‌Chapter 6

‌Kings Behaving Badly

King Carl XVI Gustaf, Sweden’s bespectacled monarch, has long been known for two passions: fast cars and hunting elk. In November 2010 his subjects learnt of a third, rather more risqué interest.

Rumours had long been circulating about the private parties that the monarch organized with a small group of close male friends in the exclusive clubs and restaurants around Stockholm’s Stureplan. Affluent and aged, like him, in their early sixties, these are mostly people the King has known for years and in whose company he feels safe. During a visit to the country that summer I was told by a member of parliament of an incident involving a friend’s twenty-something daughter who had been approached on the street in Stockholm by two young men and told that the King would like to “invite her to a party”.

A few months later the rumours were splashed all over the pages of the newspapers not just in Sweden but across the world. In their book, Carl XVI Gustaf: Den motvillige monarken (Carl XVI Gustaf: The Reluctant Monarch), Thomas Sjöberg and two fellow journalists painted a vivid picture of the King and his friends’ constant partying and playing around with young women. It was “girls à la carte for the King gang”, wrote the authors, who relied largely on anonymous sources to detail their monarch’s many supposed indiscretions.

Many of Carl XVI Gustaf’s alleged liaisons appeared to have been fleeting encounters. But the book alleged he had also had a year-long affair at the end of the 1990s with Camilla Henemark, a half-Nigerian, half-Swedish singer turned actress. Its authors claimed that Queen Silvia, Carl Gustaf’s German-born wife of thirty-four years, knew about the affair but could do nothing because her husband had fallen in love “like a teenager” with Henemark and the two were talking about escaping to a distant island to “live on coconuts”.

Ultimately more damaging, though, were claims that the King was putting himself in danger by partying at dubious clubs, including one owned by Mille Markovic, a feared figure in the Stockholm underworld. The King and his friends were said to have regularly had the club to themselves on Mondays for nights filled with elaborate meals and capped with liaisons in a whirlpool with scantily clad would-be models. Markovic was allegedly keen to have the monarch as his patron because it minimized the chances of unwanted visits by the police. Agents from Säpo, the Swedish security service, the book claimed, snooped around in various flats and otherwise pressured women who had partied with the King, ordering them to hand over rolls of film, negatives and photographs – ‌or else face unpleasant consequences.1

Anticipation ahead of the book’s release had been building for weeks, with vague rumours of its content circulating but few actual details leaking out in advance. Its publication was timed to coincide with the annual elk hunt at the Halle- och Hunneberg reserve on the shores of Vänern in western Sweden, which traditionally ends with the King addressing a press conference.

The number of journalists who turned up that year was considerably higher than usual. “I have seen some headlines that have not been so nice, and of course I have talked to the family and the Queen,” the King told them. But he declined to comment on a book he had not read. “We will turn a page and move on now because, as I understand it, this is about things that happened a long time ago,” he added. In an interview a few days later with Expressen, the leading Swedish tabloid, Henemark distanced herself from the book’s description of her as a courtesan, but said ‌“we played and had fun”.2 The book sold out almost its entire initial print run of 20,000 copies on the first day.

The King initially appeared not to have sustained much damage from the claims. A poll by SVT, the public broadcaster, found just a quarter of Swedes thought journalists were right to investigate his private life. But the scandal did not go away, amid reports that Markovic claimed to have photographs in his possession showing the King in a sex club in the same shot as two naked women. To add fuel to the fire, Anders Lettström, one of the King’s friends, admitted contacting underworld figures in an apparent attempt to track down the pictures – although insisted he was acting on his own rather than the King’s initiative.

As the crisis deepened, Carl XVI Gustaf took the unprecedented step on 30th May of giving a long interview to TT, the Swedish national news agency – the first time a monarch had deigned to answer such direct questions about his private life. The King flatly denied allegations he had visited sex clubs or had indirect contact with organized crime, and said such incriminating photos could not possibly exist. He seemed uncomfortable, however, did not always speak clearly and seemed confused about what he had – or had not – already admitted the previous November.

The Swedish media were not impressed: if the claims were not true, why had it taken the King so long to issue a denial? they demanded. In a commentary in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, Peter Wolodarski drew parallels with the disastrous attempts by Bill Clinton to cover up his relationship with Monica Lewinsky during the mid-1990s that ‌almost cost him the presidency.3

Carl XVI Gustaf is not the only one of Europe’s monarchs to have his private life subjected to scrutiny, however. Spain’s journalists had long gossiped in private about Juan Carlos’s private life, but when French and Italian magazines published stories in the early 1990s linking the Spanish King to Marta Gaya, a Catalan interior decorator, the stories were dismissed by Felipe González, the prime minister, as an international plot to undermine his country. Most of Spain’s newspapers and magazines – with the exception of the republican-minded El Mundo – agreed.

Such a united front broke down in 2008, however, when Jaime Peñafiel, a leading royal expert and former editor of ¡Hola! magazine, published a book, Juan Carlos y Sofía. Retrato de un matrimonio (Juan Carlos and Sofía: Portrait of a Marriage), in which he claimed that the King had had a series of affairs during his married life – including an eighteen-year relationship with Gaya. In his book, the contents of which were eagerly seized upon by the media, Peñafiel claimed that Gaya’s former husband, an engineer, had once complained to a friend about his wife’s affair. “Go and give the guy a couple of punches,” the friend replied. “I can’t,” the cuckolded husband reportedly said. “We’re talking about the King.” The book also claimed the royal couple had blazing rows, which ended with Sofía, his Greek-born queen, in tears. “I hate you, I hate you,” the King is quoted as shouting at her on one occasion – to which Sofía reportedly replied, “Hate me, but you can screw yourself ‌because you can’t get divorced.”4

Further embarrassing revelations followed in January 2012, in a biography of the Queen written by Pilar Eyre, a veteran commentator on Spanish royal affairs. According to the book, La soledad de la Reina (The Solitude of the Queen), Juan Carlos and Sofía’s marriage had broken down as early as 1976, when the Queen discovered her husband with his mistress at a friend’s country house near Toledo. Sofía, Eyre claimed, had wanted to leave Juan Carlos but was persuaded by her mother, the exiled Queen Frederika of Greece, not to do so. Instead the couple led separate lives, with the King embarking on affairs with a series of amigas while his wife devoted herself ‌to bringing up their children.5 The palace maintained a dignified silence in response to the allegations, although a woman named as having been one of the King’s lovers denied she was anything more than a friend. Soon after the book was published, Eyre was fired from her job at the television station Telecinco – the result, she claimed, of pressure from the royal family.

