Crown Princess Mary, the Australian-born wife of Denmark’s Crown Prince Frederik, has also been seen to be doing her part for the defence of her adoptive homeland – in 2008 she joined the Danish Home Guard, a volunteer unit of the country’s military responsible for domestic security, and after receiving basic training in, among other things, weapon use, she was awarded the rank of lieutenant in February of the following year.
While such involvement was largely symbolic, the forces have continued to play a more significant part in the life of the current male heirs to the throne. After leaving school, Frederik served in the regiment of the Royal Life Guards and then, in 1988, joined the Royal Hussars as a First Lieutenant. After graduating he returned to the Danish military in 1995, this time to the navy, where he was chosen from among three hundred applicants to become a member of the elite Frømandskorpset unit, the Royal Frogmen Corps, modelled on America’s Navy Seals and Britain’s Special Boat Service.
The three-year training course, centred on the unit’s base in a village an hour’s drive outside Copenhagen, is legendary for its toughness. Among the various tests of physical fitness on both land and water, aspiring Frogmen must be able to run one and a half miles in hilly terrain in full uniform with boots and gun in less than eleven minutes – Frederik managed it with seven seconds to spare – and swim six miles in open sea and fifty yards with hands and feet bound. “The whole time they think up imaginative ways of punishing people,” said Jesper Lundorf, the Crown Prince’s secret-service protection officer, who did the course alongside Frederik.4 One of the greatest challenges recruits face during their training is “Hell Week”, when they are dropped in small groups with an inflatable boat into the water. After weighing down the boat and hiding it underwater, they must then survive in an exercise designed to simulate life behind enemy lines. The week also includes a seventy-five-mile march.
Although Europe’s other heirs to the throne have not submitted themselves to quite such a gruelling schedule, they have also earned their stripes in the military. Following in the footsteps of his father, grandfather and two of his great-grandfathers, Prince Charles joined the navy after graduating from Cambridge University, and qualified as a helicopter pilot before becoming a member of 845 Naval Air Squadron, which operated from the commando-carrier HMS Hermes. Two years later he took command of the coastal mine-hunter HMS Bronington for the last nine months of his naval career.
Belgium’s Prince Philippe rounded off his secondary education with a spell at the Royal Military Academy, before qualifying as a fighter pilot and a paratrooper. Willem-Alexander, the Dutch crown prince, also gained his military pilot’s licence. Spain’s Prince Felipe is a qualified helicopter pilot, while Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon spent a year aboard missile torpedo boats and other vessels of the Royal Norwegian Navy.
The absence of war in Western Europe for over six decades has helped ensure that none of those mentioned above have been involved in anything more dangerous than exercises. Prince Andrew, the second son of Queen Elizabeth II, is the exception: he served for twenty-two years in the Royal Navy, and when Britain set out to reclaim the Falkland Islands from Argentina in 1982, the Prince was a member of the task force.
The question of how much danger members of the royal family can be exposed to still remains a sensitive one, especially in Britain, which in the years since the Falklands has been involved in a number of military interventions and peacekeeping missions ranging from Bosnia and Kosovo to Afghanistan and Iraq. While Andrew has long since returned to civilian life, his nephews William and Harry are both serving officers.
It was initially planned to send Harry to Iraq but, much to the young Prince’s frustration, General Sir Richard Dannatt, head of the British army, announced in May 2007 that it would be too risky, as it would turn the Prince and his comrades-in-arms in the Household Cavalry into too much of a target for insurgents. Deeply disappointed, Harry considered leaving, but agreed to stay on to retrain as a battlefield air controller. Several months later a plan was hatched: the Prince would be sent to Afghanistan, but in conditions of absolute secrecy. In an extraordinary arrangement, the editors of Britain’s major newspapers and broadcasting organizations were told of the plan but signed an agreement to maintain a news blackout. It was the Queen who told Harry of his mission.
That December, the Prince, who had just turned twenty-three, was deployed to Helmand, spending time at bases deep in a Taliban-infiltrated area in the far south of the province. Although his work meant he was in regular radio contact with pilots from several countries, they knew him only by his call sign. Then, after just over two months, his secret posting was revealed in two little-noticed articles in an Australian magazine. On 28th February the Drudge Report, the American website best known for revealing Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky, broke the news to the world. Harry was immediately recalled to Britain for his own safety.
Despite its abrupt ending, the Prince’s posting appeared to have been a success, especially in the way it allowed him to serve alongside other officers. “It’s very nice to be a normal person for once,” he declared in a television interview that was recorded in Afghanistan and broadcast after his cover was blown. “I think this is about as normal as I’m ever going to get.”5
This desire, on the part not just of Harry but of the army, for him to be treated as much as possible like an ordinary officer is a familiar one. But it is difficult to achieve, because princes will often have official royal duties that they will have to discharge while in the service. Various aspects of Harry’s and his elder brother William’s military service have brought this into sharp relief. In the early years, commentators questioned how the party-loving pair, although supposedly full-time officers, were able to spend so much time on the dance floors of fashionable London clubs. Further embarrassment came after it emerged that William used a Royal Air Force helicopter on which he was training in April 2008 to pick up his brother in London and then fly to the Isle of Wight to attend a stag party for his cousin, Peter Phillips. Nor was this an isolated incident: William reportedly made use of other training flights at the time to practise landings in a field owned by the parents of his future wife, Kate Middleton, to attend a wedding in Northumberland and to fly over Highgrove, his father’s estate.
