‌Chapter 14

‌Letting in the Light

Kathy Pauwels, the chic blonde forty-something presenter of the Belgian television programme Royalty, is having a good week. The day I meet her at the studios of VTM, the main Flemish commercial station, she has made the front pages of the Belgian newspapers. After some sleuthing, she has discovered that King Albert II has spent €1.5 million on buying two apartments and some garages in a luxurious complex in Ostende. Rumours had been flying for some time about the purchase, but Pauwels has managed to come up with the evidence: official documents naming the purchaser of the apartments as “king of the Belgians, Albert II Felix”. VTM ran it on the evening news, and this morning the papers are eagerly following up her scoop.

The story comes at a sensitive time for the Belgian royal family. It is September 2009 and the credit crunch is at its height. In his annual address to the nation on the eve of Belgian National Day on 21st July, Albert has described the crisis as raising “questions over the increasing materialism” of society. Yet in the weeks since he has rather lost his footing on the moral high ground after it emerged he has spent €4.6 million on a new yacht. And now yet another expensive purchase has been revealed.

It is only Thursday and Pauwels is not yet sure whether she and her small team will try to follow up the story for Royalty, which goes out for half an hour every Sunday at six p.m. Even without it the programme’s several hundred thousand viewers – not bad given a total Flemish population of six million people – can rely on the usual mixture of stories about the royal family and their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. Among other items will be an interview with Princess Astrid, the second child of King Albert II, on her twenty-five years of marriage, and a report from over the border in the Netherlands, where it is Prinsjesdag. The tone this week, as always, will be critical rather than fawning – not surprising given that the programme was edited until a few years ago by Pol van den Driessche, now a senator, who has made no secret of his republican views.

Pauwels likes to feel she brings the same qualities to the job as in her previous role as a news reporter. But she admits it can be a difficult balancing act: if she goes too far in criticizing the royal family, she risks upsetting the ardent monarchists in her audience, many of them middle-aged women.

A few miles away across Brussels, Anne Quevrin, an elegant dark-haired woman several years older than Pauwels, is also hard at work on her programme about royalty, Place Royale, which is broadcast at eight o’clock on Saturday night on RTL, the main French-language commercial station, drawing an audience of 600,000.

Belgium may have only one king but, thanks to the country’s division along linguistic lines, it has two of almost everything else – and that includes programmes on royalty. The difference is more than just one of language. Quevrin has a rather more respectful attitude to her subject. Her show, the first of its type in Europe, was launched in 1994, following the death of King Baudouin the previous year. A former political reporter, she believes her viewers want to see images of the lives of the royal family at work and has little time for “negative reports” about apartments or other such scandals. “What business of ours is what the King spends his money on?” she asks. “Our aim is to strengthen the institution of monarchy.” For that reason, Place Royale does not use paparazzi pictures and, unlike Royalty, it refrained from interviewing Delphine Boël, the King’s illegitimate daughter, the revelation of which in 1999 became a major news story. Indeed, Boël has only featured in her programme once – and that was when she was inadvertently caught on camera near Prince Laurent. Quevrin ceased presenting Place Royale the year after we met, but the programme’s attitude to royalty remained respectful.

The two programmes clearly know their respective audiences: their differing approaches reflect the divergence in attitude towards the royal family in the two parts of Belgium. While polls show the French speakers in the south are overwhelmingly in favour of monarchy, the Dutch-speaking north is more critical.

Yet it also reflects a more general paradox at the heart of all reporting of royal affairs, one that has become acute in the modern multimedia age. Are members of the royal family to be treated as part of a celebrity culture, whose foibles are to be ruthlessly exposed to the world? Or does their constitutional role mean they must be accorded more dignity than we would give to Madonna, Paris Hilton or Lady Gaga? And what of the institution itself? Should the media question the continued existence of monarchy or confine their criticism to the effectiveness or not with which members of the royal family carry out their duties?

This is not just a matter of deference: it can also have implications for the newspapers, magazines, TV shows or websites that feature the activities of the various royal families. Royalty is unlike celebrity in one important respect: while new singers, film stars and reality-show contestants can be easily replaced by others when we tire of them, royals are more permanent: only a few of them come along every generation. There is only one heir to the throne: devalue the brand too much and we risk killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

Matters were simpler in the days before mass media, when the only image the overwhelming majority of the population saw of their ruler was on a coin, statue or the occasional portrait. With the publication of pamphlets and newspapers came the first royal news – and also the beginnings of what was to become a love-hate relationship between palaces and the press.

In early nineteenth-century Britain, King George III was responsible for one of the first moves towards modern royal media management. Irritated at erroneous reports about movements by himself and his family, he instituted the Court Circular, an official record of royal engagements still published today. This did not prevent him from being cruelly lampooned by the caricaturists of the day, however.

His son, who succeeded him as George IV in 1820, was an even more attractive target for the fledgling media because of his lavish spending and sexual peccadilloes during his long period as Prince of Wales and then Regent. A further dimension was provided by his disastrous marriage to Caroline of Brunswick. In a foretaste of Princess Diana’s behaviour almost two centuries later, the then Princess of Wales was ready to make use of the press to get her side of the story into the public domain. Angry at being denied access to their daughter Charlotte, Caroline wrote a complaining letter to her husband and, when he didn’t respond, had it published on 10th February 1813 in the Morning Chronicle. In it she begged her husband to pity “the deep wounds which so cruel an arrangement inflicts on my feelings… cut off from one of the very few domestic enjoyments left to me… the society of my child”. The tactic worked – at least as far as winning over public opinion; prints and even cups and plates were made and sold in Caroline’s honour. It didn’t prompt her husband, however, to allow her access to their daughter. Their battle went on, much of it in print.

The newspapers continued to adopt the same critical tone towards George IV even after his death in 1830. The obituary in the Times was characterized by a savagery that would be unthinkable in the case of a modern-day monarch. “There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased king,” the newspaper wrote. “What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow?”

Elsewhere in Europe, other monarchies were also having to come to terms with the might of the press. Soon after coming to power, Louis Philippe, France’s citizen king, came under fierce criticism from his country’s newspapers for “betraying” the revolution of 1830 that had brought him to the throne. An extra visual dimension was provided by the invention of lithography, which made it much easier and quicker to reproduce images. This encouraged the emergence of caricatures, which were often savage; the King became a favourite target and was depicted as a pear. Indeed, so closely did Louis Philippe become identified with the fruit that the smallest image of a pear was immediately understood by readers as referring to him. The inevitable clampdown on caricatures as well as the written word swiftly followed.

