Book news: The male consorts of female monarchs

While much has been written about female monarchs, there has until now been no study of the roles and challenges of the men who were in the unusual position of consorts to female rulers. Therefore I am glad to be one of the contributors to the new book The Man Behind the Queen: Male Consorts in History, edited by Charles Beem and Miles Taylor, which has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan of New York.
My contribution is a chapter on Prince Consort Henrik of Denmark and his struggle for recognition of the role he has tried to carve out through his more than four decades as the first ever male consort of a Danish monarch. But this is only the last chapter of a book that covers a number of male consorts in Navarre, Spain, England/Britain, Sweden, Russia, Austria, Portugal, Brazil, India, the Netherlands and Denmark from the end of the thirteenth century till today.
The table of contents:

Introduction: The Man Behind the Queen; Charles Beem and Miles Taylor
1. The King Consorts of Navarre, 1284-1512; Elena Crislyn Woodacre
2. Ferdinand the Catholic: King and Consort; David Abufalia
3. "He to be Entitled Kinge": King Philip and the Anglo-Spanish Court; Sarah Duncan
4. Why Prince George of Denmark Did Not Become a King of England; Charles Beem
5. From Ruler in the Shadows to Shadow King: Frederick I of Sweden; Fabian Persson
6. Count Ernst Johann Bühren and the Russian Court of Anna Ioannova; Michael Bitter
7. Francis Stephen: Duke, Regent and Emperor; Derek Beales
8. Prince Albert; The Creative Consort; Karina Urbach
9. Commemorating the Consort in Colonial Bombay; Simin Patel
10. Ferdinand II of Portugal: A Conciliator King in a Turmoil Kingdom; Daniel Alves
11. Gaston d'Orléans, Comte d'Eu: Prince Consort to Princess Isabel of Brazil; Roderick Barman
12. The Rise and Fall of Siddiq Hasan, Male Consort of Shah Jahan of Bhopal; Caroline Keen
13. Royalty, Rank, and Masculinity: Three Dutch Princes Consort in the Twentieth Century; Maria Grever and Jeroen Van Zanten
14. Prince Philip: Sportsman and Youth Leader; Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska
15. The Prince Who Would Be King: Henrik of Denmark's Struggle for Recognition; Trond Norén Isaksen

Princess Ragnhild’s granddaughter marries – in a tiara

This is a bit of old news by now, but on 9 August the late Princess Ragnhild’s granddaughter, Victoria Ribeiro, married Felipe Falcão, to whom she became engaged in November last year. The only member of the royal family present seems to have been the bride’s grandfather, Erling S. Lorentzen.
25-year-old Victoria Ribeiro, who has taken her husband’s surname, is the only child of Princess Ragnhild’s and Erling Lorentzen’s eldest daughter, Ingeborg, and her husband, Paulo Ribeiro. She is a graphic designer and runs her own company, called Vi Ragna.
I have only seen a couple of photos from the wedding, but it was interesting to note that the bride wore a tiara, which is a first for the non-royal descendants of the royal family. As the family are very well-off there is no reason to believe that the tiara is a fake, but it was not one of the two owned by Princess Ragnhild.
On the other hand it has some resemblance with the diamond tiara (convertible to a bracelet) which was a wedding present to Crown Princess Märtha from her uncle and aunt, King Gustaf V and Queen Victoria of Sweden. But this now belongs to Princess Astrid, who wore it for the first and so far only time for the state banquet during the Latvian state visit in 2011, and although Princess Astrid could have lent it to her goddaughter for her wedding it seems somewhat unlikely that it should have been sent all the way across the Atlantic to Brazil.
Victoria Ragna Lorentzen Ribeiro was born in Rio de Janeiro on 19 December 1988 and christened in the Palace Chapel in Oslo the following summer in the presence of her great-grandfather, King Olav V. Given the geographical and genealogical distance she plays no public role and rarely attends royal family events. Except for her grandmother’s funeral in the Palace Chapel in Oslo two years ago I believe her last such appearance was at the big family gathering held in Trondheim in 2006 for the centenary of King Haakon VII’s and Queen Maud’s coronation. However, she and her cousins Sophia Anne Lorentzen and Alexandra Lorentzen Long cut the ribbon when the new Norwegian seamen’s church in Rio de Janeiro, named Princess Ragnhild’s Church in honour of their grandmother, was opened on 3 May this year.

