The childhood of the Continent’s coming generation of rulers has been very different. The Europe of the 1970s and 1980s in which they grew up was a peaceful place. In most cases they were also educated alongside other children, often at normal state schools – although with some exceptions. At the insistence of their French father, Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark and his younger brother Joachim spent the 1982–83 school year at the École des Roches, a boarding school in Normandy where the strict discipline proved something of a surprise for boys used to more relaxed Scandinavian ways. Crown Prince Philippe of Belgium, meanwhile, was obliged to split his education between French- and Dutch-speaking schools in order that he could be perfectly bilingual – a basic requirement for a future monarch of the linguistically divided country.
Yet none of them can be said to have had an ordinary childhood – and not only because of the wealth and status of their parents and the multiplicity of palaces and other homes in which they lived. It became clear to all of them from an early age that their parents had a job unlike almost any other: one that they performed twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week and that, in the case of the British royal family, would mean long foreign trips to far-flung corners of the Commonwealth on which their children would rarely be able to accompany them.
In some respects their position has not been so dissimilar from that of the children of American presidents. Yet there is a fundamental difference: thanks to the hereditary principle, royal children are in the public eye not only on account of the position that their father (or mother) occupies – but also because it is a role they will themselves later have to assume. The result is permanent scrutiny from the media that begins the moment when, just a few days old, they are produced for their first photo opportunity with their smiling parents outside the hospital. From then on they will become accustomed to a life in which the media will be keen to document their every move – from their first steps to their first boy- or girlfriend. If they make one mistake, they can count on a photographer being there to capture it.
Despite such pressures, Haakon for one appears to have had an idyllic childhood, spent at the country estate of Skaugum; his sole public duty was on 17th May, Constitution Day, when he would wave to the children’s procession from the palace balcony. Elsewhere, however, distant relationships between parents and children have persisted. Denmark’s Frederik has subsequently hinted that his childhood was far from happy. He and Joachim saw little of their parents; the two lived in a separate apartment at the top of the Amalienborg Palace, complete with bedrooms, a playroom and a dining room, where they were looked after by their nanny, Else Pedersen, who slept in her own room there.
In her controversial book, 1015 Copenhagen K, which caused a stir when it was published in Denmark in 2007, Trine Villemann, a former royal reporter, described Margrethe as a distant woman who played little part in the rearing of her children. “It soon became clear to us all that she was not really that interested, not even in her own children, especially not when they were younger,” claims one of the many unnamed former palace employees the author quotes.18 For his part, Margrethe’s husband Prince Henrik was a strict disciplinarian, who thought nothing of spanking his children when they did wrong. When the football-mad Frederik was looking for people to kick around a ball with, it fell to the bodyguards rather his father.
When Frederik was four – and his young brother three – there came what Villemann describes as one of the landmarks in their young lives: they were allowed to come down into the main part of the palace and eat dinner with their parents. As they grew up they did do so more often, but it was always by appointment, as if they were being granted an audience. It fell largely to Pedersen to assume the role of surrogate mother. Still a spinster in her mid-forties, she was an old-fashioned woman with a passion for good manners who became an emotional mainstay for the young princes. And, according to Villemann, it was Pedersen rather than his own mother whom Frederik would call from his boarding school in France on an almost daily basis to describe how unhappy he was.
Like Prince Charles before him, Frederik also developed a close relationship with his grandmother. As a young child he spent much of his time at Fredensborg, the royal residence north of Copenhagen; he and his brother would often walk across to Kancellihuset, the country house where Queen Ingrid lived. While she and Nanny Pedersen talked, the two boys would play.
By the time the princes were teenagers, however, it was decided they needed more of a male role model. So, in 1983, Major Carl Erik Gustaf von Freisleben, a Life Guards officer and equerry to the Queen, was put in charge of the boys, and three years later was appointed head of the Crown Prince’s household. Freisleben, who had four children of his own, acted as a kind of replacement father, playing football and tennis with Frederik and Joachim and also helping them with their homework.
Hints about the strictness of Frederik’s upbringing have not been confined to off-the-record comments from disgruntled courtiers whom Villemann interviewed for her book. The Crown Prince himself, in a speech at his parents’ silver wedding anniversary in 1992, remarked poignantly: “There is an old Danish proverb which says chastise the one you love – and Father, let me assure you… we never doubted your love.” As Frederik told the author Anne Wolden-Ræthinge, “It was a feeling of powerlessness which I often felt towards my parents. There was no question of two-way communication. It was just an order.”
