Crown Prince Christian of Denmark turned twenty this year. He spent most of it in a green uniform, training alongside everyone else.
There is something rather wonderful about a future king standing in formation with a hundred and nineteen other cadets, all of them in identical green uniforms, none of them getting any special treatment because of who his mother happens to be.
On 11 June 2026, Crown Prince Christian was commissioned as a second lieutenant at the Gardehusar Barracks in Slagelse, having completed the same officer training as everyone else in his cohort. King Frederik attended, both as a father and, rather charmingly, in his official capacity inspecting the parade. Christian’s younger siblings, Princess Josephine and Prince Vincent were there too, watching their older brother in formation.
It had been a long year to get there. Christian began his national service with the Guard Hussar Regiment back in February 2025, completed the gruelling four-day “REX-tour” exercise every conscript dreads, and started officer training that August. From here, he moves to the Royal Life Guards at Høvelte Barracks in August 2026, where he’ll serve as a platoon commander for conscripts his own age, doing the very training he just finished himself.
I find the quiet moments tell you more than the ceremonies do. In January, while King Frederik and Queen Mary were on a state visit to the Baltic states, Christian briefly stepped away from his own training to take up his constitutional duties as regent, signing official documents in his father’s absence. The Royal House’s statement on it was almost endearingly understated: he simply “took a break today from his daily exercises.” A future king, pausing basic training to run the country for an afternoon, then presumably going right back to it.
There was a lighter moment too. Ahead of his twentieth birthday, the palace shared footage of Christian in the cockpit of an F-16, his father at the airbase to see him off. He called it “a boy’s dream come true.” I rather like that he was allowed to say so.
Queen Margrethe, at his eighteenth birthday, called his path a link in the long historical chain that has united our country for centuries. Watching him train in conditions no different from anyone else’s, I think she chose her words carefully. The chain holds because each link looks, for a while, like an ordinary person doing an ordinary job.
Raising Royalty: 1000 Years of Royal Parenting by Carolyn Harris has a great deal to say about exactly this balance, the ordinary education built underneath an extraordinary inheritance, and Christian’s year in uniform feels like a contemporary chapter the book hasn’t written yet.
A future king spent his twentieth year the way most twenty-year-olds in Denmark do, in uniform, mostly tired, occasionally airborne. I find that rather reassuring.
Charlotte Ashby is Crown & Court’s Culture & Lifestyle correspondent. A devoted country house enthusiast and lifelong royal wedding watcher, she writes about how royals actually live, the homes, the rituals, and the family moments that rarely make the front page.
“Behind every crown is a family — and families are always interesting.”
