The King and the Queen are then described, and attention is drawn to the position of the Heir Apparent after he has contracted what is known as a morganatic marriage.
The King and Queen (proceeds the review) insist upon ignoring the marriage, and try to compel their son to commit bigamy by marrying a woman of the royal caste. The Prince, however--and in this Marie Corelli departs from the old legend which appears to have suggested this episode--has an unconquerable repugnance to the demand that he should commit bigamy for the good of the State.
The King, at the time when the story opens, has as his Prime Minister an aged Marquis, who is a dark, heavy man of intellectual aspect, whose manner is profoundly discouraging to all who seek to win his sympathy, and whose ascendancy in his own Cabinet is overshadowed by that of a Secretary of State, who bears an extraordinary resemblance to a certain Secretary of State who shall be nameless. This “honorable statesman” is hand-in-glove with an alien journalist, who is described here and there in terms which fit more or less loosely to one or two proprietors of journals of very large circulations in London town. With the aid of this supreme embodiment of the mercenary journalism of our latter day, the Secretary of State conceives the idea of working up a war for the annexation of a small State, whose conquest was certain to increase the value of various shares in which the Secretary and his friends had largely speculated, and further, to extricate them from various political difficulties in which they had found themselves involved.
We have Miss Corelli’s authority for stating, with all possible emphasis, that “Temporal Power” was written without the least intention on the part of the author to introduce living personalities under a romantic disguise. As touching the character of the defaulting Secretary of State, Carl Perousse, with which a large number of writers (including Mr. Stead) have sought to identify Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, it may be pointed out that if the author had any prominent European statesman at all in view, it was a well-known Italian minister, now deceased, as any one with judgment and knowledge of Italian affairs could testify--though Perousse is made tall and thin in the book, with the express object that he shall escape association with the said Italian minister, who was short and fat. Nothing has astonished the novelist more than the numerous letters she has received from members of Mr. Chamberlain’s party in which it is stated that the villainous Perousse is “exactly like” their leader. We have only to refer such correspondents to Miss Corelli’s public speeches in Edinburgh and Glasgow to prove that she has always spoken in high praise of the Colonial Secretary.