In newly created Belgium, by contrast, the newspapers continued to operate with a freedom rare in the rest of the Continent. Thanks to his years in Britain, Léopold appreciated the power of the press and, rather than trying to curb it, set out to manipulate it. In 1831, shortly after coming to the throne, he secretly founded his own newspaper, L’Indépendant, which backed the Catholic Party, and during the twelve years that followed he pumped in 40,000 francs a year to cover its losses. Then in 1858 he provided another 200,000 francs to found L’Écho du Parlement, which supported the ‌other main group, the Liberals.1

This did not prevent other newspapers from being critical – especially of Léopold’s colourful private life. Articles started appearing in the newspapers in 1847 about his relationship with his young mistress, Arcadie Meyer. To stop its diffusion, the King began to bribe journalists to avoid such subject matter. The British ambassador reported to London that Léopold gave up to 125,000 francs in “hush money” ‌a year to “scurrilous papers”.2

Léopold II, his son and successor, also paid journalists to buy more favourable coverage; indeed, he spent so much money on the practice that Adrien Goffinet, his loyal aide-de-camp, warned him to hide all the accounts of the Civil List carefully so they would “never fall into the hands of the enemy or of revolutionaries, thereby revealing that you subsidized newspapers ‌and paid pensions to journalists”.3

The King was obliged to step up his efforts considerably after reports of the atrocities carried out by his agents in the Congo at the end of the nineteenth century began to circulate in Europe and America through letters from Protestant missionaries. The tactics he had employed to build his private empire were sharply criticized in both British and American newspapers and also in pamphlets such as ‘King Leopold’s Soliloquy’, written in 1905 by Mark Twain. Their judgement coloured in part by payments from the King, Belgian newspapers from the Liberal Le Soir to the Catholic Le XXe Siècle fought back with articles that blamed such critical foreign reports on British agents who were bitter that they had been beaten to the Congo by the Belgians.

Trying to win over the foreign press necessitated a more sophisticated approach. Showing an early understanding of the dark arts of public relations, Léopold set up a secret press bureau that provided journalists with information favourable to his activities and commissioned public statements of approval from big names of the day. Embarrassingly for the King, however, the bureau’s existence was revealed to the world by the New York American after a few years of its clandestine operations.

In the last years before Léopold’s death in 1909, the media focus shifted to his private life, as had been the case with his father before him. The socialist newspaper Le Peuple was especially savage, seizing on his relationship with his last mistress, Blanche Delacroix. “The King no longer stoops to prostitution, like his associates, in wild outbursts of sensuality and lasciviousness: prostitution climbs to meet the King,” wrote Jules Lekeu on 19th July 1906, in the first of a series of articles. “To megalomaniac financing and building, the King now adds megalomaniac debauchery, and this debauchery is founded ‌on plunder and on crime.”4

Although British newspapers remained just as free as their Belgian counterparts to criticize the monarchy through all these years, they often exercised considerable self-restraint, as was shown as late as 1936 by the way they covered – or rather didn’t cover – the events leading to the abdication of King Edward VIII – or rather didn’t cover them.

The American newspapers relished the story of his romance with Wallis Simpson, reporting the various twists and turns in their relationship, and couldn’t understand why their British colleagues remained so quiet. When Lord Beaverbrook, whose ownership of the Daily Express made him the most powerful press tycoon of Fleet Street, arrived by ship in Manhattan during the crisis, reporters demanded to know why his and the other British papers had not printed the story. “You are the censor!” cried one reporter. “Who? Me?” Beaverbrook replied. But even so, as Time magazine put it, “the entire British ‌Press continued unanimously to ostrich”.5 When American newspapers and magazines with stories about the romance were imported into Britain, the relevant columns were blacked out and whole pages torn out.

Then, suddenly, on 3rd December 1936, as the crisis was reaching its height, the British press suddenly broke their silence. The catalyst was a bizarre one: in a speech to a Church conference Alfred Blunt, the appropriately named Bishop of Bradford, had talked about the King’s need for divine grace – which was interpreted, wrongly as it turned out, by a local journalist in the audience as a reference to the King’s affair. When his report was carried by the Press Association, the national news agency, the British newspapers took it as the signal they had all been waiting for: they could now report the affair.

The Daily Mirror, for example, filled its pages on 3rd December and the days that followed with stories of crisis meetings at the palace, pictures of Wallis Simpson and the opinions of men and women in the street. “They have much in common,” began its gushing profile of the royal couple. “They both love the sea. They both love swimming. They both love golf and gardening. And soon they discovered that each loved the other.”

Under the headline “Six Months of Rumours” the newspaper also looked at how speculation about the relationship had spread since Mrs Simpson’s name appeared as a guest at a dinner hosted by the King at St James’s Palace that May. Tellingly, it also felt the need to justify to its readers why it – and the rest of Fleet Street – had been sitting on the story for so long. “We have been in full possession of the facts, but we resolved to withhold them until it was clear that the problem could not be solved by diplomatic methods,” it claimed. “This course we took with the welfare of the nation and the Empire at heart. Such is the position now that the nation, too, must be placed in possession of the facts.” There were echoes of this same self-restraint – initially, at least – on the part of the British press a decade and half later when rumours started to circulate that Edward VIII’s niece, Princess Margaret, was having an affair with the divorced Peter Townsend.

The willingness of the American papers to tread where the British were reluctant to follow exemplified a broader tendency still true today. When reporting on the activities of members of the royal family of their own country, the media often hold back, whether out of respect for the institution or because of a more pragmatic realization of the need to keep on good terms with them: step too far and they risk being denied precious access to events or having other privileges withdrawn. This mutual dependency is similar to that which exists between the media and Hollywood actors and pop stars. There is far less at stake, however, when dealing with foreign countries’ royals, which opens the way to more aggressive and often downright fictional reporting – as demonstrated by the imaginative royal coverage of the more downmarket German magazines.

The invention of radio, cinema and television presented new challenges for the monarchies across Europe, especially since their arrival coincided with a greater democratization of society and a reduction in the deference of old. The various royal courts were far from passive actors and began to adapt to this new age. On Christmas Day 1932 George V began what was to turn into a national tradition: the annual radio broadcast to the nation. Seated at a desk under the stairs in Sandringham, the elderly monarchy read out words written for him by Rudyard Kipling, the great imperial poet and author of The Jungle Book. “I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all, to all my peoples throughout the Empire, to men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert or the sea that only voices of the air can reach them, men and women of every race and colour who look to the Crown as the symbol of their union.”

The broadcasts, which were mildly, but not overly, religious in tone, were intended to cast the monarch in the role of head of a great family, that spanned not just the United Kingdom but also the Empire (or Commonwealth, as it is today). This was made explicit by his son George VI in his first Christmas speech of 1937. “Many of you will remember the Christmas broadcasts of former years when my father spoke to his peoples at home and overseas as the head of a great family,” the newly crowned King declared.

That George VI had made the speech at all was an achievement in itself: despite working for more than a decade with Lionel Logue, his Australian-born speech therapist, he still loathed public speaking. In 1936 there hadn’t even been a speech: his elder brother, Edward VIII, had abdicated just two weeks earlier, and the new King did not yet feel ready to address his subjects. And even when he gave his speech the next Christmas, he made clear it was a one-off, and didn’t repeat it in 1938. Following the outbreak of war, however, he realized the importance of this annual ritual for boosting morale and reluctantly spoke to the nation again – and indeed every 25th December for the rest of his life. After her accession in 1952, his daughter, the present Queen, continued what was by then a well-established tradition.

