‌Chapter 4

‌An Ordinary Day at Work

The 10th of December has a special significance for Sweden and its royal family. On this day in 1896, at the age of sixty-three, Alfred Nobel, a rich and highly successful Swedish chemist, died of a stroke in the Italian Mediterranean resort of San Remo, where he had made his home five years earlier. A pacifist and poet, the eccentric Nobel had intended that dynamite, his most famous invention, should be used only for peaceful purposes. To his dismay it proved even more useful for warfare. And so, partly to assuage his conscience – and partly to burnish the family name – when he sat down in 1895 to write his will, Nobel pledged the bulk of his fortune, equivalent to around $250 million today, to establish a series of awards to recognize excellence in science, literature and peace. In 1901, after some wrangling with both Nobel’s heirs and the French tax authorities, the first Nobel Prizes ceremony was held. To add prestige to the event, the awards were handed out by Crown Prince Gustaf.

More than a century later, what began as a relatively low-key Scandinavian event has turned into the most prestigious prize-giving ceremony in the world – and the high point of the Swedish royal calendar. When the laureates in literature, medicine, physics, chemistry and economics – the last of which was added in 1969 – gather for the gala ceremony in Stockholm’s concert hall, it is currently Gustaf’s great-grandson, Carl XVI Gustaf, who hands them each a diploma and medal. The King and his family also have pride of place at a sumptuous banquet for 1,300 people – including 250 students – held later that day in the Stockholms Stadshus (Stockholm City Hall). To add to the lavishness, both venues are decorated with flowers flown in from San Remo.

Sweden’s media wallow in the spectacle: newspapers record the number of pigeon breasts and lobster tails eaten and bottles of wine and champagne drunk, while these days their reporters blog and tweet a running commentary from their tables. Invariably, attention focuses less on the elderly men and women honoured for their worthy but often incomprehensible academic achievements than on the glamorous guests – chief among them the King’s daughters, Crown Princess Victoria and her beautiful younger sister, Madeleine. Which ball gowns are the princesses wearing, which jewels have they selected from the Bernadotte family collection and (at least until Victoria’s wedding in June 2010) which men are on their arms?

The same day, 250 miles to the west, a similar ceremony takes place. The Nobel Peace Prize, the most prestigious of the awards, is awarded not in Stockholm but in Oslo – and here Carl XVI Gustaf’s fellow monarch, King Harald V, plays his part. In the richly decorated reception hall of the City Hall, in front of a thousand guests, the prize is handed over – although by the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee rather than by the King, who together with his immediate family is seated in the place of honour. That evening there is a glittering banquet in the Grand Hotel.

For the Kings of both Sweden and Norway, what has become known as Nobel Week is merely the most high-profile of a series of engagements – from the glamorous to the humdrum – that fill their year. There was a time when the role of monarchs was to rule, with ceremonial activities such as handing out prizes or medals little more than a public manifestation of such power. Yet, as was seen in the previous chapter, such political power has almost completely drained away, leaving today’s kings and queens in search of another role, which they have found in representational engagements such as the Nobel ceremonies. It is these functions, whether trips to obscure provincial factories or glittering state visits to important trading partners, that have come to constitute the bulk of their work. Europe’s royal families have become part of the public-relations wing of Great Britain plc, Nederland BV or Sverige AB.

The various events attended by members of the royal families are laid out in their official reports and websites. Take Sweden’s Carl XVI Gustaf. A visit to www.royalcourt.se reveals that during March 2012 he took part in no fewer than twenty-one events, ranging from a formal gathering of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, an audience with the President of the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry and hosting the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall on an official visit to a trip to the Cross-Country Skiing World Cup Final. King Harald, meanwhile, was listed as having more than one hundred and forty engagements over the year, from audiences with foreign diplomats to cultural and sporting events – as well as chairing the weekly meeting of the cabinet. Harald’s son Crown Prince Haakon and other members of the family also make their fair share of outings. And then there are the various ceremonial events, chief among them the 17th of May, Constitution Day, marked in Norway not with shows of military force but with children’s parades – including one in Oslo, drawing up to 100,000 people, who are greeted by the royal family from the balcony of the palace, as well as the state opening of parliament every October.

