THE DUKE OF EDINBURGH'S PROCLIVITIES.

Thames Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2967, 19 August 1878, Page 2

THE DUKE OF EDINBURGH'S PROCLIVITIES.

The Whitehall Review has the following :—" Most unwilling, with more than reluctance, we revert to the Royal Duke who has occupied for so long an utterly false position in the Mediterranean Squadron. A little more excilemefit in naval circles and the • contemplated recall of H.R.H. would have been inevitable ; as it is, the Admiralty, by a series of polite shuffles resembling legerdemain, have continued to keep an officer of pro-Rus-sian proclivities afloat at a moment when an accidental gunshot may involve us in war with his wife's father. True, he was ordered far beyond the range of Bosphorus forts, and has been permitted to amuse himself by cruising between Malta and Syracuse in company with a particular set of officers who understand him and can tolerate his somewhat antiEnglish political opinions. It amounts, however, to something beyond a scandal that an officer ho'ding the Queen's Commission should criticise without reserve the policy of the Government in opposing the aggression of Russia, and fur-

ther exhibit his animus by treating the Indian officers who were de rigtur introduced to him on their arrival at Malta with such pronounced coolness as to have caused a scene. That the Duchess should have followed suit and flouted the brave men who had travelled Eotben to give an account of her stolid compatriots was perhaps not quite unnatural, but that she should have complained of the presence of these officers as being a violation of good taste goes very far towards demonstrating that both she and her husband are decidedly de trop, riot only at Malta but wherever the Queen's flag flies. It is, we learn, a fact that whilst the Duke received the officers of his mother's Indian Army with studied hauteur, his wife forgot her ladyhood so for as to turn her back upon them.