The Great Survivors Read online

  Belgium has hitherto had only male monarchs. Léopold II, who succeeded to the throne in 1865 on the death of his father, was a monster best known for his acquisition of the Congo, which he ran with enormous brutality as a private fiefdom until his own death in 1909, acquiring huge riches in the process. He was also deeply disliked at home for much of his reign. His nephew, who succeeded him as Albert I, was a more popular figure, hailed across the world for spearheading his country’s resistance to the Germans during the First World War – but died in a climbing accident in the Ardennes aged just fifty-eight and was succeeded by his son, Léopold III.

  Like Edward VIII, Léopold cut a glamorous, youthful figure, although unlike his British counterpart he had the ideal consort: Astrid, the niece of King Gustaf V of Sweden. Their marriage in November 1926 had been an arranged one, but quickly turned into a love match that produced first a daughter, Joséphine Charlotte, and then two sons, Baudouin and Albert. His was an unhappy reign, however: tragedy struck on 29th August 1935, when Astrid was killed in a car accident by Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. The car was driven by the King, who escaped with minor injuries. The loss of the beautiful young Queen provoked an anguished reaction that was to be echoed decades later by the deaths of first Princess Grace of Monaco and then Princess Diana.

  Léopold chose to stay with his people when Belgium was occupied during the Second World War but, although he lobbied behind the scenes on behalf of his fellow countrymen, he was seen as a defeatist who was persuaded that the Germans would win the war and that resistance was futile. His reputation was further damaged by his secret marriage on 6th December 1941 to Mary Lilian Baels, the young, British-born daughter of a prosperous Belgian fish salesman turned government minister, after she became pregnant with his child.

  Imprisoned by the Nazis in Austria in the latter months of the war, Léopold was freed by the Americans but delayed returning home. Instead he remained in exile, settling in Switzerland, while his younger brother, Charles, acted as regent. Léopold’s fate was sealed in March 1950, when Belgians were asked to vote in a referendum whether they wanted him to return. Overall, he won the backing of fifty-seven per cent, but the country was deeply divided – while seventy-two per cent of the largely Christian Democrat Flemings supported him, fifty-eight per cent of the predominantly Socialist-voting Walloons wanted him to go. When strikes and protests turned violent, raising fears of civil war, Léopold stepped down in July 1951 in favour of his twenty-seven-year-old son, Baudouin.

  The Belgian monarchy’s battered reputation was restored in the decades that followed. However, Baudouin and his Spanish-born queen, Fabiola, both devout Catholics, failed in their prime responsibility of producing an heir. And so, when Baudouin died unexpectedly in 1993, aged sixty-two, he was succeeded by his brother Albert, four years his junior. Many had expected the throne to pass straight to Albert’s son, Philippe, whom Baudouin had been grooming for many years as his successor. It was widely felt, however, that the young prince was not yet ready for the responsibility.

  More then a decade and a half later, Philippe, known as the Duke of Brabant, the traditional title of the heir to the Belgian throne, is married with four children, and seems ready to assume the role. He and his younger brother Laurent find themselves in an uncomfortable position, however, and increasingly come under attack from a resurgent Flemish nationalism that sees the Belgian monarchy as the only glue binding the country together – and, for that reason, would like to see it disappear.

  The Norwegian monarchy can trace its origins back more than a thousand years to Harald Fairhair, who united the country’s various petty kingships into a single realm in about 885. Its current dynasty dates only to 1905, when Norway became a fully fledged independent nation after centuries of domination, first by the Danes and then, from 1814, as junior partner in an alliance with Sweden forced upon it by Bernadotte.

  It was by no means a foregone conclusion that the new Norway would remain a monarchy. An overwhelming majority of the Storting, the country’s parliament, were republicans, but at a time when most European nations were monarchies, the Norwegians reckoned their chances of international recognition and long-term survival would be enhanced by having a king of their own. Their choice fell on Prince Carl, the second son of Frederik, the Crown Prince of Denmark. Carl ticked all the boxes: he was a Scandinavian, in his early thirties and the father of a son still young enough to be brought up as a Norwegian. Even more importantly his wife, Maud, was the daughter of King Edward VII, one of the most influential monarchs in Europe. The British King was equally keen on having his son-in-law on the throne, and wrote to Carl urging him to accept the offer.

