How Danish Queen Margarethe Stripped Four Grandchildren Of Royal Status

It’s a well known gardening axiom that heavy pruning can stimulate strong growth, and that can be applied more or less to scale in business operations, but it’s not foolproof, and many a post-merger “housecleaning” has gone awry as the hatchet men set loose to make it happen get a little heavy-handed. Similarly, the application of the pruning principle to Europe’s leading royal houses can get dicey fast, as happened on September 28 in, of all kingdoms, Denmark, when Queen Margarethe, the widowed and rather fabulous Lutheran monarch who has been atop the throne for fifty years, stripped the four grandchildren of her second son, Prince Joachim, of their royal rank.

The palace announced on September 28 in an aptly dry communique that, as of 1 January 2023, the four children of Prince Joachim would be known, or “styled” in the British court parlance, as the Counts and Countesses of Monpezat, a quirky Danish noble title that Margarethe herself had created as a tribute to her late husband Prince Consort Henri’s family origins in France. The reason given in the statement was that their “previous titles as princes and princesses of Denmark would cease to exist.”

Notable is the Danish palace’s use of the extreme third person in framing that last phrase, as if the titles, themselves, simply died on the vine as grapes might that haven’t had enough rain. It is a rhetorical device meant to deflect agency from the queen herself, as if Queen Margarethe had not made the decision.

Yet Margarethe herself stated that she had been considering the move for some time for the benefit of the grandchildren. Without, of course, consulting them or their parents, as statements by Prince Joachim and one of his older children swiftly made clear.

In those statements, neither His Royal Highness Prince Joachim nor his children saw the cut in quite the same routine, equable light as the courtiers or Margarethe herself had framed it. In a video interview given on September 29 to a Danish journalist in Paris, where Joachim, a brigadier general educated in France and a Danish embassy military attache, works, the prince said: “We are all very sad. It’s never fun to see your children being mistreated like that. They themselves find themselves in a situation they do not understand.”

Joachim later pointed out that he had been given a paper by the palace in May stating that this would happen when his children, the youngest of whom is eleven, reached twenty-five. At the time he had asked the palace for time to think about it. Discussions between the parties, however, did not follow that exchange. The prince did get five days’ notice of the announcement from the palace.

For their part, the Danish press has seemed absolutely delighted with the disagreement and are reporting it in microscopic detail, in part because disagreements in Denmark are often reasonably discussed and settled, refreshingly free from public embarrassment of either side. Pouring salt on the wounds felt on Prince Joachim’s side, a Danish journalist elicited a quote from Crown Princess Mary of Denmark on September 30, in which she seemed to be supporting the monarch. She said, “I can understand that it is a difficult decision to make and a very difficult decision to receive. Change can be difficult and can really hurt. But this does not mean that the decision is not the right one.”

In fairness to the notion behind the act if not its abrupt delivery, Margarethe’s pruning does have precedence in Europe’s smaller royal families in Sweden, Belgium and elsewhere, where the monarchies have also been at pains to streamline. But it’s difficult to compare those moves to any such move in Britain, where the monarchy is bolted so tightly to Parliament, to the military, to philanthropy, and to the polity in general. By contrast, despite the acrimony around Megxit, the lengthy negotiations between Buckingham Palace and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle led to their retention of their HRH titles but with the request — by Elizabeth at the time — that the couple refrain from using them.

Bottom line, it’s a palace kerfluffle, but, for Denmark, a rather meaningful one that demonstrates the ability — or more accurately, the glaring inabilities — of Margarethe and her courtiers to handle a delicate family negotiation that could have had a far less deleterious public relations impact on the queen with the application of tact and care.