‌Chapter 10

‌Learning to Be a Monarch

Situated deep in the countryside of north-eastern Scotland, Gordonstoun was founded in 1933 by Dr Kurt Hahn, a German Jew with some unusual ideas. Hahn had been headmaster of Salem Castle School in southern Germany, but fled after being threatened by the Nazis. As a young man he had visited Morayshire to recover from illness and so the following year chose to establish his international school in two seventeenth-century buildings there.

Hahn set out to blend the traditional British public-school ethos with a philosophy derived in part from Plato’s Republic. Thus the head boy was known as “Guardian”, the school’s emblem was a trireme and the regime was Spartan. Hahn believed young people were “surrounded by a sick civilization… in danger of being affected by a fivefold decay: the decay of fitness, the decay of initiative and enterprise, the decay of care and skill, the decay of self-discipline, the decay of compassion”, and set himself the task ‌of combating such a situation.1

The four hundred boys wore shorts the whole time, regardless of the weather, and began each day with a run in the grounds, followed by hot and then cold showers. They slept in crude wooden beds in dormitories, where the windows were always left open at night – which meant wet sheets or a light dusting of snow for those unfortunate enough to sleep next to them. Emphasis was put on militaristic discipline and physical education, including sailing and hill-walking. It was intended, said Hahn, to be a place where “the sons of the powerful can be emancipated from the prison of privilege”.

It was into this curious world that Prince Charles, a rather shy young thirteen-year-old and heir to the British throne, stepped in April 1962. Charles, the first child of the then Princess Elizabeth, was born in the Buhl Room at Buckingham Palace on 14th November 1948 just after eleven p.m. Outside, a crowd, three thousand strong, celebrated until the early hours of the morning, ignoring the entreaties of the police to quieten down.

In the autumn before her son was born, Elizabeth had declared, “I’m going to be the child’s mother, not the nurses.” Yet, inevitably, duty intruded, especially after she became queen, and Charles, not yet four, like other royal children before him, was brought up by nannies. “He was very responsive to kindness,” recalled his Scottish governess, Catherine Peebles, “but if you raised your voice to him he would draw back into his shell and for a time you would be able ‌to do nothing with him.”2

Prince Philip wanted his son to come out of his shell and so, at the age of eight, after three years of Peebles’s lessons, he was sent to school – making him the first heir to the British throne to be educated with other children. This being class-based Britain, where the children of the affluent are educated separately from everybody else, it could not be just the local primary school. Charles was sent instead to Hill House, a private preparatory school (where the fees now reach more than £12,000 a year) in Knightsbridge, just behind Harrods and a short drive from Buckingham Palace.

After a year at Hill House, it was decided he was ready for that quintessentially British upper-class institution: the boarding school, a place where parents would pay large amounts of money to have their children brought up in some of the harshest conditions possible and with the strictest discipline, in the belief that it strengthens the character. So in September 1957, two months before his ninth birthday, Charles was sent to his father’s old school, Cheam – England’s oldest preparatory school, founded in 1645 “for the ‌sons of noblemen and gentry”.3 Cheam, which had moved from Surrey to Berkshire since Philip’s day, was in many respects typical of such places: it had metal beds in austere dormitories, cold showers, compulsory chapel, Latin and sports – and, of course, corporal punishment.

The Queen insisted that Charles be treated in the same way as the other boys – which was not easy given who he was: she and the Duke of Edinburgh turned up with him in a chauffeur-driven car on the first day of term, while his movements were monitored by his personal detective, who lived in the school grounds. Charles, young for his age and extremely shy, described the first few weeks of his life at the school as the loneliest of his life. He especially disliked the rugby – and was often mocked by the other boys for being overweight.

Although idiosyncratic enough in their own ways, neither Hill House nor Cheam School were quite as curious as Gordonstoun, where he was sent in 1962. Charles, who slept with fourteen other boys in a prefabricated hut, suffered a special kind of hardship there. He was picked on mercilessly by the other boys, in scenes reminiscent of William ‌Golding’s Lord of the Flies.4 The rugby field held special tortures for him. After one outburst of especially bad bullying, the novelist William Boyd, a contemporary of Charles, recalls hearing the cry: “We did him over. We just punched ‌the future king of England.”5 Charles subsequently called the school “hell” and “a prison”, and described, as part of an initiation ceremony, having been once caged naked in a wicker fish basket and left under a cold shower until he was rescued by a housemaster.

Such bullying was perhaps inevitable. “How can you treat a boy as just an ordinary chap when his mother’s portrait is on the coins you spend, the stamps you ‌use?” asked one former schoolmate.6

Charles himself remembered the nights as the worst. “I don’t get any sleep practically at all nowadays,” he wrote home in his sixth term, when he was fifteen. “The people in my dormitory are foul. Goodness they are horrid. I don’t know how anybody could be so foul. They throw slippers all night long or hit me with pillows or rush across the room and hit me as hard as they can, then beetle back again as fast as they can, waking everyone else in the dormitory at the same time. Last night was hell, literal hell. I still wish I could go home. It’s ‌such a HOLE this place!”7

The media were also watching him. As long as Charles remained within Gordonstoun, he was largely free from the prying lenses, but once he stepped outside he became far more vulnerable. Quite how vulnerable became clear in 1969 when, aged fourteen, he became involved in what was to become ‌known as the “cherry-brandy incident”.8 On an excursion on the school yacht to the Outer Hebrides with classmates, he and a few other boys went ashore at Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, where they stopped off for a meal at a hotel.

Annoyed at tourists staring at him through the windows, Charles fled to a bar and, although he had never been in one before in his life, ordered a drink. “It seemed the most sensible thing,” he recalled later. While most boys his age would have gone for a beer or cider, he ordered a cherry brandy. And that might have been it, had it not been for a freelance journalist who was also in the bar and sent the story round the world. “I was all ready to pack my bags and head for Siberia,” he declared. Punishment awaited him on his return to school.

