King appoints female Lord Chamberlain

I have been too busy lately to find time to update this blog regularly, but one piece of news from last Friday surely deserves to be mentioned: The King has appointed Gry Mølleskog Lord Chamberlain, thereby making her the first woman in Norway - and as far as I know also in Europe - to hold the top position at the royal court. Mølleskog will take over in the summer from Åge B. Grutle, who was been Lord Chamberlain since 2009 and was appointed Ambassador to Finland in the Council of State on Friday.
Mølleskog, who is 53 years old, was chief of staff to the Crown Prince and Crown Princess from 2003 to 2006, when she left to pursue a business career. She was Senior Vice President of SAS (Scandinavian Airlines) and Senior Client Partner of the recruitment company Korn/Ferry, but returned to the royal court in 2012, when the Crown Prince and Crown Princess's office merged with the office of the King's Private Secretary to form the Royal Secretariat and Mølleskog became Chief of Staff and head of the secretariat.
The creation of a joint staff for the King and Queen and the Crown Prince and Crown Princess was a significant step that intended to make the future transition from Harald V to Haakon VIII as smooth as possible. The King will not abdicate, but while King Olav remained the absolute head of the monarchy until the very end, King Harald has turned it into a teamwork, first between himself and the Queen and in the past fifteen years also including the Crown Prince and Crown Princess in the making of all major decisions (although the King retains the last word).
The fact that Gry Mølleskog will (probably) be King Harald V's last Lord Chamberlain can also be seen as a testimony to the feminisation of the monarchy and the royal court that has taken place in his reign. King Olav's court was almost exclusively male - it was only after 25 years that a female Assistant Private Secretary was appointed in 1982 - while the royal household of the current reign has been more or less equally balanced between genders. While King Olav's household consisted almost entirely of officers, the court of Harald V has been recruited from a wider base. The highest court position held by a woman before Mølleskog was that of Private Secretary, which was held from 2000 to 2012 by Berit Tversland, who began her career in the royal household as governess to the then Prince Haakon and Princess Märtha Louise in 1977.

Former journalist to head Danish royal court

Earlier this week the Danish royal court announced that Queen Margrethe II has appointed a new Lord Chamberlain, a position left vacant by Ove Ullerup’s decision to return to the Foreign Service after eleven years at court. The new Lord Chamberlain is rather surprisingly Michael Ehrenreich, a well-known journalist.
Ehrenreich, who is sixty years old, comes from the post of director of the Foreign Policy Society, which he took up only last year, but before that he worked as a journalist for 34 years, 21 of them (1982-2003) at the newspaper then known as Berlingske Tidende. He was that paper’s correspondent in London from 1984 to 1988 and in Washington from 1988 to 1993 and became editor-in-chief in 2001.
Two years later he became co-editor of Kristeligt Dagblad, a position he held until taking up his current job in 2013. In 2007 he published a biography of the then (and possibly future) US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Hillary – En amerikansk historie.
While the Lord Chamberlain’s chair is often filled by diplomats or officers it is not the first time Queen Margrethe recruits someone from the media. In 1976 she hired Hans Sølvhøj, a former Social Democratic politician who was at that time director-general of the public broadcaster DR, as her second Lord Chamberlain. Hiring Sølvhøj was Prince Henrik’s idea and turned out to be an inspired choice, as Sølvhøj has been credited with making the monarchy more accessible and encouraging Queen Margrethe to let the world see her artistic side.
The new Lord Chamberlain will take up his post on 15 February, just in time for the state visit of the King and Queen of the Netherlands in mid-March and a series of grand events to celebrate Queen Margrethe’s 75th birthday in April.

At the road’s end: Baroness Elisabeth Palmstierna (1917-2013), Princess Lilian’s Marshal of the Court

It was announced today that less than a month after the death of Princess Lilian of Sweden, her loyal, long-serving Marshal of the Court, Baroness Elisabeth Palmstierna, passed away on 6 April at the age of nearly 96. Baroness Palmstierna served the Princess until last year and was never far from her side at public functions. She is believed to have been the world’s first female Marshal of the Court.
She was born Eva Margareta Elisabeth Tham on 28 April 1917 and was the second daughter of Wilhelm Tham, who was himself Marshal of the Court, and Countess Margareta Hamilton. Elisabeth Tham worked for the Foreign Ministry between 1940 and 1950 and served at the legations in Helsinki, Warsaw and Rome. She was briefly employed by the companies Bofors and Sveriges Kreditbank before joining the Office of the Marshal of the Court in 1953.
At the Royal Court she encountered Baron Carl-Fredrik Palmstierna, whom she married in Seglora Church in Stockholm on 17 January 1959. They had one child, Margareta, nicknamed “the centennial child” because of the combined ages of her parents at the time of her birth in 1960 (57 and 43 respectively).
A prolific historian, Carl-Fredrik Palmstierna was the son of Baron Erik Palmstierna, who had been the first Social Democrat to hold the office of Foreign Minister of Sweden (and was consequently considered a traitor to his class by many of his peers) and later became his country’s long-time Minister (i.e. Ambassador) to Britain.
Carl-Fredrik Palmstierna’s internationally best-known work was probably My Dearest Louise (London 1958), his edition of the correspondence between Emperor Napoléon I and Empress Marie-Louise, whose letters by a quirk of fate had found their way to the Bernadotte Family Archives. On the other hand his memoirs in three volumes may perhaps be counted his best works.
Carl-Fredrik Palmstierna had been appointed Private Secretary to King Gustaf VI Adolf in 1951 and remained in the position for a couple of years into the reign of his grandson Carl XVI Gustaf. He retired in 1975 and died in 1993, at the age of 90.
In 1962 Elisabeth Palmstierna became secretary to the Duke of Hallandia, Prince Bertil. She thus made up his entire household on her own, something which could occasionally cause problems on the telephone when callers would enquire if there were no gentleman present they might speak to.
The problem was solved by Baroness Palmstierna being granted the title Master of the Household in 1974. In 1979 she was promoted to First Master of the Household and in 1991 she was given the title Marshal of the Court. Thereby she probably became the first woman in the world to hold that rank. Naturally she felt sure her father would have been proud of his daughter also becoming Marshal of the Court.
Having been ill for some years, Prince Bertil passed away shortly before his 85th birthday in 1997. Elisabeth Palmstierna had promised him she would be there for his widow, Princess Lilian, and thus became Marshal of the Court of what was renamed The Duchess of Hallandia’s Court.
Only two years Princess Lilian’s junior, Elisabeth Palmstierna remained at the Princess’s side well into their nineties. The Princess and the Baroness even fell and broke their respective hips on the very same night in 2008. While Princess Lilian never again appeared in public, Elisabeth Palmstierna could soon again be seen tottering around the corridors of the Royal Palace, aided by a walking stick or a walker.
In June 2010 Baroness Palmstierna confirmed to the media that Princess Lilian was suffering from senile dementia and would thus miss the wedding of Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel. However, the 93-year-old Marshal of the Court herself was present for the nuptials and would continue to come to her office early in the morning every day.
“For Beth there is only one way of retiring”, her colleagues would say. However, she eventually had to relinquish her office in 2012, when it was clear that Princess Lilian would not return to public life and there was hardly any mail to be answered anymore.
At Princess Lilian’s funeral in the Palace Church on 16 March, Elisabeth Palmstierna, now in a wheelchair, was seated with the friends rather than with the courtiers. Her sixty years of royal service were truly over. A month later, on 22 April, Baroness Elisabeth Palmstierna’s funeral will take place in the same church.
It is all a bit reminiscent of the oft-told tale of Magnus Brahe, who was Carl XIV Johan’s Marshal of the Realm and closest confidante, who never left the monarch’s side and who famously followed his master to his grave within half a year of the King’s passing, the difference being that in the case of Elisabeth Palmstierna it took only 27 days for her to follow Princess Lilian.

