2-982-365 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

His Royal Highness the Prince of Orange, 1858. 'The cities of Holland...put on their holiday attire, to pay due honour [to the prince] on his attaining his majority. The Constitution of Holland provides that no subject of his Majesty shall be of age before his twenty-third birthday, but that the King is of age on his eighteenth birthday. The Prince of Orange completed his eighteenth year on Saturday last; and, as his Royal Highness is still a subject, many thought that the King intended to abdicate in favour of his son. Hence the rumours on this subject that were floating about the French and English papers...There are others who aver that this premature coming of age of the heir to the throne was a manoeuvre for securing for the Prince State pay and a State household five years before he could constitutionally claim them...it was stated [in the press] that the Prince of Orange had asked, and been promised, the hand of our Princess Alice; and, though the subject is less talked about now than it was then, and is by many altogether discredited, it is still thought in high quarters that such an alliance will eventually be effected...The Prince, it is said by those well up in palace gossip, intends passing two years at the University of Oxford'. From "Illustrated London News", 1858.