‌Chapter 2

‌Coming and Going

In October 2009, John Lindskog, a veteran Danish journalist and royal expert, published a book about his country’s royal family that contained a bold claim: Queen Margrethe II – Daisy to her family – was considering doing what none of her predecessors had ever done before her: abdicate. Her French-born husband Henrik was not well and had made no secret of his desire to escape the cold, wet Danish winter and live out his remaining years in the couple’s beloved Château de Caïx in the wine district of Cahors in southern France. With her seventieth birthday due the following April, it seemed the ideal time for the Queen, who was also in poor health, to head south with her husband, giving up the throne in favour of her son, Crown Prince Frederik, by then in his early forties and happily married with two children.

“It is no secret that the Prince has long felt tired. He said simply that he has done his duty, and at the age of seventy-five years he feels that he is ready for retirement,” Lindskog claimed in the book, Royale rejser – Bag Kulisserne Hos De Kongelige (Royal Travels – Behind the Scenes with the Royals). “A number of events appear to have pushed forward something the Queen has always been against but that certain circumstances seem to suggest she will nonetheless do – be the first Danish ‌monarch to abdicate the throne.”1

The Danish royal palace denied the claim, as palaces always do, but that did not seem sufficient to dispel Lindskog’s theory completely. Yet more than two years later, in January 2012, Margrethe celebrated forty years on the throne – and made clear that she had no intention of stepping down. This was despite opinion polls suggesting a majority of Danes wanted their Queen to abdicate in favour of her son, if not immediately, then before she became much older. “You are handed your job as the old king or queen dies,” she said in a television interview to coincide with her jubilee. “It is not a life sentence, but a life of service.”

As Margrethe made clear, being king or queen is a job unlike any other – and that goes as much for the manner in which it is given up as that in which the appointment is made. A monarch is not just a head of state, but also, in many cases, head of the Church and army. He or she will be seen as not just the father or mother of the nation but also its very embodiment.

In a world of elected politicians who come and go, the monarch is a constant, his or her status enhanced by each year that passes. For me, as for most Britons alive today, Queen Elizabeth II has always been there, a reassuring symbol of continuity. In times of war or natural disaster, the monarch is the one we turn to. Through judicious management of the media she and her European compeers have even managed to establish themselves as part of our own Christmas or New Year celebrations.

When our monarchs marry or have children, it is like a happy event in our family; when they die, we feel it as a personal tragedy. They are also embedded in the political system: most turn up in person to open parliament every year, formally appoint prime ministers and accept their resignations. Even in the second decade of the twenty-first century there appears little serious pressure to change what is a profoundly undemocratic element in our democracies – perhaps simply because it works. If we bring ourselves to question our monarchs at all, it is to criticize the way they and their families are fulfilling their role; only a minority think to question whether they should have such a role in the first place.

The monarchy is ubiquitous and references to its members, past and present, are woven into the national culture. Past eras are defined by their monarchs. In Britain, houses can be Georgian or Edwardian in style, while the phrase “Victorian values” conjures up thoughts of conservative sexual mores and the covering of the legs of tables and pianos to avoid provoking lewd thoughts among those who gazed upon them.

Enter the word “royal” into Google and you come across a succession of organizations bearing that prefix, from the Royal Mail and the Royal Society to the Royal Academy of Arts. Visit a British supermarket and you will see a seemingly random collection of products that proclaim themselves to be “By Appointment to HM the Queen” – a mark of recognition extended to some 850 Royal Warrant holders who have supplied goods or services for at least five years to the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh or the Prince of Wales.

Although dating back more than eight hundred years, this accolade is more than a historical curiosity. The chocolate-maker Cadbury, which received its warrant from Queen Victoria in 1854, revealed recently that every Christmas it delivers several small boxes of a special dark chocolate to Buckingham Palace for the royal family to enjoy. Made by a team of three on specially reserved equipment, it has more cocoa solids than other dark chocolate – and is not sold to the Queen’s subjects. Anyone wanting a more direct royal connection can buy a product from Duchy Originals, a company set up by Prince Charles in 1990 in a reflection of his interest in organic and sustainable farming, which now produces a range of more than two hundred products from biscuits and preserves to gifts and garden seeds.

