Grandmama of Europe: The Crowned Descendants of Queen Victoria

by Theo Aronson

  All about her now, the air was thick with talk of the hopelessness of continued resistance. She refused to listen. Onto the head of some poor British general who dared suggest that Romania give up the fight, she poured a torrent of abuse. How could he, an Englishman, tell her, an Englishwoman 'and into the bargain a queen', that her country must surrender? 'I am English,' she hurled at yet another dumbfounded general, 'a race that cannot give up.' She could not bear the thought of submission. Heroic schemes chased each other through her fevered mind. She ached to make le grand geste. With part of the army, the sovereigns must cut their way through the 'Russian traitors' to link up with the 'still faithful Cossacks'. There must be la guerre à outrance, with the King and Queen, encircled by their loyal troops, fighting to the very last. Alone, if necessary, like some medieval heroine, she would face the oncoming German hordes.

  'Oh God, if only I were a man, with a man's rights and the spirit I have in my woman's body!' she exclaimed, 'I would fire them to desperate, glorious resistance, coûte que coûte!'

  It was magnificent but it was hardly practical politics. In January 1918, the Germans sent King Ferdinand an ultimatum. The Romanians were to come and treat with them. They were given four days in which to reply. The government resigned and a new government, headed by one of the generals, decided to sue for peace. There was nothing else that they could do. Queen Marie was appalled. 'I cannot resign myself to it, I cannot;' she cried out, 'it breaks my heart, it kills my soul, it is too, too unfair.'

  She was more appalled still on hearing the peace terms. To her, they were quite unacceptable. Yet, if they were not accepted, Romania was to be totally erased from the map of Europe. The country would be divided up among Germany, Austria, Bulgaria and Turkey.

  Poor King Ferdinand, faced with a resolute enemy on one hand and a no less resolute wife on the other, was in a terrible state. Throughout the agonizing days of decision, he tried to have as little as possible to do with Marie. He simply could not face another of her impassioned harangues. Moreover, neither he, nor anyone else at Jassy, was in any doubt whatsoever about her views. But, of course, a blazing, climactic row was bound to come.

  On the day that the King was to preside over the Crown Council specially assembled to accept or reject the peace terms (it was the day on which the peace of Brest-Litovsk was signed between Germany and Russia) things came to a head between husband and wife. 'Woman-like,' says Marie, in what must be the understatement of her life, 'I had my say.' Have her say she certainly did, and even she admits that she might have said too much. 'If we are to die,' runs her subsequent, and no doubt refined, version of her arguments,' let us die with our heads high, without soiling our souls by putting our names to our death warrant. Let us die protestingly, crying out to the whole world our indignation against the infamy which is expected of us.'

  But soil his soul by putting his name to his death warrant King Ferdinand did. The German peace terms were agreed to. To the anguished Marie, the capitulation marked one of the bitterest and most tragic hours of her life; 'dark,' she wails, 'as death'.

  Before going out to meet what she somewhat over-dramatically called 'a fate almost too dark to be conceived', Marie wrote a last letter to her cousin, King George V. She was not too distraught to remember to draw his attention to the sacrifices made by the Romanians and to explain that their defeat was due to the betrayal of their Russian allies and the overwhelming might of their German enemies. She ('for have I not English blood in my veins?') would rather have fought on to the bitter end. As he, however, would fight on and win, she hoped – and here was the core of her letter – that he would not forget Romania in the hour of victory.

  Her fate at the hands of the victors was not nearly as dark as she seems to have imagined it was going to be. Kaiser Wilhelm II was not one for dethroning kings. A new government, sympathetic to the Germans, managed the country's affairs and the royal family remained at Jassy.

  But there was no consoling Marie. Far worse, perhaps, than the anguish of defeat and the shame of capitulation was her feeling of personal failure, of a destiny unfulfilled. In a revealing passage, written in those black days after the surrender, she makes mention of her shattered hopes. 'I thought I was destined to be a happy, brilliant, successful queen;' she wrote, 'all within me seemed to promise this, and I seemed made for that part. But perhaps, on the contrary, my lot is to be a tragic, vanquished queen, ever so much more tragic than Carmen Sylva ever was with all her talk of a martyr's crown. I had no vocation for a martyr's part and yet it looks as though God had singled out Nando and myself to bear a cross which at times seems almost too heavy.'

