Born to Rule: Five Reigning Consorts, Granddaughters of Queen Victoria

by Julia P. Gelardi

  Queen Marie’s breakfast meetings used to amuse the gruff King of England. At lunches with King George, Marie recorded how “he liked to tease me, endlessly” about them.33 Yet those breakfast meetings yielded practical help. Around a large round table she assembled politicians, businessmen, military men; anyone who might come to Romania’s aid. Two of the most assiduous attendees also happened to be two of the queen’s most devoted admirers, Joe Boyle and Waldorf Astor.

  After her London visit, Marie returned to Paris, where enthusiasm remained undiminished. Everywhere she went, a crush of people strained to see the exotic Queen of Romania, cheering her every move. One individual, however, was immune to Romania’s effervescent queen. President Woodrow Wilson did not succumb to Marie’s charm offensive. Edith Wilson, the president’s wife, who accompanied him to his audience with the queen, found Marie looking “very becoming” in a “soft grey dress.” But the queen set off on the wrong foot when, during this first meeting, she pontificated about Russian laws on sexual relations and their impact on Romania. Seeing she was getting nowhere with Wilson, Marie suddenly stopped to show Mr. Wilson a photograph of Princess Ileana, saying, “This, Mr. President, is a picture of my youngest daughter, Ileana. My love child I call her. Is she not lovely? My other girls are blonde, like me; but she—oh she is dark and passionate.” The comment fell spectacularly flat. One of Wilson’s aides was shocked by the queen’s outspokenness, mumbling after the meeting: “Well, in all the experience I have never heard a lady talk about such things. I honestly did not know where to look, I was so embarrassed.”34

  Though Marie never dented Wilson’s armor, she did leave Paris a success. Loaded onto her train were food, medicines, and other supplies for the relief of Romania. Much more was to follow. Just as important, in granting nearly all that the country wanted, the Peace Conference resulted later that year in Romania Mare—Greater Romania—in the process doubling Ferdinand and Marie’s kingdom, to 295,000 square kilometers. Most of the Banat and Bukovina, southern Dobruja, and Bessarabia were absorbed, as was the coveted Transylvania. It was a complete triumph for Marie and for Romania; as one observer put it, “I know of no one who went away from Paris with more satisfactory annexations than did Marie of Roumania.…The Queen arrived at the Peace Conference from a kingdom numbering eight million subjects. She departed the ruler of eighteen million.”35 Grand Duchess Marie, who came to live for a little while in Romania after the war, concluded that Queen Marie, “by her charm, beauty, and ready wit could obtain anything she desired.”3

  As the war dragged on, Queen Maud found the separation from her English relatives difficult. After her birthday on 26 November 1916, Maud wrote: “Oh, I missed you all so much on the 26th and felt cheerless thinking of it being the third year in a row where I have not been ‘home’ to see you all. It feels tougher for each year that passes—And the future seems so uncertain, and this terrible war is continuing with all its misery and suffering.”37 A year later, her yearning desire to see her family in England and return to Appleton was still strong, as she told Queen Mary at the end of 1917: “I fear we will all suffer this winter in many ways, but do pray for better & happier times in the spring, there is so much one longs to talk about but daren’t write, it is all very hard being separated so long, I am dying to see you all again.”38

  Queen Ena of Spain was equally anxious to return to England, where her mother lived. Not long after the armistice, Ena sent off a letter to King George V.Thrilled that war had at last ended, Ena’s letter was also tinged with pride in being an Englishwoman, which naturally meant a longing for England:

  Though far away from you all, my heart & thoughts have constantly been in England. You can understand how trying my position has often been among the many conflicting interests of a neutral court & how hard to disguise one’s true feelings, as the news was good or bad for the Allies. But now in this wonderful moment of England’s great victory, when your feelings of pride & relief must be almost too big for words, I wish by one short line to tell you how truly I rejoice with you in this supreme hour & what great pride I feel at having been born an Englishwoman with English traditions. The excitement here has been intense & the Allied Flags are displayed in most of the streets.39