Even more visible is the Queen’s head on postage stamps and coins, and the letters ER – Elizabeth Regina – that grace letter boxes and other street furniture, just as GR did during the reign of her father, George VI. When Britain was discussing in the mid-1990s whether or not to adopt the euro, one of the arguments used by opponents was that it would mean the disappearance of the Queen’s image from coins and banknotes. To address such concerns the design was modified to provide space for the inclusion of such national symbols – even if Britain, in the event, decided to keep the pound. Indeed, some British Eurosceptics are concerned that ever closer European union will eventually lead to the creation of a superstate that will leave no role for the British monarch (although quite why the EU’s six other monarchies would acquiesce in such a plot is not explained).

Cross the English Channel and you will find monarchy equally embedded in society. Many of the streets of Brussels, Stockholm or The Hague contain the word “royal” or the name of a previous monarch. The same is true of Oslo, which continues to extend the courtesy to members of the Bernadotte dynasty who ruled the country before 1905, during the years when Norway was a junior member in an alliance with Sweden. Indeed, a statue of Carl III Johan, the dynasty’s founder (known to the Swedes, and to us elsewhere in this book, as Carl XIV Johan), still stands outside the royal palace (situated, of course, at the end of Karl Johans Gate).

Like the British version, most Continental royal families issue royal warrants of their own; Chocolaterie de Monaco, for example, is proud to declare itself a “Fournisseur Breveté de S.A.S. le Prince Souverain” (“supplier by appointment to HSH the Sovereign Prince”), and has launched special lines to mark royal occasions such as the marriage of Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly and the accession of Albert II.

Centuries ago monarchs were more than just synonymous with the nation over which they presided: they were considered divine. The ancient Egyptians believed their pharaohs were directly descended from gods. Although such ideas later came to be seen as ridiculous, the notion that kings are mortals, albeit chosen by God, endured longer. The concept of the Divine Right of Kings, which came to the fore in Britain under King James I (otherwise known as King James VI of Scotland) and in France under King Louis XIV, stated that a monarch owed his title to the will of the Almighty, and not to that of his subjects, the aristocracy or any other competing authority. Any attempt to depose him or restrict his powers, therefore, ran contrary to the will of God – a convenient way of dissuading those who might have contemplated rebellion.

Yet supernatural powers were still attributed to them. In England and France in the Middle Ages it was believed the monarch could cure scrofula – a disease known as the “King’s evil” – by touching the sufferer. Charles II is estimated to have touched as many as 90,000 people for the evil during his twenty-four-year reign in the late seventeenth century. William III, his successor but one, refused to touch at all, except when one man begged him. Laying his hand on the man’s head, the King declared, “God give you better health and more sense.” George I, who succeeded to the throne in 1714, ended the practice as “too Catholic”. In France, Louis XV stopped soon afterwards.

Old habits die hard, however. When Elizabeth II came to the throne, a quarter of the British still believed that she actually reigned by the grace of God – in other words that she was God’s representative on earth – a belief perpetuated by the most important part of the ritual surrounding the coronation of a British monarch, in which he or she is anointed with oil by the archbishop of Canterbury.

But who actually chooses the monarch? The answer, looking around the remaining monarchies of Europe, seems self-evident: the throne passes from the monarch to the oldest son – or, increasingly in this era of sexual equality, the oldest child.

In fact, heredity is only a relatively recent phenomenon. The traditional form of determining succession was military conquest and then acclamation or some form of election. In the eighth century, Pepin the Short, the father of Charlemagne, was elected king of the Franks by an assembly of Frankish leading men. Such a system of election persisted through the Middle Ages. The Germanic peoples continued to cling to the concept of elective monarchies, while the Holy Roman Emperors were chosen by prince-electors, although this often was merely a formalization of what was, in reality, hereditary rule.

