‌Chapter 11

‌The Frog Who Turned into a Prince
and Other Fairy Tales

At least half a million cheering, flag-waving onlookers lined the streets of Stockholm on 19th June 2010 as Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden, married Daniel Westling, her former fitness trainer. It was almost a decade since one of the most unlikely couples in modern European royal history had first met. Now the son of a provincial civil servant and a post-office worker had become HRH Prince Daniel, Duke of Västergötland, endowed with his own coat of arms and monogram.

Storkyrkan, the cathedral of Stockholm, close to the royal palace, was filled with nearly a thousand royals, dignitaries and friends from across Europe and beyond. Victoria wore a short-sleeved, pearl-white, off-the-shoulder gown with a gold diadem that Napoleon had given Joséphine and a veil that her own mother, Silvia, had worn when she married King Carl XVI Gustaf on the same day thirty-four years earlier. Her train was sixteen feet long. Daniel, in designer glasses with his hair slicked back, was in black tail coat and white bow tie.

Victoria, aged thirty-two, was beaming for most of the ceremony, at one point even winking at a member of the congregation. As Daniel, four years her senior, uttered the “ja” of the wedding vows, his eyes filled with tears as he turned to smile at his bride. Unusually for Sweden, Victoria chose to be given away by her father, to the consternation of many who considered such an Anglo-Saxon practice demeaning to women. Archbishop Anders Wejryd, who was presiding over the ceremony, was among those who had voiced concern over the breaking of a two-hundred-year-old Swedish tradition of “expressing equality between the spouses”.

The service, which included a piece of choral music specially written by Benny Andersson of Abba, was short. And, after posing for photographs outside the cathedral, the couple set off in an open horse-drawn carriage in a procession through Stockholm, accompanied by mounted, blue-uniformed soldiers. The city was decked in flowers, blue-and-yellow flags and royal portraits.

When they reached Galärvarvet, a wharf on the Djurgården peninsula, the couple walked hand in hand down a blue carpet to the richly ornamented royal barge, Vasaorden. Still holding her bouquet, the bride waved to the crowd as eighteen sailors in their best dress uniforms rowed her and Daniel across the water to the royal palace. Eighteen Gripen fighter jets flew overhead in formation as the couple alighted at the steps leading up to the palace almost thirty minutes later. They were met by the King and Queen, who stood chatting with the groom’s parents. A military band played.

This rather unlikely marriage marked the culmination of two weeks of celebrations dubbed “Love Stockholm 2010” that had begun on 6th June, Swedish National Day. The hype surrounding the Crown Princess’s big day was enormous. For months, Sweden’s newspapers, magazines and television had reported on every twist and turn in the preparations; Stockholm’s hotels and restaurants were preparing for a bonanza; Arlanda airport had even been named “Official Love Airport” for the occasion. The city’s chamber of commerce predicted the wedding would generate more than £8 million of extra revenue for local traders. The souvenir shops of Gamla Stan had long since filled with cups, mugs, fridge magnets and countless other items decorated with pictures of the royal couple.

Yet the souvenirs were not flying off the shelves quite as quickly as had been hoped, and some of the city’s hotel rooms were empty. Two of the three special “wedding trains” laid on to bring spectators from the provinces were cancelled due to the lack of demand. Notes of dissent had begun to creep into the media – not least over the cost of the celebrations, estimated at twenty million kronor (£1.6 million), half of which was to be borne by taxpayers.

Yet such sentiments did little to dampen the mood that evening, as the happy couple presided over a sumptuous gala for six hundred guests in the staterooms of the royal palace. For many the high point was a speech by Daniel. Speaking confidently without notes and switching effortlessly between Swedish and English, he dispelled at a stroke any doubts about his ability to handle such big occasions. “I love you, Victoria, and I am proud that we are here together,” he declared, calling his bride “princess of my heart”. “And I am so happy to be your husband.”

He recalled an early episode from their courtship when the future queen stayed up all night writing before an official trip abroad. “When I got up, I found thirty beautiful letters, addressed to me, one for each day she would be away,” he said. He even managed a joke about his humble origins: drawing on the Grimm brothers, he told the story of a young man who “while perhaps not a frog, was certainly not a prince” who met a princess. “The first kiss did not change that,” he continued, to laughter from the audience. “His transformation was not possible without the support of the wise King and Queen who had ruled the kingdom for many years and were full of wisdom and experience and had good hearts. They knew what was best and guided the young couple with a gentle hand, generously sharing all their valuable experience.”

Daniel then led his bride onto the floor for the first dance, a perfectly executed waltz, while King Carl Gustaf followed with the groom’s mother Eva, and Daniel’s father partnered Queen Silvia.

In the early hours of the following morning, while the party was still in full flow, the couple slipped away to board a private jet belonging to Bertil Hult, one of Sweden’s wealthiest businessmen and a friend of the King. It flew them to Tahiti and then on to one of the islands in French Polynesia, where a yacht was waiting for them.

Swedes, meanwhile, were left to ponder the newest addition to their royal family: they liked what they had seen – or rather, heard. Aftonbladet said the speech had “moved royals to tears and spread goosebumps over Swedes’ arms around the whole country”; it was, the tabloid declared, “the moment he became our darling prince”. An online poll on the website of its rival, Expressen, showed Daniel had become the country’s second-most popular royal – beaten only by his wife.

Westling was something of a surprise as a royal consort, even though the Swedes had already had several years to get used to him. Victoria might have been expected to end up with one of what the Swedes call “brats” – the gilded youth from wealthy families who dress well, drive flashy cars and hang out in the bars, restaurants and clubs of Stockholm’s upmarket Stureplan district.

Indeed, for several years the Crown Princess dated Daniel Collert, a “brat” par excellence, whom she met at school. Good-looking, rich and confident, Collert was an attractive catch. But his life had also been marred by tragedy: first his father died, then his mother, and he was brought up by his stepfather, Göran Collert, a wealthy banker.

When Victoria moved to America in 1998 to recover from the anorexia from which she suffered during her late teenage years, Collert followed her across the Atlantic, but by then their relationship was effectively over and they had become just friends. It was shortly after the Princess’s return to Sweden that Westling came into her life – or rather she walked into his.

By royal standards, it was a curious way to meet your future husband. Victoria had been looking to join a gym and asked around for suggestions. Both Caroline Krueger, a close friend since childhood, and Victoria’s younger sister, Princess Madeleine, recommended Master Training, an exclusive establishment near Stureplan, popular with Stockholm’s smart set. With a restrictive membership policy and annual fee of more than £1,000, it was more like a private club than a fitness centre – in short, a place where even the heir to the throne could work out undisturbed. They also suggested a trainer: a young man named Daniel Westling.

Until then, Victoria had been mixing largely with “brats” like Collert: Westling was different, and not just because he worked in a gym rather than as a lawyer or in finance. For a start, he came not from one of the smart parts of Stockholm but instead from Ockelbo, a small town of six thousand or so people in central Sweden – a fact that was immediately clear to everyone as soon as he opened his mouth. His father was not a wealthy banker or industrialist, but worked for the local council, while his mother was employed by the post office. He dressed in jeans and baseball cap rather than smart designer wear, lived in a modest ground-floor flat and drove a little Alfa Romeo.

