SOVEREIGNS I HAVE MET.

Otago Witness, Issue 2407, 19 April 1900, Page 59

SOVEREIGNS I HAVE MET.

(By Charles Lowe.)

Crowned heads have always a natural attraction for everyone — no matter what their politics or social views ; for whatever their personal merits or failings, sovereigns are at least personages who represent their people, besides being the embodiment of more or less authority over them, and the seat of personal power is ever a centre of popular interest — the greater the power, the greater the interest. Thus it was when, in the winter of 1878, I went to Berlin as the resident correspondent of The Times I confess that my primary desire was to see — not the old Emperor William I, who was the titular ruler of Germany, but Bismarck, whom I knew to be her real sovereign ; and my curiosity was first gratified in the Reichstag, to which the Iron Chancellor had come express from Varzin with his famous " Christmas card" to the nation, which took the form of an announcement that he now intended to commit the Fatherland to the experiment of a protective tariff.

AN IMPERIAL MEETING.

It was the fidelity of William I to his friends that was the- means of enabling me to add another portrait to my gallery of European Sovereigns," in the person of his nephew, Alexander 11, the Czar Emancipator of Russia. This was in the autumn of 1879, at Alexandrovo, on Germany's eastern frontier, whither the old Kaiser had secretly repaired to ireet his Imperial nephew of Russia, with the object of dissipating the international misunderstanding connected with the results of the 'Berlin Congress, which threatened to end in another war. By good luck/J managed to get wind of the meeting, and to be the onlY English correspondent present. The details and incidents of the meeting I learnt from a very good friend of mine in the suite of the German Emperor, ■who came to the railway station to despatch a telegram, and ioun*s me a close prisoner in one of the waiting-rooms — I had attracted his attention by rapping* on the window — to which I had been roughly consigned on alighting from the train, and revealing my inability to satisfy the demand for my passport. Accordingly, '1 was at once " interned," and condem 1 1 to return to Germany by the next train ; but, in the considerable interval which elapsed, I had time to learn all the particulars of the Imperial meeting from my ofiicer friend aforesaid, whose intercession with my captors even induced them to " enlarge " me for the remainder of my brief sojourn on Russian soil ; so that, under his guidance and protection, I even enjoyed an opportunity of having a good peep from the lawn of the pavilion of. their Imperial Majesties as they sat at meat — their faces suffused with the satisfaction of estranged friends once more reconciled. I thought 1 had never seen a more thorough-looking gentleman than Alexander 11, the Czar Liberator. My next visit to Russia, also by way of Alexandrovo, was of a very different kind. For no grim, grey-coated, revolver-armed gendarmes durst interfere wiih me now, seeing that I was bound for Moscow to describe the coronation of Alexander 111, whose personal guest I became. AVhat a magnificent personification of •will-power over the 120,000,000 of his fellow-men forming his subjects did Alexander, the Moujik Czar, Ifcok, as on his snow-white palfrey — the central figure of a gorgeous pageant of prince and potentates — he paced through the acclaiming streets of Moscow to his palace in the Kremlin on the day of his entry into the ancient capital of Muscovy — the willpower of a Bismarck withoiit his luminous, controlling mind. But of all the pageants of that gorgeously festive time the one which 1 love by preference to recall was the grand supper banquet in the Kremlin, soon after the triumphal entry, where we grouped ourselves at little tables, with a mixture of social ranks as fortuitous as the dealing out of cards, and where these little tables were in turn made the round of by our Imperial entertainer himself, who, bending his gracious head, solicitously asked us whether We had enough to eat and drink, and whether there was anything else he himself could do for vs — such the bounclen duty and cu&tom of the mighty Czars of Muscovy on occasions of that kind.

THE GREAT WHITE CZAB.

