‌Chapter 9

‌Marrying into the Family

Any message that is received from beyond the grave has a particular poignancy, but the posthumous confession made by Prince Bernhard, the German-born consort of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, in December 2004 was an especially dramatic one. During the late 1990s, under conditions of great secrecy, Bernhard, then well into his eighties, had given a series of interviews to the journalist Martin van Amerongen, the editor of the weekly De Groene Amsterdammer and an avowed republican. There was one important precondition for their meeting: that the interview be published only after Bernhard’s death. Its contents were to prove explosive.

Bernhard, who died at the age of ninety-three, outliving his wife by nine months, was a celebrated bon viveur and lover of fast cars, planes and women, who enjoyed considerable popularity in his adoptive homeland, largely thanks to his heroic role during the Second World War and his subsequent founding of the World Wildlife Fund and peacetime role as a champion of Dutch business. A shadow had been cast over the latter part of his life, however, by claims that during the 1970s he had taken a one-million-dollar bribe from the Lockheed Corporation, a US aeroplane manufacturer, in exchange for providing contacts and helping the firm win a contract from the Dutch government. Such was the weight of evidence against him that the Prince had been forced to resign his business, charitable, political and military posts. Yet he had steadfastly refused to admit his guilt.

In his interview with van Amerongen, published on 3rd December, two days after his death, however, Bernhard finally confessed that he had indeed taken the money. “I had earned so much money that I didn’t need that million from Lockheed,” he said. “How can I have been so stupid?” Most of it, he claimed, he had given away, but he knew this would make little difference. “I have accepted that the word Lockheed will be carved ‌on my tombstone,” he declared.1

That was not the only secret Bernhard had kept up his sleeve. It had long been rumoured that, besides his four daughters with Juliana, he had fathered another daughter, Alexia, in 1967 by Hélène Grinda, a French socialite and fashion model. But Alexia, it now emerged, had not been the only fruit of his extramarital dalliances.

In another series of interviews, this time with de Volkskrant, published in a twenty-four-page special three days after his funeral, the Prince revealed that he had had another daughter, Alicia, in the 1950s, at a time when his marriage with Juliana was going through a crisis. Bernhard declined to give more details – beyond that the daughter had been an accident and was now living in America. It subsequently emerged that her mother had been a German pilot based in Mexico, with whom Bernhard had had a long affair.

But was there also a third daughter? In August 2011, Mildred Zijlstra, born in February 1946, was named in a book as another of Bernhard’s illegitimate children. De Vrouwen van Prins Bernhard by Marc van der Linden, a Dutch royal expert, claimed Zijlstra’s mother had been a member of the resistance group Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten – and became one of the many women who became pregnant out of wedlock in the months immediately after the end of the Second World War. The girl was adopted and did not start questioning her background until she had children of her own. It was only then, the book claimed, that Zijlstra first found her biological mother and then learnt the identity of her alleged royal father. Van der Linden did not offer hard proof of the allegation, only statements from Zijlstra’s mother and friends of the family – but it was enough for the Dutch media to seize on the story, even though not everyone was convinced.

Being married to a queen or, indeed, a king is not an easy task – especially for someone uncomfortable with a status subordinate to that of his or her spouse. Yet while other consorts have been prepared to adapt to such a role, Bernhard was a far more uncompromising, larger-than-life figure – which largely explains his downfall. So who was this German prince and how did his life come to be so mired in scandal?

Queen Wilhelmina began the search for a suitable husband for her daughter when Juliana was twenty-six, but it was not easy: the successful candidate had to be a Protestant and meet the high standards of the strictly religious Dutch court. The future Edward VIII and his younger brother, the Duke of Kent, were among those cited as possibles, but nothing came of the idea. It was then during a visit to the Winter Olympics in Bavaria, chaperoned, of course, by her mother, that Juliana met Bernhard Leopold Friedrich Eberhard Julius Kurt Karl Gottfried Peter zu Lippe-Biesterfeld, to give him his full name, the man she would marry.

The couple became unofficially engaged during a meeting at the Weissenburg-Bad hotel in western Switzerland, twenty miles from Gstaad, presided over by Wilhelmina. The terms of their union were set out in a mixture of business contract and early prenuptial agreement that stipulated, in detail, what Bernhard could or could not do, how much money he would be given by the state and how their children should be educated. The Treaty of Weissenburg, as it became known, even set out when the engagement should be made public and contained the requirement that Bernhard give up his job with IG Farben in Paris and get a job with a Dutch bank. When it came to her daughter’s future, Queen Wilhelmina was determined not to leave anything to chance.

In the event, the announcement was brought forward because of fears the press would find out; Wilhelmina broke the news to her subjects in a radio broadcast on 8th September 1936. “I fully approve my daughter’s choice,” she announced, “and consider it a wise one, seeing the excellent qualities which my future son-in-law possesses.” Juliana and Bernhard followed her on air. They married the following January in The Hague.

