The Great Survivors

by Peter Conradi

  Although many such events – both joyful and sad – take place in the respective countries’ capitals, royal families have to avoid falling victim to accusations of metropolitan bias. Over the years the tradition has become established that the monarch and other members of the family should tour the realm and meet their subjects. Such tours have a special significance for the British monarchy: not only must due attention be paid to the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish, the fifteen other countries of which Elizabeth II is queen must be kept loyal with visits, if not from the monarch herself, then from other members of her family. Beyond that are the remaining countries of the Commonwealth. Composed of fifty-four nations, it has a combined population of 2.1 billion, almost a third of the world, representing twenty-one per cent of the surface of the globe.

  The monarchy under Victoria and her successors was closely identified with the British Empire – as was symbolized by her proclamation as Empress of India at the Delhi Durbar of 1877. Although Victoria never actually travelled to India (or indeed anywhere further east than the Alps), her successors have more than made up for that, embarking on a number of far-flung tours. It was fitting perhaps that when the then Princess Elizabeth heard of her father’s death, she was in the middle of one such visit to Kenya.

  Of Europe’s current monarchies, the Netherlands, Spain and Belgium also had considerable possessions abroad. Their experiences have differed from one another, though – with varying implications for relations between former rulers and subjects in the post-colonial era. The acquisition by Belgium of what was initially known as the Congo Free State (and then the Belgian Congo, Zaire and now the Democratic Republic of Congo) was essentially a private venture by King Léopold II pursued for financial gain – and it was not until 1908, following reports of the appalling abuses committed there, that it was formally annexed by the Belgian government. When the country won independence in 1960, King Baudouin personally attended the festivities, but a speech he gave there was widely seen as insensitive to the atrocities that had been carried out there. Belgium’s relations with the country have been somewhat unstable since, leaving little role for the royal family.

  The Netherlands’ relationship with Indonesia, the largest of its former colonies, has also been difficult. Queen Wilhelmina’s decision to abdicate in favour of her daughter Juliana in 1948 was inspired in large part by the economic blow her country suffered when what had been known as the Dutch East Indies fought its way to independence. Nevertheless, Juliana visited in 1970 and her daughter Beatrix, the current queen, followed in 1995. The Dutch monarchs also pay special attention to the former colonies of Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten, which today form autonomous countries within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Spain, by contrast, lost its considerable Latin American possessions much earlier, and by the early twentieth century was left with only a handful of territories in Africa. But it still retains a special link with its former colonies.

  Trips made by royalty can by their nature be gruelling, especially the foreign ones, even though they provide suitably exotic photo opportunities for television news bulletins. Some of the monarchs’ domestic engagements, in particular, can be downright tedious, with their endless meetings – but woe betide a royal who were to let slip they were anything but delighted to be at the event in question.

  In a newspaper interview in 2003 Denmark’s Queen Margrethe provided a rare insight into the realities of her job. “Being Queen involves a lot of repetition – the same ceremonies, the same functions, the same routine, every year,” she told her interviewer, Gyles Brandreth. “Sometimes you think, ‘Here we go again!’ but my parents taught me something useful that I have tried to pass on to my two boys. Whatever you are doing, be aware of it and stay involved. For example, I have to listen to a lot of boring speeches, but I have discovered there is nothing so boring as not listening to a boring speech. If you listen carefully, the speech is very rarely as boring as you thought it was going to be. You can disagree with the speech in your head. You can think, ‘He’s saying it very badly,’ but don’t switch off. Somehow listen. It ‌is much better that way.”2

  There are two institutions in particular with which monarchy has a special relationship: the Church (at least in those countries that are not Roman Catholic by tradition) and the armed forces.

  In England, King Henry VIII broke with Rome in the 1530s after the Pope excommunicated him for divorcing Catherine of Aragon and putting himself at the head of the newly created Church of England. In 1559, under his daughter Elizabeth I, the monarch’s title was changed from Supreme Head to Supreme Governor, to assuage critics who said this was usurping Jesus Christ, identified by the Bible as the head of the Church. Half a millennium later, Queen Elizabeth II remains the head of the Church, appointing its high-ranking members. This leadership is largely symbolic, however. She does so on the advice of the prime minister, who in turn takes his cue from Church leaders. The monarch also retains the title of Defender of the Faith. Originally granted by Pope Leo X to Henry VIII in 1521 for his early support for Roman Catholicism, it was taken away after the break with Rome, but then reconferred by parliament during the reign of Edward VI.

  Although there is no doubting Elizabeth’s own Christian faith, she is becoming something of an exception in today’s multicultural Britain. The Church of England is just one of a number of religious faiths competing for souls – albeit one which, for historical reasons, continues to enjoy a privileged status. These days it probably counts fewer active churchgoers than the Roman Catholics. Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs are also present in growing numbers.

