The Great Survivors

by Peter Conradi

  On 13th September 1961, news of the engagement appeared on the front pages of newspapers in Greece and in Portugal. As part of his continuing battle of wills with Franco, Don Juan had not informed the Caudillo in advance about his son’s intentions. The dictator was furious, but there was little he could do, and his fondness for the young Prince eventually won him over.

  Juan Carlos and Sofía married on 14th May 1962 in Athens with ceremonies both at the Catholic Cathedral and the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Cathedral. Until two days before the wedding the Prince had his arm in a sling: three weeks earlier he had broken his collarbone while practising judo with Crown Prince Konstantinos, his future brother-in-law.

  Other European royal princesses, meanwhile, were finding it more difficult to secure a suitable partner. As Time magazine pointed out in 1962, the Almanach de Gotha, the directory of Europe’s highest nobility and royalty, listed twenty-six spinster princesses, but only sixteen unattached ‌princes of the right generation.17 The biggest imbalance was in the Netherlands and Denmark, where the countries’ future queens regnant, Beatrix and Margrethe, were both of marriageable age. Beatrix had three younger sisters; Margrethe had two. Matters were further complicated by the legacy of the Second World War: the various German families that had hitherto provided a disproportionate share of Europe’s royal brides and grooms had lost much of their lustre – especially those with members who had joined the Hitler Youth or, God forbid, the SS.

  And so, following Frederika’s example, other European queens began to play matchmaker. Queen Juliana of the Netherlands threw a ball in 1960 to help her eldest daughter Beatrix, by then in her early twenties, find a suitable mate. It didn’t work. Five years later, though, Beatrix did find her man: Claus-Georg Wilhelm Otto Friedrich Gerd von Amsberg, a German aristocrat and diplomat. Early in July 1965, just as Wilhelmina had done three decades earlier, Juliana made a broadcast to the nation announcing her daughter’s engagement. “I assure you, it is a good thing,” she said.

  The Dutch were not so easily convinced. Both Juliana and her mother Wilhelmina had married Germans – with mixed success. Wilhelmina’s spouse, Duke Heinrich Wladimir Albrecht Ernst of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, who died a decade before Beatrix was born, was an uninspiring character. “Henry was a taxidermist’s dream of a German princeling,” according to one contemporary account, “a beady-eyed, mean-spirited fellow, of whom the best that can be said is that he learnt his place (considerably below the throne) and that, after eight years of ‌marriage, he fathered Princess Juliana.”18

  The former American president Theodore Roosevelt described in a letter after a visit to their home how Wilhelmina “ruled her fat, heavy, dull husband with a rod of iron”, snapping at him if he failed to do as he was told. When Roosevelt congratulated him on the birth of Juliana, born after three miscarriages, the unfortunate Prince replied: “Yes, I hope she has a brother; otherwise I pity ‌the man that marries her!”19 Not surprisingly, perhaps, he sought solace in other women’s arms, reportedly fathering several children out of wedlock. Beatrix’s father, Bernhard, as will be seen in the next chapter, was also a serial womanizer – and, more seriously, was to drag the Dutch royal house into a murky financial scandal. This, however, was still a decade ahead.

  Claus’s problem was far simpler: he was a German. Although Bernhard had won over the Dutch after more than twenty-five years of marriage, thanks in part to his role during the war, the Dutch had suffered badly under the Nazis, and by the 1960s anti-German feelings were still strong. Claus’s case was not helped by his past membership of both the Hitler Youth and the Wehrmacht. Crowds marched through the streets of Amsterdam chanting “Claus raus” (“Claus out”), and orange swastikas began to appear all over the country; one was even daubed on the Royal Palace. Rotterdam’s Nieuwe Courant newspaper spoke for many when it asked: “Can a German put flowers at our memorials for heroes he fought against?” Some commentators suggested Beatrix should renounce her claim to the throne.

