The Great Survivors

by Peter Conradi

  As the crisis deepened, Carl XVI Gustaf took the unprecedented step on 30th May of giving a long interview to TT, the Swedish national news agency – the first time a monarch had deigned to answer such direct questions about his private life. The King flatly denied allegations he had visited sex clubs or had indirect contact with organized crime, and said such incriminating photos could not possibly exist. He seemed uncomfortable, however, did not always speak clearly and seemed confused about what he had – or had not – already admitted the previous November.

  The Swedish media were not impressed: if the claims were not true, why had it taken the King so long to issue a denial? they demanded. In a commentary in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, Peter Wolodarski drew parallels with the disastrous attempts by Bill Clinton to cover up his relationship with Monica Lewinsky during the mid-1990s that ‌almost cost him the presidency.3

  Carl XVI Gustaf is not the only one of Europe’s monarchs to have his private life subjected to scrutiny, however. Spain’s journalists had long gossiped in private about Juan Carlos’s private life, but when French and Italian magazines published stories in the early 1990s linking the Spanish King to Marta Gaya, a Catalan interior decorator, the stories were dismissed by Felipe González, the prime minister, as an international plot to undermine his country. Most of Spain’s newspapers and magazines – with the exception of the republican-minded El Mundo – agreed.

  Such a united front broke down in 2008, however, when Jaime Peñafiel, a leading royal expert and former editor of ¡Hola! magazine, published a book, Juan Carlos y Sofía. Retrato de un matrimonio (Juan Carlos and Sofía: Portrait of a Marriage), in which he claimed that the King had had a series of affairs during his married life – including an eighteen-year relationship with Gaya. In his book, the contents of which were eagerly seized upon by the media, Peñafiel claimed that Gaya’s former husband, an engineer, had once complained to a friend about his wife’s affair. “Go and give the guy a couple of punches,” the friend replied. “I can’t,” the cuckolded husband reportedly said. “We’re talking about the King.” The book also claimed the royal couple had blazing rows, which ended with Sofía, his Greek-born queen, in tears. “I hate you, I hate you,” the King is quoted as shouting at her on one occasion – to which Sofía reportedly replied, “Hate me, but you can screw yourself ‌because you can’t get divorced.”4

  Further embarrassing revelations followed in January 2012, in a biography of the Queen written by Pilar Eyre, a veteran commentator on Spanish royal affairs. According to the book, La soledad de la Reina (The Solitude of the Queen), Juan Carlos and Sofía’s marriage had broken down as early as 1976, when the Queen discovered her husband with his mistress at a friend’s country house near Toledo. Sofía, Eyre claimed, had wanted to leave Juan Carlos but was persuaded by her mother, the exiled Queen Frederika of Greece, not to do so. Instead the couple led separate lives, with the King embarking on affairs with a series of amigas while his wife devoted herself ‌to bringing up their children.5 The palace maintained a dignified silence in response to the allegations, although a woman named as having been one of the King’s lovers denied she was anything more than a friend. Soon after the book was published, Eyre was fired from her job at the television station Telecinco – the result, she claimed, of pressure from the royal family.

  The love life of Albert II of the Belgians has also provided fuel for the tabloids – and here as well it was laid open to public scrutiny by a book: in this case, an unauthorized biography of his wife, Queen Paola, published in 1999. Entitled Paola: van la dolce vita tot koningin (Paola: From la Dolce Vita to Queen), the book claimed that back in the 1960s, when his elder brother Baudouin was king, Albert had fathered an illegitimate child, who was now living in London, where she worked “in the arts”. “During a troubled period, [the King] carried out an extramarital relationship,” it claimed. “Paola, distressed, refused to receive [in the palace] ‌the half-sister of their children.”6 And that was that. Curiously, its author, Mario Danneels, was no seasoned royal commentator, but rather an eighteen-year-old unknown writing his first book.