Bernhard proved a controversial choice; relations between the Netherlands and Germany were very different from how they had been in 1901 when Wilhelmina had married Heinrich of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Juliana’s father. The Dutch Nazi party was delighted. Liberal opinion and the country’s sizeable Jewish opinion was not. “It would be better if the future Queen had found a consort in some democratic country rather than in the ‌Third Reich,” commented Het Volk.2

Matters were not helped when the former Kaiser, allowed by Wilhelmina after the First World War to go into exile in the Dutch town of Doorn, sent his congratulations, while Hitler suggested the union was a sign of closer ties between the two countries. Bernhard’s past employment with chemical giant IG Farben, whose reputation was permanently damaged by its association with Hitler and the Nazis, counted against him. So too did his brief membership of the SS, although years later he said he had joined only to be able to continue his studies.

The couple married in January 1937 in a civil ceremony in The Hague Town Hall – with a blessing in the city’s Great Church (St Jacobskerk) – and moved into the Soestdijk Palace in Baarn. Their first child, the future Queen Beatrix, was born in January 1938. Irene, Margriet and Maria Christina, known as Marijke, followed over the next nine years.

As has already been seen, the Dutch royal family – and Bernhard among them – emerged favourably war, and by 4th September 1948, when Wilhelmina abdicated in favour of her daughter, Bernhard was already beginning to carve out a role for himself. The position of Inspector General was created for him, and he served as advisor and non-executive director of a number of companies and institutions, becoming an informal ambassador extraordinaire for Dutch business. In 1954 he was instrumental in setting up what was to become the Bilderberg Group, a forum for the business elite and intellectuals of the Western world.

At the same time, Bernhard’s marriage was coming under strain after Juliana became increasingly influenced by Greet Hofmans, a faith healer who had claimed to be able to cure Marijke, who was born almost blind. Hofmans, who was also a militant pacifist, did not succeed, but she developed a close relationship with the Queen, who became sympathetic to her views.

At a time when the Cold War was at its peak, this did not go down well with Prince Bernhard or the government, who were in favour of more armament to counter the threat of communism. The affair turned into a full-blown constitutional crisis in 1956, when Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, published an article ‌about divisions in the palace.3 A commission was set up and Hofmans banished. The result was considered a victory for Bernhard – who, it subsequently emerged, had leaked the story himself.

It was about this time that the Prince fathered Alicia von Bielefeld – who was to learn her father’s identity only seventeen years later. Juliana and Bernhard came close to divorce – but eventually pulled back from the brink, realizing the damage it would inflict on the monarchy. Yet Bernhard was continuing to stray, having affairs, including the one that led to the birth of his second illegitimate daughter, Alexia, in 1967.

Juliana appears to have taken such infidelities in her stride. According to Alicia, Bernhard revealed her existence to his wife in the mid-1970s; from 1994 onwards she would visit the royal couple at the Italian home where they spent their summer holidays as well as the Soestdijk Palace. She called Juliana a “nice, sweet woman; very straightforward, too”. When Alicia was with Bernhard, she had to say that he was a friend of her father’s. “When others were there, I couldn’t call him dad,” she added. The contrast with the relationship between Albert II of Belgium and his illegitimate daughter, Delphine Boël, could not have been greater.

Bernhard’s indiscretions outside the bedroom were to prove a more serious matter, however. In December 1975, Carl Kotchian, a vice-chairman of Lockheed, gave testimony to a Senate sub-committee in which he admitted paying a one-million-dollar bribe to a “high Dutch government official”. Ernest F. Hauser, a former company employee, was more explicit: the money, he said, had gone to none other than Prince Bernhard to guarantee sales to Holland of Lockheed’s F-104 Starfighter, a supersonic interceptor aircraft.

As inspector general of the Dutch armed forces and a member of the board of Fokker Aircraft, which had a licence to assemble the planes in the Netherlands, the Prince was clearly in a key position. Yet the allegation seemed an unlikely one: Bernhard had a tax-free salary of £190,000 a year and a private fortune estimated at £7.5 million, while his wife was one of the richest women in the world. There was also his presidency of the World Wildlife Fund, his role in setting up the Bilderberg Conference and his membership of some three hundred national and international boards and committees. The suggestion that he should stoop to take a bribe seemed unthinkable.