The love life of Albert II of the Belgians has also provided fuel for the tabloids – and here as well it was laid open to public scrutiny by a book: in this case, an unauthorized biography of his wife, Queen Paola, published in 1999. Entitled Paola: van la dolce vita tot koningin (Paola: From la Dolce Vita to Queen), the book claimed that back in the 1960s, when his elder brother Baudouin was king, Albert had fathered an illegitimate child, who was now living in London, where she worked “in the arts”. “During a troubled period, [the King] carried out an extramarital relationship,” it claimed. “Paola, distressed, refused to receive [in the palace] ‌the half-sister of their children.”6 And that was that. Curiously, its author, Mario Danneels, was no seasoned royal commentator, but rather an eighteen-year-old unknown writing his first book.

Danneels did not name the royal love child, nor did he provide any further details, but within a few days of the book coming out the tabloid La Dernière Heure named her as Delphine Boël, an artist. Alongside its article it printed a photograph of one of Boël’s typically provocative artworks: a montage featuring Brussels’s celebrated Manneken Pis with a huge penis in the Belgian national colours of black, yellow and red.

Despite the revelations of such alleged infidelities, the three kings’ marriages have survived. For the three monarchs – and also for Europe’s fourth king, Harald of Norway, and its three queens regnant – marriage is an institution to be entered into for life. Whatever the ups and downs they have experienced during married life, divorce has never seemed a realistic option.

When Juan Carlos and Sofía celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in May 2012, it was only the latest in a long line of events that demonstrate the longevity of the unions of Europe’s current generation of monarchs: in 2007, Queen Margrethe of Denmark celebrated her fortieth wedding anniversary and Queen Elizabeth of Britain her sixtieth. Harald V of Norway has been married for more than forty years and Carl XVI Gustaf more than thirty. Even Belgium’s Albert and Paola made it to their fiftieth in 2009, by which time the marital difficulties that had brought them to the verge of divorce in the 1960s seemed like ancient history. Beatrix of the Netherlands is the only current European monarch without a partner, and she was married for more than thirty-six years before her husband, Claus, died in 2002. For the kings at least, though, that has not necessarily meant absolute fidelity.

When it comes to their private lives, today’s monarchs are to a great extent a product of their time. During the 1950s and 1960s, when they were coming of age, European society was changing, and arranged marriages seemed like an anachronism. Like their subjects, they wanted to marry whom they wanted rather than someone chosen by their parents. In their case, however, a series of rules, some written, some informal, stipulated who was suitable royal-marriage material and who was not. This went not just for those expected to accede to the throne, but also their brothers, sisters and even cousins. If they insisted on pressing ahead with an unsuitable match, there was a risk it could cost them their place in the line of succession to the throne.

In most cases, the preference remained for a member of another ruling family, but this was far more difficult than it had been half a century earlier, because of the small number of monarchies that had survived the upheavals of the First and Second World Wars. A member of an ousted house – or one of the innumerable German princes or princesses – was often a good substitute or, failing that, a member of the country’s own aristocracy.

In the case of male royals, when it came to choosing a bride the rules were simple: the younger the better. Not just because she would tend to be more fertile – which is of vital importance to a monarchy based on heredity – but also because it made it less likely that a parade of former lovers would emerge with embarrassing stories to tell. Other factors, such as formal educational achievements, were of far less importance, especially in Britain – all of which explained why the twenty-year-old Lady Diana Spencer, widely thought to have been “without a history”, seemed such a perfect match for Prince Charles, who was almost thirteen years her senior and with a long string of much publicized sexual conquests behind him.

In most cases, approval for a royal marriage continues to be required both from the monarch and from parliament – which in many cases over the years has proved anything but a formality. To this have been added some other rules – both formalized and unwritten. In Britain, for example, it was, as mentioned previously, only at the Perth summit of October 2011 that it was agreed to repeal the provisions of the 1701 Act of Settlement that barred the heir to the throne from marrying a Catholic. Furthermore, the Royal Marriages Act, passed after two of George III’s brothers married unsuitable women, decrees that no member of the royal family under the age of twenty-five may marry without the permission of the monarch. Members of the Dutch royal family have also traditionally been prevented from marrying Catholics, although this was not stipulated in the constitution, but was rather a practice born out of the country’s past domination by Catholic Spain – and did not appear to be an obstacle to Crown Prince Willem-Alexander’s marriage to Máxima Zorreguieta in 2002. Until relatively recently the Scandinavian monarchies observed the practice that members of the royal house should marry only foreigners.

Queen Elizabeth, the oldest of Europe’s current reigning monarchs, was also the first to marry. Her husband Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, a member of the junior branch of Greece’s royal family, was like his bride a great-great-grandchild of Queen Victoria, but the drama of his early life in Greece could not have been more different from the comfort of Elizabeth’s upbringing in London.

Known as Philippos to the Greeks, he was born on 10th June 1921 on the dining-room table of Villa Mon Repos, a rented house on the island of Corfu. He was the fifth child, but first son, of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and the British-born Princess Alice of Battenberg. The first years of his life were turbulent: in September 1922 his uncle King Konstantinos was forced to abdicate, and Andrew was among those arrested by the military government and blamed for the defeat of his country at the hands of the Turks. Andrew was taken to Athens and put on trial in the Chamber of Deputies by a jury of junior officers.

Found guilty of disobeying orders and abandoning his position in the face of the enemy, Andrew was sentenced to death. Alice was determined to save her husband’s life and telegraphed her younger brother, Louis Mountbatten, who was a junior officer in Britain’s Royal Navy. Although only twenty-one, he not only secured an audience with King George V but managed to persuade the monarch to intervene to rescue his distant relative. When Greece’s dictator Theodoros Pangalos refused such interference in his country’s internal affairs, the HMS Calypso, a British warship, arrived in the bay and trained its mighty guns on the government offices.

The following day Andrew was brought before the court again, stripped of his military rank and royal titles and banished from Greece for life. That night, Pangalos himself drove him to the warship, where his wife was waiting. The ship then steamed to Corfu to pick up the rest of the family and took them to the Italian port of Brindisi – from where they continued by train to France. The baby Philip was carried on board the ship in a makeshift cot made out of a fruit box.

As he grew up, Philip was taken under the wing of his Uncle Dickie, as Louis Mountbatten was known in the family, an extraordinarily well-connected character who was to become Admiral of the Fleet, like his father before him, and also the last viceroy of India. Although he began his education in France, Philip was sent, aged seven, at his uncle’s insistence, to Cheam School, living partly with his maternal grandmother Victoria at Kensington Palace, and partly with his other uncle, George Mountbatten, Marquess of Milford Haven, at Lynden Manor, Berkshire. In 1933 he was sent to Schule Schloss Salem, in Germany, which was owned by one of his brothers-in-law, Berthold, Margrave of Baden. With the rise of Nazism, however, Kurt Hahn, the school’s Jewish founder, fled Germany and founded a new school, Gordonstoun, in Scotland. After two terms, Philip moved there.

