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The princely promoter

on 29 June 1940, six weeks after the Nazis had established their occupation of the Netherlands, white carnations appeared in the buttonholes of the Dutch. Forbidden by the Germans to fly the red, white and blue tricolour, or even the orange banner of the House of Orange-Nassau, the Dutch picked a flower for their first reassertion of national identity after being overrun. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands wore a fresh white carnation every day, as he still does--and this day was his twenty-ninth birthday.

On 29 June, 1976, twelve weeks after the Dutch Prime Minister, Mr Joop den Uyl, rushed on to television to announce that the 'high Dutch government official' mentioned in evidence to the American Senate committee investigating the Lockheed bribery scandal was none other than Prince Bernhard, white carnations were again on view in thousands of Dutch buttonholes to mark his sixty-fifth birthday—but nothing like as many as thirty-six years before.

The House of Orange embodies the identity of the Dutch as an independent nation in a way no other royal house has Matched. William, Prince of Orange and Count of Nassau, Stadholder of Holland, Zealand and Utrecht, called 'the Silent', began the rebellion against Spain in 1568 Which became the Eighty Years' War of liberation.

The birth pangs of a fractious nation were inordinately prolonged and savagely cruel. No less brutal, and far more of a shock, was Hitler's five-day Blitzkrieg on a country grown flabby on the fruits of an empire far richer than the British, which had helped to Make the long-since-neutral Dutch by far the wealthiest people in Europe. The ensuing five-year occupation was Holland's darkest hour since independence. It was also Prince Bernhard's finest. Devotion to the House of Orange brought the Dutch through both these crises of existence.

Bernhard Leopold Frederic Everhard Julius Coert Karel Godfried Pieter, Prins d," Nederlanden, ' was born Bernhard Karl Friedrich Eberhard Julius Kurt "1'1 Gottfried Peter, Prinz zur LippeBiesterfeld, a minor German principality 91 479 square miles south-west of Hanover, 'fl191 I. It is often said that his parents, Prince Bernhard Senior and Princess Armgard, were 'poor', giving rise to the suPerfluous fairy tale of the rags-to-riches Prince who exchanged his carefully patched suits for the dazzling uniforms provided for the husband of the future Queen of the Netherlands. While it is true that anybody. Prince or not, is poor compared with the awesome fortune of the House of Orange. Bernhard's parents owned a splendid estate

in Brandenburg as well as their lands in western Germany, and did not seem to mind when the student Bernhard popped over to London to buy his suits in Savilc Row, as he still does.

And when he was a member of the SS in 1934-5, he had the best tailor in Berlin make his uniform. His official biographer, Alden Hatch, explains this association as a means to enable Bernhard to complete his university studies in law at Berlin in 1935: members of Nazi organisations were exempted from the examination in 'political information' suddenly imposed by the Hitler regime on all students, which Bernhard realised his 'ideals and violent temperament' (Hatch) would prevent him passing. The episode is presented as a piece of calculated opportunism to contrast with the Prince's anti-Nazi convictions. So perhaps was his earlier membership of the SA.

While working for the German chemical monopoly IG Farben in Paris, Bernhard took time off to watch the winter Olympics in Bavaria early in 1936. It was then he met Princess Juliana, heir to the Dutch throne and the last of the Orange line. The relationship blossomed swiftly. They were engaged in September 1936, married in January 1937 and parents of Princess Beatrix, the present heir, a year later. Bernhard met Hitler only once—to seek annulment of his German citizenship. Alone among Europe's rulers. Hitler did not send a wedding present.

Bernhard learned Dutch from a professor, but to this day retains a distinct German accent. He also studied Dutch colonial prattices, banking, business and finance in the Netherlands and, in keeping with his first Dutch official appointment as a captain in the forces, military affairs. When Holland mobilised in 193910 protect its neutrality, Queen Wilhelmina appointed Bernhard Inspector-General of the Forces to keep her posted on their condition. On the Nazi invasion in May 1940, he fled to England with the rest of the royal family.

Bernhard found his exile highly frustrating. He learned to fly with the RAF and was made an honorary Air Commodore. Later he managed to fly a few combat Missions with the US Army Air Force, disguised in case of capture as 'Wing Commander Gibbs'. Had he been caught, he would probably have been shot as a traitor.

His real moment came when Wilhelmina and Eisenhower made him Commander-inChief of the Dutch forces, including all resistance units inside the country, in September 1944. The brunt of the ensuing liberation of the Netherlands was borne by the Canadians. British and Americans. but Bernhard proved himself to be a sound, even dashing, military leader and established personal control over not only the small regular Dutch forces but also the 200.000 members of the resistance.