Bernhard, however, was reluctant to respond to the allegation. Rather than denying it, he simply refused to address it. “If you say four words, ‘It is not true,’ I will print it,” declared a reporter from Newsweek who confronted him. “I cannot say that,” Bernhard replied. “I will not say it; I am standing above such things.” The explanation for his behaviour was simple: “He thought he was a nineteenth-century prince, that he could do whatever he wanted, that he was above the law,” said an associate of Joop den Uyl, who as prime minister from May 1973 until December 1977 had ‌to deal with the crisis.4

Such a tactic did not work in the twentieth-century Netherlands, however. A commission of “three wise men” was set up and gradually the story began to emerge: Bernhard, it appeared, had been paid $300,000 by Lockheed in 1960, followed by the same amount again in 1961 and $400,000 in 1962. The money was said to have been channelled through Colonel Alexis Panchulidzev, a former member of the Tsarist Imperial Guard, who for many years had been a companion of Bernhard’s mother. Kotchian and Daniel Haughton, another Lockheed official, were in no doubt the money had been paid; they told the US Senate committee they were “absolutely” sure of it.

It is difficult to overestimate the severity of the accusations against Bernhard and its implications for Juliana and the House of Orange. Determined to fight both for her husband and for the royal house, Juliana said she would consider abdication if her husband was not cleared of the accusations against him – something neither she, the Dutch people nor the prime minister wanted.

In the meantime, Bernhard faced more allegations: it was claimed he received another $100,000 from Lockheed in 1968 after a meeting with a company representative on a Utrecht golf course. The Prince, it was alleged, had also paid a bribe of more than a million dollars to Juan Perón, the Argentinian president, to secure a one-hundred-million-dollar order for Dutch railway equipment. As part of the deal, there was also some expensive jewellery for Evita Perón and a deluxe private train for the pair.

Questions were also asked about the Prince’s financial and personal relationship with Tibor Rosenbaum, a Swiss banker, whose Geneva-based International Credit Bank was accused of being linked with organized crime, before it went broke in 1975. The previous year Bernhard had sold Warmelo, a castle belonging to him in eastern Holland, to a company owned by the bank for well under the market price, prompting suspicions in the Dutch press that he had squirrelled away some of the money.

As far as the media on both sides of the Atlantic was concerned, it was open season on Bernhard, whose behaviour seemed rather out of place in the Calvinist Dutch court. In a report in April 1976, Newsweek claimed the Prince would “sometimes mix his old ‘drinking pals’ with the nabobs of European business” – a blend that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. “On one bright morning, I found myself on his private plane en route for Paris, with the champagne already flowing freely on board,” a prominent Dutch businessman told the magazine. “After we arrived, we went to a plush hotel where more cold champagne and oysters were waiting. At eleven a.m. I was seeing stars, and at two p.m. I passed out.” The businessman also recalls a supply of attractive women, who, he claimed, were a ‌frequent feature of Bernhard’s parties.5

The findings that the “three wise men” presented to Prime Minister den Uyl were damning. Despite overwhelming evidence against Bernhard, the Queen insisted that he be cleared. For den Uyl this was impossible, however, not least because of all the testimony on a record against him in the United States. When Juliana threatened to abdicate, den Uyl countered by warning her that Bernhard would then probably face prosecution – which would have been the ultimate disgrace for the House of Orange.

And so a deal was struck: in August 1976, the “three wise men” released their report, which immediately became a best-seller in the Netherlands. The Prince’s actions, they wrote, had “damaged the national interest”. He had been open to “dishonourable requests and offers” and “was the intended recipient of the one million dollars [from Lockheed], which was meant for his benefit alone”. It also suggested that some of the many corporate donations given to Bernhard for charitable purposes never found their way to their ultimate destination. “To sum up,” the report said, “the commission has come to the conclusion that HRH the Prince, in the conviction that his position was unassailable and his judgement was not to be influenced, originally entered much too lightly into transactions which were bound to create the impression that he was susceptible to favours.”

The day the report was made public, Bernhard resigned his various posts. On the insistence of den Uyl, he also issued a statement, but it was carefully worded and admitted the minimum. His relationship with Lockheed, he admitted, had “developed along the wrong lines” and he had failed to observe the caution “which is required in my vulnerable position as a consort of the Queen and Prince of the Netherlands”. He stopped short, however, of any admission that he had actually received the one million dollars. That was going to have to wait more than another quarter of a century.

Although no other royal spouses in recent times have been embroiled in such murky matters as Bernhard, the role of male consort has proved a difficult one, not least because of the relatively small number of role models – a result of laws of succession that have either prevented queens from reigning in their own right or have put them on the throne only when they have had no brother. Nor are they likely to become more common, at least for one more generation, despite the drive towards equal primogeniture led by the Swedes. At the time of writing, that country’s Crown Princess Victoria is the world’s only female heir apparent.

Britain has had the most women on the throne, since unlike the majority of the Continental monarchies its rules of succession have never been governed by Salic law. Previous incumbents have essentially made of the role what they wanted. In the sixteenth century, Mary Tudor’s husband Philip of Spain rarely visited Britain at all, because he had a prosperous kingdom of his own that occupied much of his attention. Just over a century later, William of Orange, who declared he could never “hold on to anything by apron strings”, gently elbowed Mary Stuart, his wife and co-sovereign, aside in order to rule alone. By contrast, Prince George of Denmark, the husband of Queen Anne, who reigned in the first decade of the eighteenth century, took almost no interest whatsoever in the affairs of state of his adoptive country.

