Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 20, Number 54, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 March 1899 — MARRIED BY PROXY. [ARTICLE]

MARRIED BY PROXY.

No Leu Thou Three Queen* Hove Thai Acquired Their Titles. One of the queerest features of court life in Europe is the marriage by proxy of royal personages. There are at the present moment no less than three royal ladies who have been thus wedded —the queen regent of Spain, the dowager queen of Portugal and the exqueen of Naples. Kings and reigning sovereigns are held to be too important personages to be married anywhere else than in their own dominions. On the other hand, it is held to be infra dignitate for a spinster princess of the blood, who is about to blossom forth into a fullfledged queen or empress, to travel abroad in quest of a consort. In order to, meet this difficulty the royal or imperial bridegroom delegates one of the principal nobles of the realm, who goes through the religious and civil portion of the wedding eeremony in the capital of the bride’s country on behalf of his master, making the responses for him and tendering his hand, as well as the ring, at the prescribed points of the ceremony. Ho then accompanies her i to his master’s dominions, acting as her chief escort. Aocording to the ideas of the Homan Catholic church, a ceremony of this kind is sufficiently binding upon the bride and upon the royal bridegroom to render any further ceremony, ecclesiastical or civil, superfluous, and when any additional religiouß function takes place it usually assumes the form of a "TeDeum” and a solemn benediction, attended by both husband and wife immediately on the arrival of the latter in the capital of her adopted country.— Ban Francisco Argonaut.