Theo Hartigan

Theo Hartigan (born 19 August 2013) is a New Westminster schoolboy and the closest friend of George V, who became King of the fourteen Crown capacities of the personal union on 31 October 2028, at fifteen. Until then he held no appointment, no office, no honour and no standing of any kind, and the absence was deliberate and was the point, the sharpest single difference between the American court and the Prussian one. At the accession he was made a Page of Honour, with three duties and no others.

He is an ordinary boy by every measure the record can apply, and the measures are worth stating because so much has been written about him that assumes otherwise. His father drives a bus on the New Westminster transit system and his mother is a nurse. The family is from the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin and moved to the capital for work, lives in a rented flat, and had no connection to the Crown, the government, the imperial establishment or the capital’s professional class before September 2025, when a seating plan at Ellicott High School put a fourteen-year-old beside the heir to the throne because Hanover and Hartigan fall next to one another in an alphabet.

The friendship is therefore an accident, and everyone involved has been careful to say so. It was not arranged, brokered, vetted in advance or proposed by anybody. Frederick is enrolled at the school as Frederick Hanover, a surname no member of his family uses anywhere else and which exists for the register and for nothing besides, and the two boys sat together for a term before either set of parents knew the other’s name.

Its public significance is a matter of proximity and of one mistake. In 2027 the Royal Household issued a statement naming him, in terms it believed would protect a private child from speculation. It did the opposite. Photographers stood outside a small flat for a fortnight, his mother’s employer moved her off a public-facing ward, and a boy of fourteen began receiving letters from strangers. The Household apologised to the family privately and has never apologised publicly, and the episode is the reason there is a Register article about a schoolboy at all. On 27 September 2028, two days after the King’s aircraft was lost, he was photographed again, arriving at the gates of Columbia Palace to see Frederick (Kittyhawk).

What he has given the King is harder to put in an infobox than what it has cost him. He is funny, which is the thing Frederick has least of elsewhere and values most. He is the reason the heir to the throne, now the King, has been inside an ordinary house, has washed up in a kitchen and has spent evenings in a flat in which nobody stood when he entered. And he has taught Frederick some Wisconsindeutsch, making the boy who is now King the only member of the House of Hanover who has ever known any, which the Wisconsin language council has declined to comment on and which is, for reasons set out below, a more complicated gift than it appears.

Family and early life

Milwaukee

Theo Hartigan was born in Milwaukee, in the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin, on 19 August 2013, the second of two children, and he lived there until he was eleven.

The Hartigans are ordinary Wisconsin people of a kind the capital does not often meet and routinely misdescribes. The surname is Irish and the household language is German, which is not a contradiction anywhere in the Grand Duchy and is treated as one by nearly every journalist who has written about the family. Peter Hartigan’s people came to the lake shore in the 1850s and married into German-speaking families within two generations; Anneliese Hartigan’s are Wisconsindeutsch on both sides and have been since before the Grand Duchy was a Grand Duchy. The result is a family with an Irish name that argues in German over dinner, which in Milwaukee is unremarkable to the point of invisibility.

Theo’s Wisconsin is not the picturesque one. He grew up in a working district on the north side, in a rented half of a two-family house, among people who worked shifts. The Grand Duchy’s ceremonial apparatus, its Grand Duke, its court at Madison and its considerable civic pride were things he encountered at school and on holidays and did not think about otherwise. When he is asked now, as he frequently is, what Wisconsin thinks of the monarchy, his honest answer is that he has no idea and did not ask anybody before he left.

The move to New Westminster

The family moved to the capital in the summer of 2025, when Theo was eleven, because Peter Hartigan lost his work and the transit authority of the Columbia District was hiring drivers.

The Register states the reason plainly because the family does. There was no ambition in the move and no design in it. A man in his forties with a commercial licence and a mortgage he could no longer meet took a job seventeen hundred kilometres away because it was the job that existed, and his wife, who is a nurse and could work anywhere, followed with two children in August. They did not choose the Columbia District. They chose employment, and the Columbia District was where it was.

They have never described the capital as home and do not now. Anneliese Hartigan’s phrase, quoted more often than she would like, is that they live in New Westminster and are from Wisconsin, and that she does not expect the two to swap places. Both children were enrolled in the district schools that September. Neither parent had heard of Ellicott High School before they were assigned to it, and neither had any idea that the heir to the throne was enrolled there, because that fact was not published anywhere and the school does not discuss it.

The flat

The Hartigans live in a rented flat on the fourth floor of a block in a working district north-east of the capital’s ceremonial centre, and the Register will not be coy about the difference between it and Columbia Palace.

It has two bedrooms. Theo shares one with his older sister behind a partition his father built in 2026, which is the arrangement the family made when it became clear they were not moving again soon. The kitchen and the sitting room are one room. There is no garden. The building has a lift that works.

Nothing about this is presented here as either a hardship or a virtue. It is a normal flat of a normal kind, in which a normal family lives on two ordinary incomes in an expensive city, and the reason the Register describes it at all is that the American Crown’s heir, now its King, has eaten dinner in it perhaps forty times, and the contrast between the two addresses is the entire reason anybody has ever been interested in Theo Hartigan.

The parents

Peter Hartigan drives a bus. He has driven the same route for most of three years, works early shifts by preference, and has declined every interview he has been offered, including two that carried a fee larger than his annual salary. He has said one sentence in public about any of this, to a reporter who approached him at a depot in 2027, and the sentence was that his son’s friends are his son’s business.

