Love with the Proper Stranger

Beaming with pleasure, The Netherlands' Princess Irene drove out to Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport one day last week to meet her future in-laws. The visitors--Prince Xavier and Princess Magdalena--were coming to celebrate Irene's engagement to their son, Spain's Prince Carlos de Borbon y Parma, and with them was the royal engagement ring, a large ruby surrounded by diamonds. Quickly, Irene slipped it on and happily showed it off for the television cameras. Next day in The Hague, she and Carlos were toasted with champagne by the Dutch Cabinet, and busied themselves with wedding plans. Best guess is that the marriage will take place in Utrecht in May.

On his formal introduction to the Dutch people in a nationwide television interview, Carlos said that he was "happy to be in Holland because I love Irene." How happy the Dutch were remained uncertain; many were still not reconciled to the idea of affiliation of the House of Orange with Spain, the country The Netherlands traditionally detests.

Secrets of the Confessional. But even Dutchmen who grudgingly agreed that Irene had fallen in love with a proper stranger were still disgruntled over the manner in which the affair had been handled by The Netherlands' government. The nation especially resented seeing popular Queen Juliana humiliated when she first announced that the engagement was off and then had to eat her words. In the lower chamber of Parliament, beleaguered Cabinet ministers eventually found a convenient scapegoat in the government information service, and promised in the future to improve communications between palace and public.

Dutch Protestants were not so easily put off. Irene's conversion to Roman Catholicism seven months ago--and especially the secrecy surrounding it--irritated many Protestant churchmen and made them feel that she had betrayed the religion of her birth. In a letter to the Archbishop of Utrecht, Bernard Jan Cardinal Alfrink, the Dutch Reformed Church said that it "was most shocked by the fact that her conversion was not immediately made public by you." The church asked the cardinal "for clarification of the matter in the interests of ecumenical understanding." Alfrink refused, saying that Irene's relations with the Catholic Church fell in the realm of "secrets of the confessional."

Power Tool. In Spain, meanwhile, Prince Carlos' engagement set off renewed maneuvering over his tenuous claim to the Spanish throne. Spain's Dictator Francisco Franco, who wants a monarchy to succeed him but who is none too happy at the prospect of installing the present Spanish Pretender, Don Juan, went out of his way to welcome Carlos back to Madrid. The threat of competition from the Carlists would give Franco a useful lever to make disdainful Don Juan more receptive to his wishes. In Holland, all this maneuvering only served to increase the fear that Princess Irene and the whole House of Orange might one day become a tool in a Spanish struggle for power.

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