My latest articles: Princess Esmeralda on her father & Edward VII and Norway

The November issue of Majesty (Vol. 36, No. 11) went on sale in Britain on Thursday and this month I have contributed two articles.
There is the second part of my interview with the writer and climate change activist Princess Esmeralda of Belgium, who this time shares her fond memories of her father, King Léopold III of the Belgians, and talks about how he rebuilt his life after his more or less forced abdication after the Second World War and how she carries on part of his work. While the first part of the interview, which appeared in the October issue, dealt with her grandparents King Albert I and Queen Elisabeth, the third and final part, which will appear in the December issue, will be devoted to her controversial mother, Princess Lilian.
As November marks the 110th anniversary of King Haakon VII's arrival in Norway, my second article investigates the role played by King Edward VII of Britain in securing the Norwegian crown for his daughter and son-in-law.

On this date: The bicentenary of the Swedish-Norwegian union

200 years ago today Norway and Sweden formed a union of crowns when the Norwegian Parliament passed a revised Constitution and elected King Carl XIII of Sweden King of Norway. The union was formalised by the Act of Union the following year.
Despite what some people, perhaps particularly foreigners, seem to think, the union did not in any way mean that Norway became part of Sweden (or the other way around) or that the two countries became one state. It was in fact one of the loosest unions in history, the two countries sharing only the King and, as foreign policy was considered a royal prerogative, the foreign service. The relationship between the two countries can perhaps best be compared to the relationship between Britain and Hanover between 1714 and 1837.
The Swedes liked to refer to the two countries as "the United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway" (the term seems to have been less popular in Norway), but the plural spells out the difference from "the United Kingdom of Great Britain and (Northern) Ireland".
The union was the brainchild of the Swedish Crown Prince Carl Johan, who hoped eventually to achieve an amalgamation of the two countries. In this he failed, but after his rather turbulent reign there followed what has subsequently been called "the happy days of the union". Clouds began to gather in the reign of Carl XV, and from the 1880s there were numerous conflicts and crisis until the Norwegian Parliament unilaterally deposed Oscar II on 7 June 1905 and Norway thereby withdrew from the union. Following negotiations between the two countries in Karlstad in the autumn, the union was formally dissolved on 26 October 1905 after both parliaments had ratified the Treaty of Karlstad and Oscar II abdicated the crown of Norway.
The union has subsequently had a very bad press in Norway, the bitterness of the political disputes having overshadowed the fact that it was also a time of economic and cultural blossoming.
Commemorations of the bicentenary have been fairly low-key, with conferences taking place yesterday and today and by a speech by the Speaker of Parliament at the start of today's parliamentary sitting.

My latest article: Union of Crowns

The May issue of the British monthly magazine Majesty (Vol. 35, No. 5) has gone on sale in Britain and will soon also be on sale in major European cities and North America, and this month I write about the union of crowns between Norway and Sweden, which lasted from 1814 to 1905.
The article is occasioned by the bicentenary of Norway's independence and the upcoming Scottish referendum about whether to become an independent state in a monarchical union with Britain, which is fairly similar to arrangement Norway entered into with Sweden after achieveing independence in 1814. Perhaps there may be some lessons to learn for the Scots from the Swedish-Norwegian union?

My latest article: Scotland, Norway and unions

Yesterday I had a short article in the Scottish newspaper Sunday Herald (external link) in reply to a claim made in the same newspaper last Sunday (external link) by seventeen mainly Norwegian authors (Jon Fosse, Jostein Gaarder et al) that the dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian union in 1905 is an argument for why Scotland should vote for independence from Britain in the referedum on 18 September.
Unfortunately the editor has distorted the first paragraph so that it does not make sense, but the point is that the events of 1905 are a poor argument for a yes vote in the Scottish independence referendum, as the arrangement the Scottish government proposes after the referendum is similar to the one between Norway and Sweden before 1905, i.e. a union of crowns between two independent states. However, there may be other lessons to be learned by the Scots from the Norwegian experience which such a loose union.
The Swedish-Norwegian union of crowns will by the way also be the topic of my article in the May issue of Majesty, occasioned both by the bicentenary of Norway's independence as well as the upcoming Scottish referendum.