Yet, almost in spite of herself, Victoria came to fall for him. What had begun as a professional relationship turned into friendship – and then something more. Unbeknownst to all but members of her closest circle, she and Westling became lovers and she even started travelling back with him to Ockelbo. The locals appeared unfazed by their future queen’s relationship with one of their own. And far from rushing to give the story to Sweden’s gossip-hungry evening papers, they took pride in keeping their secret to themselves.

Just as the King’s relationship with Silvia Sommerlath had been rumbled by the press thirty years earlier, so his daughter knew her secret would eventually come out. By May 2002 Johan T. Lindwall, a well-connected royal reporter from Expressen, Sweden’s best-selling evening tabloid, had been tipped off about their relationship and, after warning the palace, wrote a story about it. By coincidence, Victoria was due to hold a news conference on another subject on the same day Lindwall’s story appeared. This would have given her the perfect opportunity to deny the relationship – except she didn’t. Asked about Westling, Victoria said only, “Daniel is a very good friend and is very close to me.”

Confirmation of quite how close they were came that July at Krueger’s twenty-fifth birthday party, held at a restaurant in the Stockholm harbour, hired especially for the occasion. The theme was Hawaiian: Victoria and Westling were there together but, conscious of the journalists camped around the venue, they knew they had to be discreet. Then, sometime after midnight, Victoria led Daniel to the dance floor – and they kissed. Unknown to them, a lucky photographer with a long lens on a boat in the harbour captured their clinch. The next afternoon the photograph was plastered over almost the entire front page of Aftenposten under the headline “The Kiss”.

That day Victoria was due to fly to the Solliden Palace, the Swedish royals’ summer residence on the southern island of Öland, to join her family for celebrations later that week to mark her own twenty-fifth birthday. As she walked onto the plane, her image stared back at her from the front of her fellow passengers’ newspapers. That was nothing, however, compared with the discomfort that awaited her when she had to explain herself to her father.

The King, it seems, was not happy with her choice of Westling as a partner. “He was not what the King had imagined for his daughter,” says Herman Lindqvist, a journalist turned popular historian who has got to know Victoria well after tutoring her on her country’s past. “But when she met him she liked him, very much. She wanted to keep things on a friendship level, but ‌she couldn’t control her feelings.”1

The King wasn’t the only one to have misgivings. Many of the palace officials, used to mixing in their narrow court circles, looked down on this boy from the provinces. So did some of Victoria’s friends. However elite his gym, Westling was still a personal trainer. Stéphanie of Monaco may have married her bodyguard, but this was Sweden, not a tiny principality on the Mediterranean. And Victoria was going to be its next monarch. Comments began to appear in the Swedish press about Westling’s poor English and lack of sophistication. Unprepared for the media attention, he made things worse by losing his temper with the photographers who began to follow his every move.

Victoria was not going to give him up, however, and Westling began gradually to win acceptance, being seen in public with the royal family and joining them at events – but it was a process that took several years. As he came more and more into the public eye, Westling was working on his image: the jeans were replaced by smart suits and the little Alfa Romeo by a Lexus. He was also becoming more confident in high society; his English improved. One of the country’s leading public-relations companies started to give him advice and set up meetings with politicians and other prominent figures in Swedish society.

With every month that passed it increasingly became a matter not of whether the pair would marry but of when. In May 2008 Victoria and Westling appeared together at the fortieth birthday party of Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark, who is Victoria’s second cousin, but they carefully avoided public displays of affection. The next month it was announced that Westling was going to rent a modest two-hundred-square-foot one-bedroom flat in Drottningholm, the royal estate outside Stockholm, paying just over £400 a month. Palace officials insisted that the Crown Princess would continue to live in the Sjöflygel wing of the palace, which was a few hundred metres away from Westling’s new apartment in Pagebyggnaden, a house in the grounds.

The engagement was finally announced on 24th February 2009, with the wedding set for June the following year. Victoria’s parents appeared to be reconciled to the prospect of having Westling as their son-in-law – not least, perhaps, because of the family’s overarching need, like all dynasties, to have an heir. Their daughter, after all, was already into her thirties; breaking up with Westling and starting up with someone else anew could take time.

There was one more problem: although Westling seemed ostensibly fit and strong, he also suffered – unknown to the Swedish people – from a serious kidney complaint. That May, the Swedish royal court announced that he had been admitted to hospital and undergone a kidney transplant, with an organ donated by his father. The court claimed the need for a transplant had been known for a long time and the reason for the surgery was “a congenital but not inherited disease causing impaired renal function”.

If Westling seemed an unusual choice of partner, he was positively conventional beside the woman that Crown Prince Haakon, Victoria’s Norwegian counterpart, had married nine years earlier. Tall, blonde and statuesque, Mette-Marit Tjessem Høiby certainly looked like a princess; her background, however, was anything but the usual one for a future royal spouse – not least because she was a single mother.

Traditionally, Europe’s royal houses have preferred the women who marry into their family to come “without a history”. Mette-Marit had not just a history but living proof of it in the form of her son, Marius Borg Høiby, who had not only been born out of wedlock but had been fathered by a man, Morten Borg, with a conviction for possessing cocaine. Far from trying to gloss over her past, the royal couple confronted it head on. When Mette-Marit walked down the aisle of Oslo Cathedral on 25th August 2001, stunning in an ecru-coloured wedding gown of soft, thick crêpe with a twenty-foot veil, she was accompanied not just by three flower girls, but also by Marius, aged four, dressed in coat and tails.

In his wedding address, Gunnar Stålsett, the bishop of Oslo, praised the bride for setting an example in the way she had cared for her son. “You are beginning a new chapter, with the pages still unwritten,” he said. “You do this with dignity. Today you are better equipped to understand others, young and old, who are in pain. Jesus says, ‘He who is forgiven little, loves little.’”

So how had the heir to the Norwegian throne found himself such an unusual bride? The couple first met in July 1996 at the Quart Festival, a rock-music event in Kristiansand in southern Norway. Haakon had been staying with Morten Andreassen, one of the festival’s organizers, whom he knew from his time in the navy. Andreassen, in turn, introduced him to Mette-Marit. The couple apparently clicked almost immediately, and they were soon seen dancing and laughing together. It has also been claimed they began a short but passionate summer romance.

The claim, if true, was extraordinary, for Mette-Marit was, at the time, pregnant with Marius, who was born the following January. Not that she was letting pregnancy slow her down. That autumn she appeared as a “flirt queen” on Lysthuset, a TV programme in which more than a hundred singles competed for a date with her.

Their backgrounds could have not have been more different. While Haakon was groomed from birth to be king, his bride grew up in more modest conditions in Kristiansand. Mette-Marit was born on 19th August 1973, the youngest of four children, to Sven O. Høiby, a journalist turned advertising copywriter, and his wife, Marit Tjessem. In 1984 her parents divorced. The three older children had already left home, but Mette-Marit was just eleven. She stayed with her mother in the family home, visiting her father every other weekend and on holidays. Although her parents’ split was amicable, Mette-Marit took it badly.