When it comes to public appearances, however, it is the British royal family who are the most active. The journalist Robert Hardman, who followed the Windsors for a year for a BBC documentary, estimated Queen Elizabeth II and thirteen members of her family would perform 4,000 engagements over the twelve months. And although now well into her eighties, our monarch is showing little signs of slowing down. All are reported in a document issued by Buckingham Palace every day known as the Court Circular. Established in the early nineteenth century by George III, frustrated at the inaccurate reporting of his movements, it is now published by the Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Scotsman. In keeping with the palace’s enthusiastic embrace of new technology, a searchable version is also included on the website.

Queen Elizabeth II’s calendar each year includes the usual regular meetings with politicians and audiences with diplomats, as well as the more routine dinners and openings. She must also present some 2,500 honours, handed out at twenty or so investitures. In addition there are also high-profile fixed events, rich in the pageantry that characterizes the British monarchy: besides the state opening of parliament there is the Trooping of the Colour, a military parade marking the Queen’s “official birthday” ‌on a Saturday in June,1 the closest Britain comes to a national day. The Queen also presides for the third week of June over the Royal Meeting at Ascot Racecourse, west of London. In a tradition dating back to the 1820s and the reign of King George IV, she and her party begin each day with the Royal Procession, during which they parade along the track in front of racegoers in horse-drawn landaus. This is more than just duty for the Queen: a keen horsewoman, she has owned more than twenty winners at Royal Ascot.

Other members of the royal family, meanwhile, have similar duties of their own, often chosen to reflect their own interests. Prince Philip has been active in science, conservation and youth welfare; the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme for the under twenty-fives has been imitated across the world since he created it in the 1950s; Prince Charles is especially interested in farming and the built environment. As they have come of age, Princes William and Harry, although both in the armed forces, find time to devote to various charities. In part, these reflect their own interests: William, for example, works with Tusk, a small British charity devoted to African wildlife, while his brother helped create Sentebale, a charity to help deprived children in Lesotho, where he spent several months after leaving school. William has also taken over some of the charity work of the late Princess Diana, and is a patron of Centrepoint, a charity that works with homeless young people. It is the princes’ aunt, Princess Anne, though, who notches up the most engagements – more than six hundred a year, including at least three major overseas tours.

The extent to which participation in such events, or other “duties” such as visits to the ballet, an art exhibition or cinema festival, constitutes work – at least in the sense that the rest of us understand the term – is a matter for debate. Yet whenever there is media discussion in Britain of the sums paid to minor members of the royal family, the question of whether they are “worth it” is conducted largely in terms of how many such appearances they make. Purely by their presence, monarchs and their families arguably provide a public service to their subjects who treasure any contact with them, however fleeting or superficial.

The possibility of such a royal contact is the entire raison d’être of the royal garden parties, invitations to which have turned into a form of reward for public service. The first events were first held in the 1860s when Queen Victoria instituted what were known as “breakfasts” (even though they were held in the afternoon). These days, four are held each year – three in Buckingham Palace and one at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh – attended by more than thirty thousand guests, whose names are put forward by government, the armed services or other bodies. The British monarchy is justly proud of the precision with which such events are choreographed. In more than half a century and what must be tens of thousands of public appearances, the Queen has never made a mistake.

An important category of such spectacles are the intrinsically private occasions – such as marriages, births and deaths – that have been transformed by first the newsreels and then television into huge public media events. When the future King George V married Princess May of Teck (later Queen Mary) in 1893 in the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, there was room for only a hundred people. When his great-great-grandson Prince Charles wed Lady Diana Spencer in the considerably grander setting of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1981, there were three thousand five hundred people in the congregation, another six hundred thousand on the streets of London and an estimated television audience across the world of seven hundred and fifty million. More recently, the marriage of Crown Princess Victoria and Daniel Westling in June 2010 was the culmination of two weeks of celebration in which Stockholm was transformed into a “capital of love” with flowers and performances throughout the city – and rival functions organized by republicans who saw this as the perfect occasion to try to drum up support for their cause. The wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in April 2011 was an even bigger international media event.

The media wedding par excellence was undoubtedly that between Prince Rainier of Monaco and Grace Kelly in April 1956. In a foretaste of the kind of deals now commonplace between celebrities and magazines such as Hello! or OK!, MGM studios negotiated the rights to film the ceremony for its documentary, The Wedding of the Century, turning Monaco cathedral into a film set. In return, not only did the couple receive a $7,226 wedding gown designed by MGM’s head costume designer, Helen Rose, the services of an MGM hairdresser and publicity executive and a substantial share of the proceeds, but the film, seen by an estimated thirty million television viewers across the world, also meant valuable publicity for a principality keen to expand its tourist business.

