Prince Friso
Prince Friso gave up his place in the Dutch succession to marry, and spent the last eighteen months of his life in a coma. He was the second son of Queen Beatrix, read aerospace engineering at Berkeley and Delft and economics at Rotterdam, and worked as a banker and then for an international nuclear consortium - a technical career unusual in a European royal family. In 2003 he announced his engagement to Mabel Wisse Smit, and the government declined to put the marriage to parliament after it emerged that the couple had given an incomplete account of her earlier acquaintance with a since-murdered criminal. He married her anyway without parliamentary consent, which under Dutch law removed him from the line of succession and stripped him of membership of the royal house. He seems to have regarded that as an acceptable price and went on with his career. In February 2012 he was caught in an avalanche off-piste at Lech in Austria and was under the snow for around twenty minutes. The cardiac arrest left him with catastrophic brain damage; he was moved from London to the palace at Huis ten Bosch and never regained consciousness, dying in August 2013. His mother had abdicated four months earlier in favour of his elder brother, and the family had spent the intervening year answering questions about a prognosis the doctors would not give. He was forty-four, and had three young daughters. The Netherlands debated afterwards whether the succession rule that had cost him his place - a marriage refused parliamentary consent removes the prince, not the marriage - had ever been meant to apply to a second son who wanted a career in engineering. It has not been changed.
- Lived: 1968 CE – 2013 CE
- Nationality: Dutch
- Roles: royalty