Until the demise of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, its kings were elected by gatherings of nobles in a field in Wola, now a district of Warsaw. Given that every one of the half a million noblemen was entitled to take part, this was by far the widest franchise of any European country of the time. Not that it was democracy in the way we would understand today. The last king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, owed his election in 1764 largely to the military might of Tsarina Catherine the Great, his Russian patron – and lover.

Such a method became less fitting as kingdoms grew in size and societies became less egalitarian. Gradually, the right to vote would be restricted to local chieftains, the nobility or some other defined group. An elective monarchy also had the disadvantage of creating an interregnum during which the election was held, which provided an opportunity for rival candidates to ignore the rules and try to establish their rights to the throne by force.

Clear rules on succession – normally to the first-born son – provided a solution; it also suited monarchs understandably keen to pass the throne, along with their other possessions, down the generations. And so it was that elected monarchs gradually established dynasties. In Sweden, for example, Gustaf Vasa, although himself elected king by the Riksdag in 1523 after liberating his country from the Danes, was succeeded by his son, establishing a dynasty that would rule for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

There is no guarantee, of course, that the heir will actually be up to the job. Often the opposite has been the case, a serious problem when kings ruled rather than reigned. And then there were the cases when there was no legitimate heir, a frequent occurrence in the days of high infant mortality, especially in the many European countries where the succession was governed by Salic law – that is, where it was stipulated that only men could become the monarch.

Flexibility has often been the response. When the Danes found themselves with the childless Frederik VII in the middle of the nineteenth century, the future Christian IX’s claim to be named heir presumptive was helped by the fact that his wife, Princess Louise of Hesse-Kassel, was a niece of Christian VIII, the previous monarch. By contrast, there was no attempt to prove even a weak blood link when a reluctant Carl XIII of Sweden was prevailed upon in 1810 to accept Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte as his successor.

Britain was one of the earlier countries both to embrace the principle of heredity and to have queens who reigned in their own right – provided there was no male heir, that is. This should, in theory, have improved the chances of an orderly succession. On many occasions, however, the rule was broken, either because there was no heir or because he was deemed unsuitable. Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty that counted Henry VIII and Elizabeth I among its members, owed his crown to victory over Richard III, the last Plantagenet king, at Bosworth Field in 1485 rather than to heredity. When Elizabeth died childless more than a century later, the calling of James VI of Scotland to London to replace her was due not so much to his claim of descent from Henry VII as to the fact he was invited by the English parliament.

The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries brought more departures from the usual rules of succession in Britain: during what became known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688, King James II, who was considered too pro-Catholic, was deposed and replaced by a joint monarchy of his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange. It proved a short-lived remedy: the couple were childless, leaving Mary’s younger sister Anne to succeed them in 1702. Although the unfortunate Anne bore no fewer than eighteen children, none survived her – which meant another imaginative solution was needed. Again, one of the main qualifications for a successor was that he should not be a Catholic – a requirement that had been enshrined in law with the Act of Settlement of 1701. And so the Protestant George, Elector of Hanover, was invited to become King George I, even though he was already fifty-four, spoke no English and fifty-seven other people had a better claim to the throne than he had.

Heredity was not an option when it came to creating a new monarchy, as happened on several occasions in Europe during the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth. It was instead a matter of casting around other royal houses in search of a suitable candidate. This was a golden time for second or third sons otherwise faced with the prospect of life as a “spare”.

As already seen, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg and Prince Carl of Denmark were both beneficiaries of this, establishing dynasties that still reign over Belgium and Norway, respectively, today. Other countries’ experiences of “importing” a monarch have not been so happy: when Greece became an independent country under the protection of the great powers in 1832, Otto, son of the philhellene King Ludwig I of Bavaria, was invited to be its first king, even though he was just sixteen. King Otto’s thirty-year reign was stormy, however, and he was deposed in 1862. The following year the Greeks tried again, this time asking Prince Vilhelm, son of the future King Christian IX of Denmark, to be their ruler. Taking the name Georgios I, he reigned until 1913, when he was assassinated by a madman two weeks short of the fiftieth anniversary of his accession. Despite this tragic end, he did succeed in establishing a dynasty that reigned ‌over Greece – with some gaps2 – for another half a century until they were forced into exile.

