A Free Spirit

Last month, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark lost the love of her life. But who was the raffish, unconventional, at once charming and grouchy, Prince Henrik? 

- William Langley

During his 51-year marriage to Denmark’s Queen Margrethe, Prince Henrik, a free-spirited French aristocrat, managed to baffle, amuse, intrigue and infuriate his adopted country. It was only with his death in mid-February, aged 83, that the Danes finally acknowledged their fondness for him. Tens of thousands took to the streets, and the simple funeral he insisted upon brought the country to a standstill. Apparently taken aback by the scale of the mourning, TV pundits took to asking if they perhaps had Henrik all wrong.

Not that he was an easy man to make sense of. Born in south-western France as Henri de Laborde de Monpezat, he spent much of his early life in Vietnam, where his father, André, an autocratic and slightly cranky count, owned rice and tea plantations. The experience left Henrik with a lifelong passion for Indochinese art, culture – and women, whose “company”, as he delicately puts it in his memoirs, he craftily contrived to charge to the family business accounts.

With the end of the colonial era in the mid-1950s, the Monpezats were forced to return to France. Henri harboured plans to become a classical pianist, but his father, rattled by the loss of his lucrative Vietnamese holdings, ruled that the family could afford no more risky ventures, and enrolled his son in a law course at the Sorbonne in Paris. After three years of military service in Algeria, he joined the diplomatic corps, and in 1964 was handed a junior posting to the French embassy in London.

Newly arrived in town, too, was Margrethe, a 23-year-old postgraduate student at the London School of Economics. They first met at a dinner party in Chelsea, hosted by the raffish gay socialite, Nicholas Eden, son of former British Prime Minister Anthony Eden. Henri appears to have been rather more impressed by Margrethe than she was by him.