Margrethe II
Margrethe II was Queen of Denmark for fifty-two years, from January 1972 to January 2024, the first woman to reign in Denmark since the Margaret of the Kalmar Union whose name she took, a monarch who could only reign because the Danes had voted in 1953 to let a daughter succeed, and the first Danish sovereign in nearly nine hundred years to abdicate, which she announced in her New Year's speech and did on the fifty-second anniversary of her accession, handing the throne to her son Frederik in the same room where she had been proclaimed. She was born a week after the German occupation of Denmark in April 1940, the eldest of the three daughters of Frederik IX, and became heir presumptive at thirteen when the Act of Succession of 1953, passed by referendum alongside the new constitution, opened the throne to women. She read archaeology and political science at Cambridge, Aarhus, the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics, dug at excavations in Italy and Sudan, and married in 1967 a French diplomat, Henri de Laborde de Monpezat, who became Prince Henrik and spent fifty years complaining of his rank. Her father died on 14 January 1972 and she was proclaimed from the balcony of Christiansborg the next day. The Danish monarchy has no political power and she used the rest: the New Year's Eve address, watched by most of the country and listened to for its opinions on immigration or manners, the state visits, and a working life as an artist under her own name, illustrating Tolkien, designing costumes and sets for the Royal Danish Ballet and the Tivoli pantomime, and painting. She smoked in public until 2006 and was the most popular institution in the country in every poll. In September 2022 she stripped her younger son Joachim's four children of their princely titles, to slim the monarchy, and the family quarrel was public. On 31 December 2023 she said that a back operation earlier in the year had made her think about time, and that she would step down on 14 January. The crowds in Copenhagen that day were the largest since the liberation. She kept the title of queen and the palace at Fredensborg.
- Lived: 1940 CE – ?
- Nationality: Danish
- Roles: queen, monarch
