‌Chapter 13

‌Spares and Spouses

Ari Behn, the son-in-law of King Harald V of Norway, is a difficult man to categorize. If you believe some of the accounts in the country’s tabloids and celebrity magazines, he is the enfant terrible of the royal family and a Scandinavian Jack Kerouac: a hard-drinking writer whose ventures into the seedier side of life have turned him into a threat to the monarchy. Oh, and his wife Princess Märtha Louise has been accused of cashing in on her status with various commercial ventures that have included, most recently, a school where people can be taught to get in touch with their “inner angels”.

It is hard to reconcile all this with the man I meet in the lobby bar of the Continental Hotel in the centre of Oslo, a short walk from the Royal Palace. In his late thirties, Behn is wearing a stylish black suit and sports a neatly trimmed beard flecked with grey. He is not drinking bourbon, but rather a glass of white wine, followed by tea. So much for the comparisons with Kerouac or Hunter S. Thompson. Behn is softly spoken and friendly. Unfortunately, Märtha Louise is not with him.

I am pleasantly surprised that Behn has agreed to see me at all after I ring him out of the blue; his relationship with the media is often uncomfortable, largely because of the controversy usually caused by the comments he makes when interviewed. Establishing a role after marrying into any royal family is difficult for anyone, says Behn, but especially so for men, even in twenty-first-century Norway, one of the most progressive countries in Europe.

“If you’re a woman, it’s as if you have been chosen and picked up,” he tells me. “But as a man, you’re the seducer. That’s part of the whole thing, even in Norway now. But like it or not, the people have to deal with it.” His profession further complicates things: “I have to go out there and speak freely. It’s what writers have to do,” he continues. “It’s a balance between being prince consort and a writer. It’s impossible, a challenge that I have to master… I don’t have trouble with people attacking me; the only trouble I have is with not being able to talk back. That’s what really frustrates me.”

Behn first became known in 1999 at the age of twenty-seven, following the publication of his first collection of short stories, Trist som faen (Sad as Hell). Well received by the critics, the book sold more than a hundred thousand copies, a runaway best-seller by Norwegian standards. He followed with a series of short television films that touched on prostitution and cocaine use in Las Vegas.

But then he rather deviated from the script: returning from America to Norway in late 2000, Behn fell in love with Märtha Louise, at the time second in line to the throne after her younger brother, Haakon. They met not in a fashionable bar or club but over tea at Behn’s mother’s house. His mother, Marianne Solberg Behn, had got to know the Princess while they were both studying a course on the Rosen method, a form of alternative medicine based on massage.

Märtha Louise’s relationship with Behn was revealed in March the following year by the newspaper Dagbladet. At the time the Norwegian media was full of revelations about the wild youth of Haakon’s fiancée Mette-Marit, whom the Crown Prince was due to marry that August. As if that weren’t controversial enough, another colourful figure in the form of Behn, described by one commentator as a “bouncer’s nightmare”, was now set to join the Norwegian royal family. After the news broke, Behn left suddenly for a few weeks – to Timbuktu. He and Märtha Louise got engaged in December 2001 and married at Nidaros cathedral in Trondheim in May the following year.

Märtha Louise was born in 1971, the first child of the future King Harald and Queen Sonja. Norwegian law did not allow a woman to become queen regnant, and although the rules were amended in 1990 to give equal rights to men and women, the change – unlike in Sweden – was not made retrospectively. And so it was her younger brother Haakon who was destined to become the next monarch.

As a young woman she had a passion for showjumping – an appropriate hobby for a princess, although eyebrows were raised when Stein-Erik Hagen, one of the richest men in Norway, gifted her two horses. They were raised again when the King was guest of honour at the opening of Hagen’s shopping centre in Latvia.

Märtha Louise’s private life was also beginning to provoke controversy: she reportedly had a series of liaisons with eligible – and not so eligible – men, several of them sports personalities: Britain’s Prince Edward is said to have tentatively attempted a romance with her in 1990. Then in 1994 she was accused of having an affair with Philip Morris, a married English showjumping star almost twice her age. She was named in Morris’s subsequent divorce at the insistence of his wife Irene, who worked as a clerk in an Asda supermarket in Chester, and was spared an appearance in court only after lawyers acting for her father successfully argued she was entitled to diplomatic immunity. A series of disastrous relationships followed, including one with a New Zealand showjumper.

