Pressed on the subject of his marital infidelity, the Duke replied, jokingly: “For the past forty years I have never moved anywhere without a policeman… so how the hell could I get away with anything like that?”
In some respects matters have been somewhat simpler for those women who have married into the royal family – the job of a queen (or queen to be) has traditionally been to act as an elegant accompaniment to her husband on public occasions, to bear his children and supervise their upbringing. Provided she gave birth to the all-important son, the queen’s position, in most cases, was assured.
In most cases drawn from foreign royal houses, these women have been obliged to adapt to life in a different country with a different language and culture and within a court with different traditions from those they knew at home. A long way from friends and relatives, they often suffered badly from homesickness; until the building of the railways and invention of the aeroplane, visits home were arduous and rare. Matters were not helped by the jealousy – and often downright hostility – that they encountered from their new compatriots. Their life would became even more uncomfortable when a shift in alliances meant their adoptive country found itself at war with the land of the birth. And then there was the humiliation that many suffered on account of their husbands’ serial infidelities. Although a brave few took their husbands to task – or took lovers of their own – most had little alternative but to suffer in silence.
Désirée, the eccentric French wife of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, founder of Sweden’s current royal dynasty, disliked the country so much that for more than a decade after her husband became crown prince in 1810 she refused to live in the country at all, claiming that she caught cold at mention of the word “Stockholm”. (Although her pursuit of Duc de Richelieu, the French prime minister, was another reason for her refusal to go north.) A century later, the English-born Queen Maud, wife of King Haakon VII of Norway, also spent much of her time on the British royal family’s Sandringham estate rather than in chilly Norway.
When Princess Alexandra of Denmark married the future King Edward VII of Britain in 1863, she was forbidden from bringing with her any of her ladies-in-waiting; it was argued that they could be plotting among themselves in Danish and no one else would be able to understand them. Given its size and splendour, the British court was also daunting to someone used to the smaller, cosier Danish one. Alexandra’s isolation was increased by her deafness, which got worse as the years went on, and by her husband’s many mistresses.
Like many queens before and after her, Alexandra’s response was to devote herself to her five children – and her pets. In the garden of Marlborough House, her London home until Edward became king, are the graves of her three dogs, Tiny, Muff and Joss, and of Bonny, her “favourite rabbit”. For Alexandra, as for her siblings scattered across Europe, the high point of the year was the regular family gatherings at the Fredensborg Palace presided over by her father Christian IX and her mother Louise.
In more recent times, queens have been able to play a more active role. The gradual transformation of the monarch’s function from a political one to a representational one, which was largely complete by the second half of the twentieth century, has put more emphasis on the royal family as a unit – turning the queen from someone subordinate to the king into an equal partner with an independent public profile and an identity of her own.
Queen Ingrid, the mother of the current Danish Queen, Margrethe II, did much to modernize the monarchy through the positive influence she exerted on her husband, Frederik IX, in the years after their marriage in 1935. “Queen Ingrid was one of the last royals from the world of yesterday, but also the one who, together with King Frederik IX, created the modern Danish monarchy as we know it today,” claims Trond Norén Isaksen, a Norwegian historian and expert on Scandinavian royalty. “King Frederik IX was the first non-political monarch in Denmark, and what he and Queen Ingrid did was to transform the monarchy into an institution which, although not democratic itself, lives in harmony with the democracy.” As Isaksen argues, Ingrid also helped establish the concept of kingship “as a partnership between the King and the Queen”.18
Such a partnership was already a given when King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden married Silvia Sommerlath in June 1976. The German-born Queen had little chance to ease herself gently into her role, as her husband, unlike the other European monarchs of his generation, was already king when they married. Thus she was faced almost immediately with the need not just to secure the succession – which she did admirably, by bearing two daughters and a son within the first six years of marriage – but also to fulfil the representational functions required of a queen. In addition she has plunged into charity work, with special emphasis on children and on the disabled. In 1999 she founded the World Childhood Foundation, which works towards better living conditions for children across the world. She also chairs the Royal Wedding Fund, which supports research in sports and athletics for disabled young people. The Queen has studied sign language in order to be able to communicate more effectively with those with impaired hearing.
Norway’s Queen Sonja, by contrast, had a considerable time to prepare for her role. It was only in June 1991, more than two decades after she married, that her husband Harald became King. Yet it was not easy for her either: for a start, she was moving into a very male-dominated environment. Her father-in-law Olav V had been widowed before he came to the throne in 1957. The only other queen since the establishment of the Norwegian monarchy in 1905 had been Olav’s mother, the British-born Queen Maud, who lived in a very different society and also predeceased her husband by nineteen years.
As the product of a middle-class Norwegian family, Sonja had to contend with the snobbery of some court officials who, like King Olav, would have preferred Harald to have married a foreign princess. She also faced a long struggle to be allowed to set up her own office. And then, when her husband became king, she had to put her foot down with Jo Benkow, the president of the Storting, the Norwegian parliament, in order to be allowed to accompany him to the annual state openings of parliament.
