ROYAL TRIBUTE: remembering Denmark’s Prince Henrik
Last month, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark lost the love of her life. But who was the raffish, unconventional, at once charming and grouchy, Prince Henrik? William Langley investigates.
During his 51-year marriage to Denmark’s Queen Margrethe, Prince Henrik, a free-spirited French aristocrat, managed to baffle, amuse, intrigue and infuriate his adopted country. It was only with his death in mid-February, aged 83, that the Danes finally acknowledged their fondness for him. Tens of thousands took to the streets, and the simple funeral he insisted upon brought the country to a standstill. Apparently taken aback by the scale of the mourning, TV pundits took to asking if they perhaps had Henrik all wrong.
Not that he was an easy man to make sense of. Born in south-western France as Henri de Laborde de Monpezat, he spent much of his early life in Vietnam, where his father, André, an autocratic and slightly cranky count, owned rice and tea plantations. The experience left Henrik with a lifelong passion for Indochinese art, culture – and women, whose “company”, as he delicately puts it in his memoirs, he craftily contrived to charge to the family business accounts.
With the end of the colonial era in the mid-1950s, the Monpezats were forced to return to France. Henri harboured plans to become a classical pianist, but his father, rattled by the loss of his lucrative Vietnamese holdings, ruled that the family could afford no more risky ventures, and enrolled his son in a law course at the Sorbonne in Paris. After three years of military service in Algeria, he joined the diplomatic corps, and in 1964 was handed a junior posting to the French embassy in London.
Newly arrived in town, too, was Margrethe, a 23-year-old postgraduate student at the London School of Economics. They first met at a dinner party in Chelsea, hosted by the raffish gay socialite, Nicholas Eden, son of former British Prime Minister
Anthony Eden. Henri appears to have been rather more impressed by Margrethe than she was by him.
“I didn’t really take much notice of Henri,” the Queen later confessed. “He was just another young man
I met occasionally, but I do believe he noticed me.” The following year, they bumped into each other at a wedding in Scotland, and in October 1966, after a discreet romance, announced their engagement.
The young Frenchman, raised in sunny climes and barely on the first rung of a promising career, had never
been to Denmark, and had no idea of what lay in store. The 1000-year-old monarchy, headed by Margrethe’s ailing father, King Frederick IX, set stiff conditions for the marriage, insisting that the groom convert from Catholicism to the Lutheran church, renounce his French nationality, and change his name from Henri to the Nordic variant, Henrik.
The old count, Henri’s father, was outraged, denouncing the demands as an insult to the honour of France, and refusing to attend the wedding. Yet Henri was too much in love to object.
“He was prepared to become Danish body and soul,” remembers his younger brother, Etienne, who attended the February 20 funeral.
“It caused a terrible rift with our father, but I don’t think there was any sacrifice Henri wouldn’t have made.”
Besotted as he was, Henrik found life in Denmark difficult, and, when Margrethe ascended to the throne in 1972, ushering her husband into a much higher public role, the difficulties only increased. From his new, illdefined position, Henrik formed the impression that he was being mocked.
“Everything I did was criticised,” he complained in his prickly 2010 memoir, Loner, co-written with the French journalist Stéphanie Surrugue. “My Danish was hopeless, I preferred wine to beer, silk socks to woolly ones, and Citroëns to Volvos.”
Trond Isaksen, an author and historian of Scandinavian monarchies, says Denmark – small, wealthy, fiercely patriotic – is an unusually tough place for foreigners to feel at home in. “You are expected to integrate as quickly as possible, but you are still likely to be thought of as an outsider,” he says. “One of Henrik’s big mistakes was not learning the language properly, so that his Danish became a kind of long-running national joke.”
Consolation came in the form of two sons, Crown Prince Frederik in 1968 and Prince Joachim a year later. Frederik, the husband of Crown Princess Mary, has spoken with mixed feelings of his upbringing, portraying his father as a stern disciplinarian who, while wanting the best for his children, struggled to show affection. Intriguingly, Australian-born Mary, a fellow “outsider”, built an unusually warm and close relationship with father-in-law Henrik.
Even to those who claimed to know him well, he was something of a puzzle. Outwardly, he was in the best tradition of the French bon vivant, a lover of fine wines and food, who enjoyed music, wrote romantic poetry, and had an eye for a beautiful woman. He could be witty and mischievous, once urging the pet-loving Danes to try dog meat, which he claimed to have formed a taste for in the Far
East. One of his biggest pleasures was
chugging around the Danish coastline in the royal yacht, the Dannebrog, usually accompanied by a select group of male friends, but rarely the Queen.
Yet within him was a real well of grievance, which grew as the years passed. In an interview to mark his 50th birthday, he complained that he had no staff or budget of his own, and had to ask Margrethe even for money to buy his cigarettes. These “humiliations”, as he described them, fed the later dissatisfaction with his title of Prince Consort (which was only bestowed in 2005), which he felt was belittling. Henrik’s position, not unreasonable in the age of gender equality, was that he should have been made king, his core argument being that when a male monarch takes the throne, his wife usually becomes queen, so the reverse should be true.
But no one was listening, including Margrethe, who held to the established protocol. It caused a rift between them, and, although they remained personally close, never contemplating divorce, Henrik’s sense of being given a bad deal led to the sensational revelation last year that he had chosen not to be buried with his wife. “It is no secret that the Prince Consort, for many years has been unhappy with his role, and the title he has been awarded,” explained the Court’s head of communications. “For the Prince, the decision not to be buried beside the Queen is the natural consequence of not having the title and role he desired.”
As old age overtook him, there were fears that Henrik might refuse to be buried in Denmark at all, preferring to be returned to his beloved 15th-century Château de Cayx in southern France, where he made fine wines and hosted poetry festivals. In the end, he opted to be cremated, with half his ashes scattered over the sea off Copenhagen, and half in the gardens of Fredensborg Palace, where he lived.
His death, following the onset of dementia, sparked a fierce national debate about whether Henrik was given a fair shake. “Sadly, many people never really took to him,” said his friend Mette Bock, Denmark’s Minister for Culture. “He was different. He came from another country. He never learned to speak good Danish. Even his love of art and culture was used against him, and when he tried to stand up for himself he got no support.”
Others, though, suggested Henrik was happier than he seemed.“I think, deep down, he understood the way things worked, and was rather more Danish than he realised,” says his longtime friend, Copenhagen fashion designer Erik Brandt. “In private he wasn’t unhappy. He had many interests, lots of friends and lived a good life.”
The tears Margrethe shed at the funeral, a private affair in the royal chapel, suggested that, despite the differences between them, the couple’s feelings for each other remained strong. At 77, she appears resolved to carry on alone, and few expect her to abdicate.
Obvious, too, was that the ordinary Danes, shivering on the streets outside, were rather better disposed towards Henrik than he knew. “I wasn’t sure what to expect,” said Etienne as he left the chapel. “It’s been beautiful. I’ve seen flowers and tributes everywhere. Even a few photos of Henri, on which people had written, ‘Sorry’.”