And then along came Behn. Talking to reporters several days before the wedding, the Princess shrugged off suggestions that her choice of partner was denting support for the Norwegian monarchy – reminding them of how many of her compatriots had frowned when her father had himself married a commoner more than thirty years earlier. “We’re keeping a tradition going,” she said.

Before her marriage Märtha Louise took a controversial decision: she would not rely on a state allowance but would instead pay her own way by setting up an entertainment company. The government stopped paying her at the beginning of 2002; her father also ruled that she would lose her title of Royal Highness from the beginning of February. She did, however, retain her place in the succession.

The Princess’s commercial activities initially largely consisted of reciting folk tales and singing with well-known Norwegian choirs. Then in 2004 she published her first book, Hvorfor de kongelige ikke har krone på hodet (Why Kings and Queens Don’t Wear Crowns), a children’s story about the founders of Norway’s current dynasty; it was accompanied by a CD of her reading it aloud. In October that year, she and Behn went to live in New York.

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.

Consolation for Queen Juliana was no doubt provided by her third daughter, Princess Margriet, who in 1967 married Pieter van Vollenhoven, a fellow student at Leiden University, who went on to have a suitably worthy career as a professor of risk management and chairman of a number of transport- and safety-related committees. Four children and more than four decades later, they remained married, with van Vollenhoven turning into a respected figure with quasi-royal status.

The intervening years had led to more liberal attitudes towards who is – and who is not – a suitable marital partner for a prince or princess, but it has not made life easier for “spares” and their spouses – as demonstrated vividly in Britain by the travails of Prince Charles’s three younger siblings. These days, Princess Anne, born in 1950, is frequently described by the media as the most hard-working royal, as a result of the more than five hundred official engagements she carries out each year. Yet in her youth, when she was pursuing an international showjumping career that included an appearance at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, she was renowned for her grumpy outbursts; one of the most famous was at the 1982 Badminton Horse Trials when she shouted “naff off” at photographers trying to take her picture after she fell off her horse at a water jump.

As Anne herself admitted, her temper almost got her into more serious trouble in 1974, when a twenty-year-old man with mental-health problems and armed with a gun tried to kidnap her and hold her ransom for £2 million as she was being driven back to Buckingham Palace after attending a charity event in nearby Pall Mall. Anne, who dived out of the car door, was unhurt, but the kidnapper shot and wounded two police officers, a driver and a journalist who tried to follow them in a taxi. “I nearly lost my temper with him, but I knew that if I did, I should hit him and he would shoot me,” Anne told police officers. Royal security was stepped up considerably thereafter.

While Anne has gradually metamorphosed over the years into a national treasure, her younger brother Andrew, the Duke of York, born in 1960, has seen his personal and professional life come under rather stronger scrutiny. He has struggled to carve out a role for himself since he stepped down from the Royal Navy in 2001 after twenty-two years of service, and has faced criticism for his extravagant lifestyle: in 2007, for instance, he was dogged by accusations over his expenses in his role as ambassador for British Trade International (BTI), which that year came to £436,000. Potentially more damaging have been the business and personal contacts that Andrew has cultivated with senior figures in countries such as Libya, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. Following the emergence of pro-democracy movements in the Arab world and the civil war in Libya, the Prince’s relations with some of the region’s less savoury characters looked rather too friendly – and too personal.

Before all of this, however, Andrew was forced to endure negative newspaper coverage over the break-up of his marriage to Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, whom he wed in July 1986. Although the Duke and Duchess agreed on an amicable separation in March 1992, any hopes of reconciliation were dashed that August when the Daily Mirror published surreptitiously taken photographs of John Bryan, the Duchess’s American financial advisor, in the act of sucking on the toes of a topless Sarah while they were on a Caribbean holiday together. She divorced Andrew in May 1996 but, despite remaining on good terms with her ex-husband as well as sharing custody of their daughters Beatrice and Eugenie, the Duchess was left with large debts: she reportedly owed between £3 and £4.2 million. The revenue-raising activities in the years that followed – including writing children’s books and an attempt to launch a media career in the United States – ended in failure. Her difficulties were compounded in May 2010 by the notorious “Fake Sheik” scandal, in which Sarah was recorded by a tabloid newspaper offering access to Prince Andrew, in his capacity as an official British trade ‌envoy, in return for £500,000.7