But this was not the only occasion on which I was fated to be fiattei ed by tho personal attractions of the Great White Czar For on the night of his coronation in the Cathreclral of the Assumption in the Kremlin, at w hich I had the honour of being the sole representative of the" English press — all my less fortunate colleagues having been excluded for want of room — I was so exhausted by the fatigue and excitement of the long day that, after reeling off my last slip of "copy" for the telegraph office, I threw myself on my bed, dressed just as I ■was, and never woke till well on into next day — only to discover, on going to my littered writing table to see what o'clock it was, that my watch had disappeared, together with my pocket-book, containing from £20 to £30 (nominal) worth of very dirty rouble notes. I searched and searched, and made sure in every way ; but my pocket-book and my watch were hopelessly gone, and I began to feel like Slrylock when he fell to exclaiming : " Justice ! The law ! My ducats and my daughter !"

I need not detail the uproar, the runnings about, the ransaekings, and the formal investigations which now ensued, all to no purpose. The very day of lny departure had dawned, and I was lying in bed reflecting on the situation, when a knock came to my door, <md in there stepped, to my great surprise, a dashing young officer. »vKo, from his aiguillefctes, I could .perceive to be an aide-de-camp - — of the Governor-General of Moscow, aslt turned out. To my greater astonishment he put, his hand into^the breasb of his tunic, and drawing forth my mi&sing watch and chain, said : " C'est a vous, monsieur?" (Is this yours, sir?)

And then my handsome visitor proceeded to explain. A rumour of the theft had got into some of the Russian papers, and §yen attracted the gerson&l notice of £lie

Czar. The Governor of Moscow was at once communicated with, and told that the stolen watch of The Times correspondent, who was the guest of his Majesty, must, at all costs, be found. Whereupon the Governor had summoned to his presence some of the most notorious thieves in all Moscow, and threatened them with Siberia unless they succeeded in discovering the whereabouts of the missing watch, for, as being practised robbers themselves, they must be familiar with the methods of their brethren and their methods of disposing of stolen goods. How or where my watch was discovered, or by whom it had been stolen, I never discovered. It was satisfaction enough to get my ticker thus restored to me, and the same day I left Moscow for St. Petersburg with the profound conviction that there are worse forms of government after all than an autocracy, with its rough and ready methods of dealing with crimes such as that of which I had been the victim.

a prince's education-.

At St. Petersburg I was treated with much distinction, and enjoyed the guidance of. an officer of the Czar's household, who conducted me over all the Imperial palaces, and showed me things not generally shown — among otheis tLe extraordinary collection of Chinese wall paintings at the Katherinenhof, or suburban " Trianon " of the new Russian capital, where the voluptuous Catherine the Great indulged in her unbridled orgies. But there was another set of wall-pictures which _ betokened a higher and purer taste than those which disgraced the private apartments of the Katherinenhof. These I saw in the Anitehkoff Palace, on the Newski Prospect, which is the Marlborough House, so. to speak, of St. Petersburg. Here Alexander 111 had lived while heir-apparenfc, and here his children, "including the present ruler of Russia, Nicholas 11, had been born. In Moscow I had seen the little Czarewitch, marvelling much at his astonishing likeness to his cousin, his Doppelganger, the Duke of York ; and in the Anitchkoff Palace it was explained to me how simply and severely lie had been brought up. I saw the simple bedroom to which, no matter how late the Emperor returned home, he always came to cross himself over the cots of their little occupants and kiss their cheeks ; and I was taken to their schoolroom, of which the little inmates had tried to relieve the harshness by pasting all over the walls war pictures of the Ruseo-Turkish campaign, cut from the Graphic and other illustrated English papers. On several occasions after this I had an opportunity of seeing Nicholas 11, among others, at Chalons, in 1897, when I witnessed the grand review organised in his honour by the French. On this occasion he looked dapper enough in his scarlet uniform of the Cossacks of the Guard, which becomes his slight, unsoldierly figure much better than the scarlet tunic and heavy beetling bearskin of his English regiment, the Scots Greys, who had overwhelmed the horsemen of his mighty ancestor at Balaclava ; and, indeed, it was a cruel freak of English court flattery to endue with such a warlike uniform Nicholas 11, the unwariike and Peace Conference great-grandson of the bellicose Nicholas I.

