My latest article: The Second Empire

My thirtieth and last article of 2016 is about the Second Empire, i.e. the reign of Emperor Napoléon III of the French from 1852 to 1870. Like the Emperor himself, the Empire was full of paradoxes, and it turned out to be the last time France was a monarchy. The article appears in the January 2017 issue of Majesty (Vol. 38, No. 1), which is on sale in Britain from today and in other countries within two weeks, while an excellent exhibition on the splendours of the Second Empire can be seen at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris until 15 January.

Book news: The soft power of royal heirs

In August last year I participated in a conference on the soft power of royal heirs at the University of St Andrews, and now Palgrave Macmillan has gathered the lectures given at this conference in a book titled Royal Heirs and the Uses of Soft Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Frank Lorenz Müller and Heidi Mehrkens and published earlier this month. I write about how the Bernadottes during the Swedish-Norwegian union of crowns tried to create a Norwegian identity for the heirs, particularly by the power of presence, education and the office of Viceroy, while Maria-Christina Marchi deals with Italy, Kristina Widestedt with Sweden, Erik Goldstein with the United States, Milinda Banerjee with the Bengal, Janet Ridley, Imke Polland and Edward Owens, with Britain, Alma Hannig with Austria-Hungary, Richard Meyer Forsting with Spain, Miriam Schneider with Greece, Jeroen Koch with the Netherlands and Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh with Prussia, and Frank Lorenz Müller, Monika Wienfort and Heidi Mehrkens provide more general overviews of the topic.

Grand Cross Collar for Crown Princess

At a Christmas reception for the royal household at the Royal Palace yesterday, the King invested the Crown Princess with the Collar of the Grand Cross of the Order of St Olav for her services to Norway. This makes Crown Princess Mette-Marit the fifth Norwegian woman to receive the highest degree of Norway's highest order.
The first woman to receive the Grand Cross with Collar was Crown Princess Märtha, who was given it by her father-in-law King Haakon VII in 1942 in recognition of her important work in the USA during the Second World War. When Crown Princess Märtha died in 1954, her daughter Princess Astrid succeeded her as First Lady and was rewarded with the Grand Cross with Collar by her grandfather two years later. The then Crown Princess Sonja received the Grand Cross with Collar from her father-in-law King Olav V in 1972, four years after her marriage. Princes usually received the Grand Cross with Collar on coming of age, and in anticipation of the introduction of gender-neutral succession the following year, King Olav gave his granddaughter Princess Märtha Louise the Grand Cross with Collar on her eighteenth birthday in 1989.
Crown Princess Mette-Marit received the Grand Cross (without Collar) on her wedding day in 2001, while Princess Ragnhild received the Grand Cross on the occasion of her father's silver jubilee in 1982. Queen Maud, like Queen Sophie, Queen Louise, Queen Josephine, Dowager Queen Desideria and other royal ladies before her, never received the Order of St Olav at all.
The King and Crown Prince wear the Collar for state occasions such as the State Opening of Parliament, but for women there are fewer occasions to do so, the so far last being the King and Queen's solemn blessing in Nidaros Cathedral on 23 June 1991.

My latest articles: Mountbatten in Sweden & Trondheim as coronation city

This year's last issue of the Swedish royal magazine Kungliga magasinet (no 7 - 2016) went on sale a couple of weeks ago, and to this issue I have contributed an article on how Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the éminence grise of the British royal family, tried to play the role of the power behind the throne in Sweden, where his sister Louise was Queen, including attempts at making Gustaf VI Adolf abdicate and marrying off the young King Carl Gustaf, for whose future Mountbatten often feared. (A shorter version of the article appeared in English in Majesty Vol. 36, No. 12 a year ago).
Also out is Trondhjemske Samlinger 2016, the yearbook of Trondhjems Historiske Forening (the Historical Association of Trondheim), where I mark the 25th anniversary of the King and Queen's solemn blessing with an article on Trondheim as coronation city in the middle ages and in modern times, based on a lecture I gave in Trondheim in connection with the jubilee in June, which was again based on my latest book Norges krone - Kroninger, signinger og maktkamper fra sagatid til nåtid. The yearbook may be purchased from one of the larger bookstores in Trondheim (for instance Ark Bruns or Norli at Nordre gate) or ordered from the historical association.