My latest article: Norwegian secundogeniture

Today I have a two-page article in Aftenposten, Norway’s largest newspaper, about the secundogeniture idea in the second Swedish-Norwegian union, i.e. the idea that the personal union could be dissolved by the Crown Prince inheriting the crown of Sweden while a younger prince became King of Norway.
There are plenty of examples of secundogeniture solutions being used to dissolve unions or keep countries apart (for instance Austria and Tuscany) and it was also through secundogeniture that the first Swedish-Norwegian union was dissolved in 1343.
The idea was mentioned in the 1880s, but gained momentum from 1897 and had supporters in high places, possibly including members of the royal family, but did not come to fruition before the Norwegian Parliament unilaterally declared the union dissolved on 7 June 1905. However, there are certain indications that the idea might have succeeded if the union had been dissolved through bilateral negotiations.

My latest article: Bjørnson, Prince Eugen and the crown of Norway

Edvard Hoem has just become the first author ever to complete a multi-volume biography of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, the poet and dramatist who was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize for Literature and who was one of the staunchest opponents of the union with Sweden. Det evige forår, the fourth and final volume of the biography, published at the end of February, shows how Bjørnson, after decades at the front line, was completely sidelined when the union was dissolved in 1905. However, Hoem completely overlooks the most interesting thing Bjørnson did that year: His attempt to act kingmaker by, on his own initiative, offering the crown of Norway to Prince Eugen already four days before the dissolution of the union. In an article in Aftenposten today I tell the story of how this happened and how Prince Eugen reacted (a story which is also included in my 2006 dissertation on the Bernadotte candidature to the Norwegian throne).

New books: The decline of monarchy in Sweden

The Swedish monarchy is today the most powerless of all the European monarchies. While other monarchs still have a constitutional role, the current Swedish Constitution, which came into force on 1 January 1975, has left the monarch with representative duties only, virtually introducing a republic while retaining the King. How this came about is the topic of the historian Jan Berggren’s interesting new book Från härskare till estradörer – Bernadotternas fall och demokratins seger, published by Carlsson Bokförlag, which charts the decline of monarchy in Sweden since the mid-nineteenth century.
The book opens with a 50-page introduction to the development of royal power from the reign of Gustaf V in the sixteenth century to Oscar I. However, the majority of the book concerns the developments since Carl XV, who came to the throne in 1859 and whose reign marks the beginning of the decline. Berggren’s analyses of the significant events and developments which led to the King’s powers’ continuous decline are very sharp. To those not too familiar with the story of the decline of monarchical power in Sweden this book will probably be an enlightening eye-opener.
The chapter on Carl XV is admirable, clearly setting out why his reign was a turning-point and summing up the key events which inflicted defeats on the King’s power from which it never recovered. The process continued through the turbulent reigns of Oscar II and Gustaf V into the rather more peaceful years of the old and generally beloved Gustaf VI Adolf, whose reign ended with the so-called Torekov agreement of 1971, whereby the monarch was confined to a symbolic role. Berggren proves to be an expert guide through the political events of this century of monarchical decline and retains a sharp eye for the turning points. About the reign of the current King, however, he has little to say (indeed he contends that it is wrong to say that Carl XVI Gustaf “reigns” at all).
Unlike most Swedish authors Berggren takes into account the crucial fact that the first four Bernadotte monarchs were also kings of Norway, which was in a personal union with Sweden from 1814 to 1905. Swedish writers tend to leave out Norwegian issues and to treat the kings as Swedish monarchs only, which means that much of vital importance is ignored. Berggren does not make this mistake, and is to be commended for his ability to present the often complex and entangled political strives of the late nineteenth century, which eventually led to the dissolution of the union, in a clear and accessible prose.
However, one might wish that Berggren would have seen the developments in the two kingdoms more in relation to each other. For instance, one of the main reason why Oscar II, following his deposal as King of Norway in 1905, declined the offer of the Norwegian crown for a Bernadotte prince, was concern that such a move might undermine the standing of the monarchy in Sweden as well as in Norway, and diaries and memoirs suggest a certain Swedish discontent with the royal family in the wake of the union’s dissolution. But how events in one country influenced the monarchy in the other is a topic Berggren avoids.
The book’s greatest weakness is indeed its lack of context. While Berggren’s survey of the political events which led to the decline of monarchical powers is in itself excellent, he does not say more than a few words about the ideas and currents of the time, which were surely the preconditions for the political developments influencing the role of the monarchy.
The author also demonstrates an interest in the monarchs’ sex lives which does not really belong in such a book. Furthermore there are some errors and over-simplifications. For instance the author writes that the famous signature stamp of the Age of Liberty was to prevent the King from refusing to give assent, but, as Jonas Nordin has shown in his excellent book Frihetstidens monarki, the main reason for acquiring this stamp was to save the King from the burden of having to sign everything by hand and it was only rarely used to stamp his signature onto documents he was unwilling to sign. He misspells the name of the leader of the Left throughout (“Svedrup” rather than Sverdrup) and that his claim that the Norwegian Parliament altered the wording of Oscar II’s refusal to give the royal assent to the consular bill of 1905 is nonsense. His claim that Queen Victoria’s behaviour during World War I bordered on the treasonous seems exaggerated given that Sweden was not actually at war.
The last chapter is not worthy of the high standard of the rest of the book. It is indeed a curious chapter, a mix of various topics, much of it consisting of polemics against various books on the monarchy and the royal family published between 2006 and 2010. For instance, there are several pages about the very well-known story of how Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte became Crown Prince of Sweden in 1810, all of it in order to argue that the word “we” used in the subtitle of the notoriously unreliable author and tabloid journalist Herman Lindqvist’s book on Carl XIV Johan, “The Man We Elected”, is misplaced.
What makes this chapter even more confused and confusing is that it was obviously written in 2010 and only very lightly updated since then. And given the events of the past two years, which have seen the standing of King Carl Gustaf dramatically undermined, much of this chapter is no longer relevant – in particular what Berggren considers the deference shown to the royal family by the media.