Success is not the word to describe the fate of Maximilian, the younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, who was installed as Emperor of Mexico by Napoleon III of France in 1864. He was dependent on French military support for his survival, but when the civil war began, Napoleon pulled out his troops – and advised Maximilian to cut and run too. The unfortunate Austrian failed to do so and died aged thirty-four in front of a firing squad, in June 1867. His widow, Charlotte of Belgium, daughter of King Léopold I, had tried in vain to save him, having sought help in Paris, Vienna and finally in Rome from Pope Pius IX. Her husband’s violent death drove her mad, but she lived on for a further sixty years.

Equally curious was the search for a king of Albania, which was proclaimed an independent country in 1912. The crown was hawked around, but in the end was taken by Ahmed Bey Zogu, a mountain chieftain who rose from prime minister to president before becoming King Zog I in 1928. He was chased out by the Italians in 1939 and spent his last years in exile in a sparsely furnished villa on the French Riviera with Géraldine, his Hungarian-American queen, who supported him by writing mystery stories. Despite four abortive assassination attempts and a ferocious nicotine habit – he smoked 150 cigarettes a day – it was stomach ulcers and a liver ailment that eventually did for Zog. “My life is an adventure story,” he once claimed.

All of Europe’s monarchies – excluding, as we have seen, the Vatican and Andorra – have long since embraced heredity. So have those in the rest of the world, although here too there are exceptions: in Saudi Arabia, for example, succession to the throne, although hereditary, is not determined by a succession law but rather by consensus of the House of Saud as to who should become the next crown prince.

This has not prevented some rewriting of the rules of succession over the years. Appalled by the behaviour of female incumbents of the throne – especially his own mother, Catherine the Great – Tsar Paul of Russia changed the system in the late eighteenth century to ensure that a woman could succeed only in the extremely unlikely case that there were no legitimate male members of the dynasty.

In more recent times expediency has often triumphed over tradition. In the late nineteenth century the Dutch were ready to bend the rules when Willem III outlived all three sons by his first marriage, leaving only a daughter, Wilhelmina, the sole fruit of his somewhat scandalous union with his second wife Emma, who was more than forty years his junior. She became the first of a succession of three Dutch queens regnant – and a far better monarch than her male predecessors.

The Monégasques proved equally flexible a decade later, when the failure of Prince Albert’s son Louis to produce a legitimate heir meant the crown might end up in the German branch of the family – which no one wanted. And so the rules were changed to legitimize Charlotte, a bastard daughter Louis had sired by a cabaret singer while serving in the French Foreign Legion in Algeria. Ennobled as the Duchess of Valentinois and married in due course to a French nobleman, Charlotte never reigned in her own name – but did give birth to Rainier, who made his mark on the principality in the second half of the twentieth century.

After the Second World War, changing the rules of succession in Denmark proved more controversial. The constitution of 1849 declared that “Man shall follow man”, ruling out the possibility of a queen regnant. Unfortunately, King Frederik IX, who came to the throne in 1947, had three daughters but no son, and his wife, Queen Ingrid, had been warned by her doctors not to attempt childbirth again. The law seemed clear: next in line to the throne was Frederik’s brother Knud, who already had two sons, Prince Ingolf, born two months before Margrethe, and Prince Christian, born in 1942. There were concerns, however, about the suitability of both father and son – especially when they were compared with the intelligent and pretty young Princess. A referendum in 1953 approved a change in the constitution establishing male-preference primogeniture – which meant a daughter should succeed to the Danish monarchy when there was no eligible son.

