Mark Steyn: The Bicycling Queen – Juliana of the Netherlands, 1909-2004

Even before the tireless efforts of Larry King, Kitty Kelley and People, to most Americans “the Royals” have always meant the House of Windsor. But there are other Royals, too, and the collective term for the surviving Continental houses, at least in Britain, is “the bicycling Royals”. In the technical sense, not all Scandinavian or Low Country monarchs bicycle but they do all affect a less obviously regal style than Queen Elizabeth that British “reformers” (ie, republicans) say is more in keeping with an egalitarian age. This is a bit unfair on Elizabeth II, who does her best to keep up with the times, dancing Queen to queen with Sir Elton John to “Rock Around The Clock” and on another occasion taking tea with him in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot while the Duke of Edinburgh made somewhat strained conversation with Sir Elton’s “partner”. The Court of St James, with its elaborate orders of precedence for widows of baronets and second sons of marquesses, has managed to adjust its rules of placement to accommodate the gay consorts of elderly rock stars.

But for its critics the House of Windsor is still impossibly snooty compared to the unstuffy bicycling monarchies. The lady who gave a name to this phenomenon was the prototype bicycling monarch, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. She had a bicycle and she rode it around in public at a time when most monarchs stuck to their gold coaches. Sometimes she rode it to the supermarket. And, though she was 94 at the time of her passing, if only in newspaper shorthand, she died in the saddle: “Holland Mourns Bicycling Queen (The Observer); “Informal Reign Of The Bicycling Queen” (The Australian).

“Imagine Prince Charles, whose high falutin’ thoughts on the environment have bored us all, actually getting on a bike, as Queen Juliana did, and cycling to work among his subjects,” sneered Vanessa Feltz in The Express. “Fat chance.” I would have thought the chance was no fatter than that of seeing Ms Feltz, a decidedly queenly British telly personality, cycling to work among her viewers.

Of course, were the Prince of Wales to do as he’s told and mount his trusty, rusty Raleigh, Ms Feltz and the rest of the press would be the first to complain about the attendant security detail clogging up the bike path. Even a democratic republic of citizen legislators such as the United States finds it hard to facilitate the President’s participation in an act of ordinariness — visiting a diner, ordering grits — without shutting down half the town and sealing off air traffic in two time zones. In truth, Juliana’s homespun monarchy was the product of a particular combination of factors.

THE BICYCLING QUEEN
Juliana of the Netherlands, 1909-2004

Even before the tireless efforts of Larry King, Kitty Kelley and People, to most Americans “the Royals” have always meant the House of Windsor. But there are other Royals, too, and the collective term for the surviving Continental houses, at least in Britain, is “the bicycling Royals”. In the technical sense, not all Scandinavian or Low Country monarchs bicycle but they do all affect a less obviously regal style than Queen Elizabeth that British “reformers” (ie, republicans) say is more in keeping with an egalitarian age. This is a bit unfair on Elizabeth II, who does her best to keep up with the times, dancing Queen to queen with Sir Elton John to “Rock Around The Clock” and on another occasion taking tea with him in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot while the Duke of Edinburgh made somewhat strained conversation with Sir Elton’s “partner”. The Court of St James, with its elaborate orders of precedence for widows of baronets and second sons of marquesses, has managed to adjust its rules of placement to accommodate the gay consorts of elderly rock stars.

But for its critics the House of Windsor is still impossibly snooty compared to the unstuffy bicycling monarchies. The lady who gave a name to this phenomenon was the prototype bicycling monarch, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. She had a bicycle and she rode it around in public at a time when most monarchs stuck to their gold coaches. Sometimes she rode it to the supermarket. And, though she was 94 at the time of her passing, if only in newspaper shorthand, she died in the saddle: “Holland Mourns Bicycling Queen (The Observer); “Informal Reign Of The Bicycling Queen” (The Australian).

“Imagine Prince Charles, whose high falutin’ thoughts on the environment have bored us all, actually getting on a bike, as Queen Juliana did, and cycling to work among his subjects,” sneered Vanessa Feltz in The Express. “Fat chance.” I would have thought the chance was no fatter than that of seeing Ms Feltz, a decidedly queenly British telly personality, cycling to work among her viewers.

Of course, were the Prince of Wales to do as he’s told and mount his trusty, rusty Raleigh, Ms Feltz and the rest of the press would be the first to complain about the attendant security detail clogging up the bike path. Even a democratic republic of citizen legislators such as the United States finds it hard to facilitate the President’s participation in an act of ordinariness – visiting a diner, ordering grits – without shutting down half the town and sealing off air traffic in two time zones. In truth, Juliana’s homespun monarchy was the product of a particular combination of factors.

First, the House of Orange has leaned to the distaff side for over a century: Queen Wilhelmina, Juliana’s mother, succeeded to the throne in 1890 at the age of ten, with Juliana’s grandmother as Regent until she was 18; Juliana’s daughter, Beatrix, is Queen today. A bicycling queen fits easily into a “mother of the nation” tradition. Had King Zog of Albania tried it, it would have been further confirmation he was a flake.

Second, Queen Wilhelmina was a devout woman who, among other expressions of her faith, forbade Juliana, a somewhat plain teenager, from wearing make-up. When the Princess Margaret glamourpuss role is closed off to you, you might as well exploit the political advantages of homeliness. As Queen, Juliana bought her frocks off the peg.