On this date: Count Oscar Bernadotte’s 90th birthday

The Bernadottes are known for their longevity and today another of them turns ninety. Count Oscar Bernadotte af Wisborg, who was born on 12 July 1921, is the second son of Count Carl Bernadotte af Wisborg and his first wife, Baroness Marianne De Geer af Leufsta, and a grandson of Prince Oscar Bernadotte, the second son of King Oscar II of Sweden and Norway.
From his mother’s family Oscar Bernadotte inherited the entailed estate Frötuna, eight kilometres east of Uppsala. Despite his parents’ divorce in 1935, his father looked after the estate until “Oscis” had completed his military education. It was his grandfather, the only admiral in the family, who wanted him to join the navy, but after the end of WWII he switched to the air force and reached the rank of captain.
Oscar Bernadotte has a great interest for family history and was a member of the board of the Carl Johan Association for sixteen years. Last year he was present when Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel visited Pau, the hometown of their ancestor, but otherwise his contacts with the royal family are few these days and unlike his elder sister, Dagmar von Arbin, he was not invited to the royal wedding.
Count Oscar Bernadotte has been married twice, but was widowed in 1999. He is the father of four daughters and one son and now lives in Uppsala.
While researching my MA dissertation several years ago, I discovered documents which showed that Oscar II upon the dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian union in 1905 offered the Norwegians his second son, Prince Oscar Bernadotte, as their new king. If the proposal had been accepted by the Norwegians, it might have been King Oscar IV of Norway who celebrated his ninetieth birthday today. When I told Count Oscar that he might theoretically have been King of Norway, he laughed and replied that we should probably be glad that he is not.

My latest article: Why the Nobel Peace Prize is Norwegian

The announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate (in 25 minutes) is the only time each year one can count on the eyes of the international media being directed to Oslo. However, the question has often been asked why it is that the Peace Prize is awarded by a Norwegian institution while all the other Nobel prizes are awarded by Swedish institutions.
Alfred Nobel wrote in his will that the Peace Prize should be awarded by a committee appointed by the Norwegian Parliament, but offered no reasons why. Many differing explanations have been suggested over the years. While researching a coming article on Prince Carl of Sweden’s many nominations to the Peace Prize I may have found an answer to that question, which I publish in an article in Dagsavisen today (external link).
1936 was one of the three occasions on which Prince Carl was seriously considered for the Nobel Peace Prize. Seventeen of the childless Alfred Nobel’s closest relatives – all descendants of his siblings or married to descendants of his siblings – wrote to the Nobel Committee in support of the Prince’s candidature.
In their letters the Nobels wrote that their uncle had longed to “do away with misunderstandings between nations, first and foremost here in the Nordic region, where there, at the time Alfred Nobel made his will, to his grief was a strained relationship between Norway and Sweden”.
“He entertained a personal, strong sympathy for the Norwegian people”, they went on to write, “and through putting the award of the peace prize into its hands he wanted to bring about a good relationship to the Swedish fraternal people”. They added: “In no more beautiful way could he advocate his idea ‘reconciliation between the fraternal peoples’”.
Alfred Nobel drew up his will on 27 November 1895, towards the end of a year which had seen one of the severest crises of the Swedish-Norwegian union of crowns. He died a year later and thus did not live to see the union being dissolved in 1905.