Anneliese Hartigan is a nurse in a New Westminster hospital, works in acute medicine, and is the parent the Household deals with, because she is the one who answers letters. She is also the reason the friendship has survived, in the assessment of everybody close to it. She was told in 2026 what having the heir to the throne in her kitchen would involve, agreed to it with her eyes open, and has since conducted herself toward Frederick with a complete and unwavering absence of deference that the Household regards as the single most valuable thing about the arrangement.

She feeds him, corrects him, and has twice sent him home early on a school night, and the record of the American Royal Household contains a note, written by a private secretary and released under the ordinary archive rules, observing that this is the only house in the Realm where that happens.

The sister

Theo has an older sister, Kate Hartigan, born 2010, who was fifteen when the family moved and is eighteen now. She left school in 2028 and works.

She is in this article because she asked not to be, and the request illustrates the problem better than her biography would. When the Household named Theo in 2027 it did not name her, and the press found her within a day. She has since been photographed, described in print as the Prince’s friend’s sister, and asked for comment on a boy she has met perhaps a dozen times. She has given none. The Register records her existence, her age and her wish to be left alone, and nothing else about her, because nothing else about her is anybody’s business and the demonstration of that principle is more useful here than the details would be.

Ellicott High School

The school

Ellicott High School is an ordinary public secondary school in New Westminster, named for Andrew Ellicott, who completed the survey of the capital after L’Enfant was dismissed, reproduced his plan substantially and was blamed for the changes, and it is neither selective, fashionable nor distinguished. It takes about eleven hundred pupils from the districts around it. Its results are a little above the district average. It has a good music department and a bad roof.

That the heir to the throne attended it, and that the King attends it still, is a constitutional decision and not a domestic one, made by a household that judged an American schooling worth more than the dynastic familiarity a British one would have supplied. It is the sharpest expression of that judgment available: not a private school, not a foundation with a royal history, not somewhere chosen for its discretion, but the school the district would have sent him to anyway.

The school’s own conduct has been, by universal agreement, faultless. It has never confirmed that he attends, never issued a statement, never permitted a photograph on its grounds and never allowed a member of staff to speak to the press. Its head has declined every approach for four years with the same sentence, which is that the school does not discuss its pupils. The Register notes that the only institution in this entire account that has never made a mistake is a comprehensive school with a leaking roof.

Frederick Hanover

The King is enrolled as Frederick Hanover, as he was as heir, and the name exists for the register and for nothing else.

No member of the family uses Hanover as a surname in any other context. When he was enrolled the King was Ernest V, and the Prince was Prince Frederick, Prince of Columbia, Prince of Wales, and a further five dignities besides; he is now King George V. Hanover is what the house is called, not what its members are called, and the enrolment was an improvisation by a private secretary who needed a field on a form filled in and chose the least wrong thing available.

The improvisation has had consequences nobody intended. It put the heir in the H’s. Hanover and Hartigan sit next to each other in an alphabet, and in a school that seats its first-year classes alphabetically, that placed a fourteen-year-old bus driver’s son beside the future King of America on the first morning of the school year in September 2025 and left him there for the year.

How they met

There is nothing more to it than that, and both boys are consistent and slightly impatient in saying so.

They were seated together. They were seated together for a full academic year, in most subjects, because the seating followed the form list. Neither of them chose anything. Theo’s account, which he has given twice and refuses to elaborate, is that on the first morning he did not know who Frederick was, that on the second morning somebody told him, and that by the end of the first week it had stopped being interesting.

Frederick’s version, given to his father and repeated in the Household’s own note, is the version that matters: that Theo was the only person in the room who had not decided in advance how to behave toward him.

The friendship was formed before either family knew of it. The Hartigans learned of it in November 2025, when their son mentioned in passing that he had been asked to a birthday and would need a lift. Peter Hartigan asked whose birthday. The conversation that followed is a piece of family comedy that both parents have declined to repeat in public and both have confirmed the existence of.

What the school does about it

Practically nothing, which is the arrangement.

Frederick is taught in ordinary classes, sits ordinary examinations, and is marked by teachers who have been given no guidance at all about him beyond the school’s ordinary policy. There is protection on the premises and it is meant to be unobtrusive and largely is. He does not board, he is not withdrawn for royal duties during term without notice, and the school has resisted, on two recorded occasions, requests from the Household that would have made him more visible rather than less.

The pupils settled it faster than the adults. By the second term of the first year the novelty had worn off entirely, and the ordinary economy of a school reasserted itself: the Prince of Columbia is a slightly reserved boy who is good at languages, indifferent at mathematics, and not picked early for anything physical. Theo Hartigan is funnier than he is and everyone knows it.

His work

Theo is not academic and is entirely unbothered by the fact.

He is a competent student in the middle of his year, better at the practical subjects than the written ones, and has never given any indication of caring where he places. His teachers describe him, in the phrases available to teachers, as good company and no trouble. He has said that he intends to train as a paramedic, which he decided at thirteen and has not revised, and which predates everything in this article.

The ambition is worth recording because of what it is not. A boy in his position has been offered, informally and formally, a great many things: introductions, sponsorships, places, opportunities that were not available to him a year before he sat down next to somebody in a classroom. He has taken none of them and has kept to a plan he made when nobody was watching.

The friendship

Freddie

Theo calls him Freddie, which almost nobody else in the world does.

The name arrived early, unceremoniously and without any discussion, in the way names do among boys of fourteen. The Household dislikes it and has never said so, a restraint that is recorded in the private secretary’s note and that the Register regards as the most sophisticated thing the American court has done in this whole business. The reasoning, as far as it is documented, was that the moment anybody objected to the name, the friendship would acquire a supervisor.

