Turning to the social events of 1885, the most remarkable was the sudden announcement on New Year’s Day of the betrothal of the Princess Beatrice to Prince Henry of Battenberg, the younger brother of Prince Louis, the husband of the Princess’s niece--Victoria of Hesse. For fourteen years the Princess Beatrice had been the close companion of the Queen, and their lives had in time become so closely intertwined that a separation could hardly be contemplated by either with equanimity. It was therefore quite natural that Prince Henry of Battenberg, whose fortune was hardly adequate to the maintenance of a separate establishment, should permit intimation to be made that he was to live with the Princess in attendance on the Queen. The announcement of the marriage was as surprising to the Royal Family as it was to the people. In the country the old prejudice against the marriage of a Princess who claimed a dowry from the State, with a person outside the Royal caste speedily manifested itself. Indeed, the feeling against the arrangement was even stronger than that which prevailed when the Princess Louise married the Marquis of Lorne. After all, the latter was the son of a great noble on whose birth no stain of ambiguity rested. Prince Henry of Battenberg, on the other hand, was the offspring of a “morganatic” marriage between Prince Alexander of Hesse and the Countess Hauke, the granddaughter of a Polish Jew, who had entered the service of the Hessian Court in a very subordinate capacity. It was difficult to get the populace to understand that a morganatic marriage was in a certain sense a legal union--not void, though possibly under pressure of State exigencies voidable by the Royal husband--that in fact there was nothing disreputable in such an alliance, save in the sense in which it is considered a social offence for a great noble to marry his mother’s scullery-maid. The hostility of the German Crown Princess and the Court of Berlin to the connection did much to create an erroneous impression in England as to the status of Prince Henry. The Prince’s lack of fortune did not redeem his lack of social position--and it was most unfortunate that his nearest connection with Royalty was through his cousin the Grand Duke of Hesse. For the divorce suit raised by the Grand Duke against the Countess de Kalomine, a lady whom he had “morganatically” married in secret on the very night when his daughter, the Princess Victoria, was wedded to Prince Louis of Battenberg, had rendered his family extremely unpopular in England.