  Danneels did not name the royal love child, nor did he provide any further details, but within a few days of the book coming out the tabloid La Dernière Heure named her as Delphine Boël, an artist. Alongside its article it printed a photograph of one of Boël’s typically provocative artworks: a montage featuring Brussels’s celebrated Manneken Pis with a huge penis in the Belgian national colours of black, yellow and red.

  Despite the revelations of such alleged infidelities, the three kings’ marriages have survived. For the three monarchs – and also for Europe’s fourth king, Harald of Norway, and its three queens regnant – marriage is an institution to be entered into for life. Whatever the ups and downs they have experienced during married life, divorce has never seemed a realistic option.

  When Juan Carlos and Sofía celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in May 2012, it was only the latest in a long line of events that demonstrate the longevity of the unions of Europe’s current generation of monarchs: in 2007, Queen Margrethe of Denmark celebrated her fortieth wedding anniversary and Queen Elizabeth of Britain her sixtieth. Harald V of Norway has been married for more than forty years and Carl XVI Gustaf more than thirty. Even Belgium’s Albert and Paola made it to their fiftieth in 2009, by which time the marital difficulties that had brought them to the verge of divorce in the 1960s seemed like ancient history. Beatrix of the Netherlands is the only current European monarch without a partner, and she was married for more than thirty-six years before her husband, Claus, died in 2002. For the kings at least, though, that has not necessarily meant absolute fidelity.

  When it comes to their private lives, today’s monarchs are to a great extent a product of their time. During the 1950s and 1960s, when they were coming of age, European society was changing, and arranged marriages seemed like an anachronism. Like their subjects, they wanted to marry whom they wanted rather than someone chosen by their parents. In their case, however, a series of rules, some written, some informal, stipulated who was suitable royal-marriage material and who was not. This went not just for those expected to accede to the throne, but also their brothers, sisters and even cousins. If they insisted on pressing ahead with an unsuitable match, there was a risk it could cost them their place in the line of succession to the throne.

  In most cases, the preference remained for a member of another ruling family, but this was far more difficult than it had been half a century earlier, because of the small number of monarchies that had survived the upheavals of the First and Second World Wars. A member of an ousted house – or one of the innumerable German princes or princesses – was often a good substitute or, failing that, a member of the country’s own aristocracy.

  In the case of male royals, when it came to choosing a bride the rules were simple: the younger the better. Not just because she would tend to be more fertile – which is of vital importance to a monarchy based on heredity – but also because it made it less likely that a parade of former lovers would emerge with embarrassing stories to tell. Other factors, such as formal educational achievements, were of far less importance, especially in Britain – all of which explained why the twenty-year-old Lady Diana Spencer, widely thought to have been “without a history”, seemed such a perfect match for Prince Charles, who was almost thirteen years her senior and with a long string of much publicized sexual conquests behind him.

  In most cases, approval for a royal marriage continues to be required both from the monarch and from parliament – which in many cases over the years has proved anything but a formality. To this have been added some other rules – both formalized and unwritten. In Britain, for example, it was, as mentioned previously, only at the Perth summit of October 2011 that it was agreed to repeal the provisions of the 1701 Act of Settlement that barred the heir to the throne from marrying a Catholic. Furthermore, the Royal Marriages Act, passed after two of George III’s brothers married u
nsuitable women, decrees that no member of the royal family under the age of twenty-five may marry without the permission of the monarch. Members of the Dutch royal family have also traditionally been prevented from marrying Catholics, although this was not stipulated in the constitution, but was rather a practice born out of the country’s past domination by Catholic Spain – and did not appear to be an obstacle to Crown Prince Willem-Alexander’s marriage to Máxima Zorreguieta in 2002. Until relatively recently the Scandinavian monarchies observed the practice that members of the royal house should marry only foreigners.

  Queen Elizabeth, the oldest of Europe’s current reigning monarchs, was also the first to marry. Her husband Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, a member of the junior branch of Greece’s royal family, was like his bride a great-great-grandchild of Queen Victoria, but the drama of his early life in Greece could not have been more different from the comfort of Elizabeth’s upbringing in London.

