The Great Survivors

by Peter Conradi

  As Margrethe made clear, being king or queen is a job unlike any other – and that goes as much for the manner in which it is given up as that in which the appointment is made. A monarch is not just a head of state, but also, in many cases, head of the Church and army. He or she will be seen as not just the father or mother of the nation but also its very embodiment.

  In a world of elected politicians who come and go, the monarch is a constant, his or her status enhanced by each year that passes. For me, as for most Britons alive today, Queen Elizabeth II has always been there, a reassuring symbol of continuity. In times of war or natural disaster, the monarch is the one we turn to. Through judicious management of the media she and her European compeers have even managed to establish themselves as part of our own Christmas or New Year celebrations.

  When our monarchs marry or have children, it is like a happy event in our family; when they die, we feel it as a personal tragedy. They are also embedded in the political system: most turn up in person to open parliament every year, formally appoint prime ministers and accept their resignations. Even in the second decade of the twenty-first century there appears little serious pressure to change what is a profoundly undemocratic element in our democracies – perhaps simply because it works. If we bring ourselves to question our monarchs at all, it is to criticize the way they and their families are fulfilling their role; only a minority think to question whether they should have such a role in the first place.

  The monarchy is ubiquitous and references to its members, past and present, are woven into the national culture. Past eras are defined by their monarchs. In Britain, houses can be Georgian or Edwardian in style, while the phrase “Victorian values” conjures up thoughts of conservative sexual mores and the covering of the legs of tables and pianos to avoid provoking lewd thoughts among those who gazed upon them.

  Enter the word “royal” into Google and you come across a succession of organizations bearing that prefix, from the Royal Mail and the Royal Society to the Royal Academy of Arts. Visit a British supermarket and you will see a seemingly random collection of products that proclaim themselves to be “By Appointment to HM the Queen” – a mark of recognition extended to some 850 Royal Warrant holders who have supplied goods or services for at least five years to the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh or the Prince of Wales.

  Although dating back more than eight hundred years, this accolade is more than a historical curiosity. The chocolate-maker Cadbury, which received its warrant from Queen Victoria in 1854, revealed recently that every Christmas it delivers several small boxes of a special dark chocolate to Buckingham Palace for the royal family to enjoy. Made by a team of three on specially reserved equipment, it has more cocoa solids than other dark chocolate – and is not sold to the Queen’s subjects. Anyone wanting a more direct royal connection can buy a product from Duchy Originals, a company set up by Prince Charles in 1990 in a reflection of his interest in organic and sustainable farming, which now produces a range of more than two hundred products from biscuits and preserves to gifts and garden seeds.

  Even more visible is the Queen’s head on postage stamps and coins, and the letters ER – Elizabeth Regina – that grace letter boxes and other street furniture, just as GR did during the reign of her father, George VI. When Britain was discussing in the mid-1990s whether or not to adopt the euro, one of the arguments used by opponents was that it would mean the disappearance of the Queen’s image from coins and banknotes. To address such concerns the design was modified to provide space for the inclusion of such national symbols – even if Britain, in the event, decided to keep the pound. Indeed, some British Eurosceptics are concerned that ever closer European union will eventually lead to the creation of a superstate that will leave no role for the British monarch (although quite why the EU’s six other monarchies would acquiesce in such a plot is not explained).

  Cross the English Channel and you will find monarchy equally embedded in society. Many of the streets of Brussels, Stockholm or The Hague contain the word “royal” or the name of a previous monarch. The same is true of Oslo, which continues to extend the courtesy to members of the Bernadotte dynasty who ruled the country before 1905, during the years when Norway was a junior member in an alliance with Sweden. Indeed, a statue of Carl III Johan, the dynasty’s founder (known to the Swedes, and to us elsewhere in this book, as Carl XIV Johan), still stands outside the royal palace (situated, of course, at the end of Karl Johans Gate).

  Like the British version, most Continental royal families issue royal warrants of their own; Chocolaterie de Monaco, for example, is proud to declare itself a “Fournisseur Breveté de S.A.S. le Prince Souverain” (“supplier by appointment to HSH the Sovereign Prince”), and has launched special lines to mark royal occasions such as the marriage of Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly and the accession of Albert II.

  Centuries ago monarchs were more than just synonymous with the nation over which they presided: they were considered divine. The ancient Egyptians believed their pharaohs were directly descended from gods. Although such ideas later came to be seen as ridiculous, the notion that kings are mortals, albeit chosen by God, endured longer. The concept of the Divine Right of Kings, which came to the fore in Britain under King James I (otherwise known as King James VI of Scotland) and in France under King Louis XIV, stated that a monarch owed his title to the will of the Almighty, and not to that of his subjects, the aristocracy or any other competing authority. Any attempt to depose him or restrict his powers, therefore, ran contrary to the will of God – a convenient way of dissuading those who might have contemplated rebellion.

