Mary and Letizia: falling in love

The marriages of kings and queens are told and re-told throughout their lives and for centuries after their deaths.  Even the most obscure of monarchs with a consort has a tale of love, hate or something in between attached to the story. And while many crowned heads of the past met their match at the altar, or sometimes after someone had done the marriage deed for them by proxy, by the end of the 20th century it was accepted and expected that heirs to the throne would pick their own husbands and wives.  Which meant that the sentence just after 'once upon a time' suddenly got interesting.  Instead of 'my father wanted to stop a war/ start a war/ bolster the wool trade' as the following line, a whole new world of possibilities opened up.  Time to look back at the first lines of the love stories that led to Mary Donaldson and Letizia Ortiz becoming royal fiancees a decade ago.

The girl who would be queen - Mary Donaldson photographed as rumours surfaced that she was seeing Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark

The early years of the marriages of the men who will one day be king of Denmark and king of Spain were beyond similar with engagements, weddings and babies following one another sometimes with gaps of just days between them.  But the start of their relationships with their future queen consorts couldn't be more different.  While Frederik and Mary's first meeting has been described many times, sometimes by the couple themselves, the beginning of the Asturias' relationship is still pretty much a mystery.  There are many different tellings of how Spain's most photographed man managed to woo a woman who was on TV every day without anyone knowing.  But while Fred and Mary's once upon a time is easy to fill in, the first chapter of Felipe and Letizia's life together remains all but unknown.

 

Hiding in plain sight - Letizia Ortiz was hardly invisible in Spain in the months leading up to her engagement but very few had even the slightest idea that she was dating the country's future king

What will future royal historians do?  We know more about Henry VIII hooking up with Anne Boleyn than we do about Felipe, darling of the gossip mags, plighting his troth to his girl from Oviedo. There are several versions of their first meeting.  Some trace it back to November 2002 when the ship, the Prestige, sank off the coast of Galicia unleashing a massive oil spill.  The then Letizia Ortiz was sent to cover the story by her bosses at TVE while the prince was on his own work trip looking at the rescue operation and offering words of encouragement. 

Letizia Ortiz during one of her reports on the environmental disaster that accompanied the sinking of the oil tanker, the Prestige, in November 2002

 

Others say that the couple had already met at that point, having run into one another at a dinner party hosted by Pedro Erquicia, another TV journalist.  The date of that dinner party changes according to the version of the romance being told - some put it in early autumn 2002, before the Prestige, and others place it afterwards. And there several different versions of how they all ended up around the same table with some tellings of this love story casting a prince already fascinated by the girl he'd seen on TV asking acquaintances to help him meet her.

 

The lonely prince.  By the time Felipe met Letizia he'd seen several relationships founder after intense press interest. 

 

It all comes back to the fact that no one, apart from the two of them, really knows.  The announcement of their engagement was a massive surprise and journalists of the time had to scrabble to find a photo of them together to illustrate the story.  No such problem with Mary and Frederik.  By the time they were engaged in October 2003, there was an all but official version of their first meeting which has been bolstered in the following years.  They met at the Slip Inn Bar in Sydney when the prince was in town for the 2000 Olympic Games.  Frederik said, many years afterwards, that it was love at first sight. 

 

 

 

Frederik and Mary at a wedding before the announcement of their engagement

 

The second line of their story, to follow once upon a time, will be a neat summing up for the storytellers of the future.  Boy meets girl in a bar also hits all those early 21st century buttons that marks many a modern romance.  In the end, the moment a couple who will spend the rest of their lives together first lock eyes is only known to them but if you marry a monarch, you have to expect plenty of others to try and tell your love story for you. 

 

 

From eyes across a crowded bar to up close and personal in a palace - Mary and Frederik's love story has been pretty easy to retell from day one