RUMORED ROYAL MARRIAGE.

Patea Mail, Volume VI, Issue 526, 29 May 1880, Page 3

RUMORED ROYAL MARRIAGE.

Another blow is about to be struck at the Royal Marriage Act, if we may trust the rumors which reach us of the betrothal of Prince Leopold, the youngest son of Queen Victoria, to the most brilliant beauty and greatest heiress of the current season in London, Miss Frances-Evelyn Maynard, the oldest daughter of the late Hon Charles Maynard, of Essex, who predeceased his father in January, 1865. Lord Maynard, a descendant of the great lawyer, died three months after his son, Avhen the title became extinct, and his groat estate passed to his eldest granddaughter, the young lady who is now said to be engaged to Prince Leopold. Miss Maynard has just entered her ninteenth year, and on her presentation at a recent drawing-room held by the Queen, she seems to have taken London by storm, not only by her extraordinary beauty, but by a grace and stateliness which are not always the leading characteristics of British debutantes. The fashionable chroniclers went into ccstacies over the way in which she made her “ curtsey to the Queen,” an operation which is very apt to disconcert the most self-possessed of young women when it has to be performed in a robe with a sweeping train, and under the concentrated stare of a small regiment of her sister-women. She is said also to be as accomplished and amiable as she is lovely and graceful, and as she comes into estates valued at £30,000 a-year, the rents of which have been accumulating for her ever since her grand-fatber’s death in 1865, it must be admitted that Queen Victoria might do worse for her only bachelor son than to provide him with such a bride.—ondon correspondent.