The House of Guelph. Some Reminiscences of the Dukes of Brunswick and their Wealth.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 83, 3 January 1885, Page 4

The House of Guelph. Some Reminiscences of the Dukes of Brunswick and their Wealth.

The extinction of the senior branch of the House of Guelph is an advent of no European import, but of considerable interest to those acquainted with its history. Wilhelm, the last Duke of Brunswick, vegetated rather than governed. He was called to reign over the duchy in consequence of the intrigues ofhis relatives George IV. and Ernest, .Duke of Cumberland, the counterintrigues of Prussia and Austria, who did not like the House of Hanover to be too strong in Germany, and of the turbulent eccentricity and litigous spirit and despotic tendency of his eldest brother, Carl 11. Thi3 latter potentate in 1830, when the pld ducal palace of Brunswick was sacked by an angry mob, and its unique library and portraits of the great men who advanced the cause of the Reformation burned, was 26 years old, a beau, and as careful of his porsonal appearance as a belle who fears the approaches of old age. He was the godson of 16 first and second-class sovereigns, male and female, including his aunts, the Empress of Russia, the Queen of Sweden, and the Queen of Denmark, and his greatuncle, George 111. of England. In 1830 he was also the richost man in Europe. The eccentric Duke's minority was long, and the personal estate, which was at nurse during the eleven years intervening between his father's death and his majority, amounted to £8,000,000 sterling, or $40,000,000. He had, besides, vast feudal and allodial possessions, and the finest plate, porcelain, and diamonds in Germany. Duke Carl 11., who lived in the rose pink ; house in the Rue de Beaugon from the time he was chased from Brunswick by his subjects to the year 1870, carried with him from Germany 200,000,000 francs or 140,000,000 in money, gold and silver and precious stones. In England there was an idea that all the minor German sovereigns were poor as church mice. This feeling was rife in the^eighteenth century. Squire Western expressed it in his abuse of "the Hanoverian rats" and of the "Hoiiee of Hand-over." One day in Fielding's time the daughters of George 11. were hooted by a London mob. The Princess Ann, afterward Queen of Holland, put her head out of the carriage window and in a strong German accent cried: "Why do you hoot us that way ? Are we not come to England for all your goods?" She meant to say "ior your good.") "Yes, be hanged to you !" retorted the crowd, "and for all our chattels, too!" It is probable that the hereditory estates were nursed in Hanover at the cost of England. Be this as it may, the treasure of the Crown of Hanover, on which the Prussians seized, came to a fabulous amount, and after its loss an immense fortune remained to the late King, which his Queen and his son, the Duke of Cumberland, now enjoy. It is reported that the last Duke of Brunswick, who was in the bottom of his heart a Legitimist, has left the best part of his fortune to this prince, the second best part to the Emperor of Austria, and all his private artistic treasures to the Crown Prince of Prussia.— "N. Y. Tribune."