European heirs gather in the Netherlands

This weekend most of the heirs to the European thrones are gathered in Apeldoorn in the Netherlands, and a group photo may be viewed on the Swedish royal court’s Facebook page. These meetings have become a fixture during the past decade or so, but this is, as far as I know, the first time a photo has been released. There are also similar meetings between the royal courts at different levels (the lords chamberlain, the information departments, the palace librarians, etc.), which rotate between the countries. In all cases the purpose is to give those involved an opportunity to exchange ideas and experiences.
This year’s meeting takes place in the Dutch town Apeldoorn and is hosted by Prince Willem-Alexander and Princess Máxima, who will leave the group when they ascend the Dutch throne next month. The others present are Crown Princess Mary of Denmark, Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel of Sweden, Prince Felipe and Princess Letizia of Spain, Crown Prince Haakon of Norway, Prince Philippe and Princess Mathilde of Belgium and Hereditary Grand Duke Guillaume and Hereditary Grand Duchess Stéphanie of Luxembourg. Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark is attending a sports engagement in Sweden in a private capacity, while the heirs to Britain and Liechtenstein (and the heiress presumptive to Monaco) do not normally attend.
The absence of the British heir and his wife will probably lead to the usual comments about the British royal family snubbing or disliking their European counterparts, but Prince Charles clearly gets along well with his colleagues and his absence is a logical consequence of how the British monarchy since the Second World War has focused its attention on the Commonwealth rather than on Europe. If this will change in the next reign remains to be seen.

New books: Mountbatten’s daughter, Elizabeth II’s lady-in-waiting

The memoirs of the children of famous parents and of former courtiers have in common that they are frequently rather dull, dreary and over-careful not to say anything that is not already known. The autobiography of Lady Pamela Hicks, youngest daughter of the famous Earl Mountbatten of Burma, first cousin of Prince Philip and former lady-in-waiting to her third cousin, Queen Elizabeth II of Britain, is an exception to this rule.
In Daughter of Empire: Life as a Mountbatten, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson last month, Lady Pamela Hicks tells the story of her early years with humour and a sharp eye for the telling detail. She relates the story of her life from her privileged childhood, the “exile” in the United States in the early stages of World War II, her time in India while her father was its last viceroy and the tours on which she accompanied the current Queen as lady-in-waiting. These travels include the visit to Kenya in February 1952 which was cut short by the death of George VI and the accession of Elizabeth II, which Lady Pamela observed at first hand.
As children of famous parents often are in their memoirs, Lady Pamela is admiring and generally uncritical of her parents. Yet she is very candid about her parents’ unusual marriage, and how their open infidelity to each other brought their lovers into the children’s lives in what seems a most natural manner and how these lovers themselves became important to the two Mountbatten daughters. The portrayal of her paternal grandmother, Victoria, Marchioness of Milford Haven, stands out as one of the most memorable aspects of the book, along with her loving depiction of the time she spent in India with her parents during that country’s transition from colonial status to independence.
There seems to be a set of “approved” royal anecdotes which are included in all such memoirs (how many times have we not read for instance of how the then Princess Elizabeth’s tiara snapped and the pearls and the bridal bouquet had been mislaid just before she set off for her wedding?), but besides these there are many amusing stories in this book, some of them hilarious.
Occasionally Lady Pamela gets her facts wrong, for instance by giving a wrong date or misspelling a name, or imagining she departed from “JFK” airport in the 1940s when she apparently means La Guardia. And there is a glowing account of what “a privilege” it was to meet “the legendary King Haakon of Norway”, who “was deeply revered by his countrymen as a war hero, a symbol of his people’s resistance”, before Lady Pamela goes on to tell us how he “remained defiantly in his palace and rode out on his white horse through the streets of Oslo every day”, which is the exact opposite of what King Haakon actually did (leading a government in exile from London), but reminiscent of what his brother, King Christian X of Denmark, did.
The book ends with Queen Elizabeth II’s great Commonwealth tour following her accession and then a brief epilogue about Lady Pamela’s marriage to the designer David Hicks in 1960 and how they learned of the death of her mother upon returning from their honeymoon. As such it is not a complete autobiography and indeed I think this early end to the book makes Lady Pamela herself appear less interesting than what she might actually be.
There had been marital approaches made by Prince Georg of Denmark, who was turned down by Lord Mountbatten without Lady Pamela having been consulted. There was a romance with a Lebanese man and, we are told, ten proposals of marriage. But it was only when she met an untypical suitor in the shape of David Hicks that she was “completely bowled over”.
“It was an unorthodox match but one that would change my life completely”, she writes. “After twenty-nine years as the dutiful daughter of a family at the heart of British society, with all its traditions and ceremonies, I was about to enter a completely new world – of fashion, design and the whirlwind of the 1960s”. The contrast between the world into which she was born and the world into which she married must have led to interesting experiences and, perhaps, difficult transitions, something which might have been an interesting tale. But perhaps Lady Pamela Hicks considers that a different story?

