[Illustration: H. R. H., THE INFANTA EULALIA
Photograph by Henrie Manuel, Paris]
COURT LIFE
FROM WITHIN
BY
H. R. H.
THE INFANTA EULALIA
OF SPAIN
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things,
“Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax,
“Of cabbages and kings.”
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1915
COPYRIGHT, 1913, 1914
BY THE BUTTERICK PUBLISHING CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1914
BY THE CENTURY CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1915
BY DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE SEEDS OF REVOLT 1
II IRKSOME DUTIES OF A PRINCESS 22
III PULLING THE STRINGS OF SOVEREIGNTY 43
IV LOVE AND ENNUI 63
V MY MARRIAGE--IN MOURNING 85
VI ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 106
VII THE KAISER AND HIS COURT 134
VIII THE TSAR AND HIS PEOPLE 157
IX THE REGAL POSE 181
X THE SCANDINAVIAN DEMOCRACIES 190
XI THE COURTS OF ITALY 213
XII ADVENTURES IN AMERICA 222
XIII AFTER THE WAR 242
ILLUSTRATIONS
H. R. H. The Infanta Eulalia of Spain _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
The King’s Study in Escurial 26
Gardens of the Alcazar, Seville 38
Royal Palace, Madrid 50
The Infanta Eulalia 72
Alfonso XIII of Spain 96
Dowager Queen Alexandra of England, Queen Maud
of Norway and Prince Olaf, Crown Prince of
Norway 108
King George V, the Late King Edward VII and the
Prince of Wales 120
Infanta Eulalia on Horseback 138
German Emperor in Austrian Uniform 148
Nicholas II and the Heir of Russia 164
King Albert of Belgium 186
King Haakon of Norway 198
Infanta Eulalia at Window of Her Apartments 218
INTRODUCTION
I have endeavoured in these pages to present a true picture of Court
life. It is a life hedged about by many restrictions; to me a great deal
of it all was empty and meaningless.
I say nothing of those who are actively engaged in the duties of
rulership; but to the other members of Royal families, life is little
more than a round of useless ceremonies, from which a mind with any
pretence to independence flies in relief--does opportunity offer. I have
left behind me the life of Courts and palaces. But for many years, in my
own youth, and while my sons were growing up into manhood, I fulfilled
my part as a Princess of Spain, after my marriage visiting practically
all the Courts of Europe. I have written here of these visits and of my
impressions of the rulers of Europe, and, while I hope there is much in
this book of kindliness and sympathy, yet I have considered truth to be
the first essential in these recollections.
I am democratic in my sympathies, and consider the day has gone by when
Royalty should live behind closed blinds. The world, as I see it, is
peopled by one big family. We are all brothers and sisters; let us know
one another better.
Paris, 1915.
COURT LIFE FROM WITHIN
CHAPTER I
THE SEEDS OF REVOLT
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things,
“Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax,
“Of cabbages and kings.”
_Alice in Wonderland._
Once, when I was making an official visit to the South of Spain with my
brother (who was then King), we were told of a gentleman of the Province
of Sevilla who had had a talking parrot sent to him from South America;
and this parrot had been taught to say “_Viva la Reina!_”--that is,
“Long live the Queen!” But soon after its arrival in Sevilla there was a
revolution, and Spain became a republic; and it was not at all
comfortable for the gentleman to have a parrot screaming “Long live the
Queen!” So he shut it up in a room in his house and set himself to teach
it to cry “_Viva la Republica!_”--“Long live the Republic!” It was a
very intelligent parrot, and he easily taught it to say “_Viva la
Republica!_”; but it had a tenacious memory, and it took him a long
time before he could be sure that it would always say “_Viva la
Republica!_” and never forget its change of politics and cry out,
inopportunely, in a voice to be heard by the neighbours, “_Viva la
Reina!_” Then there was another revolution, and Spain became a monarchy
again, and every one shouted “_Viva el Rey!_”--“Long live the King!” And
the gentleman carried his parrot back to the closed room, and after many
days spent in trying to teach it to cry “_Viva el Rey!_” he wrung its
neck.
It was a very valuable parrot, and most intelligent, but it was not
sufficiently facile to take a speaking part in Spanish politics in those
days.
