Duke of Albany

“ To the queen's satisfaction the little Duke of Albany was adopted on 30 June 1899 as heir presumptive to the beloved principality. The arrangement unhappily took practical effect earlier than she anticipated. ”

“ Hence it is collected that this is the country which the ancients called Albany, and part of the residence of the ancient Scots, who still retain the name, and call themselves “Albinkich,” together with the ancient language and habit, continuing to be a hardy, brave, and warlike people, and very parsimonious in their way of living; and from this country the sons of the royal family of Scotland took the title of “duke of Albany;” and since the union of the two crowns, it has been found amongst the royal titles of the dukes of York. ”

“ The Duke's marriage took place, as we have recorded, on the 27th of April, 1882, and in 1883 a daughter was born to him, who received the dear and hallowed name of "Alice."
In March, 1884, the Duke of Albany went to Cannes in order to escape the spring east winds, leaving the Duchess, who was in a delicate state of health, behind him at Claremont. He appeared to profit by his stay of a few weeks in the south of France, was unusually well in health and in excellent spirits, entering generally into the society of the place. ”

“ Documents relating to Scotl. iv. 1438) ; on 2 Feb. 1476–7 was sent to conduct the bearer of the third instalment of the Princess Cecilia’s dower to Edinburgh (ib. 1445) ; and on 19 Feb. 1477-8 was ordered to bring almoner of Edward IV from the march to the presence of the king (ib. 1451) . Jealous of the authority and rights exercised by the Duke of Albany, brother of the king, as captain of Berwick, and keeper of the castle of Dunbar, Lord Home banded with the Hepburns to sow discord between Albany and the king, and was so successful that Albany only escaped imprisonment by flight to England. ”

“ In Lord Salisbury’s house he was always a welcome and honored guest, for in a letter to “his little girl” from Hatfield House he tells her of the Duchess of Albany and her two children.
“She is the widow of Prince Leopold (the Queen’s youngest son) , so her children are a Prince and a Princess; the girl is Alice, but I don’t know the boy’s Christian name; they call him ‘Albany’ because he is the Duke of Albany.
“Now that I have made friends with a real live little Princess, I don’t intend ever to speak to children who haven’t any titles. ”

“ The reign of James III is an unsolved problem. But the constitutional feeling may be illustrated by a representative incident. The Parliament of 1482 was completely under the control of the Duke of Albany. The Estates passed acts which gave to him control of the property of the Crown, and power over the life and liberty of the lieges. One year later it rescinded all these acts and proscribed the duke. They may be right who have found great constitutional activity in the mysterious records of the reign. ”

“ Seaforth Highlanders (Ross-shire Buffs, the Duke of Albany’s) .—Facings, buff, except for the 5th (Sutherland and Caithness Highland Battalion) , which are yellow.
R.C.—In each of the four corners the late Duke of York’s cypher and coronet (i.e., Frederick, at one time Duke of Albany) . The motto, “Cuidich’n Righ” (Help the King) , was given to the Mackenzie as a reward for protecting Alexander II. when attacked by a wounded stag. ”

“ The ambition of the lords, and the caprices of the queen-mother—a true sister of Henry VIII—fill up the minority of the king. Parliament met only to ratify appointments which [89] it had no power to question, and to deal with official business. It is possible that the Estates chose the Duke of Albany as regent. But it is almost certain that the impulse must have come from some of the leading nobles or prelates ”

“ In January 1398–9, in accordance with the previous understanding, Albany was succeeded in the governorship of the kingdom by the heir to the crown, the Duke of Rothesay, who was elected for three years, and was to act with the advice of a council, of which Albany was one of the principal members (Acta Parl. Scot. i. 572) . Whether or how far Albany was jealous of this transference of power to Rothesay is matter of dispute. ”

“ ALBANY, Leopold George Duncan Albert, 1 Duke of (8 child and 4 son of Queen Victoria) . b. Buckingham palace 7 April 1853. K.G. 24 May 1869, K.T. 24 May 1871; matric. at Univ. of Ox. (Ch. Ch.) 1872; D.C.L. 1876; P.C. 1874; admitted by patrimony to freedom of city of London 25 Oct. 1875; a younger brother of the Trinity House 1875; an elder brother 1878; G.C.S.I. 25 Jany. 1877; a bencher of Lincoln’s Inn 18 June 1877; G.C.M.G. 24 May 1880; created Duke of Albany, Earl of Clarence, and Baron Arklow 24 May 1881. d. Villa Nevada, Cannes at 2 a.m. 28 March 1884. bur. royal tomb, St. ”

