Royal Family. King George himself, whose renewed reign has started so well, is the fourth Sovereign to gain or regain a throne starting from this country. Great Britain has indeed proved for kings-in-waiting a land of good omen. The precedents for King George 11. ’s return have been provided by Louis XVIII. of France, by Napoleon 111. and by Alfonso XII. of Spain. Louis XVIII., brother of the unhappy Louis XVI., had assumed the title on the death of the Dauphin in the Temple Prison. He had emigrated on the same night as his elder brother’s flight to Varannes, but as he had chosen a better route, and a light vehicle instead of one which resembled “ the Palace of Versailles without the chapel and stables,” ho made good his escape. In 1808 he came to England and settled down finally at Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire. TO SUCCEED NAPOLEON. Life at Hartwell was dull for the exiles. They did their best to enliven it, but according to contemporary popular report got no further than such eccentricities as growing cabbages and keeping chickens on the roof. On April, 1814, the abdication of Napoleon and the pro-Bourbon pertinacity of Wellington, Castlereagh, and the Prince Regent mad© the recall of the Bourbons possible. Louis was fetched from Hartwell, and, accompanied by the Prince Regent, who had gone out to meet him, made a State entry into London. The restored King was scarcely a vivid personality. When he had inaid a visit to the Marquess of Buckingham’ at Stowe in 1808, Sir Henry Williams Winn, who was of the house party, had noted that be was “ a goodnatured, good kind of man, but there . not certainly either in his appearance or manner anything very ‘ attendrisant.’ ” The curves of the “ somewhat porpoise-like figure,” on which the same observer had commented, had abated nothing of their simple grandeur during the intervening seven years. After Louis had invested the Prince Regent with the Saint-Esprit, the Prince Regent, who returned the compliment by himself fastening the Garter round the King’s knee, felt “ exactly as if I were fastening a sash round a young man’s waist.” ILL-FATED ATTEMPTS. To the last the King remained a trifle undignified, for jyheri the prince Re-

gent, who. with his brothers, had accompanied him to Dover, led the cheers of the, crowd on the quay, the King was fast asleep below deck, and the Due de Bourbon had to acknowledge the salute.

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the great Emperor, made three attempts to gain a throne. The first "was slightly ridiculous. In 1840 the Prince, who had been living in Carlton Gardens for two years, set out to test the unpopularity of Louis Philippe’s Government and the strength of the mounting wave of Bonapartism. With a few friends he hired a pleasure steamer and a number of French uniforms, and with an “ army ” of 50, of which the rank and file consisted of his tailor, his chef, and some indoor servants, dressed in French uniforms, he descended on Boulogne.

Boulogne, however, failed to rise, and within a few hours all the conspirators wore captured-. The last member of the little band to be taken was a vulture. This had .been bought from a London bird fancier’s, as a somewhat tactless substitute for a Napoleonic eagle, by a colonel whose Bonapartism was stronger than his ornithology. Louis Napoleon received a sentence of life imprisonment in the Castle of Ham, but" he escaped six years later, and reappeared in London society. It took the revolution of 1848 and two more attempts before the second empire rose above the horizon. To Alfonso XII. belongs the distinction of being the only Sandhurst cadet to regain a throne. Six years after the revolution of 1868 had driven Isabella 11. from the Spanish throne her son, on an invitation from Queen Victoria, was brought to England and sent to Sandhurst. THE DEPOSIT. He entered Sandhurst at the end of 1874, at a time when , his friend, the ill-fated Prince Imperial, was in his last term at Woolwich. E’er the next two months Alfonso lived the life of an ordinary cadet at No. 1, Sandhurst Houses. At the end of term he came to London with his equerry, and engaged rooms at the Charing Cross Hotel. His luggage consisted only of a small handbag, and a suspicious management demanded a deposit of £2 before giving him a room. A major difficulty now confronted Spanish monarchists. In an age of uniforms the new King of Spain possessed only one, and it was felt that the restoration of His Most Catholic Majesty could scarcely be carried out with dignity in the uniform of a Gentleman Cadet of Her Britannic Majesty’s Royal Military College at Sandhurst. SANDHURST RELICS. It is a piece of hitherto unrecorded history that the Marquess Merry del Val, the father of the famous ex-Am-bassador to the Court of St. James, had to ransack the tailors and secondhand outfitters of London for the appropriate uniforms and orders. On King Alfonso’s return Royalist piety led to the placing of part of the Sandhurst uniform in the Royal Armoury in Madrid. There the curious can still see his full-dress cocked hat, the blue cap with V.R. in gold on it, and his cadet’s sword. Of the restored monarchs Louis XVIII. died eight years after his restoration in his native country, and Alfonso XXL died in 1885 at the age of 28. Only Napoleon 111. had to “ go on his travels again ” when his empire crashed in the thunder of the Prussian guns. It was to this country, from which he had set out with such high hopes 22 years before, that he returned a sick and dispirited old man to die in 1873.