Alarmed, perhaps, at the picture being painted of his parents, the Prince seemed to backtrack a little in an authorized biography published to coincide with his fortieth birthday in 2008. In the book, Frederik and his brother denied that their father ruled them with an iron fist, but made clear that their traditional French-style upbringing had been more formal and involved greater distance between young and old than a more liberal Danish one. Not surprisingly, Frederik has also made great play of his intention to bring up his own children very differently. He and his wife Mary, who had a solidly middle-class upbringing in her native Tasmania, have made clear their determination to be modern, hands-on parents.19
In Belgium, Crown Prince Philippe, his sister Princess Astrid and brother Prince Laurent also had a less than conventional upbringing as a result of the collapse of their parents’ marriage in the late 1960s – at the time when their father had just had a daughter, Delphine, by his mistress. Although Philippe was to some extent taken in hand by King Baudouin, his childless uncle, the situation undoubtedly weighed heavily on them. On one occasion, the servants even took them in for Christmas.
This was nothing, of course, compared to the emotional turmoil suffered by Prince William and Prince Harry. As children they were forced to suffer first the public disintegration of their parents’ marriage and then their mother’s death when William was fifteen and Harry was twelve. And then, in the full glare of publicity, they had to watch as their father pursued his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, the woman with whom he had betrayed their mother in the first place.
It would take a psychologist to determine the effect such an upbringing had on the princes, but it undoubtedly left its mark. In a speech in 2009 to mark Mother’s Day at the Child Bereavement Charity, an organization for which the Princess of Wales had worked, Prince William spoke openly about the emptiness that he has felt since the death of his mother. “Losing a close family member is one of the hardest experiences that anyone can endure,” he said. “Never being able to say the word ‘mummy’ again in your life sounds like a small thing. However, for many, including me, it’s now just a word – hollow and evoking memories.”
So what after school? At least among the Windsors, higher education took longer to catch on. The future Edward VII spent time at both Christ Church, Oxford, and Trinity College, Cambridge, but Prince Charles was the first member of the royal family to follow a proper bachelor’s course and earn a degree. He was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read archaeology and anthropology,20 but changed to history for the second part of his de
gree.
The Prince’s status meant he necessarily received special treatment. When he arrived for his first day at the wheel of his red Mini, he was met on the pavement in front of the Great Gate of the college by Lord Butler, the master of Trinity. “It is the first time I have met a student here,” Butler told reporters as he stood waiting several minutes for the prince to arrive.21 Thereafter, however, the heir to the throne was treated as much as possible like the other students, eating with them at the scrubbed oaken tables in hall and sleeping in an ordinary three-room suite, sharing his toilet and bath with ten other students on the E staircase, where Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Macaulay and Thackeray had stayed before him. The only concession was a telephone in his room. The bodyguard who tailed him around town lived quietly in another part of the college.
These were the swinging Sixties, but they rather passed Charles by. Dressed most often in traditional tweeds and flannels or baggy cords and an old jacket, he preferred classical music to pop and by all accounts was not quick to make friends; his closest companions were his cousins. The Prince’s happiest hours were spent performing in a series of comic revues; from childhood he had been a fan of the Goons, a long-running zany comedy show that was a forerunner of Monty Python’s Flying Circus – so much so that he memorized many of their routines by heart. When it came to the final exams, Charles was awarded a respectable if not brilliant lower second-class degree. Yet it was not a bad achievement given the other distractions he had suffered: not only had he taken time out for state visits abroad, he also spent a term learning Welsh at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, to prepare for his investiture as the Prince of Wales in 1969.
Prince William is not particularly an intellectual, but by the time he came of age a university education had become so common that it would have looked odd if he had not applied, so he went to St Andrews, Scotland’s oldest university. Prince Harry, whose academic results were not especially impressive, opted instead to join the army.
Charles’s Continental counterparts have followed him to university, although more often they have studied political science or followed courses tailor-made to prepare them for their future role. Crown Prince Philippe of Belgium was the first in his family to go to university, studying for several months at Oxford before going on to Stanford, where he was awarded a Master of Arts in Political Science. Crown Princes Frederik and Haakon and Crown Princess Victoria also spent time in the United States – at Harvard, Berkeley and Yale respectively – as well as at universities at home. The only one not to study abroad was Willem-Alexander, who instead attended Leiden University in the Netherlands.
For the young princes, growing up has meant transition from schoolboy pranks to the more serious diversions available to the young, wealthy and privileged. Bars, restaurants and nightclubs have turned into their natural habitat – even if the periods of military service that they have all undergone provided some respite.
Willem-Alexander, for example, swiftly acquired a reputation as the enfant terrible of the Dutch royal family in the late 1980s and 1990s. Nicknamed Prince Pils for his beer-drinking, he became a familiar sight on the Amsterdam social circuit and became known for his penchant for high-performance vehicles and action-man sports. He was once fined for speeding after his car plunged into a canal. A fitness fanatic, he sparked outrage after running a race wearing a jacket advertising Marlboro cigarettes and trousers publicizing Playboy magazine.
As a student the Prince once famously excused himself from a Belgian state visit to revise for his exams, only to be spotted that afternoon on a racetrack. For a long time this was not offset by the adoption of any kind of public profile on serious issues. There were also some public-relations disasters worthy of the House of Windsor. In 1996, for example, when he took guests hunting on a royal estate, gamekeepers drove wild boar and deer past the royal Range Rovers to make it easier for elderly members of the party to shoot them. Usually loyal subjects were disgusted. More than seven thousand people sent faxes or letters of protest to the palace. “Highness, degrade yourself no more,” screamed an advertisement taken out by animal-rights campaigners in leading newspapers. “The heavy responsibility you bear as our future king cannot be combined with spreading death and destruction among defenceless animals.”