I have remembered this sad story of the parrot because the events of its
life were so important to my own. The Queen whom it first supported was
my mother, Isabella II. The King on whose account it lost its life was
my brother, Alfonso XII. And the Republic (which lasted from 1868 to
1874) was the one that made it possible for me to escape, at least
mentally and spiritually, from the prison--very gilded, very luxurious,
but more guarded than a Bastille--in which Royalty is compelled to
live. Such an escape, I think, is more difficult than any of Baron
Trenck’s. It is one that leaves, as you might say, the impediment of
fetters on the mind, even when the body has gone free. And I have long
been curious to consider what it was in me that made me struggle out of
this splendid confinement, in which one is so envied and so many are so
content.
When the revolution of ’68 first disturbed my life--and the parrot’s--I
was too young to know it. The intelligence was still unformed, the body
infantile. But both the body and the mind had been born of a race so old
and in traditions so established that it would seem no revolution could
affect them. For many hundreds of years a few families of human beings
had been inheriting the thrones of Europe, generation after generation,
as families inherit property, from parents to children, by the consent
of society and under the protection of law. They were by birth “Royal,”
as persons may be, in democracies, by birth wealthy. And they were born
to rule as unquestionably as the children of the poor to-day are born to
poverty. They were spoken of as “Blood Royal,” as if they were of
special flesh, and they intermarried only with Blood Royal, because the
people whom they governed demanded children of this special flesh to sit
on the thrones of their countries. A king here or a queen there might
lose a crown by bad management, or misfortune, or the ill-will of
subjects, as a man might lose an inherited estate by similar causes; but
he could not lose his place among the families of Royalty (with whom he
and his children had intermarried) nor the honours of Courts and the
respect of peoples who still obeyed members of the ruling families into
which he had been born. So, since I had been born into one of these
families--the Bourbon--the essentials of my life were as little changed
by the revolution of ’68 as the parrot’s were. We both remained in our
cages.
My mother, leaving Spain, came to Paris, to live in the Palais de
Castile with her children, a Queen in exile, but still a Queen; Napoleon
III. extended the hospitality of the nation to her; and she continued to
move among ceremonies and Court functions after the manner royal.
Of all this I recall almost nothing. I have a vague memory of Napoleon
III. making us a visit, and I remember that the young Prince Napoleon
came to play with my brother and my sisters, who were older than I. I
can recall our flight from Paris, when it was about to be besieged by
the Prussians, for I was ill with measles and I was carried downstairs
wrapped in a blanket, and I saw, somewhere on our journey to Normandy,
German soldiers with helmets as our carriage passed them. But these are
recollections of the eyes alone; they mean nothing.
My first clear consciousness of myself I cannot place. It pictures me in
rebellion against wearing the earrings for which my ears had been
pierced soon after my birth, so that I might be decorated with the
jewels that were part of the regalia in which a Princess of Spain was
expected to appear, even as an infant. I do not know why I
rebelled--unless it was because the earrings interfered with the bodily
activity that was irrepressible in me. I was very healthy, very strong.
I wished to play outdoors, where I could run; I chafed at the restraint
of our formal living; and I think it was this revolt of the body that
became a revolt of the mind as soon as I developed a mind.
Conceive that we children had no playroom in the Palais. We had to
amuse ourselves in a decorous sitting-room, quietly. And we were never
allowed to be alone. We were always under the eyes of some Spanish
lady-in-waiting who guarded and repressed us. When we were taken for a
walk in the Bois, we were accompanied by ladies who prevented us from
playing with the children we met. At home some one always sat and
observed what we were doing. At night some one watched and slept in the
bedroom with us. Whatever we did there were eyes on us. It is true that
until after I was married I was scarcely left alone for a moment to sit
by myself in a room. That seems to me very sad.
I am sad, too, when I remember this: there was a courtyard in the Palais
that had in it a stone pool of water a little larger than a round tub;
and it was an escapade for me to get down into the court and play in
that pool. In summer I got fish and put them in it, and pretended that I
was fishing. In winter I skated on it, although I could scarcely make
two strokes without bumping into its sides. There was not a child in
Paris so poor that he would not have laughed at such a playground; but
to me it was liberty. One’s childhood, at least, might be more free
than that.