Philip left in 1939 and joined the Royal Navy, graduating the next year from the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, as the top cadet in his course. It was on 22nd June 1939, twelve days after his eighteenth birthday, that Philip had what, without hyperbole, could be described as a life-changing experience – and, inevitably, it was thanks to his “Uncle Dickie”.

King George VI and his wife Elizabeth had travelled aboard the royal yacht to visit the naval college, and someone had to look after their two daughters, Elizabeth, then aged thirteen, and nine-year-old Margaret. Mountbatten, who was there in his role as the King’s aide-de-camp, made sure that of all the young men present, it was his nephew, Philip, a tall, strikingly good-looking man, who was given the task. Elizabeth was smitten. “She never took her eyes off him,” observed Marion Crawford, her governess, even though Philip did not seem to ‌pay the Princess special attention.7 The couple nevertheless soon began to exchange letters.

Philip had a successful war; as the prince of a neutral power, he was initially posted as midshipman to a battleship in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), safely out of the way of the action. But after appealing to Mountbatten, by then a captain in the Royal Navy, Philip was posted to HMS Ramillies in the Mediterranean, and then in October 1942, at the age of twenty-one, he became one of the youngest first lieutenants in the navy, serving on board HMS Lauderdale, a Hunt-class destroyer. In 1944 he left for the Pacific and was in Tokyo Bay in September of the following year, when the Japanese finally surrendered.

During this time, Philip and Elizabeth continued to write. While Philip was, by all accounts, enjoying shore leave in various ports, the young Princess was knitting him socks and, every night, before going to sleep, would kiss the black-and-white photograph she kept of him beside her bed. The relationship was fed by the ambitious Mountbatten: he would tell Elizabeth where Philip was serving and how he was doing, and would do all he could to ensure that the couple met whenever he was back in Britain on leave.

As one of Queen Elizabeth’s biographers put it: “The courtship of Elizabeth by Philip seemed more like a game of chess, with the grandmaster Mountbatten in control of half the board, advising Philip how to conduct himself. For the marriage Uncle Dickie wanted to secure for Philip was of vital importance, such was his determination to cement the Mountbatten family ‌to the house of Windsor.”8

It was not until 1943, when Elizabeth turned seventeen, that Philip let it be known that he was indeed courting her. The King was not happy when told by his wife, Elizabeth, the future Queen Mother, but she persuaded him to let the romance take its course. As long as the war continued, she reasoned, there was not much danger of her daughter’s relationship going further. With the outbreak of peace, however, the problem became more acute. Philip was seen by many at court – the King included – as an unsuitable consort for the future Queen. Her mother reportedly referred to him as “the Hun”. Hoping their daughter might find someone else, the King and Queen organized a series of balls packed with eligible men over the following months, to which Philip, to his great annoyance, was not invited. Yet Elizabeth remained devoted to her prince.

Eventually, in 1946, Philip asked the King for his daughter’s hand in marriage. George agreed – but still had one last trick up his sleeve, insisting any formal announcement be postponed until after their Elizabeth’s twenty-first birthday the following April. By 18th March 1947, at Mountbatten’s suggestion, Philip had renounced his Greek and Danish titles, as well as his allegiance to the Greek crown, converted from Greek Orthodoxy to the Church of England and become a naturalized British subject. He also adopted the surname Mountbatten (an Anglicized version of Battenberg) from his mother’s family.

The couple married on 20th November 1947 in Westminster Abbey in a ceremony attended by representatives of various royal families – but not Philip’s three surviving sisters, who had married German royals with Nazi connections. On the morning of the wedding, Philip was made Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth and Baron Greenwich of Greenwich in the County of London; the previous day the King had bestowed on him the style of His Royal Highness. Elizabeth’s mother was still not convinced.

The war had ended only two years earlier and times were tough. Rationing was still in place, but Elizabeth, like other brides, was allowed two hundred extra clothing coupons to buy her dress, made of silk from China rather than from former enemy Japan. Women across the country also sent in their own coupons but, since the rules stipulated they were non-transferable, they were all returned. The day of the wedding was bitterly cold, and when the newly-weds left Buckingham Palace for Waterloo Station in an open landau to begin their honeymoon, they had hot-water bottles and blankets on their knees. For extra warmth, the Princess had one of her beloved corgis by her feet.

Albert, the second son of King Léopold III, was the next of the current generation of monarchs to tie the knot. He met Paola Ruffo di Calabria, an Italian aristocrat, in October 1958 while they were both in Rome to attend the coronation of Pope John XXIII. After the ceremony the Belgian embassy held a ball at which Albert, then Prince of Liège, was the guest of honour. Paola, also among those invited, claimed later she had not really known who Albert was. “I had a vague idea of who Baudouin was, but I didn’t really know anything about Belgium or Prince ‌Albert. Only Tintin,” she said.9 They clearly made an impression on each other – so much so that Albert came up with various reasons to prolong his stay in the Italian capital and see Paola again. And so, as one commentator put it, began a “fairy-tale romance in the least erotic place in the whole of Europe. During the official inauguration of the most jovial pope of the twentieth century, the most bourgeois of all the royal princes got to know the ‌most flamboyant of all princesses.”10

By the time Albert arrived back in Belgium, he had already made up his mind to marry Paola. Two months after their meeting, he introduced his wife-to-be to his family, and four months later to the press. On 2nd July 1959, only eight months after their first meeting, they married in Brussels. Thousands of people turned out for a glimpse of the bride, a vision of beauty in a white satin dress with a fifty-foot train by Concettina Buonanna, a Neapolitan designer, and a lace veil that had belonged to her Belgian grandmother.

The couple’s whirlwind romance and marriage had little in common with traditional royal pairings. “It was passionate love between Albert and Paola,” claims Erik Wellens, another of the King’s biographers. “There are even stories of hotel visits during which discarded clothing was found strewn from the lift to ‌the door of the room.”11 Two weeks after Paola walked down the aisle, she was already pregnant with Philippe, born the following April. A daughter, Astrid, was born in June 1962 and a second son, Laurent, in October 1963.

The Belgians fell in love with “la dolce Paola”, and she and Albert became a prime target of the paparazzi, who chased them during their engagement and their honeymoon in Mallorca. Like Princess Diana two decades later, she was often obliged to leave shops through the back door to avoid their lenses.

In common with many royal second sons, Albert was faced with the challenge of finding a role: by the mid-1960s he was leading economic missions on behalf of Belgian industry, which involved considerable foreign travel. At first Paola went with him, but as their children grew older she stayed behind in Brussels. For a young woman bought up in the dolce vita of Rome, the Belgian capital must have seemed a grey place. Paola was lonely, homesick and chafing under the protocol of the Belgian court.