Sport was to prove Willem-Alexander’s saving grace. By his late twenties it provided his main achievements, whether competing in the New York marathon or completing the Elfstedentocht, a gruelling one-hundred-and-twenty-mile skating race across the frozen canals of Holland. Willem-Alexander is not alone in his passion for sport: Frederik, the Danish Crown Prince, is a fanatical dinghy sailor, taking part in competitions across the world. Prince Albert II of Monaco has gone one better, representing his country five times in the bobsled at the Winter Olympics. Britain’s Princess Anne was also an Olympian, forming part of the British equestrian team at the 1976 summer games in Montreal.
And then there have been the cars. As has been seen, car accidents have played a dramatic part in royal history, claiming the lives of Queen Astrid of Belgium and Britain’s Princess Diana. (Princess Grace might also be added to the list, although she first suffered a stroke before crashing her car.) In August 1988, Crown Prince Frederik only narrowly avoided joining the list. He and two other friends were being driven by his younger brother, Prince Joachim, in a Peugeot 205 on a winding road near their parents’ Château de Caïx in the south of France. Suddenly Joachim, who had only recently gained his licence, lost control and crashed into a tree. Joachim escaped with only a few scratches, but Frederik and one of the friends were catapulted out of the car and into the River Lot. The Crown Prince was floating for several minutes unconscious before he was fished out and taken to hospital, suffering from a broken collarbone and in need of stitches for a deep gash in his forehead.
When news leaked of the accident, Queen Margrethe called a press conference at the castle to allow Joachim to explain what had happened. The Prince claimed he had been doing “only” sixty miles an hour – a high speed for such a narrow road – but although he did not face any legal penalties he received a serious telling-off from his mother. He had come perilously close to a nightmare scenario: if Frederik had died, not only would the Danes have been deprived of their future monarch, but his place would have been taken by the younger brother responsible for his death. The severity of the accident was revealed when a magazine published photographs of the wrecked car hidden under a tarpaulin at a local garage.
While Frederik and Joachim emerged unscathed from their car accident, Friso, the second son of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, was less fortunate when he and a childhood friend, Florian Moosbrugger, were buried by an avalanche while they were skiing in the Austrian resort of Lech in February 2012. Moosbrugger, owner of the Hotel Post, where the Dutch royal family traditionally spends its winter break, escaped without serious injury, thanks to the avalanche “airbag” he was wearing. The Prince, however, did not have one, and it took more than twenty minutes to dig him out from under the snow. Austrian doctors managed to resuscitate him, but the resulting oxygen starvation left him suffering from massive brain damage. Barring a miracle, the outlook for Friso, aged just forty-three, looked bleak – leaving a hole in the very heart of the Dutch royal family.
Although of a more trivial nature, there are other threats to young royals. Dating poses a tricky problem, especially for the young royal male: eminently eligible, the current generation of princes has enjoyed the pick of women – much as their father and grandfathers did before them. Even today, the prospect of a romance with a prince is enough to make many young women swoon.
Yet such romances these days are inevitably played out in full view of the media. While earlier royal lotharios such as Edward VII, Belgium’s Léopolds or the Netherlands’ Willems could indulge their passions largely hidden from the public gaze well into middle age, their successors have been pursued relentlessly by the paparazzi, much as if they were music or film stars. A snap of a new girl
on the arm of a prince can be worth thousands of pounds to the photographer who snatches it – even if, as often turns out subsequently, she is merely an acquaintance rather than a new love.
For the prince himself, such attention, however unwelcome, is part of the job. It can be much tougher for the girl who has suddenly found her photograph splashed across the front pages. Our first sighting of her is often anonymous. But once she has been identified, it is open season on her. Friends are tracked down and questioned and her background probed; God forbid that there should be any past photographs, or worse, videos, that could be construed as embarrassing. These days, a Facebook page can be especially revealing. And then, with indecent haste, she suddenly finds herself treated as a possible future princess whose suitability is a legitimate matter for discussion. No Hollywood star’s girlfriend has to put up with scrutiny such as this.
Despite such obstacles, however, love – or rather lust – has prevailed. Britain’s Prince Charles, who came of age in the sexually freewheeling 1960s, blazed a path for the current generation, enjoying relationships with a number of women, something in which he was encouraged by his “Uncle Dickie” Mountbatten, who placed Broadlands, his grand country house in Hampshire, at his nephew’s disposal. “I believe, in a case like yours, the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down,” Mountbatten advised Charles in one of many letters in February 1974.22 (Mountbatten himself, by then in his seventies, had not allowed marriage to get in the way of his private life, indulging in a number of affairs with men as well as women.)
The Great Survivors Page 25