Juliana of the Netherlands
Juliana was Queen of the Netherlands from 1948 to 1980 and did more than anyone to make the Dutch monarchy informal. Born in The Hague in 1909, the only child of Queen Wilhelmina, she was educated privately and then read law at Leiden, the first Dutch royal to attend an ordinary university. She married Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld in 1937. When Germany invaded in May 1940 she was evacuated with her children to Britain and then to Ottawa, where she lived for the rest of the war; a maternity ward at the Ottawa hospital was temporarily declared extraterritorial so that her third daughter would hold only Dutch nationality. The Netherlands has sent tulips to Ottawa every year since. She became queen in 1948 when her mother abdicated, and presided over the loss of the Dutch East Indies, which became independent Indonesia in December 1949 after a bitter war. Her style was deliberately unroyal — she disliked the curtsy, asked to be addressed as mevrouw rather than majesty, cycled, and sent her children to state schools. Two crises marked the reign. From the 1950s the faith healer Greet Hofmans was installed at Soestdijk to treat her partly blind youngest daughter and acquired influence over the queen's views, including on disarmament; the affair nearly split the royal family and produced a government inquiry in 1956. In 1976 her husband was found by the Lockheed inquiry to have taken over a million dollars from the aircraft manufacturer, and she was reportedly prepared to abdicate rather than see him prosecuted. She abdicated in 1980 and died in 2004.
- Lived: 1909 CE – 2004 CE
- Nationality: Dutch
- Roles: queen, head_of_state
