The Great Survivors

by Peter Conradi

  The rules of succession were changed again in 2009 to give equal rights to both male and female, but this time it was uncontroversial: Margrethe has two sons and the elder, Crown Prince Frederik, himself produced a male heir, Prince Christian, in October 2005.

  In putting men and women on an equal footing, the Danes were following their Scandinavian neighbours. In 1980 Sweden became the first monarchy in the world to introduce equal primogeniture, which put Crown Princess Victoria, the first child of King Carl XVI Gustaf, next in line for the throne ahead of her younger brother, Carl Philip. The King had made little secret of his opposition to the change, but was unable to prevent it. Norway took the same step a decade later, but this time the change was not made retroactive: this meant King Harald’s son Haakon remained first in line to the throne rather than having to stand aside in favour of his elder sister, Märtha Louise.

  The trend elsewhere in Europe is also towards sexual equality – the Dutch adopted equal primogeniture in 1983 and the Belgians in 1991 – and in its 2004 election manifesto, Spain’s victorious Socialist Party vowed to follow suit, even though it failed to do so in its two terms of office. Luxembourg followed in 2011.

  This still left Britain (along with Monaco and Liechtenstein) continuing to give precedence to male heirs. But there was change here, too – prompted by Prince William’s engagement to Kate Middleton in November 2010 and their marriage the following April. The prospect of the couple’s starting a family made the problem a potentially urgent one: if William and Kate’s first-born were a girl, it would provoke complaints of unfairness if she were overtaken by any brother born subsequently. But making such a change to the rules would be potentially more complicated than elsewhere in Europe, given Elizabeth’s role as queen not just of the United Kingdom but of fifteen other countries – all of ‌whom would have to agree.4

  David Cameron set out to tackle the issue after coming to power in May 2010. At the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth, Australia, in October 2011, he won unanimous agreement from the leaders of the fifteen that the daughters of any future monarch should have the same rights as the sons. It was also decided to end the bar on a future king or queen marrying a Roman Catholic. “The idea that a younger son should become monarch instead of an elder daughter simply because he is a man, or that a future monarch can marry someone of any faith except a Catholic – this way of thinking is at odds with the modern countries that we have become,” Cameron told them. The changes required the amending of a mass of historic legislation – including the 1701 Act of Settlement, the 1689 Bill of Rights and the Royal Marriages Act 1772 – initially in the United Kingdom but then also in the fifteen other countries.

  The gradual reduction over the centuries of the status of the king from god to mortal has been reflected in ritual: the Byzantine emperors placed the crown on their own heads as a way of demonstrating that their power came directly from God. So did the tsars and also the future Kaiser Wilhelm I when he was crowned king of Prussia in 1861. This went too far for most other European monarchies, though, which made it the task of a senior churchman to crown the king – Napoleon I called on Pope Pius VII to do the honours at his investiture in a highly elaborate ceremony in 1804 in Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.

  Britain is the only European monarchy that has continued the coronation ritual – and there seems little doubt that Prince Charles will be crowned when he succeeds his mother, Elizabeth II. In a ceremony whose origins date back a thousand years, the sovereign is first presented to and acclaimed by the people. He or she then swears an oath to uphold the law and the Church and is anointed with holy oils by the archbishop of Canterbury, the primate of the Church of England, who places the crown on his or her head.

  Although the next in line to the British throne succeeds immediately and automatically on the death of his or her predecessor, the coronation is typically held more than a year later, such is the time and effort that goes into organizing it. Edward VIII, for example, was never crowned, despite reigning for almost a year, as he abdicated before 12th May 1937, the date set for the ceremony. Being practical people, the British didn’t put all that preparation to waste: with Westminster Abbey already booked for the day, they made use of it to crown George VI, Edward’s younger brother, who had reluctantly succeeded him as king the previous December.

