A Family of Kings: The Descendants of Christian IX of Denmark by Aronson Theo

Author:Aronson, Theo [Aronson, Theo]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Thistle Publishing
Published: 2014-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

1

To find partners, and particularly royal partners, for King Christian IX's vast brood of grandchildren was no easy matter. With so many Danish or half-Danish princes and princesses on the market, it was inevitable that some of them should marry each other.

The old King's eldest son, Crown Prince Frederick, had no less than eight children to marry off. Luckily, the young princes and princesses had inherited very little of their mother's plainness or narrow-mindedness; try as she might, poor, upright Crown Princess Louise simply could not compete with the rumbustious atmosphere of the other royal households. Her own homes—the Crown Prince's Palace at Amalienborg, and Charlottenlund by the sea—might be run as strictly and as stiffly as any upper-class Victorian household, but once the court was invaded by her children's English or Greek or Russian cousins, her influence tended to go by the board.

None the less, there was one ideal which Crown Princess Louise shared with her husband's frothier relations and that was that the children be brought up as simply as possible. There was no coddling or spoiling. No less than in the other royal households, the Crown Prince's children ate plain food, slept on hard beds and spoke when they were spoken to.

The second son, Prince Charles, endured an even hardier upbringing than the rest of them for, at the age of fourteen, he joined the navy. Having talked his reluctant mother into allowing him to have an anchor tattooed on his arm (she insisted that it be done at home, by a naval captain, and not in one of those questionable-looking boats berthed in the old fish market), Prince Charles set off on a trial voyage as a volunteer cadet. From the start, he loved the navy. The long cruise over, the Prince wrote, and passed, his entrance examination for the Naval Officers' School. For the following three years Charles lived the rough-and-tumble life of any other cadet—studying in the winter and cruising in the summer. In the year 1893, at the age of twenty, he passed out as a second lieutenant. Not until three years later did Charles become a first lieutenant. This was due to the fact that his father, in true Danish democratic fashion, insisted that his son should not be favoured in any way. When asked why he had remained a second lieutenant so long, the young Prince would say, in his wry way, 'Lack of strings and influence'.

Prince Charles was an attractive young man; in many ways a typical Dane, tall, slender, fair-haired and blue-eyed. He was also a level-headed youngster, conscientious beyond his years. And, like all Christian IX's family, he was frank and unaffected, unostentatious in his way of life and unsophisticated in his tastes. Amongst his knockabout relations, he was eminently at home.

It was not surprising, then, that this open and artless young man should choose a bride from amongst his many girl cousins. Nor that he should settle on one of the daughters of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

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