"Taranaki Central Press” WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1937 HEART-ACHES IN SPANISH ROYALTY.

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 350, 3 February 1937, Page 4

"Taranaki Central Press” WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1937 HEART-ACHES IN SPANISH ROYALTY.

The bloody and infernal affair of the Spanish Civil War continues its mysterious way, with Franco still preparing for his attack on Madrid. Should that attack prove successful, Franco will have a commanding position and the odds will be on his winning out in the end. Should the rebels secure control, the next step is obvious. King Alfonso will be recalled to the throne and a Royalist Spain will again be in existence.

Round the ex-King of Spain centres one of the tragedies of modern royalty. This loose-lipped, loose-living monarch was forced to flee his country and is to-day a wealthy exile sseking the flesh-pots of society in Britain and in Central Europe.

Alfonso never abdicated from the Spanish throne. He fled taking at least a million pounds in money, royal jewels and property, to secure for him a handsome competence as he pursued his worldly way in private life.

There is much in him common to the Duke of Windsor. Both are now exiles, meeting frequently and hunting together. Our ex-King secured for himself, too, considerable wealth. During his period as Prince of Wales he amassed a huge fortune, largely from the revenue of the estates of the Duchy of Cornwall, which he contrived to retain, as Duke of Cornwall, for the period during which he was King. Both Kings gained for themselves a similar reputation in their methods of living, but Edward was at least human and was touched by the tragedies of other lives if oblivious to that which nearly overtook the Empire. Alfonso was wholly selfish, and won little admiration either as King or as a man.

The real tragedy in Spanish royalty concerns the ex-Queen Victoria Eugenie, Alfonso’s wife and granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England. She is a gracious lady on whom so much sadness has befallen that, even on the throne, she ■ was aptly named ‘‘Queen of Sorrows.”

In her family a romance led to the renunciation of royal rights. Her eldest son, Alfonso, renounced the rank of Spanish Crown Prince to marry a rich Cuban commoner. She left him, sued for divorce, claimed heavy alimony, and when the Prince was seriously ill and his mother. Queen Eugenie, came to America to see him, sought to restrain the Queen from taking her son home to Europe and beyond the jusisdiction of the United States courts. In the offing, the Queen found an other woman and a legal tangle, at the bottom of which were some Spanish crown jewels locked in a Manhattan vault as security for a note.

Meanwhile in Milan, Italy, ousted Alfonso XIII popped into the kalian Royal Automobile Club, and hopefully bought a set of Spanish road maps while his queen, Victoria Eugene, was on such sad business abroad. Since then the mother has been caring for her weak son, while his equally weak father cavorts joyously across Polish hunting-fields with ex-King Edward of England.

Another mother, too, back in England, bears the sorrows of her advancing years with regal dignity and forbearing; a mother who only a few short months ago, dressed in black and weary with travail, departed sadly from Buckingham Palace for her new home, Marlborough House, while her son and a married woman merrily boarded a special salon railway car at Aberdeen for London, there to carry on further revels to the strains of a Hungarian gipsy band which filled the noble halls of his mother’s old home.