A correction to my previous post: The controversial 1950 marriage of Prince Georg was to Anne, Viscountess Anson, the divorced wife of a British viscount. Anne Bowes-Lyon was her maiden name.
First of all, don’t forget the kings were second cousins themselves. It’s a little different than being dictated to by a complete stranger. And while it may not be completely fair to the demoted royals, it’s a rather ingenious argument on George VI’s part, especially for a man who wasn’t known for thinking out of the box. It bears some resemblance to arguments made in the past for the marriages of Lady Louise Mountbatten and Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg.
As far as I know, King George didn’t threaten or coerce his cousin in any way, so the decision was Frederik IX’s, and if someone with personal powers wants to alter precedent, they can.
Thank you for sharing another point of view.
I hope you are right that George VI was merely trying to persuade his second cousin, not pressure him. To me, the important question is whether their relationship would have been equally amenable to Frederik IX asking, and receiving, an equally major favor from George VI involving alterations to British traditions. If this degree of influence only ran in one direction, then that would have been presumptuous on George VI’s part, I think.
The cases of Princess Victoria Eugénie of Battenberg and Lady Louise Mountbatten were rather different, since Queen Victoria and King George V of the UK never asked the Spanish or Swedish monarchies to loosen their rules on marriage equality.
They simply reassured the Spanish and Swedish monarchies that although the women did not possess the title of Princess of Great Britain and Ireland, they were still formally members of the British Royal Family (and in the case of Victoria Eugénie, a British Royal Highness), and so they fulfilled the existing requirements.
However, unlike his father and grandmother, King George VI was clearly asking for King Frederik IX to modify Denmark’s marital standards to accommodate Anne, Viscountess Anson.
Both the Anson family (Earls of Lichfield) and the Bowes-Lyon family (Earls of Strathmore and Kinghorne) were “only” comital houses. A marriage of a Prince to Denmark to a member of a comital house already occurred in 1914, when HRH Prince Aage to Denmark married Countess Mathilde Calvi of Bergolo. Aage was demoted from HRH Prince to Denmark to HH Prince without a territorial designation, and removed from his rights to the throne.
Thus, George VI was asking Frederik IX to treat Prince Georg more generously than his father Christian X treated Prince Aage, who married the exact same rank of bride.
Why didn’t George VI simply create Anne a Princess himself? Then Anne and Georg could have become TH Prince Georg to Denmark and Princess Anne of Denmark without nepotism and without arguable unfairness to Aage’s son Count Valdemar of Rosenborg, who was still alive and would have been a Prince to Denmark if his parents had been treated like Georg and Anne.
Of course, George VI creating his wife’s cousin a Princess would have gone against British royal tradition. But George VI was asking Frederik IX to go against Danish royal tradition for Anne’s sake. If George VI felt that Anne deserved to be treated like she was a royal princess, regardless of tradition, why didn’t he put his money where his mouth was?