Not that my childhood was pathetic. On the contrary, I was very robust,
and instead of succumbing to repression I reacted against it. All my
earliest recollections find me engaged in an incessant struggle for
merely physical freedom and the enjoyment of sunlight and open air. I
would not sit and play with dolls. I could not be entertained with the
Spanish stories of witches that correspond to the fairy-tales of the
North. I was not an imaginative child, and I did not care for pets. I
had found a boy in the Palais--the son of one of the maids of a
lady-in-waiting--and I ran away, whenever I could, to romp in the court
with him. When my brother was home from school, _he_ was my playmate,
although he was seven years older than I. I liked him because I could
fight with him--real fisticuffs--and be rough. We played a sort of
football in the court together, and my mother used to say that she had
two sons.
Once when we were at Houlgate, in Normandy--where we had a summer villa
by the seashore--I decided to run away from home because I had been
prevented from playing with children on the beach. After dark, when no
one could see me, I set out, without knowing where I should go, all
alone, determined never to come back. I had no plan. I did not even
understand that food and lodgings had to be paid for and worked for in
the world. I walked along the country road in the dark, quite happy
because I was walking, but puzzled because when I began to tire I did
not know where to stop. So when I came to the farm of an old woman from
whom we had bought apples, I turned in, naturally, to get an apple,
without telling her that I had run away.
I was overtaken there. The lady-in-waiting--who was very shrewd--as soon
as she missed me, found out from my sister that I had threatened to run
away, and she guessed that I would go to the apple-woman’s farm, since
it was the only place near by where I had ever been. They brought me
back home, but they had all been frightened, and I began to get my own
way. For example, there was always a maid sleeping in our room at night,
and I did not wish it--as much, perhaps, because she snored as because I
wanted our bedroom for ourselves. When they insisted that the maid must
be there, I dragged my bed into the corridor every night, until they
gave me a room to myself in which I could at least sleep without being
guarded. I would not wear tight clothes, and I put my hands down inside
my waist-band when they were dressing me, so that they could not fasten
tight things on me; and in this way I avoided many tiresome affairs of
ceremony, which I disliked.
These are very trivial matters to recall, but consider that it is one of
the chief pleasures of most royal persons to dress themselves in costume
and play the parts of resplendent figure-heads that have never been
allowed to think, or see, or know anything for themselves. The small
restraints against which a healthy body made me struggle in infancy were
the attempted beginnings of those impassable walls of isolation and
ignorance and inexperience from which, in later years, I should never
have escaped.
When my sisters and I were sent as day-scholars to the convent of the
Sacré Cœur, my real escape began. We wore the dark blue uniforms of the
school, as all the girls did, and we were treated exactly as the others
were. We studied in the common classrooms and played with our
class-mates at the recreation hour in the convent grounds. How can I
tell how eagerly I went to school in the mornings with the governess who
took us through the streets? Or how happily tired I came home at night
after all the study and play and little incidents of the class-room that
had filled the day? I would be so tired that I would fall asleep at the
formal dinner that was served for my mother and her guests of honour in
the evening; and the servants would have to carry me to bed. But I would
be awake next morning very early, before any one else in the Palais, in
haste to be off again to school.
If we had remained in Spain I should never have been allowed such
freedom. They would have brought tutors and governesses to teach us in
the palace. I should never have been allowed school companions like
those we had in Paris. It was for this that I have to thank the
revolution.
I have one recollection of these days that is quaint. My sister had come
to school wearing earrings; and a nun, telling her that earrings were
forbidden in the convent, attempted to take them off. In freeing one she
tore my sister’s ear accidentally, so that it bled, and I was very angry
and I wanted to strike the nun. When we spoke of this at home to a
lady-in-waiting, she reproved me, saying that it would be “a double sin”
to strike a nun. I replied that I would not strike any one except to
give back as good as I got. “Well,” she said, “you will never have to
strike any one, for no one can strike you.” “Why not?” She answered,
because I was “a royalty.” “Then,” I said to myself, “as long as I live
I shall never have a good fight!” And this made me so sad that I
remember it yet, with a sort of sinking, as one remembers something
irreparable that made a great difference to one’s outlook on life.
My mind, by this time, had become as active as my body, and I was very
curious and full of questions. The Spanish ladies-in-waiting who formed
our household were quite ignorant. Many of them could not read or write,
and they could teach us nothing but old wives’ tales and silly
superstitions. I had learned to read very young but I could not get
books of the sort I needed. Outside of our school-books we had little
but “The Lives of the Saints,” which was read to us every day--the life
of the saint on the day dedicated to that saint--as the Bible is read in
pious families of Protestants. I remember that I had “Robinson Crusoe”
in French, and some books of Jules Verne, that were welcome because they
told of travels and adventures in the world of which I wished to know.
