Europe’s Royals are just as badly behaved as the Brits

It will probably come as no surprise to readers of Reaction to be told that Europe’s royal families are as scandal-prone as that of our own dear Queen, and usually for the same reasons: sex and money.

The Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Belgian and Luxembourg royal houses have each been rocked by stories of excess, corruption and ill-judged dalliances. If you thought that the House of Windsor was unique in attracting negative coverage of its backdoor dealings, you were wrong.

Even so, the scandal, both sexual and financial, that this week has left the reputation of the former king of Spain, Juan Carlos I, in shreds will have come as a bitter blow to those around the world who believed that Jaun Carlos, in his prime, was the very model of a modern constitutional monarch.

Born in January, 1938, the grandson of Alfonso XIII, King of Splain until the abolition of the monarchy in 1931, he was raised from his earliest days to take over from the Fascist dictator, Francisco Franco. Instead, he ushered in a new age of Spanish democracy, calling national elections and, when fanatics loyal to the Old Order subsequently stormed the Cortes, making a televised address in which he successfully demanded that the rebels stand down.

His progress from hero to zero took place, as Hemingway might have said, first gradually, then suddenly. He came to be seen over the years as somewhat louche and out of touch with his subjects, frequently on holiday and, as it turned out, just as often engaged in a variety of sexual peccadillos.

It was the revelation that, aged 76, he had spent a small fortune on a controversial elephant hunt in Botswana in the company of his mistress, Corinna Sayn-Wittgenstein, 27 years his junior, that more than anything else led to his abdication in 2014.

But it was the confirmation just this month by Swiss investigators of a long-suspected financial scandal that caused his successor, King Felipe VI, to announce that he would renounce his share of an inheritance derived from a gift to his father of some $100 million allegedly paid into an overseas account by the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in return for favours thus far undisclosed.

Much remains to be explained, and admitted, but the story, widely reported in the Spanish press, prompted Felipe to to announce that he was stripping his father of his state pension and in effect sending him into internal exile.

Whether he can do this legally remains to be seen, but the symbolism is immense.

It is perhaps fortunate for Juan Carlos – or Don Juan Carlos, as some wags have dubbed him – that the story broke in the midst of Spain’s struggle with the coronavrius.

But the former king is not the only Spanish royal to suffer the impact of scandal. His sister, the Infanta, Princess Cristina – ­ full name, Cristina Federica Victoria Antonia de la Santísima Trinidad de Borbón y de Grecia – was implicated in crimes involving tax fraud and embezzlement for which her Basque husband Iñaki Urdangarin was in 2018 sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. She denied any knowledge of her husband’s business dealings and, following a lengthy trial, was formally acquitted of all charges.

Once again, though, Felipe felt obligated to act. He could not remove his sister from the line of succession or deny her the title of Infanta, but he did force her to relinquish the title of Duchess of Palma de Mallorca.

The question now is, can the Spanish monarchy survive beyond the incumbent? Felipe’s heir, Leonor, Princess of Asturias, is only 14. Her sister, the Infanta Sofia, is a year younger. and meanwhile, the mood in the country is changing. Republican sentiment is stirring, with those who deemed themselves Carlistas – supporters of Juan Carlos in his younger days – rather than Monarquistas, gaining round.

Elsewhere in Europe, one royal house after another has been mired in some form of scandal. In the 1960s, the news out of the Continent’s scattered palaces was of bicycling royals and of princes and princesses who worked for a living instead of leaching off the public purse. It was never true. It was, in fact, fake news. There was no way that having a job – usually in banking or “public relations” – could maintain a royal lifestyle. But for a time it seemed as if the Dutch and Scandinavian royal families in particular could at least be judged to have made a contribution.