On this date: Abdication of Oscar II

104 years ago today, Oscar II abdicated as King of Norway. Although he was deposed by the Norwegian Parliament on 7 June 1905, it was only on 26 October 1905 that he renounced his and his family’s rights to the Norwegian throne.
The unilateral dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian union by the Norwegian Parliament led to negotiations between the two countries in Karlstad in August and September, with an agreement being reached on 23 September. The Karlstad agreement was ratified by the Norwegian Parliament on 9 October and by an extraordinary Swedish Parliament on 13 October. The photo shows Oscar II, the last crowned King of Sweden, dressed and robed for the State Opening of Parliament.
At the same time as the Norwegian Parliament dissolved the union it asked King Oscar to choose a prince of his house to become King of Norway. The Norwegians would have preferred his third son, Prince Carl, but the youngest son Prince Eugen and the King’s grandson Prince Wilhelm were also possible candidates.
Unofficially Oscar II offered the Norwegians his second son, Prince Oscar Bernadotte, but this suggestion was rejected by the Norwegian representative, Fritz Wedel Jarlsberg, for the reason that Prince Oscar Bernadotte, who had lost his succession rights by marrying a commoner, was not a member of the royal house and thus not included in the so-called “Bernadotte Proposal”.
Officially Oscar II did not reply to the Bernadotte Proposal until his abdication on 26 October. This created certain difficulties for the Norwegians, whose negotiations with another candidate, Prince Carl of Denmark, had to be conducted in strictest secrecy.
The extraordinary Swedish Parliament was dissolved on 18 October 1905 without having asked the King to accept the Bernadotte Proposal. This paved the way for Oscar II’s renunciation of the Norwegian throne.
He did so in a letter to the Speaker of the Norwegian Parliament on 26 October. In the letter he also declared that if a member of his family who was in line of succession to the Swedish throne were to become King of Norway, it would probably lead only to suspicion directed not only against him, but also against King Oscar – in other words the Norwegian King risked being suspected of putting the interests of Sweden before those of his own kingdom. This, King Oscar feared, would undermine the monarchy’s standing in both countries. “Therefore I declare that I cannot accept the Parliament’s proposal”, Oscar II concluded.
The letter was sent by mail and arrived in Oslo the next day, where the Speaker of Parliament, Johan Thorne, visibly moved, read it out in Parliament at 5 p.m. The Members of Parliament stood up while listening to this last act of the Bernadottes’ reign in Norway.

What to see: The Peace Monument, Karlstad

The Peace Monument in Karlstad’s Great Square must be one of the ugliest monuments in Europe. Worms emerge from a helmeted skull which is trampled to the ground by a woman breaking a sword in two, symbolising the triumph of peace over war.
The monument was done by the sculptor Ivar Johnson (1885-1970), who luckily for his reputation is better known for his “Woman by the Sea” outside the Maritime Museum in Gothenburg. This sculpture was unveiled in 1955 to mark the 50th anniversary of the peaceful dissolution of the union between Sweden and Norway. After more than three weeks of difficult negotiations, which took place in the Masonic Lodge to the monument’s right, an agreement was signed by the prime ministers of the two countries on 23 September 1905.
In 2005 four stone benches were added in a circle around the monument, inscribed with quotes from those present at the negotiations.

