The Great Survivors Read online

  ‌Chapter 1

  ‌Who’s Who

  Queen Elizabeth II is the starting point for any discussion of Western monarchy – and not only because she is Europe’s longest-serving monarch and in June 2012, aged eighty-six, celebrates sixty years on the throne. She heads a royal ‌house – the House of Windsor1 – which, thanks to a combination of its history, influence and sheer glamour, is unmatched in the world, and her remit extends across the widest geographical area. Unlike Victoria, she cannot refer to herself as Empress of India, but besides the United Kingdom she is queen of a further fifteen nations, including Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and head of the fifty-four-member Commonwealth, the modern-day successor to the British Empire.

  But while Britain’s monarchy is the most influential in Europe, it is not the oldest. That distinction is held by its Danish counterpart. Margrethe II, who became queen on the death of her father Frederik IX in January 1972, can trace her lineage back more than a thousand years to the Viking kings Gorm the Old and Harald Bluetooth. Under its hero kings, Canute the Great and the Valdemars, Denmark conquered not just England but also much of what are now the Baltic states in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Margrethe I, who married King Haakon VI of Norway at the age of ten, ended up ruling not just Denmark and Norway but Sweden too, ushering in a union of the three Scandinavian kingdoms that was to last from the late fourteenth until the early sixteenth century.

  Denmark was ruled from the middle of the fifteenth century by the Oldenburg branch of the family, and then from 1863 by Christian IX, from the junior Glücksborgs, who had been named heir presumptive in 1847 at the age of twenty-nine with the blessing of Europe’s great powers. Christian’s claim to the throne had been strengthened by his marriage to Princess Louise of Hesse-Kassel, a niece of Christian VIII, the previous monarch but one, after Queen Victoria rejected him. By royal standards, the Danes were neither wealthy nor grand: in comparison with some of their dysfunctional European counterparts, however, they seemed remarkably like a normal family.

  The country that Christian IX reigned over for most of the second half of the nineteenth century had only a fraction of Britain’s economic or political influence, but he and his German wife, Louise of Hesse-Kassel, were more than a match for Victoria and Albert when it came to finding royal marriage partners for their six children.

  As well as bringing together the Danish and British royal families by marrying his eldest daughter, Alexandra, to Victoria’s heir, Edward VII, Christian set up his own first son and heir, the future Frederik VIII, with Louise, the daughter of the king of Sweden and Norway. Of his other children, one became tsarina of Russia, one the king of Greece, and another married the ex-crown prince of Hanover. One of Christian’s grandsons, Prince Carl, was later to ascend the Norwegian throne as King Haakon VII. The royal families of Belgium and Luxembourg can also trace their lineage back to the King, who became known as the “father-in-law” of Europe.

  Christian used to invite his children and their own families back every summer from their adoptive homelands to the Fredensborg Palace, a baroque royal country seat on the island of Zealand. Leaving the cares of state behind them, they would eat, drink, relax – and often play practical tricks on one another. Those present would scratch their names and other messages on the glass window panes – starting a tradition of royal graffiti that has endured until today.

  The former King Konstantinos II of Greece tells the story – perhaps apocryphal – of how Christian, who was his great-great-grandfather, was out walking with his family one day in a park near the palace when they came across an elderly man who was lost and asked for directions. Christian told him to follow them. “He noticed this very happy family joking and laughing, and when they came out of the park he thanked them and asked whom he had had the pleasure of talking to,” Konstantinos recalls. Christian told him that he was the king of Denmark and proceeded to list his companions, who were members not just of the Danish royal family, but of those of Britain, Greece and Russia. “And the man was very happy,” continues Konstantinos, “and he took his hat off and he said, ‘My name’s ‌Jesus Christ,’ and walked off.”2

  Margrethe II, Christian’s great-great-granddaughter, was born on 16th April 1940, a week after the Nazis invaded Denmark, providing a substantial morale boost both to the royal family, who had chosen to remain in Copenhagen and sit out the occupation, and to the country as a whole. Her grandfather, Christian X, almost sixty-nine on the outbreak of war, became a highly visible symbol of “mental resistance” as he rode alone through the streets of the city on his horse. When asked by senior Nazis why he shunned a bodyguard, he reportedly replied: “The people of Denmark are my bodyguard.”

