The Great Survivors

by Peter Conradi

  The couple’s whirlwind romance and marriage had little in common with traditional royal pairings. “It was passionate love between Albert and Paola,” claims Erik Wellens, another of the King’s biographers. “There are even stories of hotel visits during which discarded clothing was found strewn from the lift to ‌the door of the room.”11 Two weeks after Paola walked down the aisle, she was already pregnant with Philippe, born the following April. A daughter, Astrid, was born in June 1962 and a second son, Laurent, in October 1963.

  The Belgians fell in love with “la dolce Paola”, and she and Albert became a prime target of the paparazzi, who chased them during their engagement and their honeymoon in Mallorca. Like Princess Diana two decades later, she was often obliged to leave shops through the back door to avoid their lenses.

  In common with many royal second sons, Albert was faced with the challenge of finding a role: by the mid-1960s he was leading economic missions on behalf of Belgian industry, which involved considerable foreign travel. At first Paola went with him, but as their children grew older she stayed behind in Brussels. For a young woman bought up in the dolce vita of Rome, the Belgian capital must have seemed a grey place. Paola was lonely, homesick and chafing under the protocol of the Belgian court.

  Relations were also often strained with Queen Fabiola, the rather severe Spanish aristocrat whom Baudouin had married in December 1960. Fabiola had little time for such frivolities as make-up or designer clothes – unlike her Italian sister-in-law, who during an official visit to Luxembourg was said to have worn no fewer than twelve outfits in four days. Fabiola and Baudouin used to drink water rather than wine and organized few parties. Like the King, Fabiola was deeply religious: indeed, according to one account, the couple first met thanks to the clerical matchmaking of Cardinal Leo Suenens, Belgium’s most senior churchman, and Sister Veronica O’Brien, an Irish nun, who had visions of the Virgin Mary. Given her five miscarriages, Fabiola may also have been a little jealous of Paola with her three healthy young children.

  Rumours began to spread about Albert’s alleged extramarital escapades; there were reported sightings at Paris nightclubs; more fancifully, at sex parties. Paola, meanwhile, was also spotted in male company.

  Then in 1966 Albert met Sybille de Selys Longchamps, a Belgian baroness. She was married at the time to Jacques Boël, an industrialist, but they were already separated. Albert appears to have fallen in love with her as quickly as he had with Paola: in February 1968, they had a daughter, named Delphine.

  Albert and Paola went their separate ways – the children staying with their mother – but such were the preoccupations of the day that they still tried to present a united front to the outside world, even allowing television cameras to film them on their tenth wedding anniversary in 1969. This show of marital unity was somewhat undermined the following year when Paola was photographed arm in arm with Albert de Mun, a journalist from Paris Match, on holiday in Sardinia.

  In the early years Albert was a regular visitor to the house in Uccle, an affluent suburb of Brussels, where Sybille lived with Delphine. The little girl didn’t know who the man was – but liked him and nicknamed him papillon. “He was a fun guy with a good sense of humour and I liked him,” she said in an interview published in 2008 to coincide with the publication of her autobiography. “I understood that I had to remain in the shadows, that he had another life with ‌his wife and three children.”12

  According to Delphine’s account, as early as October 1969 Albert talked to her mother about the possibility of divorcing, but it was made clear to him that if he did so, he would have to renounce his claim to the throne. He was also told that Sybille would be prevented from seeing his other children.

  In the years that followed, the couple continued to see each other clandestinely, but in 1976 Sybille told Albert she couldn’t go on. Again, the subject of divorce was raised, and again the conditions were the same. This time Sybille acted, moving to London, taking Delphine, aged six, with her.

  A distraught Albert bowed to the inevitable, but continued to visit for several years and, according to Delphine, used to talk to her mother almost every day on a specially installed telephone line. Delphine, who attended a series of schools before ending up at the Chelsea School of Art, had since learnt the identity of papillon, but still assumed he and her mother had been merely friends – rather than lovers. Then, in 1986, when she was eighteen, her mother revealed the truth over dinner one evening in the Foxtrot Oscar restaurant on Royal Hospital Road in Chelsea. Delphine was delighted.