Frederick calls him Theo, which is what everybody calls him, and there is no equivalent asymmetry running the other way.

What Frederick gets from it

He gets to be laughed at, and the record is unanimous that this is the thing.

Theo Hartigan is funny. It is the first quality anybody who knows him mentions, it is not a strategic or a performing kind of funny, and it is directed at Frederick as often as at anything else. A boy raised to be the object of ceremony, addressed by adults with unfailing courtesy and watched continuously for signs of what he might become, has one person in his life who takes the mickey out of him and has never once been reprimanded for it by anybody.

He also gets ordinariness, which is scarcer in his life than anything else. He has been in a flat where nobody stood when he came in. He has been made to take his shoes off. He has washed up, badly, and been told so. He has sat through an evening in which two adults argued about money in front of him in a language he did not at that point understand. None of these are experiences the household could have arranged for him, and all of them were arranged by an alphabet.

What Theo gets from it

This is the harder question and the honest answer is: a friend, and a great deal of trouble.

He does not get money, position, access or advantage, and the article sets out below why the Household has been so careful that he should not. He gets the company of a boy he likes, who is serious, dry, slower to laugh than he is and loyal to a degree that Theo has described, in the one interview his parents permitted, as exhausting.

And he gets a permanent alteration in his own life that he did not agree to and cannot undo. The section on what it has cost him is not a coda to this article. It is half of it.

The visits

Frederick has eaten dinner in the Hartigans’ flat perhaps forty times, and it is the only ordinary house he has ever been inside.

The arrangements are less elaborate than people assume and more elaborate than the family would like. A protection car sits on the street. The officers do not come up. The neighbours stopped noticing within about six weeks, which everyone involved regards as the best evidence available that the arrangement is working.

He is not treated as a guest of consequence and never has been. Anneliese Hartigan’s rule, stated once in 2026 and never revisited, is that anybody eating at her table eats what is on it. He clears his plate to the sink because the two boys clear their plates to the sink. He has been given jobs. The private secretary’s note records, with what reads at a century’s distance as astonishment, that in March 2027 the heir to fourteen Crown capacities spent forty minutes helping Peter Hartigan carry a wardrobe up four flights of stairs.

What they do not discuss

They do not discuss the Crown, and the avoidance is Theo’s rather than Frederick’s.

Frederick will answer questions about his position if they are asked. Theo does not ask them. He has never asked what the King is like as a father, never asked what Frederick expects to do with the throne, and never once mentioned Sweden, which is the second inheritance and the one Frederick finds hardest to think about. Frederick has noticed the omission and has never raised it either.

The Register does not know whether this is tact, indifference or self-protection, and neither, on the evidence, does Theo. What is clear is that it is the reason the friendship works, and that both boys understand this well enough to leave it alone.

The language

Wisconsindeutsch in the flat

The Hartigans speak Wisconsindeutsch at home, as a matter of ordinary habit rather than of principle.

Anneliese Hartigan grew up in it. Peter Hartigan learned it from his wife’s family and speaks it adequately and with an accent his children find funny. Both children understand it completely; Theo answers in it and his sister mostly does not, which is the ordinary shape of a language going out of a family and is happening in tens of thousands of Wisconsin households at the same rate.

In New Westminster it has become, without anybody deciding this, the language the family uses when it does not wish to be understood. A household tongue seventeen hundred kilometres from the nearest other speakers turns into a private one, and Anneliese Hartigan has said that she is not sure whether that has preserved it in her family or embalmed it.

Teaching Frederick

Frederick asked, and Theo taught him, and neither treated it as significant at the time.

It began at the Hartigans’ table, where a boy who is genuinely gifted at languages sat through evenings of conversation he could not follow and started asking what things meant. Nobody planned a course of instruction. He picked it up the way anybody picks up a household language, in fragments and jokes and the names of foods, over two years and some forty dinners.

He is not fluent and makes no claim to be. He can follow a conversation at the table, can make himself understood in a domestic register, and has an accent that the Hartigans find hilarious and have not corrected, on the grounds that correcting it would spoil it.

The only Hanover who knows any

Frederick is, so far as the record goes, the first member of his house ever to know a word of Wisconsindeutsch, and this is not the straightforward compliment it sounds like.

The Grand Duchy’s language survives for a reason that its own speakers state plainly and that the Register has recorded elsewhere: it was never made valuable. No war made it disloyal, no reform made it a virtue, and its people have quietly seen to it that it never became a credential, an asset or a job. It is classified officially as a dialect rather than a language, which is its one real grievance, and its speakers have concluded on reflection that the insult is the thing protecting them.

The heir to the American throne, now its King, learning it in a flat in New Westminster is precisely the kind of event that mechanism exists to prevent.

Since the fact became public, Wisconsindeutsch has been the subject of more national attention in eighteen months than in the preceding fifty years. There have been features in the capital press. There has been a proposal, made seriously in the Wisconsin Landtag and not yet withdrawn, for the reclassification of the tongue from dialect to language. There has been talk of a royal patronage.

The Wisconsin language council has said nothing at all, in what its critics call paralysis and its defenders call the only correct response available. Its position, so far as anybody can establish it, is that the council exists to keep the language ordinary, that everything now being offered would make it extraordinary, and that it has no mechanism for declining an honour nobody has formally offered.

Nothing about this is resolved. The reclassification bill has not been voted on. The patronage has not been proposed in form and has not been ruled out. Nobody has asked Theo Hartigan what he thinks, and he has not volunteered, except once, to his mother, in the language in question, and she has not repeated it.