The Ministry of Defence initially justified William’s flight to the stag party as an exercise that “tested his new skills to the limit”. This was not the whole story, however. Republic, a republican pressure group, used the Freedom of Information of Act to demand the release of internal documents to get to the truth. Not only had the nine training flights cost taxpayers £86,434, it also emerged that the Prince’s station commander had not been told about the “true nature” of the flights and would certainly not have approved the one to the Isle of Wight if he had known. Several senior officers were taken to task over the affair – as was William himself.
Military helicopters were a sensitive issue at the time, because of the acute shortage of them being suffered by the armed forces fighting in Afghanistan. What looked to have been a deliberate attempt to cover up the incident only added to the embarrassment both for the royal family and the government.
Chapter 5
Pomp, Circumstance and Paying the Bills
At first sight she could have been any elderly lady heading out of London for her Christmas holidays. Dressed in a long grey coat, with a bunch of flowers in one hand and a Hermès scarf tied firmly over her head, Queen Elizabeth II walked down platform 11b of King’s Cross station. After boarding the 10.45 First Capital Connect train to King’s Lynn in Norfolk, she took her seat in a first-class carriage next to a middle-aged man with closely cropped hair who was dressed in a smart suit.
The photographs, which appeared in the press in December 2009, did not tell the whole story. A few minutes before the Queen had arrived at the station, one of Britain’s busiest, the platform had been cleared and swept by security men. And, rather than mingling with
other passengers, Elizabeth was seated in an eight-seat section at the back of the carriage. The man beside her was a plain-clothes royal-protection officer; his four colleagues standing by the door of the compartment turned away any other passengers who tried to join her. Then, at 12.20, when the train arrived at its destination a hundred miles to the north, the Queen was whisked away by a waiting Range Rover to Sandringham House, where she and her family traditionally spend the Christmas holidays. Yet the point had been made – and was rewarded with approving headlines that will have brought cheer to Buckingham Palace and its spin doctors. As one newspaper pointed out, the Queen could have chosen instead to make the journey by the royal train – which costs taxpayers £57,142 each time it is used. In comparison, the regular first-class tickets cost £44.40 each for the monarch and members of her entourage.1
However unusual the image, it was not the first occasion on which the Queen had taken public transport. A spokesman for the palace said members of the royal family frequently use scheduled train services when security allows. The difference this time was that the press had been tipped off in advance.
In Britain, as in the rest of Europe, the cost of maintaining the monarchy is a complicated and highly emotive issue. In medieval times the monarchy and state were indistinguishable from one another: the king received revenue from taxes, but this had to pay for the workings of the government and for fighting wars – as well as fund his own court. The country was like a family-run firm, and the treasury was what its name suggested: the chest that contained the king’s personal wealth.
A medieval monarch would demonstrate his power in part through the splendour of his court. By wearing finer clothes or owning more luxurious palaces than those of rival rulers, he was not merely indulging himself or even showing off on a personal level. He was also showing off on behalf of his nation. When Henry VIII of England and King François of France met near Calais in 1520, both monarchs tried to outshine each other with the magnificence of their tents, clothes, feasts, music and games. Such was the splendour of the occasion that their meeting place became known thereafter as Le Camp du Drap d’Or – the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
Such traditions of conspicuous consumption are still maintained by the ruling families of the Gulf states; visitors to Muscat, the capital of Oman, will see the Sultan’s splendid five-hundred-foot yacht – large enough to accommodate a fifty-piece orchestra – anchored conspicuously off the Corniche. Yet different rules apply to constitutional monarchs, whose economic power has dwindled over the centuries along with their political influence.
The modern-day European monarch has much in common with a civil servant: in return for the duties outlined in the preceding chapters, he or she is paid a fixed sum each year from the public purse. Yet this is clearly a civil servant with a difference. For a start, the amount paid, variously described as a “civil list” or an apanage, is, in most cases, several times higher than that received by the prime minister or any other public figure – even though it may be dwarfed by the sums earned by the more successful banker.
Nor does it stop there: in most cases, there are also allowances for the monarch’s spouse, children and, in the British case, even cousins. Typically there are several palaces and other residences that need maintaining – and staffing – as well, perhaps, as a royal yacht, train or plane.
Blurring the picture, monarchs can also rely on vast personal wealth, accumulated over the centuries; such fortunes usually have their origins in military conquests or other confiscations, but have grown in recent years thanks to successful investments. Special tax concessions, especially on inheritance, have also helped.
Writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, Walter Bagehot contrasted the relatively modest nature of Queen Victoria’s court with the splendour of Napoleon III of France’s surroundings. “Refined and original observers,” he said, believed that “there are arguments for not having a court and there are arguments for having a splendid court, but there are no arguments for having a mean court. It is better to spend a million in dazzling when you wish to dazzle, than three quarters of a million in trying to dazzle and yet not dazzle.” Yet while conceding this argument might hold true for Napoleon’s realm, Bagehot was not sure how appropriate it was for his own country. If the British court were to be as lavish as its French counterpart, he warned, “it would do evil if it added a new example to our many examples of showy wealth – if it gave the sanction of its dignity to the race of expenditure.”2
In today’s more egalitarian, meritocratic age, public opinion has shifted further in Bagehot’s direction: we are much more likely to disapprove of such displays of royal wealth, which, although acceptable among film stars or footballers, are less easy to stomach when indulged in by those who have inherited rather than earned their fortunes. There are limits, however: while some may grumble at the sight of some or other act of royal extravagance, few – at least among those who support the idea of monarchy – would want to see their king or queen living in a modest home, travelling regularly by bus or train or dressed in high-street clothes.
But how wealthy are Europe’s royal families? How much are they paid – and, indeed, how much should they be paid – and how lavish should their court be? The answers have varied from country to country.
Sandringham, the estate to which Queen Elizabeth II was heading on that December day, is one of a series of residences that the monarch occupies at different times of the year. Home to four generations of sovereigns since 1862, it is here, close to the north Norfolk coast, that Elizabeth and her family traditionally spend the period from the Christmas holidays until February. In August and September, by contrast, their home is Balmoral Castle – a property beloved of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, which lies on a 17,400-acre estate in the Scottish Highlands. Both are the private property of the royal family.
And then there are the official residences. Windsor Castle, west of London, the largest occupied castle in the world and a royal home and fortress for more than nine hundred years, is usually used by the Queen at weekends and is her official residence for a month over Easter and again for a week in June, when she attends the service of the Order of the Garter and the Royal Ascot race meeting.
The most famous royal residence of them all – and indeed in the world – is Buckingham Palace, a massive structure 335 foot wide, with 775 rooms and almost 830,000 square feet of floor space. Bought by George III in 1761 for £21,000 as a private retreat, it was only in 1837 on the accession of Queen Victoria that it became the principal royal residence. Very much a working building, it has since become firmly established as the centrepiece of Britain’s constitutional monarchy. There are a series of other palaces too, among them Clarence House, the former London home of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, which provides an official residence for the Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cornwall and Princes William and Harry.
Despite the obvious scale of the palaces, life within them cannot always be described as opulent. The Buckingham Palace into which the future Queen Elizabeth and her younger sister Margaret moved in 1937 after their father became king was a curious mixture of luxury and decrepitude. As Marion Crawford, the girls’ governess found, the upper floors had been little changed since Victoria’s days. Shortly after they arrived, Crawford – or “Crawfie” as she became known – recalled sitting down for tea on a pink-and-gold chair in the magnificent Belgian Suite, only for it to dissolve beneath her with an ominous splitting sound. The chair, it seemed, had not been recaned. The first night that the housemaid came to pull down her bedroom curtains, the whole thing – curtains, pelmet and heavy brass rods – came down with a clatter, narrowly missing their heads. In a nod to modernity, electric light had recently been installed, but the switch to operate the bedroom light was two yards away down the corridor.
And then there were the mice. Crawford described a meeting with the vermin man, who offered her his secret weapon for her bedroom: the so-called sticky trap, a piece
of cardboard with a lump of aniseed in the middle surrounded by a sea of treacle. Crawford declined. “People think that a royal palace is the last word in up-to-date luxury, replete with everything the heart could desire, and that people who live there do so in absolute comfort,” she recalled later. “Nothing could be further from the truth. Life in a palace rather resembles camping in a museum. These historic places are so old, so tied up with tradition, that they are mostly dropping to bits, all the equipment there decades behind the times.”3
Life at Buckingham Palace became considerably grimmer during the Second World War as the royal family made a great show of sharing rationing and other privations endured by their subjects. Hot water was available for only a few hours a day, and black lines were painted on the side of all the royal bathtubs to indicate the five inches of water allowed. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wife Eleanor, who stayed there for two days in 1943, was struck by how tough life was: she was allocated the Queen’s bedroom; it was cold and draughty, with wind whistling through the bombed-out windows, while the fishcakes offered for dinner were of poor quality. Roosevelt’s hosts may have been exaggerating the hardship they were suffering for dramatic effect: the royal family’s rations were, in reality, bolstered by the large numbers of deer, pheasants, grouse and rabbits caught on the royal estates. One member of the staff at Balmoral recalled eating so much venison during rationing, “it’s a wonder we didn’t grow antlers”.4
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