BIRTH AND REIGN
Harald’s beginning on Feb 21, 1937, was trigger for nationwide celebration – he was the primary royal inheritor to be born in Norway in nearly 570 years. Danish and Swedish monarchs had dominated over the Scandinavian nation for hundreds of years, till 1905.
Simply three years after Harald was born, Nazi Germany invaded the nation. King Haakon and then-Crown Prince Olav fled to Britain, the place they led Norway’s government-in-exile, whereas the three-year-old Harald went together with his mom, Crown Princess Martha, to impartial Sweden, then to the US.
After residing briefly on the White Home, after which for 5 years in Bethesda, Maryland, Harald, his older sisters Ragnhild and Astrid and their mom met continuously with US President Franklin D Roosevelt, whom Harald years later described as like a grandfather.
When he returned to Norway after the conflict resulted in 1945, Harald attended state faculties reasonably than the personal classes his father had acquired.
His marriage in 1968 to a commoner broke with custom and adopted a nine-year stand-off together with his father that ended solely after Harald threatened by no means to marry reasonably than surrender Sonja.
LATER YEARS
In 1998, the king confronted an unprecedented wave of public criticism over press reviews that he had accepted a 4-million-crown (US$400,000) yacht from a gaggle of industrialists as a birthday current, and that palace repairs had price the federal government 500 million crowns.
Across the identical time, his former deputy personal secretary prompt that Harald ought to abdicate on the egalitarian nation’s regular retirement age of 67.
Opinion polls gave the king agency backing to remain on for all times, nevertheless, and the criticism subsided. A yr later, in one other Reuters interview, Harald joked that he would stay on the throne for all times except he went mad.
“There isn’t any custom in Norway for that (abdication). However you by no means know. If you happen to go fully bonkers,” he stated. Queen Sonja laughed and stated: “However who will ever inform you that?”
Harald’s son Haakon, 53, might be Norway’s fourth king for the reason that nation gained independence from Sweden in 1905, with Mette-Marit, additionally aged 53, as his queen.