UPDATE (1 November): Having seen a better picture I can now say that it is indeed not Princess Astrid's tiara, but a previously unseen one.

On this date: Erling S. Lorentzen’s 90th birthday

Erling S. Lorentzen, businessman, war veteran and brother-in-law of the King, celebrates his ninetieth birthday today.
The son of shipping magnate Øivind Lorentzen and his wife Ragna, Erling S. Lorentzen was born in Oslo on 28 January 1923. During World War II he joined the resistance movement, becoming one of the youngest members of the elite resistance group Company Linge.
When the royal family returned from exile in 1945, Lorentzen became part of the royal protection squad. He was also given the task of teaching the young princesses to sail, and captured the heart of Princess Ragnhild in 1946. Despite initial strong opposition from King Haakon and Crown Princess Märtha, Lorentzen and Princess Ragnhild were eventually allowed to marry. The wedding took place in Asker Church in Asker outside Oslo on 15 May 1953.
Meanwhile, Lorentzen had studied at Harvard Business School, graduating with a Master of Business Management degree in 1948. Following their wedding, Lorentzen and the Princess settled in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to take care of the Lorentzen family’s business interests. The initial plan was for them to stay there for two years, but it turned out to be forever.
In 1968 Erling S. Lorentzen founded the company Aracruz Cellulose, which turned out to be a great financial success; Lorentzen was able to sell his share for approximately $ 1.7 billion when Aracruz merged with another company in 2008.
At the age of ninety, Erling S. Lorentzen remains active and apparently healthy. Princess Ragnhild died on 16 September last year.

Royal jewels: The Brazilian tiara

The grandest of the many grand tiaras in the possession of the Swedish royal family is the so-called Brazilian tiara, formerly wrongly known as the Coronation tiara. This magnificent piece of jewellery is normally only worn for the grandest of occasions. Queen Silvia has made it a tradition to wear it for incoming state visits from reigning monarchs and she also wore it for Crown Princess Victoria’s and Prince Daniel’s wedding in 2010 and for the sixtieth birthday of King Carl Gustaf in 2006. She has also worn it for most official portraits.
The myth that this tiara was worn by Swedish queens on their way to the coronation church ever since the eighteenth century can be traced no further than to a book written by the royal postcard collector Sigyn Reimers in 1957 (a book which also seems to be the original source for the equally wrong claim that the emerald parure now in the possession of the King of Norway belonged to Empress Joséphine of the French and was worn by her at the coronation in 1804).
However, there are no traces of this splendid piece of jewellery until the inventory of the jewels of the Dowager Queen Josephina of Sweden and of Norway which was drawn up after her death in 1876. In this inventory the tiara and a matching necklace, a brooch and a pair of earrings are valued at 248,000 SEK, making it by far the most expensive parure in the inventory – the so-called Leuchtenberg sapphires are, for comparison, valued at 69,500 SEK, and the emerald parure now in Norway at 41,000 SEK.
The art historian Göran Alm, who recently retired as head of the Bernadotte Library at the Swedish Royal Collection, has furthermore discovered that Queen Josephina in a draft of her will describes it as “the great Brazilian parure”, leaving it to the royal jewellery foundation. This makes it obvious that the parure only came to Sweden as part of the great inheritance from Queen Josephina’s younger sister, the Dowager ex-Empress Amélie of Brazil, who died in Lisbon in 1873, an inheritance which also included the above-mentioned emerald parure and many other splendid items.
The inheritance was shipped to Kristiansand in Norway onboard the Norwegian naval corvette “Balder” and from there to Stockholm. Thus the tiara arrived in Sweden after the last coronation in the country’s history had been held in May 1873, making it possible to reject conclusively the myth put forward by Sigyn Reimers.
The Brazilian author Claudia Thome Witte, who is writing a biography of Empress Amélie, has recently revealed that the tiara was a wedding present to her from her husband, Emperor Pedro I, in 1829. The diamonds had originally belonged to the Emperor’s first wife, Leopoldina, née Archduchess of Austria, and had been inherited by their children following the Empress’s death in 1826. Pedro acquired the diamonds by assuming a debt in bonds as compensation to the children and presented the tiara to his new bride, who first wore it for the hand-kissing ceremony following her wedding. Empress Amélie wrote to her mother, Dowager Duchess Auguste Amalie of Leuchtenberg, that “the tiara [was set] with the best Brazilian diamonds in various sizes and [of] so pure clarity that [they] seemed made of water”.
There are no known portraits of Queen Josephina wearing the tiara, but following her death in 1876 it was worn by her daughter-in-law, Queen Sophia (pictured above with it and parts of the emerald parure) and subsequently by Queen Victoria. Following Queen Victoria’s death in 1930 it was worn rather frequently by her daughter-in-law, Crown Princess and from 1950 Queen Louise. Queen Louise often wore it to the State Opening of Parliament and in 1937 also at the coronation of her second cousin, King George VI of Britain. After Queen Louise’s death in 1965 it was not seen again until her step-grandson Carl XVI Gustaf married in 1976 and Queen Silvia immediately began to wear it. Now that its Brazilian origins have been established this seems particularly fitting, as Queen Silvia is herself half Brazilian.

