Well, we’re back, having taken two small children to the Hague for the weekend and attended the royal wedding.
Royal wedding? Well, sort of. My friend Mabel got engaged last summer to her long-time boyfriend, whose mother is Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. Mabel works for George Soros, who has been a significant funder of my own work since I moved to Brussels in 1999, and she and I have worked quite closely together – mainly on the Balkans but also on the Caucasus, and Moldova – off and on. She’s also been a very good friend in need. So I was not especially surprised, but none the less a bit thrilled, when the cream envelopes from the Dutch Royal Palace started arriving with details of how to dress, how to get there and where to stay.
The engagement ran into some controversy last autumn, as a result of which Mabel and her fiancé, Prince Johan Friso (known generally as Friso) withdrew their request for the Dutch parliament to approve their wedding. The consequence is that Friso ruled himself out of the line of succession. He is the second of the Queen’s three sons anyway, and both his brothers are already married with children, so the constitutional consequences are fairly minimal, but it was a difficult period for them.
However it did mean that the wedding was a bit less royal than it might otherwise have been. A further dampening factor happened last month, when the Queen’s mother, who had ruled the Netherlands as Queen Juliana from 1948 to 1980, died at the age of 94. More cream envelopes arrived from the Palace, explaining that out of respect the celebrations were to be toned down. But the wedding was going ahead on schedule.
I took Friday off work. More or less – an Albanian journalist tracked me down and came out to Leuven to do a TV interview, but I made him sweat for it! I’d spent most of the previous month grappling with our report on the mid-March violence in Kosovo, and it had finally been published on Thursday. (I came back this evening to find a message that it had already been downloaded more than 3000 times, making it our quickest starting report ever.)
But by 4.20 pm we were ready to set off: first, delivering B to her respite care on the far side of Brussels, and then driving 200 km north to the Hague. Of course, the rush hour on Friday hits much earlier than on other days, and we were awfully delayed on both Brussels ring road and motorway; combined with essential stops for food and maintenance, we made it to our hotel in Scheveningen only by 9.30. Oddly, as we made our final approach to the Hague, the signs over the fast lane of the motorway told us not to use it, which seemed puzzling as there was no obvious physical obstruction. But all was to become clear.
Why did we stay in Scheveningen? It is the grandest beach resort in the Netherlands, and originally the evening do was supposed to be at the Kurhaus spa hotel there. Because of Queen Juliana dying it was scaled down, but we’d already made our booking – and rather than go for one of the grand hotels with a special (but still huge) rate, I found two doubles in a perfectly presentable three-star establishment nearby. Buses were laid on from the “official” hotels to the various events.
And then came phase two of the master plan: Anne’s sister H, who conveniently works right beside the channel tunnel train station in Kent, arrived in the Hague around 1030 to help with babysitting for the big day. So I was able to pick her up from the central station (it’s only five miles) with minimal difficulty. Though I do wonder how we ever managed in the days before text messages.
Anne and I rose early the next morning – F woke up in time to help us get breakfast at the hotel, and then Anne and I left the children with H and walked down the hill to one of the “official” hotels to get the bus. The weather was overcast but mild. I wore my standard work suit. Anne wore her wedding dress for the first time since 1993 (she had no difficulty fitting into it, which she finds most gratifying) along with a red jacket and a Hat. The invitation had specified most explicitly that ladies were to wear Hats. Anne’s was a straw hat with a ribbon which looked great.
The journey to the wedding ceremony took place in two phases. First of all we were delivered to the front door of the Dutch Council of State in the centre of the Hague, five miles inland from Scheveningen. The buses were surrounded by police escorts, holding up traffic for us, waving us through red lights and the wrong way down one-way streets. I could get used to travelling like that. At the Council of State we were ushered into the Gothic Chamber for coffee and biscuits, and to be assigned our seats in the church. This turned out for me to be the most politically hacky bit of the whole event as various people who know me (and Mabel) through Balkan politics made contact.
After the coffee we were ushered out of the back door of the Council of State and got another bus, another five miles inland, to the ancient town of Delft where the wedding ceremony was due to take place. Coincidentally it’s also the area where Mabel grew up. We ended up on the bus beside George Soros, who continued a conversation we’d started earlier about Kosovo, but eventually switched to talking about the Hats, and pretending to reminisce about his memories of 17th-century Delft. The bus and our police escort zoomed along the fast lane of the motorway, which was closed to other traffic, thus explaining the mysterious traffic signs I had seen the previous night.
We were let off in Delft and ushered towards the Oude Kerk and our seats in it. Crowds of well-wishers (today’s paper estimates about 3,500) cheered us on as we arrived. Apart from my own wedding, I don’t think I’ve ever been cheered by a crowd in that way. OK, I know perfectly well that they were mostly cheering the happy couple, the royal family, the Queen and their country, but there is a part of me that feels that to a very small extent they were cheering us as well.
Our block of seats was mainly work colleagues of Mabel’s plus partners, ie the people who had never before been invited to a royal wedding and don’t expect it will happen again. That was actually rather reassuring. We were in those lovely pews which are shut by half-doors at either end, only six rows back from the open space in the front where the action was to take place. Because of the Hats, of course, it was impossible to see directly. There were apparently 1500 people in the church.