Life went on, however. Mette-Marit grew into a pretty blonde teenager interested in music, boys and sport. Bored with life in Norway, she set off in 1990 for Australia for a year on a school exchange. She had hoped to be sent to Sydney, Melbourne or another big city, but ended up in Wangaratta, a dusty town of just 20,000 people in the state of Victoria. She nevertheless adapted quickly to Australian life, making friends and quickly losing her Norwegian accent.

Fitting back into life in southern Norway proved more difficult. One day she turned up to school with her head shaved; her school friends thought it was cool; her mother, predictably enough, was horrified. She also fell in love with a boy two years older than her who played in a party-loving local band. This meant alcohol and hashish, which she appeared to have tried for the first time.

Despite the hedonism, Mette-Marit passed her school-leaving exam in 1994. Shortly before, she had split with her musician boyfriend and taken up instead with John Ognby, a disc jockey from Lillestrøm in eastern Norway who was fifteen years her senior. Soon afterwards she moved in with him and was plunged into a life of wild parties, although this time the drugs, including ecstasy, LSD and other hallucinogens, were stronger than in her Kristiansand days.

Mette-Marit began to realize she had to move on. Her exam results had not been that good, and she decided to take them again at Bjørknes, a private grammar school in Oslo, where she moved in with a girlfriend, who lived in the Grünerløkka part of town. Ognby did not take separation easily: after allegedly making a number of threatening telephone calls – for which she denounced him to the police – he turned up in Oslo and threatened her with a knife on the street. He was held for forty-eight hours before he was released. Their intention, he said, had been to marry in Las Vegas; Mette-Marit had already bought the rings.

It was shortly afterwards, while she was working as a waitress at various cafés, that Mette-Marit met Borg and became pregnant by him. She wanted to keep the baby and was strengthened in her resolve by her mother, who had since remarried. Borg, too, promised to be there for the baby, who was born on 13th January 1997 in Oslo’s Aker hospital.

At the 1999 Quart Festival, Haakon met Mette-Marit again. The arrival of Marius had barely brought any stability to her life. After living alone for a few months, in the summer of 1997 she moved in with a new man – another disc jockey, this time ten years her senior – but split from him the following spring and in early 1998 moved back to Kristiansand with another boyfriend. This relationship, too, ended after a few months. After spending a year at an engineering school in Grimstad in southern Norway, she decided to give up and go back to Oslo and study social anthropology. The problem was that she had nowhere in the capital to live.

Fortuitously enough, Haakon did. Since his return from California, where he had been studying at Berkeley, he had been living in a large bachelor pad at Ullevålsveien 7 in Oslo. He had fallen head over heels in love with the woman he had first met three years earlier, and, concerned at her plight, invited her to come and live there with him. For the rest of that year Marius spent most of the time with his grandparents in Kristiansand.

Initially, it seems, Haakon and Mette-Marit shared a flat – but not a bed. Soon the relationship flourished. Even so, Haakon was reluctant to tell his father, and Mette-Marit used to leave by the back door. Norway is one of Europe’s most liberal countries – but the Crown Prince knew what the press would nevertheless make of their relationship.

When Haakon finally summoned the courage to tell his father, Harald was understanding: his own relationship with Queen Sonja, a commoner, had been controversial during the 1960s. The question was: when should they tell the public? Birgitte Klækken, a journalist with the southern Norwegian newspaper Fædrelandsvennen, decided the question for them. For some time, she had been investigating rumours about the romance. On 29th December ‌1999 she broke the story.2

With their relationship now in the open, the couple embarked on a rapid damage-limitation exercise. They realized they had no chance of hiding Mette-Marit’s past, but there was also the matter of various embarrassing private photographs and videotapes. One by one, Mette-Marit’s friends handed them over, but there was concern there was still something out there.

The media, meanwhile, were investigating Mette-Marit’s past. In April 2000 came the revelation that Borg had a past conviction for possessing cocaine. Crisis sessions in the palace followed: the following month, Haakon went on the offensive and gave an interview to NRK, the state television channel, in which he confirmed his relationship. “I have a girlfriend and her name is Mette-Marit,” he declared. “The reason I have decided to go public now is that if I had been passive, my girlfriend, her son, her family, her friends and acquaintances could all have been dragged into this unnecessarily.” In the interview the Crown Prince admitted his girlfriend had been a frequent visitor in the early Nineties to huge dances where drugs were often used, but insisted that was now a closed chapter.

Despite polls showing that his future subjects were less than enamoured of the relationship, Haakon persisted, and in September 2000 he, Mette-Marit and Marius moved into a flat in a smart but far from exclusive area just north of Oslo’s city centre. The building was on a fairly busy road and had an overgrown front garden with a bus stop right outside and just a couple of discreet security cameras by way of protection. From there the Prince and his girlfriend, dressed in jeans and trainers, would go out to coffee bars, concerts and record shops like any other young couple. They even bought their furniture from Ikea.

And so it might well have continued, if there had not been pressure from Norway’s Lutheran Church – of which Crown Prince Haakon is due one day to become head. And so, on 1st December 2000, after obtaining a green light from the prime minister, the King announced his son’s engagement.

The following August, at a news conference three days before the wedding, Haakon expressed thanks that he had not been made to choose between love and the throne. Mette-Marit, meanwhile, made a heartfelt confession of her youthful indiscretions. “My adolescent rebellion was stronger than most,” she said, holding back tears. “I was in an environment where we experimented and we went beyond the established norms.” She did not deny suggestions of previous drug use, but insisted: “I have had experiences for which I have paid dearly. I would like to take this occasion to condemn drugs.”

The news conference proved a masterstroke: from then on Mette-Marit’s wild past ceased to be a story for the Norwegian media. There was one still problem though: her father, Sven O. Høiby. His career had gone downhill since the breakup of his marriage. While his daughter had moved in with the Crown Prince, Høiby, now in his mid-sixties, was living alone in a small flat in Kristiansand. He was also drinking heavily. For a woman hoping to become the next Queen of Norway, “Sven O.”, as he became known, was a disaster waiting to happen – and a gift for the tabloid press.

Håvard Melnæs, an ambitious young journalist from Se og Hør, a celebrity magazine with a circulation of more than 400,000 copies a week and deep pockets, knew just how to exploit him. After news of Haakon’s relationship with Mette-Marit broke, Melnæs had been given the job of trying to find her friends and family, and based himself down in Kristiansand for six months for the purpose. Past boyfriends were a particular target. Melnæs wanted photographs and stories and was happy to pay thousands of pounds for them – in cash, if necessary.

Almost a decade later, seated over a beer in the bar of the Grand Hotel on Oslo’s Karl Johans Gate, Melnæs still seemed surprised by their willingness to cooperate. “I tracked down about ten to fifteen boyfriends, which, given she was twenty-seven, meant an average of one every six months,” he recalls. All but one of them had a criminal record – mostly for drugs. Many of them, he claims, were ready to help the magazine in return for money – as too were many of the future Crown Princess’s other friends. “The more people we paid off, the more ‌copies we sold,” he said.3

None of this could have prepared Melnæs for the experience of meeting Høiby. Melnæs had tried to contact him from Oslo but failed to find a telephone number, so he looked up his address in Kristiansand and went round to try his luck. After he had been standing several hours outside his apartment building, an elderly man, still distinguished and ramrod straight, appeared. Melnæs suggested they go for a coffee. Høiby proposed beer instead.