Knud – reduced at the stroke of a pen from first to fourth in line to the throne – and his wife (and first cousin), Princess Caroline-Mathilde, were not pleased, leading to a bitter rift within the Danish royal family that endured for decades. From then on the two brothers saw each other almost only on official occasions. Knud, who died in 1976, outliving Frederik by four years, “would have liked very much to have those years as king”, Ingolf revealed in a magazine interview in 2010. “He ‌died as a bitter man.”3

Ingolf, then a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, was also disappointed, although with time he came to accept he would never be king. The events of 1953 nevertheless continued to hang for a long time like a cloud over the Danish royal family. It was only after his father’s death that Ingolf, much against his mother’s will, approached his cousin Margrethe, who was now Queen, with the aim of reconciliation.

The rules of succession were changed again in 2009 to give equal rights to both male and female, but this time it was uncontroversial: Margrethe has two sons and the elder, Crown Prince Frederik, himself produced a male heir, Prince Christian, in October 2005.

In putting men and women on an equal footing, the Danes were following their Scandinavian neighbours. In 1980 Sweden became the first monarchy in the world to introduce equal primogeniture, which put Crown Princess Victoria, the first child of King Carl XVI Gustaf, next in line for the throne ahead of her younger brother, Carl Philip. The King had made little secret of his opposition to the change, but was unable to prevent it. Norway took the same step a decade later, but this time the change was not made retroactive: this meant King Harald’s son Haakon remained first in line to the throne rather than having to stand aside in favour of his elder sister, Märtha Louise.

The trend elsewhere in Europe is also towards sexual equality – the Dutch adopted equal primogeniture in 1983 and the Belgians in 1991 – and in its 2004 election manifesto, Spain’s victorious Socialist Party vowed to follow suit, even though it failed to do so in its two terms of office. Luxembourg followed in 2011.

This still left Britain (along with Monaco and Liechtenstein) continuing to give precedence to male heirs. But there was change here, too – prompted by Prince William’s engagement to Kate Middleton in November 2010 and their marriage the following April. The prospect of the couple’s starting a family made the problem a potentially urgent one: if William and Kate’s first-born were a girl, it would provoke complaints of unfairness if she were overtaken by any brother born subsequently. But making such a change to the rules would be potentially more complicated than elsewhere in Europe, given Elizabeth’s role as queen not just of the United Kingdom but of fifteen other countries – all of ‌whom would have to agree.4

David Cameron set out to tackle the issue after coming to power in May 2010. At the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth, Australia, in October 2011, he won unanimous agreement from the leaders of the fifteen that the daughters of any future monarch should have the same rights as the sons. It was also decided to end the bar on a future king or queen marrying a Roman Catholic. “The idea that a younger son should become monarch instead of an elder daughter simply because he is a man, or that a future monarch can marry someone of any faith except a Catholic – this way of thinking is at odds with the modern countries that we have become,” Cameron told them. The changes required the amending of a mass of historic legislation – including the 1701 Act of Settlement, the 1689 Bill of Rights and the Royal Marriages Act 1772 – initially in the United Kingdom but then also in the fifteen other countries.

The gradual reduction over the centuries of the status of the king from god to mortal has been reflected in ritual: the Byzantine emperors placed the crown on their own heads as a way of demonstrating that their power came directly from God. So did the tsars and also the future Kaiser Wilhelm I when he was crowned king of Prussia in 1861. This went too far for most other European monarchies, though, which made it the task of a senior churchman to crown the king – Napoleon I called on Pope Pius VII to do the honours at his investiture in a highly elaborate ceremony in 1804 in Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.

Britain is the only European monarchy that has continued the coronation ritual – and there seems little doubt that Prince Charles will be crowned when he succeeds his mother, Elizabeth II. In a ceremony whose origins date back a thousand years, the sovereign is first presented to and acclaimed by the people. He or she then swears an oath to uphold the law and the Church and is anointed with holy oils by the archbishop of Canterbury, the primate of the Church of England, who places the crown on his or her head.

