Charles did not fight shy of married women either – some, such as Dale “Kanga”, Lady Tryon, were even married to his friends. Her husband, Lord Tryon, one of Charles’s closest sporting companions, was apparently quite happy, like many aristocratic men before him, to find himself cast in the role of mari complaisant; Charles often dropped in at the pair’s smart London home or was a guest at their fishing lodge in Iceland.
Amid this flurry of sexual partners was one constant: Camilla Shand, the daughter of Major Bruce Shand, a Second World War hero, and the Honourable Rosalind Cubitt, a society charmer. Appropriately enough, her great-grandmother, Alice Keppel, had been the favourite mistress of Edward VII. Accounts vary as to how Charles and Camilla first met, although it appears to have been at a hunt in the early summer of 1971. If the tabloid accounts are to be believed, Camilla’s first words were: “You know, sir, my great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather – so how about it?” Yet this hardly rings true: far more plausible is another version in which Camilla looked at Charles’s horse and declared, “That’s a fine animal you have there, sir.”
Their relationship quickly blossomed, and during the months that followed Charles and Camilla partied together in London at Annabel’s, the Mayfair nightclub, or shared their passion for country pursuits. But duty called: in November 1972 the Prince was posted to the naval frigate HMS Minerva, which, the following February, was deployed to the Caribbean.
Despite their obvious feelings for one another, Charles was unable to commit to Camilla – probably because he realized that as a woman with a “history” she could be his mistress but never his wife. This did not lessen the blow he suffered when he went ashore in Antigua in April 1973 and learnt that the love of his life planned to marry Andrew Parker Bowles, a major in the prestigious Blues and Royals regiment. Their wedding, a grand society affair attended by the Queen Mother among others, took place two months later, while Charles was still at sea.
Yet Charles had to move on and find himself a bride: by 1980, he was past thirty, the age by which he had always said he was going to wed. But who would be the lucky woman? The basic formal requirements were not that onerous: the prospective princess of Wales and future queen could not be a Catholic or, with the memory of Edward VIII’s abdication still fresh, a divorcee. However, there was another, more problematic requirement: while Charles’s sexual exploits had been well documented by the media, his bride would have to be a virgin – or at least appear to be one. Such women were not easy to find in those post-pill and pre-AIDS days. Certainly, neither Camilla nor any of Charles’s other conquests would have fitted the bill – all of which was to open the way for Diana Spencer.
Charles’s Continental counterparts have, in most cases, shown the same predilection for glamorous young women. But it is one thing to date an underwear model: as many have found, the problems start when the relationship becomes serious. Just as in the past, some girls are seen as perfectly legitimate playthings for a royal fling – but certainly not as wife material.
Born in 1967, almost two decades later than Charles, Willem-Alexander was romantically linked with a number of glamorous women – among them Frederique van der Waal, a model and head of a lingerie company who happily posed for the cameras wearing nothing but the briefest of her own products. She was, as a result, considered highly unsuitable, and the Prince was “ordered” to end their affair. Or so the story went: van der Waal, who has gone on to a successful career and now lives in New York, later claimed the romance had been invented by the press. “He studied together with my brother in Leiden, and we certainly saw each other,” she said. “But then it appeared in some ridiculous rag that that Beatrix had said I could never be queen because I had posed in my underwear. It was nonsense of course.”23
In his late twenties, the Prince did embark on a serious relationship – with Emily Bremers, a dentist’s daughter whom he met at Leiden University in 1994, when he was twenty-seven. Bremers, who worked for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines after her studies, was never officially recognized by the palace as the Prince’s girlfriend. Not only was she a commoner, she was a Catholic – a major drawback.