Sonja’s role has been to expand the royal family’s area of activities to reflect, in part, her interest in the arts and culture, while making sure not to overshadow her husband or get in the way of his constitutional tasks. This has helped by her considerable energy – which led to the nickname “Turbo Sonja”. She has also been active in the inevitable charitable ventures, like Queen Silvia, with special emphasis on the most vulnerable in society: the young, the disadvantaged, refugees and immigrants and people with psychiatric problems.
The Norwegian queen has been a strong influence on her husband too. King Harald was effusive in praise of his wife when they celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary in August 2008 with a cruise in the Adriatic aboard the royal yacht Norge, accompanied by their children, their children’s spouses and their grandchildren. “I was a completely different person when I married forty years ago,” he said to Norwegian reporters as he gazed fondly at his wife. “Apart from everything else I was extremely shy, but with her help, I got over it.”19
Just as Sonja struggled initially with her role, so Britain’s Princess Diana found that becoming a member of a royal family, with rituals and traditions that have become established over the centuries, can be daunting even for someone who is not facing a language or cultural barrier. In Diana’s case the challenge was made greater by the very messy and public collapse of her marriage with Prince Charles. Unlike generations of previous royal brides who suffered in silence, Diana proved ready to go public with her grievances – with highly damaging results, for herself as much as for the British royal family.
But Diana broke the mould in a more positive way too. After having produced the requisite heir and spare with commendable speed, she fashioned for herself a role that went beyond that of mere consort – becoming a public figure in her own right. Whether hugging HIV-positive children or lepers in a hospital ward or campaigning agains
t Angolan landmines, she threw herself into a range of charitable causes – arousing the jealousy of her increasingly estranged husband.
Diana’s opposite numbers on the Continent have learnt from her example, identifying themselves with causes for which their backgrounds appear to suit them. Crown Princess Máxima of the Netherlands has become involved in the issue of providing finance for countries in the developing world, even being appointed the UN Secretary General’s Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance. Mette-Marit of Norway has worked on international development and HIV-AIDS as well as youth and mental-health issues, while Denmark’s Crown Princess Mary has set up the Mary Fund, which aims to help adults, children and families who are “socially isolated or excluded”.
But what fate awaits the queen when her king dies? Higher female than male life expectancy – accentuated by a tendency by many monarchs to marry younger women – has meant most queens have outlived their husbands, leaving them to live out their remaining days playing the largely undefined role of dowager queen or queen mother.
To some extent theirs is merely a more extreme form of the fate of any stay-at-home mother who has devoted her adult life to husband and family and then suddenly finds herself alone. Royal life brings some specific extra humiliations, however: the next monarch will almost certainly have married by then, forcing his mother-in-law to cede the glamour and prestige that comes from being “First Lady” to a woman in the bloom of youth. She will also most likely be obliged to leave the principal palace for more modest accommodation. The financial arrangements – although certainly more generous than those enjoyed by the majority of her subjects – will also most likely be scaled back.
Some, such as George VI’s wife Queen Elizabeth – mother of the current Queen Elizabeth II – more than rose to the challenge. Widowed in 1952 at the age of just fifty-one, the “Queen Mother”, as she became known, lived on for another half a century, becoming something of an institution. Partly thanks to her discretion – an interview she gave when she was twenty-two and newly engaged was the only one made public during her lifetime – and also her longevity, she established herself as the nation’s favourite grandmother. She also became close to her grandchildren. Such was the Queen Mother’s enduring appeal that when an authorized biography of her by William Shawcross was published in 2009 it jumped to the top of the best-seller list.
Queen Margrethe’s Swedish-born mother, Ingrid, also succeeded in redefining herself during her twenty-eight-year widowhood, especially as a surrogate mother for Crown Prince Frederik, whose own parents were often distant towards him during his childhood.
The position of Fabiola, the widow of King Baudouin of Belgium, has been more difficult, not least because she had no children of her own. Her husband’s untimely death and his succession by his younger brother, Albert, meant she had to give up her role not to her daughter but to her sister-in-law, Paola. While she was Queen, the conservative and deeply religious Fabiola was disapproving of Paola’s more flamboyant lifestyle. To find their roles suddenly reversed will have come as an uncomfortable shock.
In her old age Fabiola has also not been accorded the same reverence as Britain’s Queen Mother by the media. Questions have been asked about the extent of her allowance and size of her entourage, while she has suffered the ignominy of seeing at least one Belgian newspaper erroneously report her death. Bizarrely, she has also had anonymous threats against her life, including one in July 2009 by someone threatening to kill her with a crossbow. Fabiola’s response was to appear at Belgian National Day celebrations later that month waving an apple to the crowd – a witty demonstration of her unwillingness to be intimidated by any would-be William Tell. Yet such threats, repeated in early 2010, have undoubtedly weighed on her.
Chapter 10
Learning to Be a Monarch
Situated deep in the countryside of north-eastern Scotland, Gordonstoun was founded in 1933 by Dr Kurt Hahn, a German Jew with some unusual ideas. Hahn had been headmaster of Salem Castle School in southern Germany, but fled after being threatened by the Nazis. As a young man he had visited Morayshire to recover from illness and so the following year chose to establish his international school in two seventeenth-century buildings there.