  Carl was more cautious than either Léopold or Bernadotte, however. His family was also unwilling to damage relations with their Swedish opposite numbers, who were unhappy about the loss of Norway. Setting out to establish his legitimacy in the eyes of his new subjects, Carl insisted on a referendum. An overwhelming majority of Norwegians voted for their country to become a monarchy. Carl was formally elected to the throne on 18th November 1905, aged thirty-three, after getting the go-ahead from his grandfather, King Christian IX – endearing himself to his new subjects by styling himself Haakon VII, an old Norse name used by past kings of Norway.

  The new king’s court was as much British as Scandinavian, thanks to the influence of Maud, who brought with her as her comptroller and private secretary Henry Knollys, whose elder brother, Francis (and later Viscount) Knollys, fulfilled the same role for her father. Initially, the monarchy also had something of a temporary feel; Haakon knew he owed his throne largely to foreign-policy considerations; the reverberations that followed the Russian Revolution added to the feeling of insecurity. A woman who went to high school with Haakon’s son, Prince Olav, in 1920 recalled years later that he had bet her ten kroner (about two US dollars at the time) that he would never become king.

  Olav turned out to have been too pessimistic – even if he had to wait until 1957 to succeed his father, by which time he was himself fifty-four. The dynasty had become extremely popular in the intervening years, emerging strengthened from the Second World War, during which Haakon had refused to surrender to the Nazis. Instead, together with his son, the King escaped in spectacular fashion to Britain, from where he headed the Norwegian resistance.

  The current King, Harald V, who succeeded Olav in 1991, has continued to enjoy high approval ratings. The royal family nevertheless found itself under fire towards the end of the last decade of the twentieth century over the huge amounts of money spent on renovating the royal palace in Oslo, which had been badly in need of modernization. Another cause of controversy was Crown Prince Haakon’s relationship with Mette-Marit Tjessem Høiby, a single mother with a son by a man with a conviction for drug-dealing, whom the Crown Prince had met at a music festival.

  After defusing the crisis through deft media management, the couple married in August 2001 and have since had two children. While Mette-Marit has flourished in her new role as Crown Princess, Haakon’s elder sister, Märtha Louise, has courted controversy in recent years both because of her choice of partner, Ari Behn, a flamboyant writer and film-maker, and as a result of her own commercial activities, centred on claims she can help people to talk to their “inner angels” – and even the dead.

  Juan Carlos, the Spanish king, is a member of the Borbón dynasty who have ruled the country on and off since 1700, when Felipe de Borbón, the Duke of Anjou, succeeded his great-uncle Carlos II, who was the last of the Spanish Habsburgs. Yet when Juan Carlos was born to his parents in exile in Rome on 5th January 1938 at the height of the Spanish Civil War, his chances of ever becoming king of his homeland seemed slim.

  Monarchy in Spain has had a chequered history, and the royalists have been bitterly divided among themselves since the 1830s when the ailing King Fernando VII set aside the country’s Salic laws of succession to name his daughter Isabel as heir in place of his own younger brother, the Infante Carlos. She came to the throne
as Isabel II on her father’s death the following year, but her reign was marred by a series of wars waged by supporters of Carlos, who over the following century became a rallying point for the Catholic right.

  Isabel, whose scandalous private life became the talk of Europe, responded by becoming more authoritarian herself, which alienated her more liberal supporters. She fled to France in 1868, and after abdicating two years later was replaced briefly by Amadeo, the duke of Aosta, nicknamed King Macaroni because of the Italian accent with which he spoke Spanish, and then, in February 1873, by the country’s short-lived First Republic.

