Prince Henrik of Denmark

Biography

He wrote his first poems for the desk drawer. In 1982 Henrik had a collection, “Chemin faisant”, printed in 150 copies, which never went on sale and were used only as gifts. He made his public debut as a poet only in 2000, with the book “Cantabile”: the first five thousand copies sold quickly.

He was born Henri Marie Jean André de Laborde de Monpezat on 11 June 1934 in Talence, near Bordeaux, into a family that lived in Tonkin, in French Indochina. He was the second of nine children. He spent his first five years in Hanoi; in 1939 the family returned to France, to the estate of Le Cayrou, not far from Cahors. At home he was taught by governesses and tutors, and he went to school, a Jesuit one in Bordeaux, only in 1947. From 1950 he lived in Hanoi again and in 1952 graduated from the French lycée there. He wanted to study piano at the Paris Conservatoire but chose the education his father wished for.

From 1952 to 1957 he studied law and political science at the Sorbonne, and Chinese and Vietnamese at the National School of Oriental Languages. Then he studied in Hong Kong (1957) and lived in Saigon (1958). In 1959–1962 he served in the army and took part in the Algerian War. After that he joined the Asia department of the French Foreign Ministry, and from 1963 to 1967 he was a secretary at the French embassy in London. There he met Princess Margrethe, heir to the Danish throne, who was studying at the London School of Economics.

The wedding took place on 10 June 1967 at Holmen Church in Copenhagen. Before it he had converted from Catholicism to Lutheranism. He received the name and title of Prince Henrik of Denmark. His native language was French; he learned Danish quickly but spoke it with a marked accent, and Danes joked about it. When Margrethe came to the throne in 1972, he became the first male consort of a monarch in Danish history. No one had defined his duties. At first he had an office at Amalienborg and a secretary, but no assignments and no funds of his own; later he compared his position to that of a general without a staff. From 1969 he worked with the Danish Red Cross, and he went on to become patron of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Denmark and of Europa Nostra, an organisation devoted to preserving Europe’s architectural heritage.

His title remained a grievance. In 2002, at the New Year reception for ambassadors, Crown Prince Frederik received the guests in place of the Queen, who was unwell. Henrik felt he had been pushed from second place to third, and he left for France, to the Château de Cayx, where he stayed about three weeks. He later said that he would have liked to be king consort. In 2005 he accepted the title of prince consort, and in 2016 he gave it up and was again styled Prince Henrik. In 2008 the Queen granted both their sons the hereditary title of Count of Monpezat. The couple had bought the Château de Cayx in 1974; wine was made there and served at the court’s official dinners.

He wrote his poems in French, and most of the collections appeared with a Danish translation or paraphrase: “Cantabile” (2000), “Les escargots de Marie Lanceline” (2003), “Murmures de vent” (2005), “Frihjul” (2010), “Fabula” (2011), “La part des anges” (2013) and “Dans mes nuits sereines” (2014). The composer Frederik Magle wrote a symphonic suite based on “Cantabile”, performed by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra at concerts for the prince’s 70th and 75th birthdays. His memoirs, “Destin oblige”, appeared in 1996, and in 1998 they won him the European prize of the Association of French-Language Writers. Together with the Queen, under a pseudonym, he translated Simone de Beauvoir’s novel “All Men Are Mortal” into Danish (1981). The Queen illustrated several of his collections.

In the late 1970s he approached the Academy of Fine Arts, and the sculptor Poul Holm Olsen taught him to model. The results were small fantastic animals and abstract figures. A bronze torso by Henrik stood in the park of Marselisborg Palace when Jens Erik Sørensen, director of the ARoS museum, not knowing who the author was, walked through it at a newspaper’s invitation. He remembered the sculpture and in 2009 included it in the Sculpture by the Sea exhibition, where the prince first showed his work to a wide public and received harsh criticism from professionals. Later some of the figures were enlarged and cast in bronze; they stand mostly in the parks of royal palaces. From 12 October 2013 to 2 March 2014 ARoS in Aarhus held the exhibition “Pas de Deux Royal”, with about 150 works by both spouses; it was visited by 285,510 people, a record for the museum. He also made music: on 8 March 1970 he played the second movement of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with the Royal Danish Orchestra under his father-in-law, Frederik IX, and in 2013 he recorded the piano part for the song “Echo” by the band Michael Learns to Rock.

He collected African objects and Asian jade himself; the jade and wooden figures were shown in 2017 at Koldinghus museum.

In August 2017 he announced that he did not want to lie beside the Queen in Roskilde Cathedral, where Danish monarchs are buried. The prince died on 13 February 2018 at Fredensborg Palace. His coffin lay in the Palace Chapel at Christiansborg; more than 19,000 people came to pay their respects. After the ceremony on 20 February the body was cremated: half of the ashes were scattered over Danish waters, the other half placed in the private part of the gardens at Fredensborg.