Charles, who also spent two terms at Timbertop School in the bush north-east of Melbourne, which was in many respects an Australian version of Gordonstoun, did respectably, if not brilliantly – achieving five GCE O levels and two A levels. He has said subsequently that the school helped him develop willpower and self-discipline – and also taught him curious habits he still follows, such as following a hot bath with a cold shower. He nevertheless claims not to have enjoyed his time there and when he left it was with apparent relief. Tellingly, he did not send either of his own sons to the school. They were educated instead at the prestigious, but rather far more conventional Eton College.

Before Charles, the heirs to the British throne had been educated at home. After early childhoods spent largely in the care of governesses, the royal children were entrusted to a variety of scholars selected from the universities, the army or the Church. The academic results were mixed, and they suffered from their deliberate isolation from other children. Matters were not helped during the eighteenth century by an almost uniformly hostile relationship between father and son.

The future Queen Victoria had an especially strange preparation for her role. The death of her father the Duke of Kent when she was just eight months old left her to be brought up by her German-born mother, Victoria, and Sir John Conroy, an army officer who became comptroller of the Duchess’s household and most probably the Duchess’s lover.

Together the pair developed a strict set of rules that became known as the “Kensington System”: it isolated the young Princess from other children and made her totally dependent on them. Victoria was never allowed to be apart from her mother, tutor or governess and was even obliged to sleep in the Duchess’s room. She and Conroy hoped to wield power through the young Princess if her uncle, King William IV, died before she came of age. They failed, however: when Victoria became Queen less than a month after her eighteenth birthday she swiftly turned against both of them. One of her first acts on becoming Queen was to remove her bed from her mother’s room. Conroy was banned from her apartments and relations with her mother became cool.

When it came to educating Victoria’s own nine children, it was her husband, Albert, who took charge, drawing up a plan outlined in a memorandum that he and the Queen signed in January 1847. His approach was motivated largely by his determination – bordering on obsession – that they should not grow up with the character defects of his wife’s uncles, George IV and William IV, whose wayward pasts haunted the royal family. Victoria just wanted them to be little replicas of her beloved Albert – especially when it came to her second-born child and first-born son, whom she christened Albert Edward and who was eventually to rule Britain as Edward VII.

They were to be sorely disappointed. The Prince of Wales – or “poor Bertie” as his mother used to refer to him – proved difficult to teach and was prone to fits of sulkiness and anger, during which he would throw objects around the room. As a result he was frequently beaten. Then, as he got older, it was his sex life that caused his strait-laced parents most concern. Matters came to head when the Prince was studying at Cambridge and invited Nellie Clifton, an actress, to spend the night with him in his rooms. Albert was so appalled at such debauchery that he went to Cambridge to lecture his son. Albert died several weeks later, apparently of typhoid fever, but the Queen blamed it on a cold he caught walking around the city with their son. “That boy – I never can or shall look at him without a shudder,” she wrote. Not surprisingly, Bertie was to take a more relaxed attitude to the upbringing of his own three girls and two boys.

Like her predecessors, Queen Elizabeth II did not enjoy anything like a normal childhood, even though she became heiress presumptive only in December 1936 at the age of ten, after her uncle Edward VIII abdicated and her father, Albert, took his place as George VI. Known in the family as “Lilibet” because of her inability as a small child to pronounce her own name, she was educated at home. Because she was a girl, though, the practice of the day dictated that the intellectual demands on her should be smaller.

This was made clear to Marion Crawford, the young Scottish woman who became governess to both Elizabeth and her younger sister, Margaret, during her first meeting with the girls’ grandfather, King George V. “For goodness’ sake, teach Margaret and Lilibet to write a decent hand, that’s all I ask you,” the King told her in his loud, booming voice. “Not one of my children can write properly. They all do ‌it exactly the same way.”9

Later, after Crawford had started giving them lessons – which were held in a boudoir off the main drawing room of 145 Piccadilly, the tall narrow house just beyond Hyde Park Corner where they lived – Queen Mary, the young princesses’ grandmother, was to intervene more directly, asking for a copy of their timetables. The Queen came back with some suggestions: more history and geography – or at least the parts relating to Britain’s dominions and India – and learning poetry by heart, but Crawford could cut back on the arithmetic, on the grounds that “these two would probably never have to do ‌even their own household books”.10

To counter the isolation suffered by previous royal children, Crawford tried to bring the princesses as much as she could in touch with the outside world, taking them out for walks in nearby Hyde Park. On one occasion, to Elizabeth and Margaret’s delight, they even went for a ride on the Underground to Tottenham Court Road and took tea at the YWCA. A plain-clothes detective travelled with them at the end of the carriage but, Crawford noted, “looked so very obviously a detective that people began to look round to try to discover what he was detecting.” Another time they went for a ride on the top deck of a bus. Such jaunts came to a sudden end, however, when the Irish Republican Army began a letter-bomb campaign to draw attention to their demands for full independence and an end to the country’s dominion status.

A further change came after their father became King George VI. For the children this meant leaving the cosiness of 145 Piccadilly for Buckingham Palace, with its vast rooms and long draughty corridors. Crawford likened it to “camping in a museum” and complained of the crumbling furniture and large mouse population. The sheer scale of the place made it a curious experience; outside there were often crowds, apparently waiting for something – although the girls never worked out what. On wet winter afternoons, they used to amuse themselves by staring back at them through the lace curtains. The enormous gardens were also a joy to the two young girls.

George was keen for his daughters to have as normal and happy a childhood as possible; as long as he was duke of York, with relatively light official duties, this had been easy. Nothing was allowed to stand in the way of various family sessions, which ended with the children’s bath hour and bedtime. This necessarily became more difficult after he became king, and official engagements intruded, but they would always begin the day with their girls and have lunch with them if they were at home. Even after they moved to Buckingham Palace, few restraints were put on them and they were allowed to race around its corridors.

By now it was becoming clear that the girls were not going to have a younger brother, which meant that Elizabeth would one day be queen. This, it was felt, meant more attention should be paid to her education in order to prepare her for her future role. And so twice a week, until the war started, her mother would take her to Eton College, where Sir Henry Marten, an eminent scholar and vice-provost of the school, would give her lessons in constitutional history.

