There are many remarkable things about Queen Wilhelmina’s life and reign. The fact that she took the throne in the first place was extraordinary in itself – because of the semi-Salic law which governed the succession she was preceded by an elder brother and a great uncle; and her fiery, outspoken character in an age when women still had few rights and people feared the absolutist pull of a political monarch made her story even more incredible. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the very first queen regnant of the Netherlands was that the institution she embodied for nearly 58 years survived at all. Wilhelmina’s voluntary abdication in 1948 was as much a symbol of a modern progressive monarchy as it was a potent act of triumph, a message to the world that, having weathered the storm of extremism that rocked the continent and brought down so many of her royal neighbours, she was free to lay down the crown at a time of her choosing.
Wilhelmina was born in 1880 when the Netherlands was not a major player on the world stage. The country was neighboured on one side by a recently unified and imperially ambitious Germany, and on the other by the UK, a global, industrialised superpower with a monarchy stretching back nearly 1,000 years and an empire on which the sun never set. The Austro-Hungarian Empire in the east was also vast and expansive.
A strictly monarchical system was also a relatively new concept to the Netherlands. For much of its history it had been a somewhat fractious republic, perhaps in part due to it being a forward-thinking melting pot of intellect,