  If anything the criticism was directed more at Beatrix’s mother, Juliana. In fact, despite her public support for the marriage, the Queen had been privately opposed to it because of the damage she feared it would do to the royal family. Unable to persuade her daughter to change her mind, she had asked the German foreign minister to post Claus, who was based at the time in Bonn, out of Europe. Beatrix heard about the scheme and went on a three-day royal hunger strike in protest. Juliana’s plan was dropped.

  The wedding, set for 10th March 1966, was held in Amsterdam. It was a high-risk choice: the city had probably suffered more than any other in Holland from the Nazi occupation and by the mid-1960s was a hotbed of radical opinion. Juliana would have preferred her daughter to follow the Dutch royal tradition, according to which monarchs were married in The Hague, inaugurated in Amsterdam and buried in Delft. Yet Beatrix seemed determined to make a point. “I could be married in The Hague or Rotterdam and win over either city,” she declared. “But if I win the hearts of the Amsterdammers, I will win the heart of all the Netherlands.”

  The Amsterdammers were not so easily won over. As Beatrix and Claus rode out from the Royal Palace in their golden coach, accompanied by eight footmen in bulletproof vests, a smoke bomb rolled underneath and exploded, and the royal couple disappeared momentarily from view. Other bombs were thrown and a dead chicken with a swastika painted on its body thumped against the door. The police responded heavy-handedly, wading into the crowd, clubbing a number of innocent bystanders to the ground. Beatrix tried to smile and wave but the smoke made her eyes water. When police staged a photographic exhibition of their handling of the riots nine days later, demonstrators again took to the streets, damaging buildings and setting fires in front of the Dam Palace.

  It was at about the same time that Margrethe, two years Beatrix’s junior, was meeting her husband to be. Born Henri Marie Jean André Count de Laborde de Monpezat, the future prince consort was, like Claus, a diplomat, albeit a fairly lowly one in the French embassy in London, and on one occasion found himself seated at a dinner at the right hand of the then Princess Margrethe, who was studying at the London School of Economics. He was immediately smitten – apparently by her intellect as much as by her looks. “I fell under the charm of her turn of mind and her granite intelligence,” he wrote in his ‌memoirs. “My attraction was immediate.”20 Margrethe reciprocated his feelings. Henri proposed marriage in the summer of the following year during a secret visit to Denmark. Although the news was meant to be secret, it was leaked – apparently by a politician – and splashed on the front page of Ekstra Bladet, a Danish tabloid, leaving the palace with little alternative but to confirm that the couple would, indeed, wed.

  They married on 10th June 1967; Margrethe’s groom had to change not just his name – henceforth he was to be known as Henrik rather than Henri – but also his nationality and religion. Such sacrifices were a foretaste of what was to come. At a wedding reception for four hundred guests in a huge marquee in the garden of Fredensborg Palace, the Prince charmed guests with a speech in heavily French-accented Danish in which he sung his praises of his bride.

  Given the surfeit of eligible young princesses, finding a bride should have been simpler for Beatrix and Margrethe’s male peers, the future King Harald V of Norway and King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. Yet unlike Albert and Juan Carlos neither of them went for the royal – or even the noble – option. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of their choices: both men’s fathers and grandfathers before them had married foreign princesses, and it had been expected that they, like Juan Carlos, would follow suit. Instead Harald and Carl Gustaf married middle-class girls, inadvertently paving the way for their children’s unions several decades later, which have pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable even further.

  Harald was just twenty-two in 1959 when he stunned his father King Olav by announcing his choice of bride. Her name was Sonja Haraldsen, and her father, Karl August, recently deceased, had owned an upmarket ladies’ appare
l shop in Oslo. Although affluent, with a comfortable villa in one of the western suburbs of the capital, the Haraldsens were commoners – and Norwegian monarchs were meant to marry royalty, or at least nobility – which meant a foreigner, since the country had long since dispensed with nobles.