Far more vivid in British memories is Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, who, in a reflection of the traditions of royal intermarriage, was the great-great-grandfather of both Queen Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip. Although devoted to his wife, Albert found it difficult to play second fiddle to her. “I am very happy and contented, but the difficulty in filling my place with the proper dignity is that I am only the husband, not the master in the house,” he complained in a letter to William von Lowenstein in May ‌1840, shortly after his marriage.6

Matters were not helped by Albert’s low standing with the British public, who were not impressed by the impoverished and undistinguished German state from which he came, which was barely larger than an English county. Parliament refused to make him a peer – partly because of anti-German feeling and also out of a desire to exclude him from exercising any political role. The besotted Victoria wanted him to be crowned king (or king consort), but Lord Melbourne, her avuncular prime minister, urged her not to. It was only in June 1857, after he had spent seventeen years as HRH Prince Albert, that he was formally granted the title of Prince Consort by his wife. Albert was also given a relatively modest annuity of thirty thousand pounds – substantially less than the fifty-thousand-pound pension that had been awarded to his uncle Léopold. Albert was aware of the wariness of his wife’s subjects towards him and acted in an appropriately self-effacing manner. “The position of prince consort requires that the husband should entirely sink his own individual existence in that of his wife,” he wrote.

Over time, however, Albert succeeded in carving himself out a role: he ran the Queen’s household, estates and office, was heavily involved with the organization of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and also adopted many public causes, such as educational reform and the abolition of slavery. At a time when the monarch could still conduct diplomacy independently of her government, he carried the key to Victoria’s dispatch boxes, serving as advisor and confidant and drafter of her state orders. “He is king to all intents and ‌purposes,” one disgruntled critic muttered.7 Yet he also helped the development of Britain’s constitutional monarchy by persuading Victoria to show less partisanship in her parliament – even though he actively disagreed with the interventionist “gunboat” diplomacy of Lord Palmerston while he was foreign secretary.

Recent times have seen two other royal consorts who, to varying degrees, have struggled with the same problems as their predecessors: Prince Claus, the German-born husband of Juliana’s daughter, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and Prince Henrik, the French diplomat who married Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.

Despite the outburst of anti-German feeling prompted by his marriage, Prince Claus was to prove a popular member of the Dutch royal family. He became involved in trade and industry as well as the preservation of historic buildings, nature conservation and the environment. More importantly, in April 1967, he and Juliana produced a baby boy, Willem-Alexander, the first male Dutch royal in one hundred and sixteen years. As the guns boomed one hundred and one times, the country went crazy. Bells tolled, bars were packed with revellers and ten thousand people signed a register at the Soestdijk Palace. The animosity towards their wedding just the previous year seemed forgotten. The couple went on to have two more sons, Johan Friso and Constantijn.

Claus displayed a humility that appealed to the unassuming Dutch, which was a sharp contrast with the flamboyance of his father-in-law. In 1997 he asked the public to refrain from marking his birthday because it coincided with the funeral of the Princess of Wales. At an African fashion show the following year he expressed admiration for Nelson Mandela’s casual style of dress. In what he called the Declaration of Amsterdam, he ripped off his own necktie and tossed it at his wife’s feet, calling it “a snake around my neck”. His act briefly touched off an open-necked fashion craze among normally conservative Dutchmen, but the Prince was unable to escape royal decorum for good and, before long, was knotting his tie again.

Claus appears to have found it difficult to adjust to life as a royal consort, however, and suffered a serious nervous breakdown in the early 1980s. In later life he suffered a string of maladies, including Parkinson’s disease and prostate cancer, and had to have a kidney removed. Although well enough to attend Willem-Alexander’s wedding in February 2002, he spent the following few months in and out of intensive care with respiratory and heart problems. He died that October of Parkinson’s disease and pneumonia, aged seventy-six, his three sons at his bedside.

Denmark’s Prince Henrik also seems to have struggled to come to terms with his role as first gentleman in his adoptive land, claiming that the Danes have never accepted him. The French accent – and his preference for his native tongue, with which he speaks to the Queen – counted against Henrik in the eyes of many of his subjects. So too did his robust attitudes towards parenting; on one occasion he urged parents to “bring up children like dogs”, on the grounds that “both need a strong hand” – a sentiment that may have been accepted in French aristocratic circles, but did not go down well in liberal Denmark where corporal punishment has long been discouraged. He was also unhappy about being financially dependent on his wife and in 1984 asked that he too receive an official allowance, which he was eventually granted.