By that time Britain was well into the television age. When Elizabeth was crowned in 1953, the now elderly Winston Churchill, back for his final stint as prime minister, did not want to allow the television cameras into Westminster Abbey out of fear it would impose an intolerable burden on the young monarch. His cabinet unanimously agreed. The Queen’s position was not so clear. According to the official version of events, she overruled them, insisting that the event be televised. Robert Lacey, the respected royal biographer, by contrast, suggests she was initially opposed but changed her mind after ‌an outcry by the newspapers.6 In any case the cameras were admitted into the Abbey, for the first time in its history, allowing an estimated twenty million viewers to watch the mammoth outside broadcast, transmitted from 10.15 a.m. to 5.20 p.m.

It was an undoubted success – even if the man in charge of the television cameras who was meant to press the “censor” button to prevent any too intrusive close-ups during the ceremony got carried away by the occasion and failed to do so. The viewers will have thanked him for it. Nor was it only people in Britain who were able to enjoy the spectacle. Since satellite link-ups had yet to be invented, Canberra jet bombers were used to fly film recordings of the day’s events to America and Canada.

The televising of the coronation not only enhanced the new Queen’s popularity, it also provided a boost for the young BBC. Almost overnight the number of licence-fee holders who provided its revenue doubled to three million. Equally importantly, the public-service broadcaster had established itself as the medium on which to watch great public events – preferably narrated by Richard Dimbleby, whose whispering delivery became synonymous with royal coverage.

The relationship between these two great British institutions had begun, and from the beginning the BBC played the role of a loyal subject. In the late 1950s the Corporation banned from its airwaves the writer Lord Altrincham after he provoked a controversy by suggesting in an obscure journal that the Queen’s court was too upper-class and described her style of speaking as “a pain in the neck”. The same fate befell another critic, Malcolm Muggeridge, who compared the lives of the royal family to a soap opera. Both men were obliged to state their cases on ITV, the new commercial service, instead.

For the time being at least, the Christmas speech was confined to radio, but in 1957 the Queen was seen as well as heard for the first time. Such a development was far from automatic, however. Although she agreed to have cameras in the Abbey, it was quite another thing to have them intruding on her family Christmas – since, like its radio equivalent, the television version was to be broadcast live. Again, however, the palace had to bow to the inevitable, not least because the spread of television ownership had caused the ratings for her radio broadcast to dip alarmingly. In the event the broadcast proved a resounding success: sixteen and a half million people watched the three p.m. broadcast. From then on, watching – rather than just seeing – the Queen became an important part of Britons’ Christmas Day ritual.

Europe’s other royals also give speeches during the holiday season, although in Denmark and Norway it is on New Year’s Eve. In both cases this is in effect a continuation of a tradition begun during the Second World War, when their then rulers made rousing speeches to their respective nations from exile in London.

As Europe entered the media age, other events began to be televised – especially royal weddings, starting with that of Prince Rainier of Monaco and Grace Kelly in 1956 – which, as seen earlier, was a true media sensation. The audiences, meanwhile, soared. The marriage of Princess Margaret to Antony Armstrong-Jones in 1960, also in Westminster Abbey, attracted an estimated three hundred million viewers worldwide. That number had risen to five hundred million by June 1976 when King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden married Silvia Sommerlath.

Then in July 1981 came the biggest one of them all: the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. It was taken for granted that when Diana died sixteen years later, the television cameras should not only follow her funeral procession through London but also broadcast the service from inside Westminster Abbey. The marriage of Crown Prince Victoria of Sweden to Daniel Westling in June 2010 was also a major spectacle; Prince William’s marriage to Kate Middleton in April 2011 was even bigger still.

Churchill, with his opposition to the televising of the coronation, was wrong: the ability of people to follow royal occasions – both joyful and sad – on television did the royal brand no harm. It soon became clear, however, that such set-piece events would not be enough to satisfy the demands of the modern media, who were increasingly keen to portray members of their respective royal families as flesh-and-blood humans rather than as mere symbols. Conveniently, this coincided with a move by the various dynasties to portray themselves as the leading family of the nation.

In Britain this process had already begun in the late 1920s, when the young Princess Elizabeth became a media star, with newspapers and magazines on both side of the Atlantic keen to publish stories and photographs – often with the encouragement of the royal family, which appreciated their publicity value. Extraordinarily, the third birthday of baby “Lilibet”, as Elizabeth was known in the family, was considered an important enough occasion to earn her a place on the cover of Time magazine on 21st April 1929 – even though her father, at that stage, was not even heir to the throne.

Other royal families were pursuing a similar course: after the birth of the future Queen Beatrix in 1938, her father Prince Bernhard supplied the Dutch newspapers with his own photographs of her, which appeared on the front pages. He also shot some amateur movie footage of his daughter’s first steps, which was turned into a film, Ons prinsesje loopt (Our Princess Walks), which was a box-office hit when it came out at cinemas the following year.

In Denmark, Queen Ingrid, the Swedish-born wife of King Frederik IX, also had a keen appreciation of the importance of public relations for the monarchy. The couple’s marriage in 1935 had been one of the major media events of the day. After her husband came to the throne in 1947, Ingrid, by then the mother of three young daughters, strove to make the Danish monarchy more media-friendly and shift attention away from the King alone to the royal family as a whole. Danish newspapers and magazines began to fill with photographs of the family; cosy gatherings turned to public-relations events. The Queen even gave permission to Ebba Neergard, her hofdame (lady-in-waiting), to publish a book of private photographs of the three princesses.

One of the more unusual fruits of the Danish royal family’s media strategy was a special unrehearsed children’s radio programme in 1949 that allowed an estimated one million listeners to eavesdrop on Frederik’s tea with Ingrid and their children. During the show the King could be heard telling Margrethe, the future Queen, who was a few months short of her ninth birthday, to take her feet off the table. His children, Frederik told his interviewer, were “as charming as anyone else’s” but they could also be very noisy on occasion, “so that sometimes you feel you could strangle them”. He also gave an insight into his working life, with its rounds of meetings with ministers, public audiences and daily signings of documents. “Sometimes I work late, but when one has a charming wife and charming kids, there is no ‌reason for complaint,” he concluded.7

This merely whetted the appetite for more ambitious fly-on-the-wall television documentaries, which have become commonplace across Europe in the past few years. One of the most notable was Richard Cawston’s Royal Family, a programme made by the BBC to accompany the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales in July 1969. In the most famous scene he and the family are seen having a barbecue beside a loch at Balmoral, their Scottish home. While Prince Charles mixes salad dressing, Prince Philip grills the sausages. In another scene, Prince Charles is playing the cello when a string snaps, hitting his younger brother Edward in the face. The family are shown eating lunch and decorating their Christmas tree; the Queen even visits a shop.

The project had been prompted by demand from broadcasters from across the world for footage of the Prince ahead of his inauguration. Given that Charles, at that early stage in his life, had not actually done very much, it was decided instead to make a film that looked more broadly at monarchy and its role. It also appears to have coincided with a desire by the royal family to show themselves in public amid criticism from some commentators who saw them as out of step with the more liberal atmosphere of the 1960s.