Relations were also often strained with Queen Fabiola, the rather severe Spanish aristocrat whom Baudouin had married in December 1960. Fabiola had little time for such frivolities as make-up or designer clothes – unlike her Italian sister-in-law, who during an official visit to Luxembourg was said to have worn no fewer than twelve outfits in four days. Fabiola and Baudouin used to drink water rather than wine and organized few parties. Like the King, Fabiola was deeply religious: indeed, according to one account, the couple first met thanks to the clerical matchmaking of Cardinal Leo Suenens, Belgium’s most senior churchman, and Sister Veronica O’Brien, an Irish nun, who had visions of the Virgin Mary. Given her five miscarriages, Fabiola may also have been a little jealous of Paola with her three healthy young children.

Rumours began to spread about Albert’s alleged extramarital escapades; there were reported sightings at Paris nightclubs; more fancifully, at sex parties. Paola, meanwhile, was also spotted in male company.

Then in 1966 Albert met Sybille de Selys Longchamps, a Belgian baroness. She was married at the time to Jacques Boël, an industrialist, but they were already separated. Albert appears to have fallen in love with her as quickly as he had with Paola: in February 1968, they had a daughter, named Delphine.

Albert and Paola went their separate ways – the children staying with their mother – but such were the preoccupations of the day that they still tried to present a united front to the outside world, even allowing television cameras to film them on their tenth wedding anniversary in 1969. This show of marital unity was somewhat undermined the following year when Paola was photographed arm in arm with Albert de Mun, a journalist from Paris Match, on holiday in Sardinia.

In the early years Albert was a regular visitor to the house in Uccle, an affluent suburb of Brussels, where Sybille lived with Delphine. The little girl didn’t know who the man was – but liked him and nicknamed him papillon. “He was a fun guy with a good sense of humour and I liked him,” she said in an interview published in 2008 to coincide with the publication of her autobiography. “I understood that I had to remain in the shadows, that he had another life with ‌his wife and three children.”12

According to Delphine’s account, as early as October 1969 Albert talked to her mother about the possibility of divorcing, but it was made clear to him that if he did so, he would have to renounce his claim to the throne. He was also told that Sybille would be prevented from seeing his other children.

In the years that followed, the couple continued to see each other clandestinely, but in 1976 Sybille told Albert she couldn’t go on. Again, the subject of divorce was raised, and again the conditions were the same. This time Sybille acted, moving to London, taking Delphine, aged six, with her.

A distraught Albert bowed to the inevitable, but continued to visit for several years and, according to Delphine, used to talk to her mother almost every day on a specially installed telephone line. Delphine, who attended a series of schools before ending up at the Chelsea School of Art, had since learnt the identity of papillon, but still assumed he and her mother had been merely friends – rather than lovers. Then, in 1986, when she was eighteen, her mother revealed the truth over dinner one evening in the Foxtrot Oscar restaurant on Royal Hospital Road in Chelsea. Delphine was delighted.

Albert and Paola, meanwhile, were finding themselves again, thanks in part to the intervention of Cardinal Suenens, who recommended they went on a Christian-inspired Marriage Encounter weekend course. The couple were impressed – so much that they even invited Spain’s King Juan Carlos and his wife Sofía to their castle in Ciergnon to attend one. Albert and Paola also got into religion – becoming members of the Charismatic Movement. The marriage of their daughter Princess Astrid to Lorenz, an Austrian archduke, in September 1984 seemed to have helped their reconciliation.

Then, on 31st July 1993, Baudouin died unexpectedly of heart failure while on holiday with Fabiola at Villa Astrida, their estate in Motril in southern Spain. He was just sixty-two and childless. It had been widely expected that Albert – four years younger and next in line – would renounce the throne, and his son, Philippe, then aged thirty-three, would become Belgium’s sixth king. But instead it was Albert who on 9th August swore the constitutional oath. No explanation was given, even though it was felt by many – including apparently Jean-Luc Dehaene, the prime minister – that the still unmarried Philippe, whose main interests appeared to be fast cars and aeroplanes, was not yet ready to assume the role.

The revelations, six years later, of Albert’s love child came at an unfortunate moment. Danneels’s book appeared just as Philippe, the King’s eldest son, was setting off on a prenuptial tour of Belgium, the so-called Joyeuse Entrée, with his fiancée, Jonkvrouwe Mathilde d’Udekem d’Acoz, whom he was due to marry on 4th December that year.

As experience across Europe has shown, there is nothing like a royal wedding to boost the standing of a royal family – and this looked a good one, so good in fact that when Philippe and Mathilde’s engagement had been announced that September there was speculation that it was an arranged marriage – an assertion Philippe angrily denied. The bride, whose striking beauty, grace and social skills inevitably drew comparisons to the late Diana, Princess of Wales, would become the first Belgian-born queen in the country’s history. More significantly, she also had rare credentials to act as a binding force between the country’s two warring linguistic communities, the French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemings. Mathilde’s family was originally from Poperinge in West Flanders, and her uncles were Flemish Christian Democrat politicians, but the family chateau in which she grew up was in Wallonia, at Villers-la-Bonne-Eau, near Bastogne. By then she was working as a speech therapist in Brussels.

Philippe’s marriage was a suitably grand affair, courtesy of €1 million of taxpayers’ money. It began with a civil wedding at the town hall on the gothic Grand-Place, a two-hour Mass at a nearby cathedral, a lunch for twelve hundred people at the royal palace, and a reception for two thousand five hundred at the Château de Laeken, the royal family’s sprawling estate in the northern outskirts of Brussels. Work to spruce up the roads around the royal palace and the cathedral had been going on for two months; the fifteen-hundred-man security detail included 132 gendarmes on horseback and another twenty-five who formed a motorcycle escort. There was a ceremonial fly-by of F-16 fighter jets over the royal palace.

Yet the scandal of the King’s alleged love child was not going away. The initial reaction of the royal palace was to dismiss the matter as “gossip” – but that changed a few months later when Albert made his traditional Christmas speech to the nation. Straying from the usual pleasantries, he noted how the season gave the opportunity to look back not just on happy times but also unhappy ones – in particular, on a crisis that he and Paola had undergone in their marriage thirty years earlier. “Together we were able to overcome these difficulties and rediscover a deep understanding and love,” the King declared. “We were reminded of this period of crisis recently.”

Albert’s words were vague, yet few of those gathered around their television sets were in much doubt about what the King meant – nor of the significance of his apparent willingness, if only obliquely, to tackle it.

But what of the reminder of these difficulties the couple had left behind them? Delphine had remained in contact with Albert even after he had become king, but accepted his insistence that he could not publicly acknowledge her existence. He would often call, though, and send her “little presents” on her birthday.

This changed after Danneels’s revelations. Delphine’s first reaction was one of relief that she would no longer have to keep her secret, but that quickly became apprehension after the paparazzi tracked her down to the house in fashionable Notting Hill in west London where she had made her home. Delphine and her mother were besieged with requests for interviews, but refused to comment. When they turned to the palace for help, they received a cool reaction. “At the palace one had imagined there would be a solution to my problems,” she wrote in her book Couper le cordon. “It was suggested to us that it would be desirable for me to disappear, that I leave England for a distant location, where the press would no longer always be after me. What would have been, according to them, the ideal place of exile? Zanzibar or the North Pole.”

