New Princess Mary photo says everything
The Aussie Crown Princess has returned to the spotlight days after it was revealed she is set to become Queen.
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When Mary Donaldson, former Belle Property Kings Cross staffer and habitué of Sydney’s Slip Inn, moved to Copenhagen in 2002, high on the agenda was learning Danish. The following year when Amalienborg Palace announced the engagement of briskly reformed Euro-playboy Crown Prince Frederik to Mary, she answered questions from the media in both Danish and English.
But you don’t need to speak any language, even one full of umlauts and hard consonants, to be able to fluently and swiftly translate this particular photo of the soon-to-be Queen Mary.
Taken on Christmas Day, it shows Mary and Frederik arriving for High Mass at Aarhus Cathedral though they look more like two people on their way to a colonoscopy or a will reading than filled to the brim with festive joy.
When the couple arrived at the traditional new year reception at the Palace their smiles were firmly in place in an outing that seems like quite the exemplar of the phrase, ‘best behaviour’. Footage from the black-tie event shows the princess having the train of her dress repeatedly stepped on by a footman and failing to once make eye contact with her husband.
Crown Prince Frederik and Crown Princess Mary.
— ChristinZ (@ChristinsQueens) January 1, 2024
🎥 DR1 pic.twitter.com/vmnb2785G0
To crudely paraphrase a line from a play about the world’s most famous sad-sack prince (at least until Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex got that book deal and learnt there was a ‘u’ in cheque), Hamlet: Something seems a tad rotten in the state of Denmark.
This week, during her annual New Year’s Eve address, Queen Margrethe announced that she is set to abdicate on January 14, to make way for her son to accede to the throne. And thus, very soon, Our Mary will make history as the world’s first Queen to have occasionally filed in on a reception desk.
However, this elevation for the couple comes hot on the heels of the Crown Prince’s outing as a passionate devotee of the arts.
It was only about five weeks ago that Spanish magazine Lecturas published photos showing Frederik having stayed overnight in the Madrid flat of Genoveva Casanova, a woman variously described as a model and a socialite.
According to the report, the duo visited a Pablo Picasso exhibition, wandered around a park and dined together before, I’m assuming, the crown prince learnt first hand what it’s like to sleep on that metal bar in a fold-out sofa.
While Casanova “flatly denied” an affair with the future King, it remains unclear why a prince from a family worth an estimated $58 million had not taken the sensible option and found himself a nice four-star hotel with complimentary Wi-Fi and continental breakfast.
The timing of the November Lecturas revelations could not have been worse for Mary given that she and Frederik were in the middle of hosting a State visit by Spanish King Felipe and Queen Letizia and thus could not stay at home to hurl barbs and the occasional Danish Old Master at one another.
During those fraught and painfully public couple of days, the Tasmanian-born royal delivered a master class in grinning and bearing it for the cameras while her husband looked like he was preparing to find out what the Amalienborg spare rooms were like. Photos of Mary from that Spanish visit suggest that she could have single-handedly refrozen the polar ice caps.
Suddenly, with Fred’s Madrid sojourn, two words that had never been uttered before in Australia started to circulate. Poor Mary.
For two decades the law grad seemed to be living out an actual Cinderella story, defying all cynicism and boosting the profile of the teeny Scandi nation Down Under. Mary was the humble, normal gal who had met and charmed a prince, who then whisked her back to his castle with underfloor heating to save her from a lifetime of running open-for-inspections.
Then came the Fairytale Wedding (Fred cried at the altar seeing Mary in the church), the Fairytale Family (two boys, two girls) and the Fairytale Life (the Swiss ski chalet, summers on Australian beaches) for nearly two decades.
Until, that is, November and the news of Fred’s imprudent Madrid city break, and overnight the world, or at least Aussies, started to look at Mary’s life anew. Does a seven-bedroom Verbier weekender make up for having a husband wholly lacking in good judgement and Marriott Bonvoy frequent stayer points?
If Mary’s life was not complicated enough, in 12 days when Queen Magrethe officially abdicates to return to her favourite pastimes of running up her own raincoats out of a tablecloth fabric (true story) or costume designing for Neltix (also true), she will be trapped. For good.
Princesses can and have left or divorced their husbands, but Queens? Not as far as I’m aware.
(A number of Kings have tried to chuck over their wives such as Henry VIII and George IV and it has generally always ended in disaster or dismemberment.)
Should Mary have, post-Madrid and pre-abdication, decided that she might fancy another life, a life not stuck with a husband who just loves art so damn much and a husband unwilling to fork out for an Airbnb, it would have been entirely conceivable.
It’s easy to see how the princess’ life could have played out if Mary and Frederik had decided, like 42.7 per cent of Danish couples, to split. (The country has one of the highest divorce rates in Europe.) There would have been plenty of dosh to go around, a colour-coded alternate weekend schedule for the Verbier property and some sort of very sensible, mature co-parenting arrangement.
Mary probably could have kept her title, given that Danish spare Prince Joachim’s ex-wife Alexandra is known as the Countess of Frederiksborg, and she also could have, in the same vein as Diana, the late Princess of Wales, kept her stable of charity roles.
Fred, for his part, could have then enjoyed taking in every new, major exhibition of 20th century art across multiple continents without anyone batting an eye or tipping off Paris Match or Hola!.
However, now, with those his-n-hers thrones looming, that possibility, that other future, that other life for Mary and Fred is no longer even a remote possibility.
Unlike his British counterpart King Charles, King Frederik won’t get a dazzling coronation and unlike Charles the Danish monarchs are about to learn first-hand what that til-death-do-us-part bit really means.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
Originally published as New Princess Mary photo says everything
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