  The coronation of George VI’s daughter Queen Elizabeth II on 2nd June 1953 was a spectacular pageant that added a dash of colour to grey post-war Britain, drawing hundreds of thousands of people from across the country to the streets of London. It was also to prove an important milestone in the monarchy’s relationship with the media as television cameras were allowed into Westminster Abbey to film proceedings. Although marred by heavy rain, the ceremony was perfectly choreographed and went off without a hitch – unlike some previous coronations, which had contained an element of farce: George III’s in 1761 was held up for three hours after the sword of state went missing, while his son and successor George IV’s was overshadowed by his row with his estranged and hated wife, Caroline of Brunswick.

  In terms of pomp, the Dutch come closest to the British, although its monarchs are invested rather than crowned. The ceremony is held in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, but proceedings are secular rather than religious and conducted in accordance with constitutional law. Unlike in Britain, the regalia – a crown, the sceptre, the orb, the sword of state, the national standard and vellum-bound copy of the constitution, all of which symbolize royal power and dignity – are displayed on a credence table rather than worn or carried by the monarch.

  Elsewhere such ceremonies are more modest affairs. In Belgium the king is sworn in before parliament and seated on a throne more or less ‌knocked together for the occasion.5 He also has no crown and no sceptre. Similarly, when Juan Carlos became king of Spain he merely swore an oath in the Cortes. The last Swedish king to be crowned was Oscar II, who came to the throne in 1872. His son, Gustaf V, who disliked such ceremonial as much as Britain’s Edward VII loved it, decided not to have a coronation at all when he became king in 1907.

  Subsequent Swedish monarchs have followed his example. Carl XVI Gustaf, the current monarch, was installed in a simple ceremony in the throne room of the Royal Palace in Stockholm. As in the Netherlands, the crown jewels were displayed on cushions to the right and left of the royal throne, but were never given to the king.

  When Margrethe II of Denmark replaced her father in 1972, the formalities were restricted to an appearance on the balcony of the Christiansborg Palace, the seat of parliament, with Jens Otto Krag, the prime minister, shouting three times to the crowds below: “King Frederik IX is dead. Long live Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II.” The declaration was followed by the traditional ninefold hurrah. The other symbols of royal power have long since fallen into disuse: the Christiansborg Palace has a Trongemak (Throne Room) where the queen receives foreign ambassadors, but although there are two special chairs there they are not used for formal occasions. The crown jewels, meanwhile, are kept in a museum at Rosenborg Castle.

  Nevertheless, as is shown by the example of Norway, the youngest of Europe’s dynasties, there is sometimes a reluctance to dispense completely with the spiritual. Although many of Norway’s politicians considered such ceremonies “undemocratic and archaic”, Haakon, the first king of a fully independent Norway, was crowned and anointed in 1906 in Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, which had been used as a place of coronation since the fifteenth century. The crown and other regalia had been inherited from the Bernadottes.

  Two years later, however, the country’s parliament voted overwhelmingly to remove the article in the constitution stipulating the requirement for a coronation. From then on, the monarch needed merely to take a formal accession oath in the Council of State and the Storting, the parliament. Traditions die hard, however, and when Olav succeeded his father in 1957, he insisted on a “consecration” ceremony to mark the beginning of his reign. Held as before in Nidaros, it retained some elements o
f the old tradition of konungstekja – “king-taking” or “proclaiming” in Old Norse – dating back to the Norwegian monarchs of the tenth century.

  Significantly, though, even here the crown jewels were displayed, but not bestowed, during the ceremony, reflecting a modern rejection of the medieval Christian concept that a crowned and anointed monarch was God’s highest temporal representative in his or her nation. It all went too far for many members of the ruling Labour Party – although several of them attended anyway. By the time Harald, the current Norwegian king, repeated the ceremony on his accession in 1991, it had become an established part of tradition. This – along with the monarch’s lying-in-state – remains the only occasion on which the crown and other regalia are used; the rest of the time they are on display in the Archbishop’s palace next to the cathedral. The royal coaches and horses have also long since gone – when the King travels to open parliament he does so by car.