According to one account by a former courtier who had a small part in the film, Prince Philip was a driving force behind the project, which he hoped would reveal quite how much his wife and the rest of the family did for the nation. “We were saying, ‘Hey fellers, this is the Queen,’” the courtier said. “This is a year in the life of the Queen. And it isn’t all gilt coaches and Rolls-Royces, balls and banquets and champagne. It’s bloody hard work, and this film reveals what sort ‌of hard work it is.”8 In other words, it was all about people involved in running a family business, but doing so with a sense of humour and fun.

For Cawston, one of the most serious problems was being allowed to film some of the scenes. “Get away from the Queen with your bloody cameras,” Philip barked at him during the Balmoral barbecue. An even greater obstacle was the reluctance of the family, whose public comments were traditionally confined to reading carefully prepared speeches, to allow their unscripted conversations to be recorded.

The programme went to the heart of the delicate balancing act that the royal family faced: trying on the one hand to allow enough access to give an insight into their lives while showing enough restraint to “to preserve the mystique”. Just in case it all went wrong, the palace was promised a right of veto – although it didn’t need to exercise it.

It was still a high-risk strategy, as David Attenborough, who was at the time the BBC’s director of programmes, pointed out to Cawston in appropriately anthropological terms. “You’re killing the monarchy, you know, with this film you’re making,” he said. “The whole institution depends on mystique and the tribal chief in his hut. If any member of the tribe ever sees inside the hut, then the whole system of the tribal chiefdom is damaged ‌and the tribe eventually disintegrates.”9

Milton Shulman, television critic for the Evening Standard, expressed similar sentiments. “Is it, in the long run, wise for the Queen’s advisers to set as a precedent this right of the television camera to act as an image-making apparatus for the monarchy?” he asked. “Every institution that has so far attempted to use TV to popularize or aggrandize itself ‌has been trivialized by it.”10

In terms of ratings, Royal Family, broadcast first on the BBC and repeated a week later on ITV, was a great success: as many as two-thirds of the population are believed to have watched one or other of the two screenings, an extraordinary figure even for an era when there were just three television channels. So what of its longer-term effects on the monarchy? In one sense, by allowing the cameras to record them in such informal moments the royal family were blurring the distinction between the public and private, which effectively paved the way for the more invasive and personalized reporting of their lives that has followed. As one contemporary observer put it, the sight of Prince Philip cooking sausages meant that thereafter people would want to see and hear everything. Even so, it would be going too far to blame the programme alone for the public-relations disasters that befell the Windsors in the 1990s.

Surprisingly for such a significant film, it has not been shown again since. Researchers are allowed to view it, but only with prior permission from Buckingham Palace. Other royal documentaries are allowed to use only short clips – although not of the celebrated barbecue scene (even though snippets of it have popped up on YouTube). When the National Portrait Gallery put on an exhibition, The Queen: Art and Image, to mark the Diamond Jubilee, it was allowed only a ninety-second extract.

Other television films setting out to show the everyday life of the royal family have followed in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. In Denmark, Jacob Jørgensen, head of JJ Film, a production company, appeared to break new ground in 1995 with Årstider i kongehuset (The Seasons of the Royal Family) a series of four sixty-minute films that tracked a year in the life of the royal family and their staff. JJ Film has made something of a speciality of such shows and has produced more than twenty films featuring the Danish royals, establishing a close relationship with the family. Quite how close this relationship was became clear when it emerged that Jørgensen’s cameraman son Martin fell for Alexandra, the wife of Prince Joachim, the younger of the Queen’s two sons, after apparently meeting during the making of one of the programmes. Alexandra was divorced in 2005 and married her new love, who is fourteen years her junior, in March 2007.

In Sweden meanwhile the Bernadotte dynasty’s two hundredth anniversary in 2010 was marked with a six-part documentary entitled Familjen Bernadotte. To make the programmes, Gregor Nowinski, a documentary film-maker, was given unprecedented access to the royal family, following them at work and play for two years and conducting a number of in-depth interviews.

While most such projects appear to have been well received, there was one notable exception: an execrable one-off version of the popular slapstick game It’s a Knockout, organized by a twenty-three-year-old Prince Edward in June 1987 in what was his first foray into television. The programme raised more than a million pounds for various royal-backed charities, but many traditionalists were appalled by the sight of Edward, Princess Anne and the Duke and Duchess of York presiding over competitions between various film, television and sports stars, including John Travolta, Rowan Atkinson and Meat Loaf – all of them dressed in medieval costumes. The programme did not do much for Edward’s reputation: at a news conference afterwards, the Prince asked the journalists present what they had thought of the show. The response was nervous laughter, prompting an angry Edward to storm out.

While members of the British royal family proved reluctant to hold themselves up to such ridicule again, there were plenty of others prepared to do it for them. In the early 1960s the popular television programme That Was the Week That Was, presented by a young David Frost, lampooned the royal family along with other parts of the establishment. Private Eye, launched in 1961, responded to the royal family documentary by referring to them by working-class nicknames: the Queen became Brenda, Prince Charles was nicknamed Brian and the Diana character, when she came on the scene later, named Cheryl. This was taken a step further in the 1980s by Spitting Image, which cruelly parodied the royal family. Prince Charles was shown talking to flowers, Prince Philip was portrayed as a buffoon always in naval uniform, and the Queen Mother, who elsewhere in the media had long since attained the status of national treasure, was generally seen with a bottle of Gordon’s Gin in one hand and a copy of the Racing Post in the other. In Sweden, meanwhile, Hey Baberiba, a comedy-impressions show launched in 2005, included a regular strand, “Familjen”, in which actors impersonated members of the country’s royal family.

Many in Europe’s palaces would probably have been happy to confine themselves to various televised set-piece engagements and the occasional documentary, but by the 1980s the media, especially in Britain, wanted more. It was provided for them by Diana Spencer. For newspaper and magazine editors, not just in Britain but across the world, her arrival was a godsend. She was young and beautiful, and inclusion of her image on a cover was bound to boost circulation.

Diana’s Cinderella-like transformation from ordinary young woman about town to princess was something with which readers could identify – even if, as the daughter of an earl and a member of one of Britain’s grandest families, she had never been quite as “ordinary” as the media liked to portray her.

The protracted – and very public – collapse of her marriage to Charles during the 1990s provided even more stories, many of them fed to the press by the couple themselves. The tradition in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, had hitherto been that royal brides – however unhappy with their partners – kept their feelings to themselves. Diana was not ready to abide by that rule, however, and chose instead to follow the example of Caroline of Brunswick. The results were equally disastrous: Diana’s secret cooperation with Andrew Morton, which in 1992 produced Diana: Her True Story, chronicling the misery of her marriage – suicide attempts and all – prompted Charles to tell his version of events in an authorized book and television interview with the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby two years later. This, in turn, led Diana to retaliate in November 1995 with her notorious Panorama interview with Martin Bashir, in which she memorably declared: “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” As if that were not enough, even one of Diana’s lovers, James Hewitt, a dashing staff captain in the Life Guards, weighed in with Princess in Love, a steamy account of his relationship with the Princess written, according to many, in a style reminiscent of Barbara Cartland. The revelations proved great box office: some twenty-one million Britons – almost half the adult population – tuned in to watch Diana pour out her heart to Bashir – but, taken together, they constituted an unedifying spectacle that dealt a serious blow to the image of the British monarchy.