Yet once the court of Berlin was guilty of an indiscretion equally great, if far more serious in its consequences. In the year of tbe coronation of Alexander 111 — 1883 — I went to Homburg to attend the autumn manoeuvres of the 11th Army Corps, which were witnessed by quite a galaxy of sovereigns, including the Kings of Saxony, Servia, and Spain ; and with the last-named I may be said to have had a vicarious interview, through his Foreign Minister, the Marquis de la Vega de Armijo. From Homburg, on his way home, Alfonso XII — a little, rickety, shallow, pimpled, effeminate sort of sovereign I*,1 *, but with a fine high spirit in his unsoldier like body, went to Paris, where he was received with hisses and howls of execration — and all because, at Homburg, he had the effrontery to accept the honorary chief ship of a Prussian cavalry regiment, and become what the Parisians scornfully described as a " roi Uhlan."

Most unfortunately for him, the lancer regiment of which he had become chief, happened to be stationed at Strasburg, the capital of one of the conquered provinces, and the impulsive French" at once jumped to the conclusion that here was another of M. de Bismarck's studied and gratuitous insults. As a matter of fact, Bismarck had no more to do with this than the man in the moon. It happened that at this time there were only two Prussian cavalry regiments vacant of a chicf — one of hussars, the other of lancers — and the choice of these had been offered to Alfonso the Brave, who innocently chose the Uhlan one at Straitburg, because it chanced to have jrellow facings, which would thus suit his own sallow complexion — a proof to me at the time that a political earthquake might possibly spring from a pimply face.

THE TOURIST KAISER.

If Frederick 111 might have been described as Kaiser " Toom Tabard " — a phrase which the Scots applied to one of their early kings from the fact of his being all show and little substance — his son <md successor may be said to have begun his careei as a kind of Kaiser " Tom-tom,"' seeing that he was for ever beating the big drum at Berlin, and keeping the nerves of all Europe on edge by his perpetual "alarums and excursions:." On some of those excursions it was my duty to accompany, or, at least, to follow, the Tourist Kaiser — above all, to Constantinople, where I was able to add still another to my gallery of sovereign portraits. The Kaiser determined to see something of the East, but previous to this the East, in the person of the Shah of Persia, had determined to see him ; and for this purpose, in the summer of 1889, had taken Berlin on his way to London. On this occasion I .saw a good deal of the Shah, and heard still more of his curious Oriental ways of life in the Chateau Bellevue, which 'had been assigned him as a residence in a remote corner of the Thiergartcn — \i ays so weirdly Oriental that, on his at last quitting Berlin, it was said by the wits of the court, who were not all endowed with courtly wits, that the watchword given out to the garrison for ;fcb-§ &X . wa .s " Scitwejnfui'th^' which, js fcke

name of a place, but might also read " Schwein fort "■ — ■'' The pig has gone."

But I was not yet done with the Shah. For, chancing to spend my holiday in my native country, I was making a hill-pony tour among the Deeside Highlands, and in the course thereof came to Ballater, where the Shah, after all his feasting in England, was presently expected to enjoy a taste of Scottish hospitality at the hands of Mackenzie of Glenmuick, which being interpreted, as they told me, means the Glen of the Pig's Nose. Being known to a member of the Mackenzie family, I was kindly bidden to the grand ball at Glenmuick House, held in a huge marquee on the lawn, and my road companion up the glen was an earl's son, who Avas then serving as a private in the Cameron Highlanders, furnishing the Queen's Guard of Honour at Ballaler. We had rare good fun at the ball — " Faith, we'se hae fine remarkin' " being our motto, from "The Holy Fair." But what most of all amused me was see the Shah, with a greasy leer in his eye, go up to a rather ugly old peasant woman, who was standing among the miscellaneous crowd of spectators around the dancing arena, and poke her under the ribs with a squirking sound from his throat, till the poor old thing almost squealed and " skirled." The Shah seemed to enjoy the joke immensely, though it was not a very dignified action on the part of the earthly King of Kings. — Sunday Sun.