Henrik reflected his frustration with remarkable frankness in his memoirs, Destin oblige, published in 1996. “I said recently that to be prince consort requires the sensitivity of a seismograph under the skin of a rhinoceros,” he wrote. “To be tough, but to feel the slightest vibration. To expect to be the ‌preferred target of any head-hunter.”8

These frustrations came to a head in an extraordinary outburst in January 2002, when Queen Margrethe was forced to miss the annual exchange of greetings with the foreign ambassadors at the staterooms of Christiansborg Castle, the Danish parliament, after falling and breaking two ribs. Henrik hosted the social part of the event, but Søren Haslund-Christensen, the lord chamberlain, arranged it so that it was Crown Prince Frederik who replied in French to the speech by the doyen of the diplomatic corps.

Henrik was livid, especially when he read the praise that the Danish newspapers heaped on his son the next day. The court was a social event where he and Margrethe received greetings, he felt, and therefore he should have replaced the Queen in her absence. Unusually, however, he did not try to keep his feelings to himself.

A couple of weeks afterwards, Henrik left Denmark for France, where he attended a music festival before going home to his estate to oversee production of that year’s vintage. While he was there the palace agreed that he should grant an interview to Bodil Cath, the respected royal correspondent of BT, a Danish tabloid. Completely at ease on his home turf, he vented his frustrations with the way he had been relegated overnight from second to third in the hierarchy. “I feel that after more than thirty years’ service I have been put on ice,” Henrik said. “I have been trying to do everything in my power for my country. I am happy in Denmark. I care very much for Denmark. Why this constant degradation of me? Why this need to disappoint me? Why step on my toes and make me lose my self-respect? Something like this would not happen in the United States,” he added. “There you have the expression ‘The First Lady’; why not ‘The First Man’? The First Man is me, not my son.” The only reaction from the royal family was provided by Crown Prince Frederik, who told the paper: “My father is not well at the moment. ‌He needs to remain calm.”9

Henrik’s comments caused a media storm. The Danish television news led with his remarks, and other newspapers weighed in with their analysis. The Amalienborg Palace responded to the blizzard of press enquiries with a simple “No comment” but swiftly shifted into damage-control mode. The Queen and Frederik, who had been in the Netherlands at the wedding of Crown Prince Willem-Alexander, flew immediately to France to be with Henrik. Their second son, Joachim, followed soon afterwards.

The next day, Henrik posed with Margrethe and Frederik outside the chateau for photographers. “As you can see with your own eyes, we are very happy to be together,” Henrik told them. No questions were allowed.

Predictably, this was not enough to calm the media. “The Prince’s comments are incomprehensible, and we need a more profound explanation of what is happening now,” declared the conservative daily Jyllands-Posten. Speculation was rife that the couple were heading for a divorce. Amid the torrent of criticism, it was up to Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the prime minister, to defend the Prince and voice appreciation for his work for Danish society. Henrik’s “period of reflection” over, he finally returned home the following week. The divorce never happened.

The Queen provided her view of events in Margrethe, an authorized biography made up of a series of interviews she gave to journalist Annelise Bistrup, which was published in 2005. “At times it has been more difficult for my husband than I realized,” she admitted. “And I did not help him sufficiently. I have not been aware of how best to help.” She insisted, however, that the couple had overcome the crisis. “When you have been married for so many years as we have, you should be able to cope with some rough seas once in a while,” she said. “Actually, I think we have fewer crises than many other married couples. This particular thing had a happy ending. I think my ‌husband feels the same way.”10

Now in his seventies, Henrik has suffered increasingly from ill health. A lover of food and fine wine, he put on weight after a health scare prompted him to give up smoking in 1997. Ten years later, a royal trip to South Korea had to be cut short after he went down with bronchitis on the flight out there. Arthritis has forced him to cut down on two of his passions – sculpting and playing the piano – and he has also given up horse riding. He devotes himself increasingly to writing poems, in French of course, which he reads at private gatherings. Some are apparently quite erotic. “He certainly does not beat around the bush when he writes,” said a friend who had attended several such gatherings. “It is not that he uses dirty words, but yet, you are in no doubt of the meaning of his poem. His language ‌is very flowery, very verbose.”11

Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, provides a model for the modern consort – even though he too found it difficult to adapt to his position during the early years of his marriage. As long as his father-in-law George VI was alive, the Duke of Edinburgh, as he became known when he married, was able to continue his career in the Royal Navy. Stationed in Malta from 1949, he spent much of his time away at sea.

The Duke’s life changed for good in February 1952, however, when Elizabeth became Queen and he was required to return to Britain to be at her side. Her elevation also confronted him with what he was to perceive as a series of slights – the first over the name of the royal house. Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, who had played such an important role in bringing the couple together, suggested the House of Windsor should be renamed the House of Mountbatten on the grounds that Elizabeth, had she been any other woman, would typically have taken her husband’s surname – or at the very least ensured that it was carried by their children. Elizabeth’s paternal grandmother, Queen Mary, was appalled, and told Winston Churchill, recently returned to power as prime minister, who advised Elizabeth to issue a proclamation declaring the royal house was to remain the House of Windsor.

