Our marriage is a big deal to Russell and me, but it doesn’t quite have the clout as two fellow Swedish residents also tying the knot in June.
Princess Victoria will marry commoner (gasp!) Daniel Westling, who apparently was her personal trainer, on June 19 in Stockholm.
The couple has an official website created by the Royal Court, and The Local, which publishes Swedish news in English, has created a Royal Wedding Blog. Their faces also are on commemorative plates and stamps.
I can’t compare our wedding site to the royals, but we rule in personal touch. I don’t think Victoria sat with Daniel one night going through the best songs, photos and text to use.
The Royal Court website claims “Swedish Television has said that this is the biggest event that has ever been covered in Stockholm.” I admit, while our TV will still be on a boat somewhere in the Atlantic, I’ll find a way to watch.
The royals in Sweden, like in the UK, have little power. However, an interesting fact about Victoria is she’s expected to be the fourth female ever to become a ruling queen of Sweden. The last woman to have this title lived in the 1700s. An old, outdated law was changed in 1979 to allow the monarch’s eldest child to inherit the throne, regardless of gender.
Russell tells me from his Swedish sources that the last woman or two to rule were horrible, so the government decided to not allow women to have the throne. Like my mom said, that’s like saying we’re not going to allow males to become president anymore because we had a few bad seeds.
Victoria’s father has said he’d prefer his younger son to rule, and this is in a country where women are believed to have more equal rights with men than any other place.
Royalty is such an odd and foreign concept to me, but it’s also one of the many interesting things I will learn about living in Sweden. Less than one month to go.
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"the last woman or two to rule were horrible, so the government decided to not allow women to have the throne."
ReplyDeleteThat's not quite right. We have had three female monarchs before Viktoria. Queen Margareta (who was danish and ruled the Kalmar union between Sweden, denmark and norway together with Erik of Pommern), Queen Kristina who inherited the throne from her father Gustav II Adolf, and Ulricha Elleonora who was appointed ruler while they were trying to decide who had the right to the crown (which they managed in a month and she was removed from the throne again).
Of these only Kristina made any trouble. She was very generous with titles of nobility, in a time when sweden's resources were stretched to the limit through continuous wars since early 16th century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Sweden
The least thing that was needed was a bunch of freeloaders.
Then she converted to catholicism (oh no!), abdicated and moved to Rome while still receiving all the tax income from one major city and the islands of Öland and Gotland.
Apart from that she did ok.
Her life is quite interesting and is pretty well described on wikipedia (but at times a bit too emotionally written for an encyclopedic text).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_of_Sweden