The Netherlands: The Headstrong Princess

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THE NETHERLANDS

Stuffed tripe, boiled eggs, Edam and Gouda cheeses, several kinds of sausage, salt shakers filled with chocolate to sprinkle on the bread and butter—it was the usual Sunday breakfast enjoyed by a prosperous Dutch middle-class family. The quarrel raging over the breakfast table was recognizable too. The family did not really approve of daughter's fiance, and now the headstrong girl was demanding a big church wedding with all the family's most important friends invited.

But there was a difference: the girl's mother was Queen Juliana of The Netherlands. When the usually vacillating monarch finally put her foot down, willful Princess Irene of The Netherlands stormed out of the palace and drove off, tires screeching, to begin a week that scandalized the country, embarrassed the government and shook the royal family.

Royalist Ambitions. Without a word to her family, Irene flew to Paris, where she joined her fiance, Spain's Prince Carlos de Borbón y Parma. Her engagement to him and her conversion to Roman Catholicism caused a constitutional crisis two months ago that was only ended by her removal from the Dutch line of succession (TIME, Feb. 14). Now, in a country precariously balanced between Protestants and Roman Catholics, the crisis flared up again when the pair flew from Paris on to Rome for an audience with Pope Paul VI. The meeting was held in secret to avoid straining the good relations between the Vatican and The Netherlands. But the story leaked out; so, against the Pope's wishes, did a photograph. While the Dutch government and the royal palace were still vigorously denying the story, the picture of the Pope with the couple arrived by wirephoto in Amsterdam newspaper offices and was splashed all over the evening editions.

That evening the couple flew back to Amsterdam, where Carlos, hoping to strengthen his tenuous claim to the Spanish throne,*pressed for the wedding to be held in Holland, with all of Europe's royalty invited. Incredibly, he even wanted the Roman Catholic marriage to be held in Amsterdam's 17th century Nieuwe Kerk, even though it is a Protestant church, where such a ceremony is palpably impossible. When Juliana refused, Irene abruptly decided to stay home from a scheduled state visit to Mexico with her mother. And in further retaliation, Irene issued a public statement that she would support her fiance's royalist ambitions and Falangist politics. The Queen appeared in tears at the airport, even waited for a while, apparently in the hope that her errant daughter would change her mind, finally took off when Irene did not show up. "You can't do such a thing to your mother," muttered people in the airport crowd.