Memorial service for Princess Ragnhild held in Rio de Janeiro

At 5 p.m. local time tonight (10 p.m. Norwegian time) a memorial service was held in the English church, Christ Church, in Rio de Janeiro for Princess Ragnhild of Norway, who died on Sunday at the age of 82. The Princess had been living in Rio since 1953.
Her son, Haakon Lorentzen, gave an address at the memorial service, something he will also do during the funeral in the Palace Chapel in Oslo next Friday. The Norwegian priests Anne Netland and Ørnulf Steen officiated.
Princess Ragnhild’s coffin will now be flown to her native Norway, where the King and Princess Astrid will receive their sister’s casket at Oslo Airport Gardermoen on Saturday.

Historian criticises Queen Silvia’s Nazi investigation

It is now two weeks since the Swedish royal court published Erik Norberg’s investigation into the Nazi past of Queen Silvia’s father Walther Sommerlath, which had been commissioned by the Queen. The investigation mostly confirmed the findings of TV4’s two-part documentary on the topic last year, but nuanced some points, most importantly that Sommerlath had paid for the factory he took over from the Jewish businessman Efim Wechsler, who was forced to sell it by the Nazi authorities, by giving him a coffee plantation in Brazil in exchange, which also made it possible for Wechsler to emigrate to Brazil.
However, Norberg’s report is fiercely criticised by historian Håkan Arvidsson in a long article in Svenska Dagbladet today (external link). As I expected, the fact that Erik Norberg is a Lord-in-Waiting to the King is used to cast doubt over the impartiality of Norberg’s investigation. The report seems mostly solid to me, but exactly to avoid such doubts it would have been better if the task of investigating the issue had been given to someone not bound to the King and Queen by bonds of loyalty.
Arvidsson also criticises the fact that Norberg describes his investigation as a “narration”, arguing that a narration and an investigation are in themselves incompatible. Arvidsson considers the report “a mix of narration and investigation where narration progressively becomes dominant”.
A large part of Arvidsson’s article is a summary of Norberg’s report. He takes issue with how Norberg’s choice of words occasionally appears to try to put a positive spin on things and makes some valid points about certain weaknesses of Norberg’s investigation.
He points out that the report does not say anything about the value of Wechsler’s factory, which Arvidsson estimates at between 55 000 and 65 000 Reichsmark. As the value of the plantation and the stocks Wechsler received in exchange was 25 000 Reichsmark, this was a good affair for Sommerlath, but not for Wechsler.
Arvidsson also points out that the report says that Wechsler immediately after his arrival in Brazil handed over the plantation to Sommerlath’s brother-in-law, but that it does not say at what prize, if any at all. This, Arvidsson suspects, could possibly mean that it had been agreed that Wechsler should return the plantation and that he might not have received any compensation for doing so.
Arvidsson’s perhaps most interesting point is that what Norberg says about Sommerlath’s apparently passive membership of the Nazi party is based solely on Brazilian sources and thus only concerns the years when Sommerlath was living in Brazil. But Sommerlath returned to Germany in 1938, Arvidsson points out, and Norberg has not looked at whether he was an active or passive party member during those years he lived in Germany and thus had more of an opportunity to be active. The way he took over Wechsler’s factory as part of the “Aryanising” process at least shows that Sommerlath knew how to use his position as a party member to his own advantage, Arvidsson argues.
Arvidsson’s view of Walther Sommerlath is harsh. He believes that there are a lot of indications of Sommerlath being “a man without any particular moral conviction, a fellow traveller who seems to have cynically exploited every opportunity to save his own skin even at the expense of others”.
I cannot agree with his conclusion that “this entire sad and tragic story remains as shrouded in darkness as it was before Chamberlain [sic] Norberg’s effort”, but at least he shows that there are still questions which remain unanswered.