  A coup d’état by the military the following year turned out the parliament and put Isabel’s seventeen-year-old son on the throne as King Alfonso XII. He died of tuberculosis just short of his twenty-eighth birthday, however, and was succeeded by his own son, Alfonso XIII, born six months after his father’s death. Despite reigning (initially with his mother as regent) for almost half a century, Alfonso XIII too was eventually driven from power in 1931 when a republican majority was returned to the Cortes Generales with a programme to abolish the monarchy. The Second Spanish Republic was declared, and the King went into exile – but didn’t abdicate.

  General Francisco Franco’s victory in the civil war that followed should have been good news for the Borbóns, but Franco depended for his support on the Falangists, who were avowedly republican, and the Carlists, who, although unable to agree on a candidate of their own, were united in their rejection of all Isabel’s descendants. And in any case, as long as he was alive, Franco was insistent that he – rather than a king – should be the undisputed leader of the nation.

  Despite their history, the Borbóns possessed the tenacity typical of exiled royals and did not give up their dream of one day regaining their throne. Alfonso died in 1941, but a few months earlier had abdicated in favour of his second surviving son, Don Juan. The pretender’s relations with Franco were to prove difficult; the Ley de Sucesión passed in 1947 declared Spain a kingdom, but gave Franco the right to name his eventual successor. And the dictator made clear he did not want Juan. The Prince’s son, Juan Carlos, was far more acceptable to him, however, and so, when the boy was just ten, his father, still living in exile, took the difficult decision to send him back to be educated in Spain. The strategy paid off: in 1969 Juan Carlos was named by Franco as his successor. On 22nd November 1975, two days after the dictator’s death, he became king.

  Thankfully for Spain – and for Europe – Franco’s trust in Juan Carlos as the best man to continue his authoritarian rule after his death turned out to have been completely misplaced. After acceding to the throne, the King horrified Franco’s supporters by instituting liberalizing reforms, appointing Adolfo Suárez, a moderate nationalist, to oversee the transition to democracy and accepting the constitution of 1978 that turned him into a constitutional monarch. Any last doubts about Juan Carlos’s commitment to democracy were dispelled in February 1981 when he saw down an attempted military coup. In the years since he has proved a model modern king.

  Juan Carlos is married to Sofía, daughter of Pavlos, the penultimate king of Greece, and great-great-granddaughter of Christian IX of Denmark. The youngest of their three children, Felipe, prince of Asturias, is next in line to the throne. Married to Letizia, a former television journalist who was already briefly married before, he has two daughters, Leonor and Sofía.

  Over the centuries, Luxembourg, which lies on the border between Germanic and Romance Europe, has been variously occupied by the Bourbons, Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns and the French. It became a grand duchy in a personal union with the Netherlands under the terms of the Congress of Vienna of 1815, but then lost more than half its territory in 1839 to recently independent Belgium.

  The country’s union with the Netherlands was broken in 1890 with the death of King Willem III. While the Dutch throne passed to his daughter Wilhelmina, Luxembourg was governed by semi-Salic law (which allowed inheritance by females or through the female line only upon extinction of male members of the dynasty) under a Nassau family pact dating back to 1783. This meant Willem was succeeded there by Adolphe of Nassau-Weilburg, who had been duke of Nassau but had been left without a job after Prussia annexed his duchy in 1866.

  Luxembourg is home to just under half a million people, living in an area of just over 1,600 square miles. The current grand duke, Henri, who was born in 1955, came to the throne in October 2000, when his father Jean abdicated in his favour.

  Moving southwards, Liechtenstein, a micro-state of just sixty or so square miles sandwiched between Switzerland and Austria, has been an independent entity since 1719, when Karl VI, the Holy Roman Emperor, merged the territories of Vaduz, the future capital, and Schellenberg, both of which were owned by the Liechtenstein family, turning them into a Fürstentum (principality). The move was essentially inspired by expediency: the territory was given its new status so Prince Anton Florian of Liechtenstein would be entitled to a seat in the Reichstag.

  The Prince felt no need actually to live in his principality, though; indeed it was not until 1818 that a member of the house of Liechtenstein, the future Prince Aloys II, bothered even to set foot in the realm that bore the family name. In the century that followed, the royal family preferred to live in cosmopolitan Vienna rather than tiny Vaduz, although that changed when the Nazis annexed Austria in the Anschluss of 1938.

