‌Chapter 1

‌Who’s Who

Queen Elizabeth II is the starting point for any discussion of Western monarchy – and not only because she is Europe’s longest-serving monarch and in June 2012, aged eighty-six, celebrates sixty years on the throne. She heads a royal ‌house – the House of Windsor1 – which, thanks to a combination of its history, influence and sheer glamour, is unmatched in the world, and her remit extends across the widest geographical area. Unlike Victoria, she cannot refer to herself as Empress of India, but besides the United Kingdom she is queen of a further fifteen nations, including Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and head of the fifty-four-member Commonwealth, the modern-day successor to the British Empire.

But while Britain’s monarchy is the most influential in Europe, it is not the oldest. That distinction is held by its Danish counterpart. Margrethe II, who became queen on the death of her father Frederik IX in January 1972, can trace her lineage back more than a thousand years to the Viking kings Gorm the Old and Harald Bluetooth. Under its hero kings, Canute the Great and the Valdemars, Denmark conquered not just England but also much of what are now the Baltic states in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Margrethe I, who married King Haakon VI of Norway at the age of ten, ended up ruling not just Denmark and Norway but Sweden too, ushering in a union of the three Scandinavian kingdoms that was to last from the late fourteenth until the early sixteenth century.

Denmark was ruled from the middle of the fifteenth century by the Oldenburg branch of the family, and then from 1863 by Christian IX, from the junior Glücksborgs, who had been named heir presumptive in 1847 at the age of twenty-nine with the blessing of Europe’s great powers. Christian’s claim to the throne had been strengthened by his marriage to Princess Louise of Hesse-Kassel, a niece of Christian VIII, the previous monarch but one, after Queen Victoria rejected him. By royal standards, the Danes were neither wealthy nor grand: in comparison with some of their dysfunctional European counterparts, however, they seemed remarkably like a normal family.

The country that Christian IX reigned over for most of the second half of the nineteenth century had only a fraction of Britain’s economic or political influence, but he and his German wife, Louise of Hesse-Kassel, were more than a match for Victoria and Albert when it came to finding royal marriage partners for their six children.

As well as bringing together the Danish and British royal families by marrying his eldest daughter, Alexandra, to Victoria’s heir, Edward VII, Christian set up his own first son and heir, the future Frederik VIII, with Louise, the daughter of the king of Sweden and Norway. Of his other children, one became tsarina of Russia, one the king of Greece, and another married the ex-crown prince of Hanover. One of Christian’s grandsons, Prince Carl, was later to ascend the Norwegian throne as King Haakon VII. The royal families of Belgium and Luxembourg can also trace their lineage back to the King, who became known as the “father-in-law” of Europe.

Christian used to invite his children and their own families back every summer from their adoptive homelands to the Fredensborg Palace, a baroque royal country seat on the island of Zealand. Leaving the cares of state behind them, they would eat, drink, relax – and often play practical tricks on one another. Those present would scratch their names and other messages on the glass window panes – starting a tradition of royal graffiti that has endured until today.

The former King Konstantinos II of Greece tells the story – perhaps apocryphal – of how Christian, who was his great-great-grandfather, was out walking with his family one day in a park near the palace when they came across an elderly man who was lost and asked for directions. Christian told him to follow them. “He noticed this very happy family joking and laughing, and when they came out of the park he thanked them and asked whom he had had the pleasure of talking to,” Konstantinos recalls. Christian told him that he was the king of Denmark and proceeded to list his companions, who were members not just of the Danish royal family, but of those of Britain, Greece and Russia. “And the man was very happy,” continues Konstantinos, “and he took his hat off and he said, ‘My name’s ‌Jesus Christ,’ and walked off.”2

Margrethe II, Christian’s great-great-granddaughter, was born on 16th April 1940, a week after the Nazis invaded Denmark, providing a substantial morale boost both to the royal family, who had chosen to remain in Copenhagen and sit out the occupation, and to the country as a whole. Her grandfather, Christian X, almost sixty-nine on the outbreak of war, became a highly visible symbol of “mental resistance” as he rode alone through the streets of the city on his horse. When asked by senior Nazis why he shunned a bodyguard, he reportedly replied: “The people of Denmark are my bodyguard.”

