Inside King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima of the Netherlands’ romantic royal wedding album

Royal Wedding of Prince Willem-Alexander and Máxima Zorreguieta Cerruti, 2002

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King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, who will soon attend King Charles’s Coronation, celebrates his 56th birthday today. The Dutch king, who ascended to the throne after the abdication of his mother, Princess Beatrix, in 2013, is a father of three daughters, including heir-to-the-throne Princess Catharina-Amalia, and Princess Alexia, who studies at UWC Atlantic, in Wales. He is also a loving husband to Queen Máxima, whom he married on 2 February 2002. Here, to celebrate his birthday, Tatler looks back at their romantic royal wedding.

Royal wedding bells pealed across Amsterdam, as the then Prince Willem-Alexander, heir to the throne, wed his Argentine fiancée of just under a year, Máxima Zorreguieta Cerruti. The couple’s engagement had been announced in 2001 by the prince’s mother, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and the ring featured a unique orange oval-shaped diamond – perhaps a nod to the family’s House of Orange name. It was the Netherlands’ second royal wedding that decade, with Prince Willem-Alexander’s younger brother Prince Constantijn tying the knot the year prior to him.