New books: Herman Lindqvist on Crown Princess Victoria

Two months after his very bad biography of Carl XIV Johan was published, the prolific Swedish journalist Herman Lindqvist is now out with his 51st book – this time Crown Princess Victoria is his victim.
Lindqvist, who is known to hold inflated ideas about his own importance, boasts in the preface that he “for some years” has had “the privilege to talk history with Victoria. Together we have gone through Sweden’s entire history with focus on our regents, their lives and work, both their private lives and their lifework, their merits and their faults”. It must be said that this does not auger well for the future head of state’s knowledge and understanding of history.
“Herman Lindqvist might be called court historian [...]. But he is as much the Swedish people’s historian [...]”, we read on the cover. However, Lindqvist is as little a historian as I am a brain surgeon. He has written a number of bestselling books on history which certainly have helped raise the Swedish people’s interest in history. But his books are not based on original research, he finds it hard to decide what is relevant and what is unimportant, they often have a very simplistic view of historical events and processes and are mostly packed with factual mistakes.
Victoria – Drottning med tiden (published by Bonnier Fakta in November) is a hagiography of the good old sort. No-one is as unique as Crown Princess Victoria and no-one is such a wonderful person. If so, it would have to be her brave and remarkable fiancé Daniel Westling.
Lindqvist puts a lot of creativity into informing us about what is so very unique about these two people and in doing so chooses so narrow criteria that only they can fit into them. “Never has an ordinary Swedish man received a ducal title”, Lindqvist writes. As ducal titles are linked to succession rights and Victoria is the first princess with succession rights to marry, this is true, but a rather obvious fact. It becomes quite tiresome when he gets on and on like this and it reminds me a little of a magazine which recently proclaimed that Barack Obama was “the first Afro-American world leader to receive the Nobel Peace Prize”. (Well, he is the first black US President so I guess he might as well be described as the first Afro-American world leader to tie his shoestrings).
Some of these statements are even debatable. “Never has a Swedish heir to the throne become engaged to a non-royal, even non-noble – and yet kept the position as heir”, Lindqvist enthuses. That might seem true, as Victoria’s father was already king when he married a commoner. However, Prince Bertil was first in line to the throne when he married a commoner in 1976 and remained heir presumptive even after the wedding and until the birth of Crown Prince Carl Philip in 1979.
This book is written in a pompous, yet rather naïve manner. Occasionally what the Crown Princess said in a couple of interviews with Lindqvist in June is quoted, but it seems she had little of particular interest to say to him. The only thing I found of some interest is that she says that she and Prince Carl Philip have never discussed the events of 1979-1980 whereby he ceased being Crown Prince and she bypassed him in the succession.