“ I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall. ”

“ Nevertheless, to Hepburn the loss of this great preferment was permanently galling; and becoming one of the chief confidants of Albany, he revenged himself by poisoning the duke's mind against both Angus and Home. They therefore found it expedient to make common cause with each other. In accordance with a decision of the estates, Albany determined to obtain possession of the young king, but this was met by the queen with the proposal that he should be committed to the custody of four persons nominated by herself, her husband Angus and Home being two of these. ”

“ The attempt to conduct the government in Albany's absence by dividing the power between the chief Scottish nobles and De la Bastie and the French commanders failed. No sooner had the duke left Scotland than the old dissensions broke out among the nobles. On 15 June Queen Margaret returned to Scotland, little more than a week after Albany's departure. Towards the end of July or beginning of August De la Bastie was slain by David Hume of Wedderburn in revenge for Albany having put his chief to death. ”

“ Those caitiffs would have dome me foul despite.
VII
" 'Tis fitting you should know, that in the spring
Of life, I to the palace made resort;
There served long time the daughter of the king,
And grew with her in growth, well placed in court.
When cruel love, my fortune envying,
Willed I should be his follower and his sport;
And made, beyond each Scottish lord and knight,
Albany's duke find favour in my sight.
VIII
"And for he seemed to cherish me above
All mean; his love a love as ardent bred.
We hear, indeed, and see, but do not prove
Man's faith, nor is his bosom's purpose read. ”

“ The distance from Springfield to Albany is eighty-one miles. The above villages have a neat and comfortable appearance, and the fields were in a good state of cultivation. Upon our arrival at Schoodie the night was just setting in, but unfortunately we were lighted by a burning house upon an eminence not far off. At the village of Greenbush, near Albany, we crossed the Hudson or North river in a horse-boat, and upon our arrival in the city took lodgings at Cruttenden’s boarding-house, on an eminence near the capitol or state-house.
Albany contains about fifteen thousand inhabitants. ”

“ He was trained as a soldier, and served with some distinction under the emperor. Visiting England after the accession of his brother, he was created Duke of York and Albany and Earl of Ulster on 29 June 1716, and was, together with his great-nephew Frederick, afterwards Prince of Wales, elected a knight of the Garter. ”

“ My debt to the kindness of persons who have put unpublished matter at my disposal, or helped me to collect various information, is a large one. In the first category, I wish to express my best thanks to the Director of the Public Library at Siena; to Cavaliere Guiseppe Porri, a great collector of autographs, in the same city; to the Countess Baldelli and Cavaliere Emilio Santarelli of Florence, who possess some most curious portraits and other relics of the Countess of Albany, Prince Charles Edward, and Alfieri ”

“ And when, at the beginning of February 1788, the Countess of Albany, in the full enjoyment of her love for Alfieri, and of the pleasures of the most brilliant Parisian society, received the news that on the last day of January Charles Edward had passed away peacefully in the arms of the Duchess Charlotte; and that the drink-soiled broken body, from which she must so often have recoiled in disgust and terror, had been laid out, with the sad mock royalty of a gilt wooden sceptre and pinchbeck crown, in state in the cathedral of Frascati ”

“ Setting to work after the manner of one possessed of the same supreme authority as the King of France, Albany began his government with an air of rigour, insomuch that the common historians speak of him as having resolved to suppress the turbulent spirit of the age, and assert the supremacy of law and order. ”

“ By insisting upon royal honours such as had been enjoyed by his father, but which the Papal Court, anxious to keep on good terms with England, absolutely refused to give him, the Pretender had virtually cut himself and his wife out of all Roman society; for he would not know the nobles on a footing of equality, and they, on the other hand, dared know him on no other. The great entertainments in the palaces where Charles Edward had so often danced, the admired of all beholders, in his boyhood, were not for the Count and Countess of Albany. ”

