King Harald V of Norway died on August 28 at Oslo University Hospital, aged 89, after being hospitalised since August 17 with haemolytic anaemia. He was immediately succeeded by his son, now King Haakon VIII. In his tribute, King Charles called Harald his “dear cousin” and wrote that “for thirty-five years, King Harald served his people with unwavering dedication, guiding Norway through times of great change with warmth and humility.” That word — cousin — wasn’t a figure of speech. The two men were genuinely related, through a connection that runs back through a British princess who became a Norwegian queen more than a century ago.
Where the tribute came from
Harald’s reign began on January 17, 1991, following the death of his father, Olav V, and ran for thirty-five years — long enough to make him, at the time of his death, Europe’s oldest reigning monarch. He and Charles had a long-standing personal relationship as fellow European heads of state; Harald and Queen Sonja attended Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in 2022. Charles’s tribute extended condolences directly to “Queen Sonja and all her family, as Britain shares in Norway’s grief at this time of such heartbreaking loss.”
The actual family connection
Charles and Harald were second cousins once removed, and the line runs through Princess Maud, a daughter of Britain’s King Edward VII. Maud became Queen of Norway when she married Prince Carl of Denmark, who took the name Haakon upon becoming the Norwegian king. Their son Alexander was renamed Olav when his father succeeded to the throne, and Olav was Harald’s father. On the British side, Charles’s grandfather, King George VI, was a first cousin of Olav — which makes Charles and Harald cousins at one further remove. Both men, along with Spain’s King Felipe VI, ultimately trace their ancestry back to Queen Victoria, whose descendants still occupy thrones across Europe more than a century after her death.
What happens now
Haakon VIII has already been formally confirmed as king, with a date set for his oath of office. A funeral date for King Harald hasn’t yet been announced; unlike the British royal family, which typically has detailed public funeral planning in place well in advance, the Norwegian Royal House has kept those arrangements largely private so far. Whether King Charles will attend in person hasn’t been confirmed either, though given the personal relationship between the two families, and the precedent of Harald’s own attendance at Elizabeth II’s funeral, it would be a notable absence if he didn’t.
What’s actually happening here isn’t just one monarch expressing condolences to another out of protocol. It’s one of the last visible threads of Queen Victoria’s “grandmother of Europe” network of family ties among reigning royal houses — a family relationship that’s outlasted empires, world wars and the near-total disappearance of monarchy as a form of government across the rest of the continent.