Diana’s death in August 1997, appropriately enough while being pursued by the paparazzi, heralded the third and final act in the tragedy – and generated even more press coverage. The fatal car accident in a tunnel in Paris and the various conspiracy theories that followed were the source of a flood of stories that continued for years.

Diana proved a difficult act to follow – especially for the British media. Princes William and Harry made good copy, although their respective girlfriends, Kate Middleton and Chelsy Davy, could not initially fill the gap left by the demise of the princes’ mother. Kate has necessarily moved to centre stage since her engagement and marriage. Yet both the national mood and attitude of the media have changed in the intervening years, and there has been no return to the reporting frenzy that accompanied Diana’s every move. William, understandably enough, has grown up with a strong suspicion towards the media, and has resisted strongly any attempt to turn Kate into a twenty-first-century version of his mother.

For her part, the Duchess has quickly demonstrated a flair for handling the media, dealing well with the relentless attention – and pressure. Her first speech, delivered on 19th March 2012 at the opening of a hospice in Ipswich, run by one of “her charities”, was roundly pronounced a success.

The activities of foreign princes and princesses, on the other hand, have been greeted with indifference in Britain, apart from a small number of hard-core royalists. The Monégasque royal family are the exception: the Grimaldis had been entertaining readers, listeners and viewers since Prince Rainier married Grace Kelly in 1956, neatly merging the worlds of royalty and show business. By the 1980s the colourful love lives of their daughters Caroline and Stéphanie were the source of rich pickings. Yet their appeal too has faded in recent years, although Caroline’s children, Andrea, Charlotte and Pierre, now in their twenties and with a series of high-profile relationships behind them, have started to take their place.

The Continental monarchies watched the obsessive media attention that Diana generated with a mixture of bemusement and relief at how much quieter things were at home in comparison. Yet by the mid-1990s attitudes were beginning to change, as a new generation of royals came of age. Philippe, Willem-Alexander, Frederik, Haakon, Felipe and Victoria were young, glamorous and attractive to young readers, especially once they started to enjoy themselves socially and fall for members of the opposite sex. Paris Match, of course, had been charting the ups and downs of the love lives of Europe’s royals for years. Given that France had no royal family of its own, it had followed everyone else’s – starting with the Grimaldis. Across Europe, other magazines and the newly emerging “lifestyle” sections of newspapers started to follow its lead.

Royals were portrayed as celebrities whose private lives were worthy of the same treatment as those of pop singers or television or film stars. Magazines such as ¡Hola!, Bunte or Oggi still used the posed photographs and photo opportunities arranged by the palaces, but supplemented them with informal images of the royals at play taken by paparazzi, who were generously paid for their exclusives. For readers wanting a more reverent approach there were specialist royal magazines such as Britain’s Majesty or the Dutch Vorsten Royale. The pictures are formal ones; the stories describe engagements carried out by members of the various royal families or talk about their jewellery, palaces or history. Their selling point is that they provide an “insider’s” – or maybe that should be courtier’s – view of what goes on behind the walls of the royal palace.

Britain’s Majesty, founded in 1980, sums itself up thus on its website: “Every month Majesty gives its readers a colourful insight into the privileged lives of the royal families of the world. Personalities, lifestyles and fashion are all captured in exciting features and stunning photographs. Majesty records all the important royal engagements and takes an in-depth look at the dramatic history of Britain’s monarchs. Month by month it builds into a beautiful and authoritative collection.”

Within the countries that are still monarchies, interest is necessarily concentrated on the national royal family, with foreign ones playing a supporting role. The German media, with a voracious appetite for royalty but like the French no ruling family of their own, have simply adopted everyone else’s instead: the Swedish royal family has come to enjoy a special role, though, thanks to German-born Queen Silvia – “unsere Königin” (“our Queen”). This fascination was reflected in the huge coverage the German media gave to Crown Princess Victoria’s wedding in June 2010.

The changing relationship between royalty and magazines over recent decades is well illustrated by the transformation of Sweden’s Svensk Damtidning, a glossy women’s magazine that sells 140,000 copies a week. Back in the 1950s, when King Carl XVI Gustaf and his four elder sisters were growing up, it used to publish sweet photographs of the royal children. Over the following decades, however, the royals were only a relatively small part of their coverage. That suddenly changed in the mid-1990s following the revelation that Crown Princess Victoria was suffering from anorexia.

Karin Lennmor, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, had previously assumed her readership was composed of middle-aged or older women. Now she found a new generation of young girls who identified with the twenty-year-old Princess and wanted to read about her and her friends. “Victoria became a trendsetter: where she went, where she went on vacation, the kind of labels ‌she would buy,” Lennmor recalls.11 So the magazine was revamped with the strapline “Den Kungliga Veckotidningen” (“The Royal Weekly”) and a little crown on its cover, and began to follow the Princess and her younger siblings, Carl Philip and Madeleine, who were also beginning to make their way in the world.

Inevitably, the emphasis is on the positive, so when the magazine’s journalists heard in early 2010 of problems in Princess Madeleine’s relationship with her fiancé, Jonas Bergström, they did not print them. Instead it was the Norwegian magazine Se og Hør that effectively precipitated the break-up by publishing the claims of the Norwegian woman who said she had slept with him.

Alongside such magazines there are also television programmes. While Belgium has Royalty and Place Royale, Dutch television has Blauw Bloed, a weekly show running since 2004 in which host Jeroen Snel presents a mixture of news and history about both the country’s own royal family and the other European ones. Snel also co-hosts a quiz programme, De grootste Royaltykenner van Nederland (The Greatest Royalty Expert in the Netherlands), in which contestants compete to answer obscure questions about the Dutch royal house.

Such programmes are not a permanent fixture elsewhere in Europe, although in Sweden, in the three months preceding the marriage of Crown Princess Victoria in June 2010, SVT, the main state television channel, screened Det kungliga bröllopet (The Royal Wedding), in a one-hour, prime-time slot every Monday evening. The show, presented by Ebba von Sydow, a former magazine editor, drew audiences of up to one million people with a mixture of footage of past royal events and reports on everything from the pastry chef charged with making the wedding cake to the groom Daniel Westling’s home town of Ockelbo.

As in Britain, much of the reporting has concentrated on the glitz, the history and ceremonial of monarchy or else on the private lives of royals. Yet some newspapers have mounted serious investigations into royal activities – and especially into the background of the prospective crown princesses who emerged in the late 1990s – with dramatic results: Mette-Marit, for example, was obliged to come clean about her previous drug use, while Máxima’s father, Jorge Zorreguieta, had to keep away from his daughter’s wedding following revelations of his role as a minister in the country’s former ruling military junta. Interest has continued since the weddings, with the media seizing on suggestions that their unions might be anything less than happy or, in the case of Mary’s marriage to Frederik, the Crown Prince of Denmark, hinting at the reappearance of old flames.