King awards Grand Cross to last Private Secretary

The King has been pleased to award the rare honour that is the Grand Cross of the Order of St Olav to his outgoing Private Secretary, Berit Tversland, making her only the third non-royal Norwegian woman to receive this honour. An era comes to an end at the Norwegian royal court when Tversland now retires as the King’s Private Secretary, a position which was created by King Haakon VII in 1905 and now ceases to exist.
Berit Tversland has been employed by the royal court since 1977, first as governess to the then Prince Haakon and Princess Märtha Louise and later as their secretary. In 2000 she succeeded Magne Hagen as Private Secretary, becoming the first woman to hold that position.
The position as Private Secretary is now abolished, and its office merges with the office of the Crown Prince and Crown Princess into a new entity which will be known as the Royal Secretariat. It will be led by Gry Mølleskog, with the title Chief of Staff. Mølleskog was also head of the office of the Crown Prince and Crown Princess from 2003 to 2006.
The first Norwegian woman to receive the Grand Cross of St Olav was Crown Princess Märtha, who was awarded it with its collar in 1942. The Grand Cross was subsequently given to the author and Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset and the actress Johanne Dybwad in 1947, to Princess Astrid (with collar) in 1956, to Crown Princess Sonja (with collar) in 1972, to Princess Ragnhild in 1982, to Princess Märtha Louise (with collar) in 1989 and to Crown Princess Mette-Marit in 2001.

New heads of Swedish Royal Collections and Royal Armoury

The Swedish royal court has announced that Margareta Nisser Dalman will be the new Director of the Royal Collections with the Bernadotte Library. 54-year-old Dalman is an economist who also holds a doctorate in the history of art and has for some years been in charge of public activities at the Royal Palace in Stockholm. She will succeed Carin Bergström, who, at the age of seventy, will retire.
Today it was also announced that the Royal Armoury will have a new boss from 20 August, when Malin Grundberg will take over as head of that museum. 39-year-old Grundberg now works at the Historical Museum, but has earlier been employed by the Royal Armoury and holds a doctorate in history. Her doctoral dissertation on royal ceremonial in the age of the Vasas has also been published as a book with the title Ceremoniernas makt - Maktoverföring och genus i Vasatidens kungliga ceremonier.

At the road’s end: Ingvald M. Smith-Kielland (1919-2012), former Lord Chamberlain

An announcement in Aftenposten today tells us of the death of the courtier and officer Ingvald M. Smith-Kielland, who served both King Olav and, briefly, King Harald as Lord Chamberlain, i.e. head of the royal court.
Born on 20 September 1919, Ingvald Mareno Smith-Kielland was a veteran of World War II and eventually reached the rank of major in the army. At one stage he served as an equerry to the King and he became Court Marshal in 1966.
He was appointed Lord Chamberlain in 1985, and as such followed in the footsteps of his father, Ingvald Marillus Emil Smith-Kielland, who had served as Lord Chamberlain to King Haakon VII from 1955 to his death in 1957 and to King Olav V from 1955 to 1966.
As an officer of the army he was typical of the court of King Olav, which was recruited almost exclusively from the armed forces. As Lord Chamberlain, Smith-Kielland worked very closely with the King on a daily basis. Their last meeting took place on 17 January 1991, the very day of King Olav’s death.
Four days later Smith-Kielland carried the crown on a velvet cushion as King Olav’s coffin was brought to the Palace Chapel for the lying-in-state. He also walked at the head of the funeral procession on 30 January 1991.
When King Harald V appointed his new court, Smith-Kielland was retired and replaced by Kaare Langlete. He was awarded the very rare honour of the Grand Cross of the Order of St Olav. Among his other decorations were the War Medal and the Legion of Honour (Grand Officer).
He died on 9 May and the funeral has, according to the death announcement, already taken place privately. He was 92.