The Crown at a distance

No appointment

Theo Hartigan holds no appointment, no title, no honour, no household position and no formal relationship with the Crown of any kind, and this is a decision that was taken deliberately, at a high level, and defended since.

The question arose in 2027, after the Prussian appointments. Alexander I, German Emperor and King of Prussia and Frederick’s first cousin, made three of his pre-accession friends Pages and Companions in the weeks after his accession, on the proposal of the Regency Council, with regulated access, safeguarding rules, a household secretary and a published set of terms. Lukas Brandt is the best known of the three. The arrangement was reported across the Concert and was widely admired as a sensible piece of modern court practice.

The Household considered the same thing and refused it.

Why the refusal

The reasoning, set out in a memorandum of March 2027 that entered the archive in the ordinary way, runs in three steps and the Register reproduces its structure because it is a good argument.

First, that an appointment would make the friendship a position, and a position can be withdrawn. A boy who holds nothing cannot lose it. A boy who holds a page’s warrant can be removed from a list, and the removal would be a public event with a public meaning, and the household would then be in the business of publicly ending a fifteen-year-old’s friendship.

Second, that the American Crown has no business conferring standing on children. The memorandum is blunt on this and cites the Charter settlement: the Crown in right of America operates within an order that is deeply suspicious of hereditary and personal favour, and a court that began appointing its heir’s schoolfriends would be doing, in miniature, precisely the thing the Realm’s constitutional culture exists to prevent. A Prussian court may create a Gefährte. An American one may not, and the difference is not decorative.

Third, and this is the sentence most often quoted, that the value of the boy is that he is not anything. The moment Theo Hartigan holds an office, his company becomes a duty, his opinions become discreet, his parents become people with a relationship to the palace, and the one address in the Realm where the heir is treated ordinarily stops being ordinary.

The refusal is therefore an act of protection framed as an act of restraint, and it is generally judged the most intelligent thing the Household has done. It is also, as the next section shows, not the only thing it did.

The comparison with Prussia

The two courts made opposite decisions about the same problem in the same year, and both were defensible.

Prussia formalised, and got regulated access, written safeguarding, a named household contact and a set of prohibitions, along with the corresponding costs: three children with a public status they did not seek, and an arrangement the Prussian household has been criticised for presenting as an honour rather than as a set of obligations.

America declined to formalise, and got a boy with no status to lose and no obligations to breach, along with the corresponding cost: no rules, no named contact, no safeguarding framework, and nobody at all whose job it was to think about him. When the Household did something that damaged him, there was no procedure that had been broken, because there was no procedure.

The Register does not adjudicate between the two courts and observes only that each has been hurt by the thing the other did instead.

Meeting the King

Theo has met Ernest V once, briefly, at Columbia Palace, and the meeting is the single most-quoted thing about him.

It took place in 2027. The King, whose ordinary residence is in London and who is in the Columbia District for a fraction of the year, was at the palace; Theo was there with Frederick; they were introduced in a corridor and spoke for perhaps four minutes.

The King asked after his parents by name. He asked how Peter’s shifts were, and whether Anneliese was still on the acute ward, and he used both first names without prompting or preamble.

Theo has never got over it, and the reason he has never got over it is not flattery. He has said, in the one interview his parents permitted, that he had expected to be asked nothing, or to be asked something polite and general, and that what unsettled him was working out afterwards that somebody had told the King, and that the King had bothered to remember, and that this had been done deliberately and would never be mentioned.

He found the King himself unremarkable, which he has also said, and which the Register records because it is the more interesting half. An ordinary-looking tired man in his fifties asked about a bus timetable and a hospital rota. A monarchy that spends a great deal of money on ceremony achieved more with four minutes in a corridor than it has with any of it, and Theo Hartigan is the only available witness to the fact.

The Governor-General

He has never met Michelle Lujan Grisham and has no relationship with the vice-regal establishment, which is worth stating because it is frequently assumed otherwise.

Frederick’s constitutional formation was conducted substantially under the Governor-General, and the two are in regular contact. None of that touches Theo, who is a schoolfriend and, since 31 October 2028, a Page of Honour with three ceremonial duties, and not a part of the King’s constitutional apparatus, and the distinction has been maintained scrupulously by everyone except the press.

The screening

Told, and asked

The Hartigans were screened before the friendship was six months old, and they were told about it properly and in advance.

This is the part of the story the Register wishes to state with particular clarity, because it is the part that goes against expectation and because the alternative would have been a serious wrong. A household officer went to the flat in February 2026, sat down with both parents, and explained what would be looked at, why, by whom, and what would happen to it afterwards. The family was asked whether it consented. It consented. The officer left a written summary and a telephone number.

The screening was thorough and unremarkable in its results. It covered the parents, the adult sister and the immediate family in Wisconsin. Nothing of consequence was found, because there was nothing of consequence to find.

Why this matters

Because the post-May Day security settlement is not visible and its characteristic harm is not friction.

The Realm’s arrangements since 2006 work by background screening rather than by checkpoints, queues and public inconvenience, and the ordinary American’s ordinary day is very largely unchanged. The harm that settlement produces, when it produces harm, is invisibility: a person is listed, or wrongly listed, and consequences follow that are never explained and often never noticed, and the individual is not told and has no obvious way to find out.

A bus driver’s family from Milwaukee, screened because their son sits next to the heir, is exactly the situation in which that harm would ordinarily land. It did not. Somebody in the Household made a decision, in a system that did not require it, to tell them first and ask.

The Register records this as a thing done right, and does so at length, because the following section records at greater length a thing the same household did very badly indeed, and the two together are the truer account than either alone.