Late royals: Prince Oscar Bernadotte (1859-1953)

Born on 15 November 1859, Prince Oscar Carl August, Duke of Gotlandia was the second son of the future King Oscar II and Queen Sophia of Sweden and Norway and was named for his recently deceased grandfather Oscar I. The future Gustaf V was his elder brother, with Prince Carl and Prince Eugen making up a quartet of brothers.
Like his father, Prince Oscar joined the navy at an early age. He caused quite a scandal when he made it known to his parents that he wanted to marry Ebba Munck af Fulkila, a lady-in-waiting to his sister-in-law Crown Princess Victoria. It was constitutionally forbidden for princes of the royal house to marry non-royals and Ebba was discharged from royal service and Oscar sent on a long journey around the globe to think things through. When he returned, the couple were still intent on marrying and were able to do so after winning the support of the wise Queen Sophia.
The wedding took place in Bornemouth, England on 15 March 1888. The marriage to a commoner meant that Prince Oscar automatically lost his right of succession to the Swedish and Norwegian thrones and with them he lost those titles which were considered linked to his dynastic status. He did however keep his title of prince (but not of Sweden and Norway), which was seen as his by birth, to which was added the surname Bernadotte. He renounced his Norwegian citizenship and became Prince Oscar Bernadotte. His wife was styled Princess Ebba Bernadotte, but their children were plain Mr and Miss Bernadotte until Queen Sophia’s half-brother, Grand Duke Adolphe of Luxembourg, granted Oscar’s descendants in the agnatic line the title Count(ess) of Wisborg in 1892.
Five children were born of the marriage: Maria, Carl, Sofia, Elsa and Folke. Prince Oscar’s naval duties meant that the family firstly lived in Karlskrona, but later they settled in a house at Karlavägen in Stockholm. As he was no longer a member of the royal house, Prince Oscar Bernadotte did not carry out public duties and his great-niece Princess Astrid of Norway once told me that eventually there was some sort of distance between Prince Oscar’s branch of the family and the royal branch.
When the union between Sweden and Norway was brought to an end in 1905, the Norwegian Parliament proposed to Oscar II that he should choose a prince of the royal house to be King of Norway. King Oscar offered the Norwegians Prince Oscar Bernadotte, but this was flatly refused by the Norwegian negotiator Fritz Wedel Jarlsberg as Prince Oscar did not belong to the royal house and was therefore not included in the so-called “Bernadotte Proposal”.
Oscar II eventually refused the offer on behalf of his family and informally recommended Prince Carl of Denmark. While the issue was still unresolved, the prospective King Oscar III wrote to his brother Eugen: “For my own part I do not want to put my children in such a situation, but possibly I could sacrifice myself, but probably they do not want me and Ebba, except of course those in Norway who believe in the Lord Jesus”.
Prince Oscar and Princess Ebba were both deeply religious and active in organisations such as YMCA and the Salvation Army. Prince Oscar Bernadotte was also a dedicated lay preacher.
All the four sons of Oscar II lived to a great age – Gustaf V to be 92, Prince Carl to 90 and Prince Eugen to 82. Prince Oscar Bernadotte outlived them all, dying on 4 October 1953, a few weeks before his 94th birthday. Princess Ebba had died in 1946 and he also had the misfortune of losing their daughter Sofia in 1936 and their son Folke, who was assassinated in Jerusalem while on a UN peace mission in 1948.

My latest article: The Norwegian Royal Arms

In the new issue of Heraldisk Tidsskrift (volume 10, issue 99, dated March 2009), which has just arrived from the printers, I have a short article on the change to the Royal Arms of Norway when the union with Sweden was dissolved in 1905.
My article is a commentary to a longer article on the same subject by Hans D. Cappelen in Heraldisk Tidsskrift, volume 10, number 94, dated October 2006, where he identified the Norwegian art historian Harry Fett and the Danish archivist and heraldist Anders Thiset as those who worked out the new coats of arm for the state and the royal house, which were then designed by Eilif Peterssen. Cappelen also addressed the question of why the new king’s family heraldry was not included in the royal arms.
Based on the diaries of the historian Yngvar Nielsen, which I read in the National Library some years ago, I can add that Professor Nielsen was approached by the Norwegian government in July 1905 and asked to assist in this issue. Nielsen suggested that one should use the red flag with the golden lion carrying the golden axe of St Olav which had been the emblem of the medieval kings of Norway, but was unable to find a way to include the Bernadotte arms in it.
Nielsen was then under the impression that Oscar II would accept the Norwegian Parliament’s proposal to make a Bernadotte prince King of Norway, but as we know it was in the end a Danish prince who assumed the Norwegian throne. Yngvar Nielsen’s proposal was accepted and in the picture we can see the Royal Standard fluttering above the Royal Palace in Oslo and the equestrian statue of King Carl XIV Johan.
A link to Heraldisk Tidsskrift’s website:

http://www.heraldik.org/