  Ena’s letter was soon followed by one from Maud, “wild with excitement at the idea of at last coming home and seeing you all again! It seems all like a dream, to me, everything has changed so quickly from the awful war into peace.”40 In October 1919, Ena wrote to her English relations, “You can’t think how we are both [Ena and Alfonso] looking forward to seeing you again after all these long sad years that we have not met.”41 As soon as they possibly could, both cousins were off to visit relations in England. When it came time to celebrate her fiftieth birthday, in November 1919, Maud preferred to do so in England. An ecstatic Maud wrote to Queen Mary: “It was a joy to spend the day here again after six years!”42

  Although she had been Queen of Norway for nearly fifteen years, Maud remained simple and unaffected. Especially in England, she could forget easily who she was. When Edith Wilson visited London just prior to the opening of the Paris Peace talks, she was taken aback by her audience with Maud, Toria, and Queen Alexandra. Having been introduced simply to “Maud” and “Victoria” by the queen, Mrs. Wilson was surprised to hear Princess Victoria ask: “Would it be asking too much if I requested you to sign my book?” Queen Maud then clasped her hands together and added: “Oh, I so wanted the same thing, but alas, my trunks have not come; so I have no book and must miss this great opportunity.” The two sisters watched Edith Wilson sign Princess Victoria’s autograph book: “Edith Bolling Wilson.” Mrs. Wilson then heard them exclaim together: “Oh, you sign three names.” As Maud seemed “even more desolated at the loss of such an autograph,” recounted Mrs. Wilson, “I asked if she would like me to sign on a sheet of the paper bearing the royal crest which was on the desk, and she seemed enchanted by the suggestion.”43

  In the postwar years, energetic as ever, Marie immersed herself in work. Famine relief was a priority. The Americans proved to be generous givers. Herbert Hoover, though no great fan of Romania or Queen Marie, sent provisions, as did the American Red Cross.

  Queen Marie’s urgent desire to help the Romanian people was based on very human feelings of compassion and pity, but she was also aware that in order to keep communism at bay, her people needed to be fed, and fed quickly. She feared that should the Romanians succumb to Bolshevik propaganda, her countrymen were bound to die by the thousands in an orgy of violence similar to what had taken place in Russia. Among those Marie enlisted for help was her faithful Colonel Boyle. One list the queen gave Boyle was staggering. She asked him to procure 70 farm tractors, 200 threshing machines, 650 hand threshers, 1,000 raking machines, 1,500 mowers, 1,500 seeders, 3,000 reaping machines, 2,375 carloads of Manitoba wheat, 133,000 spades and shovels, 190,000 garden forks, and 600,000 pickaxes. “The quicker we are aided the better for our general peace and the better for the throne,” went the attached message, along with a line bound to strike a chord in Joe Boyle’s heart: “Marie—The Queen You Are So Faithfully Serving.”44

  Having succeeded in separating Carol and Zizi, Ferdinand and Marie now found themselves reluctantly allowing the couple to get back together. Carol had taken up with a milliner whose ambitions knew no bounds; hence the reappearance of Zizi. In the midst of solving Prince Carol’s problems, Queen Marie also had to contend with a new war, against Hungary, led by the Communist Béla Kun. In May 1919, Lenin’s Soviet Union, supporting Kun, declared war on Romania. The Romanians, though, defeated Kun’s armies in July.

  In the meantime, Prince Carol, ordered abroad on an official trip, responded by shooting himself in the leg. When Carol was ordered to join Romanian forces in their push against Kun’s army at the end of July, he balked. An infuriated Queen Marie fired off a letter to her son urging him to join his regiment:

  For the last time, in the name of all you hold sacred, I ask you is it possible that
you can let your regiment go to the front without you…have you lost all sense of honour and duty…? Is it not better to die, a bullet in the head, to be buried in good Roumanian soil than to betray your country.…One day, Carol, you will understand all the dreadful things you are doing.…Make another effort, become a man again…fight like a soldier.45

  Carol fell in, but insulted his parents and Romania by renouncing his right to the throne in August 1919. In January 1920, Zizi gave birth to a son, named Carol Mircea. To Queen Marie’s relief, the child was given his mother’s maiden name for a surname. A month later, Carol told Zizi that they could not marry: he wished to be reinstated as crown prince. He was then promptly dispatched on a world tour. Marie arranged through Joe Boyle that Zizi and her child as well as Carol’s milliner girlfriend and their child were compensated. The queen hoped her errant son would finally take his duties seriously.