Home schooling was also the norm elsewhere in Europe for royal children. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, who became Queen at the age of ten in 1890 after the death of her elderly father Willem III, was given a bespoke education designed to prepare her for her future role. Under the guidance of her disciplinarian mother, Emma, who acted as regent until her eighteenth birthday, she was given private lessons in history, constitutional affairs and foreign languages by the country’s finest teachers. Admirals and generals came to the palace to teach her the basics of military science, while economic instructors taught her finance. The curriculum was rounded off with Bible study.

It was an extraordinarily lonely existence, in which Wilhelmina, the only surviving child of Willem III, was prevented from having even the most minimal contact with her future subjects. She later described it as “the Cage”. Dolls became a substitute for other children. “If you are naughty I shall make you into a princess and then you won’t have any other little children to play with,” the young Wilhelmina reportedly ‌told them on one occasion.11 From the start, Emma tried to instil in her a sense of duty. When, aged ten, Wilhelmina looked down on the cheering ranks of her subjects, she asked her mother, “Mama, do all these people belong to me?” “No,” came the reply. “It is you who ‌belong to all these people.”12

For all her loneliness, the result was an extraordinarily self-confident young woman. As a little girl she visited Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, one of the most powerful men in Europe. “See, my guards are seven feet tall and yours are only shoulder high to them,” the Kaiser told her.

“Quite true, Your Majesty,” she replied, “your guards are seven feet tall. But when we open our dykes the water is ten feet deep.”

At the age of thirteen she travelled to England to meet Queen Victoria, a formidable figure then in her seventies. The young Wilhelmina returned impressed by the policemen, the pipers at Windsor, but most of all by Victoria herself. “She took me for a drive and I’ve never seen anyone sit so straight. I couldn’t believe she was smaller than me.” Five years later, when she was invested as Queen – the first in the history of the Netherlands – she seemed remarkably unfazed by the whole affair and even apparently insisted on writing her own speech.

Wilhelmina was determined that her only child, the future Queen Juliana, should not suffer the same isolation. And so she arranged for a small, carefully selected group of children to be brought to the Huis ten Bosch, the magnificent summer palace just outside The Hague that was Juliana’s home for most of her childhood. Wilhelmina may not have been quite as stern as her own mother, but the court in which Juliana grew up was strict and humourless – and one in which she was made aware of her own status from an early age. “Even when I was a tiny girl, if I came into a room old ladies would leap to their feet and give me a tottering curtsy,” she remembered. “It was ‌so embarrassing I almost died.”13 It was also deeply spiritual. Wilhelmina took charge of her daughter’s religious education, instilling in her from an early age the notion that a good earthly ruler was merely an agent of God’s will.

Juliana tried to be more liberal with her own children – a determination apparently reinforced by the time they spent in exile in Canada during the Second World War – even though this brought her into conflict with her more conservative-minded husband. Bernhard was appalled by what he saw when they sat down for their first family dinner together at Soestdijk Palace after returning to the Netherlands in August 1945. Two-year-old Margriet beat a spoon on her plate, Irene sat with a leg curled underneath her and Beatrix, seven, talked incessantly with her mouth full and said she would prefer the steak and ice cream her mother had given her in Canada to the Dutch food on their plate.

The war also had an impact on the lives of others of the current generation of rulers. Like the future Queen Beatrix, the then Prince Harald of Norway was still a child when he fled his native country with his parents after the Germans invaded, going first to Sweden and then to Washington DC with his mothers and sisters, while his father, Crown Prince Olav, and his grandfather, King Haakon, stayed in London with the Norwegian government-in-exile. After the war he was enrolled in the third grade of Smestad Skole, the first member of the Norwegian royal family to attend a public school.

The Danish royal family, by contrast, remained in Copenhagen – although the future Queen Margrethe, born in 1940, would have been too young to understand much of what was going on. She had a mixture of private lessons at the Amalienborg Palace and public schooling, which included a year at a boarding school in Hampshire, something that helps explain her excellent English. Sweden’s Carl XVI Gustaf, born six years later, missed the war completely but suffered tragedy of a very personal kind with the death of his father, Prince Gustaf Adolf, in an air crash when he was just nine months old.

It was not until he was seven that his German mother, Princess Sibylla, told him what had happened. Decades later, the King’s sister Princess Birgitta, who was nine years his senior and so had felt the loss of her father more keenly, gave an interview in which she bemoaned the way their mother had handled the accident. “Children’s questions were met with silence, children’s anxiety and fear with the same silence,” she said. “It was Mother’s way of handling the situation, to handle living her life. Of course it was not good for us children. It would have been much better to be able ‌to speak about Father’s death.”14

Born more than a decade before Carl XVI Gustaf, King Albert of Belgium and his elder brother, Baudouin, who ruled the country before him, had an especially tough childhood. First came the death of their mother, Queen Astrid, in the car crash in Switzerland in 1935; then came the Second World War, and a form of house arrest in Brussels; and then, following the Allied landings, deportation to Germany. For the last few months of the year, the boys were held together with their father and elder sister, Joséphine Charlotte, at a fort in Hirschstein in Saxony and then at Strobl in Austria. The presence of their father’s new wife, Lilian Baels, who had had the first of three children by Léopold in 1942, further complicated matters. The end of the war meant their release – but not their return home. Faced with controversy over his role in the war, Léopold went into exile in Switzerland, where his three children continued their education in Geneva. Then, a few months before Baudouin’s twenty-first birthday, his father abdicated and he became King – the youngest to ascend the throne in Europe since Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands more than half a century earlier.

The childhood of the future King Juan Carlos of Spain was also heavily influenced by his country’s complicated political situation. He was born in Rome in 1938, where his grandfather King Alfonso XIII, father Don Juan and other members of the Spanish royal family had settled following the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic seven year earlier. Juan Carlos’s upbringing was to prove not to be the usual one of a royal exile, however. Instead, for the first decades of his life, he was caught up in a trial of strength between the royal family and General Francisco Franco, who was head of state after his forces won the Civil War.

