High Tempered

Queen Wilhelmina of Holland is by no manner of means the “docile, submissive, and sweet-tempered girl” that she has been represented to be by the English press during her recent visit to London. On the contrary, she is exceedingly hot-tempered and passionate, and is preserved from being downright intolerable only by her warm heart, which causes her quickly to regret any pain she may have inflicted in a moment of anger.

Docility and submissiveness are about the last qualifications that could be accorded to her. The members of the royal household at The Hague tell very amusing stories of the battles royal that take place between the young queen and her fat and, in the main, good-humored mother, who experiences the greatest difficulty in preventing her daughter from giving way to all those extravagant and often preposterous impulses to which young girls of 15 and 16 are so prone.

Indeed, Queen Wilhelmina has been known to threaten her mother with all sorts of royal reprisals when she ascends the throne, and those who imagine that she will permit herself to be swayed by the lady who administers the regency with so much sagacity and common sense will find themselves very much mistaken.

She gives every promise of ultimately treating her mother in the same way as Queen Victoria did the Duchess of Kent. Queen Victoria was scarcely 18 years of age when she ascended the British throne and was fully as high-tempered and warm-hearted as young Queen Wilhelmina.

Yet as soon as she became queen she cooly relegated her mother to the background and declined to be influenced or led by her in any way whatsoever, seeking counsel of comparative strangers and showing a considerable amount of animosity to persons such as Sir John Conroy and others of her mother’s entourage, who in accordance with the instructions of the duchess had made a point of treating the royal girl with a good deal of strictness, not to say severity.