A similar function is served by royal births. Court officials may no longer be crowded into the delivery room – or in an adjoining room as was until quite recently the case – but hoards of photographers are sure to be waiting outside, hungry for an image of the newest addition to the royal family. Funerals can also play an important role in strengthening the monarchy; the sight of the coffin of a beloved elderly king or queen borne through the streets in a lavish cortège can unite a nation in grief. The effect is even stronger in the case of those such as Britain’s Princess Charlotte, Belgium’s Queen Astrid or Monaco’s Princess Grace, who were cut down in their prime. There has been one important exception, though: following the death of Princess Diana in 1997, the royal family was pilloried by the media for maintaining a traditional stiff upper lip despite the near-hysterical public reaction. And during the funeral itself, comments made by Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, were interpreted as a thinly veiled attack on the monarchy itself.

Although many such events – both joyful and sad – take place in the respective countries’ capitals, royal families have to avoid falling victim to accusations of metropolitan bias. Over the years the tradition has become established that the monarch and other members of the family should tour the realm and meet their subjects. Such tours have a special significance for the British monarchy: not only must due attention be paid to the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish, the fifteen other countries of which Elizabeth II is queen must be kept loyal with visits, if not from the monarch herself, then from other members of her family. Beyond that are the remaining countries of the Commonwealth. Composed of fifty-four nations, it has a combined population of 2.1 billion, almost a third of the world, representing twenty-one per cent of the surface of the globe.

The monarchy under Victoria and her successors was closely identified with the British Empire – as was symbolized by her proclamation as Empress of India at the Delhi Durbar of 1877. Although Victoria never actually travelled to India (or indeed anywhere further east than the Alps), her successors have more than made up for that, embarking on a number of far-flung tours. It was fitting perhaps that when the then Princess Elizabeth heard of her father’s death, she was in the middle of one such visit to Kenya.

Of Europe’s current monarchies, the Netherlands, Spain and Belgium also had considerable possessions abroad. Their experiences have differed from one another, though – with varying implications for relations between former rulers and subjects in the post-colonial era. The acquisition by Belgium of what was initially known as the Congo Free State (and then the Belgian Congo, Zaire and now the Democratic Republic of Congo) was essentially a private venture by King Léopold II pursued for financial gain – and it was not until 1908, following reports of the appalling abuses committed there, that it was formally annexed by the Belgian government. When the country won independence in 1960, King Baudouin personally attended the festivities, but a speech he gave there was widely seen as insensitive to the atrocities that had been carried out there. Belgium’s relations with the country have been somewhat unstable since, leaving little role for the royal family.

The Netherlands’ relationship with Indonesia, the largest of its former colonies, has also been difficult. Queen Wilhelmina’s decision to abdicate in favour of her daughter Juliana in 1948 was inspired in large part by the economic blow her country suffered when what had been known as the Dutch East Indies fought its way to independence. Nevertheless, Juliana visited in 1970 and her daughter Beatrix, the current queen, followed in 1995. The Dutch monarchs also pay special attention to the former colonies of Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten, which today form autonomous countries within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Spain, by contrast, lost its considerable Latin American possessions much earlier, and by the early twentieth century was left with only a handful of territories in Africa. But it still retains a special link with its former colonies.

Trips made by royalty can by their nature be gruelling, especially the foreign ones, even though they provide suitably exotic photo opportunities for television news bulletins. Some of the monarchs’ domestic engagements, in particular, can be downright tedious, with their endless meetings – but woe betide a royal who were to let slip they were anything but delighted to be at the event in question.

In a newspaper interview in 2003 Denmark’s Queen Margrethe provided a rare insight into the realities of her job. “Being Queen involves a lot of repetition – the same ceremonies, the same functions, the same routine, every year,” she told her interviewer, Gyles Brandreth. “Sometimes you think, ‘Here we go again!’ but my parents taught me something useful that I have tried to pass on to my two boys. Whatever you are doing, be aware of it and stay involved. For example, I have to listen to a lot of boring speeches, but I have discovered there is nothing so boring as not listening to a boring speech. If you listen carefully, the speech is very rarely as boring as you thought it was going to be. You can disagree with the speech in your head. You can think, ‘He’s saying it very badly,’ but don’t switch off. Somehow listen. It ‌is much better that way.”2

There are two institutions in particular with which monarchy has a special relationship: the Church (at least in those countries that are not Roman Catholic by tradition) and the armed forces.