Later that evening they sat for four to five hours in Høiby’s local bar, downing six or seven beers. Melnæs noticed a plastic bag he was carrying with him. It contained photographs of Mette-Marit – fifteen of them. “They were all innocent stuff: Christmas Eve, the first day at school, that kind of thing,” Melnæs recalls. For a magazine that wanted to build up a picture of the future queen, they were worth a lot of money, which Melnæs was happy to pay. But Høiby, whose media background gave him an idea of how his daughter would be treated by the press, wanted something else: a story in Se og Hør painting his daughter in a positive light. Melnæs duly obliged. “I wrote the most positive story possible, even making up anonymous sources whom I quoted saying what a great future queen she would make,” he says.

It was the beginning of a mutually beneficial friendship. Melnæs’s bosses were so pleased with their new source they started to pay Høiby a retainer of 15,000 kroner (about £1,680) a month and provided him with a mobile phone so he could stay in touch. That was only the starting point: extra information or new photographs from his daughter’s past would earn him more than £10,000. And now Høiby had a phone and was back in contact with friends and family, the information – and money – began to flow. “Over the first two years, we must have paid him 700,000 to 900,000 kroner [£78,000–100,000],” Melnæs recalls. “Lots of times it was black money – I used to carry the money in envelopes and hand it to him.”

With the wedding approaching, Mette-Marit was faced with the problem of how to deal with the increasing embarrassment of her father. It is unknown whether she knew he was the source of all the photographs, but she realized he had to be brought under control. Initially it was not clear whether he would be allowed to come to the wedding. Eventually he received his invitation, although he was not permitted to accompany his daughter down the aisle. According to Melnæs – who had by then turned into a kind of surrogate son for Høiby – Mette-Marit also made her father sign an agreement pledging not to drink for the duration of the festivities.

Sven O. was left largely to his own devices: it was his “sponsors” at Se og Hør who not only paid for the four different suits he needed for the various formal wedding functions, but also financed his stay at the Grand Hotel, one of the most expensive in Oslo. They also gave him a pocket camera so he could take pictures of the wedding. “He was driven into our arms,” says Melnæs. In the event he behaved himself (even though the camera was confiscated by a security guard).

The elevation of Sven O.’s daughter to Crown Princess had not solved his money problems – nor made him more reluctant to use the only means at his disposal of resolving them: the press. But the media’s interests had changed since the wedding: the appetite for details of Mette-Marit’s past life had faded. It was time for Sven O., hitherto an unnamed source, to become the story himself.

The result was his first on-the-record interview – with Se og Hør, of course – in which he talked frankly about his life. It was published under the headline: “I drink beer at nine in the morning”. Sven O. was well paid for this too, but the money was soon gone, and he had to find other ways of cashing in on his new-found fame. He was also beginning to enjoy the attention.

Ever creative, Sven O. then announced he was going to write a book about his grandson, Marius. Haakon and Mette-Merit, who had both since gone to London to study, were horrified. It was announced that Sven O. would go to Britain for a “crisis meeting” with them. In the event the Crown Princess refused to see her father. The book was never written – nor was it clear it was ever going to have been. The important thing was it meant another story for the magazine, and more money for Høiby.

There was more embarrassment to come: in 2004 Sven O. went on tour with Sputnik, a veteran country-music singer. Also part of the act was Renate Barsgård, a stripper whose career, now she had reached her thirties, was on the way down. Sven O., in his late sixties, suggested they marry – which meant another exclusive for Se og Hør and a further four thousand or so pounds for Høiby. “It is strange that an old man like me could fall in love with a woman who is the same age as my youngest daughter,” he told the ‌magazine. “But it’s true love.”4

Even before the wedding took place, Sven called the magazine to say his young fiancée was pregnant. He was getting greedy, though, and claimed a rival publication was ready to pay 250,000 kroner (£28,000) for the exclusive. Se og Hør was ready to match that – but only if they could make sure the story was true. And so, since Melnæs was away, another reporter was dispatched from Oslo to meet Barsgård with a pregnancy-testing kit. She declined to take the test.

The wedding was still on track, and Se og Hør took control of the organization; it decided to hold the ceremony in a Norwegian embassy abroad, so the couple would not be recognized and the magazine would keep its exclusive. They chose The Hague, on the grounds that there were unlikely to be any Norwegian tourists around. The magazine paid for everything, including the rings, although Melnæs, who went along, was amused to see that Sven O. bought the cheapest ones possible – one for four euros and another for twelve euros – so he and his “bride” could keep as much money as possible for themselves. This didn’t stop the Norwegian ambassador from congratulating the couple on their rings.

Se og Hør also had the rights for the couple’s honeymoon in Thailand, but to Melnæs’s relief it was a colleague from the magazine who went with them. “It was like a mental hospital,” he says. “I never saw anyone as exhausted as my colleague when he came back. As for Sven O., he had stopped eating. It was just beer, gin and tonic and cigarettes.”

Three months later, in June 2005, predictably enough, the unlikely couple announced they were divorcing – which meant another story and another 50,000 kroner fee (£5,600) for Sven O.

It was soon afterwards that Melnæs decided he had had enough of the magazine and left. To the embarrassment of his former employers, he decided to write a book about his experiences, with the ironic title En helt vanlig dag på jobben (A Normal Day at Work). Its contents were explosive. Those in the know had long suspected Se og Hør of employing dubious methods, but Melnæs’s claims that the magazine had bought information not just from sources like Sven O. but also from police, banks, the civil service and other organizations provoked considerable hand-wringing.

“We had so many informers, it was ‌like the Stasi,” he claimed.5 Others in the Norwegian media queued up to disassociate themselves from such methods. Despite protests from the magazine, Melnæs claimed he had got his facts right and was obliged to change only one word from the first to the second edition. In response to his revelations, a number of inquiries were set up. The book was itself turned into a film that opened in Norwegian cinemas in March 2010.

Sven O., meanwhile, had been edging towards a reconciliation of sorts with his daughter, despite the embarrassment he had caused her. It was to prove short-lived, however. In 2006 Sven O. was diagnosed with cancer. He died the following March at home in his apartment in Kristiansand – but still had the potential to cause problems even from beyond the grave. In November 2007, a biography written with his cooperation by Anette Gilje, ‌a Norwegian journalist, was published.6

Among the guests at Haakon and Mette-Marit’s wedding were Willem-Alexander, the Prince of Orange and heir to the Dutch throne, and his fiancée Máxima Zorreguieta. Máxima was born on 17th May 1971 in Buenos Aires to Jorge Zorreguieta and María del Carmen Cerruti. The generally accepted version of her background was that it was an affluent one – which seems to be confirmed by her education at the bilingual Northlands School, where the rich of Buenos Aires send their children, followed by the private Universidad Católica de Argentina.

The reality was different, according to Gonzalo Álvarez Guerrero and Soledad Ferrari, two Argentinian journalists who researched Máxima’s life for an unofficial biography that appeared in 2009. The Zorreguietas lived in a fairly standard 1,290-square-foot apartment in the Barrio Norte part of Buenos Aires, while her father, far from being a wealthy landowner, began his working life as a customs officer, they found. When Máxima was born, her father was still married to another woman, by whom he already had three daughters. Because of Argentina’s restrictive divorce laws, it was not until 1987 that he was finally ‌able to marry her mother.7

If they could afford to pay their daughter’s school and university fees, then it was only because they saved on everything else. Máxima repaid the investment: with her degree in economics, she worked in finance and in 1996 moved to New York, getting a job first at HSBC James Capel Investment Management and then at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson.

