Immediately the hunt was on. The apparent combination of royalty, religion and sex was irresistible to the newspapers, and both Buchman and his royal friends were eagerly pursued. The tea reception took place, but Queen Marie did not appear, although her son Prince Nicolas did. 'While Dr Frank N. D. Buchman, "surgeon of souls", sat patiently in his home, No 11 West 53rd Street, surrounded by 150 guests who had been asked to meet the Queen, Marie of Romania forsook the engagement, if engagement it was,' reported the New York Herald Tribune.2 Eventually, according to the reporter, Buchman phoned a message to the Queen, and his guests went off to a brief audience at her hotel, each with a blank admission card on which he had written in red pencil: 'Ambassador Hotel to meet Queen Marie'. Time added the false gloss that Buchman had only met the Queen when 'he was presented to her on the Leviathan a fortnight ago'.3

Buchman was from then on cast by the press at large as the leader of a strange and unhealthy sect, another Rasputin exploiting a brief encounter with royalty, who operated in 'darkened rooms', 'holding hands', 'hysterical', 'erotic', 'morbid'.*

(* These allegations went into the newspaper files and for many years permeated most accounts of Buchman and his work in America.)

Buchman was deeply hurt by these insinuations, especially hating being made to look like the leader of a new cult, the more so as his own name was used to describe what he regarded as God's work and not his. When he first heard the word 'Buchmanism', he said later, 'it was like a knife through my heart'. 'What is Buchmanism? There is no such thing,' he told the New York-American. 'We believe in making Christianity a vital force in modern life.'4

The whole affair was an ideal casus belli for Buchman's critics in Princeton. The student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, summarised what Time had said about the Waterbury campaign and asked, in an editorial, what the graduate Secretaries of the Philadelphian Society were doing, dragging the good name of Princeton in the mud. To try to clear the air, the university authorities agreed to an open forum to debate the work of the Philadelphian Society. It was held in the largest lecture hall in the university, interest was intense and the hall was packed.

It turned out to be a debate more about Buchman's work than that of the Philadelphian Society. There was much angry talk about 'Buchmanism', though, as the campus doctor, Donald Sinclair, said later, 'no one...seemed to have any definite idea what it was to which they were opposed'.5

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