In England, King Henry VIII broke with Rome in the 1530s after the Pope excommunicated him for divorcing Catherine of Aragon and putting himself at the head of the newly created Church of England. In 1559, under his daughter Elizabeth I, the monarch’s title was changed from Supreme Head to Supreme Governor, to assuage critics who said this was usurping Jesus Christ, identified by the Bible as the head of the Church. Half a millennium later, Queen Elizabeth II remains the head of the Church, appointing its high-ranking members. This leadership is largely symbolic, however. She does so on the advice of the prime minister, who in turn takes his cue from Church leaders. The monarch also retains the title of Defender of the Faith. Originally granted by Pope Leo X to Henry VIII in 1521 for his early support for Roman Catholicism, it was taken away after the break with Rome, but then reconferred by parliament during the reign of Edward VI.

Although there is no doubting Elizabeth’s own Christian faith, she is becoming something of an exception in today’s multicultural Britain. The Church of England is just one of a number of religious faiths competing for souls – albeit one which, for historical reasons, continues to enjoy a privileged status. These days it probably counts fewer active churchgoers than the Roman Catholics. Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs are also present in growing numbers.

Acutely conscious of such sensitivities, Prince Charles has argued for a change when he comes to the throne, but it is a treacherous subject: an initial suggestion that he would like to be known as “Defender of the Faiths” after he becomes king alarmed some within the Church of England. As a compromise, it has since been mooted that he instead be termed “Defender of Faith” – a more abstract-sounding job description that avoided the need to choose between the singular and plural. Even this might not be easy: constitutional experts have warned that removal of that single word would nevertheless require parliament to agree to amend the 1953 Royal Titles Act, which came into law after changes were made for the Queen’s coronation in the same year.

There are other, even more complicated issues relating to the British monarch’s relationship with the Church. Under the terms of the Act of Settlement, passed in 1701 (and extended to Scotland in 1707), a relic of a very different age that is still in force, the monarch “shall join in communion with the Church of England”. Catholics are explicitly prevented from becoming monarch or indeed marrying into the royal family. Its provisions extend well beyond those who have any realistic chance of succeeding to the throne: when the Queen’s cousin, Prince Michael of Kent, married Baroness Marie-Christine von Reibnitz, a divorced German Catholic in 1978, he had to give up his right to the throne – even though he was so far down in the order of succession that the right was little more than theoretical.

Following the marriage of Prince William in April 2011, the question of what seemed unfair and outdated discrimination against Catholics also looked likely to be tackled, and, as was seen earlier, at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth in October 2011, it was agreed that the laws of each of the sixteen countries of which Elizabeth is queen would be amended in order to ensure that daughters of future sovereigns would not be passed over in favour of elder sons, and that successors to the throne would no longer be barred from marrying Catholics.

Elsewhere in the Protestant world, the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish monarchs are heads of ‌their respective Lutheran state Churches.3 In the Netherlands, the Dutch Reformed Church was put under the direct control of the state when the Kingdom of the Netherlands was formed in 1815, but Church and state were formally separated as early as 1853. However, persecution of Dutch Protestants during the period in which they were ruled by the Catholic Spanish ensured that religion continued to be a touchy subject.

Although the Netherlands has long had a substantial Catholic minority, it has become a tradition that monarchs are members of the Dutch Reformed Church (which was merged in 2004 with three other institutions to form the Protestant Church in the Netherlands). For this reason, the monarchy was plunged into crisis in 1963 by the decision of the future Queen Beatrix’s younger sister, Princess Irene, secretly to convert to Catholicism and get engaged to a Spanish Catholic, whom she married the following year. Beatrix’s youngest sister Marijke also fell for a Catholic, this time a Cuban exile whom she met in New York, but in an attempt to avoid a repetition of the scandal she renounced her and future children’s rights to the throne before converting to Catholicism and officially announcing her engagement in 1975.

Times have changed, however. Princess Máxima, the Argentinian-born wife of Crown Prince Willem-Alexander, is a Catholic and has shown no inclination to change her faith, which would make her the first Catholic queen of the Netherlands when her husband becomes king. Even so, she did study the Protestant faith and, crucially, agreed that their eldest daughter, Princess Catharina-Amalia, who is destined herself to become queen one day, and her two younger sisters should all be brought up as Protestants.

