Märtha Louise wanted her daughters to be educated in Norway, however, and she and Behn returned home after only a short time. Soon afterwards she was plunged into controversy again after the announcement in 2007 that she was starting a new alternative-therapy centre that would draw on an ability to talk to angels that she had acquired while working with horses. Students at the centre – swiftly nicknamed the “angel school” by the Norwegian press – would learn to “create miracles” in their lives and harness the powers of their angels, which she described as “forces that surround us and who are a resource and help in all aspects of our lives”. Märtha Louise said she wanted to share her “important gift” with other people – or at least those prepared to pay an annual fee of 24,000 kroner for the three-year, part-time course.
The palace insisted it had nothing to do with the venture, but some churchmen were horrified, especially because of her father’s role as symbolic head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Some suggested she be excommunicated. Jan Hanvold, a televangelist, accused the Princess of “blasphemy” and called her “an emissary from hell”.
Undaunted, Märtha Louise went one step further: by publishing a book, Møt din skytsengel (Meet Your Guardian Angel), expounding on her theories. The press were scathing, but the Norwegian public seemed fascinated and it became a best-seller, and was translated into both Swedish and German. During a promotional tour of Germany in May 2010, Märtha Louise declared in a magazine interview that being in touch with her own angel helped her with her royal work. “Only through conversations with angels did I find my role as a member of the royal family,” she declared. Asked what her parents thought of her interest, she declined to answer.1
Märtha Louise’s activities and the accusations of “cashing in” on her royal connections are part of a much broader question: what is – or should be – the function within Europe’s royal families of “the spare”? As we have seen in the previous chapter, it is difficult enough to find an appropriate role for the heir to the throne. What of their siblings, who are really little more than an insurance policy?
On the simplest level, the role of a “spare” is to be precisely what the name suggests: the second, third or fourth child of a monarch stands ready to step in if those before them in the line of succession are somehow disqualified from taking the throne. This was more important in the days of high infant mortality, but even in recent times many “spares” have gone on to become kings or queens. In Britain, three of the six most recent monarchs – Victoria, George V and George VI – owed their place on the throne to the death of the more direct heir or abdication. Belgium’s Albert II is a second son who became king only because of the premature death of his brother; his namesake, Albert, who reigned in the first part of the twentieth century, was merely the second son of the third son of Léopold I, the founder of the dynasty.
More recently, there was speculation, at a time when the furore over Crown Prince Haakon of Norway’s choice of bride was at its height, that he might cede his place to Märtha Louise. There was similar talk in the Netherlands over Crown Prince Willem-Alexander’s relationship with Máxima, with suggestions he might step aside in favour of his younger brother Friso. In neither case did it happen.
But what if the crown passes seamlessly from monarch to crown prince or princess? What can the “spare” do other than watch him- or herself slide further and further down the list of succession as the heir to the throne produces children? And if it’s difficult enough for the spares, what about their husbands and wives?
Royalty is like a family business, which means there is always work for everyone, whether it’s addressing conferences, opening factories or attending cultural events. These are unlikely to be the most glittering or attractive of occasions, however, and the spares do not have any formal role in the ceremonial side of monarchy. Furthermore, as seen in Chapter Five, the second sons and daughters enjoy considerably less generous financial arrangements than the heir – even though they benefit from the use of palaces and other perks that come from being part of a royal family. Not surprisingly, Märtha Louise is not the only one of them to have been embroiled in controversy.
The British royal family has had its share of troublesome “spares”, exemplified most colourfully in the late eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries by the eight younger brothers of the future George IV (or rather the six who survived to adulthood), whose womanizing and financial problems made them a constant source of despair to their father; not, admittedly, that their elder brother behaved any better during his years as prince of Wales and prince regent.
Seen in that way, the present queen’s younger sister Margaret Rose, born in August 1930 at Glamis Castle, her mother’s ancestral home in Scotland, was continuing something of a family tradition. The difference in character between the two sisters was apparent from an early age: Elizabeth was serious and conscientious – Margaret, four years her junior, was naughtier and an attention-seeker. Their father George VI neatly summed up the contrast between his two daughters: the first was his pride and the second his joy.2
As a beautiful young woman with an eighteen-inch waist and vivid eyes, Margaret quickly established herself as a feature of high society in the years immediately after the Second World War, often appearing in the press at balls, parties and nightclubs. She was a gift for the gossip columnists – much as Diana was to be three decades later. Then, when she was just twenty-one, her father the King died. While her elder sister, now queen, moved into Buckingham Palace, Margaret and her mother went to live in Clarence House, where she became surrounded by a group of rich and largely titled young men who became known as the “Margaret Set”.
In those years, Margaret was linked with no fewer than thirty-one eligible young bachelors. Yet the photographers who covered her twenty-first birthday celebrations at Balmoral in August 1951 were disappointed that the only pictures they got of her were while she was out riding with Group Captain Peter Townsend, her father’s equerry, who was seventeen years her senior. Little did they know what was really going on.
