Royal Danes

We Americans are nutty about British royalty. I include myself in that “we”.

The wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton played over and over on television last week. Americans, especially women, couldn’t get enough of it.

Most Americans don’t even know that the Danes also have a royal family. We don’t see them on television, the way we see English royals.

Like England, Denmark’s reigning monarch is a queen. Queen Margrethe’s is descended from a line of kings going back as far as Queen Elizabeth II’s.

The English and Danish royal families intermarried many times. It is too complicated to unravel it all here. Suffice to say, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip are both descendants of both England’s Queen Victoria and Denmark’s King Frederick VIII, whose daughter Alix married Victoria’s son, who became King Edward VII.

I saw Queen Elizabeth in London in 1980. She waved to me as she passed in front of me riding in her golden coach on the way to open Parliament.

I saw Denmark’s Queen Margrethe in Chicago. I was working for The Billboard in Chicago’s Loop. On my lunch hour I walked down Randolph Street to the civic plaza, where I watched the queen, a pretty, slim young woman who towered over the short, rotund figure of the first Mayor Richard Daley, as they walked in front of that ugly big bronze Picasso figure (Is it a woman or a vulture?) to lay a wreath on a small memorial, right in front of the fence where I pressed my gawking face. What does the Queen of Denmark look like now? At age 71, is she overweight and gray-haired like Queen Elizabeth – and me?

Wally’s ancestors were from Denmark. Not royalty. He learned a little from the pictures of battles and faces of famous men and kings on Danish stamps. I knew nothing of the small country’s history until I went to Denmark with him for the international philatelic exhibition.

To see where the royal family now live, I went to a square with twin white marble palaces. After Czar Nicholas II and his family were murdered, his mother, another daughter of Denmark’s Frederick VIII, and two of the Czar’s sisters escaped to Denmark, where her brother, King Christian X, gave them one of the twin palaces as a refuge.

In the movie “Anastasia” Ingrid Bergman makes a trip to Denmark to see “Granny”. The interview in “Anastasia” is one of those fictions which people see in movies and believe. It never happened. The woman, whose story was portrayed in the movie, later was proved by DNA to be Polish without a drop of royal blood.