BEARDED and hungry, Crown Prince Frederik of
Denmark returned home yesterday from four months in
the Arctic wilderness to confront the question of his great
wavering princely "ancestor", to be or not to be.
"It's going to be very strange to be back in Copenhagen,"
said the 32-year-old Prince who before his trek in
northern Greenland enjoyed a reputation as something of
a playboy in the Danish capital. "I haven't decided how
long I will stay there."
There could be no more disturbing news for his
long-suffering mother, Queen Margrethe, who has been
planning an orderly succession. The Prince, a keen
marathon runner, has been groomed for the throne with
stints of military service, study at Harvard and a post in
the Danish Embassy in Paris.
Plainly, like Hamlet, he is uneasy in his role, having been
exposed to nothing but ice, snow and sledge dogs since
early spring. His immediate plan is not to become king but
rather to take his pilot's licence. For Danes, eager for
change, that smacks of an identity crisis.
The comparison with Hamlet is admittedly thin. It was a
bit odd to leave court for four months ("I'm looking
forward to making friends with huskies," he said before
departure) but not quite in the Hamlet league of madness.
There seems to be no murder plan.
Queen Margrethe, however, showed determination
worthy of Hamlet's mother by flying out to the Arctic to
give him coffee and cakes, apparently nervous that Prince
Frederik was not eating properly. Since the whole point of
the expedition was to prove his manhood, that left the
Crown Prince sorely embarrassed.
Prince Frederik's adventure does highlight the problem of
all continental crown princes. They are young, sometimes
clever, men watching their contemporaries making
fortunes in the e-economy. They, in the meantime, have to
kick their heels waiting for their parents to make space on
the throne.
There was some consolation from Prince Frederik's
attentive mother yesterday after he touched down in
Copenhagen: he will have an unpopulated patch of
northern Greenland named after him. The Queen also
pinned a medal to his chest. Prince Frederik, still
complaining about the food in Greenland, then went off to
have a square meal.
The doyen of crown princes is naturally the Prince of
Wales whose serious pursuits underline the generational
differences: unlike the playboy princes across the Channel,
he has been married and has fathered two sons. He is still
no closer to the throne, however, than the likes of Prince
Haakon Magnus of Norway, 26, or Prince
Willem-Alexander of The Netherlands, 33.
The stories of these restless continental princes are similar.
With a chronic shortage of acceptable royal brides, they
are tending to delay marriage and trawl nightclubs for
distraction. They seem to have a strong preference for
models. Prince Haakon Magnus was sent to work in the
United Nations when his parents, King Harald and Queen
Sonja, became concerned about his relationship with the
model, Mona Woll Haland. Crown Prince Felipe in Spain
has taken a fancy to a Norwegian underwear model, Eva
Sannum.
Prince Frederik, before taking up with huskies, was
friends with an underwear model, Katja Stokholm
Nielsen, moved on to a pop singer, Maria Montell, and
seems now to be in a liaison with a 24-year-old fashion
student.
Prince Nicolaos of Greece does not have a throne to
inherit - the family have lived in exile since 1967 - but he
shares the peer preference for Scandinavian models. For
three years he was a friend to Sofie Egmont-Petersen
from Copenhagen. Prince Albert of Monaco also has a
liking for the fashion runways.
There is some parental concern about this trend. "Elder
sons are behaving like second sons and that should not be
allowed to continue," one Scandinavian court watcher said
yesterday. The troubled love life of Crown Prince
Willem-Alexander shows how delicate the dilemma has
become. Queen Beatrix found herself the target of the
Dutch press which accused her of killing the four-year
love affair between her son and the commoner, Emily
Brewers. "Will Emily be the Dutch Camilla?" asked a
Dutch magazine after reporting that the dentist's daughter
had to be smuggled into the palace through side doors and
was cold-shouldered at court balls. The Queen's main
concern was probably not that Miss Brewers was a
commoner but that she was a Catholic, which spelt
trouble for the Protestant House of Orange.
She was well liked by the Dutch and a stable and sensible,
if shy, counterpart to the bubbly playboy Prince.
The Dutch fear is that the problems of the House of
Windsor could be exported over the North Sea to the
House of Orange. That seems to have been sufficient for
Queen Beatrix to stop the affair. Now Prince
Willem-Alexander is consoling himself with an Argentine
banker, Maxima Zorreguita, 28. She is not entirely
uncontroversial because her father was a minister under
the Galtieri regime. She too is a Catholic.
Mothers wanting a smooth succession are thus doomed to
be disciplinarians as their sons drift through discotheques
in the long wait for the throne. When Queen Margrethe
discouraged Frederik from his relationship with Maria
Montell, crowds gathered outside the palace and chanted:
"Margrethe, let your son marry."
Prince Frederik told an interviewer defiantly: "I am the one
who will decide on my private life. There's no law that
says I have to marry blue blood. I'm sure that I will
choose a woman I love." This fighting talk was somewhat
undermined by the Queen's mercy mission to the Arctic
Circle.
By comparison, the British succession dilemmas, though
filling acres of newsprint, seem minor, or at least
manageable. Camilla Parker Bowles is not Catholic, not a
future monarch's mother, and not an underwear model.