  Queen Marie also had to contend with the disappearance of the two men she was closest to, Barbo Stirbey and Joe Boyle. Long looked upon with suspicion as an éminence grise, Stirbey finally left his post as head of the Royal Household in the fall of 1919, in order to spare any further assaults on the dynasty. He took his family on an extended visit to Italy to be away for a while from Marie. But Stirbey’s departure left them both devastated, after seeing each other daily for so many years.

  When Prince Stirbey left his official position with the king’s household and temporarily absented himself from Marie’s side, Ferdinand and Marie were in a quandary as to who to trust for sage and impartial advice. In one instance in 1919, they both turned to Frank Rattigan, of the British Legation in Bucharest. It was a daring move, which momentarily threw Rattigan off. During his audience with the queen, Rattigan reminded her that though he was “deeply touched and honoured by this proof of Their Majesties’ trust, foreign representatives ought in no way to interfere with internal politics.” Marie knew how to sidestep that sticky issue. Rattigan reported to his superior, Lord Curzon: “Her Majesty said she quite understood this, but that she was an Englishwoman asking for my help and advice as an Englishman.” Rattigan could not resist such an appeal, admitting to Queen Marie that “it was only under the strong pressure of the appeal she made to me as an ‘Englishwoman in distress’ that I had ventured to give my advice.”4 Rattigan aided the queen in her quest for help in sorting out some issues concerning Romanian politicians.

  Not long after Stirbey left, Marie had to accept the fact that Colonel Boyle’s presence by her side also had to end. Jealousy from gossips and courtiers over Boyle’s closeness to the queen was one factor, but it was the right time for him to leave Romania. “They one and all torture me about faithful old Boyle and my unshakable belief in him,” lamented Marie. Many could not or would not bring themselves to empathize with this extraordinary friendship, tinged as it was with strong spiritual undertones. “You and I are man and woman and we have come together at a late period of our lives and come together in a way but few could understand,” Marie wrote to Boyle.47 They remained devoted to each other and stayed in touch for the rest of Boyle’s life.

  By the end of 1919, Queen Marie of Romania was exhausted. Yet she dug deep within herself to continue the fight for what was right and good for Romania. As she wrote to her friend, the American dancer, Loie Fuller:

  The “vision” is what is wanting in my people. They speak of it, but they have not got it. Somewhere in the Bible I found these words: “He that hath no vision perisheth”—I try to keep their “vision” before them, some climb up to my side and try to help me but jealousy like an evil pestilence is always ready to tear from me those that are ready to be my right hand.48

  PART FOUR

  Denouement (1920-1969)

  Twenty-four

  CAPITULATION AGAIN

  THE GREEK ROYAL FAMILY FOUND REFUGE IN SWITZERLAND, TAKING up residence in November 1919 at the Hôtel National in Lucerne. During her stay in Switzerland, Sophie wished to live as normal a life as possible. “I wanted to be just like the other guests—I wanted, as they said I was no longer a Queen, not to be a Queen, just to be an ordinary human being.” But she was treated as less than a human being by some of her so-called friends. For what was most painful about her exile, aside from being separated from her son, King Alexander, and being away from her home, was the rebuffs she and her husband were subjected to from old friends, especially English friends. Sophie recalled one particularly painful incident:

  Staying in the hotel were several of my old English friends, whom in days gone by I had known quite intimately. They used to be of my party in the opera; I have danced at their houses, dined with them. One and all, they cut me dead. I shouldn’t have minded that—for, after all, there are ways of cutting people, aren’t there? But they did it in the unkindest way possible, publicly—not only to myself but to my husband—leaving any room that I entered, and staring me straight in the face as they went out. Now—it isn’t like English people to do that, is it? And yet they did. It was not till I picked up some of the English papers, and learnt what they were saying about us over there, that I realized the reason for it.1

  Since they were always a tightly knit group, the Greek royal family’s exile was especially difficult for Sophie. Unlike his older brother, George, Alexander was not trained to be King of the Hellenes. In fact, he was never happier than when tinkering for hours with motorcars, often in overalls. Leaving her favorite son in Athens in trying circumstances at the mercy of Venizelos meant that Sophie never stopped worrying. Besides the political upheaval, however, there was also the issue of King Alexander’s secret engagement to a daughter of one of King Constan-tine’s equerries.