The text runs to less than 50 pages, with the remaining 2/3 of the book being made up of photos – some of them quite good. Yet in these 40-something pages Lindqvist manages to make a whole list of factual mistakes – to name a few examples he refers to Princess Christina, Mrs Magnuson as plain “Christina Magnusson” (with the surname spelt wrongly), makes no less than three mistakes when he writes that the Crown Prince of Norway in 2001 married “Mette Marit Tjessim Höjby” (who, incidentally, Lindqvist told us already two years ago that would soon tire of her royal role, file for divorce and leave), describes Queen Josephina as “a king’s daughter from Bavaria” (the King of Bavaria was in fact her maternal grandfather; her father was Viceroy of Italy and later Duke of Leuchtenberg) and says that Victoria’s goddaughter Eléonore, rather than her elder sister Elisabeth, is “Hereditary Princess of Belgium”.
The parents of Queen Louise are described as “wholly German” although her father was a British subject. According to Herman Lindqvist the birth of the future Gustaf V in 1858 was the last royal birth to take place with official witnesses in an adjacent room, but this tradition did in fact continue for another five decades. We also learn that several Swedish princes have attended universities and colleges, “but they never completed their studies with exams”. Except for the fact that Prince Sigvard did.
Crown Princess Victoria tells us that Carl XIV Johan is her “favourite king in the history of Sweden”, an opinion, I could add, she seems to share with all other Bernadottes. Having made the monumental discovery, while writing his previous book, that the future Carl XIV Johan actually received only the name Jean Bernadotte at the time of his birth – a fact which has only been known to other biographers and readers at least since the publication of Fredrik Ulrik Wrangel’s book Från Jean Bernadottes ungdom as recently as 120 years ago – Lindqvist now ludicrously insists on referring to him as “Jean (Baptiste) Bernadotte”.
I was also quite startled to read that Crown Princess Victoria “shares her interest in military affairs with her namesake and great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria, married to Gustaf V”. For the sake of Sweden I sincerely hope that this is only a sign that Lindqvist is ignorant of how far the late Queen’s military interests went and not that Crown Princess Victoria intends to follow in her ancestress’s war-mongering footsteps.
Lindqvist ends this book, as he did his last one, by stating: “Today there is no dynasty in any country in Europe, indeed not in the whole world, where the same branch of the same family has sat on the throne as long [as the Bernadottes] without interruption, where the regent has never been chased into exile for reasons of internal or foreign politics and has never been forced to see his country at war, but where the dynasty has been able to continue reigning over a free and peaceful people in an independent state”. No matter how many times Lindqvist repeats this it remains untrue.
The current British dynasty has been on the throne since 1714, 104 years longer than the Bernadottes, and although Britain has been at war several times during those nearly three centuries the dynasty’s rule has not been interrupted by those wars. One may correctly point out that it is not the same branch of the British dynasty, as the throne passed from George IV to his brother, from William IV to his niece and from Edward VIII to his brother. But, even though Herman Lindqvist chooses to ignore it, the same happened for the Bernadottes when Carl XV was succeeded by his brother Oscar II.
One may wonder if Lindqvist tries to cover this up when he refers to Carl XV and Queen Lovisa as ancestors of Crown Princess Victoria – in fact she is not descended from them at all, but from Carl XV’s brother.

