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Little Lily. All her life Wilhelmina has admirably filled the role of a Princess of Orange-Nassau. In 1880, fearing that the line would die out and the crown would pass to some alien German princeling, the Dutch waited anxiously to see if the aging King William III would produce a child of his old age. With wild jubilation, they greeted the announcement that a royal daughter had been born.
When she was ten years old her father, having done his royal duty, died, and Wilhelmina became Queen of The Netherlands. She had a lonely time of it. Denied the companionship of other children, she lavished affection and attention on her dolls—scolded them, pampered them, admonished them that "if you are naughty I shall make you into a princess and then you won't have any other little children to play with."
An imperious girl ("Do all these people belong to me?"), she was also slim, proud, and pretty. The French dramatist Edmond Rostand called her "The little lily queen who rules over the kingdom of tulips."
Bad Luck & Good. Queen Wilhelmina's choice of a consort was Henry Wladimir, youngest son of the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Henry was a taxidermist's dream of a German princeling, a beady-eyed, mean-spirited fellow, of whom the best that can be said is that he learned his place (considerably below the throne) and that, after eight years of marriage, he fathered Princess Juliana.
Juliana had better marital luck than her mother. Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld was another German princeling, and vaguely suspected of Nazi sympathies to boot. But his record of intense loyalty to his Queen and adopted country during the war has made Prince Bernhard the most popular man in Holland today. In the last year of the war, he served as head of the Dutch resistance movement, later organized relief of stricken areas. .
Bernhard, who pilots his own plane, recently toured Scandinavia with Juliana ("Lula" to him) to thank the ruling houses for the relief sent Holland. The Danes gave Bernhard and Juliana the prized Order of the Elephant. Grateful but rueful, Bernhard commented privately: "There are two kinds of decorations—those for valor and those for banqueting; I get all the eating decorations." Wilhelmina, who used to disapprove of Bernhard's prewar frivolity (he even drank cocktails on Sunday) now thinks so much of him that she lets him smoke in her dining room.
As the People Change. The Queen has changed her mind about many other people and things. Before the war she was as conservative a monarch as could be found in Europe; she then expressed the character of a highly conservative people. But the Dutch changed under the Nazi occupation. Wilhelmina in London sensed the change, and, like a good daughter of the House of Orange, changed with them. When Cabinet members submitted programs she often said: "This is merely what you gentleman want. What would the Dutch people want?"