Máxima and Willem-Alexander met in April 1999 at the Feria de Abril de Sevilla, an annual fortnight’s festival in southern Spain during which the banks of the Guadalquivir River are covered with rows of casetas – individually decorated marquee tents – owned by prominent families, companies and other institutions. The official version has it that they met purely by chance, but Guerrero and Ferrari claim they were brought together by the matchmaking skills of Máxima’s old school friend Cynthia Kaufmann, who had also moved to New York and met the Prince when he ran in the marathon there in 1992.

The Prince, still getting over the end of his four-year relationship with Emily Bremers, was immediately smitten. When he suggested going to New York to see her, she didn’t say no – although she apparently said subsequently that when he turned up three weeks later, “I’d nearly forgotten what he looked like.”

What began as a fling turned rapidly into a serious relationship. Over the next few months the Prince was to be a frequent visitor to the apartment at 225 West 20th Street that Máxima had until recently shared with Dieter Zimmermann, her former boyfriend. Máxima also visited the Netherlands. The Prince was soon ready to introduce her to his parents – a sensitive moment for anyone, particularly for the heir to the throne. That August Máxima was invited to join the royal family at Beatrix and Claus’s house in Tavernelle near Florence; they also went to visit Willem-Alexander’s grandfather, Prince Bernhard, at his villa in Porto Ercole.

It didn’t take too long for the paparazzi to notice the glamorous new woman on Willem-Alexander’s arm and by late August the story was out. Compared with Mette-Marit, whose existence was about to be revealed, Máxima seemed an ideal candidate to be a princess. Admittedly she was a commoner, but this no longer seemed a problem – and was perhaps even an advantage. In an increasingly secular age it also did not seem such a major drawback that she was Catholic, the religion of Holland’s former Spanish masters. She made no secret that she liked to enjoy herself, but there was no history of drug use and, above all, no illegitimate child.

Yet, as with Mette-Marit, there was a problem with Máxima’s father. As the Dutch media discovered within a few days, Jorge Zorreguieta had progressed from humble beginnings in the customs service to become an under-secretary of agriculture in the military junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, during which thousands of people disappeared or were killed – making him a potentially embarrassing father-in-law for a future Dutch Queen.

But what had Jorge Zorreguieta himself done? He claimed that as a civilian he had been unaware of what was going on during the dictatorship. Not everyone was convinced. And so, at the request of the Dutch parliament, Professor Michiel Baud, an expert on Latin American history, was charged with conducting an investigation into his past. Baud cleared Máxima’s father of direct involvement in any of the atrocities, but concluded it was highly unlikely that a person in such a powerful position should have been unaware of what the regime was doing.

Concern about the union rumbled on. Beatrix, mindful of the criticism that had surrounded her engagement with Prince Claus more than thirty years earlier, stood by Willem-Alexander’s choice. In November 2000, she hosted a dinner for her son’s potential parents-in-law. And then, the following January, during her sixty-third birthday celebrations in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, she gave her stamp of approval to the union, posing for photographs alongside the couple, who were appearing together in public for the first time.

Yet speculation was growing that Willem-Alexander might have to renounce the throne if he wanted to go ahead and marry Máxima – which would have meant his younger brother, Johan Friso, then aged thirty-two and working for Goldman Sachs in London, would have to take his place. Willem-Alexander did not make things any better with a rather clumsy defence of his father-in-law at a news conference in New York; members of the Dutch parliament described his comments as “painful” and “incomprehensible”, while Wim Kok, the prime minister, said he had “asked him to keep quiet about the matter”. A compromise was found: Kok sent Max van der Stoel, a former foreign minister, on a secret mission to meet Máxima’s father and explain “that his presence at the wedding would be impossible”. Zorreguieta agreed to stay away, as did his wife.

Matters moved more quickly than most observers would have predicted: on 30th March in a rare televised address, Queen Beatrix, accompanied by her husband, son and future daughter-in-law, announced Willem-Alexander’s engagement and praised his fiancée as “an intelligent modern woman”. At a news conference afterwards, Máxima, speaking in near flawless Dutch, said she abhorred the military regime and “the disappearances, the tortures, the murders and all the other terrible events of that time”. As for her father, she said, “I regret that while doing his best for agriculture, he did so during a bad regime.” That July, a joint session of the two houses of parliament gave their formal consent to the union, although fifteen of the 225 members voted against.

The wedding, held on 2nd February 2002 in Amsterdam, passed off without incident. After a civil ceremony at the Beurs van Berlage, a former bourse, the couple pronounced their vows in a Protestant ceremony at the Nieuwe Kerk, kneeling on a prayer stool specially made for the 1901 wedding of Willem-Alexander’s great-grandmother, Queen Wilhelmina. The newly-weds then rode through the streets in the Golden Coach given to Wilhelmina by the city when she took the throne in 1898.

The only sign of dissent was a small group of demonstrators carrying placards that read “Where is my son?” – a pointed reference to the many young men who had “disappeared” during the junta’s rule – but it was nothing compared to the riots that marred Beatrix’s wedding in 1966. One of Máxima’s first actions after the ceremony was to telephone her parents, who, according to the authors Guerrero and Ferrari, watched the ceremony on a television in a suite at the Ritz Hotel in London paid for by Beatrix.

Yet the controversy over Zorreguieta’s past has never gone away completely: in November 2011, Brandpunt, a Dutch current-affairs programme, uncovered what it claimed was new evidence that the Princess’s father was indeed aware of at least a few of the cases of atrocities against civilians. The Labour Party said that just as he had stayed away from his daughter’s wedding, so he should be barred from attending Prince Willem-Alexander’s coronation when he ascends the throne.

The year 2004 saw the weddings of two of Europe’s crown princes, again both to commoners. On 14th May, as the strains of Handel’s coronation anthem, ‘Zadok the Priest’, rang out in Copenhagen Cathedral, Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark married Australian Mary Elizabeth Donaldson. Eight days later, Prince Felipe de Borbón of Spain married Letizia Ortiz, a former television journalist.

Despite her lack of royal blood, Donaldson was in many respects the ideal bride. Born on 5th February 1972 in Hobart, capital of Australia’s island state of Tasmania, she was the fourth child of John Donaldson, a Scottish-born mathematics professor at the University of Tasmania, and Henrietta, who had worked as secretary to the university’s vice-chancellor. The parents, both from the little fishing village of Port Seton, east of Edinburgh, had been school friends and childhood sweethearts. They married aged just twenty-one in 1963, after John gained his bachelor’s degree from the University of Edinburgh. Several months later they emigrated to Tasmania, to join the rest of John’s family, who had relocated there already.

Mary’s childhood, spent in Taroona, a few miles’ drive from Hobart, was a comfortable suburban one. After school and at weekends, Morris Avenue, the street in which they lived, was filled with children of all ages who played together or went to the beach. Mary was especially close to her brother John, who was just eighteen months older than her.

