A
new book portrays the English princess who became Norway's first modern
queen as a sickly, spoiled young woman who had a clear dislike for
Denmark, a country she was supposed to represent. The new biography of
Denmark's Prince Carl and his wife, Princess Maud, reveals startling
details of a woman who returned to England at every opportunity.
Princess Maud of England is portrayed
as a spoiled young woman who never wanted to leave her homeland.
PHOTO:
NTB
There
were doubts over whether Princess Maud would ever have a child. The
birth of Alexander (later King Olav of Norway) came as a big surprise
to many. This photo is from 1904.
PHOTO:
SCANPIX ARCHIVE
Prince Carl (later King Haakon) and
Princess Maud with the baby boy she gave birth to on July 2, 1903.
PHOTO:
SCANPIX ARCHIVE
|
Maud's
behaviour during the early years of her marriage to Prince Carl of
Denmark troubled both her Danish inlaws, King Christian IX and Queen
Louise, who also were her grandparents, and even her own mother, the
Princess of Wales and a former Danish princess herself who later became
Queen Alexandra of England.
"It really is my own children who are so spoiled
that they think everything is boring... if they can't live exactly like
they do at home," wrote an indignant Alexandra in 1900. "It unsettles
me, since it happens so often, and in the end, everyone becomes so
self-centered!"
Tor Bomann-Larsen, author of the new royal biography Folket
(The People), paints a well-documented picture of Maud as a near
hypochondriac who never wanted leave England, even though she married a
Danish prince and had Danish blood herself. She seemed to think they
could both live in England, since her new husband, Prince Carl, had an
older brother who would take over the Danish throne.
The couple
didn't arrive in Copenhagen until nearly half-a-year after their
wedding in England in 1896, and from then on, Maud seized every chance
to leave Denmark. She complained endlessly about the climate, missed
her mother (who was born a Danish princess) and sister Toria terribly
and generally used "health reasons" to justify her frequent absences.
"I'm
going to be miserable when we have to go back to Denmark," she wrote in
one letter towards the end of a lengthy stay in England in 1899, "but I
hope I won't have to leave quite yet, because I'm really not
well, and can't stand the thought of the cold and damp climate (in
Copenhagen)."
Her
father-in-law, Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark, later noticed that
Maud was also sickly during the crowning of her own father, King Edward
VII, in London in 1901 . Bomann-Larsen cites a letter written by Crown
Prince Frederik, in which he suggested it was almost "a comfort" to see
that Maud also could be in poor health on English soil, not just in
Denmark.
Maud remained highly critical of Denmark and its people.
She thought her fellow female royals developed "monstrous forms," and
wore "old-fashioned" clothes, and she fretted that this was
"contagious." She wrote in one letter that even she "really never
cared" about how she looked in Denmark, because no one else was
fashionable.
Nor
did Maud help fill the vacuum created when King Christian IX's
strong-willed queen died in September 1898. Bomann-Larsen writes that
of Denmark's four established princesses, "none stood farther from such
a role than Maud. She had her grandfather the king's sympathy, but the
endless travels abroad had made her a distant figure in the Danish's
people's consciousness."
At one point, Maud and her family tried
to arrange a naval appointment for Prince Carl in the British fleet,
but his family in Denmark put a stop to that. The couple's Danish
grandmother, Queen Louise, along with Crown Princess Louise worried
about Maud's lack of a sense of duty to Denmark.
They also felt a
need to remind both her and Prince Carl that their first loyalty must
be to Denmark, not England. "You mustn't become a foreigner in your own
land," wrote Crown Princess Louise in a letter to the couple as early
as 1897. "And it's even worse if the people become distant for you."
Perhaps
the ultimate snub came after Maud finally got pregnant after six years
of marriage. She'd already been in England for several months and never
went back to Denmark while pregnant. The couple nearly forgot to alert
the Danish monarch that a "new prince of Denmark" (later King Olav) had
been born in England on July 2, 1903. It wasn't until March of 1904
that Carl, Maud and Alexander finally traveled to Denmark. Little
Prince Alexander was nine months old, and Maud hadn't set foot in the
country for nearly two years.
Bomann-Larsen had unique access to
royal archives in Oslo, Copenhagen, England and Russia to research his
book. His work took him from the Royal Archive at Windsor to the Hoover
Institution at Stanford University in California, and the current King
Harald of Norway served as a door-opener, as did some Norwegian
government officials.
It seems clear that Norway's existing power
structure wanted the historical facts to come out, well before next
year's centennial celebrations.