The armed forces too have traditionally enjoyed a special relationship with monarchy, a reflection of their position as the defender of the nation that has the king or queen at its summit. In modern European societies the army and other services are also a repository of deference, service, hierarchy and discipline, values with which royalty has traditionally been associated.

English history is full of stories of royal derring-do on the battlefield: Henry V’s courage against the French at Agincourt in 1415 was celebrated by Shakespeare, while Henry VII became the last English king to win the throne in battle after defeating Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Two centuries later, William III’s victory over James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, in which the Protestant Dutchman personally led his forces, is still celebrated to this day by the Protestants of Northern Ireland – and remains a source of often violent friction with the Catholic community.

Elsewhere in Europe many kings over the centuries have reigned thanks to military conquest – or at the very least continued in power thanks to the success of their armed forces in seeing off enemies who would have overthrown them. The overwhelming majority of monarchies that fell in the twentieth century did so as a result of defeat in the First and Second World Wars.

No European monarch these days would lead his or her army into battle; for a start, most would not have the know-how. And then there is the fear of the possible consequences if they were killed or, worse, captured by the enemy. George II was the last reigning British monarch to fight, with not very impressive results: on 27th June 1743, during the War of the Austrian Succession, the King, then aged sixty, personally led his forces against a French army commanded by the Duc de Noailles at the Battle of Dettingen, in Bavaria. The British won, although it almost ended in disaster for the King: at one point his horse ran off and had to be halted by Ensign Cyrus Trapaud, who received a promotion as a reward.

By the nineteenth century monarchs were increasingly leaving military matters to those who knew what they were doing. This did not stop them trying to play a role. Under the Belgian constitution, the King was both required to “maintain the national independence and the integrity of the territory” and made the commander of territorial and maritime forces. Belgium’s Léopold I personally commanded his troops against the country’s former Dutch rulers in 1831–32; his grandson, Albert I, in turn, led Belgian forces when the Germans invaded in 1914; heavily outnumbered, they were, inevitably, defeated. But while the Belgian government moved across the French border to Le Havre, Albert and his little army stayed in De Panne, on the Flemish coast, maintaining a foothold in the country.

By that Christmas, the legend of the Roi-Chevalier was born – and the King was hailed as a hero around the world – even if evidence since uncovered by revisionist historians has somewhat undermined his image. The King led his army during the Courtrai offensive of autumn 1918 and on 22nd November entered Brussels in triumph on horseback flanked by the Queen, his children and the Duke of York, the future King George VI of Britain.

Other royal involvement in military affairs ended less happily; Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, a great lover of the culture and trappings of militarism, revelled in the title of Supreme War Lord during the First World War, but as the conflict continued it was increasingly his generals who took the decisions. His arch-foe, Tsar Nicholas II, meanwhile, insisted on appointing himself commander-in-chief in 1915 when the war started going badly for Russia, in the mistaken belief it would inspire his troops. The effect was disastrous: the country’s military performance went from bad to worse while the Tsar, based at Mogilev, some 370 miles from St Petersburg, failed to grasp the seriousness of the crisis unfolding in the capital.

During the Second World War, it was Léopold III’s attempts, in his role as commander-in-chief, to emulate his father’s behaviour during the previous conflict that led to his subsequent undoing. Other monarchs played less of a direct role in military affairs, acting as symbols of national resistance in exile – such as Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands or King Haakon VII of Norway – or within their country, in the case of the Danish and Swedish monarchs. In Britain too, military strategy was a matter for the government and the generals. The main contribution of George VI – who had served in the Royal Navy during the First World War – and his wife, Elizabeth, was instead his morale-boosting visits to munitions factories and the scenes of bombings as well as to military forces abroad. His daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth II, meanwhile, although only thirteen on the outbreak of war, joined the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service in 1945, becoming number 230873 Second Subaltern Elizabeth Windsor. Training as a driver and mechanic, she drove a military truck, rising to the rank of junior commander.

When Elizabeth became queen seven years later, she also became nominal head of the armed forces – a position she still occupies. Long-standing constitutional convention, however, has vested de-facto executive authority in the office of the prime minister and the cabinet. The Queen nevertheless remains the “ultimate authority” of the military and retains the power to prevent its unconstitutional use.

Europe’s other monarchs also remain commander-in-chief, in name if not in practice – with the exception of Sweden: when the constitution was changed in 1975 to strip the king of political power, he also ceased to be titular head of his country’s military. He nevertheless remains a four-star general and admiral à la suite in the Swedish army, navy and air force and is by convention the foremost representative of the Swedish armed forces.