The Duke was angry. “I am nothing but a bloody amoeba,” he complained. “I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his ‌name to his own children.”12 In a concession to her husband, the Queen did, however, announce that the Duke was to have “place, pre-eminence and precedence” next to her “on all occasions and in all meetings, except where otherwise provided by Act of Parliament”.

By nature, Philip loved to be in command, whether of a Royal Navy ship, a polo team or his own family. That could no longer be the case now his wife had become Queen. His role was to support her in her duties as sovereign, accompanying her to ceremonies such as the state opening of parliament, to state dinners and on tours abroad. “Until that point, I was head of the family,” he wrote later. “Within the house, whatever we did, it was together. I naturally filled the principal position. People used to come and ask me what to do. After the King’s death the whole ‌thing changed very, very considerably.”13

Matters were not helped by the attitude of the royal household, ministers and other members of the establishment, for whom Philip, with his foreign origins, was something of an outsider. For some, he was too Teutonic – not a helpful attribute in country that had just spent six years at war with Germany. Some members of the aristocracy nicknamed him “Phil the Greek”.

Lord Charteris, who became Elizabeth’s first private secretary in 1949, suggested Philip had not made things easier with his own attitude. “I think Philip might have tried a little harder to accommodate the views of the royal household,” he wrote. “Because of the way he was treated, especially before his marriage, he had a certain amount of prejudice against the old order. He thought it was stuffy and needed shaking up. He became the consort of the sovereign as opposed to the husband of a princess, with a certain amount of antipathy and impatience. ‌He sulked quite a lot.”14

Elizabeth quickly realized she would have to find a way of keeping her hyperactive husband occupied; so she put him in charge of modernizing Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and Sandringham, as well as making him chief ranger of Windsor Great Park. Philip began with Buckingham Palace: he set to with gusto, coming up with a flurry of proposals to update both the structures of the buildings and the way they were run. Not surprisingly, many of his plans were blocked by staff, but he succeeded in pushing some through. Lower, false ceilings were put into some of the rooms, the central heating was upgraded and an intercom system installed. There were also mass sackings and redundancies among the staff, many of whom were pensioned off.

While the Duke makes a point of walking two steps behind his wife in public, theirs is apparently a far more traditional relationship when they are alone together. “They have worked out an interesting modus operandi,” says one senior royal official. “In public, as you might expect, the Queen is very much in the lead, and the jokes about him always being one step behind her are entirely accurate. But in private, he is very much in the lead. He takes the initiative on their conversations and what they will do. So their private and public worlds are entirely different.” Gyles Brandreth, author of the joint biography Philip and Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage, who knows the couple well, agrees: “They are typical of their generation. She wears the crown but he wears the trousers. Interestingly, she doesn’t really feel safe except ‌with the Duke of Edinburgh.”15

Sir Michael Oswald, an old friend of the Queen, claims the royal couple also share a sense of humour, teasing each other when they are away from the spotlight. “It helps them deal with stressful situations,” he says. “It is part of their mutual support, part of their camaraderie.” This is confirmed by Brandreth, who recalls being in a car behind theirs on the night of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002 and seeing them having an attack of the giggles. “You don’t think of the Queen really letting go, but she was actually rocking back and forth with laughter,” he says. “It was a wonderful sight. They will have been sharing ‌some anecdote about the day.”16

Unlike many of their royal predecessors, the couple apparently share a bed, even if they have necessarily always spent a considerable time away from each other – which has helped fuel persistent rumours about Philip’s philandering. There seems no doubt the Duke enjoyed a number of romantic dalliances during his courtship with Elizabeth. Young, good-looking and a prize catch, he was sought after by beautiful women and reciprocated their attentions. After the end of the war and his return he was a fixture on the London party scene, often together with Mike Parker, who had been a close friend since their time in the navy together. Together they would frequent the capital’s drinking clubs and nightclubs.

The partying continued after they married, although no convincing evidence has been produced for any of his supposed liaisons. Nor, following royal tradition, has the Prince ever responded to the claims – to the apparent frustration of some of the women concerned. Pat Kirkwood, an actress who lived for six decades under the suspicion of having been his mistress after they spent an evening together in 1948, wrote bitterly to Philip in May 1993, “I think if there had been some support from your direction, the matter could have been squashed years ago instead of having to battle ‌a sea of sharks single-handed.”17

Pressed on the subject of his marital infidelity, the Duke replied, jokingly: “For the past forty years I have never moved anywhere without a policeman… so how the hell could I get away with anything like that?”

