Since the death of Queen Elizabeth
II and the accession of King Charles III in September, the Firm — as the
British royal family is unofficially known — has not just been grappling with a
major management reshuffle.
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In a Netflix series and his splashy new
memoir,
Prince Harry has been lobbing a near-constant stream of bombshell
revelations into the public domain, airing intimate personal details as well as
allegations of treachery and familial betrayal afoot behind palace doors in the
House of Windsor.
But Britain does not have a monopoly on
royal dirty laundry. Here are four other messy monarchies that have also been
engaged lately with disfunction, disorder, and high drama of their own.
NorwayThere were waves in Norway in November when
Princess Martha Louise relinquished royal duties to focus on her alternative
medicine business with her fiance, Durek Verrett, a celebrity shaman whose
clients have included Selma Blair and Nina Dobrev.
It was the latest in a series of
controversies stemming from the princess’ relationship with Verrett, who
suggested in his 2019 book, “Spirit Hacking”, that cancer was a choice. The
self-described “sixth-generation shaman” also sells a “Spirit Optimizer”
medallion on his website that he claims helped him recover from COVID-19. For
her part, Martha Louise has frequently suggested that she can communicate with
animals and angels.
DenmarkThere has been much talk in Britain in
recent years about a potential slimming down of the monarchy that would cut the
number of working royals. In September, the Danes actually did it.
Queen Margrethe II of Denmark announced
that she had “discontinued” royal titles for the children of her second son,
Prince Joachim, meaning that her grandchildren in that line — Nikolai, 23;
Felix, 20; Henrik, 13; and Athena, 10 — would not be princes or princesses. She
ruffled some familial feathers in the process, sparking a tit-for-tat saga that
played out in the Danish news media.
“We are all very sad,” Prince Joachim told
the Danish tabloid Ekstra Bladet. “It’s never fun to see your children being
mistreated like that. They have been put in a situation they do not
understand.” The prince said he had been given only five days to tell his
children. His eldest son, Nikolai, added: “We are in shock at this decision. I
am very confused as to why it has to happen like this.”
In October, the queen admitted that she had
“underestimated” the impact of her choice but said her decision had been “a
long time coming” and was made in line with her values as a “queen, mother, and
grandmother.”
“It is my duty and my desire as queen to
ensure that the monarchy always shapes itself in keeping with the times,” she
said in a statement. “Sometimes, this means that difficult decisions must be
made, and it will always be difficult to find the right moment.”
ThailandKing Maha Vajiralongkorn of Thailand is not
a conventional ruler, at least by contemporary standards. The king, who was
officially crowned in 2019, two-and-a-half years after acceding to the throne
upon his father’s death, has been married four times and has publicly courted
untold mistresses.
When Thailand’s king was crown prince, he
appointed his pet poodle Foo Foo to the role of air chief marshal and held four
days of Buddhist funeral rites when the poodle died in 2015, according to the
Guardian. Then there is the 70-year-old king’s fondness for crop tops and
transfer tattoos, which he has worn on numerous promenades during the pandemic
in Germany, where he spends most of his time.
Belly-baring vests have become the garment
of choice for many young Thai pro-democracy protesters at rallies in recent
years. Their demands include limiting the powers of a king who has become the
richest monarch in the world, partly by amassing personal control of an
estimated $43 billion in royal assets in 2018 that were historically overseen
by an agency meant to manage the money for the benefit of the Thai people.
SpainIn May of last year, Juan Carlos, the
former king of Spain, returned to Spanish soil for the first time in almost two
years, prompting headlines across the country he had ruled for nearly four
decades.
Juan Carlos, who abdicated in 2014, moved
to Abu Dhabi in 2020 after fraud investigators alleged that he had received
about $100 million in kickbacks in connection with a high-speed-rail contract
in Saudi Arabia that was awarded to a Spanish consortium.
Swiss prosecutors dropped the case, but it
was far from the first controversy to tarnish a monarch known for his lavish
lifestyle — including an elephant-hunting trip that took place in the midst of
the financial crisis — and a string of extramarital affairs. His predilection
for murky business dealings — one shared by his younger daughter’s husband —
has tainted public view of the Spanish monarchy, despite the best efforts of
the current king, Felipe VI; his wife, Queen Letizia; and their two teenage
daughters.
The two Spanish kings — father and son —
were last seen in public in September at the funeral of Queen Elizabeth in
London.
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