The World has learned to admire her matchless majesty as it increasingly becomes a rarity in these modern days. Perhaps the most extraordinary virtue of Her Majesty is her ability to combine grandeur and closeness to the people, to maintain the magnificence and the magic of a Court, while continuing to draw hundreds of thousands to the streets to celebrate royal events, continuing to be extremely and genuinely popular. It is, in our view, the perfect example of a modern monarchy and surely one of the last to retain all the social virtues (as opposed to political virtues that continue to justify all the monarchies) that most possessed half a century ago.
All recent Danish royal occasions have been ones of incomparable and perfect splendour and dignity, in accordance with an established Danish tradition of royal celebrations. In June 1992 HM The Queen and HRH The Prince Consort celebrated their Silver Wedding Anniversary with a large gathering of royals from around Europe, repeated for the 60th Bithdays of the couple in 1994 (Prince Henrik’s) and 2000 (Queen Margrethe’s). In January 1997, the Silver Jubilee of the sovereign was also the occasion for lavish celebrations, but the most publicized and spectacular event was perhaps the unforgettable wedding of HRH Prince Joachim of Denmark to Miss Alexandra Manley, in November 1995, in the most romantic setting of Frederiksborg Palace, outside Copenhagen.
As Denmark prepares another Royal Wedding for May 2004, all these magnificent and glittering events come to our mind in expecting the most spectacular of weddings for the heir to the Danish throne, HRH Crown Prince Frederik, when he marries Miss Mary Elisabeth Donaldson, the Australian lawyer who will become the new Crown Princess of Denmark and shall one day, God willing, be Queen Consort and inherit the task of helping the Danish monarchy to maintain its splendour and its immense popularity. It is to mark their wedding that this website is being unveiled.
Although it would be wonderful to cover all the magnificent events mentioned (and even some more, concretely those recent ones relating to HRH Princess Benedikte and her family) in this new website, such task would require an amount of time of which we do not currently dispose. Nevertheless, willing to mark the Danish Royal Wedding in the same style we marked the Norwegian and the Dutch Royal Weddings, we decided to recall not one but two of the most glittering royal weddings held in the 1960’s in a website called “The Immense Glitter of Two Danish Royal Weddings”. In it, we look back at 1967 and 1968, the years in which HM King Frederik IX gave away his two elder daughters, having done so with the youngest in 1964, when HRH Princess Anne-Marie married HM King Constantine II of The Hellenes.
On the 10th June 1967, HRH Princess Margrethe, heiress to the Danish Throne, married the French diplomat Count Henri de Laborde de Monpezat, created a Royal Highness and Prince of Denmark by his father-in-law. The wedding happened in the most remarkable splendour, between several gala events and with the presence of several European sovereigns. The same kind of glitter was repeated in February 1968, when HRH Princess Benedikte married HSH Prince Richard zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg. Both ceremonies reflected the aspects we underlined about the Danish royal events, being marked by popular rejoicing and a glitter worthy of what some would call a bygone age but we prefer to call a most fabulous age!
It is this glitter, all this immense glitter, that we invite you to recall while we all anxiously wait for the lavish ceremonies that are to mark the wedding of HRH The Crown Prince of Denmark and Miss Mary Elisabeth Donaldson.
March 2004, the Editors