Although determined to cling to power for his own lifetime, Franco tantalized the Borbóns by holding out the prospect of a restoration of the monarchy after he died. Crucially, however, he made clear that he – rather than the royal family itself – would decide who the next king would be. And as the years passed it became increasingly certain that this would not be Don Juan – whom Franco had come to detest – but rather his son, whom the dictator considered still young enough to be brought up in the ways of his regime.

Don Juan, who by then had moved from Rome to Estoril in Portugal to be closer to his home country, realized his son’s claim to the throne would be strengthened considerably if he were educated in Spain. And so, in November 1948, a tearful Juanito, aged ten, was put on the overnight Lusitania Express, bound for a country in which he had not hitherto set foot. The discomfort he suffered was more than that of any small boy separated from his family. From the moment he arrived in Spain he was forced into a high-profile role that depended on fluctuating relations between his father and Franco’s regime. While delegations of Royalists would come to fawn on him, he also had to come to terms with often savage attacks on his family in the official press. And then there were the meetings with Franco himself – and the fear of speaking out of turn. “When you meet Franco, listen to what he tells you, but say as little as possible,” his father had warned him. “Be polite and reply briefly to his questions. A mouth tight ‌shut lets in no flies.”15

As Paul Preston, a biographer of Juan Carlos, has argued, the apparent equanimity with which the boy accepted that his father had effectively sold him into slavery for the sake of the dynasty was remarkable. “In a normal family, this act would be considered to be one of cruelty, or at best, of callous irresponsibility,” he said. “But the Borbón family was not ‘normal’ and the decision to send Juan Carlos away responded ‌to a ‘higher’ dynastic logic.”16

It was just after celebrating his eighteenth birthday, during the time he was undergoing officer training at the Military Academy of Saragossa, that Juan Carlos was involved in a tragic episode that even today remains something of mystery. In March 1956, when the future king was back for the holidays at the family’s Villa Giralda in Estoril, his younger brother, Prince Alfonso, then aged fourteen, died after being shot dead with a single bullet from a revolver. The official version, put out by the Spanish embassy in a communiqué, was that “while His Highness Prince Alfonso was cleaning a revolver last evening with his brother, a shot was fired hitting his forehead and killing him in a few minutes.”

Rumours quickly began to circulate, however, that Juan Carlos had been holding the gun at the time it went off – although the various versions of what actually happened varied: Josefina Carolo, dressmaker to the future king’s mother, for example, claimed the Prince had playfully pointed the pistol at his brother, unaware that it was loaded, and then pulled the trigger – remarkably irresponsible behaviour for an eighteen-year-old well into his stint of officer training. Bernardo Arnoso, a Portuguese friend of Juan Carlos, was also quoted as saying the Prince fired the pistol not knowing that it was loaded, but that the bullet ricocheted off a wall before hitting Alfonso in the face. Helena Matheopoulos, a Greek author who spoke with Juan Carlos’s sister, Pilar, came up with a third and even more bizarre version of events: Alfonso, she claimed, had been out of the room and, when he returned, the opening of the door knocked Juan Carlos in the arm, causing ‌him to fire the pistol.17 Ironically, the pistol itself was said to have been a gift from General Franco.

The childhood of the Continent’s coming generation of rulers has been very different. The Europe of the 1970s and 1980s in which they grew up was a peaceful place. In most cases they were also educated alongside other children, often at normal state schools – although with some exceptions. At the insistence of their French father, Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark and his younger brother Joachim spent the 1982–83 school year at the École des Roches, a boarding school in Normandy where the strict discipline proved something of a surprise for boys used to more relaxed Scandinavian ways. Crown Prince Philippe of Belgium, meanwhile, was obliged to split his education between French- and Dutch-speaking schools in order that he could be perfectly bilingual – a basic requirement for a future monarch of the linguistically divided country.

Yet none of them can be said to have had an ordinary childhood – and not only because of the wealth and status of their parents and the multiplicity of palaces and other homes in which they lived. It became clear to all of them from an early age that their parents had a job unlike almost any other: one that they performed twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week and that, in the case of the British royal family, would mean long foreign trips to far-flung corners of the Commonwealth on which their children would rarely be able to accompany them.

In some respects their position has not been so dissimilar from that of the children of American presidents. Yet there is a fundamental difference: thanks to the hereditary principle, royal children are in the public eye not only on account of the position that their father (or mother) occupies – but also because it is a role they will themselves later have to assume. The result is permanent scrutiny from the media that begins the moment when, just a few days old, they are produced for their first photo opportunity with their smiling parents outside the hospital. From then on they will become accustomed to a life in which the media will be keen to document their every move – from their first steps to their first boy- or girlfriend. If they make one mistake, they can count on a photographer being there to capture it.

Despite such pressures, Haakon for one appears to have had an idyllic childhood, spent at the country estate of Skaugum; his sole public duty was on 17th May, Constitution Day, when he would wave to the children’s procession from the palace balcony. Elsewhere, however, distant relationships between parents and children have persisted. Denmark’s Frederik has subsequently hinted that his childhood was far from happy. He and Joachim saw little of their parents; the two lived in a separate apartment at the top of the Amalienborg Palace, complete with bedrooms, a playroom and a dining room, where they were looked after by their nanny, Else Pedersen, who slept in her own room there.

In her controversial book, 1015 Copenhagen K, which caused a stir when it was published in Denmark in 2007, Trine Villemann, a former royal reporter, described Margrethe as a distant woman who played little part in the rearing of her children. “It soon became clear to us all that she was not really that interested, not even in her own children, especially not when they were younger,” claims one of the many unnamed former ‌palace employees the author quotes.18 For his part, Margrethe’s husband Prince Henrik was a strict disciplinarian, who thought nothing of spanking his children when they did wrong. When the football-mad Frederik was looking for people to kick around a ball with, it fell to the bodyguards rather his father.

When Frederik was four – and his young brother three – there came what Villemann describes as one of the landmarks in their young lives: they were allowed to come down into the main part of the palace and eat dinner with their parents. As they grew up they did do so more often, but it was always by appointment, as if they were being granted an audience. It fell largely to Pedersen to assume the role of surrogate mother. Still a spinster in her mid-forties, she was an old-fashioned woman with a passion for good manners who became an emotional mainstay for the young princes. And, according to Villemann, it was Pedersen rather than his own mother whom Frederik would call from his boarding school in France on an almost daily basis to describe how unhappy he was.