Otherwise our books were all religious; and I had found that I could not
ask questions about religion.
For instance, a nun at the convent, giving us religious instruction in
the mysteries of the creation, had said that the world must have been
created because nothing could exist without a creator; and when I
interrupted her to ask, childishly, who, then, had created the Creator,
she replied that it was a mystery beyond our human comprehension. I
asked her who had told her about it, and she was very angry, and
punished me by making me copy out pages of Racine’s poems during the
recreation hour. This method of teaching religion was not successful
with me, because--not being an imaginative child--I was sceptical of
anything that could be explained to me. And, being contemptuous of the
ladies-in-waiting, who were very religious in an ignorant way, I became
contemptuous of the superstitions which their ignorance had added to
their faith.
They carried about with them great numbers of metal images of saints,
blessed medals, and relics in little lockets, which they kissed and
believed in as potent against all sorts of diseases and misfortunes.
They had large pockets for the purpose under their skirts; and my
sisters and I had the same kind of pockets, filled with the same things.
It was not long before I had emptied mine to make room for the cakes
which I used to smuggle from the table to eat at school, where our food
was rather scanty. For such irreverences as this, and for laughing at
incidents in the lives of the saints which amused me when they were read
to us, I became rather a scandal to our household, and they would say to
me, “You are only fit for America! You ought to be sent to
America!”--since America was regarded as a barbarous place where the
manners were bad. And so I came to think that if I could only take a
ship and go to America I should be really happy.
The nuns were very sweet and gentle with me, but I would have liked them
better if they had been rough. There was something in me that distrusted
suavity and desired brusqueness. I was not sensitive about harsh
contacts, and I did not fear or resent punishment. Consequently, I not
only imposed myself on my sisters, who were less robust than I, but
upon my teachers, who could not control my spirit. Mirrors being
forbidden in the convent, I put sheets of paper behind the panes of
glass in the doors, and dragged the girls to them to look at themselves.
And this seemed an ingenious perversity that staggered the nuns.
My two sisters having gone through their preparation for First
Communion, my mother took them to Rome to receive the sacrament from the
hands of the Pope. She took me, too; and, although I had not been
prepared, the Pope gave me communion at the same time, saying that I was
a “little angel,” because I had fair hair and blue eyes. When I returned
to the convent and the nuns heard that I had received communion without
the preparation, they were outraged. “Well, then,” I said, “isn’t your
Pope infallible?” And this shocked and silenced them. Altogether,
although I lost many recreation hours by having to do “impositions” as
punishment for small rebellions, school failed to subdue me, and I kept
a wilful freedom of mind.
I had heard from the gossip of the household that my mother--who had no
knowledge of the value of money--was spending so extravagantly that we
should soon have nothing to live on. And this delighted me. I used to
picture myself working hard to earn--perhaps by teaching languages or
painting, of which I was very fond--and the joy of the thought was
intense. My eldest sister suffered from headaches in school; she used to
be sent often to the infirmary; and I would ask permission to go up to
her and sit by her bedside, and tell her wonderful stories of my dreams
for our future when we should be fighting for life.
It seemed to me the happiest, the most exciting thing, to be in such a
struggle, among people who had to work and make their way, always busy
and interested in something, and never shut up in idleness to be bored.
No Cinderella ever invented for herself stories of rescue by Prince
Charming with more longing than I looked forward to my escape from the
sort of life with which Cinderella was rewarded. And I still think that
I was wiser than she.
My grandmother, Queen Maria Cristina--the widow of Ferdinand VII. of
Spain--was living in retirement in Normandy; she had lost her throne by
marrying a Spanish officer of her escort; and she would tell me that
she had never been so happy in Courts--never as happy as since she had
been exiled with the man she loved. We went to visit her very often
during our summers--a very clever old lady with a mind of her own--and I
liked her the best of all my relatives.
Her story of her marriage with the officer (which she told me herself)
made a deep impression on me. She had been on a journey through the
mountains near Madrid, and the altitude had given her a bleeding at the
nose. The ladies-in-waiting had given her their handkerchiefs, and she
had used all her own, but the bleeding still continued, and she turned
to the officer of her escort riding beside her carriage and asked him
for his handkerchief. She did not know him; she had never spoken to him
before; but she was in such distress that when he gave her his
handkerchief she passed all the others to him without knowing what she
was doing. He kissed them and put them in his breast. Then the ladies
said to themselves, “Ah, the poor officer! Now he will be sent away to
Cuba or the Philippines!” And they were sorry for him, because he was a
very handsome man and very well liked.