After school Mary followed the rest of her family to the University of Tasmania, where her father was now dean of the science faculty; she took a bachelor’s degree in commerce and law. Like many Tasmanians Donaldson found the island constricting and moved to the Australian mainland, first to Melbourne, where she got a job in advertising, as a trainee with DDB Needham. She was soon promoted and then moved onto Mojo Partners, where she became an accounts manager. Pretty, talented and ambitious, she seemed to have everything going for her: but then in November 1997 her mother, known as Etta to friends and family, died suddenly at the age of fifty-five from unexpected complications following a heart operation. Mary, just twenty-five, was devastated.

Six months later, Mary left Melbourne and after a few months’ tour of Europe and America – including a spell in Edinburgh – took the next logical step for an energetic young Australian: she moved to Sydney, the country’s largest city, where she was offered a job as account director in the local branch of Young & Rubicam. Soon after she moved to Love Communications, a major advertising agency.

Mary has said she saw herself eventually becoming managing director of such an international firm, but her life was changed for good by the Olympic Games, which opened in Sydney in September 2000. Politicians and heads of state from across the globe travelled to Australia for the ceremony; among them were Frederik and his younger brother Joachim.

That evening the princes decided to go out on the town with Bruno Gómez-Acebo, the nephew of King Juan Carlos of Spain. Their guides were Katya Tarnawski, an Australian friend of the Spaniard, and her sister Beatrice. Gómez-Acebo had said he would bring along two friends – but did not reveal they were the two Danish princes. Beatrice had assumed they would be Spanish athletes and called a friend, Andrew Miles, asking him to “bring some nice girls” to balance out the numbers. Among them was Mary, who was Miles’s housemate.

The two groups met at the Slip Inn, a popular bar in Sussex Street, near the waterfront, where they ordered pizzas, beer and wine and chatted. Frederik was jet-lagged and burnt out after having just completed his pilot’s training back home, but quickly seemed to hit it off with Mary, who was seated next to him. Quite when she realized the true identity of her partner is not clear, but after the party moved on later to Establishment, a trendy bar and restaurant a few streets away, the others noticed that the pair were deep in conversation. “When I left Establishment, they were still talking,” Beatrice Tarnawski recalled later. “The next morning I talked to Andrew to evaluate the evening, and we concluded that something was ‌afoot between Mary and Frederik.”8

Frederik clearly had the same feeling and the next day, after far too little sleep, called her. “There was something special about this girl, I felt, and she was by no means discouraging when I called her,” he recalled later. During the remaining weeks of the games, Frederik slipped away from his official functions to meet Mary several times, visiting her at the 1920s terraced house that she, Miles and other housemates rented at 20 Porter Street, near Bondi Beach. “I really felt she was a soulmate,” he recalls. “I was attracted by Mary in all respects. She was fantastic. To begin with, it was all somewhat secretive, but very lovely. If one was to visualize it, it was almost like a moonlit summer landscape. A calm lake, ambient, there’s ‌a surface, but also depth.”9

The Danish press followed Frederik’s love life closely, but the journalists who had come to Australia to cover the Olympics were oblivious to the huge story unfolding under their noses – and the Prince was keen to keep it that way.

Frederik had to return home after the games, but he was determined to see Mary again. And so, just two weeks later, he flew back, halfway around the world, for what was billed as a five-week holiday to allow him to get to know better the country with which he had fallen in love during the games. In fact, it was Mary with whom he had fallen in love, and the couple spent much of the five weeks together, either at Porter Street or strolling in the city, hoping not to be spotted by a visiting Dane. Frederik got to know not just Mary but also her friends, who were struck by his down-to-earth manner.

During the following year, Frederik took the twenty-four-hour flight to Sydney at least five times; he spent much of the time with Mary in the city, but they also went on holiday together, on one occasion staying in a little cabin by the Queensland border and another time at a house on the coast just south of Sydney. Although a growing number of Mary’s circle knew the identity of her lover, the Danish media were still none the wiser – much to Frederik’s relief. “It was really good that the press didn’t suss things out and that our love was able to unfold and develop,” he told his biographers. “There were enough obstacles already. Not least the physical distance between us. But that year that passed before our deciding that something radical had to happen, we had to ourselves. It was an exciting time and an excellent test of how much we really wanted each other.”

The frequency of Frederik’s trips to Australia meant the secret was not going to keep much longer, however, and the Danish press began to suspect a romance lay behind his love for the country. In September 2001, the Danish gossip magazine Se og Hør published a cover story revealing, apparently much to Frederik’s amusement, that he was going out with Belinda Stowell, who won gold for Australia in the sailing at the Olympics.

The next month, Frederik travelled again to Sydney to see Mary, staying for two weeks. After a relationship that had lasted thirteen months, they had come to a momentous decision: they couldn’t continue living on opposite sides of the world, and, since he couldn’t go and live in Australia, Mary would have to come to him, even though this would mean she would have to leave family, friends and job behind. By the time he left on 9th November, their minds were made up.

Three days later Mary got a first taste of her new life. Late that afternoon, as she was leaving her office at Belle Property, the estate agent where she was now working, she was confronted by Anna Johannesen, a reporter with Se og Hør’s rival, Billed-Bladet, which describes itself as “Denmark’s Royal Weekly Magazine”. Johannesen had a simple question: “Are you going out with the Crown Prince?” “No comment,” was Mary’s reply. But the secret was out. Three days later, she was pictured in a tight red skirt and black blouse on the front of the magazine. The couple had enjoyed more than a year together undisturbed. Now their relationship was out in the open.

To Mary’s horror and surprise, she found herself surrounded by photographers almost everywhere she went; an Australian freelancer was even employed to go through her rubbish bin in the hope of picking up an interesting snippet about her shopping habits. After a month, she gave up her lease on Porter Street and went to Paris to teach English, and then, in spring 2002, moved to Copenhagen.

The couple began to see more and more of each other, and Mary, who had got a job with Microsoft, built up a network of Danish girlfriends, who helped her to furnish the flat she moved into at Langelinie in Copenhagen, a few minutes’ walk from Amalienborg, the main royal residence where Frederik was living.

Signs multiplied of the growing seriousness of their relationship: during Christmas that year Queen Margrethe was seen with the couple at a cinema in Aarhus, where they watched The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Then in January 2003 the couple had their first public kiss – on the dock in Hobart, where Frederik was taking part in a sailing competition. It was only a peck on the cheek, but enough to create a sensation back home. Danish television showed it again and again, even in slow motion.

After keeping Mary – and the Danish public – waiting and waiting, Frederik finally proposed in September 2003 during a mini-break in Rome; going down on one knee and speaking in English, he asked if she would marry him. “You can’t say no, you mustn’t say no, you have to say yes,” he ‌told her. He wasn’t disappointed.10

Later that day Frederik called Per Thornit, his chief of household, from Rome, telling him he could send out a press release announcing the royal engagement. The couple meanwhile had another four or five days to themselves, which they spent in a hotel on the Adriatic coast a few hours’ drive from Rome.

The Queen gave her formal blessing to the union at a council of state on 8th October. Two hours later, after meeting members of the government for a champagne toast, the couple stepped out onto the balcony of the Amalienborg Palace and waved to the twenty-thousand-strong crowd below. That afternoon, at a press conference broadcast live on television, Danes were able to get a measure of the woman who was destined one day to be their queen.