War and peace as Obama accepts Nobel Prize

Today President Barack Obama is here in Oslo, where he received the Nobel Peace Prize in a ceremony at the City Hall at 1 p.m. Tonight approximately 10,000 people came to see and cheer him, or to protest, when he and Michelle Obama made a brief appearance on the balcony of Grand Hotel before the Nobel banquet.
In his Nobel speech, Obama spoke almost as much about war as about peace. He quoted Martin Luther King, who received the Peace Prize in 1964: “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones”.
“As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence”, Obama said, but added: “But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their [King’s and Gandhi’s] examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. [...] To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason”.
He did however mark a clear difference from the regime of his predecessor George W. Bush: “Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct. And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. [...] We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor - we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it's easy, but when it is hard”.
The whole speech may be read here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-acceptance-nobel-peace-prize

Barack Obama was by the way not the only person to receive a Nobel Peace Prize today. Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 laureate, today got back the medal and the diploma which Iranian authorities stole from her bank safety box recently. It was the first time a Nobel Peace Prize had been confiscated by a political regime.

New books: Bernadottes and Romanovs

A book on the Bernadottes and the Romanovs in itself sounds like a good idea. It was the then Crown Prince Carl Johan’s alliance with Emperor Aleksandr I in 1812 which ultimately brought about the union with Norway and which greatly helped secure his position as an upstart monarch. Russia remained a key ally throughout most of Carl XIV Johan’s reign, until his son, Oscar I, broke with his father’s pro-Russian policy by concluding the November Treaty with Britain and France in 1855.
But as the subtitle indicates, the scope of Gunna Wendt’s new book Die Bernadottes und die Romanoffs. Europäische Dynastien auf der Mainau (published by Verlag Huber in Frauenfeld), is narrower than so.
At the centre of her story stands a marital rather than a martial alliance – in fact the only such alliance concluded between the Bernadottes and the Romanovs. In 1908 Prince Wilhelm of Sweden, the second son of King Gustaf V and Queen Victoria, was married off to Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia, a granddaughter of Emperor Aleksandr II. It was arguably the grandest match the Bernadottes ever made as well as the most disastrous. Princess Maria ran away after five years and divorce followed in 1914. Maria wrote about the marriage with great bitterness in her memoirs, while Wilhelm passed the whole thing over in his.
The fruit of the marriage was an only son, Prince Lennart, who, having lost his royal title by marrying a commoner in 1932, became known as the multi-talented Lennart Bernadotte and lived to a great age – he died on Mainau five years ago this month, aged 95.
This book has been written in connection with the exhibition “100 Jahre Lennart Bernadotte – Zurück zu den Wurzeln”, which was held at Mainau this year to celebrate his centenary. The author, who has earlier written a biography of Lennart Bernadotte’s second wife, Sonja, cooperated with her, Lennart’s cousin Prince Michel Romanoff and the French author Jacques Ferrand, in preparing the exhibition, but sadly all of them, except Wendt, died before its opening.
The book begins with a chapter on Carl XIV Johan. It is obviously based mostly on Fritz Corsing’s 1946 biography, but it is well written and Wendt offers some interesting perspectives on the founder of the Bernadotte dynasty.
After this we hear quite little about the Bernadottes and comparatively more about the Romanovs, as the author charts the life story of Lennart Bernadotte and some of his Russian relatives – his great-grandfather Aleksandr II, his maternal grandfather Grand Duke Pavel Aleksandrovich, his mother Maria Pavlovna and his uncle Grand Duke Dimitry Pavlovich, as well as Grand Duke Pavel’s three children from his second, morganatic marriage. One of them, Princess Irina Paley, was the mother of Prince Michel Romanoff, a first cousin who came to be a close friend of Lennart Bernadotte.
What many of those persons had in common was that their lives turned out quite differently from what they had expected. Grand Duke Pavel was banished from Russia because of his morganatic marriage, but was allowed to return at the outbreak of World War I, only to be executed by the Bolsheviks because of “the sins of his family” in 1919. Grand Duke Dimitry escaped this fate by having been banished from St Petersburg because of his involvement in the murder of Rasputin.
Lennart Bernadotte himself was thrown out of the royal family and had to make his own living by the use of his many talents. And his mother, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, refused to live in a loveless marriage with Prince Wilhelm and became one of the Russian royals who best succeeded in creating a new existence for herself following the revolution. It must however be said that Gunna Wendt puts somewhat too much faith in Maria Pavlovna’s memoirs, particularly when it comes to her version of her marriage and divorce.
The Bernadottes have produced more interesting and talented characters than most royal dynasties, yet they remain in the shadow of Lennart Bernadotte’s closest Russian relatives throughout this book. The relations between the two dynasties would also be worth a study, but is mostly bypassed by Wendt.
All in all this is an easily read and mostly correct book, but some significant voids make it less interesting than it might have been.

New Swedish royal monogramme published

The Swedish Royal Court today made public the monogramme which will be used by Crown Princess Victoria and her future husband Daniel Westling. The monogramme has been designed by Vladimir A. Sagerlund at the Swedish National Archives.

Press release (in Swedish):
http://www.kungahuset.se/ovrigt/pressrum/pressmeddelanden/aretsarkiv/kronprinsessparetsmonogram.5.62402a8b12475b47cdb80003423.html