Although the next in line to the British throne succeeds immediately and automatically on the death of his or her predecessor, the coronation is typically held more than a year later, such is the time and effort that goes into organizing it. Edward VIII, for example, was never crowned, despite reigning for almost a year, as he abdicated before 12th May 1937, the date set for the ceremony. Being practical people, the British didn’t put all that preparation to waste: with Westminster Abbey already booked for the day, they made use of it to crown George VI, Edward’s younger brother, who had reluctantly succeeded him as king the previous December.

The coronation of George VI’s daughter Queen Elizabeth II on 2nd June 1953 was a spectacular pageant that added a dash of colour to grey post-war Britain, drawing hundreds of thousands of people from across the country to the streets of London. It was also to prove an important milestone in the monarchy’s relationship with the media as television cameras were allowed into Westminster Abbey to film proceedings. Although marred by heavy rain, the ceremony was perfectly choreographed and went off without a hitch – unlike some previous coronations, which had contained an element of farce: George III’s in 1761 was held up for three hours after the sword of state went missing, while his son and successor George IV’s was overshadowed by his row with his estranged and hated wife, Caroline of Brunswick.

In terms of pomp, the Dutch come closest to the British, although its monarchs are invested rather than crowned. The ceremony is held in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, but proceedings are secular rather than religious and conducted in accordance with constitutional law. Unlike in Britain, the regalia – a crown, the sceptre, the orb, the sword of state, the national standard and vellum-bound copy of the constitution, all of which symbolize royal power and dignity – are displayed on a credence table rather than worn or carried by the monarch.

Elsewhere such ceremonies are more modest affairs. In Belgium the king is sworn in before parliament and seated on a throne more or less ‌knocked together for the occasion.5 He also has no crown and no sceptre. Similarly, when Juan Carlos became king of Spain he merely swore an oath in the Cortes. The last Swedish king to be crowned was Oscar II, who came to the throne in 1872. His son, Gustaf V, who disliked such ceremonial as much as Britain’s Edward VII loved it, decided not to have a coronation at all when he became king in 1907.

Subsequent Swedish monarchs have followed his example. Carl XVI Gustaf, the current monarch, was installed in a simple ceremony in the throne room of the Royal Palace in Stockholm. As in the Netherlands, the crown jewels were displayed on cushions to the right and left of the royal throne, but were never given to the king.

When Margrethe II of Denmark replaced her father in 1972, the formalities were restricted to an appearance on the balcony of the Christiansborg Palace, the seat of parliament, with Jens Otto Krag, the prime minister, shouting three times to the crowds below: “King Frederik IX is dead. Long live Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II.” The declaration was followed by the traditional ninefold hurrah. The other symbols of royal power have long since fallen into disuse: the Christiansborg Palace has a Trongemak (Throne Room) where the queen receives foreign ambassadors, but although there are two special chairs there they are not used for formal occasions. The crown jewels, meanwhile, are kept in a museum at Rosenborg Castle.

Nevertheless, as is shown by the example of Norway, the youngest of Europe’s dynasties, there is sometimes a reluctance to dispense completely with the spiritual. Although many of Norway’s politicians considered such ceremonies “undemocratic and archaic”, Haakon, the first king of a fully independent Norway, was crowned and anointed in 1906 in Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, which had been used as a place of coronation since the fifteenth century. The crown and other regalia had been inherited from the Bernadottes.

Two years later, however, the country’s parliament voted overwhelmingly to remove the article in the constitution stipulating the requirement for a coronation. From then on, the monarch needed merely to take a formal accession oath in the Council of State and the Storting, the parliament. Traditions die hard, however, and when Olav succeeded his father in 1957, he insisted on a “consecration” ceremony to mark the beginning of his reign. Held as before in Nidaros, it retained some elements of the old tradition of konungstekja – “king-taking” or “proclaiming” in Old Norse – dating back to the Norwegian monarchs of the tenth century.

