Queen Margrethe
How her husband rebelled against the monarchy
© dpa | Patrick van Katwijk / Picture Alliance
Queen Margrethe sat on Denmark’s throne for 52 years, and on January 14, 2024 she will hand over the scepter to her son Prince Frederik. There are strenuous years behind the monarch, also because of her late husband Prince Henrik.
Queen Margrethe, 83, is calling it quits! After 52 years on the throne, the Danish queen will abdicate in a few days, as she herself announced in her emotional New Year’s speech on December 31, 2023: “I have decided that now is the right time. On January 14, 2024 – 52 years, After inheriting my beloved father – I will step down as Queen of Denmark. I will hand over the throne to my son Crown Prince Frederik.”
A novelty in the Danish monarchy: Until now, it was traditional for the change of throne to take place when the ruler died, as was the case most recently in 1972.
“That was two mistakes!”
But Queen Margrethe and her creative husband Prince Henrik, †83, have always gone their own way. Margrethe smoked up to 60 cigarettes every day for around 66 years until June 2023, while Henrik never minced words throughout his life when it came to his role in the institution. In his autobiography “Skæbne forpligter”, published in 1996, the Frenchman wrote, among other things, about his difficult early years in Denmark: “A few months after my arrival, everything I did was criticized. My Danish was shaky, I preferred wine to beer, silk stockings to silk stockings Knitted socks, Citroën instead of Volvo, tennis instead of football. Even for the Gauloises, which I smoked instead of Virginia tobacco and which had the reputation in this country of being the brand of socially critical intellectuals, I could not hope for leniency. I was different. I seemed to be happy with this position and not to be ashamed. Those were two mistakes!”
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Queen Margrethe sent her son forward
In addition, the culture-loving Prince Henrik criticized the role of the husbands of queens more than once. In 2002, Queen Margrethe had to cancel an official appointment at the diplomatic corps’ New Year’s reception for health reasons and instead sent her eldest son, Prince Frederik, 55. The fact that he even had to give way to his own son hurt Prince Henrik – he retired to his Châteaux de winery Caix near Cahors.
Prince Henrik’s fight for the title
But he came back. And angrier than ever before. He felt discriminated against in his role as Prince Consort and, in an interview with Ekstra Bladet in 2009, expressed his wish that men of queens would be given “the same rights as girls.” He referred to Queen Silvia of Sweden, 80, who also became queen through her marriage to King Carl Gustaf, 77. In 2015, he reiterated his demands for greater equality in the royal family in terms of protocol to the French newspaper “Le Figaro” and brought up the title of royal consort. It was “obvious that I should be king’s husband and not prince’s husband,” Henrik made clear.
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Uproar over the location of his funeral
In 2016, however, he stopped fighting, officially renounced his desired title and also gave up the title of Prince Consort. He also withdrew from many of his representative tasks. A year later, the next big thing: The Danish royal family had to announce that Prince Henrik did not want to be buried next to his wife in Roskilde Cathedral as planned. He had told “Se og Hör” at the time that he did not marry the queen in order to be buried in Roskilde. Instead, the former prince consort, who suffered from dementia in the last years of his life, wanted half of his ashes to be buried in Denmark water, while the other half was to be buried in an urn in the private garden of Fredensborg Castle.
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Margrethe accepted the wishes of her husband, who died on February 13, 2018 – the last few years with him were not easy. “I noticed something was wrong, but it takes some time to figure out that you’re talking about dementia. It hasn’t been easy in the last few years, I want to say. He wasn’t feeling well,” she confessed for about two years after his death to the magazine “Alt for damerne” and explained: “It’s hard to say it out loud. And it doesn’t sound good when you say it. But I’m grateful that he didn’t have to be with us anymore.”
Sources used: politiken.dk, berlingske.dk, lefigaro.fr, Alt for damerne, seoghoer.dk