A new report on Walther Sommerlath’s actions in the Nazi era

It caused quite a stir earlier this year when Swedish TV4 ran a two-part documentary investigating the Nazi past of Queen Silvia’s father Walther Sommerlath, which, contrary to claims earlier made by the Queen and her brother, showed that their father, who joined the Nazi party in 1934, in 1939 took over a factory belonging to a Jew, Efim Wechsler, who was forced to leave Germany following the Kristallnacht, and that Sommerlath’s factory subsequently contributed to the war industry.
Queen Silvia was deeply affected by these accusations against her father and claimed to know nothing about it (she was born in 1943). She subsequently announced that the family would carry out an investigation to uncover the facts and the results of this investigation have now been published on the royal website (external link) in Swedish, English, German and Portuguese.
The report, written by Erik Norberg, Lord-in-Waiting to King Carl Gustaf and former national archivist, confirms much of TV4’s findings, but adds some important information about how Walther Sommerlath took over Wechsler’s factory, which makes Sommerlath appear in a better light than previously.
At the time of his daughter’s wedding to the King of Sweden in 1976, Walther Sommerlath denied to Swedish media that he had ever been a member of the Nazi party. This was disclosed as a lie nine years ago by journalists of the newspaper Arbetet, who simply checked the membership files and found that Sommerlath joined the party in 1934.
Norberg’s report confirms this, showing that Sommerlath joined the Brazilian branch of the German Nazi party in 1934, a year in which its membership rose from 107 to 1014. While Queen Silvia has earlier claimed that “everyone” joined the party, Norberg states that NSDAP eventually had approximately 2,900 members in Brazil, but insists that other organisations associated with the party should also be counted and thus reaches the number 12,000. The German colony in Brazil at that time consisted of some 89,000 individuals, which confirms that a Brazilian historian interviewed by TV4 was right when she shot down Queen Silvia’s claim.
In the absence of any proof of why Sommerlath joined the Nazi party, Norberg speculates about the reasons, but mentions only “social” reasons – the idea that it might have been for ideological reasons is not even hinted at. However, there is nothing which suggests that Sommerlath was an active party member.
It was in December 1938 that Efim Wechsler was asked to leave Germany and in June 1939 he emigrated to Brazil, where his only child was already living. TV4’s documentary showed that at this time, when forced sales of Jewish companies were commonplace, Walther Sommerlath took over his firm Wechsler und Henning in Berlin.
Norberg confirms that Sommerlath’s factory did contribute to the war industry, but adds that the “company was of course insignificant in relation to the overall production apparatus, and it was also a subcontractor to pure military equipment industries”.
Most importantly Norberg shows that the circumstances in which Sommerlath took over Wechsler’s factory were not as black as TV4’s documentary may have made it seem. Walther Sommerlath had in 1937 decided to leave Brazil for Germany, which he did the following year. However, during 1938 he returned briefly to Brazil and at this time bought 20.5 % of a coffee plantation, Fazenda Santa Joaquina, which belonged to his wife’s family.
On 29 April 1939 Walther and Alice Sommerlath sold this to Efim Wechsler, whose company Firma Wechsler und Hennig was taken over by Walther Sommerlath a few days later. But already on 21 December 1939 Wechsler sold his shares in the plantation to Alice Sommerlath’s brother-in-law José Baptista de Almeida Barbosa, using the money to set himself up with a new job and new home in Rio de Janeiro.
Although the sale of Wechsler’s company was obviously forced upon him by the Nazi regime, this goes a long way in indicating that the new owner, Walther Sommerlath, tried to help Wechsler make the best out of the situation.
“All indications are that this was an agreement that had been put in place to compensate Wechsler for the takeover of Firma Wechsler und Hennig and to make it possible for Wechsler to establish himself in Brazil”, Norberg writes. “The price of Firma Wechsler und Hennig was thus quite simply the plantation and the land in Santo André, and these assets in turn created the conditions for Wechsler eventually to become established with his workshop in Rio de Janeiro”.
Norberg also points out that following the end of the war it was “possible to apply to the German State with claims for compensation for economic damage suffered during the period of the Third Reich”. The fact that Wechsler in 1949 applied to the Wiedergutmachungsamt only for compensation for a property in Berlin and not for the company, means that it is “not unreasonable to assume that he considered that payment had already been made for the transfer”, Norberg concludes.