In Britain, of course, if we discount Prince Edward’s foray into It’s a Royal Knockout, the solution has always been to spend five-to-ten years in uniform before taking up royal duties full-time. The Sovereign Grant and the  Privy Purse, topped up by income from the Duchy of Cornwall and handouts from the Queen’s personal fortune were normally deemed sufficient to keep the wolf from the door. Prince Harry’s flight into exile with Megan Markle has changed all that. The Prince, now better described as the Duke of Sussex, says he and the duchess are determined to pay their own way. Well, we shall see.

Sexual shenanigans are something else. Divorce and long-running affairs, to say nothing of one-night-stands, are the stuff of royal gossip. Prince Andrew may (or may not) lead the way when it comes to behaving badly, but he is far from alone in disregarding his marital vows.

In Sweden, King Carl Gustaf XVI, now 74, had successfully lived down a dubious past, involving sex clubs at home and abroad, only for the press to expose the fact that in the late 1990s, still married to Queen Silvia, he had embarked on an affair with a Swedish-Nigerian pop star. “I have spoken with my family and the Queen and we choose to turn the page and move forward,” he later explained on his way back from an elk hunt.

Margrethe II, Queen of Denmark, has aruguably had less to put up with than Queen Silvia. Recently, however, it was revealed that her son, Crown Prince Frederik, and his wife, Princess Mary, a former marketing executive, from Tasmania, had spent the equivalent of $15 million a decade ago on a ski lodge in Verbier (not far, as it happens, from the one which Prince Andrew and his ex-wife, the Duchess of York, have been forced to sell to pay off their debts). Under Danish law, Prince Fred (as he is known) is not allowed to spend public money outside of Denmark without Parliament’s permission. He has said that he and his wife bought the property out of their own pocket, but as they live primarily off their state allowance, this did not go down well. Nor did their decision to send all four of their children to an expensive boarding school in Switzerland.

Belgium’s royal family has never entirely recovered from the fact that in the years before and after the turn of the twentieth century King Leopold II ruled vast swathes of the African Congo as his personal fiefdom and piggy bank. But it was a smaller matter, the fact that Leopold’s descendant, Albert II (married to Princess Astrid of Sweden), having abdicated the throne in 2013, finally admitted this year to having fathered an illegitimate daughter that nearly brought down the divided country’s royal house.  Albert, now 82, had denied for years being the father of Delphine Boël, a high-born Belgian artist. It was a DNA test ordered this year by a Brussels court that set the record straight. Madame Boël has thus far failed to be accepted as a member of the royal family, but will entitled to a share of Albert’s estate, which, it should be stressed, no longer includes the Congo.

In Norway, Princess Märtha Louise, the divorced daughter of King Harald V, caused ructions last year when it was revealed that she was in a business and personal relationship with an African-American “shaman” who claims he can split atoms and cure cancer. More recently, her sister-in-law Princess Mette-Marit, married to Crown Prince Haakon, took her turn in the limelight when (again like Prince Andrew) she was forced to admit to having spent a lot of time over the years with the notorious US entrepreneur and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

“I should have investigated his past more thoroughly, and I’m sorry that I didn’t,” she said in a statement after Epstein’s death.

Things are quieter in The Hague, where there has not been a significant scandal since it was revealed in 2003 that Prince Bernhard, the German-born father of Ex-Queen Beatrix, was a serial philanderer who had gone so far as to install one of his mistresses in the royal palace. Bernhard’s name had been mud for some time after he admitted in a statement released after his death in 1980 that he had taken over one million dollars in bribes from the Lockheed corporation. It was hard to say which disclosure most offended the liberal-minded Dutch.

Which brings us, inevitably, to little Luxembourg, whose titual ruler, Grand Duke Henri, had to suffer the indignity of his son, Prince Louis, marrying an enterprising young woman he had got pregnant, only for their marriage to end in divorce owing to the prince’s “unreasonable” behaviour. Princess Tessy was obliged under the terms of the settlement to give up her titles of Princess Tessy of Luxembourg, Nassau and Bourbon Parma and settle for the monicker Ms Tessy Antony de Nassau. But it is understood that she, and her two children of the marriage, continue to live comfortably in Kensington.