Even more far-reaching were, as we have seen, the Dutch media’s investigations into the past of Mabel Wisse Smit, which forced Prince Friso to renounce his claim to the throne when he married her. While the methods used were, in most cases, conventional journalistic ones, there have also been examples of the kind of tabloid techniques used by Britain’s News of the World and Daily Mirror – as shown most graphically by Håvard Melnæs and other reporters at the Norwegian gossip magazine Se og Hør in their investigations into Mette-Marit’s past.

For the Belgian media, interest came from a different quarter. During his forty-two-year reign, the devoutly religious King Baudouin and his wife Queen Fabiola had provided the press with little to get their teeth into. The accession in 1993 of his younger brother Albert, whose marriage had been a much stormier affair, was to be more fruitful for them – including the revelation of the existence of the King’s love child in 1999. The speed with which the Belgian media identified and tracked down Delphine Boël was impressive.

However loud the criticism of individual members of the royal families, Europe’s media devote little space to the questioning of the institution of monarchy and its continued relevance in the twenty-first century – and republican groups must fight hard to get any coverage at all. Andrew Marr’s high-profile three-part television series, Diamond Queen, broadcast on BBC 1 in February 2012, was distinctly hagiographical in tone. As two observers of the British media scene have argued, the media tends to depoliticize and trivialize the monarchy in favour of a relentless focus on the activities of ‌the royals as family members.12 Such a focus tends to squeeze out a broader debate about monarchy as a whole. Yet it is impossible to separate the two completely. As has been shown on plenty of occasions in Britain and elsewhere, popular unhappiness with the behaviour of individual royals can spill over into a decline in support for the institution.

Such coverage is also an inevitable by-product of the blurring of monarchy with celebrity that has become common even in the more heavyweight newspapers. Politicians frequently complain that too much emphasis is put on personality rather than on policy. Yet with members of the royal family there is no policy to discuss – quite the opposite: in contrast to their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors, who still ruled as well as reigned, modern-day monarchs are at pains not to involve themselves in the political process or do so only according to carefully circumscribed rules. The result is to leave only the personal for the media to report.

The palaces have responded in different ways to the new demands placed upon them – especially when it comes to interviews. Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, for example, does not give interviews; nor did her parents before her. The only time her mother gave one was when, as Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, she became engaged to her “beloved Bertie”, the future King George VI. She talked to a journalist about her engagement ring and said how she enjoyed tennis and hunting – all of which proved too much for the palace, which reminded her that such openness was not appropriate. She never spoke to the newspapers again.

The Scandinavian monarchs have been far more accessible: Sweden’s Carl XVI Gustaf frequently talks with journalists, especially during royal trips. Margrethe II of Denmark has not confined herself to her many appearances in documentaries: she frequently gives newspaper and television interviews and has even cooperated with the authors of books; in the most recent one, published in April 2010 to coincide with her seventieth birthday, she reflected among other things on her childhood, her family and her role as head of state. In the unlikely event that Britain’s Queen agreed to such a publication, it would be seized upon by royal watchers desperate for an insight into her views. In Denmark, by contrast, reviewers complained that their Queen had already spoken so extensively about herself that she had little new left to say.

Denmark is also unusual in that Prince Henrik, the Queen’s French-born husband, published a book of his own, Destin Oblige, in 1996. In it he writes of life both before and after he became prince consort – and does so with considerable frankness. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine, say, Prince Philip, talking so openly about the problems he has faced since marrying into the royal family. For many years the Danish royal couple also used to invite journalists to their chateau in the south of France, where they answered questions in an informal setting. In 2009 the event was cancelled. No official reason was given, but some at the palace clearly believed the royal family were in danger of becoming overexposed.

The heirs to the throne and other members of the royal families are far more willing to give newspaper or television interviews – especially at the time they become engaged, when they will typically give a press conference or television interview jointly with their partner. In Britain, the ritual of the pre-wedding interview was initiated by Princess Anne and Mark Phillips before their marriage in 1973. Sometimes the subject matter can be tough – such as when Mette-Marit of Norway was forced to reveal her past as a drug-user. Equally memorable was the interview Prince Charles gave with Diana Spencer before they married in 1981 when, asked if he was in love, the heir to the throne replied “whatever that is” – the words were to be quoted against him long afterwards. (Diana, by contrast, had replied, “Of course.”) Undaunted, Charles has continued to talk to journalists, often on favourite subjects such as architecture and the environment. His Continental counterparts have often followed suit. Prince William and Kate Middleton observed the tradition when they announced their engagement.

Such interviews are inevitably soft in tone. Those members of a royal family who agree to subject themselves to an interview are largely spared the tough questions that politicians or business leaders routinely endure. Strict rules also apply during coverage of royal visits and events: certain occasions are intended purely as opportunities to film and take photographs – not to ask questions. Occasionally, however, a journalist will challenge such protocol, as happened in Belgium in August 2009, at the height of the controversy over King Albert and Queen Paola’s new yacht. During a fête at the Palace of Laeken to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary, the royal couple were challenged over the purchase by Christophe Deborsu, a journalist for Belgian television. And why not, retorted Queen Paola. “We find that it is terribly unjust… especially since we’ve had yachts since our marriage, that is to say for fifty years. We have always had them. We started with a little boat measuring two metres… no, five metres.”

Albert himself said nothing, apparently stunned by such a breach of etiquette. Pierre-Emmanuel De Bauw, the palace spokesman, complained afterwards that it was forbidden for journalists to try to pose questions when the microphones were on. For Belgian royal watchers, the fact that the journalist concerned was from the traditionally more royalist French-speaking part of the country rather than the more republican Flanders was significant.

This remains the exception, though. Most interactions with royalty are characterized by a form of deference and an acceptance of the ground rules set by the palace. It is almost as if those interviewing them – like members of the public who go weak at the knees after a royal encounter – cannot entirely free themselves from the feeling that they are mere subjects and must behave accordingly in the presence of their rulers. Even the most experienced television interrogators are not immune: when Christiane Amanpour, the veteran foreign correspondent, interviewed Haakon and Mette-Marit in October 2009 on CNN, she gave them a considerably gentler ride than she would have done a politician.

Media coverage of royalty in Britain in particular has acquired an extra dimension thanks to a small number of courtiers and other royal officials who have been tempted, usually by the prospect of considerable financial reward, to publish inside accounts of life within the palace. Most notorious of them all was Marion Crawford, who spent fifteen years as a governess to the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. After she retired in 1949 at the age of forty, Crawfie, as she was known, was asked by the American magazine Ladies’ Home Journal to write articles or a book about them.

Crawfie asked the Queen, who at a meeting told her she should say “No no no to offers of dollars for articles about something as private & precious as our family”, and offered instead to help her ‌find a new teaching post.13 Crawfie initially appeared to comply, but the lure of the money on offer was too great and she went ahead with the project. Her account boosted the circulation of the Ladies’ Home Journal by half a million and was also published in Britain by Women’s Own and in book form. After years on a meagre royal salary, Crawfie became a very rich woman indeed: she was paid £30,000 for world rights by her British publisher George Newnes and another $6,000 for its serialization in the United States in Ladies’ Home Journal.

