Page 49 - They Also Served

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Philippe, Duc d’Orléans 1888.
Prince Louis-Philippe-Robert d’Orléans was born in York House, Twickenham, on 6th February 1869. The family lived in England after the banishment of his great-grandfather Louis-Philippe, King of the French, in 1848. They returned to France in 1871 after the fall of Emperor Napoleon III. Philippe entered the French Military Academy at Saint-Cyr. However, in 1886, only a few weeks before commissioning, the family was again exiled and returned to England.
In February 1887, on the nomination of Queen Victoria, he entered Sandhurst and was attached to the King’s Royal Rifle Corps at the end of his training. Like Louis, the ill-fated son of Napoleon III, Philippe was allowed to serve alongside the British, although a French law forbade their subjects from holding commissions in foreign armies. Nevertheless, he served in India on the staff of Lord Roberts before being sent to Switzerland to further his military education. In 1889, Philippe, having fathered a son by an actress in Lausanne, arrived in Paris and tried to re-enlist in the French Army but was imprisoned for having broken the terms of his exile. Once released, he returned to his attachment with the British Army and went on a long expedition to Nepal and the Himalayas.
On his return to England, Philippe conducted an affair with the renowned Australian opera singer Nellie Melba, but the relationship cooled when he was named as a co-respondent in her divorce case. In December 1890, to place distance between himself and his complicated love life, he applied unsuccessfully to join the Russian Army. However, for all his philandering, he was a noted explorer and, for sterling service on several field trips following his Himalayas expedition, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1893. After yet another attachment to the British Army, this time to the Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars, a yeomanry unit, Philippe became Orléanist claimant to the French throne upon the death of his father in 1895. Such was the complicated state of French society that there were four pretenders during this period: the Orléanists, Bourbons, Napoleon Bonapartists and Canino Bonapartists.
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