The Intermountain Catholic. (Salt Lake City [Utah] ;) 1899-1920, 1904-12-03
THE THoRNs OF ROYALTY.

Few people in this country have any idea of the
suffering which royal personages have to endure
III Europe from the lack Of privacy Inherent I'm their
rank An extraordinary illustration thereof was
furnished the other day at Madrid on the occasion
of the particularly sad death of the king of SPANS
elder sister, the 22-year-old princess of the
Asturias, who succumbed to failure of the heart
torty-eght hours after giving premature birth to an
infanta
If ever people yearn for privacy it is when
gathered around the death bed of a dearly loved
daughter, wife, and sister to receive her last fare
well. Queen Christina, King Alfonso. the Infauta
Maria Theresa and Don Carlos of Bourbon. hus
band of the dying woman, were thus assembled after
the princess had received absoution from the
father confessOr of the family, when suddenly the
great folding doors of the apartment were thrown
OPEN and, escorted by the haberdiers of the royal
guard, the grand almoner Of the court. followed
by all the canons and dignitaries of the chapel
royal. some forty III number. by all the grand dig
ntarles of the court and officials of the royal house
hold, and by all the grandees, men and women, who
happened to be appraised in time of the impending
ceremony, marched into the death chamber each
bearing lighted candle. All dropped on their
knees, the halberdiers we'll as the others, and
after administering the viaticum the grand amoner
commenced to recite the prayers for the dying. to
which the responses were made by the attendant
clergy and by all others present Before twenty
minutes had gone by the princess had passed away.
While the scene was solemn, yet the presence of
that vast crowd OF people, some of them compare
tive strangers and barely known to the royal family
at such moment must have added to the distress
or the bereaved husband, mother and other rela-
tives. They would naturally have preferred that
the young princess should have been left to them
and to their family chaplain and trusted spiritual
adviser during those last sad moments.
But the memorable laws of Spanish court Ell
quette require that it should be otherwise and that
when member of the royal family is about to die
and sometimes the death agony is terrible to be-
hold, though it not so in the case of the
princess of the Asturias-a the dignitaries of the
court, all the guards on duty the servants of the
palace, and all the noblemen and nobewomen of
grandee rank who may happen to be at the palace
should have the right to put in an appearance
around the royal death bed and to witness the royal
demise.
1t is in keeping with those other barbaric Gus
toms which exact that the corpse of Spanish royalty
should be reduced to the condition of a mummy
by not merely months but years of exposure to the
dry atmosphere of the vaults cut in the rock on
which the palace of the Escurial is built before be-
ing laid to their last rest in the tomb that forms
feature of the palace mausoleum and church: which
requires the presence of all sorts of great dign-
tares OF state at royal births, TO safeguard against
any danger of suppoSition, and which at Vienna
at Dresden, at Munich, etc, demand that the heart
the vscera, and the brain of the royal dead should
be consigned to the care of other churches and ca
thedras than those where the mutated BODY is laid
The existence of royalty is married by many
thorns and one cannot feel astonished that they
should sometimes express their eagerness to barter
all the advantages of their rank for those enjoyed
by even the humbest peasantly-name: privacy and
immunity from the laws of court etiquette