  But what happens to terminate a monarch’s reign? Regicide has brought an end to some: while the killings of Charles I, Louis XVI and Tsar Nicholas II – as well, indeed, as that of the unfortunate Maximilian of Mexico – were executions effectively carried out in the name of a new regime, other kings were murdered for political reasons or simply by madmen. Most far reaching in its consequences was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie, on the streets of Sarajevo in June 1914. Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb patriot who shot them, lived long enough to see the consequences of what he had done, although before dying in jail in April 1918 he reputedly claimed, perhaps with some truth: “If I hadn’t done it the Germans would have found another excuse.”

  The killing of Franz Ferdinand demonstrated the vulnerability of royalty when they were in transit away from the protection of the court. Tsar Alexander II of Russia survived several assassination attempts – including one in which a bomb was placed under the dining room of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg – before the revolutionaries finally got him in 1881. The bulletproof carriage given to him by Napoleon III saved him from one bomb, but when he got out he was mortally wounded by a second. Carlos I of Portugal and his elder son Luís Filipe were shot as they travelled through Lisbon in 1908; the assassination of Georgios I of Greece five years later was as he was walking through Thessaloniki.

  The most spectacular royal killing, in terms of pure theatre, was that of Gustaf III of Sweden in 1792 – so much so that it formed the inspiration for Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera (even though the censors obliged him to shift the action from Stockholm to colonial-era Boston). An absolute monarch who found himself increasingly out of tune with the times, Gustaf had received a number of threats to his life, the most recent of them as he was sitting down for dinner before attending a masked ball at the Royal Opera House. As he entered in the early hours of the morning, he was surrounded by three noblemen wearing black masks, who greeted him in French with the words “Bonjour, beau masque”. The lead conspirator, Jacob Johan Anckarström, a military officer, then shot the King in the back with his pistol. Gustaf died almost a fortnight later, the third Swedish monarch in a hundred and sixty years to perish from gunshot wounds.

  For every successful regicide, there have been several abortive attempts. Queen Victoria was the victim of eight attacks of varying degrees of seriousness during her reign – the first in 1840 as she was riding through London with Prince Albert in a carriage, and the last in 1882 as she left Windsor railway station. Most of her assailants were unhinged rather than politically motivated. The last, Roderick McLean, was a budding poet who wanted revenge after a poem he had sent the Queen was rewarded with only a standard reply from Buckingham Palace.

  Victoria’s son, the future Edward VII, almost fell victim to a politically motivated killing in 1900 when he was shot at by a Belgian anarchist angry at Britain’s role in the Boer War while he was on his way to Denmark.

  As the monarchs’ roles have diminished so, thankfully, has the number of assassination attempts. While Queen Elizabeth has had to contend with the odd intruder into the palace, there have been no attempts on her life – although Prince Philip’s uncle, Louis Mountbatten, the man responsible for bringing him and Elizabeth together, was killed when the Irish Republican Army blew up his boat in 1979 while he was holidaying in Northern Ireland. Five years earlier, the Queen’s daughter Princess Anne had narrowly escaped a kidnapping attempt when she and her then husband Mark Phillips were driving near Buckingham Palace.

  More serious, however, was the attempt on the life of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands during the Queen’s Day celebrations on 30th April 2009. Karst Tates, an unemployed thirty-eight-year-old recluse, drove his car at high speed into an open-topped bus carrying Beatrix and other members of the royal family as they were travelling through the streets of Apeldoorn a few hundred metres from Het Loo Palace, the former residence of Queen Wilhelmina. Tates missed the bus, but ploughed into a crowd of spectators at seventy miles per hour, killing seven bystanders and seriously injuring himself. As he lay slumped and bleeding in his car, he confessed that he had intended to kill the royal family, calling Crown Prince Willem-Alexander a “fascist” and a “racist”. Tates went into a coma shortly afterwards, dying of his injuries the next day. A four-month investigation by more than two hundred detectives portrayed him as a loner who could not hold down a job and had spent some time homeless – but failed to provide an explanation for the attack.