The statement

What the palace did

In September 2027 the Royal Household issued a statement naming Theo Hartigan.

The circumstances were these. A photograph had been taken outside the school and offered to two newspapers. It showed Frederick with an unidentified boy. The Household was approached for comment, judged that publication was imminent, and concluded that speculation about an unnamed child would be worse for that child than a controlled disclosure. It therefore issued a short statement identifying him by name, describing him as a school friend of the Prince, and asking that his privacy and that of his family be respected.

The reasoning was decent, the intention was protective, and the effect was a disaster.

What followed

A named child is a story. An unnamed one is a photograph nobody can print.

Within a day the family’s district was known. Within two the building was known. Photographers stood outside the flat for a fortnight, on a public street in a working district, in numbers the family had no idea what to do about and no experience of managing. There was no household officer on the street. There was no telephone number that produced anybody quickly. The Hartigans, who had been asked politely for their consent to a security screening eighteen months earlier, were not asked about this and were told about it forty minutes before it happened.

Anneliese Hartigan’s hospital moved her off a public-facing ward, on its own initiative and for reasons it explained to her sympathetically, which she has described as the moment the thing stopped being about her son. Peter Hartigan’s depot was contacted by journalists and handled it poorly, in the manner of an employer with no procedure for anything of the kind. Kate Hartigan, who is not in this story, was found and photographed within a day.

And a fourteen-year-old boy began to receive letters from strangers, most of them kind, some of them not, and none of which anybody had prepared him for.

The apology

The Household apologised to the family privately, in writing, within a month. It has never apologised publicly and has never corrected the public record.

The private apology is said by those who have seen it to be full, unqualified and personally written. The Register cannot assess it, because it has not been published. What is on the public record is a statement that named a child, and nothing since.

The asymmetry is the point and the Register states it as a fault. The Household’s error was public, was made in a document it issued under its own name, and produced consequences that were visible from the street. Its apology was private, and remains so, and is therefore of no use whatever to the boy’s standing with anyone who read the first document and not the second. An institution that will not correct itself in the register in which it erred has not, in the way that matters, corrected itself.

What it revealed

The refusal to appoint him had a cost and this was the moment it came due.

Lukas Brandt, in Prussia, has a named household secretary whose function is to be telephoned. Theo Hartigan had nobody. There was no officer whose responsibility he was, no procedure that governed his treatment, no rule that had been broken and nobody who could be said to have failed in a duty, because no duty had ever been created.

The Household had been so careful not to give him a status that it had also not given him a protector, and when a decision was taken about his life in a room he was not in, there was no one in that room whose job was to say that he should be asked. That is the cost of the more intelligent policy, and it fell entirely on a family of four in a rented flat.

What it has cost him

Being recognised

He is recognised, and he did not choose it, and there is no mechanism by which it can be undone.

The recognition is not constant and is not oppressive in the way that celebrity is oppressive. It is intermittent, local and cumulative. He is recognised on the transit system his father drives on. He is recognised in shops in his own district. He is recognised by adults more often than by other boys, which he has said is the part he finds strangest, and which follows from the fact that it was a newspaper story rather than anything a fifteen-year-old would encounter on his own.

What it has removed is the ordinary anonymity of adolescence. He cannot be publicly foolish, publicly rude, publicly clumsy or publicly unkind without the possibility that it becomes a paragraph about somebody else. He is fifteen. The ordinary work of being fifteen involves being all four of those things at intervals, in front of people, and learning from it, and he is now obliged to do that work under conditions no other boy in his year faces.

He was not guarded at thirteen and is guarded now, and the change is visible to his parents and to his teachers, and both have said so.

Wisconsin is no longer a refuge

The heaviest cost is the one the family did not anticipate, which is that they cannot go home.

They can go home. There is no impediment. They cannot go home without it being an event there, and that is a different thing entirely.

Milwaukee knows. The Hartigans are the family whose boy sits next to the Prince, and in a district where everyone knows everyone’s people, that is not a fact that can be set down. Their return visits, of which there have been four since 2027, have been occasions. There have been photographs in the Wisconsin press, which is under no arrangement with the capital press and has never been asked to be. There have been well-meant approaches from a Landtag member and from a language society. There has been a request, declined, that Theo attend a civic function.

The family’s refuge has been converted into a second place where they are looked at, and it was the one place they had. Anneliese Hartigan, who moved seventeen hundred kilometres for her husband’s work and has never called the capital home, has said the thing plainly: that she went to New Westminster for a job and expected Milwaukee to stay where she left it, and that it has not.

The Register regards this as the real price of the friendship and states it as such. Not the photographers, who went away after a fortnight. Not the letters, which are managed. The loss of the one address in the world where the Hartigans were nobody in particular.

The friends he had before

He has kept some and lost some. The losses were not dramatic and were not anybody’s fault, and Theo has been careful, in the little he has said, not to blame anyone.

What happened is what happens. A boy who is at the Prince’s house on a Saturday is not at somebody else’s. A boy whose name has been in a newspaper is a slightly different proposition to invite. A friendship at fifteen survives on ordinariness and repetition, and both were disrupted, and some of them did not survive it.

He has not replaced them, and the article should not pretend that Frederick is a substitute for four other boys.

The money

He has been offered money for the story and has not taken it.

The offers are documented in general terms and have been made repeatedly since 2027: for an interview, for a photograph, for a signed piece under his name, for what one approach delicately called his perspective. The largest of them, made, was for a sum greater than his father earns in a year.