My latest article: Obituary of Princess Grete Sturdza

Following the aforementioned death of the Norwegian-born Princess Grete Sturdza on 29 November I have gathered some information about her and compiled a short obituary which is published in Aftenposten today.
The basic biographical facts are that she was born in Oslo on 27 April 1915 as the daughter of a Norwegian father and a Russian mother. She won a Norwegian junior championship in tennis and studied British literature and philosophy at Magdalen College in Oxford. There she met the law student Prince Gheorghe (Georges) M. Sturdza, who belonged to a Romanian princely family which included two sovereign princes of Moldavia and one Romanian prime minister.
Having known each other for 1 ½ year they married in St Nikolaus’s Orthodox Church in Oslo on 12 April 1937 and settled in Iasi in Romania. They had three sons. In the years after World War II, when Romania was hit by famine and draughts, Princess Grete Sturdza and her mother-in-law were involved in relief work and were able to draw upon Princess Grete’s acquaintanceship with Folke Bernadotte.
The Sturdzas had to flee Romania when the monarchy fell in December 1947. With the help of the Swedish minister the Princess and her children managed to flee to Prague, while her husband walked on his feet from Iasi to Vienna.
The family first came to Norway, but later moved to Varangeville-sur-Mer near Dieppe in Normandy. There the Princess in 1957 opened the private botanical garden Vasterival, where she collected 10,000 different species. She was honorary President of the International Dendrological Society and received a number of other honours.

Late royals: Princess Margaretha of Denmark (1899-1977)

Princess Margaretha was one of only three women in modern history to have been a princess of all the three Scandinavian countries – the others were her mother and her grandmother.
Princess Margaretha Sofia Lovisa Ingeborg of Sweden and Norway was the eldest child of Prince Carl and Princess Ingeborg. She was born at her parents’ summer house Parkudden in Stockholm on 25 June 1899. She eventually got two younger sisters, Märtha and Astrid, and a baby brother, Carl Jr. The siblings had a happy childhood with Fridhem, their new summer house, as their preferred home.
When she was six years old, the personal union between Norway and Sweden was dissolved and the Norwegian Parliament offered its country’s crown to Margaretha’s father. As he did not yet have a son, the Norwegians were willing to amend the Constitution to make Margaretha his heir. However, the Norwegian throne eventually went to Margaretha’s maternal uncle, who became King Haakon VII.
Swedish society columnists rejoiced when Princess Margaretha was confirmed – it was a very long time since there had been eligible young princesses in the male-dominated Bernadotte dynasty. Queen Mary of Britain also took note of the young princess and wrote to Princess Ingeborg suggesting that Margaretha might be a suitable consort for the Prince of Wales. However, Margaretha had to turn down the British crown as she was already secretly engaged to the talented Prince Axel of Denmark, a first cousin of her mother eleven years her senior.
The wedding took place in the Cathedral of Stockholm on 22 May 1919. It was the first royal wedding in Stockholm since Margaretha’s maternal grandmother Lovisa had married the future King Frederik VIII of Denmark in 1869. The wedding came only a few months after Sweden in November 1918 had stood at the brink of revolution – a large celebration was just what the monarchy needed to revive its popularity.
Prince Axel and Princess Margaretha settled in a villa called Bernstorffshøj, located near Bernstorff Palace in Gentofte outside Copenhagen. Margaretha gave birth to Prince Georg in 1920 and to Prince Flemming (pictured above) in 1922. Prince Axel made a career in the navy and in the East Asiatic Company, whose director he became, and also held several other positions such as member of the IOC and chairman of the board of Scandinavian Airlines.
Margaretha dedicated herself to family and charity, but also accompanied her husband on some of his official journeys. In 1930 they made a long journey to Asia together with Crown Prince Frederik and Prince Knud, and in 1953 Prince Axel and Princess Margaretha represented Denmark at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in London.
Princess Margaretha’s life was not without sorrows and difficulties. Her marriage was not always happy as Prince Axel had a roving eye. In 1922 the family lost most of their money when the Danish bank Landmandsbanken collapsed. And in 1936 their home burnt down to the ground.
In 1935 her youngest sister, Queen Astrid of the Belgians, was killed in a car accident at the age of 29. Margaretha remained in Brussels for several months after the funeral to look after the motherless children. In 1954 her other sister, Crown Princess Märtha of Norway, died after a long illness. “Aunt Tha” again stepped in to comfort her nephews and nieces and try to take on the role as a maternal figure in their lives.
Princess Margaretha was a tireless letter writer – letters in her characteristic, challenging hand were regularly sent off to her relatives in many different countries and were expected to be answered promptly.
After her husband’s death in 1964 she became a keen traveller. She always went to her native Stockholm in early December, saying she would die if she did not hear Handel’s “Messiah” in the Cathedral on the first Sunday of Advent. Christmas war mostly spent with her family in Norway.
Princess Margaretha was considered the most regal of the three sisters and was anxious for etiquette and royal dignity to be maintained. But she was also a bit shy and these factors combined occasionally caused outsiders to find her arrogant and aloof. Those who knew her thought nothing could be further from the truth.
Princess Margaretha suffered a stroke during Christmas of 1974 and was dependent on a wheelchair for the rest of her life. She died from another stroke during a New Year visit to her second son at Tranemosegaard on 4 January 1977, aged 77. She was buried in the park of Bernstorff Palace.