  Yet supernatural powers were still attributed to them. In England and France in the Middle Ages it was believed the monarch could cure scrofula – a disease known as the “King’s evil” – by touching the sufferer. Charles II is estimated to have touched as many as 90,000 people for the evil during his twenty-four-year reign in the late seventeenth century. William III, his successor but one, refused to touch at all, except when one man begged him. Laying his hand on the man’s head, the King declared, “God give you better health and more sense.” George I, who succeeded to the throne in 1714, ended the practice as “too Catholic”. In France, Louis XV stopped soon afterwards.

  Old habits die hard, however. When Elizabeth II came to the throne, a quarter of the British still believed that she actually reigned by the grace of God – in other words that she was God’s representative on earth – a belief perpetuated by the most important part of the ritual surrounding the coronation of a British monarch, in which he or she is anointed with oil by the archbishop of Canterbury.

  But who actually chooses the monarch? The answer, looking around the remaining monarchies of Europe, seems self-evident: the throne passes from the monarch to the oldest son – or, increasingly in this era of sexual equality, the oldest child.

  In fact, heredity is only a relatively recent phenomenon. The traditional form of determining succession was military conquest and then acclamation or some form of election. In the eighth century, Pepin the Short, the father of Charlemagne, was elected king of the Franks by an assembly of Frankish leading men. Such a system of election persisted through the Middle Ages. The Germanic peoples continued to cling to the concept of elective monarchies, while the Holy Roman Emperors were chosen by prince-electors, although this often was merely a formalization of what was, in reality, hereditary rule.

  Until the demise of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, its kings were elected by gatherings of nobles in a field in Wola, now a district of Warsaw. Given that every one of the half a million noblemen was entitled to take part, this was by far the widest franchise of any European country of the time. Not that it was democracy in the way we would understand today. The last king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, owed his election in 1764 largely to the military might of Tsarina Catherine the Great, his Russian patron – and lover.

  Such a method became less fitting as kingdoms grew in size and societies became les
s egalitarian. Gradually, the right to vote would be restricted to local chieftains, the nobility or some other defined group. An elective monarchy also had the disadvantage of creating an interregnum during which the election was held, which provided an opportunity for rival candidates to ignore the rules and try to establish their rights to the throne by force.

  Clear rules on succession – normally to the first-born son – provided a solution; it also suited monarchs understandably keen to pass the throne, along with their other possessions, down the generations. And so it was that elected monarchs gradually established dynasties. In Sweden, for example, Gustaf Vasa, although himself elected king by the Riksdag in 1523 after liberating his country from the Danes, was succeeded by his son, establishing a dynasty that would rule for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  There is no guarantee, of course, that the heir will actually be up to the job. Often the opposite has been the case, a serious problem when kings ruled rather than reigned. And then there were the cases when there was no legitimate heir, a frequent occurrence in the days of high infant mortality, especially in the many European countries where the succession was governed by Salic law – that is, where it was stipulated that only men could become the monarch.

  Flexibility has often been the response. When the Danes found themselves with the childless Frederik VII in the middle of the nineteenth century, the future Christian IX’s claim to be named heir presumptive was helped by the fact that his wife, Princess Louise of Hesse-Kassel, was a niece of Christian VIII, the previous monarch. By contrast, there was no attempt to prove even a weak blood link when a reluctant Carl XIII of Sweden was prevailed upon in 1810 to accept Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte as his successor.

  Britain was one of the earlier countries both to embrace the principle of heredity and to have queens who reigned in their own right – provided there was no male heir, that is. This should, in theory, have improved the chances of an orderly succession. On many occasions, however, the rule was broken, either because there was no heir or because he was deemed unsuitable. Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty that counted Henry VIII and Elizabeth I among its members, owed his crown to victory over Richard III, the last Plantagenet king, at Bosworth Field in 1485 rather than to heredity. When Elizabeth died childless more than a century later, the calling of James VI of Scotland to London to replace her was due not so much to his claim of descent from Henry VII as to the fact he was invited by the English parliament.

  The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries brought more departures from the usual rules of succession in Britain: during what became known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688, King James II, who was considered too pro-Catholic, was deposed and replaced by a joint monarchy of his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange. It proved a short-lived remedy: the couple were childless, leaving Mary’s younger sister Anne to succeed them in 1702. Although the unfortunate Anne bore no fewer than eighteen children, none survived her – which meant another imaginative solution was needed. Again, one of the main qualifications for a successor was that he should not be a Catholic – a requirement that had been enshrined in law with the Act of Settlement of 1701. And so the Protestant George, Elector of Hanover, was invited to become King George I, even though he was already fifty-four, spoke no English and fifty-seven other people had a better claim to the throne than he had.

  Heredity was not an option when it came to creating a new monarchy, as happened on several occasions in Europe during the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth. It was instead a matter of casting around other royal houses in search of a suitable candidate. This was a golden time for second or third sons otherwise faced with the prospect of life as a “spare”.