In Britain, where the links between royalty and the armed forces are particularly strong, soldiers fight for “Queen (or King) and country”, not “prime minister” or “government” and country. It is to the Queen that they swear allegiance, rather than the constitution, which in the case of Britain is anyway a set of laws rather than a single document – and it is the Queen’s portrait that hangs on mess-hall walls. The country has a Royal Navy and Royal Air Force, although strangely not a Royal Army – even though many individual regiments have “royal” as part of their name. The defence of the Netherlands, meanwhile, is in the hands of the Koninklijke Landmacht, the Royal Army. Europe’s palaces are also home to a disproportionate number of retired army and naval officers, perhaps because they are seen to possess precisely the necessary qualities of obedience, discipline and discretion required for royal service.

Indeed, across Europe the link between royalty and the armed forces remains an enduring one, right down to regimental level. Monarchs and their families have wardrobes full of different military uniforms – whether army, navy or air force – to be worn as the occasion demands. At the last count, Queen Elizabeth was colonel-in-chief of – or held some other formal military position in – some thirty-five British regiments or other formations, as well as a further two dozen in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The Duke of Edinburgh and their children hold similar positions at several others. Princess Diana became colonel-in-chief of the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment when it was formed in 1992. Since her death five years later, her place as colonel-in-chief has been taken by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.

Not surprisingly, a spell of military service has traditionally been considered de rigueur for young royals – and this remains the case today in all Europe’s royal houses. In Sweden, this goes for the girls too. And so, in March 2003, Crown Princess Victoria, the twenty-five-year-old eldest daughter of King Carl XVI Gustaf, was among a group of forty-two men and women learning combat skills, marksmanship, first aid and chemical-warfare safety as part of their basic military training. Dressed in army fatigues and with camouflage paint on her face, the Crown Princess took time out after a course at the Swedish armed forces’ peacekeeping training ground south of Stockholm to meet the press, handling her AK-5 assault rifle with practised ease as she posed for pictures. While some of the other forty students in the course were expected to go on to international assignments in Swedish peacekeeping units, a posting to a foreign war zone was not on the cards for Victoria.

Although obligatory at the time for men, military service in neutral Sweden was optional for women – and only a relatively small number signed up. For Victoria, however, her time at the camp was a highly symbolic part of her preparation for her future role as queen, which had also included stints as an intern at the United Nations in New York and at Swedish foreign-trade offices in Berlin and Paris. It also provided spectacular photographs published by newspapers and magazines across the world.

Crown Princess Mary, the Australian-born wife of Denmark’s Crown Prince Frederik, has also been seen to be doing her part for the defence of her adoptive homeland – in 2008 she joined the Danish Home Guard, a volunteer unit of the country’s military responsible for domestic security, and after receiving basic training in, among other things, weapon use, she was awarded the rank of lieutenant in February of the following year.

While such involvement was largely symbolic, the forces have continued to play a more significant part in the life of the current male heirs to the throne. After leaving school, Frederik served in the regiment of the Royal Life Guards and then, in 1988, joined the Royal Hussars as a First Lieutenant. After graduating he returned to the Danish military in 1995, this time to the navy, where he was chosen from among three hundred applicants to become a member of the elite Frømandskorpset unit, the Royal Frogmen Corps, modelled on America’s Navy Seals and Britain’s Special Boat Service.

The three-year training course, centred on the unit’s base in a village an hour’s drive outside Copenhagen, is legendary for its toughness. Among the various tests of physical fitness on both land and water, aspiring Frogmen must be able to run one and a half miles in hilly terrain in full uniform with boots and gun in less than eleven minutes – Frederik managed it with seven seconds to spare – and swim six miles in open sea and fifty yards with hands and feet bound. “The whole time they think up imaginative ways of punishing people,” said Jesper Lundorf, the Crown Prince’s secret-service protection officer, who ‌did the course alongside Frederik.4 One of the greatest challenges recruits face during their training is “Hell Week”, when they are dropped in small groups with an inflatable boat into the water. After weighing down the boat and hiding it underwater, they must then survive in an exercise designed to simulate life behind enemy lines. The week also includes a seventy-five-mile march.