  3

  The peace of Brest-Litovsk, signed between Russia and Germany on 3 March 1918, had an almost immediate effect on the Russian imperial family. Since late August the year before, the Tsar, the Tsaritsa and their five children had been living in comparative comfort at Tobolsk in Siberia. Even the Bolshevik revolution had not unduly worsened their lot. The troops guarding them had become more truculent and their allowance had been cut down, but their way of life had been little altered. The Tsar kept himself busy by sawing wood, the Tsaritsa by doing handwork and the children by acting and doing lessons.

  They remained a devoted family. Nicholas and the children behaved as simply and as charmingly as always while Alexandra revealed herself as a woman of real nobility of spirit. Her piety, her integrity and her sincerity remained unaltered and to them were added an almost sublime humility and resignation. She never complained, she never felt sorry for herself, she was never bitter. She hoped, as they all did, that they would be released or rescued and that they would live to see better days but she wasted no time railing against fate or regretting past glories. Sustained by her faith in God and her love of her husband and children, she bore her long martyrdom with dignity and calm.

  Her chief worry, now as always, was for the health of her thirteen-year-old son Alexis. During the last few months he had been quite well but in the spring of 1918 he had a fall. The resulting haemorrhage was the worst since the terrible attack at Spala in 1912. With no Rasputin to help her, Alicky was forced to face the trial alone.

  It was at this stage, with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk recently signed, that a new commissar arrived at Tobolsk. His name was Yakovlev. He appears to have had orders to take the imperial prisoners to Moscow. Why they should be wanted there is uncertain. The Tsar imagined that he was going to be forced to sign the Peace Treaty; Kaiser Wilhelm II would far rather have dealings with a fellow monarch than a revolutionary government. But whatever the reasons for the move from Tobolsk it soon became obvious to Commissar Yakovlev that young Alexis was in no state to be transported. He therefore decided that the Tsar alone must accompany him. This flung the Empress into an agonizing dilemma. Without her support, she felt that her husband might be forced into some shameful action. Yet her heart was torn at the thought of leaving Alexis. After a searing period of indecision, she decided to accompany her husband. Alexis was getting better and he would be left in the devoted care of three of his sisters and the tutor Gilliard. The Empress and her daughter Marie would go with the Tsar.

  At dead of night, on 25 April 1918, they set out. After a nightmarish journey in carts through the snow and slush of the spring thaw, they reached Tyumen, where they boarded a train. As the line from Tyumen to Moscow ran through Ekaterinburg, where the local Soviet (the Ural Regional Soviet) was known to be violently antagonistic towards the Tsar, Yakovlev appears to have decided to take another route.

  But the Ural Regional Soviet got wind, of his plan. On nearing Omsk, the train was stopped and diverted to Ekaterinburg. The Tsar was now delivered into the hands of a group of hostile and ruthless men. Whether it was by accident or part of an elaborate plan by the Central government to get rid of the Tsar is uncertain. What is certain is that everyone now washed their hands of responsibility for the imperial family; everyone, that is, other than the Ural Regional Soviet, who loathed them.

  The Tsar and
his party were put into a two-storeyed house in the centre of the town. Within a month they had been joined by the rest of the family from Tobolsk. Gilliard and some of the others were set free. In contrast to their earlier treatment, the imprisonment at Ekaterinburg was both severe and humiliating. The family was closely guarded and allowed only short periods of exercise in the walled-in yard. They were subjected to petty cruelties and lewd indignities. Not even in the lavatory were the young grand duchesses safe from the crudities of their captors: the door had to be left open and on the walls were scrawled obscene drawings of the Empress and Rasputin.

  In July 1918 the Ural Soviet, having all along intended to execute the Tsar, was hurried into taking action. Civil war had broken out in Russia and a strong anti-Bolshevik force was already sweeping westward towards Ekaterinburg. By 12 July it was feared that the town might fall at any day. It was therefore decided that the imperial family must be shot as soon as possible and their remains totally destroyed. Already their ill-disciplined guards had been replaced by an alarmingly efficient force of secret police under the command of a Commissar Yurovsky. It was he who was to organize the mass killing.