Huge TV-screens discreetly nestled amongst the pillars; they alternated between stern warnings to turn off our mobile phones and coverage of people coming from the civil ceremony in Delft Town Hall to the Oude Kerk, and eventually of events inside the church which would have been invisible to us otherwise. There was a huge telescopic boom with a camera mounted on it immediately to our left, and I twitched occasionally as it appeared to be about to collide with the pillars, the screens or the overhead lights. But there was no problem. With this the third royal wedding in three years (and also two royal funerals in the last year and a half – the present Queen’s husband died in late 2002) the cameramen are obviously well practiced.
People arrived – including the Queen’s father, 94-year-old Price Bernhard, who looks a good fifteen years younger than his actual age, and eventually the two mothers (Mabel’s mother is also a widow; she wore a fairly modest hat, whereas the Queen’s was a huge blue feathery but regal affair), the witnesses and Mabel and Friso themselves. Mabel’s dress was of course fairly spectacular, and I write as one with no eye for these things. (Because they had already had the civil ceremony there was none of the bridegroom-waits-anxiously-for-bride-to-arrive nonsense that happens elsewhere; they arrived together.)
The order of service was provided for us in two booklets, one in Dutch with just the hymns, readings and section headings, and one slightly bulkier in English with translations of the sermons, prayers and other interventions (which of course were otherwise in Dutch). The first hymn was “Praise My Soul the King of Heaven”, to be sung in Dutch or English as the singer preferred. This didn’t quite work but the rest of it did. Only the first reading was in English, read by an American minister.
The service was really very good. The celebrant had done both Friso’s brothers’ weddings, but this didn’t stop him bringing a real sense of personalisation to it. The standard I Corinthians reading was presented in a fresh translation. There was a rather hauntingly beautiful hymn written specially for the occasion. The one glitch – and it was very funny – happened when Friso had considerable difficulty getting the ring onto Mabel’s finger!
And then it was all over, and we filed out under orders, through the winding corridors of the Delft pottery museum, back to the buses and back to Scheveningen and our hotel, waving regally in response to the (many) passers-by who waved at us, again with police escort and motorways blocked off. We got back to the hotel to find H, F and U in good form; they had paddled in the sea in the morning, to general glee and hilarity.
It was now after 2 pm and we hadn’t eaten since the early breakfast (apart from coffee in the Council of State) so we ventured to the Scheveningen boardwalk and found a very acceptable tex-mex type place. F and U had pancakes. H, who’d been teaching all week and then had sole charge of the children all morning, went for a rest, and we took F and U on a tram to Madurodam, the exhibition of 1/25 scale model buildings from all over the Netherlands.
I’d prepared the way for this by taking F to a similar exhibition near Brussels called Mini Europe on Easter Monday, and he’d enjoyed that so much that he demanded to be taken back later that week. But Madurodam is three times the size of Mini Europe, and probably five times as good. A ship that goes on fire, and another ship that puts it out! A fun-fair! A lorry that drives around and gives you a sweet for ten cents! And most of all the trains!!!!! U surveyed it all from her push-chair, and Anne and I mainly enjoyed watching F enjoy himself, to the extent that looking through the official guidebook afterwards we realised we’d missed a lot of other interesting things. But Madurodam was a fantastic success, just as much fun as I remember it from when I was thirteen, if not even more so.
We rejoined H, had another good meal on the boardwalk, and then Anne and I changed into “smart casual” clothes for the evening do (I wore smart jacket and trousers but with a “Sandman” t-shirt; she wore a blouse and skirt). This had originally been planned for the Kurhaus in Scheveningen, but the venue was now switched to the stables of the Royal Palace at Noordeinde in the Hague. Not a huge function room, with I would say fewer than 200 people there. (Of course, there had been several other meals and parties for the other guests.) Parked casually in a corner of the room was the Gold State Coach that the Queen uses every year on April 30 for the state opening of the Dutch parliament. Otherwise it was chairs, comfy cushions and throw mats.
We got there in time for Friso’s brothers to show an affectionately mocking video biography of the couple made by them and their friends, including embarrassing photographs from their teenage and student days, and the Queen offering supposedly essential words of wisdom to the happy pair (and keeping a straight face). The Queen herself was mingling very informally with the guests, though we did not introduce ourselves; Mabel greeted us with immense affection but didn’t stop to chat; I did manage a conversation with Friso later on; he commented that the whole day had passed much more quickly than he had imagined it would.
I brought Anne back to the hotel around midnight but returned for a little more partying myself. A friend of mine, who is an MP in an Eastern European country, commented that he thought these Dutch royals were pretty good; it turned out that apart from his own country’s royals (who are still visible on the local scene) he’s had more dealings than he felt necessary with Prince Charles. I agree with his assessment (though I admit from less direct experience.) Generally good fun, and good company. I got back around 2 am and must admit I found it rather slow going this morning.
But in the end we made it back; H caught a mid-morning train back to England, we pottered around on and off the boardwalk for a few hours, then drove back south (no closed off lanes this time), collected B and got home by 7 pm. A fun weekend.
