The Headstrong Princess

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 Borbon 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.

All but Banished. Irene's decision to support her future husband politically goes against the Dutch requirement that the royal family stay out of politics. It also goes against the grain of most Dutchmen, who all too readily consider the Carlists as somehow linked to the Nazis. The Dutch press tore into Carlos, who reportedly wants Irene to appear at next month's annual rally of the Carlists in Spain; the program calls for her to wear the traditional half military, half nursing uniform of Margarita, a revered Carlist queen, while the Carlist pretender is to circle overhead in a helicopter to greet the crowd. "Carlos didn't give a damn about Juliana's interests," wrote the Amsterdam Alge-meen Handelsblad bluntly, and went on to call Irene "a tool in the hands of Carlos' political movement."

In a letter to Parliament, Dutch Premier Victor Marijnen all but banished Irene. Her words and acts, he said, should no longer be considered the responsibility of the government, the Queen should not attend her wedding, she should no longer use official transport or be guarded by Dutch police, and Netherlands ambassadors abroad should ignore her.

*A split in the Spanish royal family happened in 1833 when King Ferdinand VII died without a son, after changing the law of succession so that his daughter Isabella Maria II could follow him. Ferdinand's younger brother Don Carlos refused to recognize Isabella's right to the throne and led an unsuccessful rebellion; descended from him is a line of chronically unsuccessful Carlist pretenders, including Irene's fiance and his father Prince Xavier de Borbon y Parma. The best present-day claim to the Spanish throne belongs to Don Juan de Borbon y Battenberg, 50, who traces his descent through his father Alfonso XIII, last king of Spain, back to Isabella Maria herself.

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