Despite erroneous reports linking Willem-Alexander with Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden,24 his romance with Bremers continued. And, as time passed, she seemed gradually to win acceptance in royal circles. In May 1998 she even accompanied the Prince to the wedding of his cousin Prince Maurits, fifth in line to the throne. The wedding was significant in itself: Maurits’s bride, Marilène van den Broek, the daughter of a European commissioner, was both a commoner and a Catholic – a first for a member of the Dutch royal family. Indeed, royal watchers speculated that the official sanctioning of their union might open the way for Willem-Alexander to marry Emily, who appeared to be making her way into royal circles when she appeared at Queen Beatrix’s sixtieth birthday celebrations that year.
It was not to be: that September, De Telgraaf reported the couple’s romance was over. In fact, it was claimed, they had split up several months earlier, but kept their breakup under wraps in the hope they would sort out their problems. They didn’t. The following year, the Prince, then thirty-two, declared that he would not marry for at least ten years – following the example of his father, who had waited until he was nearly forty.
Felipe, the heir to the Spanish throne, who is a year younger than Willem-Alexander, found that his love life came under equally close scrutiny. In his early adult years he went out with a number of glamorous women. One of his first serious relationships appears to have been in the late 1980s with Isabel Sartorius y Zorraquín de Mariño. Three years older than him, she had grown up in Madrid, lived in Peru and studied in Washington. She was the daughter of the Marquess de Mariño, Vicente Sartorius y Cabeza de Vaca, and Isabel Zorraquín. But the couple separated when their daughter was just eight. Her mother went on to marry Manuel Ulloa Elías, who was prime minister of Peru between 1980 and 1982, while her father wed Princess Nora of Liechtenstein, ensuring Isabel mixed with Europe’s leading socialites.
The Prince, it was said, was besotted, but King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofía were dead against the relationship. Not only were her parents divorced, but the press linked some of her mother’s friends to cocaine smuggling, although no proof was provided. She was also a commoner – and under a rule dating back to a royal ordinance made by Carlos III in the eighteenth century, anyone who wanted to marry a commoner had to be prepared to renounce the throne.
Apparently more serious was the Prince’s relationship with Eva Sannum, a Norwegian student and part-time model whom he met in the late 1990s. The relationship, which lasted several years, raised eyebrows among monarchists who were convinced that Felipe, now in his thirties, should get on with doing his duty to preserve the fragile Borbón dynasty – that is, find a bride among the ranks of his fellow European royals and start a family. “It is obviously a matter of concern when the heir to the Crown is prepared to travel all the way to Oslo just to spend the weekend with a model,” sniffed Jaime Peñafiel, Spain’s most prominent royal expert, after photographs of the couple appeared. “This young woman has posed in bra and knickers, and bared her breasts on the catwalks. She cannot be the future bride of the Prince.”
Their relationship endured, however, even though it was not until August 2001, four years after they first met, that Felipe and Sannum made their first public appearance together at the wedding of Crown Prince Haakon. Felipe, in full military regalia, and Sannum, wearing a light-blue silk evening dress, discreetly walked together into the great hall at the Norwegian royal palace where the party was being held. The wedding – and Sannum’s especially sexy dress – may have been the final nail in the coffin of their relationship. Felipe confirmed to journalists that December that he and Sannum had decided to end their relationship “freely, with mutual accord and jointly”. In his bachelor days, Norway’s Haakon was also associated with a number of fashionable women, although usually from relatively high-placed families.<
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Crown Prince Philippe, heir to the Belgian throne, managed to keep his private life a little more discreet – but he too had his fair share of romances. The first love of his life appears to have been Barbara Maselis, the daughter of a cattle-food manufacturer from Roulers, whom he met while he was studying at secondary school in Zevenkerken in Loppem. Blonde and rather Scandinavian in appearance, she was intelligent, spoke at least three languages and, according to those who knew her, was not easily intimidated. They dated for three years: Philippe visited her at her parents’ home in Roeselare or in the flat that she shared with her sister in Louvain, and she even came to the Château du Belvédère, where Philippe’s mother and father lived.