The eldest of three daughters, Margrethe owes her position to a change in the rules of succession, implemented when she was a child, that removed the bar on women sitting on the Danish throne. As queen, she has proved a firm and popular monarch; she is also an accomplished artist. More controversial has been the role of her husband, Prince Henrik, a former French diplomat, born Count Henri de Laborde de Monpezat. Notorious like Britain’s Prince Philip for his gaffes, Henrik has appeared to struggle – on occasions openly – with the role of consort. In 2002, apparently angry at being relegated to third place in the pecking order behind his son, he went off in a huff to the couple’s Château de Caïx in Cahors in southern France.

Next in line to the throne is Crown Prince Frederik, who, after providing plenty of fodder for the tabloids as a young man, in May 2004, at the age of thirty-five, married Mary Donaldson, a former estate agent from Tasmania whom he met in a bar during the Sydney Olympics. The union has been widely seen as a success, but the couple have faced media criticism of their lavish lifestyle. The Crown Princess was dubbed a “Nordic Imelda Marcos” in 2006 after an annual report into the finances of the Danish royals showed she and her husband were splurging the equivalent of almost £2,000 a day on clothes, shoes and furniture.

Several months after Frederik’s wedding, it was announced that his younger brother Joachim was divorcing Princess Alexandra, his Hong Kong-born wife, after nine years – the first Danish royal divorce in more than one and a half centuries. The palace was applauded for the openness with which it handled the breakup, and both have since remarried.

Most countries in Europe – and indeed the world – have made the transition over the past few centuries from monarchy to republic. The Dutch are unique in having moved in the opposite direction. It was only in the nineteenth century that the country became a monarchy under King Willem I. But his dynasty of Orange-Nassau, whose current head is Queen Beatrix, has exerted influence over the lands that now constitute the Netherlands since they moved there from Germany in 1400.

Until the sixteenth century, this region was ruled by Spain, along with most of present-day Belgium, Luxembourg and some parts of France and Germany. The predominantly Protestant Dutch were pressing to free themselves from their Catholic Spanish overlords, however, and in 1581 the States-General of the Dutch provinces passed an Act of Abjuration declaring that they no longer recognized King Felipe II of Spain as their king. The rebellion was led by Willem, Prince of Orange, and although he was assassinated in 1584 his fellow countrymen fought on in what became known as the Eighty Years’ War, eventually defeating the Spanish in 1648.

Under the idiosyncratic system the Dutch devised to rule themselves, their country was divided into provinces, each led by a stadtholder, many of whom were chosen from the House of Orange. Formally, the state remained a confederated republic rather than a monarchy, even when it was decided in 1747 to make Willem IV, Prince of Orange, who was already stadtholder of Friesland and Groningen, into the stadtholder of all the other provinces too. Willem was the first man to have such a position and was given the title of Stadhouder-Generaal, which was made hereditary, turning him into a king in all but name.

The arrival of French Revolutionary forces in 1795 and the creation of the Batavian Republic was bad news for his son and successor Willem V, who fled to Britain and died in exile in Prussia in April 1806 – just two months before Napoleon made his own younger brother, Louis, King Lodewijk I. He reigned for just four years before Napoleon decided to incorporate his kingdom into France. Then, in 1813, the French were swept out, and Willem’s son, also Willem, returned, proclaiming himself sovereign prince of the United Netherlands. On 16th March 1815, Willem became king of the Netherlands (and also grand duke of Luxembourg).

Queen Beatrix, his great-great-great-granddaughter, who has reigned since 1980, is the third in a succession of female monarchs. Initially, only men were allowed on the throne, but the rules were changed after the Netherlands faced a potential succession crisis in the late nineteenth century.

Beatrix’s grandmother, Wilhelmina, who reigned for fifty-eight years, longer than any other Dutch monarch, came into her own during the Second World War when she fled to London and, thanks to her regular radio broadcasts to her subjects, became a symbol of resistance to Nazi rule of her homeland; Winston Churchill famously described her as the “only real man in the Dutch government in exile”. The reign of her daughter, Juliana, was more controversial, however, and marred by controversy during the 1950s over her association with Greet Hofmans, a faith healer said to have exercised a Rasputin-like influence over her, and then, two decades later, by revelations that her German-born husband, Prince Bernhard, accepted more than one million dollars in bribes from the Lockheed Corporation, an American aerospace company. By contrast, Beatrix, who will eventually be succeeded by her son, Willem-Alexander, has rarely put a foot wrong in more than three decades on the throne.