  There was a precedent, but not a very happy one: in 1953, Harald’s eldest sister Ragnhild had married Erling S. Lorentzen, a highly successful businessman and army officer who had served as her bodyguard immediately after the war, but the union caused a controversy. She was the first Norwegian royal to marry a commoner, and the newly-weds, encouraged to keep a low profile, moved to Brazil, where Lorentzen’s family had business interests. Their initial plan was to stay for a short time – in the event they were still there more than half a century later. Then in 1961, Harald’s other sister, Astrid, married Johan Martin Ferner, owner of an upmarket men’s clothing store. Ferner, a former Olympic medallist in sailing, was also a commoner – and worse, divorced – which did not go down well with many Norwegians.

  Harald was heir to the throne, though, and different rules applied. His grandfather, Haakon, had married King Edward VII’s daughter, Princess Maud, while his father, Olav, had concluded an equally traditional royal union by wedding his cousin, Princess Märtha of Sweden, who had died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1954, three years before her husband had come to the throne. During his youth Harald had been linked with all manner of Scandinavian and other European princesses. Queen Frederika of Greece had high hopes that he would marry her youngest daughter, Irene. It was not to be, however.

  Haraldsen, four months Harald’s junior, had met the future King as a thirteen-year-old child at a sailing camp in Hankø in 1950. Their first encounter as adults was nine years later at a party organized by Johan Stenersen, a friend of the Crown Prince’s from his time at school. It was surprising that their paths had not crossed before: they moved in similar circles and had a number of friends in common.

  Sonja had recently come back to Oslo after taking a diploma in dressmaking at the École Professionnelle des Jeunes Filles in Lausanne and a year in Cambridge learning English, where she worked behind the bar of the celebrated Eagle pub, pulling pints and calculating change in pounds, shillings and pence. Her father had just died unexpectedly, and Sonja spent most of her time at home with her mother, Dagny. She didn’t feel in the mood to go to parties, but when Stenersen’s invitation came, her mother had persuaded her to accept.

  Harald was due to graduate a few weeks later from the Krigsskolen, the Norwegian military academy, and a few days after their meeting at Stenersen’s party, he telephoned Sonja and invited her to go with him to the graduation ball. She said later she was struck by his sense of humour and how shy he was.

  While they were at the ball, Bjørn Glorvigen, a journalist and photographer, took the first press image of the two together, although it was some time before Sonja was identified. In the months and years that followed their romance continued, even though they spent considerable time apart: while Harald was pursuing royal duties, Sonja was studying at the Bjørknes private school in Oslo.

  While the couple’s friends and the Norwegian press were discreet, the same was not true of the foreign media. “It was not very private,” Sonja recalled later. “A classmate told me that he had been offered a good sum of money by a foreign publication to allow interviews about me. There was also a foreign reporter and a photographer who pretended that they wanted to make a report on the school. The rector said yes to them – and realized too late what the ‌two were really looking for.”21 Eventually, after the photographers got too much for her, she escaped to France.

  King Olav, meanwhile, was opposed to the match, refusing even to meet Sonja. “Norwegians are not ready for this,” he told his son. Most Norwegian royal watchers also doubted it would last. “No one took it seriously,” recalls Annemor Møst, a Norwegian journalist who began to cover the royal family in the late 1950s. “Everyone thought it would be impossible that he would marry a commoner – especially because there ‌were so many princesses around.”22 As the relationship began to look serious this disbelief turned into disapproval, both in parliament and the media. “The End of the Kingdom?” asked a front-page headline in the newspaper Verdens Gang in 1967.

  The couple, too, were beginning to despair. “There were periods when we lost hope that we would get King Olav’s consent for our marriage, and we saw no other way but to break off our ‌relationship,” Queen Sonja recalled later.23 It did, however, give them time to be sure they were serious about each other. “Nobody could accuse us of marrying head-over-heels. And we learnt to know ‌each other very well indeed.”24 The situation was equally hard on the future king, who was finding it difficult to hide his feelings. “He used to look very sad as he went ‌about his duties,” recalls Møst.25

  Eventually, according to a biography of the King by Per Egil Hegge, the Crown Prince presented his father and Per Borten, the prime minister, with an ultimatum: if he was not allowed to marry Sonja then he would never marry anyone, which would have meant the end of Norway’s brief monarchy: his sisters were both prevented by the constitution from inheriting the throne. And so, despite powerful objections, politically, publicly and within the palace, the engagement was announced in March 1968.