  Acutely conscious of such sensitivities, Prince Charles has argued for a change when he comes to the throne, but it is a treacherous subject: an initial suggestion that he would like to be known as “Defender of the Faiths” after he becomes king alarmed some within the Church of England. As a compromise, it has since been mooted that he instead be termed “Defender of Faith” – a more abstract-sounding job description that avoided the need to choose between the singular and plural. Even this might not be easy: constitutional experts have warned that removal of that single word would nevertheless require parliament to agree to amend the 1953 Royal Titles Act, which came into law after changes were made for the Queen’s coronation in the same year.

  There are other, even more complicated issues relating to the British monarch’s relationship with the Church. Under the terms of the Act of Settlement, passed in 1701 (and extended to Scotland in 1707), a relic of a very different age that is still in force, the monarch “shall join in communion with the Church of England”. Catholics are explicitly prevented from becoming monarch or indeed marrying into the royal family. Its provisions extend well beyond those who have any realistic chance of succeeding to the throne: when the Queen’s cousin, Prince Michael of Kent, married Baroness Marie-Christine von Reibnitz, a divorced German Catholic in 1978, he had to give up his right to the throne – even though he was so far down in the order of succession that the right was little more than theoretical.

  Following the marriage of Prince William in April 2011, the question of what seemed unfair and outdated discrimination against Catholics also looked likely to be tackled, and, as was seen earlier, at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth in October 2011, it was agreed that the laws of each of the sixteen countries of which Elizabeth is queen would be amended in order to ensure that daughters of future sovereigns would not be passed over in favour of elder sons, and that successors to the throne would no longer be barred from marrying Catholics.

  Elsewhere in the Protestant world, the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish monarchs are heads of ‌their respective Lutheran state Churches.3 In the Netherlands, the Dutch Reformed Church was put under the direct control of the state when the Kingdom of the Netherlands was formed in 1815, but Church and state were formally separated as early as 1853. However, persecution of Dutch Protestants during the period in which they were ruled by the Catholic Spanish ensured that religion continue
d to be a touchy subject.

  Although the Netherlands has long had a substantial Catholic minority, it has become a tradition that monarchs are members of the Dutch Reformed Church (which was merged in 2004 with three other institutions to form the Protestant Church in the Netherlands). For this reason, the monarchy was plunged into crisis in 1963 by the decision of the future Queen Beatrix’s younger sister, Princess Irene, secretly to convert to Catholicism and get engaged to a Spanish Catholic, whom she married the following year. Beatrix’s youngest sister Marijke also fell for a Catholic, this time a Cuban exile whom she met in New York, but in an attempt to avoid a repetition of the scandal she renounced her and future children’s rights to the throne before converting to Catholicism and officially announcing her engagement in 1975.

  Times have changed, however. Princess Máxima, the Argentinian-born wife of Crown Prince Willem-Alexander, is a Catholic and has shown no inclination to change her faith, which would make her the first Catholic queen of the Netherlands when her husband becomes king. Even so, she did study the Protestant faith and, crucially, agreed that their eldest daughter, Princess Catharina-Amalia, who is destined herself to become queen one day, and her two younger sisters should all be brought up as Protestants.

  The armed forces too have traditionally enjoyed a special relationship with monarchy, a reflection of their position as the defender of the nation that has the king or queen at its summit. In modern European societies the army and other services are also a repository of deference, service, hierarchy and discipline, values with which royalty has traditionally been associated.

  English history is full of stories of royal derring-do on the battlefield: Henry V’s courage against the French at Agincourt in 1415 was celebrated by Shakespeare, while Henry VII became the last English king to win the throne in battle after defeating Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Two centuries later, William III’s victory over James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, in which the Protestant Dutchman personally led his forces, is still celebrated to this day by the Protestants of Northern Ireland – and remains a source of often violent friction with the Catholic community.

  Elsewhere in Europe many kings over the centuries have reigned thanks to military conquest – or at the very least continued in power thanks to the success of their armed forces in seeing off enemies who would have overthrown them. The overwhelming majority of monarchies that fell in the twentieth century did so as a result of defeat in the First and Second World Wars.

  No European monarch these days would lead his or her army into battle; for a start, most would not have the know-how. And then there is the fear of the possible consequences if they were killed or, worse, captured by the enemy. George II was the last reigning British monarch to fight, with not very impressive results: on 27th June 1743, during the War of the Austrian Succession, the King, then aged sixty, personally led his forces against a French army commanded by the Duc de Noailles at the Battle of Dettingen, in Bavaria. The British won, although it almost ended in disaster for the King: at one point his horse ran off and had to be halted by Ensign Cyrus Trapaud, who received a promotion as a reward.

  By the nineteenth century monarchs were increasingly leaving military matters to those who knew what they were doing. This did not stop them trying to play a role. Under the Belgian constitution, the King was both required to “maintain the national independence and the integrity of the territory” and made the commander of territorial and maritime forces. Belgium’s Léopold I personally commanded his troops against the country’s former Dutch rulers in 1831–32; his grandson, Albert I, in turn, led Belgian forces when the Germans invaded in 1914; heavily outnumbered, they were, inevitably, defeated. But while the Belgian government moved across the French border to Le Havre, Albert and his little army stayed in De Panne, on the Flemish coast, maintaining a foothold in the country.