  Towards midnight on 16 July, the imperial family was awakened. They were told to dress and hurry downstairs as they were to be moved once more. With the sleepy Alexis in his arms and the rest of the family trailing behind, Nicholas came down. They were ordered into an unfurnished cellar and told to wait. The Tsar asked for chairs for his wife and son. Three chairs were brought in. The Tsar, the Tsaritsa and Alexis sat down. The rest of the little party, including the four grand duchesses, stood behind. Suddenly Commissar Yurovsky and his armed squad entered the cellar. He announced that they were all to be shot. With that the men opened fire. They did not stop until the entire party of eleven people had been massacred. The second last one to die was the young Tsarevich. The last one was his sister Anastasia.

  The bodies were piled onto a lorry and driven some fifteen miles out of Ekaterinburg. Here they were cut to pieces and burned. When they had been reduced to little more than ashes they were flung down a disused mine-shaft. Five days later Ekaterinburg fell to the anti-Bolshevik forces. Of the imperial family they had come to save, there was no trace.

  It was not quite twenty-five years since that morning in Darmstadt when Queen Victoria's breakfast had been disturbed by the news that Alicky and Nicky had become engaged. Hand in hand the flushed and radiant young couple had come to her for her blessing. It had seemed impossible to the old Queen that 'gentle simple Alicky should be the great Empress of Russia'.

  4

  The end of the First World War, in November 1918, saw a wholesale collapse of European monarchy. Throughout Central and Eastern Europe, sovereigns tumbled like skittles. In Germany, the flight of the dethroned Wilhelm II to Holland precipitated the overthrow of a host of lesser kings and reigning princes. In Russia the Tsar had already been murdered. In Austria the old Emperor Franz Josef had died and his successor, the Emperor Karl, deposed. In Bulgaria King Ferdinand, 'Foxy Ferdie', having proved himself not quite foxy enough by joining the Central Powers, was forced to abdicate. In Greece, King Constantine had been driven from his throne. Two pre-war monarchs only withstood the hurricane that swept through the eastern half of Europe: King Peter I of Serbia and King Ferdinand of Romania.

  This meant, of course, that Queen Marie of Romania had been triumphantly and gloriously vindicated.

  Never once, in the dark days of defeat, had she lost faith in ultimate victory. She might have been depressed but she was never entirely without hope. 'For the moment I was beaten,' she wrote, 'this I had to recognize. Beaten yes, but not broken, oh, no, not broken! I was, in fact, biding my time, relentlessly attached to one steady ideal, though for the present it was quite impossible to see whence light might again come to us.'

  Nor did she lose any opportunity of keeping alive Romania's spirit of resistance. She was constantly haranguing the King to stand up to his Germanophile government; Crown Council meetings were forever being interrupted by the arrival of yet another hectoring note from the Queen to the King. She encouraged anti-German talk, action and attitudes. She even, on one occasion, drove into neighbouring Austrian Transylvania with a car-load of supplies and there regaled the peasants with promises of a brighter, Romanian-controlled future.

  And, gradually, things did indeed begin to look brighter. The tide of war had begun to turn. At first slowly, then more quickly, and finally in a rush, the Allied Powers moved towards victory. In a foam of mounting excitement Queen Marie followed these stirring events. Every day brought better news. The Germans were falling back on the Western Front. At the end of September Bulgaria capitulated to the Allied forces moving up from Greece. A month later Turkey dropped out of the war. Five days afterwards Austria capitulated. Revolution broke out in Germany. In Romania, the pro-German government fell. The Romanian army was once more mobilized.

  Queen Marie, who during the last few months had been something of an embarrassment, suddenly found herself being acclaimed. Her flicker of resistance had developed into a great blaze of victory. One day, on returning to Jassy by train after a short holiday, she was given a totally unexpected and overwhelmingly vociferous reception. The station and the streets were packed with cheering people. In language as fulsome as her own, she was welcomed as 'The Guardian Angel of our Great National Dream: the one who through every adversity has never weakened or lost hope and who, like a beacon, has led us through darkness to the great hour of light.'