Margaret had got to know the dashing former fighter pilot in 1947 during a visit with her parents and sisters to southern Africa on which Townsend had been her chaperone. Despite their age difference their friendship turned to romance. Then in 1953 Townsend, who after the King’s death had become comptroller of the Queen Mother’s household, proposed marriage. Margaret accepted. Townsend was a war hero, and his exploits, which included a prominent role in the Battle of Britain, made him look like suitable partner. Yet there was also one, apparently insurmountable problem: he was divorced with two small children.
Memories of the abdication crisis of 1936 were still fresh, and Queen Elizabeth’s coronation was set for 2nd June, after which she planned to set off on a six-month tour of the Commonwealth. The establishment lined up against Margaret, while the Queen, not wanting to stand in the way of her younger sister’s happiness, asked her to wait a year. In the meantime Townsend was transferred from the Queen Mother’s household to the Queen’s own, and then on to Brussels.
As in 1936, public opinion was deeply divided. One newspaper, People, claimed a marriage between Margaret and a divorcee such as Townsend would be “unthinkable” and “fly in the face of Royal and Christian tradition”.3 Others were less judgemental, not least because there was considerably less at stake than there had been seventeen years earlier. Margaret, unlike her uncle, was not the monarch, and now that her elder sister had two children, Charles and Anne, she was never likely to become queen.
Two years later, Townsend returned from exile. The Princess was now twenty-five and so no longer bound by the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which previously obliged her to seek her sister’s permission before marrying. Yet the conventions of the state and the Church of England still placed obstacles in her path. In October 1955 Margaret finally made her choice: in a statement she announced she was choosing her royal role over Townsend. “I have been aware that, subject to my renouncing
my rights of succession, it might have been possible for me to contract a civil marriage,” she said. “But mindful of the Church’s teachings that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before others.”
It is impossible to do anything more than speculate whether such a union would ultimately have succeeded. What is not in doubt, however, is that it marked Margaret’s life for good. In the years that followed, she had her share of affairs; then in February 1960 she got engaged to Antony Armstrong-Jones, a fashionable young photographer who was part of the bohemian crowd with whom she mixed. The pair had met regularly at his tiny flat in Rotherhithe, south-east London, for intimate dinners, but the press, who were following the Princess’s private life, were taken completely by surprise. Margaret had apparently accepted his proposal after learning from Townsend that he intended to marry Marie-Luce Jamagne, a Belgian heiress half his age who bore “more than a passing resemblance to the Princess”.4
Margaret’s wedding, held that May in Westminster Abbey, was the first British royal wedding to be broadcast on television, attracting as many as 300 million viewers across the world.5 Margaret dazzled in her dress designed by Norman Hartnell. The couple honeymooned in appropriately grand style: setting off on a six-week cruise of the Caribbean aboard the royal yacht Britannia. As a wedding present Colin Tennant, the 3rd Baron Glenconner, gave Margaret a plot of land on his private Caribbean island, Mustique, where she was later to spend a considerable amount of time. This was the swinging Sixties, when the stuffy conformism of an earlier age was replaced by a more liberal spirit, and London, home of the Beatles, Mary Quant and the Mini, seemed the centre of the world. Margaret and Armstrong-Jones, ennobled as the Earl of Snowdon, played their part in this new world perfectly, becoming prominent members of the party scene. They also had two children: David, Viscount Linley, in 1961 and Lady Sarah in 1964.
But despite the passion they felt for each other, cracks soon became apparent in their marriage, especially after Snowdon began to disappear for long foreign assignments after being taken on as a photographer for the Sunday Times magazine. It was while he was away on such a trip, to India, that Margaret embarked on what was reportedly her first extramarital affair, with her daughter’s godfather Anthony Barton, a Bordeaux wine producer. In the years that followed, Margaret was associated – rightly or wrongly – with yet more well-known names, including the actor David Niven. More fanciful were suggestions (unproven) of flings with Mick Jagger, the actor Peter Sellers and Keith Miller, an Australian cricketer. John Bindon, a cockney actor who had spent time in prison, sold a story to the Daily Mirror boasting of a close relationship with Margaret. While the veracity of his claim was debatable, it further damaged her reputation.6
This was nothing compared to what was to happen next. In September 1973 Colin Tennant hosted a house party in Scotland at which Margaret met a young man named Roddy Llewellyn, whose father Harry was an Olympic showjumper. At just twenty-five, he was seventeen years younger than Margaret. In the months that followed, Llewellyn became a frequent visitor to Les Jolies Eaux, the holiday home the Princess had built for herself on Mustique – which, according to a television documentary aired after her death, became the centre of wild parties and drug-taking. In February 1976 a picture of the couple in bathing costumes on the island was published on the front page of News of the World. Margaret, by then forty-five, was portrayed as the predatory older woman and Llewellyn as her toy-boy lover. The following month the Snowdons publicly acknowledged that their marriage was over.
The contrast with the staid but thoroughly commendable home life of Margaret’s older sister could not have been greater. Willie Hamilton, a Labour MP and one of Britain’s few out-and-out republicans, described the Princess as “a monstrous charge on the public purse”. The last vestiges of sympathy that Margaret had enjoyed for putting royal duty above her relationship with Townsend faded, and there were calls to end her entitlement to payments from the Civil List.