This enabled him to prevent indiscipline after the German surrender, when the temptation to exact revenge on the occupiers was overwhelming. Having performed his greatest ,service for his adopted country with courage and determination, Bernhard justly attained the peak of his popularity. This popular regard gave rise to the curious case of..the coup di;tat that never was. The evidence is confused if not murky and there is no proof at all that Bernhard was anything but an innocent bystander, but it is clear, that there was a strong faction in the Dutch government in exile and its successor provisional government which wanted to set aside the uniquely complicated Dutch democratic system. This rs based on the institutionalised right of every minority to have its say—social, as well as parliamentary, proportional representation. Hence the importance of the House of Orange as a unifying factor.

The right-wingers; aware that this admirable tolerance made it unconscionably difficult, as it still does, to run the country, wanted a Prussian solution to facilitate reconstruction, with Bernhard as absolute ruler. Hatch does not mention This hazy plot, if such it was, but does describe how Bernhard refused a similar proposition put to him directly by resistance leaders. His most influential office after the war, and until last week, was that of Inspector General of the Forces, which he has now surrendered with many others.

Since 1945, Bernhard. blessed with enormous energy and enthusiasm, has flung himself first into reconstruction and then into a host of other spheres. He found his true métier as a promoter. He travelled the world drumming up orders for Dutch industry with great panache. He has served as president of the International Equestrian Federation, and of the World Wildlife , Fund, for which he collected ten million dollars by forming the '1001 Club' among his friends from big business, royalty and the jet set, each of whom had to contribute 510,000 to join. He set up the Prince Bernhard Foundation to buy Spitfires during the war and for cultural purposes in peacetime. A passionate advocate of European union. he set up a European cultural foundation and the 'Bilderberg circle', a no-holdsbarred private discussion forum of the great on European unity and the Atlantic Alliance. He does all this on a tax-free income from the Dutch state of 798.0(X) guilders ( I 60,000) a year and, where appropriate as in the case of the '1001 Club'. with a little help from his friends and contacts.

The character of this promoter-prince is. as often with major public figures. difficult to assess frem a distance. Bernhard. known to his friends and intimate advisers variously as P.B.. Bernilo or Benno.. disclaims interest in internal politics.

This is probably a good thing, for in a 1971 interview he disclosed that he had once said to a Dutch prime minister that it would be a good idea to send Parliament with all its tiny splinter groups home for a couple of years and leave the government to rule alone. At the end of the time, the government would put a motion of confidence on its record, having been spared the nuisance of parliamentary questions and other timeconsuming irritants. This caused uproar.

Bernhard is not lacking in authoritarian tendencies. In 1957, he embarrassed the government by stopping a lorry driver he had seen ignoring a right of way and taking away his driving licence. Before the war, he wanted to have a lorryload of Dutch Nazis shot without trial for using the Hitler salute. Of his relationship with Juliana, Bernhard once said: 'My wife reigns in the country—at home, I'm in charge.' But the billions of guilders the House of Orange has stashed away in everything from Manhattan real estate to shares in Royal Dutch/Shell are beyond his reach.

To Hatch, Bernhard admitted being overconfident in himself, impatient, intolerant, quick to anger and lacking in self-control, egocentric, superficial and insufficiently responsive to public opinion. The first faults outsiders in the know tend to mention is naivety or credulity, then recklessness.

'I also have many other faults which I shall not, mention,' he told his biographer. Senate committee investigators claimed to have evidence not only that he took s1,100,000 from Lockheed but also that he used some of it to support a mistress in Paris. Needless to say, evidence that Bernhard leads a complicated private life is not plentiful.

If it becomes necessary or appropriate to produce a play called 'The Fall of the House of Orange', the cast of characters will make strange reading. There is Greet Hofmans, the faith-healer who inveigled herself into the royal household by promising to cure the bad eyesight of Princess Christina, whom Bernhard ejected in 1956; there is Carlos Hugo of .Bourbon-Parma, unemployed Spanish prince, whose marriage to Princess Irene in 1964 aroused folk-memories of the sixteenth-century Spanish occupation; there is Claus von Amsberg; minor German nobleman and diplomat, whose marriage to Crown Princess Beatrix in 1966 aroused the fresher memories of German occupation, but who redeemed himself by siring the first three princes of the blood in four generations; and there is Carl Kotchian, director of the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, who spoke of the 'high Dutch government official'.

Such are the crises which have rocked the House of Orange since the war. It cannot take much more. The House of Orange still commands much loyalty in the country it created. But times.are changing in Holland. It has been a long road from William the Silent to Bernhard the Lip, and the moment may not be far off when the Dutch decide they can get along without the House of Orange to hold them together.