Prince Edward, born in 1964, does not have the same wealthy foreign friends as his elder brother, and of Queen Elizabeth’s four children he is the only one not to have divorced. This does not mean, however, that he has been spared criticism. In Edward’s case this focused initially on his wife Sophie Rhys-Jones, who became Countess of Wessex on their marriage in 1999. Suspicions began to grow that Sophie, who had made her career in public relations, was trading on her royal connections in order to win business for her firm, RJH Public Relations, something that was apparently confirmed by another stunt by the News of the World’s “Fake Sheik”, who this time posed as a wealthy Arab with a leisure complex in Dubai, which he ‌wanted Sophie’s company to promote.8 In the days that followed, newspapers were filled with stories of crisis meetings. According to their accounts, the royal family was divided over what to do next: while Edward’s father the Duke of Edinburgh was angry that the press seemed to be dictating the agenda yet again, Prince Charles and his sister Anne argued that their brother and his wife should make a choice between their business activities and their royal status and privileges – which were considerable.

The affair also inevitably focused attention on Edward’s own activities, which had already begun to cause embarrassment. The Prince had resigned his Royal Marines commission in 1987 to pursue a career in the performing arts, eventually setting up his own television production company, Ardent, which as well as making a loss year after year caused controversy by filming at St Andrews University, where Prince William was studying, in defiance of an agreement that the second in line to the throne should be allowed to pursue his studies free of media intrusion. Prince Charles was reported to be “incandescent with rage”, and a few days later the company announced it would stop making films about royalty. In March the following year, Edward and Sophie announced they were permanently stepping down from their business roles. The official reason was to support the Queen during her Golden Jubilee, but given that their decision was a permanent rather than a temporary one, no one was convinced. “Few were surprised when Prince Edward announced that his career in TV was over,” commented the Guardian. “The only mystery was how ‌it had lasted so long.”9

The current generation of Continental “spares” have also run into problems. In the Netherlands, Prince Friso (born Johan Friso in 1968, but the “Johan” was dropped in 2004), the second son of Queen Beatrix, could not have foreseen the trouble that lay ahead when he met a glamorous young woman named Mabel Wisse Smit in 2001 while working at Goldman Sachs in London.

When the couple’s engagement was announced just over two years later, it seemed like a match made in public-relations heaven. Wisse Smit, a former Balkans expert at the United Nations, and long-running head of the Brussels office of financier George Soros’s Open Society Institute, was vetted by the Dutch secret service and approved as a suitable bride. For the Prince the union had the added benefit of quashing persistent rumours about his sexuality – which had become so prevalent that an official announcement was made in 2001 denying he was homosexual.

Before long however it emerged that Mabel had some rather awkward skeletons in her closet. It was bad enough that her previous lovers included Muhamed Sacirbey, the former ambassador of Bosnia-Herzegovina to the United Nations, who was by that time incarcerated in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he was fighting attempts by the Bosnians to extradite him on charges of misappropriating public funds. Even more embarrassing were claims she had also had a relationship with Klaas Bruinsma, one of the most notorious figures in the Dutch mafia.

The Dutch press’s interest was understandable. Bruinsma, born into a wealthy brewing family, had become an infamous underworld boss with links to drug trafficking and a series of murders. One of his victims was found embedded in concrete; his legs and penis had been cut off before he was killed. Bruinsma himself was gunned down in 1991 at the age of thirty-seven after a late-night drinking session at the Amsterdam Hilton ended in an argument.

Wisse Smit had initially told Jan Peter Balkenende, the prime minister, that she had “vaguely” known Bruinsma for a short time in 1989 when she was a student, after meeting him through their shared love of sailing – but had broken off contact with him when she discovered how he earned his money. Bruinsma’s former bodyguard, Charlie da Silva, alleged in an interview with Dutch television however that their relationship went far beyond that – and indeed, that the gangster had been smitten by her, so much so that she was the only woman he had allowed on board his yacht.

