“I actually have plans to make him completely English”

From Last Hope Island by Lynne Olson. 

Until he became king of Norway, Haakon VII, the second son of the crown prince of Denmark, had barely set foot in the country. He did not learn to speak Norwegian until the age of thirty-three, shortly before his reign began. Known as Prince Carl in Denmark, he had been a modest, unassuming young royal who grew up believing he would never be king of anything, for which he was profoundly grateful. His mother had reportedly pressured him to marry the young Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, but he had resisted, wanting nothing to do with the pomp and formality of official court life. Instead, he wooed and won his first cousin Maud, the sports-mad daughter of King Edward VII of Britain, who was as anxious for a quiet life, out of the limelight, as he was.*1 At the time of his marriage, Carl, who sported a tattoo of an anchor on his arm, was an officer in the Danish navy and planned to make it his career.

But in 1905, Norway’s declaration of independence from Sweden turned the life of the sailor prince upside down. The century-old union between the two countries had never been an equal one: Sweden, whose kings ruled both nations, had been the dominant partner from the beginning, and Norway had been growing increasingly restive. To lessen the chance of forceful Swedish opposition to their peaceful rebellion, Norwegian leaders said they would welcome a junior member of Sweden’s royal family as the country’s new monarch. Prince Carl, whose maternal grandfather was the king of Sweden and Norway, was the obvious choice.

The prince, however, was appalled at the idea. Not only did he want to remain in the Danish navy, he knew virtually nothing about Norway and its people. He was also acutely aware that many citizens of Norway, which had abolished its aristocracy in the nineteenth century, were in favor of a republic, not a monarchy. Under heavy pressure from his father-in-law, Edward VII, among others, he finally agreed—but only if Norway held a referendum on the issue. When 88 percent of the electorate voted for a monarchy, Carl was crowned, taking the ancient Norwegian royal name of Haakon. (His wife, English to the core, refused to renounce her given name: she was known as Queen Maud until the day she died in 1938. She continued, as she always had done, to address her husband as Charles, the Anglified version of Carl. “I actually have plans to make him completely English,” she confided to her diary early in their courtship.)

With Haakon as monarch, Norway boasted the most egalitarian kingdom in the world. Sir Frederick Ponsonby, an aide to Queen Maud’s father, once said that Norway was “so socialistic that a King and Queen seemed out of place.” After a visit to Oslo in 1911, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to an acquaintance that the insertion of a royal family into the most democratic society in Europe was like “Vermont offhandedly trying the experiment of having a King.”