In July 1978 her divorce was finalized. It was the first divorce of a senior member of the British royal family since Henry VIII – but not, as we have already seen, the last. Indeed, it could be argued that by breaking up with Snowdon Margaret paved the way for the divorces more than a decade later of her nephews Charles and Andrew and niece Anne.
While Snowdon married his assistant Lucy Lindsay-Hogg just five months later, Margaret remained single. She and Llewellyn, who went on to become a successful landscape gardener and designer, remained close for several years, and stayed as friends for the rest of her life. When he told her he was to marry Tatiana Soskin, an old friend, she approved, even hosting a luncheon party for them on the announcement of their engagement.
Margaret, however, was beginning to suffer from increasingly ill health. In January 1985 she had part of her left lung removed and, starting in 1998, she suffered a series of strokes, which ultimately brought her to her death four years later. She was seventy-one. In accordance with her wishes, the ceremony was a private one for family and friends; among the mourners was her mother, who died six weeks later. Although Margaret carried out her share of royal duties, it is difficult to avoid the impression of a wasted life. As the writer Gore Vidal, an acquaintance, once wrote: “She was far too intelligent for her station in life”.
While Margaret gave in and chose duty over love when it came to Townsend, several of her Continental counterparts in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s chose instead to follow their hearts. Changing social attitudes meant they were increasingly willing to challenge the rules – especially when it came to marriage – even if it meant losing their privileges and place in the line of succession.
As was seen earlier, in Sweden two of the children and the sole nephew of King Gustaf VI Adolf, who reigned from 1950 until 1973, had to give up their places in the succession after they chose brides deemed unsuitable. In Norway King Harald’s two sisters also attracted criticism by marrying commoners. Purely in dramatic terms, however, none of these cases could compare with the war of words that erupted in Netherlands in the 1960s over the marriage of Princess Irene, the younger sister of Queen Beatrix, the current Dutch Queen.
While studying Spanish in Madrid in the early 1960s, Irene, then in her twenties, fell in love with Carlos Hugo of Bourbon-Parma, the eldest son of Xavier, Duke of Parma, the Carlist pretender to the throne of Spain. The union was problematic on various levels: not only was Carlos Hugo a Roman Catholic, he was Spanish, a representative of Holland’s old enemy, and also close to General Franco, who was not remembered fondly by the Dutch for the support he had given Hitler.
Irene’s handling of the difficult situation in which she found herself was anything but delicate: in the summer of 1963 she secretly converted to Catholicism. The first the Dutch public – or even her own family – knew about it was when a photograph appeared on the front page of an Amsterdam newspaper showing the Princess kneeling at a Mass in the Roman Catholic Church of Los Jerónimos in Madrid, provoking outrage among Protestants and a constitutional crisis back home.
What followed bordered on farce. Desperate to stop a marriage that would have been a political disaster, Irene’s mother Queen Juliana sent a member of her staff to Madrid to persuade the Princess to think again. It seemed to work, and the Queen went on Dutch radio to announce that her daughter had agreed to cancel her engagement and was returning home. When the plane that was meant to be carrying the Princess arrived at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, however, she was not on board, and Queen Juliana and her husband, Prince Bernhard, were supplied with a Dutch military plane to go to Spain to retrieve their daughter. The government was losing patience, however, and threatened to resign en masse if Juliana dared set foot on the soil of the old enemy – something no monarch from the House of Orange had done before. The royal trip was cancelled.
Princess Irene finally flew home early the next year, accompanied by Carlos Hugo, and went into an immediate meeting with
the Queen, prime minister Victor Marijnen and three top cabinet ministers. Irene insisted on pressing ahead with the marriage, even pouring further salt into the wound when she and her fiancé had an audience with Pope Paul VI and attended a Carlist rally in Spain. That April the couple married in the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. No member of the Dutch Royal family or any Dutch diplomatic representative were present.
The Queen and Prince Bernhard watched the ceremony on television, until a power cut prevented them from seeing the exchange of vows. Irene, second in line to the throne, was stripped of her right to succession, because she had failed to obtain the approval of the States-General, the Norwegian parliament, and agreed to live outside the Netherlands. She continued to cause embarrassment for the royal family by becoming active in her husband’s political cause, but over time they drifted away from right-wing ideology and became part of the international jet set.
The couple had four children, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1981. Irene later returned to the Netherlands, and in 1995 published her book Dialoog met de natuur (Dialogue with Nature). In it she outlined her philosophy that human beings are alienated from the natural world; the Dutch media were more interested in passages that recounted conversations the Princess claimed to have had with trees and dolphins – not with angels, like Märtha Louise of Norway.
Irene’s younger sister Marijke, who from 1963 had decided to be known by her second name Christina, also caused controversy with her marriage – to Jorge Pérez y Guillermo, a Cuban refugee and social worker whom she met while teaching at a Montessori school in New York. They married in 1975, but only after the Princess converted to Catholicism and renounced her – and her children’s – right to the Dutch throne. They too divorced, in 1996.
The Great Survivors Page 32
