Today we are going to look back at the wedding of Crown Prince Frederik and Crown Princess Mary which took place 15 years ago. Denmark’s Crown Prince married his Australian fiancée on a beautiful May morning at the Copenhagen Cathedral.
Crown Prince Frederik first met his future wife, Mary Donaldson, in Sydney while he was there for the 2000 Olympic Games. They met at the Slip Inn Bar, and the Prince did not alert Mary to his identity until later. They dated long distance for a while, and Mary was publicly identified as Crown Prince Frederik’s love interest in a 2001 Danish tabloid. She moved to Paris in 2002 but moved to Copenhagen shortly afterwards. The couple’s engagement became official on 8 October 2003 after Queen Margrethe gave her consent at a State Council meeting.
Before her wedding, Mary was granted Danish citizenship through Mary’s Law, passed to give her citizenship upon her marriage, as is customary for new members of the Danish Royal Family; and she converted to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark from Presbyterianism. If she becomes Queen consort, Crown Princess Mary will become the first Australian woman to be a queen.
At the ceremony, Crown Prince Frederik was attended by his younger brother, Prince Joachim, and Crown Princess Mary’s bridesmaids were her sisters, Jane Stephens and Patricia Bailey, and friend Amber Petty. The couple’s flower girls were Erin and Kate Stephens (Mary’s nieces), and Madisson Woods; Prince Nikolai and Count Richard von Pfeil und Klein-Ellguth were pageboys.
Including members of the Danish Royal Family, other royals in attendance included the King and Queen of Sweden and their children; the Queen of Spain and her children; the Queen of the Netherlands and two of her sons and daughters-in-law; the King and Queen of Norway and their children; the King and Queen of the Belgians and their children; the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess of Luxembourg and their son, Hereditary Grand Duke Guillaume; the Crown Prince of Japan; Prince Albert of Monaco and Princess Caroline of Hanover and her husband; and the Earl and Countess of Wessex.
Crown Princess Mary’s wedding dress was designed by Uffe Frank, a Danish fashion designer, and she wore a veil that had been first worn by Crown Princess Margareta of Sweden and nearly every Danish bride since – Queen Ingrid, Queen Margrethe, Queen Anne-Marie of Greece, and Princess Benedikte. Her wedding tiara was a gift from Queen Margrethe and Prince Henrik.
Their post-wedding festivities were held at Fredensborg Palace, and the Crown Prince Couple spent their honeymoon in Africa, as they told ABC News in Australia in 2005.
“She didn’t know where we were going, and I wanted to go some place where we could get…be ourselves, literally, just the two of us. And we had to go to the African continent, in my opinion, to get that, or you have to go to Antarctica or Greenland,” Crown Prince Frederik said.
“…We chose the host spot, and so we went down and had a wonderful photo safari, just south of the equator, really, or I would say between the Tropic of Cancer and the Capricorn.”
Crown Princess Mary revealed that they left the same night and woke up in Africa, but neither confirmed precisely which country they were in.
Their summer was spent on a tour of mainland Denmark aboard the royal yacht Dannebrog; they then toured Greenland. The couple also attended the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, almost four years after they first met at the Sydney Olympics.
Today, the Crown Prince Couple is still happily married and active in their royal duties. They have four children: Prince Christian, their eldest, followed by Princess Isabella, and twins Prince Vincent and Princess Josephine.
I like both of them. But despite all the Mary hype, it is Frederik who will be head of state (like his mother). A charming, cute and aethletic man.
Wishing them many more years of happiness. Our Mary, doing Australia proud.
the story is charming. the two of them are very good at representing their country. best wishes!
Crown Princess Mary would not be the first Australian to become a Queen Consort. Queen Susan of Albania was actually the first Australian women to become a Queen consort.