The contents of the book were innocuous enough and painted a fairly touching portrait of royal life. Indeed, the publishers even sent a manuscript to the palace and agreed to remove certain inaccuracies pointed out to them. But that was not the point as far as the King and Queen were concerned. The former governess was guilty of the worst kind of breach of trust – and “doing a Crawfie” thereafter became the term used for betrayal. For the palace, she had become a “non person”.

Crawfie nevertheless continued to write – or at least have people write under her own name. Her career came to an abrupt end in 1955, however, when an article was published under her name describing the Trooping the Colour ceremony and the Ascot races, even though both had been cancelled that year because of a strike. Crawfie retired to her native Scotland, to a cottage close to Balmoral Castle, but no member of the royal family ever visited; when she died in 1988 neither the Queen, the Queen Mother nor Princess Margaret sent a wreath.

The death of Diana – and the massive market for books about her – brought forth a crop of latter-day Crawfies; among them was Paul Burrell, her former butler. His autobiographical book, A Royal Duty, published in 2003, denounced by Prince William and Harry as “a cold and overt betrayal” of their mother, was an international best-seller and launched him on a second career based largely on cashing in on his royal past. This included everything from appearing on television reality and game shows to launching his own “Royal Butler” range of furniture, rugs and wine, aimed largely at buyers in America, which became his home for several years.

Such “insider” memoirs have been rarer elsewhere in Europe – one of the few exceptions being a book by Jesper Lundorf, the former bodyguard of Crown Prince Frederik, in which, among other things, he discusses the time he spent training with him in the elite Frømandskorpset.

Europe’s royal families have generally responded to such intrusions into their privacy either by journalists or former associates in silence, refusing to confirm or deny what is reported. Occasionally, though, they will let slip their real feelings. In a speech at dinner in aid of sick and impoverished journalists in May 1930, the future King George VI reflected on the huge media attention his young family was attracting. “I owe a rather special debt of gratitude to the gossip columns of our newspapers for, if I am in doubt as to what is happening in my own home, I need only turn to the gossip in the Daily Wonder and I find all the ‌information I require,” he said.14

While George VI seemed amused rather than angered by the attention, tempers can sometimes flare – as famously happened during a royal photo opportunity in the Swiss Alps in March 2005, a few weeks before Prince Charles married Camilla. Asked by Nicholas Witchell, the BBC’s royal reporter, whether he was looking forward to the wedding, Charles gave a sarcastic reply before turning to his sons and saying softly, “These bloody people. I can’t bear that man. I mean, he’s so awful, he really is… I hate these people.” Unfortunately for Charles, his comments were picked up, leaving his communications director to insist the Prince “doesn’t have contempt for the media”.

Sometimes, though, the media will be perceived to have gone just too far – prompting a royal response. In Britain, injunctions such as the one against the account and photographs of palace life published in the Daily Mirror in November 2003 after one of its reporters, Ryan Parry, managed to get employed for two months as a footman are relatively rare. Such is the media’s acknowledgement of its reliance on cooperation with the palace than it can be brought into line with a warning – as happened when the newly married Princess Diana was pregnant with her first child and could not leave Highgrove, their country estate in Gloucestershire, without being photographed. “The Princess of Wales feels totally beleaguered,” Michael Shea, the Queen’s press secretary, complained. “She has coped extremely well, she has come through with flying colours. But now the people who love her and care for her are anxious at ‌the reaction it is having.”15

Almost two decades later there were fears that Kate Middleton, yet to become engaged to Prince William, could suffer similar harassment. In December 2009, as the royal family prepared to celebrate Christmas at their Sandringham estate, the Queen issued a strong warning to newspapers not to publish paparazzi pictures of the royal family.

Middleton herself was reported in February 2010 to be in line to receive at least £10,000 in damages, plus substantial legal costs, after threatening to sue a photographer and two British picture agencies over photographs taken of her while she was playing tennis at Christmas 2009 – even though the pictures were taken from a public place with a camera with a normal rather than a telephoto lens and were published only in Germany and not in Britain. The claim rested on privacy law, a rapidly developing area that draws on the European Convention on Human Rights.

A precedent was set by the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in June 2004 that photographs published by Germany’s Bunte, Neue Post and Freizeit Revue showing Princess Caroline of Monaco skiing, horse-riding, sitting in a café and playing tennis with her husband Prince Ernst August of Hanover infringed her privacy. The “Caroline ruling”, which had significant implications for the tabloid media across Europe, overturned a German decision dating from 1999, which said that as a public figure she had to accept being photographed in public.

Princess Caroline’s legal action was only one of many by Monaco’s royals, whose colourful lifestyle has increased media interest. That October her five-year-old daughter Alexandra was awarded a record €76,693.78 in compensation from the German supreme court after two magazines, Die Aktuelle and Die Zwei, published paparazzi pictures of her when she was a baby. Years earlier, in 1996, Caroline had been awarded 180,000 Deutschmarks (£77,000) after the magazine Bunte was found to have made up an interview with her and €102,000 from another scandal sheet, Gala, in 2001.

Acting for Caroline was Matthias Prinz, one of Germany’s most high-profile media lawyers, whose father Günter, ironically enough, was editor of the tabloid Bild Zeitung for most of the 1970s and 1980s. In an interview with the news magazine Der Spiegel in 2009, Prinz rejected suggestions he was stifling freedom of expression. The situation faced by Caroline when she moved to the French village of Saint-Rémy after the death of her second husband Stefano Casiraghi was “catastrophic”, he said. He recalled a visit there in 1992, counting as many as twenty paparazzi outside the front door and another fifteen outside the school, attended by her three children, in the hope ‌of getting shots of them.16

Prinz has also acted for the Swedish royal family over the many legal actions it has pursued – most dramatically in December 2004, when he sued Klambt, one of Germany’s biggest magazine publishers, over what he claimed were 1,588 made-up stories, including more than five hundred front-page “exclusives”. Among them were claims the King had been unfaithful with a mystery blonde and that the Queen had been suffering from cancer but was cured by a miraculous wristband. The reaction of Rudiger Dienst, a Klambt executive, who called himself a “repentant sinner” and vowed not to print any more inaccurate stories, was revealing. “We have learnt our lesson,” he said. “We admit that we may have embellished some reports, but we have done nothing different to other tabloids. This kind of reporting has been going on for fifty years, and I don’t understand why all of a sudden the Swedish royal family are taking action against us now.”

In a further royal legal victory, a Hamburg court in July 2009 ordered another German publishing house, Sonnenverlag, to pay Sweden’s Princess Madeleine €400,000 in damages for fabricating stories about her – including erroneous claims she was pregnant. The Princess pledged to give the money to charity.

