I shall never forget the fact that the King of Spain, during my talk with him, remarked: "Remember that while I am King of Spain, I am also an Austrian Archduke."
And not only is the King of Spain by descent and in the right of his father an Archduke of Austria but his mother was an Austrian Princess of the House of Hapsburg. Study, for the moment, the genealogy of the King and Queen of Spain and you will see how royalty is inter-related in this war.
The Queen of Spain was brought up at the court of the late Queen Victoria of England and is a Battenberg princess. In 1823, Alexander, Prince of Hesse and the Rhine, took in morganatic marriage a Countess von Hauke. He made her Countess of Battenberg and in 1858 she was given the title by the ruler of Hesse, of Princess Battenberg, her children and their descendants to take the same title. One of these Battenbergs, descendants of Countess von Hauke, married Beatrice, daughter of Queen Victoria, and the daughter of the marriage is the present Queen of Spain, who just before her marriage to Alfonso was created a Royal Highness by King Edward VII. Queen Victoria Eugenia has become quite Spanish. With a mantilla on her head, she attends bull fights and is very popular.
The father of Alfonso XIII, Alfonso XII, was very intimate with the German Court. In 1883, he visited the old Emperor William I in Germany and accepted the colonelcy of a Uhlan regiment then in garrison in Strassburg, one of the towns taken from France in 1870. On his return journey he stopped in Paris and was the object of a popular demonstration so violent that the President of France and his ministers called in a body to apologise.
Shortly thereafter the Crown Prince (later Emperor) Friedrich paid a visit to Spain and an intimacy was maintained between the two courts.
It is the inclination of those in the king business to keep together and a tradition of Prussia that fellow Kings must be sustained and, if possible, maintained against democracy. That's why the Kaiser finds reciprocal sympathy in Spain.
Our popular Ambassador, Mr. Willard, and his staff, with a representative of the Spanish Foreign Office, met us at the station at Madrid on my arrival from Paris.
Madrid is a handsome city, comparatively modern. From its highest point the great Royal Palace dominates the capital and from the palace the royal park stretches unbroken to the Guadarrama mountains sixty miles away.
In many respects Spain seems a land upside down. We arrived at Madrid just at the close of the Carnival season. Masked balls began at three in the afternoon and many theatres not until ten or even eleven at night. Madrid sleeps late. The rich people get up only in time for lunch. The streets are full of noise and people until four in the morning, the sellers of lottery tickets making special efforts to swell the volume of night sounds.
My visit to the King of Spain was at eleven in the morning. Ambassador Willard went with me. As we entered the palace and waited at the foot of an elevator, the car descended and one of the little Princes of Spain, about eight years old, dressed in a sailor suit, stepped out. Evidently he had been trained in royal urbanity for he immediately came up to us, shook hands and said, "Buenos dias."