Like Prince Charles before him, Frederik also developed a close relationship with his grandmother. As a young child he spent much of his time at Fredensborg, the royal residence north of Copenhagen; he and his brother would often walk across to Kancellihuset, the country house where Queen Ingrid lived. While she and Nanny Pedersen talked, the two boys would play.

By the time the princes were teenagers, however, it was decided they needed more of a male role model. So, in 1983, Major Carl Erik Gustaf von Freisleben, a Life Guards officer and equerry to the Queen, was put in charge of the boys, and three years later was appointed head of the Crown Prince’s household. Freisleben, who had four children of his own, acted as a kind of replacement father, playing football and tennis with Frederik and Joachim and also helping them with their homework.

Hints about the strictness of Frederik’s upbringing have not been confined to off-the-record comments from disgruntled courtiers whom Villemann interviewed for her book. The Crown Prince himself, in a speech at his parents’ silver wedding anniversary in 1992, remarked poignantly: “There is an old Danish proverb which says chastise the one you love – and Father, let me assure you… we never doubted your love.” As Frederik told the author Anne Wolden-Ræthinge, “It was a feeling of powerlessness which I often felt towards my parents. There was no question of two-way communication. It was just an order.”

Alarmed, perhaps, at the picture being painted of his parents, the Prince seemed to backtrack a little in an authorized biography published to coincide with his fortieth birthday in 2008. In the book, Frederik and his brother denied that their father ruled them with an iron fist, but made clear that their traditional French-style upbringing had been more formal and involved greater distance between young and old than a more liberal Danish one. Not surprisingly, Frederik has also made great play of his intention to bring up his own children very differently. He and his wife Mary, who had a solidly middle-class upbringing in her native Tasmania, have made clear their determination ‌to be modern, hands-on parents.19

In Belgium, Crown Prince Philippe, his sister Princess Astrid and brother Prince Laurent also had a less than conventional upbringing as a result of the collapse of their parents’ marriage in the late 1960s – at the time when their father had just had a daughter, Delphine, by his mistress. Although Philippe was to some extent taken in hand by King Baudouin, his childless uncle, the situation undoubtedly weighed heavily on them. On one occasion, the servants even took them in for Christmas.

This was nothing, of course, compared to the emotional turmoil suffered by Prince William and Prince Harry. As children they were forced to suffer first the public disintegration of their parents’ marriage and then their mother’s death when William was fifteen and Harry was twelve. And then, in the full glare of publicity, they had to watch as their father pursued his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, the woman with whom he had betrayed their mother in the first place.

It would take a psychologist to determine the effect such an upbringing had on the princes, but it undoubtedly left its mark. In a speech in 2009 to mark Mother’s Day at the Child Bereavement Charity, an organization for which the Princess of Wales had worked, Prince William spoke openly about the emptiness that he has felt since the death of his mother. “Losing a close family member is one of the hardest experiences that anyone can endure,” he said. “Never being able to say the word ‘mummy’ again in your life sounds like a small thing. However, for many, including me, it’s now just a word – hollow and evoking memories.”

So what after school? At least among the Windsors, higher education took longer to catch on. The future Edward VII spent time at both Christ Church, Oxford, and Trinity College, Cambridge, but Prince Charles was the first member of the royal family to follow a proper bachelor’s course and earn a degree. He was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, ‌to read archaeology and anthropology,20 but changed to history for the second part of his degree.

The Prince’s status meant he necessarily received special treatment. When he arrived for his first day at the wheel of his red Mini, he was met on the pavement in front of the Great Gate of the college by Lord Butler, the master of Trinity. “It is the first time I have met a student here,” Butler told reporters as he stood waiting several minutes ‌for the prince to arrive.21 Thereafter, however, the heir to the throne was treated as much as possible like the other students, eating with them at the scrubbed oaken tables in hall and sleeping in an ordinary three-room suite, sharing his toilet and bath with ten other students on the E staircase, where Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Macaulay and Thackeray had stayed before him. The only concession was a telephone in his room. The bodyguard who tailed him around town lived quietly in another part of the college.

These were the swinging Sixties, but they rather passed Charles by. Dressed most often in traditional tweeds and flannels or baggy cords and an old jacket, he preferred classical music to pop and by all accounts was not quick to make friends; his closest companions were his cousins. The Prince’s happiest hours were spent performing in a series of comic revues; from childhood he had been a fan of the Goons, a long-running zany comedy show that was a forerunner of Monty Python’s Flying Circus – so much so that he memorized many of their routines by heart. When it came to the final exams, Charles was awarded a respectable if not brilliant lower second-class degree. Yet it was not a bad achievement given the other distractions he had suffered: not only had he taken time out for state visits abroad, he also spent a term learning Welsh at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, to prepare for his investiture as the Prince of Wales in 1969.

Prince William is not particularly an intellectual, but by the time he came of age a university education had become so common that it would have looked odd if he had not applied, so he went to St Andrews, Scotland’s oldest university. Prince Harry, whose academic results were not especially impressive, opted instead to join the army.

Charles’s Continental counterparts have followed him to university, although more often they have studied political science or followed courses tailor-made to prepare them for their future role. Crown Prince Philippe of Belgium was the first in his family to go to university, studying for several months at Oxford before going on to Stanford, where he was awarded a Master of Arts in Political Science. Crown Princes Frederik and Haakon and Crown Princess Victoria also spent time in the United States – at Harvard, Berkeley and Yale respectively – as well as at universities at home. The only one not to study abroad was Willem-Alexander, who instead attended Leiden University in the Netherlands.

For the young princes, growing up has meant transition from schoolboy pranks to the more serious diversions available to the young, wealthy and privileged. Bars, restaurants and nightclubs have turned into their natural habitat – even if the periods of military service that they have all undergone provided some respite.