In some respects matters have been somewhat simpler for those women who have married into the royal family – the job of a queen (or queen to be) has traditionally been to act as an elegant accompaniment to her husband on public occasions, to bear his children and supervise their upbringing. Provided she gave birth to the all-important son, the queen’s position, in most cases, was assured.

In most cases drawn from foreign royal houses, these women have been obliged to adapt to life in a different country with a different language and culture and within a court with different traditions from those they knew at home. A long way from friends and relatives, they often suffered badly from homesickness; until the building of the railways and invention of the aeroplane, visits home were arduous and rare. Matters were not helped by the jealousy – and often downright hostility – that they encountered from their new compatriots. Their life would became even more uncomfortable when a shift in alliances meant their adoptive country found itself at war with the land of the birth. And then there was the humiliation that many suffered on account of their husbands’ serial infidelities. Although a brave few took their husbands to task – or took lovers of their own – most had little alternative but to suffer in silence.

Désirée, the eccentric French wife of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, founder of Sweden’s current royal dynasty, disliked the country so much that for more than a decade after her husband became crown prince in 1810 she refused to live in the country at all, claiming that she caught cold at mention of the word “Stockholm”. (Although her pursuit of Duc de Richelieu, the French prime minister, was another reason for her refusal to go north.) A century later, the English-born Queen Maud, wife of King Haakon VII of Norway, also spent much of her time on the British royal family’s Sandringham estate rather than in chilly Norway.

When Princess Alexandra of Denmark married the future King Edward VII of Britain in 1863, she was forbidden from bringing with her any of her ladies-in-waiting; it was argued that they could be plotting among themselves in Danish and no one else would be able to understand them. Given its size and splendour, the British court was also daunting to someone used to the smaller, cosier Danish one. Alexandra’s isolation was increased by her deafness, which got worse as the years went on, and by her husband’s many mistresses.

Like many queens before and after her, Alexandra’s response was to devote herself to her five children – and her pets. In the garden of Marlborough House, her London home until Edward became king, are the graves of her three dogs, Tiny, Muff and Joss, and of Bonny, her “favourite rabbit”. For Alexandra, as for her siblings scattered across Europe, the high point of the year was the regular family gatherings at the Fredensborg Palace presided over by her father Christian IX and her mother Louise.

In more recent times, queens have been able to play a more active role. The gradual transformation of the monarch’s function from a political one to a representational one, which was largely complete by the second half of the twentieth century, has put more emphasis on the royal family as a unit – turning the queen from someone subordinate to the king into an equal partner with an independent public profile and an identity of her own.

Queen Ingrid, the mother of the current Danish Queen, Margrethe II, did much to modernize the monarchy through the positive influence she exerted on her husband, Frederik IX, in the years after their marriage in 1935. “Queen Ingrid was one of the last royals from the world of yesterday, but also the one who, together with King Frederik IX, created the modern Danish monarchy as we know it today,” claims Trond Norén Isaksen, a Norwegian historian and expert on Scandinavian royalty. “King Frederik IX was the first non-political monarch in Denmark, and what he and Queen Ingrid did was to transform the monarchy into an institution which, although not democratic itself, lives in harmony with the democracy.” As Isaksen argues, Ingrid also helped establish the concept of kingship “as a partnership between ‌the King and the Queen”.18

Such a partnership was already a given when King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden married Silvia Sommerlath in June 1976. The German-born Queen had little chance to ease herself gently into her role, as her husband, unlike the other European monarchs of his generation, was already king when they married. Thus she was faced almost immediately with the need not just to secure the succession – which she did admirably, by bearing two daughters and a son within the first six years of marriage – but also to fulfil the representational functions required of a queen. In addition she has plunged into charity work, with special emphasis on children and on the disabled. In 1999 she founded the World Childhood Foundation, which works towards better living conditions for children across the world. She also chairs the Royal Wedding Fund, which supports research in sports and athletics for disabled young people. The Queen has studied sign language in order to be able to communicate more effectively with those with impaired hearing.

Norway’s Queen Sonja, by contrast, had a considerable time to prepare for her role. It was only in June 1991, more than two decades after she married, that her husband Harald became King. Yet it was not easy for her either: for a start, she was moving into a very male-dominated environment. Her father-in-law Olav V had been widowed before he came to the throne in 1957. The only other queen since the establishment of the Norwegian monarchy in 1905 had been Olav’s mother, the British-born Queen Maud, who lived in a very different society and also predeceased her husband by nineteen years.

As the product of a middle-class Norwegian family, Sonja had to contend with the snobbery of some court officials who, like King Olav, would have preferred Harald to have married a foreign princess. She also faced a long struggle to be allowed to set up her own office. And then, when her husband became king, she had to put her foot down with Jo Benkow, the president of the Storting, the Norwegian parliament, in order to be allowed to accompany him to the annual state openings of parliament.

