AP

KINGS and queens are not ordinary folk. Though they breathe, sweat, defecate, make love and lose their tempers like the rest of humankind, a certain aura still surrounds them. In Britain, the best efforts of the tabloid press cannot quite disperse it. When a Daily Mirror reporter discovered that the royal cornflakes were kept in Tupperware containers, this did not trump the fact that they were eaten with solid silver spoons. And when the queen is photographed unflatteringly trudging through the Scottish rain, her silk headscarf is knotted exactly on her chin in a way no mere subject can aspire to.

As a member of the ruling house of the Netherlands, and as its queen for almost 32 years, Princess Juliana could not entirely avoid the glow and glitter of royalty. She spent almost all her life in palaces with servants. She wore ermine and tiaras. From the age of 11, she had private tutors. At 18, as was her prerogative, she was installed in the Council of State. And when it came to marriage-time her formidable mother arranged it all, from finding the suitor (His Serene Highness Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld) to drawing up a contract in which he was told, in no uncertain terms, how he was expected to behave as Juliana's consort and how much money he would get.

Nonetheless, Princess Juliana chafed at this, and she soon made a campaign of throwing majesty aside. She sent her children to state schools and bought her bread in the local supermarket. She was photographed cycling round the roads in frightful off-the-peg frocks. In suburban Ottawa, where she spent most of the second world war in exile shortly before becoming queen, she would queue up for a ticket at the local cinema and offer to babysit for neighbours. As queen, she liked to drop in at schools or hospitals on a whim and with no ceremony, like an ordinary mother checking on her children. Visitors to Soestdijk Palace would find the queen pouring the tea herself; and had they tried to curtsy she would have stopped them, for she had abolished it.

The Dutch were not always sure how to take this. Their queen, though lovable, perhaps did not understand the elevation of her position. A sovereign who took the risk of riding a bike, without attendants to scoop her solicitously from the road if need be, was perhaps a political liability. Nor did Princess Juliana always prove them wrong. She got into trouble for relying heavily on a faith-healer, who believed in earth-waves and aliens, to cure her youngest daughter from near-blindness. To some she seemed too ready to dismantle the hard-won and far-flung Kingdom of the Netherlands, granting sovereign independence first to Indonesia and then to Surinam. And she caused diplomatic horrors when, in a speech to America's Congress at the height of the cold war, she naively called for “more mutual understanding among the nations”.

When she abdicated in 1980 in favour of her daughter Beatrix, the present queen, it occurred to some that this shy, plain woman might never have wanted majesty very much. Yet her diffidence and down-to-earthness was peculiarly suited to her country. The Dutch came to monarchy very late, in 1815, just as much of Europe was sending its crowned heads to exile or the guillotine. Before that they had known two centuries of splendid middle-class rule, when prosperous merchants in tall black hats had sent out ships to the far ends of Asia and, with the profits, sponsored De Hooch and Vermeer. To be bourgeois in 17th-century Holland was to be quite grand enough. The industrious money-men who ruled the country did so without land or foppery or extravagant manners, and without king or court.

When they acquired a crowned head, it was one of an odd kind: a descendant of a freedom-fighter against the king of Spain. From its beginnings, therefore, the House of Orange had a streak of populism in it, and the Netherlands under its kings was still, at heart, a republic. Princess Juliana merely gave expression to the Dutch conviction that no man should make himself grander or greater than another. Logically, this should have made monarchy irrelevant, and her position perhaps that of chief social worker. In practice, it seemed to charm even those, like the Socialist Party, who longed for the return of the men in black hats.

Her finest hour came in 1953, in Zeeland, when the worst storms in 500 years burst the dykes and claimed more than 2,000 lives. In an old coat and wellingtons, the queen slopped through floods to take food and clothing to people driven from their homes. She did so partly in her capacity as president of the Netherlands Red Cross, a role in which she had organised famine relief in her newly liberated country in 1945. But she did so also to show she was an ordinary woman, suffering and labouring against the elements like any farmer's or merchant's wife.

The representatives of the House of Windsor, bravely touring the East End of London during the Blitz, still showed with hats and handbags and graciously extended hands that they were a class apart. Princess Juliana's attitude was summed up in her words as, in 1948, she acceded to the throne: “Who am I that I may do this?”

Copyright © 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.