New revelations about Queen Silvia’s father’s Nazi past

Swedish TV4’s investigative programme “Kalla fakta” last night again set focus on the Nazi past of Queen Silvia’s late father, Walther Sommerlath. At the time of her wedding in 1976 the Queen’s father denied in an interview with Expressen’s Ulf Nilson that he had ever been a member of the Nazi party, but eight years ago the newspaper Arbetaren was able to prove that he had indeed joined the Nazi party in 1934.
At the time Queen Silvia refused to comment, but in the documentary “Familjen Bernadotte” earlier this year she finally broke her silence to say that her father was not “politically active”, that it was all a “machinery” which one had to be part of and that the factory that he owned was not part of the war industry, but produced electronics such as toy trains and hair dryers, but that it was ordered to produce a membrane for gas masks.
Walther Sommerlath moved to Brazil in 1919 and was still living there at the time he joined the Nazi party in December 1934. In a telephone interview with “Kalla fakta” his eldest son, 81-year-old Ralf Sommerlath, claims that all Germans living in Brazil joined the party and that this was more or less common courtesy.
However, Ana Maria Dietrich, an expert on Nazism in Brazil interviewed by “Kalla fakta”, points out that only 2,900 out of 80,000 Germans in Brazil, joined the Nazi party. These 3.5 % she considers the “convinced” Nazis.
Walther Sommerlath returned to Germany in April 1939, a month before the Nazi party was outlawed in Brazil. He settled in Berlin and on 24 May 1939 he took over the company “Wechsler & Hennig”. His son Ralf later asked him if he bought it from Jews, which Walther Sommerlath firmly denied.
Documents found by “Kalla fakta” show that Sommerlath took over the firm from Efim Wechsler, a Jew, and that this was part of the so-called “Arisieriung” (arification) process after the Kristallnacht, when Jews were forbidden to own companies and thus forced to sell. The documents also show that his factory produced items which were used by the Luftwaffe. It thus seems increasingly clear that Walther Sommerlath misled not only the journalists of 1976 but also his own children about his past.
In a statement on the royal website (external link) Queen Silvia, who was born in 1943, says that she she regrets her father’s membership of the Nazi party, which she did not know about until adulthood and never had the chance to discuss with her father.
Her brother Ralf, on the other hand, says to Expressen (external link) that the Queen is “terribly upset” and he calls the documentary “lies and slanders”. He fumes that if all Swedes are like Mats Deland, one of the three documentary makers, he will never again visit Sweden and tell his sister to “come home”.
The documentary may be watched in its entirety on TV4’s website (external link). The second part of the documentary will be broadcast the coming Sunday.

Brazilian “heir” disappears in Air France tragedy

Prince Pedro Luíz of Orleans-Bragança, third in line to the headship of the former imperial house of Brazil, was among the 216 passengers and 12 crew members who most likely lost their lives when Air France’s flight AF 447 disappeared over the Atlantic on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris yesterday.
Head of the house is Prince Luíz Gastão, who is childless, making his brother Prince Bertrand, who is also childless, the heir. The brothers Eudes, Pedro and Fernando have renounced their rights, leaving the succession to the sixth brother, Prince Antônio, father of the 26-year-old prince who perished yesterday. The succession now passes to Prince Antônio’s second son, Prince Rafael.
Prince Pedro Luíz was born on 12 January 1983. As his mother, Princess Christine of Ligne, is a Belgian aristocrat he held dual Brazilian and Belgian citizenship. The Prince lived in Luxembourg and was closely related to its grand ducal family – his maternal grandmother is the sister of Grand Duke Jean.