While Mary Donaldson’s past was blissfully free of complications, Letizia Ortiz, the future wife of Felipe, Prince of Asturias and heir to the Spanish throne, presented a serious potential problem: she was a divorcee. Divorce and royalty have long been incompatible – as Edward VIII’s experience with Mrs Simpson showed – and the issue remained a particularly sensitive one in traditionally Catholic Spain. Divorce had not been permitted during the long years of Franco’s dictatorship and even after it was legalized in 1981 it remained stigmatized, with many couples preferring instead to remain married but live apart. In the case of Letizia, however, the Spanish public appeared ready to forgive and forget.

The future Princess of Asturias was born Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano on 15th September 1972, the daughter of a journalist turned union leader, in the tranquil northern city of Oviedo. She went to La Gesta School there before her family moved to Madrid, where she attended the Ramiro de Maeztu High School.

Letizia appears to have decided early to follow her father into the media, studying journalism at the Complutense University of Madrid, where she obtained both bachelor’s and master’s degrees. After a brief spell in Guadalajara, Mexico, where she worked at the newspaper Siglo XXI, she returned to Spain and went into television, working for the Spanish version of Bloomberg and for CNN+.

During all that time Letizia had been having a relationship with Alonso Guerrero Pérez, a man ten years her senior whom she had first met while he was teaching literature at her high school. On 7th August 1998 at a simple civil ceremony in Almendralejo, Badajoz, they married. Their union did not last, and after just a year they broke up.

Letizia’s media career, in the meantime, was taking off. In 2000 she moved to TVE, the Spanish state broadcaster, where she was given a mixture of increasingly prestigious reporting and presenting assignments, covering events ranging from that year’s US presidential elections and the 9/11 attacks to the American invasion of Iraq, winning several awards for her work. Then in August 2003 she became the anchor of Telediario 2, TVE’s daily evening news programme and the most viewed newscast in Spain.

By then her relationship with Felipe had already become serious. They had met at a dinner party at the end of the previous year in Galicia, in the north-west of Spain, where Letizia had been sent to cover the environmental disaster caused by the sinking in November 2002 of the Prestige oil tanker. Older than her by five years and, at 6'7", towering head and shoulders above her, the Prince was dark, dashing and blue-eyed; he was also single since breaking up in December 2001 with Eva Sannum, the Norwegian model.

Felipe’s relationship with Letizia moved very quickly. The couple became closer in the spring of the following year, even though their meetings were interrupted by assignments such as her trip to Iraq. By September the Prince felt sure enough about their relationship to introduce her to his parents. Yet still the Spanish media knew nothing about her. Then on 1st November, out of the blue, the palace announced that Felipe was getting engaged to Letizia. The surprise was total: “I’m a journalist, I know how to shake people off,” was how Letizia explained it to her colleagues.

The newspapers were enthusiastic: far from being seen as a disadvantage, Letizia’s lack of a noble background appeared a strong point in her favour. The contrast with the royal origins of Felipe’s mother, Sofía, a Greek princess, added to the modernizing feel. “The future queen is a Spanish woman who is very representative of our time: young, professional, a traveller, independent and with personal and professional experiences in common with millions of her compatriots,” enthused El País.

Its right-of-centre rival, El Mundo, agreed: “The fact that the Prince has chosen a journalist whose face is very familiar is a sign of modern times,” it said. Nor did it think her divorce should be an obstacle to their marriage. Spaniards seemed to agree: in a quick poll conducted by the newspaper, seventy per cent of respondents said they supported the marriage, with thirty per cent against. Five days later, Felipe formally asked for Letizia’s hand in marriage, giving her a gleaming diamond and white gold ring before they came out to face hundreds of journalists at El Pardo Palace, just outside Madrid.

Despite the initial euphoric reaction to the announcement, there were concerns in the months that followed that the “wedding of the century”, as the Spanish press were calling it, would be spoilt by discussion of Letizia’s suitability. Aided by the conservative government of José María Aznar, the palace went to extraordinary lengths to suppress intrusions into the future princess’s past: it was claimed that newspaper editors had been warned by authorities against publishing negative commentaries, while the divorce papers from her previous marriage were reportedly placed under twenty-four-hour guard in a 590-kg safe purchased specially for the purpose. This did not prevent some mildly embarrassing photographs emerging on the Internet, although there were doubts as to whether they were genuine. Some sites rather cruelly dubbed the future Princess of Asturias “Putizia”, a combination of her name and puta, Spanish for whore, and speculated about her past sex life.

The damage was limited, however: her former husband, Guerrero, who was said to have been “briefed” by palace officials and even visited by the security services, made clear he was not going to sell stories about his past life with Letizia to the media – and when he was interviewed he confined himself to wishing the couple well. Such noble behaviour did not go unrewarded, especially when he began publishing books. The label “El ex marido de la Princesa de Asturias” (“The ex-husband of the Princess of Asturias”), which was inevitably attached to Guerrero’s name, undoubtedly helped with publicity, even if he had to continue to fend off questions about his former wife whenever he appeared.

Felipe was also helped by the Catholic Church. Although not normally welcoming to divorcees, it was prepared to overlook Letizia’s first marriage on the grounds that it had taken place in a register office – which meant there was no barrier to their getting married in the Catedral Santa María la Real de la Almudena in Madrid.

The mood changed on 11th March 2004, some two months before the date scheduled for the wedding, when Islamic terrorists attacked four packed commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people and injuring a further 1,700. The pre-wedding euphoria was replaced by shock and mourning. It also brought a political change: Aznar, who had tried to blame the attack on Basque separatists, lost the election three days later and was replaced by José Luis Zapatero, the Socialist leader.

Unlike Aznar, Zapatero was no royalist and, to general surprise, called for the rules of succession to be changed to put women on an equal footing with men – which was widely seen as an attack on Felipe, who has two elder sisters and owes his place as heir to male primogeniture. Other members of the newly resurgent left complained about the cost of the wedding, due to run into millions of pounds. Felipe cancelled two prenuptial parties, donating the money that would have been spent to the families of the victims of the bombings and towards the cost of a monument.

Set for 22nd May, it was the first royal wedding on Spanish soil since Felipe’s great-grandfather, Alfonso XIII, married Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg in 1906. On that occasion, the bride and bridegroom narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by an anarchist with a bomb. This time, thankfully, amid heightened security, which involved twenty thousand police on patrol and the closing of airspace above the city, the wedding passed off peacefully – although it was marred by driving rain.

Despite the weather, tens of thousands of well-wishers turned out to line the streets of the Spanish capital, which was decked with flags and one million red-, yellow- and saffron-coloured flowers. The March bombings were not far from everyone’s thoughts, however: royal guards sent by the couple placed a bouquet of white roses at a grove of potted olive and cypress trees that had been positioned outside Atocha station, one of the main targets of the attack, with a note saying: “Always in our memory, Felipe and Letizia.”