For a contemporary artist who compares herself with Britain’s Tracey Emin, Delphine’s sudden celebrity brought distinct benefits: she exhibited at the Venice Biennale and at galleries in London and Belgium. Her exhibits seemed intended to shock – among them a sculpture of a crowned pig and cow. Yet she could not help wondering whether the new-found fame was due to her parentage rather than her talent. In the feverish world of Belgian politics, meanwhile, some saw her as a willing – or unwilling – part of a plot by Flemish nationalists to destabilize the monarchy, seen as the last piece of glue that holds Belgium together – charges she was later fervently to deny.

Two years later, when her mother’s heart problems worsened and were aggravated by nervous depression, Delphine wrote to Albert. When he failed to reply, she found his number, called him and asked him to contact her mother. Although he did so, Sybille still seemed dissatisfied, and Delphine called him again. This time, she claims, he was furious. “You must never call me again… I do not want to hear any more about this matter. And by the way, you are not my daughter.” A horrified Delphine told him not to be ridiculous, saying she had the same blue eyes as his mother, the tragic Queen Astrid, but that only made Albert angrier. “Stop! Do not say that you resemble my mother. Never say ‌that again! How dare you!”13

In 2003, when she was about to give birth to her first child, Joséphine, Delphine decided to move back to her homeland, determined that her daughter should grow up in the country of her birth. Jim O’Hare, her American-Irish businessman partner, followed her a few months later.

As for Albert and Paola, they appeared to have become completely reconciled to one another. “We had our difficulties but now we say that we were made for each other,” Paola declared in a television documentary broadcast on Belgian television in 2006 for which she granted the cameras unprecedented access.

The marriage of Juan Carlos and his queen, Sofía, three years after Albert and Paola’s, was something of a throwback to an earlier age when dynastic considerations predominated. When the couple walked down the aisle in Athens in 1962, it represented the coming-together of two of Europe’s leading royal families, the Borbóns and the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.

True, Juan Carlos’s family had not sat on the Spanish throne since his grandfather Alfonso XIII had been forced into exile just over thirty years earlier, yet there was still the hope that the House of Borbón would be restored – which came a step closer to realization seven years later when the young prince was finally confirmed by General Francisco Franco as his successor.

Sofía, by contrast, was the daughter of King Pavlos, who had been on the Greek throne since 1947. Members of the dynasty had ruled the country since 1863, when the seventeen-year-old Prince Vilhelm of Denmark had become King Georgios I. Few would have foreseen that the family’s reign would end as soon as 1967, when Sofía’s brother, who had succeeded their father as King Konstantinos II three years earlier, was forced into exile.

In making his choice of bride, Juan Carlos was even more constrained than his other European counterparts: not only did his choice have to be acceptable to his own parents, he also had to take into account the views of Franco, who had ruled Spain since his victory in the Civil War. Choosing someone whom the Caudillo rejected ran the risk of prejudicing his prospects of ever being named the dictator’s successor.

The future Spanish royal couple first met in 1954 during a cruise, when Juan Carlos was sixteen and Sofía fifteen. It was organized by the latter’s mother, Queen Frederika, the German-born wife of King Pavlos, who had invited ninety members of European royal families past and present to set sail from Naples on a cruise through the Greek islands aboard the brand-new 5,500-ton liner, the Agamemnon. Among them were representatives of the ruling houses of not just Greece but the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Luxembourg. There were also recently disinherited princelings from Italy, France, Spain, Romania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria and relics from defunct kingdoms such as the Bourbon-Parmas, Thurn und Taxis and the Hohenlohe-Langenburgs. The event, recalled Juan Carlos’s mother, Doña María de las Mercedes, ‌was organized “with Prussian efficiency”.14 The cruise was ostensibly to promote tourism; it also seems to have been about royal matchmaking.

Those on board had a jolly old time, ‌according to one contemporary account.15 Since they were all related, Frederika insisted on informality: there was a ban on formal dress and protocol, and lots were drawn to decide on the seating arrangements. Frederika’s uncle by marriage, Prince Georgios of Greece, aged eighty-five, known as Uncle Goggy to the family, was the only one allowed to bring along a personal servant on account of his advanced age. During their daily island stops, the guests enjoyed the sights and generally behaved as tourists. In the evening there were films on board and sometimes they danced the mambo and the rumba. During one especially boisterous evening, Christian of Hanover was tossed fully clothed into the swimming pool by some of the other young royals, who then jumped in after him. After that, Frederika ordered the pool emptied each evening at two a.m.

As Juan Carlos recalled later, his meeting with Sofía was not an especially auspicious one. The young princess told him she was learning judo.

“That won’t do you much good,” he commented.

“You don’t think so? Give me your hand,” she replied, and proceeded to fling him onto the ground ‌with an expert judo throw.16

That was not the only drama during the cruise. Some time afterwards Juan Carlos started to complain of stomach pains. Fortunately his mother had trained as a nurse and realized her son was suffering from appendicitis. Their ship stopped in Tangiers, where the Prince was treated by Alfonso de la Peña, a leading Spanish surgeon who happened to be in the city when they landed.

For the time being, though, nothing more happened between Juan Carlos and Sofía. His first love was instead Maria Gabriella of Savoy, the middle daughter of the short-lived King Umberto II, who had reigned in Italy for just a month in 1946 before going into exile, as the ousted Spanish royals had done, in Portugal. In December 1956, while back in Estoril with his family for the holidays, Juan Carlos met another Italian, Contessa Olghina Nicolis di Robilant, a beautiful minor screen actress. The Prince was infatuated and they began an affair that lasted for almost four years – yet, conscious of his position and his loyalty to the dynasty, he made clear their relationship could never be permanent.

His relationship with Maria Gabriella was not to last either. Despite persistent rumours late in 1960 that the couple were about to announce their engagement, both Juan Carlos’s father Don Juan and Franco were opposed, and the Prince eventually succumbed to pressure to drop her. In any case, his attentions had turned in the meantime to Sofía – even though this apparently did not prevent him from indulging in one impromptu last night of passion with Olghina di Robilant in a Rome hotel room.

Juan Carlos and Sofía’s paths had crossed again in 1958, four years after the cruise, when they were both invited to the wedding of the daughter of the duke of Württemberg, held at Schloss Altshausen near Stuttgart. Their relationship really appears to have taken off in 1960, however, when Sofía’s brother, Konstantinos, was a member of the Greek sailing team at the Rome Olympic Games, and both the Greek and Spanish royal families found themselves staying in the same hotel. By June the following year, when Juan Carlos was Sofía’s escort at the wedding of the duke of Kent and Katherine Worsley in Westminster Abbey, their relationship was becoming an open secret. Sofía subsequently claimed that during this time in London they effectively became engaged.

