FACTS ABOUT ROYAL LOVE LETTERS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 140, 9 December 1911, Page 10 (Supplement)

FACTS ABOUT ROYAL LOVE LETTERS.

The recent sale by auction in London of letters written by different Royal personages is a painful reminder of the sordid fact that everything has its. price.. Even the love-letters of kings and queens, intended to be sacred to one pair of eyes, have been desecrated with the vulgar gaze, and the still more vulgar bidding for possession. It is enough to make their exalted writers turn in their graves. What consolation would it be to poor Mary Queen of Scots to know that a letter written by her in captivity realised the other day the amazing sum of £1025? Would it sooth her troubled mind to know that this was a record, or that the said letter was acquired by its late owner for a few pence over 4Gs? Catherine of Aragon, too, would probably have had a fit had she known that 377 years after it was written a letter of hers would be knocked down to the highest bidder in a London auction room. Particularly so, considering that the missive was on the subject of divorce. The fact that the letter realised the sum of £BOO, an enormous advance on the £2O paid for it, would scarcely have reconciled her to such a gross indignity. Judging from a letter written by her to her brother, Lord Parr, Catherine of that ilk, another wife of the husband of Catherine of Aragon, would appear to have been very proud of her marriage. It might have marred "the greatest joye and comfort that would happen to me in this world" could she have foreseen that the letter in which she thus described her marriage to Henry VIIL would become a subject of twentiethcentury bids.

And she certainly would have been jealous of the other Catherine of her Sovereign lord and .master could she have divined that her missive would 'only be considered worth £175, although this was a substantial price compared with the £27 paid for it when it previously changed hands. A letter from Good Queen Bess is worth a good deal more than double that sum. In the same sale a threepaged epistle in the handwriting of Elizabeth found a purchaser at £365. The price at which it had been acquired was scarcely more than one-fifth of that sum —£75.

But even that £3<is for the Virgin Queen's ' three-paged letter was considerably less than the amount paid during the same sale for a much shorter epistle, of which Mary Tudor, her elder sister, was the writer.

This letter only extended to a single page, but it commanded .the price of £420, or £35 more than the letter in the caligraphy of Mary's sister and successor in the throne of England. The subject matter of the communication, its state of preservation, the person to whom it is addressed, and many other considerations are factors in fixing the price or value of such a relic. Curiously enough, the amount at which it had previously changed hands—£Bl —shows that this letter of Mary's had appreciated in value in the same ratio as the longer one of Elizabeth's—a fact worth noting. Some time ago a love-letter written by Napoleon Bonaparte found a market in Berlin, much to the disgust of the people of Paris. Tt was addressed from Vernoa to La Citoyenne Bonaparte, the captivating Josephine. Napolcoii was then commanding the army in Italy, and expresses heartfelt regret at his absence from his dear little Josephine. The- tone of the whole letter was warm and passionate. The missive was said to have belonged to the Meyer Cohen collection, but how it found'its way to the German capital was not explained. All that it realised was £125.