Royal protocol affords cold comfort as Dutch maverick prince is laid to rest

When Prince Friso of Orange-Nassau is buried today in the modest little graveyard beside the village church in Lage Vuursche – next to the castle where his mother, now once again “Princess” Beatrix, plans to spend her retirement – it will be a characteristically unorthodox end to an often controversial life lasting just 44 years.

Crowned heads arriving this morning for the funeral service might have been expecting to travel to Delft and the appropriately imposing Nieuwe Kerk where, beneath the mausoleum of William of Orange, lies the burial chamber of the Dutch royals, dating back to 1614. The church is undergoing extensive renovation, but that’s not the reason Lage Vuursche has been chosen.

The funeral will be private. It won’t be broadcast live on television, although footage and photographs will be released later. Security will be tight, with main roads through the village closed. And although Norway’s King Harald V, who was Friso’s godfather, will be among the mourners, this will be quite a low-key affair. Even the neighbours, the Belgian royals, are not expected to attend.

Intimate grief
Instead, it will be very much an intimate family goodbye, led by his wife, Princess Mabel, and their two little daughters, Luana (8) and Zaria (7); by his mother, Beatrix; by his elder brother, King Willem-Alexander, and his wife, Queen Máxima; and by his younger brother, Prince Constantijn, fourth in line to the throne.

But as the family gathers, in the background too will hover the immutable power of royal protocol. And, as the Dutch royals know perhaps better than most, any deviation from protocol invariably brings consequences, rarely good.

Outside the Netherlands, Prince Friso is best known now for the tragic manner in which he was left in a coma after being buried by an avalanche while skiing off-piste in Austria in February 2012. He was transferred home last month from London, where he’d lived and worked as a consultant with companies such as McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. Then, last Monday, he died.

Here though, the narrative, as they say, is different. In the Netherlands, Friso will always be remembered fondly and admiringly as the royal who gave up his claim to the Dutch throne to marry the woman he loved.

He’s the royal who took a long, hard look at a life of hide-bound protocol, and said, “No, thank you.”

That was in 2003 when Friso announced that he was to marry Mabel Wisse Smit, herself a brilliant former economics and politics student and expert on the Balkans with a less-than-orthodox past – and "a commoner" to boot.

That past included a protracted relationship with one of the country's most notorious drug barons, Klaas Bruinsma, shot dead in 1991. Then, two years later, came an affair with Bosnia's high-profile – and married – UN ambassador, Mohammed Sacirbey, which gave rise last year to a credible claim that she may have been working informally at the time for the Dutch security service.

National crisis
What mattered in 2003, however, was that the prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, was forced to write a formal letter to parliament in which he said that Mabel had given his government "incomplete and incorrect information" about her relationship with Bruinsma – a letter which caused a national crisis.

Then came the consequences. As a result of what was labelled a “breach of trust”, Friso and Mabel were married on April 24th, 2004, without the traditional Act of Consent from the Dutch parliament. Friso gave up his right of succession to the throne and – crucially in terms of protocol, including for today’s funeral – lost his membership of the Dutch royal house . . . whose members are buried in the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft.

Mabel, by contrast, became a member of the Dutch royal family – but not of the Dutch royal house.

It was all extraordinarily reminiscent of another brush with protocol: the controversial marriage two years before of the monarch-to-be, Prince Willem-Alexander, to another commoner, Máxima Zorreguieta Cerruti, whose father had been a member of the Videla military junta responsible for thousands of "disappearances" in the Argentina of the 1970s.

Banned junta member
In that case, there was a government investigation and the marriage was given the go-ahead – though Jorge Horacio Zorreguieta was banned from attending the ceremony, and again from attending Willem-Alexander's investiture as king, when Máxima became queen, earlier this year.

All this ,however, will quite rightly be history today.

The new narrative will be that Beatrix wished to keep her second son, Friso, near her in her retirement. That will have the twin virtues of being undoubtedly true, and of being far more comforting than protocol.