The Great Survivors

by Peter Conradi

  But nor did he want to give up Craig – and so he came up with a bizarre plan, which his father tolerated: he placed an advertisement in a Swedish newspaper seeking a housekeeper: more than two hundred women responded, among them, of course, Lilian Craig. She was hired. Thus they were able to live as man and wife under one roof, even though the unfortunate Lilian was not allowed to accompany her lover to official events.

  As the future monarch, Carl Gustaf was to be spared such a fate. For as long as his grandfather was alive, he was highly discreet about his relationship with Silvia. By the summer of the following year, however, the old King’s health was deteriorating badly and on the evening of 15th September 1973 he died in his sleep. When his grandson stood on the balcony of the royal palace four days later to be acclaimed King Carl XVI Gustaf, he was accompanied by his four sisters and his loyal uncle Bertil. Silvia, the woman he loved, was not among them: she watched the proceedings on the television news from her home in Innsbruck.

  As monarch, Carl Gustaf was now the only person in the Swedish royal family free to marry whom he wanted, but he hesitated. His relationship with Silvia had remained a secret: although his four sisters knew about it, the media and the country as a whole did not, and he was wary of how they would react. For her part, Silvia was naturally apprehensive about what life as a queen would be like. In the meantime, apparently vying with Britain’s Prince Charles for the title of Europe’s most eligible bachelor, Carl Gustaf provided fuel for the gossip columns by associating with a variety of society beauties.

  But he and Silvia continued to meet, in Stockholm and also in the south of France, where Uncle Bertil lent them his villa on the seafront in Sainte-Maxime. Yet the press still knew nothing of the relationship, instead linking their young king with every woman who crossed his path. That all changed when the pair met again on Öland, the island in southern Sweden where the royal family has its summer residence. While out driving one afternoon with Silvia in his metallic-blue Porsche Targa, Carl Gustaf stopped to refuel. As they were pulling out of the petrol station, a photographer snapped them. The picture, printed in newspapers across Europe, was a sensation. Who was this young woman travelling alone with the King? Forty-eight hours later she had been identified as Silvia Sommerlath.

  What happened next was entirely predictable, as least as far as royal love affairs were concerned. Palace officials in Stockholm tried to downplay the significance of the relationship, while journalists did not believe them and besieged the Olympics office in Innsbruck where Silvia was working for the 1976 winter games. Wearing a wig and dark glasses, she would slip unnoticed into Sweden to visit him. Or they would meet in Munich, where Carl Gustaf’s sister, Birgitta, lived with her German husband Prince Johann Georg in a villa in the upmarket suburb of Grünwald.

  As the Games drew to a close, rumours grew stronger that they would become engaged. Then on 12th March 1976, it was official. “This is the woman whom I love, whom I will marry and with whom I will spend the rest of my life,” Carl Gustaf told a press conference at the palace in Stockholm.

  They married on 19th June that year. It was the first wedding of a reigning European monarch since King Konstantinos of Greece married Princess Anne-Marie of Denmark in 1964 – and the first of a Swedish king since Gustaf IV Adolf in 1797. At a televised gala in the couple’s honour held the day before at the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm, members of Abba, dressed in baroque outfits in a tongue-in-cheek attempt to blend in, performed their forthcoming single ‘Dancing Queen’.

  There was a poignant postscript to the royal love affair: that December, after obtaining permission from his nephew, Prince Bertil, now aged sixty-four, was finally able to marry his beloved Lilian – more than thirty years after their first meeting in London. How could Carl Gustaf have refused him? They had another twenty years together as man and wife before he died, aged eighty-four.

  ‌Chapter 7

  ‌Mistresses, Bastards and Maris complaisants

  With their extramarital dalliances, Kings Carl XVI Gustaf, Juan Carlos and Albert II were following a long-established practice. Traditionally, royal marriages were not about love, lust or friendship – they were instead about producing heirs and cementing alliances, and were carefully arranged by parents and ministers. It is because of the usefulness of the royal marriage as a tool of foreign policy that unions were invariably with those from other countries – even if, as the experience of the First World War showed, it was perfectly possible for countries linked by close family ties to go to war against each other.

