Haakon VII of Norway

Haakon VII was a Danish naval officer whom Norway offered its throne in 1905 and who would not take it until the Norwegians had voted for it, reigned for fifty-two years, and in April 1940, in a forest village with German aircraft overhead, told his government that he would abdicate rather than appoint Quisling, which is the moment the country decided to fight. He was born Prince Carl in 1872, the second son of the future Frederick VIII of Denmark, went into the navy at fourteen, and married his cousin Maud, the daughter of Edward VII, in 1896. When Norway dissolved its union with Sweden in June 1905 the Storting, which wanted a king the powers would accept and a Danish one who would not be a Swede, offered him the crown. He said he would come only if the people asked, and the referendum of November gave him seventy-nine per cent against a republic, and he took the old Norse royal name and the motto All for Norway. He was a constitutional king in a country that had not had one of its own for five hundred years, and learned the language and the skis. On 9 April 1940 the Germans landed at every port at once, and the king, the government and the gold left Oslo by train as the Blücher went down in the fjord. At Elverum the German minister demanded that he name Quisling, who had proclaimed himself prime minister on the radio, and on 10 April at Nybergsund he told the cabinet that he could not, and that they should accept his abdication if they thought otherwise. They did not. The Luftwaffe bombed the village that afternoon, and he spent two months moving north under bombing until a British cruiser took him from Tromsø on 7 June. From London he broadcast, refused every German demand that he abdicate, and was the H7 monogram that Norwegians carved into the snow; he came home on 7 June 1945, five years to the day, to the largest crowd Oslo had seen. He died in September 1957 at eighty-five, and his son Olav, who had been in the forest with him, succeeded.

• Lived: 1872 CE – 1957 CE
• Nationality: Norwegian
• Roles: king, monarch

Related

• The Contemporary World
• Dissolution of the Sweden–Norway Union