H.R.H. PRINCESS GEORGE OF GREECE
(née PRINCESSE MARIE BONAPARTE, ONLY DAUGHTER or H.H. PRINCE ROLAND BONAPARTE).
Princess George and her Consort were the guests of the King and Queen at the Coronation of their Majesties. The Princess is the only member of the House of Bonaparte who ever attended the Coronation of an English Sovereign. Before leaving England, Prince and Princess George were the guests of Her Majesty Queen Alexandra at Sandringham.
Specially photographed by Boissonas et Taponier, Paris, and lent for this work by H.H. Prince Roland Bonaparte.
out of the Empress’s wedding-robe. There were no spectators of this pious pilgrimage of the Princesse and the Prince, or they would have witnessed the pathetic figure of the royal pair kneeling side by side at the foot of the high altar, and imploring the Divine blessing upon their union. Warm thanks for his genial courtesy were bestowed upon the Lord Abbot, Dom Cabrol, who had summoned all the members of the Benedictine community to witness the arrival and departure of the visitors, and to be presented to the Princesse.
Princesse Napoléon’s intimate friendship with the members of the Royal Family dates from as far back as 1895. Queen Victoria had expressed a wish to make the acquaintance of the youngest daughter, and on December 3 King Leopold and Princesse Clémentine proceeded to Windsor Castle, where they spent three days. Prince Christian and Princess (and the late Prince) Henry of Battenberg met the visitors at the railway-station, and escorted them to the Castle. Queen Victoria’s guests at the royal dinner-party that evening included the Belgian Minister and the Marquis and Marchioness of Lansdowne. While at Windsor Princesse Clémentine was taken to the cavalry barracks at Spittal, where she saw a “double ride” by non-commissioned officers and men of the 2nd Life Guards. From Windsor King Leopold and the Princesse went to Sandringham on a visit, from Saturday until Monday, to the then Prince and Princess of Wales, the former accompanying them to St. Pancras on the conclusion of their visit.
Princesse Napoléon has two sisters: one, Stéphanie, married, as her first husband, the Austrian Archduke Rudolf, and, secondly, Comte Lonyay; the other, Louise, became the wife of Prince Philip of Saxe-Coburg, a son of the celebrated Princesse Clémentine (daughter of Louis Philippe, King of the French until his abdication in 1848), and consequently brother of Ferdinand, King and Tsar of the Bulgarians. Princesse Stéphanie’s widowhood was brought about by the Archduke’s tragic death in his hunting-box at Meyerling—a mysterious drama of which there are many versions, all of them unsatisfactory.
The story of Princesse Louise’s wedded life is only a shade less poignant than that of her sister Stéphanie. It has been told, in all its harrowing details, by a young Austrian officer, Count Mattachich, in a volume which had a sale of more than 30,000 before it was seized and its further circulation in the Austrian Empire prohibited by the Government. It is a narrative of dissensions between Princesse Louise and her husband, of bills of exchange bearing the signatures of herself and her sister, the widowed Archduchess, of a charge of falsification brought against the Lieutenant, of his imprisonment, of the placing of Princesse Louise under surveillance as being of weak mind, and of a discussion on all these circumstances in the Reichsrath. The death of King Leopold led to the opening of another chapter of family quarrels relating to the manner in which he had disposed of much of his large fortune by gifts to the lady whom he had made Baroness Vaughan, and to whom, it was publicly asserted by an ecclesiastical dignitary, he had been married. Princesse Louise displayed no indications of feeble-mindedness when, in May, 1911, she contested her father’s will. The little ironies of royal lives, as well as those of humbler rank, are illustrated by the fact that Prince Philip of Saxe-Coburg was among the wedding-guests bidden to Moncalieri.