  When the future King George VI, the father of Queen Elizabeth II, married Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in April 1923, she became the first Briton to make a legitimate marriage to a prince of the royal house since Anne Hyde became James II’s first wife in 1659. The Continental monarchies have clung even longer to the tradition of seeking wives and husbands abroad – often in Germany. The future King Harald V of Norway’s marriage to Sonja Haraldsen in 1968 made him the first future head of a Scandinavian nation to choose a compatriot. Crown Prince Philippe of Belgium’s wedding to Mathilde d’Udekem d’Acoz just over thirty years later was the first domestic match involving the heir to the throne of one of the three Benelux monarchies.

  With so much at stake, relatively little attention was traditionally paid to the personal suitability of the couple – which in the Middle Ages, at least, would lead to some bizarre matches. Take Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the two princes murdered in the Tower of London. He was already a widower when he disappeared at the age of ten in 1483; he had been betrothed to Anne de Mowbray, a rich heiress, when he was four and she was five.

  In the days before photography, the potential for disappointment presented by such long-distance unions was considerable. England’s Henry VIII was dismayed when he caught his first glimpse of the German-born Anne of Cleves, destined to become his fourth wife. When the King went to the water’s edge to meet her on 3rd January 1540, he discovered she looked little like the portrait that Hans Holbein, the court’s most prominent artist, had painted of her. By then, however, it was too late to call off the union with a woman whom he dubbed his “Flanders mare”. “If it were not that she had come so far into my realm, and the great preparations and state that my people have made for her, and for fear of making a ruffle in the world and of driving her brother into the arms of the Emperor and the French king, I would not marry her,” Henry complained. “But now it is too far ‌gone, wherefore I am sorry.”1 He claimed he could not consummate the marriage because he “could not overcome his loathsomeness” of her “nor in her company be provoked or stirred to the Act”. At Henry’s instigation, the marriage was annulled, but Anne received a generous settlement including Richmond Palace and Hever Castle, home of Henry’s former in-laws, the Boleyns, and became known as “the King’s Beloved Sister”. And, unlike Anne Boleyn and Kathryn Howard, she also kept her head.

  In many cases, a royal couple would marry “by proxy” before even meeting at all. Under a curious procedure that endured until the nineteenth century, each would separately undergo a marriage ceremony in their home country in which a stand-in, usually a relative, would play the part of the spouse to be. The “couple” would even go to bed afterwards, although there was a limit: the union would be deemed to have been consummated once their feet had touched. As well as preventing any last-minute hitches, this would ensure the bride’s honour was protected, since she would be travelling abroad as a married rather than a single woman.

  The practice was famously depicted in Rubens’s painting, The Wedding by Proxy of Marie de’ Medici to King Henri IV (1622–25), which shows the marriage of the Florentine princess to the French King, which took place in the cathedral of Florence in 1606. Henri himself is not present – instead it is the bride’s uncle, Grand Duke Ferdinando of Tuscany, who is pictured slipping the ring on Marie’s finger. As late as 1810, when Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria became Napoleon’s second wife, the initial marriage ceremony, held in Vienna, wen
t ahead without him. He did, however, deign to turn up for a second ceremony held three weeks afterwards in the chapel of the Louvre.

  Even without such a ceremony, parental pressure was such that bride and groom would do their duty. If the two felt some kind of attraction to their spouse to be, then this was a bonus. Indifference, dislike or even physical revulsion were not reason enough to abandon the process.

  With marriages viewed this way, it is no surprise that the bride and groom were individually interchangeable. Take the case of Princess Dagmar, the brown-eyed second daughter of Christian IX of Denmark. Having set himself the task of finding his children partners in Europe’s most important dynasties, Christian wanted Dagmar to marry into the Tsar’s family. The Russians, keen for an alternative to the all too common German option, were in favour of the match too. Tsarevich Nicholas seemed the perfect husband.