  Albert and Paola, meanwhile, were finding themselves again, thanks in part to the intervention of Cardinal Suenens, who recommended they went on a Christian-inspired Marriage Encounter weekend course. The couple were impressed – so much that they even invited Spain’s King Juan Carlos and his wife Sofía to their castle in Ciergnon to attend one. Albert and Paola also got into religion – becoming members of the Charismatic Movement. The marriage of their daughter Princess Astrid to Lorenz, an Austrian archduke, in September 1984 seemed to have helped their reconciliation.

  Then, on 31st July 1993, Baudouin died unexpectedly of heart failure while on holiday with Fabiola at Villa Astrida, their estate in Motril in southern Spain. He was just sixty-two and childless. It had been widely expected that Albert – four years younger and next in line – would renounce the throne, and his son, Philippe, then aged thirty-three, would become Belgium’s sixth king. But instead it was Albert who on 9th August swore the constitutional oath. No explanation was given, even though it was felt by many – including apparently Jean-Luc Dehaene, the prime minister – that the still unmarried Philippe, whose main interests appeared to be fast cars and aeroplanes, was not yet ready to assume the role.

  The revelations, six years later, of Albert’s love child came at an unfortunate moment. Danneels’s book appeared just as Philippe, the King’s eldest son, was setting off on a prenuptial tour of Belgium, the so-called Joyeuse Entrée, with his fiancée, Jonkvrouwe Mathilde d’Udekem d’Acoz, whom he was due to marry on 4th December that year.

  As experience across Europe has shown, there is nothing like a royal wedding to boost the standing of a royal family – and this looked a good one, so good in fact that when Philippe and Mathilde’s engagement had been announced that September there was speculation that it was an arranged marriage – an assertion Philippe angrily denied. The bride, whose striking beauty, grace and social skills inevitably drew comparisons to the late Diana, Princess of Wales, would become the first Belgian-born queen in the country’s history. More significantly, she also had rare credentials to act as a binding force between the country’s two warring linguistic communities, the French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemings. Mathilde’s family was originally from Poperinge in West Flanders, and her uncles were Flemish Christian Democrat politicians, but the family chateau in which she grew up was in Wallonia, at Villers-la-Bonne-Eau, near Bastogne. By then she was working as a speech therapist in Brussels.

  Philippe’s marriage was a suitably grand affair, courtesy of €1 million of taxpayers’ money. It began with a civil wedding at the town hall on the gothic Grand-Place, a two-hour Mass at a nearby cathedral, a lunch for twelve hundred people at the royal palace, and a reception for two thousand five hundred at the Château de Laeken, the royal family’s sprawling estate in the northern outskirts of Brussels. Work to spruce up the roads around the royal palace and the cathedral had been going on for two months; the fifteen-hundred-man security detail included 132 gendarmes on horseback and another twenty-five who formed a motorcycle escort. There was a ceremonial fly-by of F-16 fighter jets over the royal palace.

  Yet the scandal of the King’s alleged love child was not going away. The initial reaction of the royal palace was to dismiss the matter as “gossip” – but that changed a few months later when Albert made his traditional Christmas speech to the nation. Straying from the usual pleasantries, he noted how the season gave the opportunity to look back not just on h
appy times but also unhappy ones – in particular, on a crisis that he and Paola had undergone in their marriage thirty years earlier. “Together we were able to overcome these difficulties and rediscover a deep understanding and love,” the King declared. “We were reminded of this period of crisis recently.”

  Albert’s words were vague, yet few of those gathered around their television sets were in much doubt about what the King meant – nor of the significance of his apparent willingness, if only obliquely, to tackle it.

  But what of the reminder of these difficulties the couple had left behind them? Delphine had remained in contact with Albert even after he had become king, but accepted his insistence that he could not publicly acknowledge her existence. He would often call, though, and send her “little presents” on her birthday.