  The current prince, Hans-Adam II, who was born in 1945 in Zurich, has had a prickly relationship with the country’s politicians since coming to power in November 1989. His resolve was undoubtedly strengthened by a personal fortune estimated at five billion dollars, derived largely from his stake in the LGT Bank – which in 2008 found itself at the centre of controversy after the German intelligence services bought a CD with details of those of its nationals who had made use of accounts at the bank to avoid paying taxes at home. A long-running trial of strength between the Prince and the Landtag came to a head in 2003: the Prince won, turning him into Europe’s only absolute monarch. In August 2004, he handed his son, Prince Alois, the power to make day-to-day decisions, but he remains head of state.

  Covering a mere three-quarters of a square mile and with a population of just 33,000, the Principality of Monaco is by far the smallest of Europe’s monarchies. Since Prince Rainier married Grace Kelly in April 1956 it has also been one of the most colourful, although her death in a car crash in September 1982 deprived it of much of its glamour.

  The ruling House of Grimaldi’s link with the principality dates back to 1297, when Francesco Grimaldi, dressed as a Franciscan monk, led a force of men who captured the Rock of Monaco. Ruled by both France and the Kingdom of Sardinia, the principality had its sovereignty recognized by the French-Monégasque Treaty of 1861 – although this also obliged it to sell the towns of Menton and Roquebrune, which accounted for ninety-five per cent of its territory, to France for four million francs.

  When Rainier came to the throne in 1949 on the death of his grandfather Louis II, gambling accounted for all but five per cent of Monaco’s annual revenue. The principality, as the writer William Somerset Maugham put it so memorably, was a “sunny place for shady people”. Rainier put his energies into promoting Monaco instead as a tax haven, commercial centre, real-estate development opportunity and international tourist attraction. He also pushed through the constitution of 1962, which turned his realm from an absolute monarchy into one in which the prince shares power with a national council of eighteen elected members.

  Rainier’s son Albert II, who succeeded him on his death in April 2005, has used his position to campaign for the need to protect the marine environment. He has also backed an ambitious plan to expand the principality, Dubai-style, by building an area of about five hectares out into the Mediterranean. The Prince insisted the entire extension should be built on stilts to avoid upsetting marine life, claiming that it will be a “model of sustainability”.

  ‌Chapter 2

  ‌Coming and Going

  In Octobe
r 2009, John Lindskog, a veteran Danish journalist and royal expert, published a book about his country’s royal family that contained a bold claim: Queen Margrethe II – Daisy to her family – was considering doing what none of her predecessors had ever done before her: abdicate. Her French-born husband Henrik was not well and had made no secret of his desire to escape the cold, wet Danish winter and live out his remaining years in the couple’s beloved Château de Caïx in the wine district of Cahors in southern France. With her seventieth birthday due the following April, it seemed the ideal time for the Queen, who was also in poor health, to head south with her husband, giving up the throne in favour of her son, Crown Prince Frederik, by then in his early forties and happily married with two children.

  “It is no secret that the Prince has long felt tired. He said simply that he has done his duty, and at the age of seventy-five years he feels that he is ready for retirement,” Lindskog claimed in the book, Royale rejser – Bag Kulisserne Hos De Kongelige (Royal Travels – Behind the Scenes with the Royals). “A number of events appear to have pushed forward something the Queen has always been against but that certain circumstances seem to suggest she will nonetheless do – be the first Danish ‌monarch to abdicate the throne.”1

  The Danish royal palace denied the claim, as palaces always do, but that did not seem sufficient to dispel Lindskog’s theory completely. Yet more than two years later, in January 2012, Margrethe celebrated forty years on the throne – and made clear that she had no intention of stepping down. This was despite opinion polls suggesting a majority of Danes wanted their Queen to abdicate in favour of her son, if not immediately, then before she became much older. “You are handed your job as the old king or queen dies,” she said in a television interview to coincide with her jubilee. “It is not a life sentence, but a life of service.”