Sweden has been a monarchy for almost as long as Denmark, and has a warlike past that seems out of place for a nation better known today for its neutrality, generous welfare state and flat-pack furniture. During the Middle Ages Swedish warriors terrorized Russia. Then in 1630 the greatest of the country’s kings, Gustaf II Adolf, known as “the Lion of the North”, invaded Germany too.

The current royal family, the Bernadottes, can trace their lineage back to the early nineteenth century and an adventurous Frenchman named Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte. The son of a petit bourgeois from Pau in the south-west of the country, Bernadotte rose to become one of Napoleon’s marshals, his position further strengthened by the fact he was married to Désirée, Joseph Bonaparte’s sister-in-law.

During his time as governor of the captured German city of Hanover, Bernadotte had become friendly with some influential Swedish officers taken prisoner during Napoleon’s northern campaign. It was to prove a life-changing friendship: these were turbulent times in Sweden and in Europe, and the Swedes needed a strong ruler. King Carl XIII, who had been installed after a coup in 1809, the previous year, was elderly and decrepit and without surviving children – which meant an heir had to be found. The first choice was Carl August of Augustenburg, a minor Danish royal, but a few months after he arrived in Stockholm, he fell off his horse and ‌died, apparently of a stroke.3 Bernadotte, with his military expertise, seemed like a good replacement.

Napoleon was initially sceptical when Bernadotte went through the motions of obtaining his approval before accepting the throne, but the Emperor gave his blessing a few months later, and Bernadotte was adopted as Prince Carl Johan. Although initially only heir apparent rather than king, he swiftly consolidated his position, defeating Napoleon’s forces with an army largely made up of German, Austrian and Russians at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, before then taking on Denmark and forcing it to cede Norway to Sweden. When the old King died in February 1818, Bernadotte succeeded him, ruling for twenty-four years as Carl XIV Johan.

The former revolutionary soon turned into an authoritarian ruler in a more traditional mould. Queen Désirée – or Desideria as she became known to the Swedes – took a hearty dislike to her husband’s adoptive country, especially its bleak weather – and was not that fond of her husband either. As a result she spent more than a decade back in Paris before eventually returning north in 1823; it was not until six years later that she was crowned queen of Sweden (she was never crowned queen of Norway). Swedish cuisine proved a particular disappointment to the royal couple. When nothing that their chefs prepared took their fancy, the King was served a lightly boiled egg – it has been tradition ever since in the palace to place a golden egg cup at the King’s place.

Bernadotte once famously described himself to the Tsar as “man of the north”, but appears to have suffered the occasional doubt that he had done the right thing. “Of me, you may say that I, who was once a marshal of France, am now only king of Sweden,” he declared on one occasion. His subjects do not seem to have shared such doubts. Even though their king never bothered to learn either Swedish or Norwegian, the Bernadotte dynasty became firmly established.

The current monarch, Carl XVI Gustaf, is the great-great-great-great-grandson of the founder of the dynasty and the seventh Bernadotte king. He came to the throne in September 1973, at the age of just twenty-seven, on the death of his grandfather, Gustaf VI Adolf, who, confirming the Bernadottes’ reputation for longevity, lived to see his ninetieth birthday. Carl XVI Gustaf never knew his father, Prince Gustaf Adolf, who was killed in a plane crash before his son’s first birthday. Although a tragedy for the royal family – and the nation – Gustaf Adolf’s death meant that Sweden, which was neutral during the Second World War, was spared the embarrassment of having as its king a man who during the 1930s had openly expressed sympathy towards Hitler’s Reich.

Carl XVI Gustaf’s designated successor is Crown Princess Victoria – who will become Sweden’s first queen regnant in modern times. At her side will be Daniel Westling, her former fitness trainer, whom she married in June 2010 after a courtship that lasted eight years, and who thereafter was styled Prince Daniel, Duke of Västergötland. Queen Victoria’s role will be a limited one, however: a constitutional reform that came into force in 1975 after at least two decades of discussion stripped the Swedish monarchy of all but ceremonial and representative duties. Some royalists were appalled; for others this was the perfect compromise and a model other European nations should adopt: a way of keeping all the popular trappings of the institution while removing the last vestige of the hereditary principle from the workings of modern democracy.