  The eldest of three daughters, Margrethe owes her position to a change in the rules of succession, implemented when she was a child, that removed the bar on women sitting on the Danish throne. As queen, she has proved a firm and popular monarch; she is also an accomplished artist. More controversial has been the role of her husband, Prince Henrik, a former French diplomat, born Count Henri de Laborde de Monpezat. Notorious like Britain’s Prince Philip for his gaffes, Henrik has appeared to struggle – on occasions openly – with the role of consort. In 2002, apparently angry at being relegated to third place in the pecking order behind his son, he went off in a huff to the couple’s Château de Caïx in Cahors in southern France.

  Next in line to the throne is Crown Prince Frederik, who, after providing plenty of fodder for the tabloids as a young man, in May 2004, at the age of thirty-five, married Mary Donaldson, a former estate agent from Tasmania whom he met in a bar during the Sydney Olympics. The union has been widely seen as a success, but the couple have faced media criticism of their lavish lifestyle. The Crown Princess was dubbed a “Nordic Imelda Marcos” in 2006 after an annual report into the finances of the Danish royals showed she and her husband were splurging the equivalent of almost £2,000 a day on clothes, shoes and furniture.

  Several months after Frederik’s wedding, it was announced that his younger brother Joachim was divorcing Princess Alexandra, his Hong Kong-born wife, after nine years – the first Danish royal divorce in more than one and a half centuries. The palace was applauded for the openness with which it handled the breakup, and both have since remarried.

  Most countries in Europe – and indeed the world – have made the transition over the past few centuries from monarchy to republic. The Dutch are unique in having moved in the opposite direction. It was only in the nineteenth century that the country became a monarchy under King Willem I. But his dynasty of Orange-Nassau, whose current head is Queen Beatrix, has exerted influence over the lands that now constitute the Netherlands since they moved there from Germany in 1400.

  Until the sixteenth century, this region was ruled by Spain, along with most of present-day Belgium, Luxembourg and some parts of France and Germany. The predominantly Protestant Dutch were pressing to free themselves from their Catholic Spanish overlords, however, and in 1581 the States-General of the Dutch provinces passed an Act of Abjuration declaring that they no longer recognized King Felipe II of Spain as their king. The rebellion was led by Willem, Prince of Orange, and although he was assassinated in 1584 his fellow countrymen fought on in what became known as the Eighty Years’ War, eventually defeating the Spanish in 1648.

  Under the idiosyncratic system the Dutch devised to rule themselves, their country was divided into provinces, each led by a stadtholder, many of whom were chosen from the House of Orange. Formally, the state remained a confederated republic rather than a monarchy, even when it was decided in 1747 to make Willem IV, Prince of Orange, who was already stadtholder of Friesland and Groningen, into the stadtholder of all the other provinces too. Willem was the fir
st man to have such a position and was given the title of Stadhouder-Generaal, which was made hereditary, turning him into a king in all but name.

  The arrival of French Revolutionary forces in 1795 and the creation of the Batavian Republic was bad news for his son and successor Willem V, who fled to Britain and died in exile in Prussia in April 1806 – just two months before Napoleon made his own younger brother, Louis, King Lodewijk I. He reigned for just four years before Napoleon decided to incorporate his kingdom into France. Then, in 1813, the French were swept out, and Willem’s son, also Willem, returned, proclaiming himself sovereign prince of the United Netherlands. On 16th March 1815, Willem became king of the Netherlands (and also grand duke of Luxembourg).

  Queen Beatrix, his great-great-great-granddaughter, who has reigned since 1980, is the third in a succession of female monarchs. Initially, only men were allowed on the throne, but the rules were changed after the Netherlands faced a potential succession crisis in the late nineteenth century.

