The Stamps
and History of The Principality of
Trinidad
Although a speck in the ocean, this remote island 700 miles off the Brazilian
coast, has a fascinating philatelic history. The self-proclaimed James I,
Prince of Trinidad, lived a dream. Born James Aloysius Harden-Hickey in
San Francisco
,
California
, in 1845, he was the son of a wealthy gold digger of Irish descent. His
mother was French and at the first opportunity, took the young boy to
Paris
away from the lawless, rip-roaring wild west of the 1850’s to a France of
Emperor, Louis Napoleon III.
James Aloysius grew up taking the Emperor Napoleon as his role model. He
even cut his beard the same shape as the French Emperor. By 1870, the Empire
of Louis Napoleon fell to the Germans and the era of the
French
Third
Republic
began. Harden-Hickey entered the Ecole de Saint-Cyr, the famous French
military academy at the age of twenty, where he became an excellent swordsman,
but his military career came to an abrupt end, when, having been kicked by a
horse, he sustained a cruel and long-lasting limp. So, unable to fulfil a
career in the army as an officer and without a profession, Harden-Hickey
entered the Parisian highlife and a world of the rich and famous. He became a
novelist, journalist, duelist and frequented the “
Latin Quarter
”; gave lavish parties and frittered away a large portion of his families
wealth.
In 1878, James Aloysius Harden-Hickey married the Countess of Saint-Pery.
In that same year he published Le Triboulet, a satirical magazine, similarly
written in the style of “Punch”, its contents devoted to Catholicism and
the royalist cause. During the 10 year period Harden-Hickey was editor of Le
Triboulet, he contested many lawsuits, was fined some 300,000 francs and by
1888 faced deportation as a undesirable American. The French government
frowned upon the Anti-republican comments, for which the paper amused
Paris
, and as Harden-Hickey had not relinquished his
U.S.
citizenship, Government sources closed Le Triboulet and expelled him from France
on August 8th, 1888.
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