~*~
'He must use his head' (UK Times)
BY ALAN HAMILTON
DURING an interview this year with the
tall, chain-smoking, enviably popular and
impressively educated Queen Margrethe
II of Denmark, The Times slipped her a
question hoping to draw her thoughts on
the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker
Bowles.
"It is certainly easier to be a Prince of
Denmark than a Prince of Wales," she
replied with consummate tact. She was
alluding to the hounding that British royals receive from the
Fleet Street tabloids, but there seemed also to be a wistful
undertone of reference to Hamlet, a tragic prince of her
ancient kingdom, presented by Shakespeare as a man who
could not make up his mind.
Queen Margrethe insisted that she was not going to interfere
with her son's choice of girlfriends although she said: "I think
he knows where his duty lies and I think he knows, too, that
our point of view is that he must follow his heart, but he must
use his head as well." Pay attention, Frederik.
~*~
Web site's birthday telegram to Prince William(Yahoo: Reuters)
LONDON (Reuters) - A web site invited Internet users on Thursday to send birthday greetings to
Prince William, the future king, via a gigantic virtual telegram it will present when he turns 18 on June
21.
Web site City 2000 (www.city2000.com/royal/) launched the drive six days before the birthday celebration and hopes to beat
the 270,000 greetings it collected for the wedding last year of William's uncle Prince Edward to Sophie Rhys-Jones.
A spokeswoman for City 2000 said it will put a selection of the greetings on a CD-ROM and give it to the palace press
secretary to pass on to William, who is the eldest son of Prince Charles and the late Diana, Princess of Wales.
"We are sure that many people will be eager to send a message to the very popular Prince William," the spokeswoman said.
Some of the messages will be posted on the Web site. Those from last year's wedding now on the site include "don't let the
press get you down" and "don't let her spend all your money."
~*~
Royal ties that bring in the royalties(Electronic Telegraph)
By Linus Gregoriadis
FEW outside the business realised until last week's row over Prince William's
18th birthday pictures that the law gives copyright in pictures automatically to
the photographer.
Photographers' archives of past shots supplement their income, and few have
a library more valuable than the select individuals invited inside palaces and
royal chapels to take "official" shots of the Queen and Royal Family. While
Buckingham Palace has sometimes drawn up contracts to vary the usual legal
position, over the years agencies and privileged photographers - such as Lord
Snowdon, Lord Lichfield and Sir Geoffrey Shakerley - have accrued
significant sums in syndication fees from pictures reproduced around the
world.
Photographs offering an exclusive glimpse of royal lives are valuable. Last
year, for example, The Telegraph paid £1,300 for three pictures taken by
Lord Snowdon of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother at the christening of
her great grandson Arthur Chatto. And good pictures stay valuable down the
years. A 1939 photograph of the Queen Mother with the Queen and Princess
Margaret, whose copyright is owned by the agency Popperfoto, still fetches
at least £250. Such pictures are normally handled by agencies, which sell
them to magazines and newspapers round the world, taking up to 50 per cent
as their fee.
In the case of Lord Snowdon, who has taken official royal photographs for
more than 30 years, royalties are paid via Camera Press, a London-based
picture agency that also counts Lord Lichfield, Sir Geoffrey and Brian Aris, all
prominent royal photographers, among its clients. Profits in 1998 - which
would not all come from royal work - were more than £1 million.
Roger Eldridge, one of Camera Press's directors, said he was unwilling to
discuss photographers' arrangements with the Palace. Though he said
provisions were often made for good causes, he refused to say whether the
agency gave any money to charity. A spokesman for Rex Features, another
agency which earns royalties from royal photographs, also refused to say
whether it made charitable donations.
Andrew Farquhar, general secretary of Lord Snowdon's charity, the
Snowdon Award Scheme, said the photographer had used £14,000 made
from royal photographs while he was married to Princess Margaret to set it
up. Mr Farquhar said Lord Snowdon had given or been involved in raising
nearly £500,000 for the scheme, but he did not give a figure for the
photographer's own donations.
He said: "The £14,000 was a considerable amount of money at that time and
he still puts time and energy into the charity." Lord Lichfield was not available
for comment. Tim Graham, another royal photographer, is also reluctant to
talk about his arrangements, though he is understood to give a certain amount
of the fee left after the agency cut to charity.
Ian Jones, The Telegraph's photographer, who everyone directly involved in
the controversy over the Prince William photographs agrees has behaved
impeccably, had originally agreed to donate some of his royalties to charities
of the Prince's choosing. He will now not receive any money for his pictures,
at his own decision.
There is only one known example of the Palace demanding copyright on
pictures at the beginning. When Prince Edward married Sophie Rhys-Jones,
pictures were taken by Jayne Fincher. A contract ensured that royalties for
pictures, and television footage - already several hundred thousand pounds -
go to the Bagshot Park Charitable Trust, set up by Prince Edward. But
whether the agency handling them is taking the usual 50 per cent cut is not
clear.
Will the Palace let agencies profit from the Prince William birthday pictures at
charities' expense? This, and all future arrangements for royal photographs, is
likely to come under intense scrutiny.