The Belgian royal house was also founded by an outsider, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who, like Bernadotte, took advantage of the frequent redrawing of the map of Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century to secure himself a throne. The current monarch, Albert II, who acceded in 1993, is the country’s sixth king and the great-great-grandson of the founder of the dynasty.

The Saxe-Coburgs’ realm was a tiny collection of unconnected territories spanning just over four hundred square miles, split between modern-day Bavaria and Thuringia, which was home to a mere fifty thousand people. The family were not just political minnows, they were also virtually bankrupt – and realized that salvation for their dynasty lay in finding good marital partners for their children.

Leopold, born in 1790 as the penultimate of nine children, was an adventurous young man who did his family proud. He became a lieutenant general in the imperial Russian army and won the greatest prize in Europe: Princess Charlotte, the daughter of the future King George IV of the United Kingdom. Charlotte had it all: youth, beauty and above all the prospect of becoming head of one of Europe’s grandest monarchies. When they married in May 1816, the couple even seemed in love – a rarity for nineteenth-century royal unions.

Yet Leopold’s hopes of becoming consort were dashed just eighteen months later when Charlotte died in childbirth – a tragedy that prompted an outpouring of public grief similar to the hysteria that followed the death of Princess Diana almost two centuries later. “It was really as though every household throughout Great Britain has lost a favourite child,” Lord Brougham, the Lord Chancellor, wrote in his memoirs.

Leopold was destined to be more than just a footnote in history – and time was on his side. Although already a widower, he had not yet reached his thirtieth birthday and had a generous pension of £50,000 voted by the British parliament. After being offered – and declining – the Greek throne, he agreed in 1831 to become the first king of the Belgians, after the southern part of the Netherlands broke away to form an independent if fragile nation. Along with his new realm, he acquired an accent on the “e” in his name.

Léopold also had a passion for matchmaking. Thus it was with his encouragement that his nephew, the young Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, wooed his niece, the then Princess Victoria, paving the way for one of the great royal love stories of all time. Léopold also succeeded in placing other members of his family in other royal houses. Climb your way up through the tangled branches of the family trees of most of Europe’s royal families – both of those still on the throne and those that are defunct – and you will get back to the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, memorably described later in the nineteenth century by Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, as the “stud farm of Europe”.

Many contemporary observers – among them Léopold himself – were sceptical about the prospects of Belgium’s survival. The French diplomat Talleyrand described the new country as “an artificial construction” in which the Dutch-speaking Flemings in the north would struggle to exist alongside the French-speaking Walloons in the south. The leading figures of mid-nineteenth-century diplomacy such as Metternich, Napoleon III and Bismarck did not expect it to last more than a generation or so.

They were to be proved wrong, in considerable part thanks to the skills of its first king. During his thirty-four years ‌as king of the Belgians,4 Léopold I oversaw the transformation of Belgium into an industrial powerhouse. More than 180 years later, his adoptive homeland continues to exist, even though relations between its two main linguistic communities have lurched from crisis to crisis in recent years, provoking the periodic question: “Will Belgium survive?” The dynasty that Léopold founded is still at its head – although since 1920 its members have been known simply as de Belgique (or van België or von Belgien) rather than of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

Belgium has hitherto had only male monarchs. Léopold II, who succeeded to the throne in 1865 on the death of his father, was a monster best known for his acquisition of the Congo, which he ran with enormous brutality as a private fiefdom until his own death in 1909, acquiring huge riches in the process. He was also deeply disliked at home for much of his reign. His nephew, who succeeded him as Albert I, was a more popular figure, hailed across the world for spearheading his country’s resistance to the Germans during the First World War – but died in a climbing accident in the Ardennes aged just fifty-eight and was succeeded by his son, Léopold III.

Like Edward VIII, Léopold cut a glamorous, youthful figure, although unlike his British counterpart he had the ideal consort: Astrid, the niece of King Gustaf V of Sweden. Their marriage in November 1926 had been an arranged one, but quickly turned into a love match that produced first a daughter, Joséphine Charlotte, and then two sons, Baudouin and Albert. His was an unhappy reign, however: tragedy struck on 29th August 1935, when Astrid was killed in a car accident by Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. The car was driven by the King, who escaped with minor injuries. The loss of the beautiful young Queen provoked an anguished reaction that was to be echoed decades later by the deaths of first Princess Grace of Monaco and then Princess Diana.