At the road’s end: Lizanne Kelly LeVine (1933-2009), sister of Princess Grace

This piece of news from last week had passed me by: Elizabeth Anne “Lizanne” Kelly LeVine, the last surviving sibling of Princess Grace of Monaco, died from cancer at the retirement home Quadrangle in Haverford on Tuesday 24 November, aged 76.
She was born on 25 June 1933, as the youngest of the four children of John B. and Margaret Kelly, and held a bachelor’s degree from the University of Philadelphia. She was married to Donald C. LeVine, who died in 2000, a year after their daughter Grace had died from cancer at 43. She is survived by her son Chris.
Her funeral was held at St. Bridget’s Church last Friday and was attended by her nephew, Sovereign Prince Albert II of Monaco.

Philadelphia Daily News has an obituary:
http://www.philly.com/philly/obituaries/20091127_Lizanne_LeVine__a_Philadelphia_Kelly.html

Funeral of Prince Alexandre of Belgium

The funeral of Prince Alexandre of Belgium, who died suddenly last Sunday, was held at the Church of Our Lady in Laeken today. Among the mourners were his widow Léa with her children Renaud Bichara and Laetitia Spetchinsky, the latter’s husband Didier Nagant de Deuxchaisnes, King Albert II and Queen Paola, a frail Queen Fabiola, Princess Esmeralda with her husband Salvador Moncada and children Alexandra and Leopoldo, Prince Philippe and Princess Mathilde (whose tenth wedding anniversary falls on this date), Prince Laurent and Princess Claire, Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg, Archduchess Marie-Astrid and Archduke Christian of Austria-Hungary, Princess Margaretha of Liechtenstein and Princess Maria Gabriella of Savoy. Prince Alexandre’s sister, Princess Marie Christine, was absent, as from the funerals of her parents. The Prince was laid to rest in the vault of the church, which has been the burial place of the Belgian royals since the days of Léopold I.

At the road’s end: Princess Grete Sturdza (1915-2009)

Several years ago I read an old newspaper article (I believe it was from the summer of 1937) about a young Norwegian woman, Grete Kvaal, marrying a Romanian prince in Oslo. In Aftenposten today her sister Vera Blom announces the passing of Princess Grete Sturdza in Varangeville on 29 November, aged 94.

Flashback to the 1930s

A few days ago a substantial majority of the Swiss people, against the wishes of their government and parliament, voted to forbid the building of minarets. This attack on the freedom of belief has naturally been endorsed by far-right wing parties across Europe. Here in Norway MP Per-Willy Amundsen (Progress Party) has said he finds the Swiss decision “interesting” and in VG yesterday there was a letter to the editor signed “Per, Bergen”, which read in full: “Now there must be a referendum on mosques also in our dear Norway”. Try substituting the word “mosques” with “synagogues” and it becomes obvious why this sounds eeriely familiar.