There were obstacles, however: first and foremost one of language, despite the fact that both of them were polyglots. Juan Carlos spoke French, Italian and Portuguese in addition to his native Spanish; Sofía had German as well as Greek. The only tongue they had in common was English, which Sofía spoke well, but, initially at least, Juan Carlos struggled with. Other problems appeared more serious: Juan Carlos was Catholic; Sofía had been brought up Greek Orthodox. For either of them to convert would have been a serious matter.

Sofía’s family could also have been forgiven for wondering how much of a catch Juan Carlos was. While their daughter was a member of one of Europe’s ruling dynasties, Juan Carlos was merely the son of the pretender to the throne of a country that had long since ceased to be a monarchy. Little did either realize that within a further two decades the respective fortunes of their two dynasties would have been reversed. Sofía’s parents were enthusiastic, however, and Juan Carlos and his parents were invited to join the Greek royal family for the rest of the summer in Corfu.

On 13th September 1961, news of the engagement appeared on the front pages of newspapers in Greece and in Portugal. As part of his continuing battle of wills with Franco, Don Juan had not informed the Caudillo in advance about his son’s intentions. The dictator was furious, but there was little he could do, and his fondness for the young Prince eventually won him over.

Juan Carlos and Sofía married on 14th May 1962 in Athens with ceremonies both at the Catholic Cathedral and the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Cathedral. Until two days before the wedding the Prince had his arm in a sling: three weeks earlier he had broken his collarbone while practising judo with Crown Prince Konstantinos, his future brother-in-law.

Other European royal princesses, meanwhile, were finding it more difficult to secure a suitable partner. As Time magazine pointed out in 1962, the Almanach de Gotha, the directory of Europe’s highest nobility and royalty, listed twenty-six spinster princesses, but only sixteen unattached ‌princes of the right generation.17 The biggest imbalance was in the Netherlands and Denmark, where the countries’ future queens regnant, Beatrix and Margrethe, were both of marriageable age. Beatrix had three younger sisters; Margrethe had two. Matters were further complicated by the legacy of the Second World War: the various German families that had hitherto provided a disproportionate share of Europe’s royal brides and grooms had lost much of their lustre – especially those with members who had joined the Hitler Youth or, God forbid, the SS.

And so, following Frederika’s example, other European queens began to play matchmaker. Queen Juliana of the Netherlands threw a ball in 1960 to help her eldest daughter Beatrix, by then in her early twenties, find a suitable mate. It didn’t work. Five years later, though, Beatrix did find her man: Claus-Georg Wilhelm Otto Friedrich Gerd von Amsberg, a German aristocrat and diplomat. Early in July 1965, just as Wilhelmina had done three decades earlier, Juliana made a broadcast to the nation announcing her daughter’s engagement. “I assure you, it is a good thing,” she said.

The Dutch were not so easily convinced. Both Juliana and her mother Wilhelmina had married Germans – with mixed success. Wilhelmina’s spouse, Duke Heinrich Wladimir Albrecht Ernst of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, who died a decade before Beatrix was born, was an uninspiring character. “Henry was a taxidermist’s dream of a German princeling,” according to one contemporary account, “a beady-eyed, mean-spirited fellow, of whom the best that can be said is that he learnt his place (considerably below the throne) and that, after eight years of ‌marriage, he fathered Princess Juliana.”18

The former American president Theodore Roosevelt described in a letter after a visit to their home how Wilhelmina “ruled her fat, heavy, dull husband with a rod of iron”, snapping at him if he failed to do as he was told. When Roosevelt congratulated him on the birth of Juliana, born after three miscarriages, the unfortunate Prince replied: “Yes, I hope she has a brother; otherwise I pity ‌the man that marries her!”19 Not surprisingly, perhaps, he sought solace in other women’s arms, reportedly fathering several children out of wedlock. Beatrix’s father, Bernhard, as will be seen in the next chapter, was also a serial womanizer – and, more seriously, was to drag the Dutch royal house into a murky financial scandal. This, however, was still a decade ahead.

Claus’s problem was far simpler: he was a German. Although Bernhard had won over the Dutch after more than twenty-five years of marriage, thanks in part to his role during the war, the Dutch had suffered badly under the Nazis, and by the 1960s anti-German feelings were still strong. Claus’s case was not helped by his past membership of both the Hitler Youth and the Wehrmacht. Crowds marched through the streets of Amsterdam chanting “Claus raus” (“Claus out”), and orange swastikas began to appear all over the country; one was even daubed on the Royal Palace. Rotterdam’s Nieuwe Courant newspaper spoke for many when it asked: “Can a German put flowers at our memorials for heroes he fought against?” Some commentators suggested Beatrix should renounce her claim to the throne.

If anything the criticism was directed more at Beatrix’s mother, Juliana. In fact, despite her public support for the marriage, the Queen had been privately opposed to it because of the damage she feared it would do to the royal family. Unable to persuade her daughter to change her mind, she had asked the German foreign minister to post Claus, who was based at the time in Bonn, out of Europe. Beatrix heard about the scheme and went on a three-day royal hunger strike in protest. Juliana’s plan was dropped.

The wedding, set for 10th March 1966, was held in Amsterdam. It was a high-risk choice: the city had probably suffered more than any other in Holland from the Nazi occupation and by the mid-1960s was a hotbed of radical opinion. Juliana would have preferred her daughter to follow the Dutch royal tradition, according to which monarchs were married in The Hague, inaugurated in Amsterdam and buried in Delft. Yet Beatrix seemed determined to make a point. “I could be married in The Hague or Rotterdam and win over either city,” she declared. “But if I win the hearts of the Amsterdammers, I will win the heart of all the Netherlands.”

The Amsterdammers were not so easily won over. As Beatrix and Claus rode out from the Royal Palace in their golden coach, accompanied by eight footmen in bulletproof vests, a smoke bomb rolled underneath and exploded, and the royal couple disappeared momentarily from view. Other bombs were thrown and a dead chicken with a swastika painted on its body thumped against the door. The police responded heavy-handedly, wading into the crowd, clubbing a number of innocent bystanders to the ground. Beatrix tried to smile and wave but the smoke made her eyes water. When police staged a photographic exhibition of their handling of the riots nine days later, demonstrators again took to the streets, damaging buildings and setting fires in front of the Dam Palace.

