Norway's King Harald V has died at the age of 89. The royal palace in Oslo said he died peacefully on Friday at 6:35 in the morning, at the National Hospital, where he was admitted last week with a rare blood disease. Family members visited him over the final 24 hours, and citizens left flowers outside the palace. He is succeeded on the throne by his son Haakon.

He reigned for 35 years. He will be remembered as a reformer who modernised the monarchy - he married a woman without a noble title, which opened the same freedom to his children. They called him "grandfather of the nation" and "the people's king", a title his father Olav V had carried too.

The king who wept in front of the nation

In July 2011, after Anders Breivik killed eight people with a bomb in Oslo and then a further 69, mostly teenagers, on the island of Utoya, Harald addressed the nation. Weeks later he gave a speech in which he grieved with the victims and their families as a father, grandfather, husband and king. His voice shook and he was on the edge of tears. "I can only imagine the depth of your pain," he said then.

In 2016 he gave a speech still quoted today: that Norwegians come from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Poland, from Sweden, Somalia and Syria, that they believe in God, in Allah, in the Universe or in nothing at all. Not many European monarchs reached for a sentence like that in those years.

A child in exile, an athlete in old age

Born on 21 February 1937, he was three when Hitler attacked Norway. His mother fled with the children across the border into Sweden, and then to the United States at Franklin Roosevelt's invitation. After the war he returned, did his military service and studied at Oxford.

He met Sonja Haraldsen, a businessman's daughter, and waited nine years for his father's permission to marry her. He told him he would stay unmarried if he could not have Sonja. His father relented and the wedding was held at Oslo Cathedral on 29 August 1968. They were married for almost 58 years.

He was also a committed sportsman and environmentalist - one of the founders of the Norwegian branch of the World Wide Fund for Nature, which he led for 20 years, and a sailor who represented Norway at three Olympic Games.

The crises that narrowed the support

The final years were harder than the previous three and a half decades. The son of his daughter-in-law Mette-Marit, Marius Borg Hoiby, was sentenced in June to four years in prison for rape and is appealing the verdict. Before the trial began, documents emerged about Mette-Marit's contacts with Jeffrey Epstein, for which she apologised and admitted poor judgement. Two days after the trial ended she had a lung transplant for pulmonary fibrosis.

Support for the monarchy fell from 72 to 54 percent, and almost half of Norwegians think Mette-Marit should not become queen. Even so, the criticism was rarely aimed at Harald personally. The historian Trond Noren Isaksen puts it in a sentence that says a great deal about the institution: when things go wrong, people blame everything except the king.

That is the biggest question left to the new king Haakon. He inherits a throne whose popularity rested on one man rather than on the institution itself. How long can a crown live off personal affection for whoever wore it?