Significantly, though, even here the crown jewels were displayed, but not bestowed, during the ceremony, reflecting a modern rejection of the medieval Christian concept that a crowned and anointed monarch was God’s highest temporal representative in his or her nation. It all went too far for many members of the ruling Labour Party – although several of them attended anyway. By the time Harald, the current Norwegian king, repeated the ceremony on his accession in 1991, it had become an established part of tradition. This – along with the monarch’s lying-in-state – remains the only occasion on which the crown and other regalia are used; the rest of the time they are on display in the Archbishop’s palace next to the cathedral. The royal coaches and horses have also long since gone – when the King travels to open parliament he does so by car.

But what happens to terminate a monarch’s reign? Regicide has brought an end to some: while the killings of Charles I, Louis XVI and Tsar Nicholas II – as well, indeed, as that of the unfortunate Maximilian of Mexico – were executions effectively carried out in the name of a new regime, other kings were murdered for political reasons or simply by madmen. Most far reaching in its consequences was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie, on the streets of Sarajevo in June 1914. Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb patriot who shot them, lived long enough to see the consequences of what he had done, although before dying in jail in April 1918 he reputedly claimed, perhaps with some truth: “If I hadn’t done it the Germans would have found another excuse.”

The killing of Franz Ferdinand demonstrated the vulnerability of royalty when they were in transit away from the protection of the court. Tsar Alexander II of Russia survived several assassination attempts – including one in which a bomb was placed under the dining room of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg – before the revolutionaries finally got him in 1881. The bulletproof carriage given to him by Napoleon III saved him from one bomb, but when he got out he was mortally wounded by a second. Carlos I of Portugal and his elder son Luís Filipe were shot as they travelled through Lisbon in 1908; the assassination of Georgios I of Greece five years later was as he was walking through Thessaloniki.

The most spectacular royal killing, in terms of pure theatre, was that of Gustaf III of Sweden in 1792 – so much so that it formed the inspiration for Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera (even though the censors obliged him to shift the action from Stockholm to colonial-era Boston). An absolute monarch who found himself increasingly out of tune with the times, Gustaf had received a number of threats to his life, the most recent of them as he was sitting down for dinner before attending a masked ball at the Royal Opera House. As he entered in the early hours of the morning, he was surrounded by three noblemen wearing black masks, who greeted him in French with the words “Bonjour, beau masque”. The lead conspirator, Jacob Johan Anckarström, a military officer, then shot the King in the back with his pistol. Gustaf died almost a fortnight later, the third Swedish monarch in a hundred and sixty years to perish from gunshot wounds.

For every successful regicide, there have been several abortive attempts. Queen Victoria was the victim of eight attacks of varying degrees of seriousness during her reign – the first in 1840 as she was riding through London with Prince Albert in a carriage, and the last in 1882 as she left Windsor railway station. Most of her assailants were unhinged rather than politically motivated. The last, Roderick McLean, was a budding poet who wanted revenge after a poem he had sent the Queen was rewarded with only a standard reply from Buckingham Palace.

Victoria’s son, the future Edward VII, almost fell victim to a politically motivated killing in 1900 when he was shot at by a Belgian anarchist angry at Britain’s role in the Boer War while he was on his way to Denmark.

As the monarchs’ roles have diminished so, thankfully, has the number of assassination attempts. While Queen Elizabeth has had to contend with the odd intruder into the palace, there have been no attempts on her life – although Prince Philip’s uncle, Louis Mountbatten, the man responsible for bringing him and Elizabeth together, was killed when the Irish Republican Army blew up his boat in 1979 while he was holidaying in Northern Ireland. Five years earlier, the Queen’s daughter Princess Anne had narrowly escaped a kidnapping attempt when she and her then husband Mark Phillips were driving near Buckingham Palace.