New books: Elizabeth II and her court

The literature on Queen Elizabeth II of Britain is enormous already in her lifetime, but the journalist Robert Hardman’s new book Our Queen, published by Hutchinson in September, is one of the most insightful so far. However, its title is somewhat misleading, as it is not so much a book about Queen Elizabeth herself as a book about the British monarchy and its workings in what will inevitably be the final decades of her reign. The title of the American edition, Her Majesty: Elizabeth II and Her Court, is perhaps more fitting.
While great jubilees often cause writers to present the era in question as one glorious triumph, Hardman is more realistic. He argues that the reign of Elizabeth II has “consisted of three episodes of sustained success and two periods of recurring difficulty”. He considers that some 2/3 of the reign should be considered “contended”, but that the 23 years of the remaining third to some extent could be described as “troubled”.
And while the statement that Queen Elizabeth “has never put a foot wrong” seems to be a favourite cliché of royal writers at this stage of her reign, Hardman observes that she actually has, although only rarely. The slow response to the Aberfan mining disaster of 1966 and the royal family’s absence in the aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing in 1988 stand out as examples. According to Hardman, Queen Elizabeth has herself acknowledged to her advisers that she got it wrong on those occasions.
But this is not a book on her entire reign. The focus is set on the last twenty or twenty-five years, which have been an age of transformation for the British monarchy. Hardman has obviously benefited greatly from being granted access to some key players during those years, among them family members such as the Duke of Cambridge, politicians such as David Cameron and Tony Blair (interestingly, the latter highlights the Queen’s “total ability to pick up the public mood”), and courtiers who have been close to the crucial events of these years.
Among the latter category, Hardman points to the 13th Earl of Airlie, who was appointed Lord Chamberlain in 1984, as one who will stand out on the list of those he rather romantically calls the “New Elizabethans”. Lord Airlie had “greater impact on the mechanics of the monarchy than almost anyone since Prince Albert”, the author states and goes on to argue his point by charting how he set out to reform the way the monarchy was run and in particular how it was funded.
While the Queen “liked the status quo”, she gave Lord Airlie the permission he needed to go through with these changes while “the Queen Mother was continuing her guerrilla war against the modernisers from within her Clarence House redoubt”. Thus the monarchy was better equipped than what has been generally assumed to handle the momentous challenges of the 1990s, a decade which certainly ranks among the troubled times of the reign.
A major reorientation has occurred along the lines of the 1992 book Elizabeth R: The Role of the Monarchy Today, where Sir Antony Jay (of “Yes, Minister” fame) stressed the monarch’s role as “head of the nation” as at least equally important as the role as head of state. That role involves the duties “concerned with behaviour, values and standards; the ones which earn the respect, loyalty and pride of the people”, Jay wrote. According to Hardman, this was “a definition which has since helped to shape the entire way the Palace goes about its business”.
Since then the death of the Queen Mother has also meant that her daughter is no longer caught in some sort of limbo between the old and the young generations, but has herself taken on the mantle as “mother of the nation” with all that goes with such a conception. Thus her mother’s death has actually made her life in public easier, a courtier argues.
The death of the Queen Mother and the golden jubilee in 2002 marked a watershed, a courtier says: “Up until then, it felt like a reign of two halves – Act One: good, Act Two: bad. Then, suddenly, we were into Act Three”.
“For all her instinctive conservatism, this sovereign has steered the monarchy through more transition than any in modern times”, Hardman writes. He is of the opinion that the British monarchy “has actually changed more in the last twenty-five years than in the previous one hundred and twenty-five”. This is obviously not solely Elizabeth II’s achievement, but would, also obviously, hardly have happened if she had been unwilling to go along. “She is actually more open to new ideas now than ten, twenty or thirty years ago”, says one senior official.
Hardman’s account generally seems even and fair, but occasionally he goes overboard. As in the first sentence of the book, where he argues that “[w]hen the world comes to look back on the early twenty-first century, two events in Britain – just weeks apart – will be lodged in the collective memory”, i.e. the diamond jubilee and the London Olympics, which is surely to overestimate the impact on the rest of the world, or when he argues that Prince Philip should be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Hardman has previously done the BBC television series “Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work” and parts of the book are clearly influenced by this in the way that the readers are served many “behind the scenes accounts” of how foreign tours, public engagements, state visits et al are organised. This is a bit long-winded and as this topic has been thoroughly dealt with by the TV series, the book which accompanied it and also by other television series, it might perhaps have been cut somewhat in this book.
Another note of criticism might be that Hardman, like many British authors, gets caught by the impossibility of reconciling the notion that Britain is superior to most other countries (if not all) with the idea that simplicity is something exclusively British. Thus the story of how the Queen’s car broke down during an official engagement: “With certain heads of state, there would be panic stations, much yelling into electronic cuffs, a public inquiry and high-level redundancy”. Problems sorted out, “off she goes in a convoy of two cars and one police outrider – the sort of modest motorcade which might be laid on for, say, a middle-ranking trade minister from the European Union” – or, in fact, most non-executive heads of state on an ordinary day. The fact that David Cameron’s car had to stop for red lights on his way to Buckingham Palace when he was to be asked to form a government is apparently considered something essentially British, with Cameron himself chiming in to say that “[t]here’s no other country in the world which has this sort of changeover”, which is far from true.
A rather large part of the book is dedicated to the Royal Household, which Hardman argues has seen “a shift in management culture away from the gentleman amateur to unisex professionalism”. However, his account of the Royal Household is so enthusiastic that one feels that everything cannot possibly be that marvellous. And when he enthuses that there are a housekeeping assistant “with a 2:1 degree in physics from [...] St Andrews” and a footman who is “a graduate in aeronautical engineering from one of Britain’s top universities” and that such things are quite common one wonders if it is really a good thing that people are holding jobs for which they are grossly overqualified.
One department which has been particularly successfully reorganised is the Royal Collection, in recent years transformed “from a dusty curatorship into a self-financing, world-class assembly of great treasures employing hundreds and viewed by millions”. Its director, Jonathan Marsden, argues that “[i]n terms of access and conservation, this reign has been a high point in the history of the collection. It will be seen as [as] significant as that of Queen Victoria”. Thus the modernised Royal Collection “will be one of the Queen’s greatest legacies”. This is a rather surprising conclusion about a monarch who is not really known for her appreciation of fine arts, but it does speak of a professionalism extending outside the areas of the monarch’s personal interests.
So what is her greatest achievement personally? Somewhat surprisingly Hardman suggests that it might be Britain’s development into a multicultural society, which the author argues that she has not only observed, but been part of.