Maselis’s bourgeois origins remained a problem for the status-conscious Belgian royals and Philippe’s father, the future King Albert II, put pressure on his son to end the union. “You are a prince of Belgium and you have an official future in our land,” he reportedly told him. “I can see that Barbara is important to you, but you must try to put an end to it. There can be no talk of a wedding.”25
Philippe appeared to have learnt his lesson. Even by the last decades of the twentieth century the Belgian royal family was still extremely particular – more so than other dynasties – about the social status of those whom its members married, and Philippe acted accordingly. Indeed, the list of women with whom it was claimed he had relationships in the years that followed read like a Who’s Who of European aristocrats: among them was the Italian Countess Fiammetta de’ Frescobaldi, once erroneously named as a girlfriend of Britain’s Prince Charles.
The extent to which any of these were genuine romances is doubtful. As with other eligible young royals, it was enough for Philippe to be photographed with a woman for the press to start speculating about how soon they would marry. More serious, however, appeared to be his relationship with Countess Anna Plater-Syberg, a twenty-eight-year-old French woman of Polish origin, with whom he was photographed by Point de Vue, the French society magazine, in 1994 in Antibes on the Côte d’Azur. “Anna Plater-Syberg, the ideal fiancée for Philippe of Belgium,” the magazine proclaimed on the cover of its edition that August.26 The Belgian royal court went as far as to confirm the relationship, describing Plater-Syberg as a friend. But Philippe broke it up, and it was back to the speculation.
While Willem-Alexander, Felipe and Philippe appeared ready to give up their unsuitable girlfriends without complaint – at least in public – Denmark’s Prince Frederik became embroiled in a more public struggle. His early adult years saw the usual romances – with Malou Aamund, for example, the slim blonde daughter of Suzanne Bjerrehuus, a television presenter and writer, who had appeared in a soft-porn movie during her youth. His first serious relationship, however, was in the mid-1990s with Katja Storkholm Nielsen, the daughter of Mogens Nielsen, chief executive of the company Risskov.
The pair had been acquaintances for several years. Both their fathers loved sailing and their children would bump into each other at events. Then, early in the summer of 1994, their friendship turned to romance; for the first time in his life, it seems, Frederik had fallen deeply in love.
It was a busy time for the Prince. He had to go away on military training and had already arranged to spend that autumn and winter in New York working at Denmark’s United Nations mission. Despite such obstacles, their relationship flourished. Katja visited him in America and moved into his bachelor pad on the top floor of Christian VIII’s mansion at Amalienborg. In January 1995 they went on holiday together in Mauritius.
Katja, with her fresh-faced beauty, easy laugh and common sense, was, according to Trine Villemann, a former royal reporter who tracked their romance in her book 1015 Copenhagen K, the perfect partner for Frederik, and especially good at strengthening his self-confidence. “They were a team,” one unnamed friend of the Crown Prince told Villemann. “They were brilliant at building each other up. There was togetherness and warmth between them, everybody could see that, and it gave him strength.”27 Villemann claims – without citing a source – that Frederik, now in his mid-twenties, even proposed marriage and Katja accepted.
But would Katja be embraced as a crown princess and a future queen? It certainly did not help that she had been working as a model – at one time even renting her own apartment in Milan, the fashion capital of Italy – and had done a few shots wearing expensive lingerie. Nor that her education had been relatively limited – although she was planning to start studying to become an art restorer.
The main problem was instead her nationality. The Danish monarchy continued to adhere to the tradition that members of the royal family should seek their spouses abroad. Frederik’s mother, Queen Margrethe, had married a Frenchman and Margrethe’s father, King Frederik IX, a Swede. Frederik’s younger brother Joachim was poised to marry Hong Kong-born Alexandra Manley. Could Frederik fly in the face of such tradition?
The answer appears to have been “no”. Although Villemann claims that his Swedish-born grandmother, Ingrid, with whom Frederik was close, approved of the union, his mother did not. The Queen effectively confirmed this veto in an interview a decade later. “When the boys were much younger, I let them know it would not be unwise if they married someone from another country,” she said. “There is, and rightfully so, a long tradition in our family. Of course, there are always many difficulties, because of the language, and because the Danes are not always easy to please language-wise. But you come with what the British call ‘no strings attached’. Of course, you have a past, but that past is not walking around in the streets among us.”
