Daisy Comes of Age

At 10:15 one morning last week, the wooden gates of Copenhagen's grey Amalienborg Palace swung open. Red-jacketed Royal Life Guards sprang smartly to attention as a Rolls-Royce bearing King Frederik IX and his pretty daughter turned slowly into the street. The day belonged to Princess Margrethe.

At Christiansborg Palace, home of the Folketing (Parliament), the 18-year-old princess was formally introduced to the Council of State, and with a gold pen signed an oath to uphold the Danish constitution. Later, as she drove home in a royal coach, crowds jammed the sidewalks to cheer her. They called again and again for her to show herself on the balcony of the royal palace. Flag-waving schoolboys swung into a popular song that ends with the words "because she is so young and pretty," and the venerable Sixtus Harbor Battery boomed out a 21-gun salute.

Thus, on her 18th birthday, was Margrethe Alexandrine Torhildur Ingrid, popularly known as Daisy, installed as Tronfolger--heir to the throne and some day Queen of Denmark, of the Wends and the Goths, Duchess of Slesvig, Holstein, Siormarn, Ditmarsken, Lauenburg and Oldenburg, and 50th sovereign of the oldest continuous kingdom in Europe.

Omen of Hope. Born just one week after the Nazis invaded her country and named after the great 14th century queen who extended her rule throughout Scandinavia, Margrethe's birth was regarded during the somber days of the occupation as an omen of brighter times to come. She grew into a shy but fun-loving little girl who, when asked what she liked best about the private school she was attending, blurted: "All that milling around and pushing and shoving in the corridors."

Unlike her two younger sisters, she developed some unusually serious tastes. All she wanted for Christmas at eleven was a membership in the Royal Society of Ornithology. From her maternal grandfather, King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden, she acquired a love for archaeology, and her royal father's subjects were treated to a succession of press photographs of a dirty-faced young princess earnestly grubbing about on all fours in some muddy excavation. In 1953 the people of Denmark overwhelmingly voted to change the law that, since the first Margrethe, has kept females from the throne.

Brief Encounter. As Tronfolger, Margrethe can now act as regent during her father's absences, with "the prerogative of mercy and granting amnesty" and, when Parliament is not sitting, of calling the nation to arms against any foreign invader. But beyond learning her official duties and finishing her education, her chief worry during the next years will be to find a suitable consort. At a ball last fall, the royal court thought for a moment that she might have found one when she insisted on dancing every waltz with a handsome teen-aged count. Unhappily, the waltzing gave the dashing count a most undashing nosebleed, and by the time he finished out the evening with his nostrils stuffed with cotton, his brief career as Daisy's No. 1 romantic possibility was over.

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