  Indeed, the Great National Dream seemed to be coming true. For not only had the country been reconquered but territories previously part of the swiftly crumbling Austrian Empire were clamouring to join Romania. Bessarabia had already declared itself annexed to Romania; now deputations arrived from Transylvania and Bucovina asking to be part of the Romanian kingdom. 'The dream of Romania Mare seems to be becoming a reality,' wrote the exultant Marie. 'It is all so incredible that I hardly dare believe it.' She might yet be Empress of all the Romanians.

  On 1 December 1918, King Ferdinand and Queen Marie re-entered Bucharest. It was an unforgettable day: a day of 'wild, delirious enthusiasm'. With the bands crashing and the troops marching and the people cheering, the King and Queen rode their horses through the beflagged streets of their capital. Both were in uniform; on her head Marie wore a grey astrakhan busby (it gave her the look, she says, of 'a healthy, chubby youth') and over her tunic, a long military cape with a fur collar. Through a hail of flowers they made their way towards the Cathedral. At one point they halted to kiss a great cross held up from an assembly of brightly robed priests; at another they were presented with the traditional gift of bread and salt by the mayor of the city. Before the Te Deum, Queen Marie changed out of her uniform into one of her glittering, trailing, diaphanous garments and, so dressed, kneeled in the light of a thousand flickering candles to give thanks for victory.

  Her dream of being a 'happy, brilliant, successful queen' was coming true. Indeed, her most brilliant days still lay ahead.

  PART THREE

  1918 – 1969

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  'Too Exuberant to Last'

  1

  The coming of peace found only three of Queen Victoria's grandchildren on Continental thrones. Maud was the Queen of Norway, Ena was the Queen of Spain and Marie the Queen of Romania. Alicky, the Empress of Russia, was dead; Willie, the German Kaiser, was in exile in Holland; Sophie, the Queen of the Hellenes, was in exile in Switzerland. But the Coburgs were nothing if not resilient and gradually the old Queen's matriarchy began to burgeon once more. The first one to regain her throne was Queen Sophie.

  Ever since the expulsion of King Constantine from Greece in 1917, the royal family had been in Switzerland. For a time they lived in the Villa Werli, belonging to the Dolder Hotel, in Zürich; later they moved to the National Hotel in Lucerne. Their exile, which was bitter enough, was rendered more bitter still by the insulting way in which they were being treated by the French an
d British living in Switzerland. French and British subjects were warned by their respective consuls against having any truck with the exiled family; old friends turned their backs as the King or Queen approached to greet them.

  King Constantine, visibly depressed by the situation, would sit for hours on end, absently twiddling his thumbs. Queen Sophie, on the other hand, kept up a proud, unyielding front. Yet she was suffering as much as he. She was terribly hurt when the two British governesses, Miss St John and Miss Nicholls, were forced to leave her employment lest they lose their passports. She ached to hear from her adored son, Alexander, now King of the Hellenes, but he could not write directly to her. Any little scrap of news about him she cut out of the newspapers; she listened avidly to the reports of those who had seen him.

  Once, on hearing that he was going to be in Paris, she decided to telephone him. For days, says her brother-in-law Prince Christopher, she could talk of nothing else. Her telephone call to her son's suite at his Paris hotel was answered by the Greek Minister in Paris. The Queen asked to speak to her son. For a moment or two the Minister waited. Then he said, 'His Majesty regrets he cannot come to the telephone.' King Alexander was never even told about the call.

  'Queen Sophie went quietly from the telephone,' reports Prince Christopher. 'She said nothing, but the disappointment on her face wrung one's heart.'

  No less distressing for the Queen than this enforced separation from her son was his determination to marry Aspasia Manos. Sophie was enough of a Hohenzollern to disapprove of this proposed match between her son and the daughter of one of King Constantine's equerries. Nor was she alone in her disapproval. Her enemy, the Greek Prime Minister Venizelos, was no less opposed to the idea; he knew that the Greek people would not approve of this marriage between a King and a commoner. He begged Alexander not to be too hasty.