  The young heir to the Russian throne had been given a photograph of the girl destined to be his bride when he was just twelve. Fortunately for their families, he and Dagmar hit it off when he travelled to Copenhagen to meet her. In 1864, when Dagmar was sixteen and Nicholas – or Nixa as she called him – was twenty, they were betrothed. Dagmar prepared herself for her future role, learning her future husband’s language by reading Hans Christian Andersen in Russian.

  In April the following year, tragedy struck: while Nixa was holidaying in the south of France at the Tsar’s villa in Nice, he was struck down with meningitis. When Dagmar received a telegram from his father saying he was being given the last rites, she rushed to Frankfurt where she met the Tsar. Together they travelled on the Russian leader’s special train at high speed; Emperor Napoleon III ordered all the normal services off the track to speed their passage southwards.

  A small matter such as death could not be allowed to stand in the way of such dynastic considerations, however, and so it was decided to marry the unfortunate princess to Nixa’s younger brother, the future Tsar Alexander III instead. After a year of mourning, he travelled to Denmark and, three weeks later, proposed.

  A bear of a man who had shocked his parents by bending the family silver, Alexander was very different from his intellectual elder brother. He would not have been Dagmar’s choice, but she did as she was told and, in November 1866, after converting to Russian Orthodoxy and taking the name of Maria Fyodorovna, she married him in the Imperial Chapel of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. She went on to bear him six children, including the future Tsar Nicholas II, and became Tsarina in 1881 after her father-in-law Alexander II was mortally wounded by a terrorist bomb.

  Fear of a similar assassination attempt against her husband was to oblige Maria Fyodorovna and Alexander III to move thirty miles away from St Petersburg to a palace in Gatchina, considered more secure. Respite from such fears came every summer when they travelled to the more relaxed atmosphere of Denmark for family gatherings; they made the journey on board one of the royal yachts, accompanied by more than a hundred courtiers, large amounts of baggage and a cow to provide milk for the children along the way.

  There was a happier outcome for Princess Mary of Teck, a British-born minor royal of German descent, who found herself in the same unfortunate situation as Dagmar almost three decades later. The Princess, known to her family as May, was betrothed in December 1891 at the age of twenty-four to her second cousin, once removed, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, the eldest son of the future Edward VII and Alexandra. The Prince – known to his family as Eddy, was expected one day to become king. But he was also a sleazy character who frequented prostitutes of both sexes and had a penchant for the low life: rumours circulated that he was associated with – or even was – Jack the Ripper, the notorious serial killer blamed for a series of brutal murders in the impoverished East End of London in the late 1880s.

  Six weeks after their engagement was announced, Eddy died unexpectedly of pneumonia. For the royal family she was too good a catch to miss and so, the following year, May became engaged to Eddy’s younger brother, the future George V. They were to remain happily married until his death more than forty years later.

  A few other royal marriages, although arranged, also turned into genuine love matches – most notably Queen Victoria’s union with Albert. The attraction was not just physical, but also intellectual. When Albert died of typhoid fever in 1861 at the age of just forty-two, Victoria was devastated and wore black for the rest of her life. Her grandfather George III too had been devoted to his wife, Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, whom he met for the first time on their wedding day, in 1761 – the year after he became king. They remained married – happily by all accounts, apart from George’s later bouts of madness – until her death in November 1818, and she bore him no fewer than fifteen children.

  These were the exceptions, however: many other royal unions quickly degenerated into indifference or downright dislike. Even so, few had got off to quite as disastrous a start as that between Victoria’s uncle, the future George IV, and Princess Caroline of Brunswick in 1795 – not least because he was already married to Maria Anne Fitzherbert, a beautiful twice-widowed Roman Catholic, with whom he had fallen in love at the age of twenty-one a decade earlier.

  The Prince, believed to have lost his virginity with one of the Queen’s maids of honour when he was sixteen, quickly acquired a reputation for philandering that clung to him throughout his life. In the spring of 1779, at the age of seventeen, he fell passionately in love first with Mary Hamilton, one of his sister’s ladies-in-waiting, who was six years his senior; then, more scandalously, with Mary Robinson, a married actress with whom he became infatuated after he saw her appear as Perdita in A Winter’s Tale at Drury Lane.