Frederik was left in a difficult situation: he was not strong enough to challenge the family tradition, but nor did he break up with Storkholm immediately afterwards. Indeed, in the summer of 1996, during a summer holiday at the family’s Château de Caïx, he introduced her to his grandmother – though not his parents. Soon afterwards, the Prince appears to have begun dating Maria Montell, a Danish pop singer. When Storkholm heard about the liaison, she ended their relationship – and did so publicly. In October that year her lawyer issued a statement declaring: “Katja Storkholm Nielsen would like to announce that her relationship with His Royal Highness, Crown Prince Frederik has been brought to an end.”
Chapter 11
The Frog Who Turned into a Prince
and Other Fairy Tales
At least half a million cheering, flag-waving onlookers lined the streets of Stockholm on 19th June 2010 as Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden, married Daniel Westling, her former fitness trainer. It was almost a decade since one of the most unlikely couples in modern European royal history had first met. Now the son of a provincial civil servant and a post-office worker had become HRH Prince Daniel, Duke of Västergötland, endowed with his own coat of arms and monogram.
Storkyrkan, the cathedral of Stockholm, close to the royal palace, was filled with nearly a thousand royals, dignitaries and friends from across Europe and beyond. Victoria wore a short-sleeved, pearl-white, off-the-shoulder gown with a gold diadem that Napoleon had given Joséphine and a veil that her own mother, Silvia, had worn when she married King Carl XVI Gustaf on the same day thirty-four years earlier. Her train was sixteen feet long. Daniel, in designer glasses with his hair slicked back, was in black tail coat and white bow tie.
Victoria, aged thirty-two, was beaming for most of the ceremony, at one point even winking at a member of the congregation. As Daniel, four years her senior, uttered the “ja” of the wedding vows, his eyes filled with tears as he turned to smile at his bride. Unusually for Sweden, Victoria chose to be given away by her father, to the consternation of many who considered such an Anglo-Saxon practice demeaning to women. Archbishop Anders Wejryd, who was presiding over the ceremony, was among those who had voiced concern over the breaking of a two-hundred-year-old Swedish tradition of “expressing equality between the spouses”.
The service, which included a piece of choral music specially written by Benny Andersson of Abba, was shor
t. And, after posing for photographs outside the cathedral, the couple set off in an open horse-drawn carriage in a procession through Stockholm, accompanied by mounted, blue-uniformed soldiers. The city was decked in flowers, blue-and-yellow flags and royal portraits.
When they reached Galärvarvet, a wharf on the Djurgården peninsula, the couple walked hand in hand down a blue carpet to the richly ornamented royal barge, Vasaorden. Still holding her bouquet, the bride waved to the crowd as eighteen sailors in their best dress uniforms rowed her and Daniel across the water to the royal palace. Eighteen Gripen fighter jets flew overhead in formation as the couple alighted at the steps leading up to the palace almost thirty minutes later. They were met by the King and Queen, who stood chatting with the groom’s parents. A military band played.
This rather unlikely marriage marked the culmination of two weeks of celebrations dubbed “Love Stockholm 2010” that had begun on 6th June, Swedish National Day. The hype surrounding the Crown Princess’s big day was enormous. For months, Sweden’s newspapers, magazines and television had reported on every twist and turn in the preparations; Stockholm’s hotels and restaurants were preparing for a bonanza; Arlanda airport had even been named “Official Love Airport” for the occasion. The city’s chamber of commerce predicted the wedding would generate more than £8 million of extra revenue for local traders. The souvenir shops of Gamla Stan had long since filled with cups, mugs, fridge magnets and countless other items decorated with pictures of the royal couple.
The Great Survivors Page 26