  In the few months that followed, the public mood shifted in favour of this unconventional match. Their marriage, on 29th August that year in a Lutheran ceremony in the Cathedral of Oslo, was a spectacular affair. It was the first grand wedding since Harald’s parents had married in 1929, and the streets of the Norwegian capital were packed with well-wishers. Guests included the monarchs of Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and Luxembourg and the Presidents of Iceland and Finland. In what was a clear sign of the completeness of Sonja’s acceptance by the royal family, she was given away by the King rather than by her brother.

  In a speech at their wedding banquet, Harald reflected on their nine-year courtship. “Allow me to thank you, Dagny,” he said, addressing himself to his new mother-in-law, “for the trust you showed in believing that I, through my feelings for your daughter, might be allowed to have her in the end and that the fact that I was with her would not ruin her life. But today she is at my side ‌as the country’s Crown Princess.”26

  Just over a decade later, the future Carl XVI Gustaf also fell in love with a commoner, Silvia Sommerlath, the glamorous daughter of Walter Sommerlath, a German businessman, and his Brazilian wife, Alice. They met at the 1972 Munich Olympics, where Silvia was working as chief assistant to the head of the German Olympic Committee. Silvia was sitting in the VIP area of the stadium and the then Crown Prince Carl Gustaf was two metres behind her, when she turned around and their eyes met. “It clicked,” he declared. He ‌was twenty-six; she was twenty-eight.27

  Over the few days that followed, the two of them came across each other at various events, greeting each other warmly. Then one day a young man came to Silvia and told her that His Royal Highness, the Crown Prince of Sweden, wanted to invite her to dinner. They were not alone, of course: various other members of the Swedish royal family were also present. But that dinner nevertheless marked the beginning of a friendship that quickly turned into a long-distance love affair after the Olympics ended and Carl Gustaf returned to Sweden.

  Just as had been the case with Harald, however, there was a serious problem that initially prevented Carl Gustaf’s relationship from turning into something more serious. Members of the Swedish royal family who wanted to marry had first to obtain permission from King Gustaf VI Adolf, Carl Gustaf’s grandfather. And there was little doubt how the old King, due that November to celebrate his ninetieth birthday, would react to the prospect of his grandson and heir marrying a commoner. Gustaf Adolf had himself married a princess, Margaret of Connaught, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and tradition dictated that his ‌five children should follow suit.28 The eldest, Prince Gustaf Adolf, Carl Gustaf’s father, had done his duty, marrying his second cousin, Princess Sibylla of Saxe-Co
burg-Gotha, while the King’s only daughter, Ingrid, spoken of at one time as a possible bride for Britain’s future Edward VIII, instead married Frederik, the then crown prince of Denmark. Their three siblings were less obliging, however, and all had lost their titles after marrying commoners.

  Although embarrassing to the dynasty, none of this would have been so serious if it had not been for the death of Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf in 1947 in an air crash. Fortunately for the Bernadotte dynasty his wife had given birth to Carl Gustaf nine months earlier. But he was their only boy: before that the couple had had four daughters, who were not allowed to reign in their own right under the laws of succession that prevailed in Sweden at the time. What if King Gustaf VI Adolf, already sixty-seven when he came to the throne in 1950, died before his grandson came of age – or if something happened to the boy before he was old enough to have children of his own?

  The old King did have one more son, Prince Bertil, who could potentially act as the Bernadottes’ insurance policy. The problem was that he too seemed in danger of writing himself out of the succession by falling in love with a commoner – Lilian Craig, a Welsh model and singer whom he had met in London in 1943 while he was posted there as a naval attaché at the Swedish embassy. Bertil had become fascinated by her and they soon became lovers. Marriage, though, was out of the question, and not only because Lilian, the daughter of a Welsh coal miner, was herself married to Ivan Craig, an actor. To ensure the continuation of the Swedish royal house, Bertil promised he would not marry his commoner sweetheart until the new crown prince grew up.