Before the Kennedys came along, the Roosevelts were the nearest thing to American royalty. In the January issue of the British monthly magazine Majesty (Vol. 40, No. 1), which is out now, I embark on an article series on Theodore Roosevelt and his relations with European royals, which marks the centenary of the 26th US President's death on 6 January 1919. The first part of the article series explores Theodore Roosevelt's attitude to monarchy and recounts his meetings with the Italian royal family and Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary on the first leg of his grand tour of the courts of Europe in 1910.
In the second part, which will appear in the February issue, Roosevelt goes to the courts of Brussels, The Hague, Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm, where he takes a strong dislike to one monarch, forms a lasting friendship with another and is enchanted by an unhappy princess.
In the third instalment, which is due in the March issue, we follow Roosevelt to Berlin, where he met the ever-outspoken Emperor Wilhelm II, and to London for the funeral of King Edward VII, where the crowned heads of Europe flocked around the former US President and he observed at close hand King George V's failure to understand why his youngest son, Prince John, was not like his other children.
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