Although Europe’s other heirs to the throne have not submitted themselves to quite such a gruelling schedule, they have also earned their stripes in the military. Following in the footsteps of his father, grandfather and two of his great-grandfathers, Prince Charles joined the navy after graduating from Cambridge University, and qualified as a helicopter pilot before becoming a member of 845 Naval Air Squadron, which operated from the commando-carrier HMS Hermes. Two years later he took command of the coastal mine-hunter HMS Bronington for the last nine months of his naval career.

Belgium’s Prince Philippe rounded off his secondary education with a spell at the Royal Military Academy, before qualifying as a fighter pilot and a paratrooper. Willem-Alexander, the Dutch crown prince, also gained his military pilot’s licence. Spain’s Prince Felipe is a qualified helicopter pilot, while Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon spent a year aboard missile torpedo boats and other vessels of the Royal Norwegian Navy.

The absence of war in Western Europe for over six decades has helped ensure that none of those mentioned above have been involved in anything more dangerous than exercises. Prince Andrew, the second son of Queen Elizabeth II, is the exception: he served for twenty-two years in the Royal Navy, and when Britain set out to reclaim the Falkland Islands from Argentina in 1982, the Prince was a member of the task force.

The question of how much danger members of the royal family can be exposed to still remains a sensitive one, especially in Britain, which in the years since the Falklands has been involved in a number of military interventions and peacekeeping missions ranging from Bosnia and Kosovo to Afghanistan and Iraq. While Andrew has long since returned to civilian life, his nephews William and Harry are both serving officers.

It was initially planned to send Harry to Iraq but, much to the young Prince’s frustration, General Sir Richard Dannatt, head of the British army, announced in May 2007 that it would be too risky, as it would turn the Prince and his comrades-in-arms in the Household Cavalry into too much of a target for insurgents. Deeply disappointed, Harry considered leaving, but agreed to stay on to retrain as a battlefield air controller. Several months later a plan was hatched: the Prince would be sent to Afghanistan, but in conditions of absolute secrecy. In an extraordinary arrangement, the editors of Britain’s major newspapers and broadcasting organizations were told of the plan but signed an agreement to maintain a news blackout. It was the Queen who told Harry of his mission.

That December, the Prince, who had just turned twenty-three, was deployed to Helmand, spending time at bases deep in a Taliban-infiltrated area in the far south of the province. Although his work meant he was in regular radio contact with pilots from several countries, they knew him only by his call sign. Then, after just over two months, his secret posting was revealed in two little-noticed articles in an Australian magazine. On 28th February the Drudge Report, the American website best known for revealing Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky, broke the news to the world. Harry was immediately recalled to Britain for his own safety.

Despite its abrupt ending, the Prince’s posting appeared to have been a success, especially in the way it allowed him to serve alongside other officers. “It’s very nice to be a normal person for once,” he declared in a television interview that was recorded in Afghanistan and broadcast after his cover was blown. “I think this is about as normal as ‌I’m ever going to get.”5

This desire, on the part not just of Harry but of the army, for him to be treated as much as possible like an ordinary officer is a familiar one. But it is difficult to achieve, because princes will often have official royal duties that they will have to discharge while in the service. Various aspects of Harry’s and his elder brother William’s military service have brought this into sharp relief. In the early years, commentators questioned how the party-loving pair, although supposedly full-time officers, were able to spend so much time on the dance floors of fashionable London clubs. Further embarrassment came after it emerged that William used a Royal Air Force helicopter on which he was training in April 2008 to pick up his brother in London and then fly to the Isle of Wight to attend a stag party for his cousin, Peter Phillips. Nor was this an isolated incident: William reportedly made use of other training flights at the time to practise landings in a field owned by the parents of his future wife, Kate Middleton, to attend a wedding in Northumberland and to fly over Highgrove, his father’s estate.

The Ministry of Defence initially justified William’s flight to the stag party as an exercise that “tested his new skills to the limit”. This was not the whole story, however. Republic, a republican pressure group, used the Freedom of Information of Act to demand the release of internal documents to get to the truth. Not only had the nine training flights cost taxpayers £86,434, it also emerged that the Prince’s station commander had not been told about the “true nature” of the flights and would certainly not have approved the one to the Isle of Wight if he had known. Several senior officers were taken to task over the affair – as was William himself.

Military helicopters were a sensitive issue at the time, because of the acute shortage of them being suffered by the armed forces fighting in Afghanistan. What looked to have been a deliberate attempt to cover up the incident only added to the embarrassment both for the royal family and the government.