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The demand had been made on the part of the Allies by the Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, who was present with three Dutch admirals and several Dutch ships. The English admirals concerned in the siege were, besides Sir George Rooke, the chief of them, Byng, Sir Cloudesley Shovel, and Leake.
On 19 July, the Confederation of the Rhine was formally established with Napoleon as Protector. The kings of Bavaria and Wuerttemberg, the grand-dukes of Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Berg, the archbishop of Mainz, and nine minor princes virtually seceded from the Holy Roman Empire and accepted the protection of Napoleon, whom they pledged themselves to support with an army of 63,000 men.
When the Duchesse de Polignac, the Comtesse Diane de Polignac, the Comte d'Artois, the Duchesse de Guiche, her husband, the present Duc de Grammont, the Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, etc., fled from Paris, he and the Queen, as if they had foreseen the awful catastrophe which was to destroy her so horribly, entreated her to leave the Court, and take refuge in Italy.
And two brief notes one on the 4th of July to Mercy, and one written a day or two later to the Landgravine of Hesse-Darmstadt are all that, so far as we know, proceeded from her pen in the sad period between the two attacks on the palace.
In December two gallant wooers were at the English Court, as a few years before King Pedro, the Arch-Duke Maximilian, and Prince Frederick William were all young bridegrooms in company. On this occasion Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt came to win Princess Alice, and the hereditary Prince of Hohenzollern Seigmaringen was on his way to ask the hand of Donna Antoine, sister of King Pedro.
In 1878 the Princess Alice, who had married in 1862 the Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, died in tragic circumstances. In the following year the Prince Imperial, the only son of the Empress Eugenie, to whom Victoria, since the catastrophe of 1870, had become devotedly attached, was killed in the Zulu War. Two years later, in 1881, the Queen lost Lord Beaconsfield, and, in 1883, John Brown.
Desperate efforts were made by the garrison to haul down the flag, but they all failed, and the Governor capitulated. The Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt was for claiming the fortress, but this Rooke would not have, and he promptly declared the Rock to be the possession of his august mistress, Queen Anne.
I hurried there and guided by the cries I found my way to a well-appointed apartment where I saw two charming girls, of about eighteen to twenty years of age, dressed only in their chemises, struggling against the advances of four or five soldiers from Hesse-Darmstadt, belonging to the regiments which the landgrave had attached to the French troops of 7th Corps.
During a visit from the Prince and Princess Charles of Hesse-Darmstadt it was settled that the young Prince Louis should come to England to get better acquainted with the Princess Alice, whom he already greatly admired.
The Prince of Wales, as chief mourner, was supported by the Crown Prince of Germany, the Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, Prince Albert Victor of Wales, and the Duke of Cambridge.
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