  This changed after Danneels’s revelations. Delphine’s first reaction was one of relief that she would no longer have to keep her secret, but that quickly became apprehension after the paparazzi tracked her down to the house in fashionable Notting Hill in west London where she had made her home. Delphine and her mother were besieged with requests for interviews, but refused to comment. When they turned to the palace for help, they received a cool reaction. “At the palace one had imagined there would be a solution to my problems,” she wrote in her book Couper le cordon. “It was suggested to us that it would be desirable for me to disappear, that I leave England for a distant location, where the press would no longer always be after me. What would have been, according to them, the ideal place of exile? Zanzibar or the North Pole.”

  For a contemporary artist who compares herself with Britain’s Tracey Emin, Delphine’s sudden celebrity brought distinct benefits: she exhibited at the Venice Biennale and at galleries in London and Belgium. Her exhibits seemed intended to shock – among them a sculpture of a crowned pig and cow. Yet she could not help wondering whether the new-found fame was due to her parentage rather than her talent. In the feverish world of Belgian politics, meanwhile, some saw her as a willing – or unwilling – part of a plot by Flemish nationalists to destabilize the monarchy, seen as the last piece of glue that holds Belgium together – charges she was later fervently to deny.

  Two years later, when her mother’s heart problems worsened and were aggravated by nervous depression, Delphine wrote to Albert. When he failed to reply, she found his number, called him and asked him to contact her mother. Although he did so, Sybille still seemed dissatisfied, and Delphine called him again. This time, she claims, he was furious. “You must never call me again… I do not want to hear any more about this matter. And by the way, you are not my daughter.” A horrified Delphine told him not to be ridiculous, saying she had the same blue eyes as his mother, the tragic Queen Astrid, but that only made Albert angrier. “Stop! Do not say that you resemble my mother. Never say ‌that again! How dare you!”13

  In 2003, when she was about to give birth to her first child, Joséphine, Delphine decided to move back to her homeland, determined that her daughter should grow up in the country of her birth. Jim O’Hare, her American-Irish businessman partner, followed her a few months later.

  As for Albert and Paola, they appeared to have become completely reconciled to one another. “We had our difficulties but now we say that we were made for each other,” Paola declared in a television documentary broadcast on Belgian television in 2006 for which she granted the cameras unprecedented access.

  The marriage of Juan Carlos and his queen, Sofía, three years after Albert and Paola’s, was something of a throwback to an earlier age when dynastic considerations predominated. When the couple walked down the aisle in Athens in 1962, it represented the coming-together of two of Europe’s leading royal families, the Borbóns and the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.

  True, Juan Carlos’s family had not sat on the Spanish throne since his grandfather Alfonso XIII had been forced into exile just over thirty years earlier, yet there was still the hope that the House of Borbón would be restored – which came a step closer to realization seven years later when the young prince was finally confirmed by General Francisco Franco as his successor.

  Sofía, by contrast, was the daughter of King Pavlos, who had been on the Greek throne since 1947. Members of the dynasty had ruled the country since 1863, when the seventeen-year-old Prince Vilhelm of Denmark had become King Georgios I. Few would have foreseen that the family’s reign would end as soon as 1967, when Sofía’s brother, who had succeeded their father as King Konstantinos II three years earlier, was forced into exile.

  In making his choice of bride, Juan Carlos was even more constrained than his other European counterparts: not only did his choice have to be acceptable to his own parents, he also had to take into account the views of Franco, who had ruled Spain since his victory in the Civil War. Choosing someone whom the Caudillo rejected ran the risk of prejudicing his prospects of ever being named the dictator’s successor.

  The future Spanish royal couple first met in 1954 during a cruise, when Juan Carlos was sixteen and Sofía fifteen. It was organized by the latter’s mother, Queen Frederika, the German-born wife of King Pavlos, who had invited ninety members of European royal families past and present to set sail from Naples on a cruise through the Greek islands aboard the brand-new 5,500-ton liner, the Agamemnon. Among them were representatives of the ruling houses of not just Greece but the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Luxembourg. There were also recently disinherited princelings from Italy, France, Spain, Romania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria and relics from defunct kingdoms such as the Bourbon-Parmas, Thurn und Taxis and the Hohenlohe-Langenburgs. The event, recalled Juan Carlos’s mother, Doña María de las Mercedes, ‌was organized “with Prussian efficiency”.14 The cruise was ostensibly to promote tourism; it also seems to have been about royal matchmaking.

