What is the HCP?

The HCP is an abbreviation of the Heir Consort Project. This is a continuation of Blog Royale’s old project on Crown Princesses’ work schedules, made gender neutral after the admittance of Prince Daniel of Sweden into the circle.

Unfortunately, the old project was lost in a recent WordPress upgrade, so I’m starting from scratch again.

All the posts can be found under the hcp tag

This project encompasses the countries of Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Spain, and the UK. Luxembourg doesn’t have an hereditary princess yet, Monaco well, the less said the better about the spouse of the current heir, and Liechtenstein’s Hereditary Princess has already stepped up to the plate as her husband is the current regent.

I’m currently only doing Europe for linguistic and publicity reasons. A lot of the Asiatic monarchies tend to be a lot more private with their schedules than the Europeans, or it is in the native language.

I scan all the royal websites, and the royal calendars, listing the events, and merge them into one calendar. As not all events are mentioned, I also look at forums, blogs, etc. for additional events, but I try to stay somewhat strictly to the royal agendas themselves.

I use a Google Calendar to keep track, and if you’d like to see it, please let me know.

After adding the last events at the end of the month , a continuous process over the month as no royal house simply publishes everything at once on the first of the month, I tally them.

I  also count the number of events they do on their own, as well as the total number of events.

I try to also mention notable events such as holiday time, maternity leaves or other issues that may have effect on the numbers.

If there is a multi-day visit somewhere, and most of the events are tied in to that visit, eg. British visit to Saudi-Arabia, I will count the days of the visit instead of miniscule things like “Taking the plane to Saudi-Arabia” that gets recorded on some calendars.

However, if some royals have visits to a certain place, but those events are unrelated to each other, each event will be counted. (It is obviously a matter of extreme consideration at times to define this, which is why I ended up doing it this way.)

Since the level of activity is also, somewhat dependent on the population size, I’ve also tried to factor this in, by adding an indicator of “busy-ness determined by population-size.”

Another factor that might be relevant, which I haven’t included, is level of activity compared to others in the same royal family. But everything cannot be included.

This is a project intended just for fun, and I might miss events here and there, so please let me know if I do.