The scandal that became known as Mabelgate was underway. And, as the press continued to dig, Prince Friso finally admitted in October 2003 that he and his fiancée had been less than forthcoming about her contacts with the mafia boss. Balkenende, visibly perturbed, went on television to announce that his cabinet would not submit the couple’s marriage to parliament for its approval, a prerequisite for maintaining Friso’s position in the succession to the throne. Mabel, he claimed, had given “false and incomplete information”, adding: “Trust has been violated… there is no remedy for untruths.”

Friso, third in line to the throne, had to choose between his official position and Mabel. He chose Mabel. Their wedding in April 2004 in Delft was described rather cruelly by the Dutch press as a B-rated affair. Although the Queen and other members of the Dutch royal family attended, there were few representatives from other royal houses. In a televised interview shown earlier in the week, the couple admitted making public-relations mistakes.

Until his horrific skiing accident in February 2012, Friso inhabited a curious halfway house, like his aunts Irene and Christina (and two of Margriet’s sons, Pieter-Christiaan and Floris, who both made what were deemed unsuitable marriages in 2005). They and their respective spouses are still entitled to call themselves His (or Her) Royal ‌Highness and Prince or Princess.10 However, although still part of the Koninklijke familie (royal family), they are not considered members of the Koninklijk Huis (royal house). Thus Friso did not appear on formal occasions – on Prinsjesdag, for example, he did not join his mother and two brothers on the balcony of the Noordeinde Palace in The Hague to wave to the crowds below. This does not prevent the Dutch media taking almost as much interest in Friso and his wife as they do in other members of the family – so much so that his Alpine disaster was turned into a national tragedy.

No other European prince or princess has been obliged to renounce his or her rights to the throne, but some have certainly endured problems of their own, including relentlessly hostile press coverage. Prince Laurent, second son of King Albert II of Belgium, has suffered especially badly – even more so than his elder brother Philippe. As a young man he struggled with his studies – or so claimed Rudy Bogaerts, the head of a private school in Uccle, who tutored him for eight years. “In one of the first lessons Laurent asked what a half plus a half was,” Bogaerts said in an interview with the news magazine ‌Humo. “He didn’t know it.”11

The Prince’s passion for cars was also to get him into trouble. The owner of several Ferraris, he was said to be especially fond of racing the TGV train along the stretch of motorway between the Belgian border and Paris. Belgian foreign-ministry officials became used to having to take care of speeding tickets that had been issued in France, elsewhere in Europe and even in America. On one occasion, Laurent was reportedly pulled over by a female state trooper outside Washington. “You can’t do this to me: I’m the prince of Belgium,” he protested. “Yeah,” the policewoman is said to have replied. “And ‌I’m the Queen of Sheba.”12

And then there were the inevitable stories of relationships with unsuitable women – and the seemingly permanent financial difficulties. Denied a civil-list payment until 2001, when he was thirty-seven, and forced to rely on handouts from his parents, Laurent was paid instead through the IRGT, the Institut Royal pour la Gestion Durable des Ressources Naturelles et la Promotion des Technologies Propres (Royal Institute for the Sustainable Management of Natural Resources and the Promotion of Clean Technology), an organization he founded in 1994.

Not surprisingly, many Belgians believed the real reason behind the government’s decision in 1991 to change the rules to allow women to succeed to the throne was to make it more unlikely that Laurent would ever become king. Before the change he was third in line behind his father and elder brother, but ahead of his elder sister Princess Astrid, to succeed his childless uncle Baudouin. He has since dropped down to twelfth place and, with time, will go down further still.

Laurent’s reputation improved following his marriage in April 2003 to Claire Combs, an Anglo-Belgian property surveyor who was born in Bath and grew up in Wavre, outside Brussels. But speculation continued about the poor state of his finances. Matters appeared to become more serious in December 2006, when the Prince’s name surfaced in connection with a corruption scandal centring on claims that Belgian naval funds had been used to refurbish Villa Clémentine, the home in Tervuren, outside Brussels, he shares with Claire and their three children. The following month, after his father signed a special Royal Decree, Laurent was subpoenaed, questioned by the police and appeared in court, where he declared he had no reason to suspect the funding of the renovations was illegal. Although Laurent was a witness rather than a defendant, it was a first for a senior member of the Belgian royal family – and an embarrassment for the palace. The Belgian media reported that Albert barred his son from royal functions for four months as a sign of his displeasure.