At the road’s end: Sivert A. Farstad (1931-2011), former Lord Chamberlain

Among the death announcements in Aftenposten today is that of former Lord Chamberlain Sivert A. Farstad, who died at the hospital Diakonhjemmet in Oslo on 28 October, aged 80.
Sivert Andreas Farstad was born on 4 July 1931 and made a career in the Navy, where he reached the rank of Rear Admiral.
He was appointed Lord Chamberlain in 1993 in succession to Kaare Langlete. This was a rather challenging time for the royal court, which was in the middle of the complicated (and eventually controversial) restoration of the Royal Palace.
Farstad took his leave in the autumn of 1996 at a crucial phase of the restoration process, citing age as his reason. He was succeeded by Lars Petter Forberg, who became the (so far) last Lord Chamberlain from the armed forces (following Forberg’s resignation one has chosen diplomats instead).
Unlike most other Lord Chamberlains, Farstad was not given the Grand Cross of the Order of St Olav when he left royal service.
He is survived by his wife of 55 years, two daughters and five grandchildren. His funeral will take place in Ullern Church in Oslo on 8 November.

New books: A privileged life on the royal sideline

Many may remember Margaret Rhodes only for being interviewed by Peter Sissons on BBC shortly after the news of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother of Britain’s death had been announced, an interview which many found insensitive and intrusive. Apparently Sissons was not aware that the Hon Mrs Rhodes, the Queen Mother’s niece and Woman of the Bedchamber, had been present at her aunt’s deathbed only a few hours before.
This episode goes entirely unmentioned in Margaret Rhodes’s recently published memoirs, The Final Curtsey: The Autobiography of Margaret Rhodes, First Cousin of the Queen and Niece of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, which opens with a moving account of the Queen Mother’s death. While royal employees writing their memoirs or talking to the press is generally frowned upon, Rhodes has spoken to the media on many occasions and is obviously one of those who are sufficiently trusted to be allowed to do so.
The youngest child of the 16th Baron Elphinstone and his wife Mary (the Queen Mother’s eldest sister), Margaret was seven years junior to her nearest sibling, but only a year older than her first cousin, Princess Elizabeth. This meant that she came to be a close companion of the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, occasionally living with them, for instance at Windsor Castle during parts of World War II. In 1991, when she had been a widow for ten years, she was asked to become Woman of the Bedchamber to the Queen Mother, “a mix of Lady-in-Waiting and companion”. She believes the Queen Mother came to regard her as her “third daughter” and she has remained close to Queen Elizabeth II to this day.
Thus she has been in a position to observe things closely, but remains careful not to give much away. Indeed the book offers little that is new to those who have already read a few books on the British royal family and many of the anecdotes told by Mrs Rhodes are well-known from other books. There are also the by now familiar “corrections” from people in the inner circle: no, the Queen Mother did not drink a lot. And no, she did not hate the Duchess of Windsor.
One exception is a rare look behind the closed doors of the monarch’s weekly audiences with the Prime Minister, about which Margaret Rhodes is able to tell us that when the young Queen Elizabeth II had her first meeting with Winston Churchill, “she was so over awed at being in the presence of the great man that she hardly dared to speak”, while Churchill “was overcome with emotion and wept tears of chivalric adoration”.
From someone this close to the royal family one might perhaps have expected something contributing to the readers’ understanding of their characters, but this Margaret Rhodes does not deliver. There are in fact not many characterisations in this book, neither of her relatives nor of other people she has met. About meeting Nelson Mandela she has nothing more to say than that “I like to think that [...] I had rounded the circle as far as South African politics were concerned” as she had met Smuts decades before. The most memorable thing about the Dalai Lama was apparently what kind of shoes he wore.
One exception is perhaps Princess Margaret, who her cousin considers “missed her vocation; she should have been in cabaret”. She adds that her cousin had “such great promise, beauty, intelligence and charm”, but that she was “very indulged, especially by her father” and “did have the most awful bad luck with men”. She concludes that “the Almighty usually gets the right people to be born first”, but only a brief look at the recent history of the British monarchy shows that in the two generations preceding Elizabeth II the person born first was not the right one.
On the same topic, Mrs Rhodes believes her cousin Elizabeth “hoped she might have one [a brother] and be let off the hook, but deep down she knew that it wasn’t very likely. She accepted that she would be Queen one day but thought it was a long way off”.
When writing about the euphoria of VE Day she admits that she does not remember much of it herself and quotes instead from her cousin’s diary, which is in itself quite a scoop (but if the terse, factual statements of the diary of 1945 is representative the future official biographer of Elizabeth II should not expect too much from her diaries).
Except for her closeness to the royal family Margaret Rhodes’s upbringing seems to have been rather the prototype of British pre-war upper class child-raising and she compares it herself to Downton Abbey and Gosford Park. She never went to school, yet apparently thinks she did not miss out on much and considers herself self-educated by virtue of having read many books, which of course indicates a certain unawareness of what an education is really about.
She worked for the MI6 during World War II and was thereafter hired to work for a businessman by the name of Denys Rhodes, with whom she began an affair and married after he had had his marriage to his first wife annulled.
Two chapters are dedicated to their travels in Asia and Africa. Such descriptions of foreign journeys are standard in the memoirs of British aristocrats of a certain age, but here, like in so many other memoirs, they are rather uninteresting because of Mrs Rhodes’s lack of education and her not making much of an attempt at understanding the “exotic” customs witnessed. Thus one ends up with rather meaningless descriptions such as this: “He danced again, but more soberly and the he spoke a few words, which were of course incomprehensible to us, but apparently it was deemed sufficient to keep the crowd satisfied”.
It is also a drawback that the author tends to get her facts wrong, particularly when it comes to years. Early on she claims that her eldest sister Elizabeth was “ten-years-old” when she was a bridesmaid for their eponymous aunt, but as the wedding took place in 1923 and Elizabeth was born in 1911 this obviously does not match up. The wedding was “solemnized at St Margaret’s, Westminster, where I was also to be married”, she tells us, but in fact the royal wedding took place next-door in Westminster Abbey.
Later we hear that Princess Margaret, born in August 1930, was “a couple of months short of eight” in May 1937 and she even manages to get her own age wrong she claims to have been “eighty-one, soon to eighty-two” when the Queen Mother died (she was in fact five years younger). In a rare attempt at seeing things in a greater context she states that her aunt’s and uncle’s state visit to France in 1938 took place at “a time when, despite the Munich Agreement, many people believed that war was inevitable”, but in fact the state visit happened more than two months before Munich. There are also at least two photos which are obviously misdated by some two decades, while her sister Jean appears in a photo dated 2000 although she died the year before.
The book is written with a certain sense of humour and is not free of self-irony. There are some funny stories (“Poor Britannia. She would have hated being Cool”, the Queen Mother said to Margaret Rhodes’s daughter at the outset of Tony Blair’s premiership), but there is one so-called hilarious story which is at best in bad taste if not downright disgusting. “I have been assured by my children that I am a consummate hostess even when disaster looms”, Mrs Rhodes tells us and continues to relate how on one “mid-winter occasion [...] our overworked heating system blew up” and they had to receive their guests in candlelight and rearrange the menu. Then the housekeeper appeared and said “that the cowman’s wife had arrived to say that she thought her husband was dead and please, could Mr Rhodes go over and see if he was actually dead”.
One hardly believes one’s eyes when one reads that Denys Rhodes refused to do so, but sent the gardener instead. “Ten minutes later the hatch opened again and the message was that Mr Mallet thought the cowman was dead, although he had twitched a couple of times”. Still neither a dying nor a dead cowman could get Mr Rhodes to leave his dinner party. “The final request, death having been established, was for Mr Rhodes to go and lay the poor man out. This pleasure, I’m afraid, Denys also declined”.
After this callous account of how they refused to help in the face of death, Marie-Antoinette Rhodes concludes that “the whole macabre sequence was unbelievably funny and our rather ribald weekend guests were convulsed”. A recently widowed guest was the only exception, seeming “merely bemused”. However, she later wrote to say “that perhaps she had been taking death too seriously – which was very tactful of her”. Margaret Rhodes concludes: “Queen Elizabeth would have revelled in the situation if she had been there”. Would she have found it equally hilarious if her own husband had been the one dying, one wonders?

