THE NETHERLANDS
Queen Juliana of The Netherlands and her consort, Prince Bernhard, last week watched their daughter, Princess Irene, get married. But they watched from a distance of 800 miles and over television in a room at Warmelo palace, near Amsterdam.
The TV power failed at 12:15 p.m., but there had been time to see Princess Irene become the bride of Prince Hugo Carlos de Borbon y Parma, and fortunately, the Dutch royal family was spared the spectacle outside Rome's Santa Maria Maggiore that looked more like a political rally than wedding festivities. The crowd rang with Carlist-battle cries of "Vivan los reyes!", and students from Spain's Loyola College, in the heart of Carlist country, serenaded the pair with guitars, tambourines and castanets. Irene's father-inlaw, Prince Xavier de Borbon y Parma, as gaunt and straight-backed as an El Greco grandee, arranged a brief interview with Pope Paul VI, who gave the newlyweds his personal blessing and their first wedding present—a crucifix. No reigning monarchs attended the wedding, but the guests included such ghost royalty as Austria's ex-Empress Zita and Portugal's Duke of Braganza. Emotionally the Roman weekly L'Espresso addressed an open letter to Irene telling her "you are like a lamb caught in a den of tigers."
Petty Game. Dutch opinion, though in less perfervid language, essentially agreed that the princess was letting herself be used by the Carlists for their own purpose, however absurd, of gaining the Spanish throne. To a lot of people outside Holland, this petty political game—and the government's anxious insistence that the Dutch monarchy must stay out of it—did not seem reason enough for Irene's own parents to boycott the wedding. But under the Dutch constitution the government is held responsible for the monarch's actions. Besides, Holland maintains a sometimes precarious balance between its Protestant and Catholic citizens, was thus bound to take the issue seriously.
The Dutch were upset by the entire tragicomedy of errors, from their belated discovery that Irene had been converted to Roman Catholicism and become engaged, through the Queen's radio announcement that the engagement had been broken, which then had to be retracted, down to the arrival in The Netherlands of the flamboyant Bour-bon-Parmas with their preposterous suggestion that the Roman Catholic wedding take place in a Dutch Protestant church. All this made the Dutch, who have a cozy, middle-class relationship with their monarchy, feel a sense of family embarrassment at the dissension in the House of Orange.
Muddled Queen. Most Dutch people now feel that Irene was too headstrong, but that the Queen could have prevented a lot of the trouble if she had been tough a little earlier in the day. Juliana was brought up under the domineering thumb of her mother, the great Wilhelmina, and was determined that her own daughters should have a happier childhood. Crown Princess Beatrix received a good education with a stress on her coming constitutional role, but the three other girls were scarcely trained as princesses and had wide freedom. A friend of the royal family recalls, "Sometimes weeks would go by when the Queen had no idea what Irene was doing."