Léopold chose to stay with his people when Belgium was occupied during the Second World War but, although he lobbied behind the scenes on behalf of his fellow countrymen, he was seen as a defeatist who was persuaded that the Germans would win the war and that resistance was futile. His reputation was further damaged by his secret marriage on 6th December 1941 to Mary Lilian Baels, the young, British-born daughter of a prosperous Belgian fish salesman turned government minister, after she became pregnant with his child.

Imprisoned by the Nazis in Austria in the latter months of the war, Léopold was freed by the Americans but delayed returning home. Instead he remained in exile, settling in Switzerland, while his younger brother, Charles, acted as regent. Léopold’s fate was sealed in March 1950, when Belgians were asked to vote in a referendum whether they wanted him to return. Overall, he won the backing of fifty-seven per cent, but the country was deeply divided – while seventy-two per cent of the largely Christian Democrat Flemings supported him, fifty-eight per cent of the predominantly Socialist-voting Walloons wanted him to go. When strikes and protests turned violent, raising fears of civil war, Léopold stepped down in July 1951 in favour of his twenty-seven-year-old son, Baudouin.

The Belgian monarchy’s battered reputation was restored in the decades that followed. However, Baudouin and his Spanish-born queen, Fabiola, both devout Catholics, failed in their prime responsibility of producing an heir. And so, when Baudouin died unexpectedly in 1993, aged sixty-two, he was succeeded by his brother Albert, four years his junior. Many had expected the throne to pass straight to Albert’s son, Philippe, whom Baudouin had been grooming for many years as his successor. It was widely felt, however, that the young prince was not yet ready for the responsibility.

More then a decade and a half later, Philippe, known as the Duke of Brabant, the traditional title of the heir to the Belgian throne, is married with four children, and seems ready to assume the role. He and his younger brother Laurent find themselves in an uncomfortable position, however, and increasingly come under attack from a resurgent Flemish nationalism that sees the Belgian monarchy as the only glue binding the country together – and, for that reason, would like to see it disappear.

The Norwegian monarchy can trace its origins back more than a thousand years to Harald Fairhair, who united the country’s various petty kingships into a single realm in about 885. Its current dynasty dates only to 1905, when Norway became a fully fledged independent nation after centuries of domination, first by the Danes and then, from 1814, as junior partner in an alliance with Sweden forced upon it by Bernadotte.

It was by no means a foregone conclusion that the new Norway would remain a monarchy. An overwhelming majority of the Storting, the country’s parliament, were republicans, but at a time when most European nations were monarchies, the Norwegians reckoned their chances of international recognition and long-term survival would be enhanced by having a king of their own. Their choice fell on Prince Carl, the second son of Frederik, the Crown Prince of Denmark. Carl ticked all the boxes: he was a Scandinavian, in his early thirties and the father of a son still young enough to be brought up as a Norwegian. Even more importantly his wife, Maud, was the daughter of King Edward VII, one of the most influential monarchs in Europe. The British King was equally keen on having his son-in-law on the throne, and wrote to Carl urging him to accept the offer.

Carl was more cautious than either Léopold or Bernadotte, however. His family was also unwilling to damage relations with their Swedish opposite numbers, who were unhappy about the loss of Norway. Setting out to establish his legitimacy in the eyes of his new subjects, Carl insisted on a referendum. An overwhelming majority of Norwegians voted for their country to become a monarchy. Carl was formally elected to the throne on 18th November 1905, aged thirty-three, after getting the go-ahead from his grandfather, King Christian IX – endearing himself to his new subjects by styling himself Haakon VII, an old Norse name used by past kings of Norway.

The new king’s court was as much British as Scandinavian, thanks to the influence of Maud, who brought with her as her comptroller and private secretary Henry Knollys, whose elder brother, Francis (and later Viscount) Knollys, fulfilled the same role for her father. Initially, the monarchy also had something of a temporary feel; Haakon knew he owed his throne largely to foreign-policy considerations; the reverberations that followed the Russian Revolution added to the feeling of insecurity. A woman who went to high school with Haakon’s son, Prince Olav, in 1920 recalled years later that he had bet her ten kroner (about two US dollars at the time) that he would never become king.

Olav turned out to have been too pessimistic – even if he had to wait until 1957 to succeed his father, by which time he was himself fifty-four. The dynasty had become extremely popular in the intervening years, emerging strengthened from the Second World War, during which Haakon had refused to surrender to the Nazis. Instead, together with his son, the King escaped in spectacular fashion to Britain, from where he headed the Norwegian resistance.