  Accidents, meanwhile, have claimed the life of King Albert I of Belgium, who died in the mountains aged fifty-eight, and Prince Gustaf Adolf of Sweden, the heir to the throne and father of the current king, who was killed in an air crash aged just forty in January 1947. Car accidents killed Léopold III of Belgium’s Swedish-born wife, Queen Astrid, and Princess Diana, the estranged wife of Prince Charles. A coronary thrombosis did for Queen Elizabeth II’s father, George VI, when he was fifty-six; King Baudouin of Belgium was sixty-two when he died of heart failure.

  Some monarchs, though, have chosen to give up their thrones voluntarily, although in recent times the practice of abdication has been confined to two monarchies: the Dutch and the Luxembourgeois. Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands has lived through the abdication of both her predecessors: in September 1948, when she was aged ten, her grandmother, Wilhelmina, stepped down; in April 1980 Wilhelmina’s daughter Juliana followed suit, making way for Beatrix.

  Surprisingly, Beatrix herself has yet to do the same: born in 1938, she has long since passed any conventional retirement date or indeed the age at which both her predecessors relinquished the throne. Dutch commentators have suggested she is waiting until Willem-Alexander’s children are older before stepping aside for her son.

  Members of the house of Nassau-Weilburg, who have sat on the throne of Luxembourg since it split from the Netherlands in 1890, have proved even more determined abdicators. Marie-Adélaïde, who became the first reigning grand duchess in 1912, stepped down in favour of her younger sister Charlotte in 1919 after criticism of her over-friendly relations with German occupying forces during the First World War. After a forty-five-year reign, Charlotte abdicated in 1964; her son Jean, who succeeded her, in turn stepped down in favour of his son, Henri, in October 2000.

  These are the exceptions, though. The notion of abdication appears anathema to Europe’s other monarchs, who, until now at least, have regarded theirs as a job for life. The reluctance of Queen Elizabeth II, in particular, to step down is understandable if one considers the fate of her “Uncle David” – better known as King Edward VIII.

  Edward’s abdication in December 1936 after just 327 days as king in order to wed Wallis Simpson, a twice-married American divorcee, was in many respects the best thing that could have happened to the House of Windsor and, by extension, the country. During his brief reign – the shortest of any British monarch since that of Jane Grey more than 380 years earlier – Edward showed little appetite for what he once described as “the relentless grind of the king’s daily l
ife”. To the exasperation of his ministers, he was often late for appointments or cancelled them at the last moment. His red boxes, which contained the state papers on which monarchs are meant to work so diligently, were returned late, often apparently unread or stained by the bases of whisky glasses. George V’s warning that as monarch his eldest son would “ruin himself within a year”, were prescient.

  The contrast with Edward’s younger brother Bertie, who reluctantly succeeded him as George VI, could not have been greater. A nervous but diligent character with a debilitating stammer, he became a much respected and loved king, not least because of the fortitude he showed during the Second World War. His brilliant portrayal by Colin Firth in the multi-Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech brought him to life for a new generation. George’s untimely death in February 1952, aged just fifty-six, also paved the way for the accession of the present Queen. Nevertheless, the events of 1936 confronted the British monarchy with one of the greatest crises in its history, and Edward’s abdication cast a shadow over the institution during the decades that followed.

  ‌Chapter 3

  ‌Of Pageantry and Political Power

  Every year, in late October or early November, Queen Elizabeth II sets off in the horse-drawn Irish state coach from Buckingham Palace down the Mall, the grand thoroughfare that leads eastwards in the direction of Trafalgar Square. As crowds – many of them tourists – look on, her carriage, painted gold, turns right into Horse Guards, then left across the parade ground, to emerge through Horse Guards Arch and then along Whitehall to the Palace of Westminster, the seat of parliament. When she arrives, the royal standard is hoisted over the building.

  Once inside, Elizabeth follows a carefully scripted ritual that has changed little since she first made the journey in 1952. After being helped into the robes of state and the imperial state crown, which has been carried to Westminster earlier in the day on a cushion aboard its own state coach, she proceeds through the royal gallery, with her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, at her side, to the House of Lords, the upper house of parliament.