The Dutch royal family were miles apart last week. Queen Juliana, struggling to maintain a gracious smile after entertaining Liberia's visiting President Tubman in The Hague, took off for a vacation in Sicily with a few of her ladies-in-waiting. Her husband, globetrotting Prince Bernhard, after elephant hunting in Tanganyika, arrived in the U.S. for a visit to Washington, New Orleans and New York.
But it was the awareness of a deeper separation that made news in Holland last week. For the first time, the people of The Netherlands seemed to have abandoned their hope that the royal crisis would disappear if they just pretended not to notice; for the first time, Dutch editors clamored specifically and vociferously for drastic government action to clear up that mess in Soestdijk Palace.
The sudden explosion of indignation in press and public was sparked by a story in London's garish Sunday Pictorial, a newspaper which seldom earns such international attention. A Pictorial reporter had been given a lift in a limousine into The Hague, and had thereby "become the confidant of a man closer to the Queen than almost anyone else." According to the reporter, the man who gave him the ride told of a plot, designed with the connivance of Prince' Bernhard's 72-year-old German mother, Princess Armgard, to force Queen Juliana off the throne. "Lies about the Queen's private life," said the man, "are being spread in a deliberate and nasty way with but one aim-to put Princess Beatrix [the eldest daughter of Juliana and Bernhard] on the throne, with her father and her paternal grandmother at her side." A quick check on the registration number of his automobile, said the Pictorial, revealed the man to be none other than Johann G. van Maasdijk, board chairman of the firm that publishes the influential De Telegraaf, and a palace chamberlain "in extraordinary service" to the Queen.
Admitting only that he had given the British newsman a lift, Van Maasdijk promptly denied the rest of the story. But whether the Pictorial spoke the truth or not, declared the potent Het Vrije Volk, the whole thing was "a shameful affair which shows the necessity not only of being in earnest about changes at the court but also of making haste."