It was at about the same time that Margrethe, two years Beatrix’s junior, was meeting her husband to be. Born Henri Marie Jean André Count de Laborde de Monpezat, the future prince consort was, like Claus, a diplomat, albeit a fairly lowly one in the French embassy in London, and on one occasion found himself seated at a dinner at the right hand of the then Princess Margrethe, who was studying at the London School of Economics. He was immediately smitten – apparently by her intellect as much as by her looks. “I fell under the charm of her turn of mind and her granite intelligence,” he wrote in his ‌memoirs. “My attraction was immediate.”20 Margrethe reciprocated his feelings. Henri proposed marriage in the summer of the following year during a secret visit to Denmark. Although the news was meant to be secret, it was leaked – apparently by a politician – and splashed on the front page of Ekstra Bladet, a Danish tabloid, leaving the palace with little alternative but to confirm that the couple would, indeed, wed.

They married on 10th June 1967; Margrethe’s groom had to change not just his name – henceforth he was to be known as Henrik rather than Henri – but also his nationality and religion. Such sacrifices were a foretaste of what was to come. At a wedding reception for four hundred guests in a huge marquee in the garden of Fredensborg Palace, the Prince charmed guests with a speech in heavily French-accented Danish in which he sung his praises of his bride.

Given the surfeit of eligible young princesses, finding a bride should have been simpler for Beatrix and Margrethe’s male peers, the future King Harald V of Norway and King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. Yet unlike Albert and Juan Carlos neither of them went for the royal – or even the noble – option. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of their choices: both men’s fathers and grandfathers before them had married foreign princesses, and it had been expected that they, like Juan Carlos, would follow suit. Instead Harald and Carl Gustaf married middle-class girls, inadvertently paving the way for their children’s unions several decades later, which have pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable even further.

Harald was just twenty-two in 1959 when he stunned his father King Olav by announcing his choice of bride. Her name was Sonja Haraldsen, and her father, Karl August, recently deceased, had owned an upmarket ladies’ apparel shop in Oslo. Although affluent, with a comfortable villa in one of the western suburbs of the capital, the Haraldsens were commoners – and Norwegian monarchs were meant to marry royalty, or at least nobility – which meant a foreigner, since the country had long since dispensed with nobles.

There was a precedent, but not a very happy one: in 1953, Harald’s eldest sister Ragnhild had married Erling S. Lorentzen, a highly successful businessman and army officer who had served as her bodyguard immediately after the war, but the union caused a controversy. She was the first Norwegian royal to marry a commoner, and the newly-weds, encouraged to keep a low profile, moved to Brazil, where Lorentzen’s family had business interests. Their initial plan was to stay for a short time – in the event they were still there more than half a century later. Then in 1961, Harald’s other sister, Astrid, married Johan Martin Ferner, owner of an upmarket men’s clothing store. Ferner, a former Olympic medallist in sailing, was also a commoner – and worse, divorced – which did not go down well with many Norwegians.

Harald was heir to the throne, though, and different rules applied. His grandfather, Haakon, had married King Edward VII’s daughter, Princess Maud, while his father, Olav, had concluded an equally traditional royal union by wedding his cousin, Princess Märtha of Sweden, who had died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1954, three years before her husband had come to the throne. During his youth Harald had been linked with all manner of Scandinavian and other European princesses. Queen Frederika of Greece had high hopes that he would marry her youngest daughter, Irene. It was not to be, however.

Haraldsen, four months Harald’s junior, had met the future King as a thirteen-year-old child at a sailing camp in Hankø in 1950. Their first encounter as adults was nine years later at a party organized by Johan Stenersen, a friend of the Crown Prince’s from his time at school. It was surprising that their paths had not crossed before: they moved in similar circles and had a number of friends in common.

Sonja had recently come back to Oslo after taking a diploma in dressmaking at the École Professionnelle des Jeunes Filles in Lausanne and a year in Cambridge learning English, where she worked behind the bar of the celebrated Eagle pub, pulling pints and calculating change in pounds, shillings and pence. Her father had just died unexpectedly, and Sonja spent most of her time at home with her mother, Dagny. She didn’t feel in the mood to go to parties, but when Stenersen’s invitation came, her mother had persuaded her to accept.

Harald was due to graduate a few weeks later from the Krigsskolen, the Norwegian military academy, and a few days after their meeting at Stenersen’s party, he telephoned Sonja and invited her to go with him to the graduation ball. She said later she was struck by his sense of humour and how shy he was.

While they were at the ball, Bjørn Glorvigen, a journalist and photographer, took the first press image of the two together, although it was some time before Sonja was identified. In the months and years that followed their romance continued, even though they spent considerable time apart: while Harald was pursuing royal duties, Sonja was studying at the Bjørknes private school in Oslo.

While the couple’s friends and the Norwegian press were discreet, the same was not true of the foreign media. “It was not very private,” Sonja recalled later. “A classmate told me that he had been offered a good sum of money by a foreign publication to allow interviews about me. There was also a foreign reporter and a photographer who pretended that they wanted to make a report on the school. The rector said yes to them – and realized too late what the ‌two were really looking for.”21 Eventually, after the photographers got too much for her, she escaped to France.

King Olav, meanwhile, was opposed to the match, refusing even to meet Sonja. “Norwegians are not ready for this,” he told his son. Most Norwegian royal watchers also doubted it would last. “No one took it seriously,” recalls Annemor Møst, a Norwegian journalist who began to cover the royal family in the late 1950s. “Everyone thought it would be impossible that he would marry a commoner – especially because there ‌were so many princesses around.”22 As the relationship began to look serious this disbelief turned into disapproval, both in parliament and the media. “The End of the Kingdom?” asked a front-page headline in the newspaper Verdens Gang in 1967.

The couple, too, were beginning to despair. “There were periods when we lost hope that we would get King Olav’s consent for our marriage, and we saw no other way but to break off our ‌relationship,” Queen Sonja recalled later.23 It did, however, give them time to be sure they were serious about each other. “Nobody could accuse us of marrying head-over-heels. And we learnt to know ‌each other very well indeed.”24 The situation was equally hard on the future king, who was finding it difficult to hide his feelings. “He used to look very sad as he went ‌about his duties,” recalls Møst.25

Eventually, according to a biography of the King by Per Egil Hegge, the Crown Prince presented his father and Per Borten, the prime minister, with an ultimatum: if he was not allowed to marry Sonja then he would never marry anyone, which would have meant the end of Norway’s brief monarchy: his sisters were both prevented by the constitution from inheriting the throne. And so, despite powerful objections, politically, publicly and within the palace, the engagement was announced in March 1968.

In the few months that followed, the public mood shifted in favour of this unconventional match. Their marriage, on 29th August that year in a Lutheran ceremony in the Cathedral of Oslo, was a spectacular affair. It was the first grand wedding since Harald’s parents had married in 1929, and the streets of the Norwegian capital were packed with well-wishers. Guests included the monarchs of Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and Luxembourg and the Presidents of Iceland and Finland. In what was a clear sign of the completeness of Sonja’s acceptance by the royal family, she was given away by the King rather than by her brother.