Third, the German invasion forced Wilhelmina and her government to exile in England. For Juliana and her daughters (and eventually her husband Prince Bernhard), it was merely an interim stop. King George VI’s cousin, Princess Alice, was married to the Earl of Athlone, then Governor-General of Canada, and it was decided that the Dutch princesses would live with them in Ottawa. Canada is a monarchy, but a minimalist one. The sovereign is, after all, several thousand miles away, and though the Canadian Crown mimics the mother country in external appearances – Royal officers in Ottawa share with London such appealingly obscure designations as Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod – the full works, the bowing and scraping, would be ludicrous in a prairie kingdom. John Buchan, the thriller writer and Lord Athlone’s predecessor as viceregal eminence, observed that “you have to know a man awfully well in Canada to know his surname.” On her assumption of the throne, one of Juliana’s first acts was to abolish the requirement of ladies to curtsey.

Fourth, in 1948, the central fact of the nation she’d become Queen of was that it had been under Nazi occupation. During the war, virtually the entire Jewish population was murdered. There was a brave Dutch resistance, and there were others who reached their accommodations with the new regime. But neither category was inclined to fawn before a Queen who’d sat out the war in Canada, and had a German husband. The post-war world diminished Royal status in other ways: the Dutch lost control over their overseas possessions from the East Indies to Indonesia, and Juliana became the first Queen of the Netherlands in almost half a millennium to be reduced to being Queen merely of the Netherlands. Even that modest territory seemed vulnerable. In 1953, massive floods killed thousands of people and put one-sixth of her realm underwater, like a disaster-movie remake of King Canute’s seaside lesson to his courtiers in the limitations of regal power. The Royal houses who’d survived the calamities that befell the Continent were concerned for the most part not to catch their subjects’ eye. After Third Reichs and October revolutions, mothballing the carriages and biking to the palace was a way to avoid the, ah, cycle of violence. Juliana sent her children to public school, which in Holland isn’t quite the sacrificial gesture it is in the District of Columbia but nevertheless had a symbolic power.

There was no coronation, no cheering throngs, no “The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen!” For one thing, the old Queen wasn’t dead. Wilhemina stepped down because 1948 marked her 50th anniversary and, like Johnny Carson, she thought it time to quit. Juliana in her turn retired in 1980 and made way for Beatrix. No fuss, no fanfare. Dutch monarchs aren’t crowned, but instead sworn in with less ceremony than a New Hampshire town clerk.

There are arguments to be made in favour of a monarchy or a republic, but Holland’s rump monarchy of quasi-republican cheese-parers seems unsatisfying by any measure. In terms of private wealth, Juliana was a much richer queen than Elizabeth II. Her grandfather, King Willem III, was a founding shareholder of Royal Dutch Shell Petroleum, just as four hundred years ago Prince Maurits of Orange started the colonial profits gushing by sponsoring the Dutch East India Company – the original Royal Dutch shell company, at least in the sense that the Oranges have been far more adroit than the Windsors in blurring the distinction between private income and the perks of colonial expansion. One could argue that, in return for the life of ease deriving from this vast wealth, it’s surely not too much to ask them to ride through the streets with a regiment of dashing hussars once or twice a reign. In 1980, when Juliana handed over to Beatrix, the induction prompted the biggest street riots in Dutch history. Mostly republicans, but it would be heartening to think that among the concrete-lobbers there were at least a few royalists who felt aesthetically cheated by this publicly dressed-down monarchy.

By then it was unclear whether the Dutch armed forces could have rustled up enough dress uniforms for a parade. In the course of her three decade reign, Juliana presided over a trickle-down informality that gave the Netherlands the first Nato soldiers with long hair, legalized prostitution, and pot, and eventually euthanasia. The last would seem to be the logical answer to reconciling Elizabeth II’s belief that monarchs should die in harness with Juliana’s antipathy to reigning into advanced old age.

But perhaps the quirks of Dutch Royalty will not be a problem much longer. Along with the relaxed attitude to monarchy and marijuana, the Dutch seem to be relaxing themselves right out of business. Indeed, until recently the entire country was showing signs of mass euthanasia. Just over a year ago, I had a conversation with a senior Dutch government minister apropos demographic trends in the kingdom – Mohammed is the most popular name for newborn boys in Amsterdam, etc. In the wake of 9/11 he and his colleagues realized that something had gone wrong, that today’s young Dutch Muslims are less assimilated than their grandparents, and, aware that I was Canadian, he told me the government wished to counter this with a citizenship ceremony modeled on my own country’s, in which new Canadians take an oath of allegiance to Queen Elizabeth. But he worried that the concept of an oath to the Queen might be a bit too overtly nationalistic for the Dutch. I suggested to him, as politely as I could, that, when Canadian nationalism is too strong meat for you, you know you’ve got a problem.

By this stage, Princess Juliana, as the retired Queen was known, had faded from public view. In 2001, her husband Prince Bernhard told a German TV interviewer she no longer recognized close family members. In many Dutch families, she would have been put down years ago. But she lingered on in her people’s affection. Today the idea of an unaffected queen bicycling among her subjects has a faintly comical innocence – like a restless soprano in a Silver Age operetta, or Princess Osra’s secret visits to the miller of Hofbau in Anthony Hope’s Ruritania. It was a transitional phase, and no one yet knows where the bike path ends. As he left America’s Constitutional Convention, Ben Franklin, fearing an inevitable tendency to monarchy, told an enquiring citizen that the country now had “a republic, if you can keep it”. A bicycling monarchy is harder to keep.

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