The family is not comfortable and the sum was not trivial to it. They live in a rented flat on two ordinary incomes in an expensive city and moved to that city because they had to. The refusal cost them something real, and it was neither easy nor obvious.

Peter Hartigan’s account of the decision, relayed second-hand and never given directly, was that the money was for something that was not his to sell.

What he will not say

He knows things and does not say them, and the distance between the two is the whole of his public position.

He has been in the room for ordinary family conversations at Columbia Palace. He knows what Frederick thinks about his position, about Sweden, about the schooling decision and about his father, because they are fifteen and sixteen and they talk. He has never repeated any of it to anybody, including to his parents, including under the direct questioning of journalists who were good at their jobs.

The discretion is loyalty to a friend and not a constitutional conviction, and the Register draws the distinction deliberately. He is not being discreet because he understands the position of the Crown. He is being discreet because Freddie told him things.

The public interest in him

Why people care

They care because he is the only ordinary person the King is known to be close to, and because everybody is trying to work out what kind of King Frederick will be.

He is read as evidence. The monarchist press reads him as proof that the American Crown is genuinely of the country: a King at a comprehensive school with a bus driver’s son for a best friend is an argument that makes itself. The republican press reads him as proof of the opposite, that a boy of fifteen and his family can have their lives rearranged by an institution answerable to nobody for the rearranging, and that the palace’s own statement is the exhibit.

Both readings are available from the same facts and both are being made. The Register does not choose between them, and notes that the person the argument is about has declined to join it.

Claimed by people he has never met

He has been cited approvingly in Parliament twice, invoked in at least one party’s literature, and claimed as a supporter by organisations he has never addressed.

None of this involved consulting him. He has issued no statement of any kind, ever, and the Household’s position, which it has held consistently since the failure of 2027, is that it will not comment on him again.

The arrangement with the press

Since 2027 there has been an understanding, and it is holding.

Its terms are not published and have never been formally agreed. In practice: the capital papers do not photograph him at the school, do not print his address, do not approach him directly, and do not approach his sister. They print his name, because his name was published by the palace and cannot be recalled.

The understanding is voluntary, has no legal force, and depends entirely on the continuing judgment of editors. It has been broken once, by a publication outside the arrangement, and was not broken again. The Wisconsin press is not party to it and has never been asked to be, which is the gap through which the heaviest cost arrived.

Character and views

The weights

He lifts, and he started before any of this, which is the point of mentioning it.

There is no room in the flat for anything of the kind, so it happens in the school’s weights room before classes three mornings a week and, in the holidays, at a municipal gym that costs him four dollars a session out of money he earns himself. It is the least glamorous possible arrangement and he has kept to it for two years.

The reason is his position and then it stopped being the reason. A boy who plays on the defensive line has to be able to hold ground against boys who are also on it, and he began the mornings at thirteen because the coach suggested it. What kept him at it is that it is one hour of the day that belongs to nobody else: no protection car, no photographers, nothing to be careful about, and no possibility of being asked a question about the Prince of Columbia at six in the morning in an empty room.

It also explains the photographs. He is fifteen and does not look it, being taller and heavier than most boys of his year, and the press has more than once printed his age beside a picture that contradicts it. His mother has found this more irritating than almost anything else that has been done to her son, on the ground that a boy who is made to look older is a boy people feel entitled to expect more from.

Funny

It is the first thing anybody says about him and it is not a small thing.

The humour is dry, quick, and directed as readily at himself as at anyone. It is not performed and does not require an audience. His teachers describe a boy who makes a room easier, his mother describes a boy who has been talking his way out of things since he was six, and Frederick, who is not effusive, has said that Theo is the funniest person he knows and that this is not a compliment he would extend to anybody else at the school.

A King with almost no experience of being teased has one friend who does it constantly, and the Register regards that as the most consequential single fact in this article.

What he thinks of the monarchy

He likes the family and has no view of the institution, and has learned that saying so satisfies nobody.

This is his actual position, stated consistently in private and once in public, and it is treated by almost everybody who hears it as an evasion. It is not an evasion. He knows Frederick, likes him, has met the King once and found him tired and courteous, and has no opinion at all about the constitutional arrangements of the Realm, having been fourteen when he acquired his connection to them and having had other things on his mind since.

Monarchists find the answer disappointing because they want an endorsement. Republicans find it disappointing because they want a grievance, and he has one and declines to frame it as a political fact. Journalists find it disappointing because it is not a story.

He has stopped giving the answer, which is itself a small loss and is recorded here as one: a boy learned at fifteen that his honest opinion was useless to everybody who asked for it, and drew the obvious conclusion.

The household’s politics

The Hartigans do not discuss politics much and are not, so far as anybody can establish, either notably monarchist or notably republican.

They voted, before the move, as most of their district voted. They have not discussed how they vote since 2027, for reasons that require no explanation. Anneliese Hartigan has made the only political remark on the record from any member of the family, to a neighbour and subsequently repeated in print, which was that she had no objection to the Crown until it wrote her son’s name in a press release.

The paramedic

He still intends to train as a paramedic and the intention is undisturbed.

He decided this at thirteen, in Milwaukee, before any of the rest of it. He has not revised it, has not been talked out of it, and has declined the opportunities that would have made a different life available. He will need his examinations and a place on a course, and neither is guaranteed, and his year has been disrupted in ways his classmates’ have not.

If he gets there, it will be the least remarkable outcome available and by some distance the most interesting one.

At present

Where it stands

The friendship is intact and is ordinary, which after eighteen months of the foregoing is a considerable statement.

