Royal Etiquette and Lesser Nobles

A dynasty of former princes, electors, kings, and emperors made up the House of Hohenzollern of Prussia, Hohenzollern, Brandenburg, the German Empire, and Romania. The family arose in the area around the town of Hechingen in Swabia during the 11th century and took their name from Hohenzollern Castle.

Royal Court Etiquette Rules

It has not escaped public notice that the Marquis of Lorn and his wife, the sister of the Duke of Edinburgh, were not present at the Duke's marriage with the daughter of the Czar. A Paris paper has volunteered to give the cause of this seeming want of affection; 

It says the court etiquette on the continent excludes any one not royal by blood from sitting at the same table with royalty. Lorn is a noble of as honorable lineage as the Guelphs, and far more ancient than the Romanoffs or the Hohenzollerns, whose ancestors were low-bred kerns running about the woods and swamps of Scandinavia and Germany, dressed in the hairy skins of wild, beasts, for centuries after the house of Argyle was noble and powerful. 

But the Argyles never had the luck to be crowned, and therefore they can't mate on terms of equality with the Romanoffs, Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs, nor eat at the same table. The Princess Louisa, wife of the Marquis of Lorn, was once obliged to witness this degredation of her husband at the Court of Berlin when she was visiting her sister, the Crown Princess of Prussia, and she then made up her mind not to subject him again to such an insult. This is the explanation of the absence ot Lorn and his lady from the late St. Petersburg wedding. — From The Sacramento Union, 1874

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