  Known as Philippos to the Greeks, he was born on 10th June 1921 on the dining-room table of Villa Mon Repos, a rented house on the island of Corfu. He was the fifth child, but first son, of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and the British-born Princess Alice of Battenberg. The first years of his life were turbulent: in September 1922 his uncle King Konstantinos was forced to abdicate, and Andrew was among those arrested by the military government and blamed for the defeat of his country at the hands of the Turks. Andrew was taken to Athens and put on trial in the Chamber of Deputies by a jury of junior officers.

  Found guilty of disobeying orders and abandoning his position in the face of the enemy, Andrew was sentenced to death. Alice was determined to save her husband’s life and telegraphed her younger brother, Louis Mountbatten, who was a junior officer in Britain’s Royal Navy. Although only twenty-one, he not only secured an audience with King George V but managed to persuade the monarch to intervene to rescue his distant relative. When Greece’s dictator Theodoros Pangalos refused such interference in his country’s internal affairs, the HMS Calypso, a British warship, arrived in the bay and trained its mighty guns on the government offices.

  The following day Andrew was brought before the court again, stripped of his military rank and royal titles and banished from Greece for life. That night, Pangalos himself drove him to the warship, where his wife was waiting. The ship then steamed to Corfu to pick up the rest of the family and took them to the Italian port of Brindisi – from where they continued by train to France. The baby Philip was carried on board the ship in a makeshift cot made out of a fruit box.

  As he grew up, Philip was taken under the wing of his Uncle Dickie, as Louis Mountbatten was known in the family, an extraordinarily well-connected character who was to become Admiral of the Fleet, like his father before him, and also the last viceroy of India. Although he began his education in France, Philip was sent, aged seven, at his uncle’s insistence, to Cheam School, living partly with his maternal grandmother Victoria at Kensington Palace, and partly with his other uncle, George Mountbatten, Marquess of Milford Haven, at Lynden Manor, Berkshire. In 1933 he was sent to Schule Schloss Salem, in Germany, which was owned by one of his brothers-in-law, Berthold, Margrave of Baden. With the rise of Nazism, however, Kurt Hahn, the school’s Jewish founder, fled Germany and founded a new school, Gordonstoun, in Scotland. After two terms, Philip moved there.

  Philip left in 1939 and joined the Royal Navy, graduating the next year from the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, as the top cadet in his course. It was on 22nd June 1939, twelve days after his eighteenth birthday, that Philip had what, without hyperbole, could be described as a life-changing experience – and, inevitably, it was thanks to his “Uncle Dickie”.

  King George VI and his wife Elizabeth had travelled aboard the royal yacht to visit the naval college, and someone had to look after their two daughters, Elizabeth, then aged thirteen, and nine-year-old Margaret. Mountbatten, who was there in his role as the King’s aide-de-camp, made sure that of all the young men present, it was his nephew, Philip, a tall, strikingly good-looking man, who was given the task. Elizabeth was smitten. “She never took her eyes off him,” observed Marion Crawford, her governess, even though Philip did not seem to ‌pay the Princess special attention.7 The couple nevertheless soon began to exchange letters.

  Philip had a successful war; as the prince of a neutral power, he was initially posted as midshipman to a battleship in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), safely out of the way of the action. But after appealing to Mountbatten, by then a captain in the Royal Navy, Philip was posted to HMS Ramillies in the Mediterranean, and then in October 1942, at the age of twenty-one, he became one of the youngest first lieutenants in the navy, serving on board HMS Lauderdale, a Hunt-class destroyer. In 1944 he left for the Pacific and was in Tokyo Bay in September of the following year, when the Japanese finally surrendered.

  During this time, Philip and Elizabeth continued to write. While Philip was, by all accounts, enjoying shore leave in various ports, the young Princess was knitting him socks and, every night, before going to sleep, would kiss the black-and-white photograph she kept of him beside her bed. The relationship was fed by the ambitious Mountbatten: he would tell Elizabeth where Philip was serving and how he was doing, and would do all he could to ensure that the couple met whenever he was back in Britain on leave.