Willem-Alexander, for example, swiftly acquired a reputation as the enfant terrible of the Dutch royal family in the late 1980s and 1990s. Nicknamed Prince Pils for his beer-drinking, he became a familiar sight on the Amsterdam social circuit and became known for his penchant for high-performance vehicles and action-man sports. He was once fined for speeding after his car plunged into a canal. A fitness fanatic, he sparked outrage after running a race wearing a jacket advertising Marlboro cigarettes and trousers publicizing Playboy magazine.

As a student the Prince once famously excused himself from a Belgian state visit to revise for his exams, only to be spotted that afternoon on a racetrack. For a long time this was not offset by the adoption of any kind of public profile on serious issues. There were also some public-relations disasters worthy of the House of Windsor. In 1996, for example, when he took guests hunting on a royal estate, gamekeepers drove wild boar and deer past the royal Range Rovers to make it easier for elderly members of the party to shoot them. Usually loyal subjects were disgusted. More than seven thousand people sent faxes or letters of protest to the palace. “Highness, degrade yourself no more,” screamed an advertisement taken out by animal-rights campaigners in leading newspapers. “The heavy responsibility you bear as our future king cannot be combined with spreading death and destruction among defenceless animals.”

Sport was to prove Willem-Alexander’s saving grace. By his late twenties it provided his main achievements, whether competing in the New York marathon or completing the Elfstedentocht, a gruelling one-hundred-and-twenty-mile skating race across the frozen canals of Holland. Willem-Alexander is not alone in his passion for sport: Frederik, the Danish Crown Prince, is a fanatical dinghy sailor, taking part in competitions across the world. Prince Albert II of Monaco has gone one better, representing his country five times in the bobsled at the Winter Olympics. Britain’s Princess Anne was also an Olympian, forming part of the British equestrian team at the 1976 summer games in Montreal.

And then there have been the cars. As has been seen, car accidents have played a dramatic part in royal history, claiming the lives of Queen Astrid of Belgium and Britain’s Princess Diana. (Princess Grace might also be added to the list, although she first suffered a stroke before crashing her car.) In August 1988, Crown Prince Frederik only narrowly avoided joining the list. He and two other friends were being driven by his younger brother, Prince Joachim, in a Peugeot 205 on a winding road near their parents’ Château de Caïx in the south of France. Suddenly Joachim, who had only recently gained his licence, lost control and crashed into a tree. Joachim escaped with only a few scratches, but Frederik and one of the friends were catapulted out of the car and into the River Lot. The Crown Prince was floating for several minutes unconscious before he was fished out and taken to hospital, suffering from a broken collarbone and in need of stitches for a deep gash in his forehead.

When news leaked of the accident, Queen Margrethe called a press conference at the castle to allow Joachim to explain what had happened. The Prince claimed he had been doing “only” sixty miles an hour – a high speed for such a narrow road – but although he did not face any legal penalties he received a serious telling-off from his mother. He had come perilously close to a nightmare scenario: if Frederik had died, not only would the Danes have been deprived of their future monarch, but his place would have been taken by the younger brother responsible for his death. The severity of the accident was revealed when a magazine published photographs of the wrecked car hidden under a tarpaulin at a local garage.

While Frederik and Joachim emerged unscathed from their car accident, Friso, the second son of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, was less fortunate when he and a childhood friend, Florian Moosbrugger, were buried by an avalanche while they were skiing in the Austrian resort of Lech in February 2012. Moosbrugger, owner of the Hotel Post, where the Dutch royal family traditionally spends its winter break, escaped without serious injury, thanks to the avalanche “airbag” he was wearing. The Prince, however, did not have one, and it took more than twenty minutes to dig him out from under the snow. Austrian doctors managed to resuscitate him, but the resulting oxygen starvation left him suffering from massive brain damage. Barring a miracle, the outlook for Friso, aged just forty-three, looked bleak – leaving a hole in the very heart of the Dutch royal family.

Although of a more trivial nature, there are other threats to young royals. Dating poses a tricky problem, especially for the young royal male: eminently eligible, the current generation of princes has enjoyed the pick of women – much as their father and grandfathers did before them. Even today, the prospect of a romance with a prince is enough to make many young women swoon.

Yet such romances these days are inevitably played out in full view of the media. While earlier royal lotharios such as Edward VII, Belgium’s Léopolds or the Netherlands’ Willems could indulge their passions largely hidden from the public gaze well into middle age, their successors have been pursued relentlessly by the paparazzi, much as if they were music or film stars. A snap of a new girl on the arm of a prince can be worth thousands of pounds to the photographer who snatches it – even if, as often turns out subsequently, she is merely an acquaintance rather than a new love.

For the prince himself, such attention, however unwelcome, is part of the job. It can be much tougher for the girl who has suddenly found her photograph splashed across the front pages. Our first sighting of her is often anonymous. But once she has been identified, it is open season on her. Friends are tracked down and questioned and her background probed; God forbid that there should be any past photographs, or worse, videos, that could be construed as embarrassing. These days, a Facebook page can be especially revealing. And then, with indecent haste, she suddenly finds herself treated as a possible future princess whose suitability is a legitimate matter for discussion. No Hollywood star’s girlfriend has to put up with scrutiny such as this.

Despite such obstacles, however, love – or rather lust – has prevailed. Britain’s Prince Charles, who came of age in the sexually freewheeling 1960s, blazed a path for the current generation, enjoying relationships with a number of women, something in which he was encouraged by his “Uncle Dickie” Mountbatten, who placed Broadlands, his grand country house in Hampshire, at his nephew’s disposal. “I believe, in a case like yours, the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down,” Mountbatten advised Charles in one of ‌many letters in February 1974.22 (Mountbatten himself, by then in his seventies, had not allowed marriage to get in the way of his private life, indulging in a number of affairs with men as well as women.)

Charles did not fight shy of married women either – some, such as Dale “Kanga”, Lady Tryon, were even married to his friends. Her husband, Lord Tryon, one of Charles’s closest sporting companions, was apparently quite happy, like many aristocratic men before him, to find himself cast in the role of mari complaisant; Charles often dropped in at the pair’s smart London home or was a guest at their fishing lodge in Iceland.

