Margrethe II, the 83-year-old queen of Denmark, saved the biggest surprise of the year for last. Hours before 2023 came to an end, on a live television broadcast, she announced her abdication.
“In 14 days, I will have been Denmark’s queen for 52 years,” she said in an address to the nation, wearing a regal purple dress. “Time takes its toll, and ailments increase. One no longer manages the same things as before.” A back operation last February, she confessed, had made her ponder “whether it was time to pass on the responsibility to the next generation”.
It was a bombshell to make her subjects drop their Lego and put down their bacon sandwiches. As the longest-serving monarch in Europe and the only ruling queen in the world, Margrethe is a matriarch who has presided over half a century of peace and prosperity with a relaxed and inclusive style. She chain-smokes and has been known to do her own supermarket shopping. Journalist Tine Gøtzsche noted that the departing queen “is to us what Queen Elizabeth was to you”.
The void that she leaves will be filled by Crown Prince Frederik and his Scottish-Australian wife, Mary – a woman whose passage to the throne so echoes that of our own Princess of Wales that they have been described as “royal sisters”.
Every indicator suggests Frederik will continue with his mother’s laid-back approach. He has had time enough to prepare for the job, albeit not as long as our own King Charles. Princes of Denmark have been known to tend towards gloominess, but Frederik is a warm, popular figure, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a refreshing lack of airs and graces.
“He is already a star among many Danes,” says Gitte Redder, the co-author of Frederik: Crown Prince of Denmark, a biography of the incoming king. “By nature he is open-minded, curious and down to earth. With Crown Princess Mary he has already set the agenda on sustainability, medicine and human rights, and the royal couple has ambitions that the monarchy should also be relevant, useful and have value for young generations in the future.
“Even before becoming king, he has been nicknamed the Frogman King, the Rock ’n’ Roll King, the Sportsman King and the Green King,” she adds. In an interview for her book, Frederik told Redder that he and Mary, “don’t just want to be driven around waving nicely to the crowds from a carriage.” He added that “the bottom line is that we must never stop developing and the royal house must continue to be a meaningful institution that the Danes are proud of and support.”
He has not always looked cut out for the gig. Born in Copenhagen on May 26 1968, the eldest of two sons of Margrethe and her husband, Prince Henrik, who died in 2018, Frederik was just three when he became Crown Prince, when his mother ascended the throne in 1972. Privately educated in France and Denmark, as a teenager he had a reputation for enjoying the high life, resenting his parents for their absence on royal duties and consoling himself with fast cars and hanging out with celebrities in nightclubs. Princes Andrew and Harry might empathise.
Frederik started to settle down when he went to Aarhus University for a degree in political science, as part of which he spent a year at Harvard. He enrolled in the US college under a fake name, Frederik Henriksen, in an attempt to avoid the limelight. It was at university that he developed his interest in green causes, a helpful thing for a royal to have on his CV in eco-conscious Denmark.
He is also made for PE. Like many British royals have, Frederik found meaning and purpose in a military career after he graduated – he trained in all three branches of the Danish armed forces. On a navy diving exercise he once found his wetsuit filled up with water, forcing him to waddle like a penguin and earning him the nickname “Pingo”. He was a competitive sailor, racing Finn and Dragon boats, and is fond of a physical challenge. He was the first Danish royal to complete an Iron Man triathlon – a 2.4-mile swim followed by a 112-mile cycle and then a marathon. Perhaps most arduously, in 2000 Frederik took part in a four-month, 2,175-mile skiing challenge. He has been hospitalised by scooter and sledding accidents, and in 2016 he broke his back trampolining with his son. Since 2018 he has organised the Royal Run, an annual running event across the country, akin to if Prince Charles were the master of Parkrun.
None of this is to say that Frederik lost his taste for the good life. The same year as his skiing odyssey, during the 2000 Olympics he met his wife, Mary Donaldson, at the Slip Inn, a pub in Sydney. Frederik was with his younger brother, Joachim, his cousin Prince Nikolaos of Greece and Denmark, and Princess Martha of Norway. A report from the Sydney Morning Herald says the group fell into conversation about chest hair. “We were allowed to touch Prince Frederik and Prince Nikolaos,” Donaldson’s friend Beatrice Tarnawski was quoted as saying. “I liked Prince Frederik best because he was so smooth. Prince Nikolaos had a lot of hair and that really wasn’t my type.”
Donaldson, then 28, the daughter of two Scottish academics who emigrated to Australia for work, had no idea the group were so blue-blooded. “The first time we met, we shook hands and I didn’t know he was the crown prince of Denmark,” she said in an interview in 2003, when she and Frederik got engaged. “An hour or so later someone came up to me and said, ‘Do you know who these people are?’”
They were married in 2004, after a romance that began in secrecy. Frederik would make clandestine trips to Australia to see Donaldson; the relationship only came to light in 2001, after they had been together for several months. When it did, the press was smitten with the fairy tale of a royal marrying a commoner. In turn, the future queen of Denmark endeared herself to the people by learning Danish. Donaldson and Frederik have four children: Christian, Isabella, Vincent and Josephine, who have mostly been educated at public schools. Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen, a historian, told AFP that Frederik and Mary are “modern, woke, lovers of pop music, modern art and sports”.
Frederik’s reputation for uxoriousness took a hit last year, however. In October, paparazzi photographed him on a night out in Madrid, taking in an art exhibition, dinner and a flamenco show with the jauntily named Mexican socialite Genoveva Casanova, sparking rumours of an affair. Casanova stridently denied the accusation, posting a letter on Instagram criticising what she called “malicious” reports.
Like other monarchies, the Danish royal family has made efforts to modernise. In 2022, Margrethe shocked the country – not to mention her family – when she stripped Joachim’s four children of their royal titles, downgrading them from princes and princesses to counts and countesses. She said the move was vital to streamline the royal family and “future-proof” the institution, but it came as a shock to Joachim and his wife Marie, who were only given a few days’ notice. In an interview, Marie described their relationship with Margrethe as “complicated”.
Margrethe said in a statement, “I have made my decision as queen, mother and grandmother, but, as a mother and grandmother, I have underestimated the extent to which much my younger son and his family feel affected. It is my duty and my desire as queen to ensure that the monarchy always shapes itself in keeping with the times. Sometimes, this means that difficult decisions must be made.” In 2016, she had said that of Frederik’s four children, only the eldest, Christian, who will become the new heir, will draw an annuity from the Danish state.
She has now made another difficult decision with her abdication. In a 2022 speech marking Margrethe’s half-century on the throne, Frederik paid tribute to his mother. “When the time comes, I will guide the ship,” he said. Now he has been handed the tiller sooner than he might have expected. Even as he aims to keep it “relevant”, Frederik, the master yachtsman, must now show that he can sail the ship of state smoothly too.
