After Denmark’s queen deprived her grandchildren of their noble titles, the house blessing is pretty crooked
Even royals can get awkward when it comes to identity. The Danish Prince Joachim (53) is now attacking his own mother, Queen Margrethe (82), because she is denying his four children the titles of prince or princess. From January 1st, Nikolai, Felix, Henrik and Athena (23 to ten years old) may only call themselves “Count/Countess of Monpezat” and only have to be addressed with “Your Excellency” instead of “Your Highness”.
Joachim, who lives in Paris with his French wife Marie, calls it “punishment”. Almost in tears, he explained in front of the camera that the Copenhagen court had given him five days before publication to gently break the news to the victims. “Now my children don’t know which leg to stand on. What are they supposed to believe in? Why are they being stripped of their identities?”
When asked whether the relationship with the mother was now disturbed, the younger brother of Crown Prince Frederik (55) gasped before he was able to answer: “I don’t have to spread that here.” Margrethe explains the changes with care rather relaxed for her granddaughters: without the burden of titles it would be easier to build up your own existence.
Princes Nikolai and Felix, who are already active as models, have probably found that the title, which will be eliminated in the coming year, is helpful. “The campaign photos for our new collection were shot in front of a historic Copenhagen palace. Prince Felix of Denmark wears the new jewelry here,” says an advertisement for an advertisement.
That definitely sounds better for this business than “…this is where Count Felix von Monpezat wears it”. Perhaps that’s why the biological mother of the downgraded person scolds just as uninhibitedly in public as the father. Alexandra, since her divorce from Prince Joachim no longer a princess herself, but only “Countess of Frederiksborg”, accuses the court of lying. To his cool statement that the change in the title had been discussed since May, she said in the tabloid “BT”: “It is a bolt from the blue for us.” The children felt expelled.
It was actually agreed that all four of them would be allowed to keep their titles until their 25th birthday, the parents explain. The demotion, which has now been brought forward for an unknown reason, is particularly bad for Princess Athena, explains Prince Joachim in an agitated tone: “Athena will only be eleven in January!” It is “anything but funny when your own children are made so sad”.
In the fight for sympathy in the Danish public, the prince probably has a bad hand compared to his mother, who is enormously popular after 50 years on the throne. Margrethe also survived completely unscathed bizarre public complaints from her husband Prince Henrik, who died in 2018, about the royal title he was denied and the unreasonable role for him as a man as number two at court.
His birth name Henri Marie Jean André de Laborde de Monpezat (from the lower French nobility) is now the inspiration for the new titles for Joachim’s children. Perhaps they will find consolation in the name that the satirical editors “ATS” of the newspaper “Politiken” once came up with for a nephew by marriage of Queen Margrethe from the German family of Pfeil and Klein-Ellguth: “Graf Jefferson Airplane Friedrich der Grosse Graf Zeppelin from arrow color to Lufthansa and no good.”