Book news: Queen Mother’s niece and lady-in-waiting to publish memoirs

The Daily Telegraph today has an interview (external link) with Margaret Rhodes, a niece and lady-in-waiting of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother of Britain, who talks about her upcoming memoirs. Titled The Final Curtsey, the book will be published by Calder Walker Associates on 30 October.
The Hon Mrs Rhodes is the daughter of the 16th Lord Elphinstone and Mary Bowes-Lyon, the elder sister of the Queen Mother. She was a bridesmaid to her first cousin, the then Princess Elizabeth, in 1947 and will in two weeks attend for the third time the wedding of an heir to the throne. For several years Mrs Rhodes served as a lady-in-waiting to her aunt and was at the Queen Mother’s bedside when she died in 2002.

Three days of celebrations for Queen Margrethe’s forty years on the throne

Earlier this week Christian Eugen-Olsen, the Master of Ceremonies at the Danish court, celebrated his seventieth birthday (the Prince Consort attended a reception in his honour at Christiansborg Palace) and Billed-Bladet online (external link) reports that he has agreed to stay on for another year in order to organise three days of celebrations of Queen Margrethe II’s forty years on the throne in January 2012.
Monarchs in general tend to hold larger celebrations only for the 25th, 50th and 60th anniversaries of their accession to the throne, while 40th anniversaries are normally more low-key affairs if commemorated at all. There were no grand events to mark Queen Elizabeth II of Britain’s forty years on the throne in 1992, while King Haakon VII of Norway had a gala performance at the National Theatre for his fortieth anniversary in 1945.
However, Queen Margrethe is known to enjoy celebrations and few of Europe’s monarchies do these things with such style as her. The last anniversary of her accession to the throne which was celebrated in grand style was her silver jubilee in January 1997, which saw a service of thanksgiving in Christiansborg Palace Church (which was re-inaugurated on that occasion following the disastrous fire of 1992), a reception at the City Hall and a gala banquet at Christiansborg Palace.
Unlike weddings and birthdays there was however no major gathering of foreign royals for the silver jubilee. Except for the Danish royal family it was attended by the King, Queen and Crown Prince of Norway, the Presidents of Iceland and Finland and their wives, and the former royal family of Greece. The King, Queen and Crown Princess of Sweden were also due to attend, but cancelled their attendance because of court mourning for Prince Bertil, who was buried the day before. Princess Christina did however attend the service of thanksgiving.
The photo shows Queen Margrethe on her seventieth birthday last April, which was also celebrated in grand manner. This year she will for once not make the traditional balcony appearance at Amalienborg on her birthday, but rather spend the day at Marselisborg Palace in Århus.