  His father, George III, was appalled, not least because his son’s dalliances were calling into question the monarchy’s reputation for moral probity. “Your love of dissipation has for some months been with enough ill nature trumpeted in the public papers,” he declared on his son’s eighteenth birthday. For that reason, when George was given his own residence in 1780, he was required to continue living with his parents so they could keep an eye on him.

  The tactic failed badly. Despite being kept under a virtual curfew, the Prince proved adept at evading those trying to watch over him. By the summer of the following year he had been seen “riding like a madman” in Hyde Park, been involved in drunken brawls at Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens and ‌seduced a number of women.2 He also embarked on another ill-advised affair with a married woman, this time with Countess von Hardenberg, the wife of a Hanoverian diplomat, who began to talk of “running away together”. George was tempted, but when he confided in his mother she had her husband send the von Hardenbergs back to Germany, where the Countess then tried her luck with George’s younger brother, Prince Frederick.

  Then George met Mrs Fitzherbert, who like Mary Hamilton was six years his senior. It was love at first sight – at least on the part of the Prince, who pursued her relentlessly, on one occasion stabbing himself to draw blood and having her brought to him so she could see his state of despair. George, who appears to have been genuinely in love, realized the only way to have his way with her was to marry – which was triply problematic: Mrs Fitzherbert was a commoner, and thus unsuitable by tradition; she was a Roman Catholic, but the Act of Settlement of 1701 stated that the heir apparent would forfeit his right to the crown if he married a follower of Rome; and, under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, every marriage contracted by a member of the royal family under the age of twenty-five without the King’s consent was invalid. George was just twenty-three.

  He was undaunted, however, and on 15th December 1785 they wed secretly in the drawing room of her home in Park Lane. The service was conducted by Robert Butt, a one-time vicar of Twickenham who was in prison for debt and who agreed to do the deed in return for his discharge. They left afterwards for a honeymoon at Ormeley Lodge, near Richmond.

  The couple made a token attempt to keep their marriage secret: rather than move in with Geor
ge, Mrs Fitzherbert rented a house nearby. Rumours spread about their relationship, however, and they increasingly lived together as man and wife. And so it might well have continued, had it not been for the huge debts being run up by the spendthrift Prince. By the early 1790s his finances were in such a parlous state that he was obliged yet again to turn to his father to bail him out. By this time he had also fallen out with Mrs Fitzherbert and had taken Frances, Countess of Jersey, as his mistress. So, in August 1794, George told the King that he was ready to make a suitable marriage, in return for a considerable financial settlement. His cousin, Princess Caroline of Brunswick, six years his junior, was chosen as his bride. The Prince agreed, even though he had never met her.

  The match was in part thanks to lobbying by Lady Jersey who, according to one contemporary observer (the Duke of Wellington), had chosen the Princess, a woman of “indelicate manners, indifferent character and not very inviting appearance from the hope that disgust for the wife would ‌secure constancy to the mistress”.3 To further strengthen her own position, the Countess insisted on becoming a lady-in-waiting to the Queen.

  When Caroline, a blonde, high-spirited woman who paid little attention to fashion or personal hygiene, arrived at St James’s on 5th April 1795, it was revulsion – rather than love – at first sight on both sides: after giving her the obligatory kiss, George retreated to the corner of the room where he was fortified by a dram of brandy. The wedding ceremony, held on the evening of the 8th in the Chapel Royal of St James’s, proved even more of an ordeal; Caroline, who complained that her husband was “nothing as handsome as his portrait”, claimed afterwards he had been dead drunk for most of the wedding night.

  The couple parted company almost immediately after their brief honeymoon – but not before conceiving a daughter, Charlotte, born on 7th January the following year. His duty done, George wrote his wife a letter on 30th April renouncing further cohabitation, and their separation became final.