Next morning he was summoned to a private audience with the Queen, and
the ladies said, “The poor man! Why did he do it? What a mistake!” But
when he came away from the audience he was not depressed, and it was
understood that the Queen had reprimanded and forgiven him. He continued
in attendance on her as an officer of the household, and it was not
suspected until long afterwards that they had been secretly married. It
seems incredible, but the Queen had several children by this marriage
without it being known even to Court circles. She once opened Parliament
a few hours after the birth of a child, going to the ceremony in a
carriage, very weak, but determined to show herself to the people
because a rumour of the birth had been circulated by her enemies. She
was a woman of unconquerable will. When the truth of the marriage could
no longer be concealed, and the people revolted, she left Spain with her
husband, and was very happy, living near Havre with him and their
children. She was a real grandmother to me, and my visits to her were
always a delight.
My father, who was the Infante Francisco, my mother’s first cousin, had
been married to her for reasons of State; they had separated after the
revolution; and he lived near us in Paris, or at Epinay, in an
establishment of his own, where we children sometimes went to see him.
He was a small, grey man, very silent, very formal, fond of books and
solitude, and contented to be out of politics and affairs of Courts.
There had been no sentiment in his marriage to my mother, and there was
none in his relations with us children. My mother, too, was more a queen
to us than a mother; and, as a girl, I knew nothing of the parental
affections of a home. I think that may have been partly because my
parents were quite old when I was born to them, so that the years
separated us. But also it is one of the penalties of Royalty that their
life cannot be intimate and fond.
My great devotion was for my brother, whom I was like. He was never
religious in a superstitious way, and he was very lively and athletic
and fond of sports, so that we played congenially. He was a clever
student, and helped me with my school work. And he was talkative with
me, and told me about his life at school, as I chattered to him about
mine. But he went away to college in Vienna when I was very young, and
then to a military college in England, and I saw him only in his
holidays.
That, then, was the sort of childhood one had in the Palais de Castile.
I saw the comings and goings of politicians and personages from Spain
without paying any attention to them and without knowing what they were
about; for I spoke French and but little Spanish. With my mother, who
spoke almost no French, we talked with difficulty in a mixture of both
languages. We scarcely saw her except at dinner in the evening among her
foreign guests, or on Sunday when we went to chapel in the Palais; and
we children made our own lives among ourselves, apart from the affairs
of our elders. I had achieved a certain independence of mind, although
no independence of action was possible to me. I had escaped the
narrowing influences of our life, but no broadening influences reached
me. I had to make my own mental growth without the aid of liberal books
or the culture that one gets from informing conversation. I often wonder
what would have become of me if another revolution had not returned us
to Spain.
I was about eleven years of age when it happened. And it came like a
bomb. I had not thought of it. I was expecting that, when I finished
school, I should have a life like other girls; and I was bewildered when
my mother summoned us to her room one morning and told us that my
brother Alfonso had been proclaimed King of Spain. I could see from her
manner that it was to her a happy event that would make a great
difference to us, but I did not realise how it would be. It was as if
some one should tell a little girl of a great inheritance that was to
make her very wealthy, when she did not understand what money could buy.
The first signs of the change came immediately from the nuns at the
convent, who treated us more formally than before. And we learned from
the girls that they had been told to be different with us, but, of
course, they did not succeed. They came to us much excited and curious
to know how we felt; and I could see that they were disappointed because
we did not feel as delighted as they supposed. Then a great many people
began to come to the Palais--Spanish personages, Republicans who had
never visited us before, and men who, I learned, had been concerned in
my mother’s exile. And it puzzled me to see that she received them all
as if they had always been as friendly as they now appeared.
Like most children, I was not forgiving; I had not learned to tolerate
the disloyalties to which life accustoms one; and I was disgusted by the
cheerful falseness of the self-interest that brought these people about
us. I began to look cynically at the show of devoted deference that
makes the peculiar atmosphere of a Court. And then I forgot everything
in the announcement that we were to join my brother in Spain--my dear
brother, whom I thought of as a playmate, not as a king. I had missed
him so much. I believed that I should always be happy now, since we were
to be together.