Amid this flurry of sexual partners was one constant: Camilla Shand, the daughter of Major Bruce Shand, a Second World War hero, and the Honourable Rosalind Cubitt, a society charmer. Appropriately enough, her great-grandmother, Alice Keppel, had been the favourite mistress of Edward VII. Accounts vary as to how Charles and Camilla first met, although it appears to have been at a hunt in the early summer of 1971. If the tabloid accounts are to be believed, Camilla’s first words were: “You know, sir, my great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather – so how about it?” Yet this hardly rings true: far more plausible is another version in which Camilla looked at Charles’s horse and declared, “That’s a fine animal you have there, sir.”

Their relationship quickly blossomed, and during the months that followed Charles and Camilla partied together in London at Annabel’s, the Mayfair nightclub, or shared their passion for country pursuits. But duty called: in November 1972 the Prince was posted to the naval frigate HMS Minerva, which, the following February, was deployed to the Caribbean.

Despite their obvious feelings for one another, Charles was unable to commit to Camilla – probably because he realized that as a woman with a “history” she could be his mistress but never his wife. This did not lessen the blow he suffered when he went ashore in Antigua in April 1973 and learnt that the love of his life planned to marry Andrew Parker Bowles, a major in the prestigious Blues and Royals regiment. Their wedding, a grand society affair attended by the Queen Mother among others, took place two months later, while Charles was still at sea.

Yet Charles had to move on and find himself a bride: by 1980, he was past thirty, the age by which he had always said he was going to wed. But who would be the lucky woman? The basic formal requirements were not that onerous: the prospective princess of Wales and future queen could not be a Catholic or, with the memory of Edward VIII’s abdication still fresh, a divorcee. However, there was another, more problematic requirement: while Charles’s sexual exploits had been well documented by the media, his bride would have to be a virgin – or at least appear to be one. Such women were not easy to find in those post-pill and pre-AIDS days. Certainly, neither Camilla nor any of Charles’s other conquests would have fitted the bill – all of which was to open the way for Diana Spencer.

Charles’s Continental counterparts have, in most cases, shown the same predilection for glamorous young women. But it is one thing to date an underwear model: as many have found, the problems start when the relationship becomes serious. Just as in the past, some girls are seen as perfectly legitimate playthings for a royal fling – but certainly not as wife material.

Born in 1967, almost two decades later than Charles, Willem-Alexander was romantically linked with a number of glamorous women – among them Frederique van der Waal, a model and head of a lingerie company who happily posed for the cameras wearing nothing but the briefest of her own products. She was, as a result, considered highly unsuitable, and the Prince was “ordered” to end their affair. Or so the story went: van der Waal, who has gone on to a successful career and now lives in New York, later claimed the romance had been invented by the press. “He studied together with my brother in Leiden, and we certainly saw each other,” she said. “But then it appeared in some ridiculous rag that that Beatrix had said I could never be queen because I had posed in my underwear. ‌It was nonsense of course.”23

In his late twenties, the Prince did embark on a serious relationship – with Emily Bremers, a dentist’s daughter whom he met at Leiden University in 1994, when he was twenty-seven. Bremers, who worked for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines after her studies, was never officially recognized by the palace as the Prince’s girlfriend. Not only was she a commoner, she was a Catholic – a major drawback.

Despite erroneous reports linking Willem-Alexander with ‌Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden,24 his romance with Bremers continued. And, as time passed, she seemed gradually to win acceptance in royal circles. In May 1998 she even accompanied the Prince to the wedding of his cousin Prince Maurits, fifth in line to the throne. The wedding was significant in itself: Maurits’s bride, Marilène van den Broek, the daughter of a European commissioner, was both a commoner and a Catholic – a first for a member of the Dutch royal family. Indeed, royal watchers speculated that the official sanctioning of their union might open the way for Willem-Alexander to marry Emily, who appeared to be making her way into royal circles when she appeared at Queen Beatrix’s sixtieth birthday celebrations that year.

It was not to be: that September, De Telgraaf reported the couple’s romance was over. In fact, it was claimed, they had split up several months earlier, but kept their breakup under wraps in the hope they would sort out their problems. They didn’t. The following year, the Prince, then thirty-two, declared that he would not marry for at least ten years – following the example of his father, who had waited until he was nearly forty.

Felipe, the heir to the Spanish throne, who is a year younger than Willem-Alexander, found that his love life came under equally close scrutiny. In his early adult years he went out with a number of glamorous women. One of his first serious relationships appears to have been in the late 1980s with Isabel Sartorius y Zorraquín de Mariño. Three years older than him, she had grown up in Madrid, lived in Peru and studied in Washington. She was the daughter of the Marquess de Mariño, Vicente Sartorius y Cabeza de Vaca, and Isabel Zorraquín. But the couple separated when their daughter was just eight. Her mother went on to marry Manuel Ulloa Elías, who was prime minister of Peru between 1980 and 1982, while her father wed Princess Nora of Liechtenstein, ensuring Isabel mixed with Europe’s leading socialites.

The Prince, it was said, was besotted, but King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofía were dead against the relationship. Not only were her parents divorced, but the press linked some of her mother’s friends to cocaine smuggling, although no proof was provided. She was also a commoner – and under a rule dating back to a royal ordinance made by Carlos III in the eighteenth century, anyone who wanted to marry a commoner had to be prepared to renounce the throne.

Apparently more serious was the Prince’s relationship with Eva Sannum, a Norwegian student and part-time model whom he met in the late 1990s. The relationship, which lasted several years, raised eyebrows among monarchists who were convinced that Felipe, now in his thirties, should get on with doing his duty to preserve the fragile Borbón dynasty – that is, find a bride among the ranks of his fellow European royals and start a family. “It is obviously a matter of concern when the heir to the Crown is prepared to travel all the way to Oslo just to spend the weekend with a model,” sniffed Jaime Peñafiel, Spain’s most prominent royal expert, after photographs of the couple appeared. “This young woman has posed in bra and knickers, and bared her breasts on the catwalks. She cannot be the future bride of the Prince.”