  Beatrix’s grandmother, Wilhelmina, who reigned for fifty-eight years, longer than any other Dutch monarch, came into her own during the Second World War when she fled to London and, thanks to her regular radio broadcasts to her subjects, became a symbol of resistance to Nazi rule of her homeland; Winston Churchill famously described her as the “only real man in the Dutch government in exile”. The reign of her daughter, Juliana, was more controversial, however, and marred by controversy during the 1950s over her association with Greet Hofmans, a faith healer said to have exercised a Rasputin-like influence over her, and then, two decades later, by revelations that her German-born husband, Prince Bernhard, accepted more than one million dollars in bribes from the Lockheed Corporation, an American aerospace company. By contrast, Beatrix, who will eventually be succeeded by her son, Willem-Alexander, has rarely put a foot wrong in more than three decades on the throne.

  Sweden has been a monarchy for almost as long as Denmark, and has a warlike past that seems out of place for a nation better known today for its neutrality, generous welfare state and flat-pack furniture. During the Middle Ages Swedish warriors terrorized Russia. Then in 1630 the greatest of the country’s kings, Gustaf II Adolf, known as “the Lion of the North”, invaded Germany too.

  The current royal family, the Bernadottes, can trace their lineage back to the early nineteenth century and an adventurous Frenchman named Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte. The son of a petit bourgeois from Pau in the south-west of the country, Bernadotte rose to become one of Napoleon’s marshals, his position further strengthened by the fact he was married to Désirée, Joseph Bonaparte’s sister-in-law.

  During his time as governor of the captured German city of Hanover, Bernadotte had become friendly with some influential Swedish officers taken prisoner during Napoleon’s northern campaign. It was to prove a life-changing friendship: these were turbulent times in Sweden and in Europe, and the Swedes needed a strong ruler. King Carl XIII, who had been installed after a coup in 1809, the previous year, was elderly and decrepit and without surviving children – which meant an heir had to be found. The first choice was Carl August of Augustenburg, a minor Danish royal, but a few months after he arrived in Stockholm, he fell off his horse and ‌died, apparently of a stroke.3 Bernadotte, with his military expertise, seemed like a good replacement.

  Napoleon was initially sceptical when Bernadotte went through the motions of obtaining his approval before accepting the throne, but the Emperor gave his blessing a few months later, and Bernadotte was adopted as Prince Carl Johan. Although initially only heir apparent rather than king, he swiftly consolidated his position, defeating Napoleon’s forces with an army largely made up of German, Austrian and Russians at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, before then taking on Denmark and forcing it to cede Norway to Sweden. When the old King died in February 1818, Bernadotte succeeded him, ruling for twenty-four years as Carl XIV Johan.

  The former revolutionary soon turned into an authoritarian ruler in a more traditional mould. Queen Désirée – or Desideria as she became known to the Swedes – took a hearty dislike to her husband’s adoptive country, especially its bleak weather – and was not that fond of her husband either. As a result she spent more than a decade back in Paris before eventually returning north in 1823; it was not until six years later that she was crowned queen of Sweden (she was never crowned queen of Norway). Swedish cuisine proved a particular disappointment to the royal couple. When nothing that their chefs prepared took their fancy, the King was served a lightly boiled egg – it has been tradition ever since in the palace to place a golden egg cup at the King’s place.

  Bernadotte once famously described himself to the Tsar as “man of the north”, but appears to have suffered the occasional doubt that he had done the right thing. “Of me, you may say that I, who was once a marshal of France, am now only king of Sweden,” he declared on one occasion. His subjects do not seem to have shared such doubts. Even though their king never bothered to learn either Swedish or Norwegian, the Bernadotte dynasty became firmly established.

  The current monarch, Carl XVI Gustaf, is the great-great-great-great-grandson of the founder of the dynasty and the seventh Bernadotte king. He came to the throne in September 1973, at the age of just twenty-seven, on the death of his grandfather, Gustaf VI Adolf, who, confirming the Bernadottes’ reputation for longevity, lived to see his ninetieth birthday. Carl XVI Gustaf never knew his father, Prince Gustaf Adolf, who was killed in a plane crash before his son’s first birthday. Although a tragedy for the royal family – and the nation – Gustaf Adolf’s death meant that Sweden, which was neutral during the Second World War, was spared the embarrassment of having as its king a man who during the 1930s had openly expressed sympathy towards Hitler’s Reich.

