Nobody outside the innermost palace councils knows exactly what Queen Juliana of The Netherlands told the three eminent statesmen whom she herself had drafted to help mend the rift in the royal family. But the worries of Netherlanders were set at rest at least momentarily last August, when they read reports issuing from the National News Agency that the Queen had "promised' to do all in her own power to reach a reconciliation with her husband (TIME, Sept. 3). Juliana, it was said, had not only agreed to see no more of Greet Hofmans, the faith healer whose influence had driven a wedge -between the Queen and Prince Bernhard, but planned to eliminate Hofmans supporters from the royal household.
To the ear of many an embarrassed and discomfited Dutchman, wishing only that the whole ugly scandal would disappear, such words, with their apparent ring of authenticity, sounded comforting indeed. The only trouble was that in Queen Juliana's mind matters were not so neatly settled. Reading the printed reports, she seethed. Since when did a Queen of the House of Orange have to promise anything to her confidential advisers? Far from breaking with her confidante Greet Hofmans, the Queen stubbornly continued to seek out and see the faith healer and all of her group. The only change made in the royal household was a minor one planned before the "three wise men" were called in for help. Meanwhile, the nation itself was in the midst of a Cabinet crisis whose solution was made virtually impossible because of the worsening situation in the palace.
Juliana's renewed obstinacy prompted two of her three wise men to protest that she had gone back on her word, and this in turn so angered the Queen that she threatened to broadcast her version of the story to her subjects. When pro tern Premier Willem Drees heard of this, he told Juliana bluntly that he had given orders to broadcasting authorities not to permit the Queen to go on the air. Meanwhile, far from fulfilling his ordained role in the masquerade of renewed connubiality, Prince Bernhard, the Queen's husband, made less and less effort to conceal his true feelings, and Princess Beatrix, heiress to the throne, who is known to sympathize with her father, moved out of her mother's palace to take a room with an official's family near her university at Leiden.
As usual, there was no open comment in Netherlands newspapers on the continuing crisis, but guarded references to it became more and more frequent in the press and in Parliament. With the nation's business marking time under a caretaker government, largely because no new Premier could be found courageous enough to face a showdown with his Queen, Juliana's realm, like her throne, was in a state of suspense. "If somebody doesn't take some action," said one worried government official, "you can be sure that we'll soon have both divorce and abdication."