The current King, Harald V, who succeeded Olav in 1991, has continued to enjoy high approval ratings. The royal family nevertheless found itself under fire towards the end of the last decade of the twentieth century over the huge amounts of money spent on renovating the royal palace in Oslo, which had been badly in need of modernization. Another cause of controversy was Crown Prince Haakon’s relationship with Mette-Marit Tjessem Høiby, a single mother with a son by a man with a conviction for drug-dealing, whom the Crown Prince had met at a music festival.

After defusing the crisis through deft media management, the couple married in August 2001 and have since had two children. While Mette-Marit has flourished in her new role as Crown Princess, Haakon’s elder sister, Märtha Louise, has courted controversy in recent years both because of her choice of partner, Ari Behn, a flamboyant writer and film-maker, and as a result of her own commercial activities, centred on claims she can help people to talk to their “inner angels” – and even the dead.

Juan Carlos, the Spanish king, is a member of the Borbón dynasty who have ruled the country on and off since 1700, when Felipe de Borbón, the Duke of Anjou, succeeded his great-uncle Carlos II, who was the last of the Spanish Habsburgs. Yet when Juan Carlos was born to his parents in exile in Rome on 5th January 1938 at the height of the Spanish Civil War, his chances of ever becoming king of his homeland seemed slim.

Monarchy in Spain has had a chequered history, and the royalists have been bitterly divided among themselves since the 1830s when the ailing King Fernando VII set aside the country’s Salic laws of succession to name his daughter Isabel as heir in place of his own younger brother, the Infante Carlos. She came to the throne as Isabel II on her father’s death the following year, but her reign was marred by a series of wars waged by supporters of Carlos, who over the following century became a rallying point for the Catholic right.

Isabel, whose scandalous private life became the talk of Europe, responded by becoming more authoritarian herself, which alienated her more liberal supporters. She fled to France in 1868, and after abdicating two years later was replaced briefly by Amadeo, the duke of Aosta, nicknamed King Macaroni because of the Italian accent with which he spoke Spanish, and then, in February 1873, by the country’s short-lived First Republic.

A coup d’état by the military the following year turned out the parliament and put Isabel’s seventeen-year-old son on the throne as King Alfonso XII. He died of tuberculosis just short of his twenty-eighth birthday, however, and was succeeded by his own son, Alfonso XIII, born six months after his father’s death. Despite reigning (initially with his mother as regent) for almost half a century, Alfonso XIII too was eventually driven from power in 1931 when a republican majority was returned to the Cortes Generales with a programme to abolish the monarchy. The Second Spanish Republic was declared, and the King went into exile – but didn’t abdicate.

General Francisco Franco’s victory in the civil war that followed should have been good news for the Borbóns, but Franco depended for his support on the Falangists, who were avowedly republican, and the Carlists, who, although unable to agree on a candidate of their own, were united in their rejection of all Isabel’s descendants. And in any case, as long as he was alive, Franco was insistent that he – rather than a king – should be the undisputed leader of the nation.

Despite their history, the Borbóns possessed the tenacity typical of exiled royals and did not give up their dream of one day regaining their throne. Alfonso died in 1941, but a few months earlier had abdicated in favour of his second surviving son, Don Juan. The pretender’s relations with Franco were to prove difficult; the Ley de Sucesión passed in 1947 declared Spain a kingdom, but gave Franco the right to name his eventual successor. And the dictator made clear he did not want Juan. The Prince’s son, Juan Carlos, was far more acceptable to him, however, and so, when the boy was just ten, his father, still living in exile, took the difficult decision to send him back to be educated in Spain. The strategy paid off: in 1969 Juan Carlos was named by Franco as his successor. On 22nd November 1975, two days after the dictator’s death, he became king.

Thankfully for Spain – and for Europe – Franco’s trust in Juan Carlos as the best man to continue his authoritarian rule after his death turned out to have been completely misplaced. After acceding to the throne, the King horrified Franco’s supporters by instituting liberalizing reforms, appointing Adolfo Suárez, a moderate nationalist, to oversee the transition to democracy and accepting the constitution of 1978 that turned him into a constitutional monarch. Any last doubts about Juan Carlos’s commitment to democracy were dispelled in February 1981 when he saw down an attempted military coup. In the years since he has proved a model modern king.

