Rensselaer Journal, Volume 11, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 January 1902 — UNDERSTUDIES OF KINGS. [ARTICLE]

UNDERSTUDIES OF KINGS.

Every European Monarch Haa One but the Job is Growing Unpopular. * Practically every European potentate hires an understudy, whose duty it,is to impersonate his royal master what time the latter desires to be left free from public observation or intrusion. At one period posts of this kind were eagerly sought after; but that was before the evolution of the anarchist and the nihilist. Candidates nowadays are apt to recall with a shudder the fate of Sergius Komaroff, the late czar’s double, assassinated in mistake for his sovereign and employer at Moscow a few years back; and of Abdul Hamid’s unhappy understudy (so like his royal master that even the palace, officials, so it was said, could scarcely "tell t’other from which”), who was “removed’ by the ejnissaries of one of the Armenian revolutionary committees only last summer. Not that the “billet” was ever a particular “soft” one. Count Capo d’lstria, president of Greece, originated the idea, and he had the mortification of losing two of his best doubles in less than eighteen -months. In Spain, where court etiquette is exacting and inexorable beyond all conception, it would be well-nigh impossible even for a sovereign who was a man or woman grown to do without an understudy. To a child, such an ordeal would be quite out of the question. Consequently, the little Leon Alphonso, who, as all the world knows, came into the world a king, has had a succession of understudies from his cradle upwards. They have, for the most part, however, had a fairly safe if not particularly easy time of it, their duties being principally limited to deputizing for the boy monarch in as many as possible of the endless and tiresome court ceremonials. The last understudy of Queen Victoria is now living quietly in retirement in a little Gloucestershire village.