My latest article: Nobility at the Bernadottes’ Norwegian court

A few years ago a librarian at the National Library asked me if there were any books or articles dealing with the history of the Norwegian royal court. It turned out that no such book or article existed, but now I have done something about that and in the latest issue of Historie (no 4-2010), which is out today, one can read my article “Adel ved Bernadottenes norske hoff”, which deals with the Norwegian court during the union of crowns with Sweden and focuses in particular on the role played at the court by the nobility.
Five years ago, in December 2005, the current King and Queen hosted a gala dinner for their employees to celebrate “the Royal Court’s centenary”, but this is obviously wrong and must have been based on very bad research. In his contribution to the anthology on the establishment of the Bernadotte dynasty my fellow historian Per Sandin on the other hand landed on the date 1818 for the establishment of a separate Norwegian court, but in my article I argue that the available sources indicate that this actually happened in 1816 (although the short reign of King Christian Frederik also saw the appointment of a court on 22 May 1814).
The nobility was abolished by Parliament in 1821, which deprived King Carl Johan of what might have been a significant means to build a power-base in Norway. Instead it seems he chose to fill his Norwegian court with members of the former noble families, which made the court almost entirely dominated by aristocrats during his reign.
The first State Almanac published after his accession shows that 10 out of 14 courtiers were nobles in 1820, but the state almanacs show a clear decreasing tendency during his successors. Following his son Oscar I’s accession in 1844 the number is 13 out of 25 courtiers, in 1862 (the first almanac after Carl XV’s accession in 1859) 13 out of 30 courtiers belong to the former noble families, in 1875 (two years after Oscar II’s accession) the number is 12 out of 48 and in the last State Almanac published under the Bernadotte dynasty, that of 1905, only 7 out of 35 courtiers belong to the former noble families.
In the article I also look specifically on the two most senior positions at court, those of Lord Chamberlain and Mistress of the Robes. Three out of six Lord Chamberlains belonged to the former noble families, whereas four out of five Mistresses of the Robes did so.
Although we find courtiers from the families Anker, Clauson-Kaas, Kaltenborn, Mansbach, Rosenkrantz, Wedel-Jarlsberg, Haffner, Haxthausen, Løvenskiold, de Besche, Falsen, von Munthe af Morgenstierne, Trampe, Treschow and Knagenhjelm, three families stand out as particularly strongly represented at court.
Sixteen Wedel-Jarlsbergs, eleven Løvenskiolds and eleven Ankers held positions at the royal court between 1816 and 1905 and the article explores these families’ links to the court through offering details of what positions were held by which members of these families. It is quite interesting to note how service at the court was almost the norm in these most notable of the former noble families. For further details about the noble families and their links with the royal court I refer you to the article.
The photo above shows the arms of the Wedel-Jarlsberg family (the only titled noble family in Norway) as it appears above the entrance to the family crypt beneath Sem Church on the outskirts of Tønsberg. It might be added that the choice of illustrations made by the editors for the article is a bit peculiar, as none of the persons portrayed were in fact courtiers.

It might by the way seem that I write more articles than I am aware of myself. At least I was quite surprised when I recently received a letter with an enquiry to my article about Oscarshall in the latest issue of Langt Vest i Aker. I had never heard of this periodical, but it turns out that it is published by Ullern historielag, a local history club, and that they have quite simply stolen the article I wrote on Oscarshall as a royal residence in the reign of Oscar I from Byminner this summer. This is obviously a blatant violation of Norwegian law, which accords me the copyright to my article for my entire life and seventy years from my death. It turns out that a fellow historian has had one of her articles reprinted without permission in the previous issue of the same periodical, so obviously this publication is based on systematic piracy.

New books: Amalienborg, its inhabitants and its court

Amalienborg is the title of a book just published by Gyldendal in Copenhagen, written by Jørgen Larsen and Thomas Larsen and illustrated by Bjarke Ørsted. The title is however somewhat misleading, as this is not really a book about Amalienborg itself, but about the workings of the institution which has its headquarters there, i.e. the Danish monarchy. The book benefits from being written by political journalists with a more analytical approach than what is often the case with books on royalty.
The book opens with two chapters on the origins and history of the complex of four mansions that is Amalienborg, followed by interviews with Queen Margrethe, Henrik the Prince Consort and Crown Prince Frederik. The Queen, known to be articulate, is interviewed in no less than four chapters, but only one of them deals directly with her own relations to Amalienborg, her winter home for most of her life. In that chapter we get to hear about her and her husband’s views on interior decorating and how they reasoned when Christian IX’s Mansion was turned into their home following their 1967 wedding, which is quite interesting reading.
She also says quite much about her mother’s role in relation to Amalienborg, but this is strongly coloured by a daughter’s fond memories of her mother. She tells us how “well-informed” Queen Ingrid was about old houses and how they should be taken care of, but as the recent renovation of Frederik VIII’s Mansion has shown, Queen Ingrid did great harm to that building, often by overruling professionals who had other ideas.
In the other chapters Queen Margrethe speaks about various other things, such as wartime memories, her New Year speeches and her worry that today’s children are not allowed to be children as long as in her days. The chapter in which Prince Henrik is interviewed is more of a portrait of the man, to a great extent based on earlier interviews and his memoirs.
Queen Margrethe, probably the only one among the current European monarchs who could be described as an intellectual, is always a great interview subject, as she is very knowledgeable, has a sharp mind and a wonderful turn of phrase. Some highlights from these interviews are: “I am not without opinions, but they are for personal use”, “When people have sat down to listen, something should be said” (about her New Year speeches, which contain much more than the platitudes and pleasantries of her father’s days), and “Particularly when we want to be modern we end up being very conservative” (about Danish interior decoration in general). But Queen Margrethe has given so many interviews that one tends to feel that one has heard a lot of it before.
To my surprise I found that the most interesting interview in this book was that with Crown Prince Frederik. The Crown Prince and his family now live partly at the Chancellery House at Fredensborg and partly in Frederik VIII’s Mansion at Amalienborg, both buildings which were the homes of his beloved grandmother Queen Ingrid. Crown Prince Frederik speaks of the privilege of being able to live in the same houses as his forebears (a faint hint of cigarette smoke and perfume can sometimes be felt in his grandmother’s former homes) and also gives an interesting insight into the reasoning behind his and Crown Princess Mary’s choice to decorate their mansion with works of contemporary art as well as his own interest in modern art.
It is also interesting to note how he during the past decade or so has grown closer to his mother while at the same time becoming less critical of his own upbringing than he used to be in interviews and speeches. And this is perhaps where Crown Prince Frederik dares to say on behalf of his father what Prince Henrik himself has never gone so far as to say publicly, namely that he felt the needed to turn certain things around when he arrived in Denmark. According to the Crown Prince “he did away with parts of the conservatism which my grandmother and grandfather represented in his eyes. My grandfather was the patriarch, and what daddy did was always right”.
Except for the interview with the Crown Prince I found those chapters which deal with the working of the royal court the most interesting parts of the book. We get to meet some of the key courtiers – the Lord Chamberlain, the Private Secretary, the Master of Ceremonies, the Head of the Information Department – as well as many of the unsung heroes, who provide the reader with an insight into the work of the library, the furniture restoration workshop, the garage, the cleaners, the equerries, the Life Guard and others.
Also interesting are the chapters dealing with the challenges facing the monarchy today, both in relation to the media and in relation to politics and public opinion. The final chapters outline some interesting developments and trends relating to the monarchy in modern days, including the more critical voices which have appeared recently, for instance in connection with the debate over changing the Act of Succession.
(As a disclaimer I should add that although I am repeatedly mentioned and referred to in the book I have not contributed to it and am thus not partial when I review it).