  As already seen, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg and Prince Carl of Denmark were both beneficiaries of this, establishing dynasties that still reign over Belgium and Norway, respectively, today. Other countries’ experiences of “importing” a monarch have not been so happy: when Greece became an independent country under the protection of the great powers in 1832, Otto, son of the philhellene King Ludwig I of Bavaria, was invited to be its first king, even though he was just sixteen. King Otto’s thirty-year reign was stormy, however, and he was deposed in 1862. The following year the Greeks tried again, this time asking Prince Vilhelm, son of the future King Christian IX of Denmark, to be their ruler. Taking the name Georgios I, he reigned until 1913, when he was assassinated by a madman two weeks short of the fiftieth anniversary of his accession. Despite this tragic end, he did succeed in establishing a dynasty that reigned ‌over Greece – with some gaps2 – for another half a century until they were forced into exile.

  Success is not the word to describe the fate of Maximilian, the younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, who was installed as Emperor of Mexico by Napoleon III of France in 1864. He was dependent on French military support for his survival, but when the civil war began, Napoleon pulled out his troops – and advised Maximilian to cut and run too. The unfortunate Austrian failed to do so and died aged thirty-four in front of a firing squad, in June 1867. His widow, Charlotte of Belgium, daughter of King Léopold I, had tried in vain to save him, having sought help in Paris, Vienna and finally in Rome from Pope Pius IX. Her husband’s violent death drove her mad, but she lived on for a further sixty years.

  Equally curious was the search for a king of Albania, which was proclaimed an independent country in 1912. The crown was hawked around, but in the end was taken by Ahmed Bey Zogu, a mountain chieftain who rose from prime minister to president before becoming King Zog I in 1928. He was chased out by the Italians in 1939 and spent his last years in exile in a sparsely furnished villa on the French Riviera with Géraldine, his Hungarian-American queen, who supported him by writing mystery stories. Despite four abortive assassination attempts and a ferocious nicotine habit – he smoked 150 cigarettes a day – it was stomach ulcers and a liver ailment that eventually did for Zog. “My life is an adventure story,” he once claimed.

  All of Europe’s monarchies – excluding, as we have seen, the Vatican and Andorra – have long since embraced heredity. So have those in the rest of the world, although here too there are exceptions: in Saudi Arabia, for example, succession to the throne, although hereditary, is not determined by a succession law but rather by consensus of the House of Saud as to who should become the next crown prince.

  This has not prevented some rewriting of the rules of succession over the years. Appalled by the behaviour of female incumbents of the throne – especially his own mother, Catherine the Great – Tsar Paul of Russia changed the system in the late eighteenth century to ensure that a woman could succeed only in the extremely unlikely case that there were no legitimate male members of the dynasty.

  In more recent times expediency has often triumphed over tradition. In the late nineteenth century the Dutch were ready to bend the rules when Willem III outlived all three sons by his first marriage, leaving only a daughter, Wilhelmina, the sole fruit of his somewhat scandalous union with his second wife Emma, who was more than forty years his junior. She became the first of a succession of three Dutch queens regnant – and a far better monarch than her male predecessors.

  The Monégasques proved equally flexible a decade later, when the failure of Prince Albert’s son Louis to produce a legitimate heir meant the crown might end up in the German branch of the family – which no one wanted. And so the rules were changed to legitimize Charlotte, a bastard daughter Louis had sired by a cabaret singer while serving in the French Foreign Legion in Algeria. Ennobled as the Duchess of Valentinois and married in due course to a French nobleman, Charlotte never reigned in her own name – but did give birth to Rainier, who made his mark on the principality in the second half of the twentieth century.

  After the Second World War, changing the rules of succession in Denmark proved more controversial. The constitution of 1849 declared that “Man shall follow man”, ruling out the possibility of a queen regnant. Unfortunatel
y, King Frederik IX, who came to the throne in 1947, had three daughters but no son, and his wife, Queen Ingrid, had been warned by her doctors not to attempt childbirth again. The law seemed clear: next in line to the throne was Frederik’s brother Knud, who already had two sons, Prince Ingolf, born two months before Margrethe, and Prince Christian, born in 1942. There were concerns, however, about the suitability of both father and son – especially when they were compared with the intelligent and pretty young Princess. A referendum in 1953 approved a change in the constitution establishing male-preference primogeniture – which meant a daughter should succeed to the Danish monarchy when there was no eligible son.

  Knud – reduced at the stroke of a pen from first to fourth in line to the throne – and his wife (and first cousin), Princess Caroline-Mathilde, were not pleased, leading to a bitter rift within the Danish royal family that endured for decades. From then on the two brothers saw each other almost only on official occasions. Knud, who died in 1976, outliving Frederik by four years, “would have liked very much to have those years as king”, Ingolf revealed in a magazine interview in 2010. “He ‌died as a bitter man.”3

  Ingolf, then a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, was also disappointed, although with time he came to accept he would never be king. The events of 1953 nevertheless continued to hang for a long time like a cloud over the Danish royal family. It was only after his father’s death that Ingolf, much against his mother’s will, approached his cousin Margrethe, who was now Queen, with the aim of reconciliation.