  Those on board had a jolly old time, ‌according to one contemporary account.15 Since they were all related, Frederika insisted on informality: there was a ban on formal dress and protocol, and lots were drawn to decide on the seating arrangements. Frederika’s uncle by marriage, Prince Georgios of Greece, aged eighty-five, known as Uncle Goggy to the family, was the only one allowed to bring along a personal servant on account of his advanced age. During their daily island stops, the guests enjoyed the sights and generally behaved as tourists. In the evening there were films on board and sometimes they danced the mambo and the rumba. During one especially boisterous evening, Christian of Hanover was tossed fully clothed into the swimming pool by some of the other young royals, who then jumped in after him. After that, Frederika ordered the pool emptied each evening at two a.m.

  As Juan Carlos recalled later, his meeting with Sofía was not an especially auspicious one. The young princess told him she was learning judo.

  “That won’t do you much good,” he commented.

  “You don’t think so? Give me your hand,” she replied, and proceeded to fling him onto the ground ‌with an expert judo throw.16

  That was not the only drama during the cruise. Some time afterwards Juan Carlos started to complain of stomach pains. Fortunately his mother had trained as a nurse and realized her son was suffering from appendicitis. Their ship stopped in Tangiers, where the Prince was treated by Alfonso de la Peña, a leading Spanish surgeon who happened to be in the city when they landed.

  For the time being, though, nothing more happened between Juan Carlos and Sofía. His first love was instead Maria Gabriella of Savoy, the middle daughter of the short-lived King Umberto II, who had reigned in Italy for just a month in 1946 before going into exile, as the ousted Spanish royals had done, in Portugal. In December 1956, while back in Estoril with his family for the holidays, Juan Carlos met another Italian, Contessa Olghina Nicolis di Robilant, a beautiful minor screen actress. The Prince was infatuated and they began an affair that lasted for almost four years – yet, conscious of his position and his loyalty to the dynasty, he made clear their relationship could never be permanent.

  His rela
tionship with Maria Gabriella was not to last either. Despite persistent rumours late in 1960 that the couple were about to announce their engagement, both Juan Carlos’s father Don Juan and Franco were opposed, and the Prince eventually succumbed to pressure to drop her. In any case, his attentions had turned in the meantime to Sofía – even though this apparently did not prevent him from indulging in one impromptu last night of passion with Olghina di Robilant in a Rome hotel room.

  Juan Carlos and Sofía’s paths had crossed again in 1958, four years after the cruise, when they were both invited to the wedding of the daughter of the duke of Württemberg, held at Schloss Altshausen near Stuttgart. Their relationship really appears to have taken off in 1960, however, when Sofía’s brother, Konstantinos, was a member of the Greek sailing team at the Rome Olympic Games, and both the Greek and Spanish royal families found themselves staying in the same hotel. By June the following year, when Juan Carlos was Sofía’s escort at the wedding of the duke of Kent and Katherine Worsley in Westminster Abbey, their relationship was becoming an open secret. Sofía subsequently claimed that during this time in London they effectively became engaged.

  There were obstacles, however: first and foremost one of language, despite the fact that both of them were polyglots. Juan Carlos spoke French, Italian and Portuguese in addition to his native Spanish; Sofía had German as well as Greek. The only tongue they had in common was English, which Sofía spoke well, but, initially at least, Juan Carlos struggled with. Other problems appeared more serious: Juan Carlos was Catholic; Sofía had been brought up Greek Orthodox. For either of them to convert would have been a serious matter.

  Sofía’s family could also have been forgiven for wondering how much of a catch Juan Carlos was. While their daughter was a member of one of Europe’s ruling dynasties, Juan Carlos was merely the son of the pretender to the throne of a country that had long since ceased to be a monarchy. Little did either realize that within a further two decades the respective fortunes of their two dynasties would have been reversed. Sofía’s parents were enthusiastic, however, and Juan Carlos and his parents were invited to join the Greek royal family for the rest of the summer in Corfu.