They are in the same year at the same school. They see each other daily in term and often out of it. Frederick still comes to the flat. Theo still calls him Freddie and the Household still says nothing. Neither boy has given any indication of finding the other less good company than in 2025, and the people around them report a friendship that has been dented in its circumstances and not in its substance.

The new reign

On 30 October 2028 King Ernest V told his realms that he had decided to abdicate, and the thirteen Compact governments agreed that Frederick would reign as George V from the day the last realm gave it effect, his mother acting as Regent until his sixteenth birthday on 2 May 2029. On 31 October the last realm acted, and Frederick became King. Theo was the first person outside the family to know. Frederick told him the evening before his statement of 25 October, at the Hartigans’ kitchen table, where Anneliese Hartigan’s rule is that anybody eating at it eats what is on it. Theo’s answer is the only part of the evening anybody has recorded: “Okay, Freddie. Eat your dinner.”

On 30 October a Milwaukee weekly reported that the Household meant to reverse the decision of 2027 and make him a Page of Honour on the accession. The report said that the reason given inside the Household was the cost the 2027 memorandum had admitted, that under it nobody’s job was him, and that a King’s closest friend cannot be left to nobody. It said the appointment would carry three duties and no others: attending the King at the State Opening of Parliament, at the Eleventh at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and at the accession. It said that his parents had told the Household the decision was his, as they had with the screening in 2026, and that he had said yes on one condition, which was that he would go on calling the King Freddie. It also said that the King would finish at Ellicott High School with his year.

The Household neither confirmed nor denied it that day, and the capital papers, keeping to the understanding, did not repeat it beyond saying that it had been reported. The weekly is not party to the understanding and never has been, which is how the story reached print, and the gap through which the family was hurt in 2027 is the gap through which this arrived too.

On the evening of 31 October, after the Privy Council had proclaimed the King, the Household announced it. Theo Hartigan is a Page of Honour from the accession, with the three duties the report had named and no others, and the King will finish at Ellicott High School with his year. The announcement did not mention his condition, and nobody has said that he has stopped calling the King Freddie.

The Register’s account of the 2027 refusal therefore stands as the record of a reasoned decision that was later reversed for a reason it had itself supplied. The memorandum feared that a position could be withdrawn. The announcement does not say whether the warrant answers that fear.

The open question

Frederick’s schooling ends, and nobody knows what happens then. As announced on 31 October, the King finishes at Ellicott with his year and Theo holds a Page’s warrant, which answers the question of the next two years and not of the years after.

He will leave Ellicott High School within two years. What follows for a King of fourteen Crown capacities is a formation that was planned in outline for a decade, when he was the heir: constitutional instruction, the realms, service of some kind, and the slow assumption of a public role. None of it has a place in it for a boy training as a paramedic in New Westminster.

Until 31 October 2028 there was no mechanism to end the friendship and no mechanism to sustain it. The refusal of 2027, which protected him from being removed, also meant there was nothing to keep him. Its reversal gave him a Page’s warrant, which is a mechanism of three days a year, and which can be withdrawn, the risk the memorandum named. The two of them will be, from about 2030, two young men who were at school together, which is a category from which most friendships quietly do not survive, and neither the Household nor either family has any plan for it at all.

Nobody has raised it with them. Both boys are fifteen. The question of whether the most valuable relationship in the King’s life survives his education is, at the time of writing, being managed by nobody, discussed by no one, and left entirely to two children.

Assessment

Theo Hartigan matters because of what he is not.

Until 31 October 2028 he was not an official, a companion, a page, an appointee or a member of anything, and since then he has been a Page of Honour with three duties and nothing else. He was not chosen, vetted for suitability, or proposed by a council. He was seated next to somebody by an alphabet, and the American Crown, presented with the most valuable relationship in its heir’s life, made the deliberate and defensible decision to touch it as little as possible, and reversed it only when the heir became King.

The decision was right and it was not free. By refusing to give him a status the household also refused to give him a protector, and when it made a serious error about his life there was no procedure to breach and nobody whose duty he was. Prussia’s court formalised and has been criticised for the burden that placed on three children. America’s court declined to formalise and has been criticised for leaving one child with no one. Neither answer is obviously better and the Register does not pretend otherwise.

The household’s record here is genuinely split and the split is instructive. In the invisible part, where nobody was watching, it behaved well: it screened a family, told them first, asked their consent and left a telephone number. In the visible part, where everybody was watching, it named a child in a press release and stood a fortnight of photographers outside his mother’s home. An institution that is careful in private and clumsy in public is not a hypocritical institution. It is an institution that has thought hard about security and not at all about publicity, and the Realm has heard that criticism before.

What the friendship has cost is not the photographers and not the letters. It is Milwaukee. A family that moved to the capital for work and kept one place in the world where they were nobody in particular has lost it, and cannot get it back, and did nothing whatever to bring it about. That is the price, it was paid by people who were never asked, and no apology has been offered for it because nobody at the palace has identified it as a harm.

And against all of it stands a plain fact. The King of America has washed up in a stranger’s kitchen, carried a wardrobe up four flights of stairs, been laughed at by somebody who is not paid to be near him, and learned a few hundred words of a language that survives by being worth nothing. No household could have arranged any of that. It happened because two surnames fall next to each other in an alphabet, and because a nurse from Milwaukee decided that anybody eating at her table eats what is on it.

The ordinary week

What they actually do

The friendship is conducted almost entirely in the ordinary registers of adolescence and the record of it is correspondingly dull, which is the best thing about it.