Juan Carlos is married to Sofía, daughter of Pavlos, the penultimate king of Greece, and great-great-granddaughter of Christian IX of Denmark. The youngest of their three children, Felipe, prince of Asturias, is next in line to the throne. Married to Letizia, a former television journalist who was already briefly married before, he has two daughters, Leonor and Sofía.

Over the centuries, Luxembourg, which lies on the border between Germanic and Romance Europe, has been variously occupied by the Bourbons, Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns and the French. It became a grand duchy in a personal union with the Netherlands under the terms of the Congress of Vienna of 1815, but then lost more than half its territory in 1839 to recently independent Belgium.

The country’s union with the Netherlands was broken in 1890 with the death of King Willem III. While the Dutch throne passed to his daughter Wilhelmina, Luxembourg was governed by semi-Salic law (which allowed inheritance by females or through the female line only upon extinction of male members of the dynasty) under a Nassau family pact dating back to 1783. This meant Willem was succeeded there by Adolphe of Nassau-Weilburg, who had been duke of Nassau but had been left without a job after Prussia annexed his duchy in 1866.

Luxembourg is home to just under half a million people, living in an area of just over 1,600 square miles. The current grand duke, Henri, who was born in 1955, came to the throne in October 2000, when his father Jean abdicated in his favour.

Moving southwards, Liechtenstein, a micro-state of just sixty or so square miles sandwiched between Switzerland and Austria, has been an independent entity since 1719, when Karl VI, the Holy Roman Emperor, merged the territories of Vaduz, the future capital, and Schellenberg, both of which were owned by the Liechtenstein family, turning them into a Fürstentum (principality). The move was essentially inspired by expediency: the territory was given its new status so Prince Anton Florian of Liechtenstein would be entitled to a seat in the Reichstag.

The Prince felt no need actually to live in his principality, though; indeed it was not until 1818 that a member of the house of Liechtenstein, the future Prince Aloys II, bothered even to set foot in the realm that bore the family name. In the century that followed, the royal family preferred to live in cosmopolitan Vienna rather than tiny Vaduz, although that changed when the Nazis annexed Austria in the Anschluss of 1938.

The current prince, Hans-Adam II, who was born in 1945 in Zurich, has had a prickly relationship with the country’s politicians since coming to power in November 1989. His resolve was undoubtedly strengthened by a personal fortune estimated at five billion dollars, derived largely from his stake in the LGT Bank – which in 2008 found itself at the centre of controversy after the German intelligence services bought a CD with details of those of its nationals who had made use of accounts at the bank to avoid paying taxes at home. A long-running trial of strength between the Prince and the Landtag came to a head in 2003: the Prince won, turning him into Europe’s only absolute monarch. In August 2004, he handed his son, Prince Alois, the power to make day-to-day decisions, but he remains head of state.

Covering a mere three-quarters of a square mile and with a population of just 33,000, the Principality of Monaco is by far the smallest of Europe’s monarchies. Since Prince Rainier married Grace Kelly in April 1956 it has also been one of the most colourful, although her death in a car crash in September 1982 deprived it of much of its glamour.

The ruling House of Grimaldi’s link with the principality dates back to 1297, when Francesco Grimaldi, dressed as a Franciscan monk, led a force of men who captured the Rock of Monaco. Ruled by both France and the Kingdom of Sardinia, the principality had its sovereignty recognized by the French-Monégasque Treaty of 1861 – although this also obliged it to sell the towns of Menton and Roquebrune, which accounted for ninety-five per cent of its territory, to France for four million francs.

When Rainier came to the throne in 1949 on the death of his grandfather Louis II, gambling accounted for all but five per cent of Monaco’s annual revenue. The principality, as the writer William Somerset Maugham put it so memorably, was a “sunny place for shady people”. Rainier put his energies into promoting Monaco instead as a tax haven, commercial centre, real-estate development opportunity and international tourist attraction. He also pushed through the constitution of 1962, which turned his realm from an absolute monarchy into one in which the prince shares power with a national council of eighteen elected members.

Rainier’s son Albert II, who succeeded him on his death in April 2005, has used his position to campaign for the need to protect the marine environment. He has also backed an ambitious plan to expand the principality, Dubai-style, by building an area of about five hectares out into the Mediterranean. The Prince insisted the entire extension should be built on stilts to avoid upsetting marine life, claiming that it will be a “model of sustainability”.