A successful visit to Amsterdam

April 22, 1879

King Willem III and Queen Emma have arrived in Amsterdam to "great rejoicings."  The city was well decorated, reports the Chicago Daily Tribune.

The former Princess Emma of Waldeck und Pyrmont,  20, married King Willem at Arolsen on January 7.  She is his second wife.  The 62-year-old King Willem's first marriage to Princess Sophie of Württemberg took place in 1839.  She died on June 3, 1877. 

King Willem has had three sons by his first wife,  Willem, the Prince of Orange, who was born in 1840, and Prince Alexander, who was born in 1851.   Prince Maurits was born in 1843, and died at the age of seven in 1850.

The Prince of Orange is unmarried.  In the early 1860s, there were plans for the young prince to marry Queen Victoria's second daughter, Princess Alice, but she preferred the Grand Duke of Hesse and By Rhine, and they married in 1863.  A decade later,  he fell in love with a 19-year-old Countess Mathilde de Limburg-Stirum, but she was not of equal rank.  He was willing to marry Mathilde without his father's consent, but Mathilde's parents would not agree to a marriage. 

The Prince is now living in Paris with a mistress, where he leads a rather debauched lifestyle, much to his father's dismay.    Prince Alexander is also unmarried.