They are in the same classes. They eat lunch together. They walk part of the same way after school before the protection car takes one of them somewhere else. They play football badly for a school side that does not win, in which Theo is a serviceable defensive lineman and Frederick is put in late in games that have already been decided. Theo is one of the bigger boys in his year and has been since he was thirteen, which is most of why he plays where he plays, and which means that photographs of the two of them together are routinely misread by people who assume the taller and heavier boy must be the older one.

Frederick is better at languages and Theo is better at everything requiring a hand. They watch Green Bay at the flat when it is on, and Theo supports the club with an intensity Frederick finds funny and does not share. The Packers are the one club in the Realm that its supporters actually own, which Theo has explained to him more than once and which Frederick, who holds fourteen Crowns and cannot support anything, finds a genuinely interesting arrangement. This is the only respect in which the two boys’ positions are ever discussed between them, and it is discussed as a joke.

The letters

Since 2027 he has received letters, and the volume has settled at something between ten and thirty a week.

Most are kind and a great many are from children. Some are from people who want something. A small number are unpleasant, and a smaller number have been referred, by his parents, to the police, in the ordinary way that any family would refer them and without any assistance from anybody at the palace.

Nobody screens his post. There is no household officer whose function that is, because there is no household officer at all, and the arrangement by which a fifteen-year-old’s correspondence is opened by his mother at a kitchen table is not an arrangement anybody designed. Anneliese Hartigan does it because somebody has to and there is nobody else, and this is the most concrete illustration available of what the refusal to appoint him actually means in practice.

Religion

The Hartigans are Catholic in the ordinary Wisconsin manner, which is to say culturally and intermittently.

They attend at Christmas and Easter and at the deaths and marriages of relatives. Both children were baptised. Neither parent would describe the household as devout and neither would describe it as anything else either.

Frederick’s own position is Anglican and establishment-adjacent in a way the Hartigans find faintly exotic and have never discussed with him. He has never been to church with them and has never been invited. The Register mentions religion only to record that in this friendship it has been entirely without significance, which is worth stating in a Realm where the Crown’s relation to establishment is a live constitutional subject and where a great many people have assumed otherwise.

The two courts

He has never met Lukas Brandt

The two boys occupy the same position in two allied monarchies, are the same age within a year, and have never met, corresponded or spoken.

The assumption that they have is widespread and the Register can find no basis for it. Lukas Brandt is Page and Gefährte to Alexander I in Prussia; Theo Hartigan is nothing whatever to anybody in America, and the difference is not a matter of degree. Brandt holds a warrant, has a household secretary, attends functions in a defined capacity and has been photographed beside a reigning sovereign in an official role. Theo has been photographed outside his own front door.

Frederick and Alexander are first cousins and are in contact. Their friends are not, and no one has proposed that they should be, and the notion that there exists some fraternity of royal companions across the monarchies of Europe is a press invention with nothing behind it.

What each court got wrong

Prussia presented an obligation as an honour. Its household offered three children an appointment framed as a distinction, did not set out clearly what it forbade, and then found that a boy who had never been told he must not see state papers had been present when something was said that he should not have heard. The rules were written afterwards.

America presented an absence as a protection, which it genuinely was, and did not notice that the same absence removed every safeguard the Prussian arrangement supplies. There was nobody to telephone. There was nobody to open the post. There was nobody in the room in September 2027 whose job it was to say that the boy should be asked before his name was published.

Both households acted in good faith, both were criticised, and the criticisms are opposites. The Register sets them side by side because the comparison is the most useful thing in this article: there is no arrangement under which a child near a throne is safe, and the two most thoughtful courts in Europe have now demonstrated the two different ways of failing.

Milwaukee since

The visits

There have been four return visits since the family was named and each has been more difficult than the last.

The first, at Christmas 2027, passed without incident because nobody had yet worked out that they were coming. The second was photographed. By the third, in the summer of 2028, the family was recognised at the airport, and Anneliese Hartigan’s brother, who had driven to collect them, was asked for a comment on his way to the car park.

The visits are now planned in the way that other families plan a difficult journey, with arrival times chosen to be inconvenient and stays shortened. The children’s grandmother, who is eighty-one and does not travel, sees them for fewer days a year than she did before 2027.

The Grand Duchy’s interest

Wisconsin has been unable to decide whether it is delighted or embarrassed, and has expressed both.

A member of the Landtag proposed a civic reception, which the family declined through an intermediary. A language society approached Theo directly, which his mother regarded as the single worst-judged approach anybody has made, on the ground that it went to a child rather than to his parents. The Grand Duke’s household has said nothing at all, and the family have been told privately, by somebody in a position to know, that this is deliberate and is meant kindly.

The Grand Duchy’s press is not party to the capital’s understanding and has never been asked to be. This has been raised twice with the Royal Household, once by the family and once by a Wisconsin newspaper proprietor who wished to be released from an arrangement he had never been offered. Nothing has been done, and the gap is the mechanism by which the family’s home was taken away from them.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• George V, King since 31 October 2028, formerly Prince Frederick, who is enrolled at school as Frederick Hanover
• Kittyhawk, the loss of the King’s aircraft, on the second day of which he went to Columbia Palace
• Lukas Brandt, who holds in Prussia the appointment the Household refused to make
• Alexander I, German Emperor and King of Prussia, Frederick’s first cousin, whose court took the opposite decision
• Ernest V, who asked after a bus driver and a nurse by name
• Wisconsindeutsch, the language that survives because nobody ever made it worth keeping
• Grand Duchy of Wisconsin, which the family still calls home and can no longer visit quietly
• The May Day Bombings, and the security settlement whose characteristic harm is invisibility rather than friction

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