Hahn set out to blend the traditional British public-school ethos with a philosophy derived in part from Plato’s Republic. Thus the head boy was known as “Guardian”, the school’s emblem was a trireme and the regime was Spartan. Hahn believed young people were “surrounded by a sick civilization… in danger of being affected by a fivefold decay: the decay of fitness, the decay of initiative and enterprise, the decay of care and skill, the decay of self-discipline, the decay of compassion”, and set himself the task of combating such a situation.1
The four hundred boys wore shorts the whole time, regardless of the weather, and began each day with a run in the grounds, followed by hot and then cold showers. They slept in crude wooden beds in dormitories, where the windows were always left open at night – which meant wet sheets or a light dusting of snow for those unfortunate enough to sleep next to them. Emphasis was put on militaristic discipline and physical education, including sailing and hill-walking. It was intended, said Hahn, to be a place where “the sons of the powerful can be emancipated from the prison of privilege”.
It was into this curious world that Prince Charles, a rather shy young thirteen-year-old and heir to the British throne, stepped in April 1962. Charles, the first child of the then Princess Elizabeth, was born in the Buhl Room at Buckingham Palace on 14th November 1948 just after eleven p.m. Outside, a crowd, three thousand strong, celebrated until the early hours of the morning, ignoring the entreaties of the police to quieten down.
In the autumn before her son was born, Elizabeth had declared, “I’m going to be the child’s mother, not the nurses.” Yet, inevitably, duty intruded, especially after she became queen, and Charles, not yet four, like other royal children before him, was brought up by nannies. “He was very responsive to kindness,” recalled his Scottish governess, Catherine Peebles, “but if you raised your voice to him he would draw back into his shell and for a time you would be able to do nothing with him.”2
Prince Philip wanted his son to come out of his shell and so, at the age of eight, after three years of Peebles’s lessons, he was sent to school – making him the first heir to the British throne to be educated with other children. This being class-based Britain, where the children of the affluent are educated separately from everybody else, it could not be just the local primary school. Charles was sent instead to Hill House, a private preparatory school (where the fees now reach more than £12,000 a year) in Knightsbridge, just behind Harrods and a short drive from Buckingham Palace.
After a year at Hill House, it was decided he was ready for that quintessentially British upper-class institution: the boarding school, a place where parents would pay large amounts of money to have their children brought up in some of the harshest conditions possible and with the strictest discipline, in the belief that it strengthens the character. So in September 1957, two months before his ninth birthday, Charles was sent to his father’s old school, Cheam – England’s oldest preparatory school, founded in 1645 “for the sons of noblemen and gentry”.3 Cheam, which had moved from Surrey to Berkshire since Philip’s day, was in many respects typical of such places: it had metal beds in austere dormitories, cold showers, compulsory chapel, Latin and sports – and, of course, corporal punishment.
The Queen insisted that Charles be treated in the same way as the other boys – which was not easy given who he was: she and the Duke of Edinburgh turned up with him in a chauffeur-driven car on the first day of term, while his movements were monitored by his personal detective, who lived in the school grounds. Charles, young for his age and extremely shy, described the first few weeks of his life at the school as the loneliest of his life. He especially disliked the rugby – and was often mocked by the other boys for being overweight.
Although idios
yncratic enough in their own ways, neither Hill House nor Cheam School were quite as curious as Gordonstoun, where he was sent in 1962. Charles, who slept with fourteen other boys in a prefabricated hut, suffered a special kind of hardship there. He was picked on mercilessly by the other boys, in scenes reminiscent of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.4 The rugby field held special tortures for him. After one outburst of especially bad bullying, the novelist William Boyd, a contemporary of Charles, recalls hearing the cry: “We did him over. We just punched the future king of England.”5 Charles subsequently called the school “hell” and “a prison”, and described, as part of an initiation ceremony, having been once caged naked in a wicker fish basket and left under a cold shower until he was rescued by a housemaster.
Such bullying was perhaps inevitable. “How can you treat a boy as just an ordinary chap when his mother’s portrait is on the coins you spend, the stamps you use?” asked one former schoolmate.6
Charles himself remembered the nights as the worst. “I don’t get any sleep practically at all nowadays,” he wrote home in his sixth term, when he was fifteen. “The people in my dormitory are foul. Goodness they are horrid. I don’t know how anybody could be so foul. They throw slippers all night long or hit me with pillows or rush across the room and hit me as hard as they can, then beetle back again as fast as they can, waking everyone else in the dormitory at the same time. Last night was hell, literal hell. I still wish I could go home. It’s such a HOLE this place!”7
The media were also watching him. As long as Charles remained within Gordonstoun, he was largely free from the prying lenses, but once he stepped outside he became far more vulnerable. Quite how vulnerable became clear in 1969 when, aged fourteen, he became involved in what was to become known as the “cherry-brandy incident”.8 On an excursion on the school yacht to the Outer Hebrides with classmates, he and a few other boys went ashore at Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, where they stopped off for a meal at a hotel.
The Great Survivors Page 23