  Alexander’s fiancée, the nineteen-year-old Aspasia Manos, though descended from an illustrious Greek family, was not deemed worthy to be a queen. As in neighboring Romania, it was felt that having a native of the country marry into the ruling dynasty invited trouble. Aspasia’s background did not sit well with many, least of all Queen Sophie, whose letters to her son made this clear, entreating Alexander not to push for the match further lest it lead to a deterioration in King Constantine’s health. For the love-struck young man, alone in Greece with little inclination to battle the hotbed of Greek politics, his parent’s entreaties proved fruitless. Government spies hovered over him; he missed his family; and the propaganda being perpetrated against them all, deeply saddened Alexander. King Alexander’s lonely life only served to increase his yearning to make Aspasia his wife.

  By the summer of 1919, Alexander told Venizelos of his determination to marry. Venizelos managed to put off the controversial wedding; but by November an impatient Alexander had taken matters into his own hands. In an echo of Crown Prince Carol’s elopement with Zizi Lambrino, Alexander married Aspasia in a secret Orthodox ceremony. The reaction in Greece, when news of the marriage eventually leaked out, was predictably unfavorable, prompting the bride to flee for a while. Eventually, Venizelos allowed Aspasia to accompany Alexander on an official trip to Paris in May 1920, provided she not participate in any formal events where she might be mistaken for a queen. The idyll in Paris would prove to be among the couple’s happiest moments.

  Though she disapproved of her son’s marriage, Alexander’s Paris sojourn delighted Queen Sophie. According to Alexander’s uncle, Prince Christopher, “Queen Sophie adored her son and fretted out her heart in secret over him.” Upon hearing of Alexander’s temporary escape from Greece, the queen “shed tears of joy,” for days talking of nothing but the chance to speak to Alexander. “At last,” she sighed, “I shall be able to telephone him.”2

  But when the queen tried to telephone, it was not Alexander who answered but the Greek minister to Paris. “His Majesty is sorry, but he cannot come to the telephone,” was the curt reply. According to Prince Christopher, “Queen Sophie went quietly away from the telephone. She said nothing, but the disappointment in her face wrung one’s heart.” Alexander was never told that his mother had telephoned. Still, the queen continued to follow news of
her son, cutting out “every scanty little notice in the newspapers referring to him…[hanging] on to the words of such friends as were able to see him occasionally.”3 Queen Sophie’s great-grandson, Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia, familiar with the “striking, emotional letters” exchanged between King Alexander and his parents in exile, has noted that Sophie “was very warm in these letters, extremely concerned.”4 Tragically for Queen Sophie, her anxieties over her son were to grow heavier.

  In September 1920, King Alexander was bitten by a gatekeeper’s pet monkey at Tatoi. Blood poisoning set in, and in no time, the king lay dying. When word reached Queen Sophie of the incident, she realized that her son was seriously ill. Her request to travel to Greece was cruelly denied by the Greek government, fearful that her appearance might incite royalists to rally round the king and his mother. Prince Christopher recalled that “from the very first moment she had a premonition that her boy would not get better and begged the authorities, almost going on her knees to them, to let her go to him.”5 Frantic with despair, Sophie asked her mother-in-law, Queen Olga, to try to obtain permission to go to Alexander. Queen Olga was allowed to travel to Greece, and Sophie then agonized over each telegram that arrived from there.

  Wracked with a high fever, in excruciating pain, the king could be heard screaming by those outside the palace. He fell into fits of delirium, asking for his mother to the very end. Aspasia, who was four months pregnant, nursed him devotedly throughout the ordeal, which lasted for several weeks. After a journey delayed by stormy seas, Queen Olga arrived at Alexander’s bedside—but she was too late. He had died just hours before, on 25 October 1920. Alexander was twenty-seven years old.

  Recalling that momentous day, Prince Nicholas wrote that “on the day of his death they had already telegraphed from Athens that nothing could be done. Yet, in spite of that, the distracted mother never gave up hope, and bombarded her doctor with questions. She stayed up till late in the night, continually sending to ask if any message had arrived.” Though Nicholas and the doctor had seen the telegraph late at night announcing Alexander’s death, they kept the news from King Constantine and Sophie to allow them some much-needed rest. It was broken the next morning. “The moments that followed,” recorded Nicholas in his memoirs, “are too sacred to speak of.”