Swedish court appoints new Director of Information and Press

It has been announced that Bertil Ternert has been appointed Director of the Information and Press Department at the Swedish royal court in succession to Nina Eldh, who unexpectedly announced her resignation in September. Bertil Ternert, a 61-year-old Lieutenant-Colonel who is currently head of information at the airline SAS, will take over from Nina Eldh in January.

Nina Eldh quits the Swedish court

According to Resumé (external link) Nina Eldh, the Director of the Information and Press Department at the Swedish royal court, today unexpectedly announced her resignation. Her five-year-contract expires at the end of the year and she told the news agency Rapidus that although King Carl Gustaf had wanted her to continue, she had chosen not to. The 64-year-old does not know what she will be doing after the New Year.

My latest article: The lady-in-waiting who inspired Hamsun?

This year’s second issue of the periodical Historie is just out and in it you can read my biographical article of Ida Wedel Jarlsberg, an artist, lady-in-waiting and female pioneer who might also have inspired one of the most famous characters in Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun’s works.
Ida Wedel Jarlsberg belonged to Norway’s most prominent noble family and was the daughter of the last Norwegian count, Peder af Wedel-Jarlsberg. On both her father’s and her mother’s side she belonged to families with close ties to the royal house and several of her relatives belonged to the royal court.
Ida herself made the rather unconventional choice of becoming an artist, but was later pressured by her parents to accept a post as lady-in-waiting to Queen Sophia. It was at this time that she probably came to know the young author Knut Hamsun and the greatest Hamsun expert, Lars Frode Larsen, has argued convincingly that Ida was the model for the ideal woman in Hamsun’s novel Hunger (1890), called Ylajali, but whose real name in the book is given as “lady-in-waiting Nagel”.
Ida became close to Queen Sophia, but left royal service in dramatic circumstances when she fell victim to the constitutional crisis of 1884, which saw the impeachment and sentencing of the Selmer government, the formation of political parties, the breakthrough of parliamentarianism and the establishment of the first liberal government.
Ida Wedel Jarlsberg, who belonged to a conservative family, refused to follow orders when she was supposed to escort Crown Princess Victoria to a dinner hosted by the liberal Prime Minister Johan Sverdrup, thereby creating a furore which ended only with her resignation in 1886. The political and court intrigues resulting from Ida’s independent stand are all described in detail in the unpublished diaries of her brother-in-law, the historian Yngvar Nielsen.
Ida Wedel Jarlsberg thereafter dedicated the rest of her life to her artistic career and to good works. Together with her close friend Birgitte Esmark she founded Young Women’s Christian Society, which was the first organisation in this country to be run entirely by women.
Having lived in Rome for several years, Ida Wedel Jarlsberg – courtier, artist, pioneer and possibly Ylajali – died in Oslo in 1929 at the age of 74.

Also out this week is Royalty Digest Quarterly no 2 - 2010, in which I have a review article on Lena Rangström’s book En brud för kung och fosterland - Kungliga svenska bröllop från Gustav Vasa till Carl XVI Gustaf, which I have also reviewed here earlier.

What to see: Statue of Ingegjerd Løvenskiold, Bærums Verk

The unveiling of a statue of Ingegjerd Løvenskiold Stuart at Bærums Verk last year made the Mistress of the Robes one of the increasing number of Norwegians to be honoured by monument in their lifetimes.
The statue was done by Kirsten Kokkin, an American sculptor of Norwegian descent who is perhaps best known for her statue of Crown Princess Märtha outside the Norwegian ambassador’s residence in Washington, of which replicas have been erected in Oslo’s Palace Park and outside Crown Princess Märtha’s Church in Stockholm.
The statue of Ingegjerd Løvenskiold Stuart is called “Fruen til verket”, loosely translated as “the Lady of the Manor”, and honours her commitment to the restoration of the former industrial village of Bærums Verk.
The ironwork to which it belonged had come into the possession of her husband Harald Løvenskiold’s family in the days of his great-great-great-great-grandfather Peder Anker and since the death of Harald Løvenskiold in 1994 it belongs to his and Ingegjerd’s son Carl Otto, who resides at the nearby manor.
Ingegjerd Løvenskiold, née Andvord, was appointed Mistress of the Robes by King Olav in 1985, making her the highest-ranking female member of the royal court. Shortly after her husband’s death she remarried the wealthy American Robert D. Stuart and moved to the USA. Following her remarriage she was relieved of her duties as Mistress of the Robes, although she retains the title and the rank.
A successor is not expected to be appointed, making her the last to fill the position first held, between 1816 and 1845, by her husband’s great-great-great-grandmother, Countess Karen of Wedel-Jarlsberg, and later by her husband’s great-grandmother, Elise Løvenskiold, from 1887 to 1905.

At the road’s end: Gunnar Brodin (1931-2009), former Marshal of the Realm

A few days ago there was an obituary in Svenska Dagbladet of Gunnar Brodin, former Marshal of the Realm at the Swedish royal court, who died on 24 December after a long illness. Brodin was a civil engineer by education and became a professor at the Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholms Tekniska Högskola) in 1970 and served as the school’s chancellor between 1981 and 1986. Thereafter he became University Chancellor from 1986 till 1992 and then County Governor of Norrbotten from 1992 to 1995, when he was appointed Marshal of the Realm (head of the Royal Court). He retired in 2003 and was succeeded by Ingemar Eliasson, who has signed the obituary together with his successor Svante Lindqvist, the current Marshal of the Realm.