One monarch was nicknamed Lilibet; the other, Daisy. One was the longest-reigning royal in Britain, skilled at disarming world leaders with humor. The other was educated at Cambridge, is often seen with a cigarette dangling from her lips and hopped a roller coaster in May to mark her Golden Jubilee.
Though they ruled from capitals hundreds of miles apart in Europe, they found time now and again to meet and spill the tea about family, children and other matters.
When Lilibet, better known Queen Elizabeth II, died last Thursday at 96, Daisy, a.k.a. Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, became the reigning queen in Europe.
Elizabeth reigned for 70 years. Margrethe has marked 50 years at the helm of one of the oldest monarchies in Europe. As the news of the British royal’s death ricocheted around the globe, Margrethe, 82, scaled back plans to celebrate her own jubilee, called for a moment of silence and quickly sent a sorrowful letter to Elizabeth’s oldest son, King Charles III, that said, “We shall miss her terribly.”
More than friends, the queens shared lineage dating to Queen Victoria. When they commiserated, Margrethe recalled in an interview with the British broadcaster ITV News in May, they used their nicknames and had an “affectionate” rapport.
Margrethe, the eldest of three daughters of King Frederick IX and Queen Ingrid, entered the line to the throne at age 13 when Denmark made a constitutional change to allow female succession and the king passed over his brother for his daughter.
A good chunk of her schooling took place in Britain: Margrethe attended boarding school there, went to Cambridge University to study archaeology and spent time at the London School of Economics.
In 1966, while breezing through New York on her way to Latin America, she paused to for an interview with The New York Times. She allowed that though she would try out her Spanish on her tour, “I don’t know if it will work.”
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“I speak English, French and I wouldn’t starve in Germany,” she said then.
After the Danish Parliament approved her engagement to Count Henri Marie Jean André de Laborde de Monpezat, a French diplomat who was a member of the nobility, they married in 1967. (The wedding was delayed a tad so that her pregnant sister Queen Anne-Marie of Greece could attend.) News reports said the couple jetted off to the Mexican island of Cozumel for their honeymoon.