SPAIN: British Grandee

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Still moving cautiously, the Cortes continued last week the tremendous job of expropriating the great estates of the Grandees of Spain. Despite numerous petitions from Spanish intellectuals that his property be spared because of his great gifts to Spanish education, all estates of the Duque de Alba, Spain's grandest grandee and holder of 30 titles under the monarchy, will be confiscated. Also refused exemption last week were the lands of the Duke of Vitoria, but after formal protest by the British Government one Spanish grandee's lands were spared: those of the Duque de Ciudad Rodrigo, Arthur Charles Wellesley, fourth Duke of Wellington.

The decision reminded the world last week of the rich rewards which frightened Europe was willing to pay 120 years ago to anyone who could beat Napoleon. The present Duke, still a fervent foxhunter at 84, is the grandson of the Iron Duke, was three years old when the latter died. The title Duke of Wellington and the right to bear the Union Jack on his coat of arms is but a small part of his inheritance. He is a Duke in Portugal, a Prince in Holland and recipient of a $20,000-a-year pension from the Belgian government. Ciudad Rodrigo, scene of one of his grandfather's great victories and centre of the Spanish estates thrust upon him by a grateful Cortes, is a little fortified Spanish town between Salamanca and the Portuguese frontier. Tourists bless the ultra-British foxhunting Duque de Ciudad Rodrigo, for in that town is one of the quaintest, best run inns in Western Spain, the Hospederia del Castillo de Enrique II.