ROYAL LADIES IN REVOLT.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CIX, Issue 13066, 4 March 1903, Page 4

ROYAL LADIES IN REVOLT.

(New York Sun.) Tho divorce mill which now grinds for all, cooks as well as Grand Duchesses, has only of late years been doing anything like active business in behalf of mismated royal folk. At present there are five royal European ladies who .oave to tho courts of law their escape from the thrall of matrimony, but gossip says there are others about to join this select colony. The ‘doyenne of the group is the csPrincess of Monaco, better known as Lady Mary Douglas-Hamilton. Twenty years ago she and the present reigning Prince, who had been married by their parents and found the entcqmso a failure, made an appeal to the Pope and secured a divorce from the Roman Curia.

Queen Natalie of Servia, another devout Catholic, was the next royal lady to ask for a divorce from her husband. King Milan. This time the Roman Curia did not come to her relief, but her divorce did not impair her good standing as a church member, and she got it in 1888. Yet a third Catholic Princess, her Royal Highness Louise of Belgium, has secured a divorce from her husband. Prince Philip of Coburg, and thereby has incurred the everlasting disapproval of her conventional if not immaculate old father, the present King of the Belgians. So long as the venerable and highly respected Queen Victoria lived not one of the royal Protestant families of Europe ever so slightly related to her dared hint at divorce as a solution of conjugal troubles. The Queen did not approve of divorce for anybody. She would not receive divorced women at her court and she frankly announced that any in her family would be cut out of her will.

Just as soon, however, as the old Queen died two of her granddaughters immediately secured legal release from the bonds of wedlock. The present King of England has an easy-going desire to see everybody happy, and because bis nieces have found it impossible to get along comfortably with their husbands'he thinks none’the less of them for ••

SEEKING PEACE IN SOLITUDE. The first member of the British royal

family to ask for freedom was the Princess Ariberb of Anhalt* She is the second daughter of Princess Christian of Schleswig-* Holstein, who is King Edward's sister. She was married to Prince Ariberb Joseph of Anhalt in 1891; in 1900 her divorce was granted. Prince Ariberb is the third son of, his father, who is a very small princelings among the miniature States of the German Empire. There is a big family of and not one of them is as well off as that average American merchant, while all of, them °are burdened: with the keeping up of a certain amount of empty state. Princess Ariberb might have* endured the dulness ol country life in an antique German schlossi where economy is practised right down tef the bone, and everybody goes to bed at the unearthly hour of ten o’clock, if it had not been for her mother-in-law.' In this case, the mother-in-law was a lady of the extreme old German school of royal and feminine morals, manners, and deportment, and Princess Aribert, who represents the extreme new school of royal and feminine independence of thought and actionj didn’t hit it off with her elderly relative. Whenever she could, she escaped' to England for long visits among the richer and more liberal-minded members of her own family, and the strained relations between herself and her mother-in-law reached the snapping point after one of these absences. Princess Aribert brought back to tha achloss with her a pair of boxing-glove* and an American punchlng-ba-g, and SET ABOUT GETTING- UP HER MUSCLE. This was a jar too great for the German! ideas of what a woman and a Princess should do, and, as the husband in the case, cravcnly agreed with his mother, that punching the bag was not a decent indulgence for the wife of a German Prince, a family council was called, and the marriage was privately annulled. Of course, the punching-bag did nob figure in the solemn and private legal proceedings, but it was, after all, the real occasion for the divorce, which evidently did not break the heart of the young Princess. She has set up housekeeping in a cosey suite of apartments in Hampton Court Palace, and, as her grandmother left her an adequate little fortune, she dwells in supreme'comfort, keeps one lady companion, a smart carriage, and goes by heß maiden title of Princess Louise of Schles-wig-Holstein. •

She punches the bag at her own eweeU will in a small gymnasium adjoining her bedroom, and has a degree of liberty in', speech and action that can only be en> joyed by a royal divorced woman, and ia hungered and thirsted for by many of tha younger set of princely ladies throughout Europe. That is to say, she goes shopping, calling, sight-seeing, and to the plays and concerts and the houses of her friends quite as freely as a private individual, and she goes unattended if she chooses. It ia true that, as a divorced woman, she cannot lay corner-stones, open hospitals and unveil memorials or receive bouquets, and she must walk at the very tag end of royal processions, hut the loss' of these prerogatives has „ ,

NO TF.RROHS for the new hotal woman, lb had no terrors for the Grand Duchess' Victoria Melita of Hesse, who was legally separated from her husband as soon as her grandmother was dead. More than once Queen Victoria had been called upon to quell the rebellion of this gay, plucky and independent young granddaughter against conjugal and Court discipline.

The Grand Duchess has a will of hen own. She is young, and while not pretty, is the most chic, witty, cultivated and ambitious young Princess in Europe. At one time she and her cousin, Emperor William, were great friends. As tha smartest horsewoman in Germany, with a really masculine knowledge of- military etiquette and tactics, he made her Colonel of the 117th Infantry Regiment. Her uniforms fitted her to perfection, and at reviews, her breast glittering with Orders, she paraded her regiment before the Em* peror in a style that was beyond criticism. •Besides these accomplishments , ■ tha Duchess can tool a four-in-hand with tha reckless ease. of a- Deadwood stage coachman and with tlie finish and style of at Howlitt. She dresses like a Parisian, speaks five languages and swims like a duck. • To the disgust of her husband and the Lord Chamberlain of the Hessian court none of her accomplishments can be described as domestic. As all the Hessian Grand Duchesses from away back have known how to bake bread, knit stout stockings, conduct soap boiling and even superintend pigkilling, with ability, it was easy to see that the housewives of the Duchy were being set a pretty bad example by her Highness. In vain the Duke forbade his wife to drive a spike team of five matched greys to tho grand ducal racecourse. In vain the Lord Chamber-lain besought her to study the famous receipts for pickled pigs’ feet that had been handed down hy succeeding Grand Duchesses since the Dark Ages. It is said that there were high words ia tho palace and the Duchess TACKED HER TRUNK ANT) WENT BACK TO ■ HER MOTHER. The result is a legal separation, not ai full divorce, and the little Princess Elizabeth of Hesse, tho only child of tho marriage, lives with her mother, who enjoys a big fortune of her own and lives most of her time near Frankfort. She keeps up mag* nilicent stables, runs over to Paris for her frocks, and her only grief is that she hag had to give up the friendship of the Kaiser, her colonelcy tfcd her handsome uniforms. Tim Kaiser‘docs not approve of divorces and separations, and some day the gossips say the Grand Duchess will probably go back to her husband and arbitrate the question of her household duties. ,

Now, while it Is perfectly true that all the level heads of the loading royal houses of Europe are opposed to divorce, it is admitted that a greater degree of liberty must be. accorded the royal ladies, _ especially if all is to remain serene in princely households. Rumour flics from St Petersburg ta London with the names of the Czarina, tho Queen of Holland, the Duchess of . Aosta and tho Crown Princess of Roumania, oa all agitating the question of regaining their freedom. ' Tho Czarina finds the perils of Imperial Russian life too trying on the nerves, and the Czar has reproached her for not giving him o son. The Queen of Holland could try again no doubt, if she liked, in tto matrimonial market and have the approval of her people in so doing, and the Duohesa of Aosta and the Crown Princess of Roumania have their grievances too. Now that the ice has been broken and*at few ladies have tried life as it is- lived outside the irksome espionage and ceremonial! of royal courts, there is every reason to believe" that others are ready to join the divorce colony or stand up for the rights they think they are, under the n£w woman! regime, fully entitled to enjoy/