The _Imparcial_, in an article dealing with Señor Maura’s assertion, immediately after his fall in 1909, that the Conservatives are the only bulwark against revolution and the only support of the Throne, recalled this fact, and added that “without the Liberals the Throne would not exist now, because the Liberals rescued it from revolution after it had been shaken by the bloody attacks of Carlism. Without Sagasta, without Castelar, the Spanish monarchy would not be.” Yet so persistently has the story of the Queen Mother’s clericalist leanings been repeated by those interested in its acceptance during the twenty-three years that King Alfonso XIII. has been on the throne, that the mass of the people still believe that she defers to the Jesuits even in matters in which their interference cannot fail to injure the King in the eyes of his people--a preposterous misconception, which cannot be corrected too soon. Quite lately I heard a working woman say: “She cannot be a Jesuit, as they say. A Jesuit mother could not have borne such children as hers. Look at the King! He has none too much love for the _curas_ (priests). Yet we have always been told that Queen Cristina is a Jesuit! Why should that be said? These are _cosas de los frailes_ (doings of the friars) ‘said to make us dislike her.’” In one town where I had some acquaintances among the clergy, I was struck by the malicious things that were said by them about the young Queen, and especially about her relations with the Queen Mother. Not long before I went there I happened to have heard a very pleasant account of the private life of the Royal Family from a foreigner, entirely outside of politics, who was for a short time employed in one of the palaces while the Royal Family were in residence. His description left no doubt at all as to the happiness of their home life. With this in my mind I did not feel greatly concerned at being informed by various Ultramontanes that “Queen Victoria was on the worst terms with the Queen Mother, who had never forgiven her for having been brought up a Protestant,” and that “Maura had refused to let her go to England after the Barcelona affair, because she was so miserable in Madrid that she had declared she would never return to Spain if once she got back to her own country.”