THE BABY.
THE newspaper talk about the "affectionate regard" felt by all Englishmen for the Royal family, though very proper, is perhaps a little conventional. The English like to read about Princes and Princesses, and to gossip about their doings, and to utilise them for ceremonials, but their positive liking for them has rather narrow limits. They will not allow them any political influence; they are desperately jealous of their claim to appointments even in the Army, though Princes fill these fairly well; and they will not, when they can help it, vote them any money to live on. It will by-and-by be simply impossible even to ask Parliament for grants. The real English feeling, we should have said, is limited to the Sovereign, and to those who must succeed her, the throne rather than the Royal family being the true object of the nation's regard. There is therefore a strong wish felt, even by Republicans, that the succession should go on safely and easily; and this has of late been accidentally intensified. If the marriage of the Duke of York had proved childless, there must have been ultimately a change in the family on the throne, and a Duff dynasty would not have been popular. The Duke of Fife is well liked, and nobody objected to his marriage with a Princess, bat, strangely as it has risen, his family is not illustrious by descent, and its career has been, to say the least, a troubled one. Its accession to the throne would not have been welcome either to the great Houses of Europe, or to the older English aristocracy, while the change would have been visible even to the common people, owing to a custom which it is not very easy to explain, and which is peculiar to Great Britain.
Although the history of the dynasty may be said to be un- broken, the Queen being the descendant of Alfred and of Egbert, there has never been in this country a House of Eng- land, known as such to the people and habitually so called, as was the House of France, and is the House of Austria. The line has ended of ten in females, and each new family which married the heiress of England, has transmitted its special name to a line of Sovereigns. We habitually speak of the Plantagenets, the Tudors, the Stuarts, and the House of Hanover, never of the House of England, though relationship to that, and not to the intruding lines, has always been, even in times of revolution, the first claim to the throne. People forget that William III. was, after Mary and Anne, the next in the Stuart succession. On the Continent this is not so, the Austrian line being still called the House of Hapsburg, though that family merged itself on the marriage of Maria Theresa, in the much better descended House of Lorraine, the nearest representatives of Charlemagne. The Braganzas too, are still called Braganzas, though on the English system they are Coburgs, just as the Spanish House would have con- tinued to be called Bourbons even if Queen Isabella had married out of that ancient race. From the accession of the Prince of Wales the British Royal family, by British custom, will be called the Coburgs; and had it been the lot of the little Lady Alexandra Duff, or any future brother of hers, to found a new line, that would have been called the Duffs, alike by historians and by the people, a prospect which inspired no pleasure. The Coburgs are better liked; they are supposed, and so far rightly supposed, to accommodate themselves more easily than any other reigning family to constitutional Monarchy ; they are Royal by descent.; and they have had the strangest good fortune in their alliances. Within a few years the three greatest thrones in the world, those of Great Britain, Germany, and Russia will be filled by descendants of the Prince Consort, while seven minor thrones, those of Belgium, Portu-
gal, Greece, Hesse, Saxe-Gotha, Ron , and Bulgaria—one of which two last may reign at Cons itinople—will all be filled by men of Coburg blood. A pox ion of that kind is a very great, though a very peculiar one, and when the change occurs—may it be long first—the English will have no need to explain whence their new dynasty springs, or how it got there. The feeling for pedigree, though it is inexplicable, for after all the Founder is usually the greatest of his line, is per- manent and indestructible ; and there was therefore universal pleasure when it was announced that the Duchess of York had been safely delivered of a son, and that the line of Coburg was, humanly speaking, destined to continue. England, some people think, will be a Republic before the new baby becomes a Monarch, say, fifty years hence; but dynasties are long- lived, England has been nearer Republicanism than she is now, and within the time of men still living a. new rampart has built itself round the Monarchy. When the Royal Standard is pulled down, the Empire will be pulled down too, and it is the Empire that the people delight in, rather than in any dream of a federation of the English•speaking peoples, which would transfer all political initiative from London to some city across the Atlantic. We do not see why language should be much of a bond, and we do see that the Spanish- speaking Republics are no friends to Spain. For anything any one can forecast, not only may the newest Coburg reign in Great Britain and India, but his tenth descendant. The hold of the word " Republic " over the imaginations of man- kind has not increased of late years, nor the evidence that democracy and Monarchy are inherently incompatible.
It is a matter perhaps of little importance, but as observers interested in social as well as political history we rather wonder how "the Royalties," as people begin to call them, will settle themselves down into European society. Their present position is hardly tolerable. Owing probably to some little-noticed change in morals, and to a relaxation of the rule against morganatic descent being recognised, the Princes of the Royal Houses, the people to whom you must speak standing, are becoming numerous beyond all precedent. There are literally scores of them, all equal by birth, all claiming top- most places, and all more or less cut off from active careers. They may be soldiers still if they like, but they cannot be statesmen, or Ambassadors, or Viceroys, much less Merchants or Captains of Industry. They are not per mitted to marry out of their own caste, there are no islands for them to conquer, and they must not take to the new trade of agitation. They are not even allowed to marry heiresses without renunciations which are galling to their pride ; and what are they to do for a living? The question is becoming a pressing one, for rich b,S all Royal Houses are, except our own, no family wealth will suffice to maintain hundreds of families all wanting to live with the wealthy nobles, and all deprived of the means of making money. The Grand Dukes of Russia, the Archdukes of Austria, the Princes of our own country, are becoming clans, burdensome to the stocks from which they derive their grandeur ; and at a certain point, now by no means distant, that fact will be officially recognised. There are " Royalties " even now who, in English eyes, would be accounted poor men, and in the next generation there will be Royalties literally with nothing, yet if the present system continues, chiefs of society, and observed, as before this generation even Kings were not observed except at intervals. What are they to do? We can see nothing for it except for the dynasties to let them go, to make a rule that " Royalty " shall only extend to, say, the tenth person from the throne, and that the remainder must just sink back among the people, and win titles or rank or fortune like everybody else. Their pedigrees will help them somewhat, they spring from strong races, and they may be, if they please, as well educated as their neighbours. They can help one another if they like, as Scotch- men and Jews do, and once lost in the commonalty, the strange jealousy of them, which now keeps them out of public life, would speedily disappear. They could adopt names as the nobles' sons do in business, and gradually would come to remember their pedigrees only as sources of family pride, and let us hope as incentives to specially honourable lives. We are not joking in the least, or writing what would be par- ticularly foolish satire. The maintenance of poor relations does actually press closely and heavily on most Royal Houses, and in the next generation, if not in this, will have to be met by some system of dropping the collaterals. The people will not maintain a whole caste in idleness, the roads to activity once so widely open to all of Royal descent, are now closed to them, and the family fortunes, great as they are, are insufficient for a burden which in- creases so rapidly. Admit that the Austrian income from property reaches £600,000 a year,—a very large admission,— and still, if sixty Archdncal houses are to be kept up out of it, there will not be much left for the Sovereign to spend. The Royalties of Europe not actually close to thrones, will, we are convinced, within thirty years be disestablished ; and we con- fess to a curiosity to see the form that painful process will take. Will our children live to see the Princes a noble but un- paid caste, like the descendants of Confucius, or will they see a Hapsburg taken into partnership by the Rothschilds, or a descendant of George III. seeking fees as a barrister or an oculist ? There is a "Royalty," a real one too, who cures people's eyes even now ; suppose his son takes pay for that beneficial work ? Seriously, the social privileges which accompany a descent from Kings, must, within one more generation, be confined somehow to a thinner and straighter line.
Previous page