Sonja’s role has been to expand the royal family’s area of activities to reflect, in part, her interest in the arts and culture, while making sure not to overshadow her husband or get in the way of his constitutional tasks. This has helped by her considerable energy – which led to the nickname “Turbo Sonja”. She has also been active in the inevitable charitable ventures, like Queen Silvia, with special emphasis on the most vulnerable in society: the young, the disadvantaged, refugees and immigrants and people with psychiatric problems.

The Norwegian queen has been a strong influence on her husband too. King Harald was effusive in praise of his wife when they celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary in August 2008 with a cruise in the Adriatic aboard the royal yacht Norge, accompanied by their children, their children’s spouses and their grandchildren. “I was a completely different person when I married forty years ago,” he said to Norwegian reporters as he gazed fondly at his wife. “Apart from everything else I was extremely shy, but with her ‌help, I got over it.”19

Just as Sonja struggled initially with her role, so Britain’s Princess Diana found that becoming a member of a royal family, with rituals and traditions that have become established over the centuries, can be daunting even for someone who is not facing a language or cultural barrier. In Diana’s case the challenge was made greater by the very messy and public collapse of her marriage with Prince Charles. Unlike generations of previous royal brides who suffered in silence, Diana proved ready to go public with her grievances – with highly damaging results, for herself as much as for the British royal family.

But Diana broke the mould in a more positive way too. After having produced the requisite heir and spare with commendable speed, she fashioned for herself a role that went beyond that of mere consort – becoming a public figure in her own right. Whether hugging HIV-positive children or lepers in a hospital ward or campaigning against Angolan landmines, she threw herself into a range of charitable causes – arousing the jealousy of her increasingly estranged husband.

Diana’s opposite numbers on the Continent have learnt from her example, identifying themselves with causes for which their backgrounds appear to suit them. Crown Princess Máxima of the Netherlands has become involved in the issue of providing finance for countries in the developing world, even being appointed the UN Secretary General’s Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance. Mette-Marit of Norway has worked on international development and HIV-AIDS as well as youth and mental-health issues, while Denmark’s Crown Princess Mary has set up the Mary Fund, which aims to help adults, children and families who are “socially isolated or excluded”.

But what fate awaits the queen when her king dies? Higher female than male life expectancy – accentuated by a tendency by many monarchs to marry younger women – has meant most queens have outlived their husbands, leaving them to live out their remaining days playing the largely undefined role of dowager queen or queen mother.

To some extent theirs is merely a more extreme form of the fate of any stay-at-home mother who has devoted her adult life to husband and family and then suddenly finds herself alone. Royal life brings some specific extra humiliations, however: the next monarch will almost certainly have married by then, forcing his mother-in-law to cede the glamour and prestige that comes from being “First Lady” to a woman in the bloom of youth. She will also most likely be obliged to leave the principal palace for more modest accommodation. The financial arrangements – although certainly more generous than those enjoyed by the majority of her subjects – will also most likely be scaled back.

Some, such as George VI’s wife Queen Elizabeth – mother of the current Queen Elizabeth II – more than rose to the challenge. Widowed in 1952 at the age of just fifty-one, the “Queen Mother”, as she became known, lived on for another half a century, becoming something of an institution. Partly thanks to her discretion – an interview she gave when she was twenty-two and newly engaged was the only one made public during her lifetime – and also her longevity, she established herself as the nation’s favourite grandmother. She also became close to her grandchildren. Such was the Queen Mother’s enduring appeal that when an authorized biography of her by William Shawcross was published in 2009 it jumped to the top of the best-seller list.

Queen Margrethe’s Swedish-born mother, Ingrid, also succeeded in redefining herself during her twenty-eight-year widowhood, especially as a surrogate mother for Crown Prince Frederik, whose own parents were often distant towards him during his childhood.

The position of Fabiola, the widow of King Baudouin of Belgium, has been more difficult, not least because she had no children of her own. Her husband’s untimely death and his succession by his younger brother, Albert, meant she had to give up her role not to her daughter but to her sister-in-law, Paola. While she was Queen, the conservative and deeply religious Fabiola was disapproving of Paola’s more flamboyant lifestyle. To find their roles suddenly reversed will have come as an uncomfortable shock.

In her old age Fabiola has also not been accorded the same reverence as Britain’s Queen Mother by the media. Questions have been asked about the extent of her allowance and size of her entourage, while she has suffered the ignominy of seeing at least one Belgian newspaper erroneously report her death. Bizarrely, she has also had anonymous threats against her life, including one in July 2009 by someone threatening to kill her with a crossbow. Fabiola’s response was to appear at Belgian National Day celebrations later that month waving an apple to the crowd – a witty demonstration of her unwillingness to be intimidated by any would-be William Tell. Yet such threats, repeated in early 2010, have undoubtedly weighed on her.