Their relationship endured, however, even though it was not until August 2001, four years after they first met, that Felipe and Sannum made their first public appearance together at the wedding of Crown Prince Haakon. Felipe, in full military regalia, and Sannum, wearing a light-blue silk evening dress, discreetly walked together into the great hall at the Norwegian royal palace where the party was being held. The wedding – and Sannum’s especially sexy dress – may have been the final nail in the coffin of their relationship. Felipe confirmed to journalists that December that he and Sannum had decided to end their relationship “freely, with mutual accord and jointly”. In his bachelor days, Norway’s Haakon was also associated with a number of fashionable women, although usually from relatively high-placed families.

Crown Prince Philippe, heir to the Belgian throne, managed to keep his private life a little more discreet – but he too had his fair share of romances. The first love of his life appears to have been Barbara Maselis, the daughter of a cattle-food manufacturer from Roulers, whom he met while he was studying at secondary school in Zevenkerken in Loppem. Blonde and rather Scandinavian in appearance, she was intelligent, spoke at least three languages and, according to those who knew her, was not easily intimidated. They dated for three years: Philippe visited her at her parents’ home in Roeselare or in the flat that she shared with her sister in Louvain, and she even came to the Château du Belvédère, where Philippe’s mother and father lived.

Maselis’s bourgeois origins remained a problem for the status-conscious Belgian royals and Philippe’s father, the future King Albert II, put pressure on his son to end the union. “You are a prince of Belgium and you have an official future in our land,” he reportedly told him. “I can see that Barbara is important to you, but you must try to put an end to it. There can be ‌no talk of a wedding.”25

Philippe appeared to have learnt his lesson. Even by the last decades of the twentieth century the Belgian royal family was still extremely particular – more so than other dynasties – about the social status of those whom its members married, and Philippe acted accordingly. Indeed, the list of women with whom it was claimed he had relationships in the years that followed read like a Who’s Who of European aristocrats: among them was the Italian Countess Fiammetta de’ Frescobaldi, once erroneously named as a girlfriend of Britain’s Prince Charles.

The extent to which any of these were genuine romances is doubtful. As with other eligible young royals, it was enough for Philippe to be photographed with a woman for the press to start speculating about how soon they would marry. More serious, however, appeared to be his relationship with Countess Anna Plater-Syberg, a twenty-eight-year-old French woman of Polish origin, with whom he was photographed by Point de Vue, the French society magazine, in 1994 in Antibes on the Côte d’Azur. “Anna Plater-Syberg, the ideal fiancée for Philippe of Belgium,” the magazine proclaimed on the cover ‌of its edition that August.26 The Belgian royal court went as far as to confirm the relationship, describing Plater-Syberg as a friend. But Philippe broke it up, and it was back to the speculation.

While Willem-Alexander, Felipe and Philippe appeared ready to give up their unsuitable girlfriends without complaint – at least in public – Denmark’s Prince Frederik became embroiled in a more public struggle. His early adult years saw the usual romances – with Malou Aamund, for example, the slim blonde daughter of Suzanne Bjerrehuus, a television presenter and writer, who had appeared in a soft-porn movie during her youth. His first serious relationship, however, was in the mid-1990s with Katja Storkholm Nielsen, the daughter of Mogens Nielsen, chief executive of the company Risskov.

The pair had been acquaintances for several years. Both their fathers loved sailing and their children would bump into each other at events. Then, early in the summer of 1994, their friendship turned to romance; for the first time in his life, it seems, Frederik had fallen deeply in love.

It was a busy time for the Prince. He had to go away on military training and had already arranged to spend that autumn and winter in New York working at Denmark’s United Nations mission. Despite such obstacles, their relationship flourished. Katja visited him in America and moved into his bachelor pad on the top floor of Christian VIII’s mansion at Amalienborg. In January 1995 they went on holiday together in Mauritius.

Katja, with her fresh-faced beauty, easy laugh and common sense, was, according to Trine Villemann, a former royal reporter who tracked their romance in her book 1015 Copenhagen K, the perfect partner for Frederik, and especially good at strengthening his self-confidence. “They were a team,” one unnamed friend of the Crown Prince told Villemann. “They were brilliant at building each other up. There was togetherness and warmth between them, everybody could see that, ‌and it gave him strength.”27 Villemann claims – without citing a source – that Frederik, now in his mid-twenties, even proposed marriage and Katja accepted.

But would Katja be embraced as a crown princess and a future queen? It certainly did not help that she had been working as a model – at one time even renting her own apartment in Milan, the fashion capital of Italy – and had done a few shots wearing expensive lingerie. Nor that her education had been relatively limited – although she was planning to start studying to become an art restorer.

The main problem was instead her nationality. The Danish monarchy continued to adhere to the tradition that members of the royal family should seek their spouses abroad. Frederik’s mother, Queen Margrethe, had married a Frenchman and Margrethe’s father, King Frederik IX, a Swede. Frederik’s younger brother Joachim was poised to marry Hong Kong-born Alexandra Manley. Could Frederik fly in the face of such tradition?

The answer appears to have been “no”. Although Villemann claims that his Swedish-born grandmother, Ingrid, with whom Frederik was close, approved of the union, his mother did not. The Queen effectively confirmed this veto in an interview a decade later. “When the boys were much younger, I let them know it would not be unwise if they married someone from another country,” she said. “There is, and rightfully so, a long tradition in our family. Of course, there are always many difficulties, because of the language, and because the Danes are not always easy to please language-wise. But you come with what the British call ‘no strings attached’. Of course, you have a past, but that past is not walking around in the streets among us.”

Frederik was left in a difficult situation: he was not strong enough to challenge the family tradition, but nor did he break up with Storkholm immediately afterwards. Indeed, in the summer of 1996, during a summer holiday at the family’s Château de Caïx, he introduced her to his grandmother – though not his parents. Soon afterwards, the Prince appears to have begun dating Maria Montell, a Danish pop singer. When Storkholm heard about the liaison, she ended their relationship – and did so publicly. In October that year her lawyer issued a statement declaring: “Katja Storkholm Nielsen would like to announce that her relationship with His Royal Highness, Crown Prince Frederik has been brought to an end.”