Thursday 7 October 2010

My latest article: A broken royal engagement

When Princess Madeleine and Jonas Bergström called off their engagement in April it was the first time a Scandinavian royal engagement was broken off since Crown Prince Frederik (IX) of Denmark and Princess Olga of Greece ended their betrothal in 1922.
In the latest issue of Royalty Digest Quarterly (no 3-2010), which has just arrived, I look at the story of that engagement. There has been much speculation about what were the reasons for that rupture, but from the diaries of Princess Olga and King Christian X it seems the real reason was that the proposal happened too spontaneously and that Crown Prince Frederik soon realised his mistake.
The official reason, that Princess Olga was unwilling to convert to Lutheranism, was certainly not true as the diary of Christian X shows that he and the Danish government had agreed that it would not be necessary for the Princess to convert as long as her children were raised at Lutherans.

In the same magazine I also have a review article of the late Stig Hadenius’s biography of Gustaf V’s influential consort, Drottning Victoria av Sverige – Om kärlek, plikt och politik. (Curiously, the editor seems to have mixed up my name with the author’s, so that the byline reads “Stig Norén Isaksen”).

2 comments:

  1. Could you elaborate a little more.
    Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rather than repeating everything here I will refer you to the article, where you will find more details.

    ReplyDelete

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