The Dutch royals have also often had recourse to the courts – largely, again, in cases against German publications. In 1968, Prince Bernhard, the husband of Queen Juliana, became the first member of the country’s royal family to take legal action against a gossip magazine after Neue Welt published a report claiming that his daughter Princess Irene had had an abortion. It took three years, but the Prince eventually won and was awarded the equivalent of over £40,000 damages, which he ‌donated to the Red Cross.17

Other members of the Dutch royal family followed suit, especially Bernhard’s son-in-law, Prince Claus, whose own relationship with the press got off to a difficult start after he was “outed” in May 1965 by Britain’s Daily Express as the man in the life of the future Queen Beatrix, despite a request by the palace to give the couple a little more time together out of the limelight. Claus went on to pursue several cases successfully against the press – including one over claims by Privé magazine in 1985 that Crown Prince Willem-Alexander, still just eighteen, had spent a night in the Amsterdam ‌Hilton with an unknown woman.18 Other legal actions followed – the last of which the Prince won just days before his death in 2002.

Willem-Alexander has enthusiastically taken up the baton, especially after the beginning of his relationship with his future wife, Máxima. The couple have been especially determined to prevent publication of what they consider intrusive pictures of their three daughters, Catharina-Amalia, Alexia and Ariane. Nor is it just mass-market magazines such as Privé or Shownieuws that have come into conflict with the palace. In August 2009 the royal family won a legal battle with Associated Press, the American news agency, after it sent its clients photographs of Crown Prince Willem-Alexander and his family on holiday in Argentina. In weighing freedom of expression against the right of privacy, a Dutch court ruled that members of the royal family, while they take the risk of media scrutiny when performing their public duties, do have an expectation of privacy in their personal lives.

Such cases, though, are relatively rare given the sheer amount of royal reporting – a reflection of the fundamental interdependence of royalty and the media. While the various royal families may find some of the coverage of their lives intrusive, they would be even more concerned if the media simply stopped covering them at all. With their function these days largely a representational one, it would be a first step towards irrelevance and possibly extinction.

For the media, meanwhile, the royals are a useful source of material to fill newspapers or television programmes. Hence the often pragmatic deals struck between the two: official royal trips are carefully orchestrated to provide photographers and cameramen the shots they need. In the case of the British royal family this principle is extended to some private holidays too, such as when Prince Charles goes skiing with his sons: photographers are granted a photo opportunity in return for agreeing to leave them in peace for the rest of the time. An extreme example of such an arrangement was the agreement between the palace and the British media over Prince Harry’s deployment to Afghanistan – significantly, it was an American website rather than the British media that broke the embargo.

Illuminating is the example of the Independent, which, when it was launched in 1986, vowed to ignore royal stories. Andreas Whittam-Smith, who edited the newspaper for its first eight years, claimed later to have had a private bet with himself that a successful newspaper could manage without royalty. He lost, however, and after a time the Independent abandoned its stance and began to report the Windsors’ activities like other newspapers. “For good commercial reasons, national newspapers as a whole cannot any longer manage without daily coverage [of the royal family],” Whittam-Smith concluded in 2000. “The doings of the various members of the House of Windsor provide the raw material for the most powerful of narrative forms – invented as it was by television, drawing its inspiration from nineteenth-century novels – the soap opera. ‌A large cast is essential.”19

Other newspapers and magazines elsewhere in Europe have come to a similar conclusion. In Denmark Ekstra Bladet, a strident tabloid, has been a fierce critic of the monarchy – but this has not prevented it from running plenty of stories about both its country’s royal family and royalty elsewhere. The Danish edition of the weekly magazine Se og Hør has also proved itself as enthusiastic a pursuer of the royals as its Norwegian namesake; curiously, the magazine is owned by the same media group as Billed Bladet, a pro-royalty weekly, and both are run out of the same spectacular building on the Copenhagen waterfront. The motivation appears largely commercial: targeting both monarchists and republicans means they have the whole market covered.

The last years of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first brought a new challenge – and opportunity: the Internet. The British royal family has been a pioneer, setting up its website in the late 1990s following the arrival of a new press chief, Simon Lewis. The site (www.royal.gov.uk) has grown enormously since, and offers a huge mixture of news, history, photographs and information as well as clever features such as an interactive map that allows you to find royal visits past and present in your area. Since October 2007, there has been a “Royal Channel” on YouTube, which as of April 2012 has 465 professional-quality videos and boasts more than thirty-six million views. Then in November 2010 it was announced that the British monarchy was to get its own page on Facebook. Unlike her subjects, however, the Queen would not be accepting friends or, it was assumed, writing her own entries. It was nevertheless a success: more than 40,000 people rushed to “like” the Queen an hour after the page was launched – although some went on to post abusive comments, many of them about her daughter-in-law Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall.

The other royal families also have websites of their own, although they are less comprehensive and professional than the British one, notably the Belgian (www.monarchie.be) and Spanish (www.casareal.es) sites. But they too are becoming more sophisticated. In May 2009 the Dutch royal family followed the British by setting up their own YouTube channel, which includes both contemporary material and clips dating back to the enthronement of Queen Wilhelmina in 1898. Those curious about the activities of Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon and Crown Princess Mette-Marit, meanwhile, can follow their activities on Twitter. Some of the entries, the palace claims, are even written by the royal couple rather than by their spin doctors: “kph” at the end means Haakon, “kpm” stands for Mette-Marit and “kpp” denotes a joint effort. They also have their own Facebook page.

Many of the websites of Europe’s newspaper and television channels have set up separate royal sections – in a reflection of the popularity of such news with readers. Hello! magazine’s website, for example, has not just news and photographs but also background information such as family trees and descriptions of palaces.

Countless stand-alone websites and networks have also sprung up – some fairly professional and well-funded affairs, others little more than one-person blogs written from some of the more unlikely locations on earth. Some do little more than collect together links to stories on mainstream media, while others run forums and chatrooms for readers interested in royalty across the world to ask each other questions or share ideas. One of the most comprehensive, www.royalforums.com, which has more than 30,000 registered members and presumably many more casual users, has a bewildering variety of chatrooms, links and discussion strands covering royal families past as well as current, not just in Europe but also in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

And then there are the more personal blogs, some of which are both well written and learned. For anyone interested in the Scandinavian monarchies, one of the best is undoubtedly the blog written by Trond Norén Isaksen, a young Norwegian historian who is the author of several books and many articles on different aspects of monarchy (trondni.blogspot.com). Exhibiting an extraordinarily detailed knowledge of his subject, Isaksen (who writes in perfect English) reflects on royal news and also runs often critical reviews of the latest royal literature. Equally serious but very different in tone is crossoflaeken.blogspot.com, which describes itself as “dedicated to the Catholic monarchs of Belgium, and other topics of historical, cultural, human, political and religious interest”. Belgium’s monarchs – especially Léopold III – have a chequered history, but the writer portrays them as martyrs.

There are also a few quirky or more light-hearted blogs – one of the oddest of which is madhattery.royalroundup.com, which features photographs of different members of royal families in hats and tiaras, the more exotic the better. “My goal here is always to entertain,” writes Ella Kay, the American-based author. “This is primarily a blog about silliness – I have a healthy respect for the British royals and royals around the world, and I do not intend to belittle. It’s about frivolous fashion and nothing more than that, really.” Kay, a teacher who developed her love for all things royal during a semester spent abroad in England as a student, also runs a more serious blog, www.royaltywithellakay.com.