The first half of the decade saw one more wedding of an heir to the throne, which was the most extraordinary of them all: that of Britain’s Prince Charles and the great love of his life, Camilla Parker Bowles. Since the very painful and public collapse of the Prince’s marriage to Diana and their divorce in 1996, there had been speculation about whether the Prince of Wales would ever marry Camilla. In the aftermath of Diana’s death the following year, the answer was a definite “no”. Camilla was already deeply unpopular. Now she was vilified by the British tabloid press, which was in the process of turning the dead Princess into a secular saint.

Charles was in no hurry, however, anticipating correctly that the passage of time would gradually make Camilla more acceptable to his future subjects. In June 2000, after years in which the Queen avoided meeting Camilla and pointedly did not invite her to royal functions, the two of them attended a party that Charles threw at Highgrove to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of ex-King Konstantinos of Greece, the younger brother of Queen Sofía of Spain. Their meeting, revealed the next day in the Mail on Sunday, had been kept secret until the last moment; the newspaper claimed that even Tony Blair, the prime minister, had not been told until the Queen arrived. So as not to push the matter, however, the monarch and her prospective daughter-in-law were seated far apart from each other during the lunch that followed. In a world in which protocol is everything, the choice of venue was deliberate. By meeting Camilla at Charles’s house rather than at one of the royal palaces, it was noted, the Queen was signalling a desire to end the family rift, but without formally welcoming her son’s girlfriend into the world of royalty.

The mood was changing – but only slowly and it was not until almost five years later that the announcement finally came: the couple would marry on 8th April 2005. In deference to the memory of the late Diana, however, Camilla would be known after the marriage not as the Princess of Wales, but as the Duchess of Cornwall. By royal standards this was to be a very low-key affair: as a divorcee, Camilla was barred from marrying Charles in the Church of England. (Charles was divorced too, but since his ex-wife had since died, he could have wed in a church.) The ceremony would be held instead at Windsor Castle, which would be temporarily designated a register office; the civil service would be followed by a blessing.

Things quickly started to go wrong – with a series of problems all eagerly seized on by the British tabloid press, who were still reluctant to accept Camilla. The first problem was the venue: examination of the small print of a law recently passed governing the use of non-standard buildings for weddings revealed that if the castle were licensed for the royal marriage it would have to be available for use by other couples for three years – which the royal family was understandably keen to avoid. The venue was quickly shifted to Windsor’s Guildhall.

Then came the Queen’s announcement that she would not attend the ceremony and only join her son for a “religious blessing” and party to be held in the castle. As supreme governor of the Church of England, she did not think it appropriate to attend a wedding not sanctioned by the Church.

Legal scholars also began to question whether it would be lawful for Charles and Camilla to marry in a civil ceremony, since members of the royal family were specifically excluded from the 1836 law that instituted civil marriages in England. Eventually, four unnamed legal experts ruled that the marriage would be lawful, although curiously it was later decided by the government that their advice would remain secret indefinitely because of its constitutional “sensitivity and significance”.

The greatest blow, though, came completely out of the blue: on 2nd April, Pope John Paul II died and his funeral was set for six days later, clashing with the date chosen for Charles and Camilla’s wedding. The Prince was left with no alternative but to postpone the marriage for twenty-four hours – not only would this allow him to attend the funeral, it would also avoid forcing Blair and other important guests from having to choose which event to attend. The press was not sympathetic. “What’s the problem with waiting one more day?” demanded the Sun. “He’s been keeping Camilla waiting ‌for the past thirty-five years.”11 Souvenir sellers, meanwhile, faced a last-minute scramble to change the dates on their commemorative merchandise.

The sun was shining, though, as Camilla, dressed in an oyster-silk basket-weave coat and natural-straw hat, emerged from the Rolls-Royce that carried the couple to the Guildhall. Although the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh stayed away, the other senior members of the royal family were there. Prince William and Camilla’s son Tom Parker Bowles were the witnesses.

The contrast with Charles and Diana’s wedding in 1981 could not have been greater. Then, an estimated six hundred thousand people had lined the streets to watch the couple travel to and from St Paul’s. This time, there were just twenty thousand on the streets of Windsor. More than thirty years after their romance began, the Prince had finally married the woman he loved. According to guests, the Queen made a speech at the reception in which she told how “proud” she was of her son on his wedding day, and wished him and his new wife well.

If Charles’s second wedding was low key, that of Prince William to Kate Middleton on 29th April 2011 was anything but; up to a million people – thousands of whom had camped out for one or more nights – lined the streets as Kate set off with her father aboard the Queen’s Rolls-Royce Phantom VI limousine for Westminster Abbey from the Goring Hotel in Belgravia, where she had spent her last night as a single woman.

William, who had been given three new titles to mark the occasion – Duke of Cambridge, Earl of Strathearn and Baron Carrickfergus – was waiting at the altar, dressed in the red tunic of the Irish Guards infantry regiment, the uniform of his highest military rank. When the couple emerged just over an hour later, now man and wife, to more bells and cheering from the crowd in Parliament Square, Kate, the middle-class girl now to be known as Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cambridge, looked entirely composed, but William seemed a little nervous.

For commentators in the British media, the contemporary feel to the day’s proceedings was in sharp contrast to the rather unreal, fairy-tale atmosphere of Charles and Diana’s wedding. “There was traditional pomp, pageantry and protocol aplenty, nostalgia and sentiment, but also a new and different air to this wedding – more relaxed, less reverent, more personal and natural,” wrote the Times. “Even the balcony kiss was brief and artless, followed by a princely blush. To make it seem sufficiently schmaltzy, television editors felt obliged to slow down the footage. Where Charles and Diana seemed almost overwhelmed by the sheer scale and majesty of their nuptials, Wills and Kate (to restore their ‌rightful monosyllables) seemed merely joyful.”12

Part of the difference between the two events was attributable to the enormous changes in British society in the intervening three decades. Yet it also appeared a reflection of the determination of the couple to put their personal stamp on proceedings rather than allow themselves to be bullied by the palace establishment.

Although the couple’s every move remained a matter of fascination to the press, Kate seem to be spared the excessive media intrusion faced by Diana three decades earlier. Matters were helped by the fact that she and William began married life in a cottage on the Welsh island of Anglesey, where he continued his posting as a search-and-rescue helicopter pilot for the Royal Air Force – which, to the fury of the Argentinian government, included a six-week stint in the Falkland Islands starting in February 2012. Even so, this did not prevent the occasional royal complaint against paparazzi who overstepped the mark.

When Kate celebrated her thirtieth birthday in January 2012 – at a suitably quiet dinner for friends and family – the occasion was marked by stories in the British press praising the way she had taken to her new role. St James’s Palace announced that she had accepted honorary positions with four charities that deal with a range of issues, including tackling drug addiction and helping young people. The four, chosen out of hundreds of applicants, reflected her “personal interests in the arts, the promotion of outdoor activity, and supporting people who are in need of all ages, especially young children”. The announcement drew comparisons with Diana and her work with charities that helped AIDS victims and removed landmines from conflict zones.

As far as the British press was concerned there was only one more thing that Kate needed to do: produce an heir, and what better year to do so than 2012, the year of the Queen’s jubilee? In an apparent attempt to encourage her, the February edition of Tatler even ran a cover photograph of the Duchess accompanied with the words: “Kate (What to expect when you are expecting)”. Whether she would do her royal duty remained to be seen.