Laurent survived the crisis, but the criticisms continued. The Prince, according to his former advisor Noël Vaessen, a retired colonel sentenced to two and half years in jail for his role in the fraud, was “obsessed” with spending money and buying cars, and during the 1990s had spent most of the annual allowance, which currently stands at close to €300,000, on expensive watches, clothes and going out. The following year members of parliament demanded a cut in Laurent’s civil-list allowance after it was claimed he had used government money to buy a €1 million villa in Italy.

In Sweden, by contrast, Crown Princess Victoria’s younger brother Carl Philip and their glamorous younger sister Madeleine had for a long time a gentler ride with the press, not least because both became involved in long-term relationships at a relatively early age: Madeleine with Jonas Bergström, a lawyer, and Carl Philip with Emma Pernald, who worked in public relations. In August 2009, six months after her elder sister’s engagement, it was announced that Madeleine too was going to get married: although no date was set, it was expected to be in late 2010 or early 2011.

As Victoria’s own wedding, scheduled for June 2010, approached, however, things started to go wrong with both her siblings’ relationships. Carl Philip had broken with Pernald after ten years, and in early 2010 was reported to be having an affair with Sofia Hellqvist, a glamour model who had appeared on Paradise Hotel, a reality television show, and posed topless for photographers with a python draped artistically around her body. An invitation to the palace to meet Carl Philip’s parents seemed out of the question.

Then, in what was potentially even more damaging for the palace, reports began to appear that all was not well with Madeleine’s relationship either. At the Princess’s side for eight years, Bergström, with his upper-class background, successful career and good looks, had seemed the ideal royal spouse – much more suitable, in the eyes of some, than Victoria’s own fiancé Daniel Westling. Yet suddenly the couple stopped being seen together in public and the Swedish tabloids began to fill with stories of Bergström’s “double life” and hedonism.

Asked in April what was going on with her daughter, Queen Silvia said the wedding was being postponed, but insisted “everything is OK”. Not everybody – least of all the tabloid royal watchers – were convinced. Their doubts grew even stronger after the Norwegian weekly Se og Hør, which had done so much to delve into the past life of Crown Princess Mette-Marit before her marriage, published an interview with Tora Uppstrøm Berg, a twenty-one-year-old Norwegian student and former handball player who claimed to have slept with Bergström during a trip he made without Madeleine to the ski resort of Åre in April the previous year.

A few days later it was official. An hour after Madeleine left Stockholm on board a plane bound for New York, where she was due to spend several weeks working for the World Childhood Foundation, a children’s charity founded by her mother, came an announcement from the palace that she and Bergström had “made a joint decision to go separate ways”.

Royal engagements are serious affairs and not normally broken off. While the Swedish media went into a frenzy, it was left to King Harald of Norway to make what was probably the most apt comment. “It’s good that the breach is now and not after the wedding,” he said.

Madeleine remained in America and, with time, the relentless press attention on her private life began to fade. When she attended her elder sister’s wedding that June, looking glamorous in a blue chiffon dress and a diamond tiara, she was accompanied not by a new love but by her brother, Carl Philip. She is since said to have found love with Chris O’Neill, an American financier.

Elsewhere in Europe, Prince Joachim, the second son of Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, has also been obliged to cope with some harsh newspaper coverage after the collapse of his first marriage to Alexandra, his Hong Kong-born first wife, who had become a favourite with the Danes – not least because of the speed with which she learnt their difficult language. His reputation appeared restored after he married Marie Agathe Odile Cavallier, a glamorous Parisienne twelve years Alexandra’s junior, in May 2008. The marriage of Infanta Elena, the eldest daughter of King Juan Carlos of Spain, also broke down after just over a decade. She and her husband, who had two children, stopped living together in November 2007; their divorce was finalized in January 2010.

Elena’s younger sister, the Infanta Cristina, faced problems of a different character: in late 2011 her husband, Iñaki Urdangarin, the Duke of Palma de Mallorca, a former Olympic handball player turned businessman, became embroiled in a scandal involving the alleged embezzlement of large amounts of public money from the Nóos Institute, a non-profit foundation that he headed for several years. That December, as the case rumbled on and the damage to the monarchy grew, the palace took the unusual step of announcing that Urdangarin would no longer take part in official ceremonies involving the royal family.