More serious, however, was the attempt on the life of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands during the Queen’s Day celebrations on 30th April 2009. Karst Tates, an unemployed thirty-eight-year-old recluse, drove his car at high speed into an open-topped bus carrying Beatrix and other members of the royal family as they were travelling through the streets of Apeldoorn a few hundred metres from Het Loo Palace, the former residence of Queen Wilhelmina. Tates missed the bus, but ploughed into a crowd of spectators at seventy miles per hour, killing seven bystanders and seriously injuring himself. As he lay slumped and bleeding in his car, he confessed that he had intended to kill the royal family, calling Crown Prince Willem-Alexander a “fascist” and a “racist”. Tates went into a coma shortly afterwards, dying of his injuries the next day. A four-month investigation by more than two hundred detectives portrayed him as a loner who could not hold down a job and had spent some time homeless – but failed to provide an explanation for the attack.

Accidents, meanwhile, have claimed the life of King Albert I of Belgium, who died in the mountains aged fifty-eight, and Prince Gustaf Adolf of Sweden, the heir to the throne and father of the current king, who was killed in an air crash aged just forty in January 1947. Car accidents killed Léopold III of Belgium’s Swedish-born wife, Queen Astrid, and Princess Diana, the estranged wife of Prince Charles. A coronary thrombosis did for Queen Elizabeth II’s father, George VI, when he was fifty-six; King Baudouin of Belgium was sixty-two when he died of heart failure.

Some monarchs, though, have chosen to give up their thrones voluntarily, although in recent times the practice of abdication has been confined to two monarchies: the Dutch and the Luxembourgeois. Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands has lived through the abdication of both her predecessors: in September 1948, when she was aged ten, her grandmother, Wilhelmina, stepped down; in April 1980 Wilhelmina’s daughter Juliana followed suit, making way for Beatrix.

Surprisingly, Beatrix herself has yet to do the same: born in 1938, she has long since passed any conventional retirement date or indeed the age at which both her predecessors relinquished the throne. Dutch commentators have suggested she is waiting until Willem-Alexander’s children are older before stepping aside for her son.

Members of the house of Nassau-Weilburg, who have sat on the throne of Luxembourg since it split from the Netherlands in 1890, have proved even more determined abdicators. Marie-Adélaïde, who became the first reigning grand duchess in 1912, stepped down in favour of her younger sister Charlotte in 1919 after criticism of her over-friendly relations with German occupying forces during the First World War. After a forty-five-year reign, Charlotte abdicated in 1964; her son Jean, who succeeded her, in turn stepped down in favour of his son, Henri, in October 2000.

These are the exceptions, though. The notion of abdication appears anathema to Europe’s other monarchs, who, until now at least, have regarded theirs as a job for life. The reluctance of Queen Elizabeth II, in particular, to step down is understandable if one considers the fate of her “Uncle David” – better known as King Edward VIII.

Edward’s abdication in December 1936 after just 327 days as king in order to wed Wallis Simpson, a twice-married American divorcee, was in many respects the best thing that could have happened to the House of Windsor and, by extension, the country. During his brief reign – the shortest of any British monarch since that of Jane Grey more than 380 years earlier – Edward showed little appetite for what he once described as “the relentless grind of the king’s daily life”. To the exasperation of his ministers, he was often late for appointments or cancelled them at the last moment. His red boxes, which contained the state papers on which monarchs are meant to work so diligently, were returned late, often apparently unread or stained by the bases of whisky glasses. George V’s warning that as monarch his eldest son would “ruin himself within a year”, were prescient.

The contrast with Edward’s younger brother Bertie, who reluctantly succeeded him as George VI, could not have been greater. A nervous but diligent character with a debilitating stammer, he became a much respected and loved king, not least because of the fortitude he showed during the Second World War. His brilliant portrayal by Colin Firth in the multi-Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech brought him to life for a new generation. George’s untimely death in February 1952, aged just fifty-six, also paved the way for the accession of the present Queen. Nevertheless, the events of 1936 confronted the British monarchy with one of the greatest crises in its history, and Edward’s abdication cast a shadow over the institution during the decades that followed.