  By that Christmas, the legend of the Roi-Chevalier was born – and the King was hailed as a hero around the world – even if evidence since uncovered by revisionist historians has somewhat undermined his image. The King led his army during the Courtrai offensive of autumn 1918 and on 22nd November entered Brussels in triumph on horseback flanked by the Queen, his children and the Duke of York, the future King George VI of Britain.

  Other royal involvement in military affairs ended less happily; Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, a great lover of the culture and trappings of militarism, revelled in the title of Supreme War Lord during the First World War, but as the conflict continued it was increasingly his generals who took the decisions. His arch-foe, Tsar Nicholas II, meanwhile, insisted on appointing himself commander-in-chief in 1915 when the war started going badly for Russia, in the mistaken belief it would inspire his troops. The effect was disastrous: the country’s military performance went from bad to worse while the Tsar, based at Mogilev, some 370 miles from St Petersburg, failed to grasp the seriousness of the crisis unfolding in the capital.

  During the Second World War, it was Léopold III’s attempts, in his role as commander-in-chief, to emulate his father’s behaviour during the previous conflict that led to his subsequent undoing. Other monarchs played less of a direct role in military affairs, acting as symbols of national resistance in exile – such as Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands or King Haakon VII of Norway – or within their country, in the case of the Danish and Swedish monarchs. In Britain too, military strategy was a matter for the government and the generals. The main contribution of George VI – who had served in the Royal Navy during the First World War – and his wife, Elizabeth, was instead his morale-boosting visits to munitions factories and the scenes of bombings as well as to military forces abroad. His daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth II, meanwhile, although only thirteen on the outbreak of war, joined the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service in 1945, becoming number 230873 Second Subaltern Elizabeth Windsor. Training as a driver and mechanic, she drove a military truck, rising to the rank of junior commander.

  When Elizabeth became queen seven years later, she also became nominal head of the armed forces – a position she still occupies. Long-standing constitutional convention, however, has vested de-facto executive authority in the office of the prime minister and the cabinet. The Queen nevertheless remains the “ultimate authority” of the military and retains the power to prevent its unconstitutional use.

  Europe’s other monarchs also remain commander-in-chief, in name if not in practice – with the exception of Sweden: when the constitution was changed in 1975 to strip the king of political power, he also ceased to be titular head of his country’s military. He nevertheless remains a four-star general and admiral à la suite in the Swedish army, navy and air force and is by convention the foremost representative of the Swedish armed forces.

  In Britain, where the links between royalty and the armed forces are particularly strong, soldiers fight for “Queen (or King) and country”, not “prime minister” or “government” and country. It is to the Queen that they swear allegiance, rather than the constitution, which in the case of Britain is anyway a set of laws rather than a single document – and it is the Queen’s portrait that hangs on mess-hall walls. The country has a Royal Navy and Royal Air Force, although strangely not a Royal Army – even though many individual regiments have “royal” as part of their name. The defence of the Netherlands, meanwhile, is in the hands of the Koninklijke Landmacht, the Royal Army. Europe’s palaces are also home to a disproportionate number of retired army and naval officers, perhaps because they are seen to possess precisely the necessary qualities of obedience, discipline and discretion required for royal service.

  Indeed, across Europe the link between royalty and the armed forces remains an enduring one, right down to regimental level. Monarchs and their families have wardrobes full of different military uniforms – whether army, navy or air force – to be worn as the occasion demands. At the last count, Queen Elizabeth was colonel-in-chief of – or held some other formal military position in –
some thirty-five British regiments or other formations, as well as a further two dozen in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The Duke of Edinburgh and their children hold similar positions at several others. Princess Diana became colonel-in-chief of the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment when it was formed in 1992. Since her death five years later, her place as colonel-in-chief has been taken by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.

  Not surprisingly, a spell of military service has traditionally been considered de rigueur for young royals – and this remains the case today in all Europe’s royal houses. In Sweden, this goes for the girls too. And so, in March 2003, Crown Princess Victoria, the twenty-five-year-old eldest daughter of King Carl XVI Gustaf, was among a group of forty-two men and women learning combat skills, marksmanship, first aid and chemical-warfare safety as part of their basic military training. Dressed in army fatigues and with camouflage paint on her face, the Crown Princess took time out after a course at the Swedish armed forces’ peacekeeping training ground south of Stockholm to meet the press, handling her AK-5 assault rifle with practised ease as she posed for pictures. While some of the other forty students in the course were expected to go on to international assignments in Swedish peacekeeping units, a posting to a foreign war zone was not on the cards for Victoria.

  Although obligatory at the time for men, military service in neutral Sweden was optional for women – and only a relatively small number signed up. For Victoria, however, her time at the camp was a highly symbolic part of her preparation for her future role as queen, which had also included stints as an intern at the United Nations in New York and at Swedish foreign-trade offices in Berlin and Paris. It also provided spectacular photographs published by newspapers and magazines across the world.