  As one of Queen Elizabeth’s biographers put it: “The courtship of Elizabeth by Philip seemed more like a game of chess, with the grandmaster Mountbatten in control of half the board, advising Philip how to conduct himself. For the marriage Uncle Dickie wanted to secure for Philip was of vital importance, such was his determination to cement the Mountbatten family ‌to the house of Windsor.”8

  It was not until 1943, when Elizabeth turned seventeen, that Philip let it be known that he was indeed courting her. The King was not happy when told by his wife, Elizabeth, the future Queen Mother, but she persuaded him to let the romance take its course. As long as the war continued, she reasoned, there was not much danger of her daughter’s relationship going further. With the outbreak of peace, however, the problem became more acute. Philip was seen by many at court – the King included – as an unsuitable consort for the future Queen. Her mother reportedly referred to him as “the Hun”. Hoping their daughter might find someone else, the King and Queen organized a series of balls packed with eligible men over the following months, to which Philip, to his great annoyance, was not invited. Yet Elizabeth remained devoted to her prince.

  Eventually, in 1946, Philip asked the King for his daughter’s hand in marriage. George agreed – but still had one last trick up his sleeve, insisting any formal announcement be postponed until after their Elizabeth’s twenty-first birthday the following April. By 18th March 1947, at Mountbatten’s suggestion, Philip had renounced his Greek and Danish titles, as well as his allegiance to the Greek crown, converted from Greek Orthodoxy to the Church of England and become a naturalized British subject. He also adopted the surname Mountbatten (an Anglicized version of Battenberg) from his mother’s family.

  The couple married on 20th November 1947 in Westminster Abbey in a ceremony attended by representatives of various royal families – but not Philip’s three surviving sisters, who had married German royals with Nazi connections. On the morning of the wedding, Philip was made Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth and Baron Greenwich of Greenwich in the County of London; the previous day the King had bestowed on him the style of His Royal Highness. Elizabeth’s mother was still not convinced.

  The war had ended only two years earlier and times were tough. Rationing was still in place, but Elizabeth, like other brides, was allowed two hundred extra clothing coupons to buy her dress, made of silk from China rather than from former enemy Japan. Women across the country also sent in their own coupons but, since the rules stipulated they were non-transferable, they were all returned. The day of the wedding was bitterly cold, and when the newly-weds left Buckingham Palace for Waterloo Station in an open landau to begin their honeymoon, they had hot-water
bottles and blankets on their knees. For extra warmth, the Princess had one of her beloved corgis by her feet.

  Albert, the second son of King Léopold III, was the next of the current generation of monarchs to tie the knot. He met Paola Ruffo di Calabria, an Italian aristocrat, in October 1958 while they were both in Rome to attend the coronation of Pope John XXIII. After the ceremony the Belgian embassy held a ball at which Albert, then Prince of Liège, was the guest of honour. Paola, also among those invited, claimed later she had not really known who Albert was. “I had a vague idea of who Baudouin was, but I didn’t really know anything about Belgium or Prince ‌Albert. Only Tintin,” she said.9 They clearly made an impression on each other – so much so that Albert came up with various reasons to prolong his stay in the Italian capital and see Paola again. And so, as one commentator put it, began a “fairy-tale romance in the least erotic place in the whole of Europe. During the official inauguration of the most jovial pope of the twentieth century, the most bourgeois of all the royal princes got to know the ‌most flamboyant of all princesses.”10

  By the time Albert arrived back in Belgium, he had already made up his mind to marry Paola. Two months after their meeting, he introduced his wife-to-be to his family, and four months later to the press. On 2nd July 1959, only eight months after their first meeting, they married in Brussels. Thousands of people turned out for a glimpse of the bride, a vision of beauty in a white satin dress with a fifty-foot train by Concettina Buonanna, a Neapolitan designer, and a lace veil that had belonged to her Belgian grandmother.