His royal contemporaries considered him to be a bloated frog. They thought Juliana pretty much had married a commoner. He was born a count von Biesterfeld and was only elevated to the rank of Prince by his paternal uncle in 1916! The Von Lippe-Biesterfelds were a junior branch and a comital line. His father married a mere Baroness and therefor his mother, Bernhard and his brother were granted only a Comital title von Biesterfeld. So all and all nice and aristocratic but with quite diluted royal lineage. Bernhard came from a relatively poor and irrelevant branch of the House of Lippe. He and his brother Aschwin gained some prominency in the Almanach de Gotha after their uncle Leopold became heir to the ruling House of Lippe and for a few years ruled as Prince of the House of Lippe (until 1918). But Bernilo acted as if he came from this grand German royal background because that was the fairytale the uninformed Dutch people were told and wanted to believe. They saw a prince charming and they fell just as hard for him as Jula did. Only in due time did they realise who they cheered for....a Parvenu.

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He might very well have been "over-privileged, self pleasing and himself over-estimating", and the Lockheed scandal suggests that he was, at best, unscrupulous and at worst, ... well, let's not go there, but "parvenue" he was not. The House of Lippe(-Biesterfeld) descends from Jodocus Herman, Lord of Lippe, who died c. 1096. Although. this descent does not come close to the antiquity of the House of Kung of even that of the Banu Hashim, surely an agnatic descent spanning 1000 years is not "parvenu".