In a speech at their wedding banquet, Harald reflected on their nine-year courtship. “Allow me to thank you, Dagny,” he said, addressing himself to his new mother-in-law, “for the trust you showed in believing that I, through my feelings for your daughter, might be allowed to have her in the end and that the fact that I was with her would not ruin her life. But today she is at my side ‌as the country’s Crown Princess.”26

Just over a decade later, the future Carl XVI Gustaf also fell in love with a commoner, Silvia Sommerlath, the glamorous daughter of Walter Sommerlath, a German businessman, and his Brazilian wife, Alice. They met at the 1972 Munich Olympics, where Silvia was working as chief assistant to the head of the German Olympic Committee. Silvia was sitting in the VIP area of the stadium and the then Crown Prince Carl Gustaf was two metres behind her, when she turned around and their eyes met. “It clicked,” he declared. He ‌was twenty-six; she was twenty-eight.27

Over the few days that followed, the two of them came across each other at various events, greeting each other warmly. Then one day a young man came to Silvia and told her that His Royal Highness, the Crown Prince of Sweden, wanted to invite her to dinner. They were not alone, of course: various other members of the Swedish royal family were also present. But that dinner nevertheless marked the beginning of a friendship that quickly turned into a long-distance love affair after the Olympics ended and Carl Gustaf returned to Sweden.

Just as had been the case with Harald, however, there was a serious problem that initially prevented Carl Gustaf’s relationship from turning into something more serious. Members of the Swedish royal family who wanted to marry had first to obtain permission from King Gustaf VI Adolf, Carl Gustaf’s grandfather. And there was little doubt how the old King, due that November to celebrate his ninetieth birthday, would react to the prospect of his grandson and heir marrying a commoner. Gustaf Adolf had himself married a princess, Margaret of Connaught, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and tradition dictated that his ‌five children should follow suit.28 The eldest, Prince Gustaf Adolf, Carl Gustaf’s father, had done his duty, marrying his second cousin, Princess Sibylla of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, while the King’s only daughter, Ingrid, spoken of at one time as a possible bride for Britain’s future Edward VIII, instead married Frederik, the then crown prince of Denmark. Their three siblings were less obliging, however, and all had lost their titles after marrying commoners.

Although embarrassing to the dynasty, none of this would have been so serious if it had not been for the death of Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf in 1947 in an air crash. Fortunately for the Bernadotte dynasty his wife had given birth to Carl Gustaf nine months earlier. But he was their only boy: before that the couple had had four daughters, who were not allowed to reign in their own right under the laws of succession that prevailed in Sweden at the time. What if King Gustaf VI Adolf, already sixty-seven when he came to the throne in 1950, died before his grandson came of age – or if something happened to the boy before he was old enough to have children of his own?

The old King did have one more son, Prince Bertil, who could potentially act as the Bernadottes’ insurance policy. The problem was that he too seemed in danger of writing himself out of the succession by falling in love with a commoner – Lilian Craig, a Welsh model and singer whom he had met in London in 1943 while he was posted there as a naval attaché at the Swedish embassy. Bertil had become fascinated by her and they soon became lovers. Marriage, though, was out of the question, and not only because Lilian, the daughter of a Welsh coal miner, was herself married to Ivan Craig, an actor. To ensure the continuation of the Swedish royal house, Bertil promised he would not marry his commoner sweetheart until the new crown prince grew up.

But nor did he want to give up Craig – and so he came up with a bizarre plan, which his father tolerated: he placed an advertisement in a Swedish newspaper seeking a housekeeper: more than two hundred women responded, among them, of course, Lilian Craig. She was hired. Thus they were able to live as man and wife under one roof, even though the unfortunate Lilian was not allowed to accompany her lover to official events.

As the future monarch, Carl Gustaf was to be spared such a fate. For as long as his grandfather was alive, he was highly discreet about his relationship with Silvia. By the summer of the following year, however, the old King’s health was deteriorating badly and on the evening of 15th September 1973 he died in his sleep. When his grandson stood on the balcony of the royal palace four days later to be acclaimed King Carl XVI Gustaf, he was accompanied by his four sisters and his loyal uncle Bertil. Silvia, the woman he loved, was not among them: she watched the proceedings on the television news from her home in Innsbruck.

As monarch, Carl Gustaf was now the only person in the Swedish royal family free to marry whom he wanted, but he hesitated. His relationship with Silvia had remained a secret: although his four sisters knew about it, the media and the country as a whole did not, and he was wary of how they would react. For her part, Silvia was naturally apprehensive about what life as a queen would be like. In the meantime, apparently vying with Britain’s Prince Charles for the title of Europe’s most eligible bachelor, Carl Gustaf provided fuel for the gossip columns by associating with a variety of society beauties.

But he and Silvia continued to meet, in Stockholm and also in the south of France, where Uncle Bertil lent them his villa on the seafront in Sainte-Maxime. Yet the press still knew nothing of the relationship, instead linking their young king with every woman who crossed his path. That all changed when the pair met again on Öland, the island in southern Sweden where the royal family has its summer residence. While out driving one afternoon with Silvia in his metallic-blue Porsche Targa, Carl Gustaf stopped to refuel. As they were pulling out of the petrol station, a photographer snapped them. The picture, printed in newspapers across Europe, was a sensation. Who was this young woman travelling alone with the King? Forty-eight hours later she had been identified as Silvia Sommerlath.

What happened next was entirely predictable, as least as far as royal love affairs were concerned. Palace officials in Stockholm tried to downplay the significance of the relationship, while journalists did not believe them and besieged the Olympics office in Innsbruck where Silvia was working for the 1976 winter games. Wearing a wig and dark glasses, she would slip unnoticed into Sweden to visit him. Or they would meet in Munich, where Carl Gustaf’s sister, Birgitta, lived with her German husband Prince Johann Georg in a villa in the upmarket suburb of Grünwald.

As the Games drew to a close, rumours grew stronger that they would become engaged. Then on 12th March 1976, it was official. “This is the woman whom I love, whom I will marry and with whom I will spend the rest of my life,” Carl Gustaf told a press conference at the palace in Stockholm.

They married on 19th June that year. It was the first wedding of a reigning European monarch since King Konstantinos of Greece married Princess Anne-Marie of Denmark in 1964 – and the first of a Swedish king since Gustaf IV Adolf in 1797. At a televised gala in the couple’s honour held the day before at the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm, members of Abba, dressed in baroque outfits in a tongue-in-cheek attempt to blend in, performed their forthcoming single ‘Dancing Queen’.

There was a poignant postscript to the royal love affair: that December, after obtaining permission from his nephew, Prince Bertil, now aged sixty-four, was finally able to marry his beloved Lilian – more than thirty years after their first meeting in London. How could Carl Gustaf have refused him? They had another twenty years together as man and wife before he died, aged eighty-four.