“ Thus, seeing crowds of the most distinguished and delightful people, receiving piles of the most interesting and adoring letters, happy, self-satisfied, Mme. d'Albany grew into an old woman. Every evening until ten, the rooms of the Casa Alfieri were thrown open; the servants in the Stuart liveries ushered in the guests, the tea was served in those famous services emblazoned with the royal arms of England. ”

“ He made free of the queen’s rents and abducted Lord Traquair’s daughter. The queen set about to obtain a divorce, and used her influence for the return of Albany as a means of undoing her husband’s power. Albany’s arrival in November 1521, with a large body of French men-at-arms, compelled Angus, with the bishop and others, to flee to the Borders. From this retreat Gavin Douglas was sent by the earl to the English court, to ask for aid against the French party and against the queen, who was reported to be the mistress of the regent. ”

“ The Pretender, we must remember, had offered a thousand sequins to anyone who would kill Alfieri; and even in that humdrum late eighteenth century a man of position might easily hire a couple of ruffians to waylay a carriage and kidnap a woman.
The Countess of Albany was installed in the Ursuline convent in Via Vittoria, a street near the Piazza di Spagna. A gloomy family memory hung about the place: it had been the asylum of Clementina Sobieska when she had fled from the elder Pretender as Louise d'Albany had fled from the younger. ”

“ For we must bear in mind what a man like Alfieri, in the heyday of his youth, his beauty, and that genius which was the indomitable energy and independence of his nature, must have been in the eyes of the Countess of Albany. ”

“ Count Vittorio Alfieri; and all of them doubtless took a great interest in him as her lover, and a little interest in him as the great poet of Italy; not certainly without wondering—amiable people as they were, and persuaded that France and Paris alone existed—that Mme. d'Albany should find anything to love in this particularly rude and disagreeable man, and that a country like Italy should have the impudence to set up a poet of its own. The Countess of Albany, made to be a leader of intellectual society, was happy ”

“ And thus, one day in the autumn of 1777, there was brought, we know not by whom, half-curious and half-indifferent, to the salon of the Countess of Albany a certain very tall, thin, pale young man of twenty-eight, with handsome, mobile, rather hard aquiline features, choleric, flashing blue eyes, and a head of crisp, bright red hair; a man of fashion, nattily dressed in the Sardinian uniform, but with something strange, untamed, morose about his whole aspect which contrasted singularly with the effete gracefulness and amiability of young Florentine dandies. ”

“ Writers and artists, beautiful women, diplomatists, journalists, pedants, men of science, women of fashion, Châteaubriand and Mme. de Staël, Lamartine and Paul Louis Courier, Mme. Récamier and the Duchess of Devonshire, Canova and Foscolo, and Sismondi and Werner, the whole intellectual world of the Empire and the Restoration, all seem to be projected, figures now flitting past like shadows, now dwelling long, clear and coloured, upon the rather colourless and patternless background of Mme. d'Albany's house ”

“ But to us, who have followed the career—whose lesson is that of the meanness which lurks in noble things, the nobility which lurks in mean ones—of this woman from her inauspicious wedding-day to the placid day of her death, to us Louise of Stolberg, Countess of Albany, Queen of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, will remain, for all blame we may give her and her times, a figure to remember and reflect upon, principally because of those suppressed words of her epitaph: "A Victorio Alferio ultra res omnes dilecta, et quasi mortale numen ab ipso constanter habita et observata." ”

“ Forty-four years later, when the Queen of Hearts was a stout, dowdy old lady, with no traces of beauty, and himself a flighty, amiable old gossip of seventy, Karl Victor von Bonstetten wrote to the Countess of Albany from Rome: "I never pass through the Apostles' square without looking up at that balcony, at that house where I saw you for the first time." ”

“ Alfieri a perfect being—a being adored and venerated by Mme. d'Albany! One cannot help, in reading these words, smiling sadly at the strange magic by which Death metamorphoses those whom he has taken in the eyes of the survivors; at the strange potions by means of which he makes love spring up in the hearts where it has ceased to exist, saving us from hypocrisy by making us really feel what is false to our nature, enabling us to lie to ourselves instead of lying to others. The Countess of Albany's grief was certainly most sincere ”