Stockholm: She was one of the better kept secrets of Sweden’s royal household: a commoner and divorcee whose relationship with Prince Bertil was seen as a threat to the Bernadotte dynasty.
In a touching royal romance, Welsh-born Princess Lilian and her Bertil kept their love unofficial for decades and were both in their 60s when they finally received the king’s blessing to get married.
Lilian died in her Stockholm home on Sunday at age 97. The Royal Palace didn’t give a cause of death, but Lilian suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and had been in poor health for several years.
She met Sweden’s Prince Bertil in 1943, but his obligations to the throne and Lilian’s status as a divorced commoner prevented them from making their love public. The couple’s sacrifices and lifelong dedication to one another gripped the hearts of Swedes.
“If I were to sum up my life, everything has been about my love,” the witty, petite princess said of her husband when she turned 80 in 1995. “He’s a great man, and I love him.”
Born Lilian Davies in Swansea, Wales, on August 30, 1915, she moved to London at 16 to embark on a career as a model and an actress, showcasing hats and gloves in commercials and taking on small roles in movies. She met British actor Ivan Craig, whom she married in 1940.
After the Second World War broke out, Craig was drafted into the British army while Lilian stayed behind in London, working at a factory making radio sets for the British merchant fleet and serving at a hospital for wounded soldiers.
At the time, Prince Bertil was stationed at the Swedish Embassy in the British capital as a naval attache. The couple first laid eyes on each other in the fancy nightclub Les Ambassadeurs shortly before Lilian’s 28th birthday in 1943. Lilian then invited him to a cocktail party in her London apartment. But it wasn’t until he fetched her with his car following an air raid in her neighbourhood that the romance blossomed, Lilian recalled in her 2000 memoirs, My Life with Prince Bertil.
“He was so handsome my prince. Especially in uniform. So charming and thoughtful. And so funny. Oh how we laughed together,” Lilian wrote.
Lilian was still married at the time, but the situation resolved itself since Craig, too, had met someone else during his years abroad in the army, and the couple divorced on amicable terms.
Delicate issue
Upon Bertil’s return to Sweden, however, his relationship with a commoner became a delicate issue.
Bertil became a possible heir to the throne when his eldest brother died in a plane crash, leaving behind an infant son — the current King Carl XVI Gustaf. Two other brothers had dropped out of the line of succession by marrying commoners.
Bertil’s father, King Gustaf VI Adolf, ordered him to abstain from marrying Lilian, since that would jeopardise the survival of the Bernadotte dynasty.
Instead, the couple let their romance flourish in an unofficial manner, living together in a common-law marriage for decades.
They first lived in their house in Sainte-Maxime in France, but later shared their time between the French village and Stockholm, where Lilian discreetly stayed in the background for years.
Despite the royal reluctance to recognise her officially, Lilian’s charm and warm personality soon won the Swedes over, and magazines depicted the happy couple playing golf and riding around on the prince’s motorbike. When Prince Bertil had to use a walking frame after an operation, she cheerfully nicknamed it his “Bugatti.”
In 1976, some 33 years after they first met, the new king finally gave them the approval they had been waiting for.
On a cold December day the same year, Lilian, or “Lily” as the prince used to call her, became princess of Sweden and duchess of the southern province of Halland in a ceremony at the Drottningholm Palace Chapel just outside Stockholm. The bride had by then turned 61 and the groom was 64.
No children
The couple never had any children.
Every year from 1976 until 2005 she attended the Nobel Prize-giving ceremony, adorned in royal jewels and Sweden’s highest order of chivalry (the Seraphim). It was only at the age of 91 that she discontinued this tradition, deciding that she was too old. Prince Bertil died aged 84 on January 5 1997, with Princess Lilian at his side. In her years of widowhood she continued to undertake royal engagements and to support many of her husband’s causes. In 2000 she published a book about her life with Prince Bertil. Five years later she celebrated her 90th birthday, when it was noted that she was as active as ever as she attended a flamenco festival at the House of Dance and a smoking dinner at Nalen. Refusing to allow a fuss to be made, she asked for no personal presents, preferring people to make donations to SOS Children’s Villages.
“I have most things,” she said. Inevitably she was asked for the secret of her longevity, and she replied: “I think that the work — and laughter — keeps me somewhat young in mind. I don’t do gymnastics or exercise. But I do feel the same wish to help as my husband did.”
The Princess remained supremely elegant, liking to wear high heels and haute couture clothes. She loved practical jokes and was fortified by the love of Queen Silvia, to whom she was especially close, and the younger members of the Swedish royal family. White orchids invariably adorned the Villa Solbacken, where she lived under the care of a rota of three nurses. At the time of her death, she was the oldest member of the Swedish royal family, entirely accepted by all generations of that family. In 2010, the palace said Lilian suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, preventing her from attending the wedding that summer of Crown Princess Victoria and Daniel Westling.