  Carl XVI Gustaf’s designated successor is Crown Princess Victoria – who will become Sweden’s first queen regnant in modern times. At her side will be Daniel Westling, her former fitness trainer, whom she married in June 2010 after a courtship that lasted eight years, and who thereafter was styled Prince Daniel, Duke of Västergötland. Queen Victoria’s role will be a limited one, however: a constitutional reform that came into force in 1975 after at least two decades of discussion stripped the Swedish monarchy of all but ceremonial and representative duties. Some royalists were appalled; for others this was the perfect compromise and a model other European nations should adopt: a way of keeping all the popular trappings of the institution while removing the last vestige of the hereditary principle from the workings of modern democracy.

  The Belgian royal house was also founded by an outsider, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who, like Bernadotte, took advantage of the frequent redrawing of the map of Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century to secure himself a throne. The current monarch, Albert II, who acceded in 1993, is the country’s sixth king and the great-great-grandson of the founder of the dynasty.

  The Saxe-Coburgs’ realm was a tiny collection of unconnected territories spanning just over four hundred square miles, split between modern-day Bavaria and Thuringia, which was home to a mere fifty thousand people. The family were not just political minnows, they were also virtually bankrupt – and realized that salvation for their dynasty lay in finding good marital partners for their children.

  Leopold, born in 1790 as the penultimate of nine children, was an adventurous young man who did his family proud. He became a lieutenant general in the imperial Russian army and won the greatest prize in Europe: Princess Charlotte, the daughter of the future King George IV of the United Kingdom. Charlotte had it all: youth, beauty and above all the prospect of becoming head of one of Europe’s grandest monarchies. When they married in May 1816, the couple even seemed in love – a rarity for nineteenth-century royal unions.

  Yet Leopold’s hopes of becoming consort were dashed just eighteen months later when Charlotte died in childbirth – a tragedy that prompted an outpouring of public grief similar to the hysteria that followed the death of Princess Diana almost two centuries
later. “It was really as though every household throughout Great Britain has lost a favourite child,” Lord Brougham, the Lord Chancellor, wrote in his memoirs.

  Leopold was destined to be more than just a footnote in history – and time was on his side. Although already a widower, he had not yet reached his thirtieth birthday and had a generous pension of £50,000 voted by the British parliament. After being offered – and declining – the Greek throne, he agreed in 1831 to become the first king of the Belgians, after the southern part of the Netherlands broke away to form an independent if fragile nation. Along with his new realm, he acquired an accent on the “e” in his name.

  Léopold also had a passion for matchmaking. Thus it was with his encouragement that his nephew, the young Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, wooed his niece, the then Princess Victoria, paving the way for one of the great royal love stories of all time. Léopold also succeeded in placing other members of his family in other royal houses. Climb your way up through the tangled branches of the family trees of most of Europe’s royal families – both of those still on the throne and those that are defunct – and you will get back to the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, memorably described later in the nineteenth century by Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, as the “stud farm of Europe”.

  Many contemporary observers – among them Léopold himself – were sceptical about the prospects of Belgium’s survival. The French diplomat Talleyrand described the new country as “an artificial construction” in which the Dutch-speaking Flemings in the north would struggle to exist alongside the French-speaking Walloons in the south. The leading figures of mid-nineteenth-century diplomacy such as Metternich, Napoleon III and Bismarck did not expect it to last more than a generation or so.

  They were to be proved wrong, in considerable part thanks to the skills of its first king. During his thirty-four years ‌as king of the Belgians,4 Léopold I oversaw the transformation of Belgium into an industrial powerhouse. More than 180 years later, his adoptive homeland continues to exist, even though relations between its two main linguistic communities have lurched from crisis to crisis in recent years, provoking the periodic question: “Will Belgium survive?” The dynasty that Léopold founded is still at its head – although since 1920 its members have been known simply as de Belgique (or van België or von Belgien) rather than of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.