After Ferdinand was given an ultimatum—Hélène or the throne—much as he believed he loved the girl, he gave her up, with abject apologies to his parents and his uncle for causing them so much angst. To cure his broken heart, he was sent on a Grand Tour of Western Europe to meet eligible young princesses, bearing in his pocket a handwritten list of candidates that King Carol had compiled for him.
Missy was the first name on Carol’s list, so Ferdinand requested her photograph before their first meeting. A decade older than the fifteen-year-old princess, Ferdinand had already become enchanted by her photo by the time they saw each other in Cassel; it was the occasion of Missy’s first adult appearance in society. She thought the family was merely visiting her cousin Kaiser Wilhelm. Little did she know, after her mother bought her a new mauve gown (her favorite color), and slyly schemed to have her seated next to Ferdinand at dinner, that she was being scouted.
But nothing came of it, at least not immediately. Berlin was filled with worldly belles, and although she was slender and fair, the sheltered Missy, a mere Backfisch, or teenager, failed to make an impression with any of the sophisticated grown men she met during her visit. After one week, she was whisked back to the less cosmopolitan confines of Coburg.
Meanwhile, over in England, the Waleses wondered why their boy George hadn’t heard from Missy in two years. Owing to the death of his older brother in January 1892, he was now second in line to Victoria’s throne. What was not to like? George wrote to Missy to reopen the lines of communication. Unbeknownst to him, her mother had intercepted his correspondence and responded on Missy’s behalf. The duchess ghostwrote a Dear John letter to George, informing him that he should not have taken their Malta flirtation seriously.
George would go on to wed his late brother’s fiancée Princess Mary of Teck, while the duchess brought Missy to Munich and spent the spring of 1892 finding ways to throw her daughter and Ferdinand together: at dinner parties, outdoor excursions, visits to galleries, theater parties, and shopping ventures. The elder Marie never passed up a chance to enumerate the merits of Eastern Europe. Being Russian herself made her feel infinitely superior to other mortals, but Roumania was the next-best thing, being at the time the easternmost country in Western Europe.
The duchess—who firmly believed that princesses should marry when they were young, before they began “to think too much and to have too many ideas of their own which complicate matters”—was relentless in her intent to demonstrate the merits of wedding a cultivated German prince. All her daughter needed to do was say yes to the match. Ultimately, Missy’s maternal instincts, untested as they were, were aroused by Ferdinand’s overwhelming shyness. Even though he was a decade older than she was, it gave her “a longing to put him at ease . . . in fact you wanted to help him.” Missy was also charmed by the prince’s unpretentious and amiable character.
Despite their ten-year age gap and the fact that Ferdinand spoke no English, he had been given no more preparation for marriage, or evidently for anything else, than Missy had. As she would later write in her memoirs, “We were brought up in a Fool’s Paradise. . . . We had been kept in glorious, but I cannot help considering dangerous and almost cruel, ignorance of all realities . . . it was . . . a deliberate blinding against life as it truly is, so that with shut eyes and perfect confidence we would have advanced towards any fate.”
The couple became engaged at the Neue Palais in Potsdam. Missy wrote, “How he ever had the courage to propose is . . . a mystery to me; but he did and I accepted—I just said ‘Yes,’ as though it had been quite a natural and simple word to say . . . and with that ‘Yes’ I sealed my fate.” The duchess was “radiant” that her plan had come to fruition.
The match had been an inside job, instigated and prodded by the Duchess of Edinburgh. Missy’s father had not been present at the announcement of her engagement and had yet to meet her fiancé. The princess’s conscience was troubled that the English side of her family was not on board with her prospective marriage. Queen Victoria would ultimately realize what a dismal, inglorious union it was, her clever, vivacious granddaughter sacrificed to be a breeding cow in Europe’s hinterlands. She would privately speak of Missy as “a great victim . . . to be enormously pitied.”
More troubling to the “victim” herself was the ever-present shadow of King Carol, der Onkel, as Ferdinand referred to him, inserting his autocratic uncle’s name into every conversation. The crown prince couldn’t even visit the privy (or so it appeared) without der Onkel’s permission. According to Missy, “When he spoke of him something very like anxiety and not far removed from dread came into his eyes; one felt that a shiver ran down his spine.”
At least, according to Missy, the fiancés got along like gangbusters during the period of their engagement. “Nando and I were two loving companions advancing towards perfect bliss, towards plenitude and fulfillment, beneath the kindly, indulgent smiles of those who were going to make our road easy for us and our life all joy. . . .”
Having secured the marriage she desired for her daughter, the Duchess of Edinburgh then began to wrangle over Missy’s wedding plans. The Sigmaringen branch of the Hohenzollerns were Catholics and the British royal family were Protestants; by wedding Ferdinand, Missy would have to renounce all claims to the English throne, even though she was miles down the line of succession. Additionally, the official religion of their mutual adopted country was neither of their own; they would be expected to raise their future offspring in the Roumanian Orthodox Church. Queen Victoria, who wanted her grandchild wed at Windsor, was none too pleased that Missy could not have the ceremony there, because she was not marrying another Anglican. The pope was miffed, because the Hohenzollerns were blowing off their Catholicism for the sake of the Roumanian throne. Then there was a bit of a hiccup when Victoria asked King Carol whether it was true that his nephew had previously been engaged to another girl. Embarrassed that HRM had somehow gotten wind of the Hélène Vacaresco episode, the king lied through his teeth and blamed it on his wife’s fanciful imagination. As the flighty Carmen Sylva was legendary for her whimsy, Queen Victoria swallowed Carol’s fib. Missy, too, had no idea that there had indeed been a prior love and that Ferdinand “was supposed to be travelling about with a broken heart.”
Ultimately, the main reason the wedding ceremony was postponed until January 1893 was to wait for Missy to grow up a bit. As it was, she would wed at the ripe old age of seventeen. Meanwhile, 1892 was spent paying visits to various branches of both sides of everyone’s family. Although she was thrilled with all her new clothes, Missy felt “excruciatingly shy and ridiculously self-conscious” during all the requisite changes of wardrobe throughout each day, as if she were just a girl playing dress-up. “Occasionally I felt nothing but a negligible accessory to my voluminous sleeves, in which I almost entirely disappeared. I may have been smart but I was certainly not chic. I do not think Mamma considered it quite proper or bon ton for a princess to be chic.”
“Nando,” as everyone called Missy’s dark-haired, mustachioed fiancé, doted on her with puppyish ardor, but the more she grew acquainted with him, the more she realized how ill-suited they were. As Marie of Roumania recollected in her memoirs, “. . . on my side all my feelings, ideas and visions were based upon an entirely erroneous conception of life. I was happy in a slightly troubled way. I was strangely incurious. I did not fear the future, I was too much a born optimist and idealist to fear anything. . . .” Not only that, “I was to be led utterly innocent up to the altar. . . . But there were occasional moments when it suddenly came to me that Nando and I had not perhaps exactly the same tastes about everything. . . .” Marie was an outdoorsy, sporty girl who adored horses; Nando preferred the cultured refinement of indoor pursuits.
Nonetheless, the pair mutually enjoyed a significant amount of premarital kissing when they were together; when they were apart, they exchanged numerous billets-doux. Lonely without her, Ferdinand wrote daily to his
fiancée, assuring Missy that there never before had been a duo that “loved each other more and were more happy than we two.” He insisted that they demonstrate to their respective sets of parents how grateful they were for arranging their marriage, adding that he had already promised his own father and mother that he and Missy would be “good and obedient children”—this from a man nearly twenty-seven years old.
A few days before the royal wedding, the Duke of Edinburgh spoke privately with his daughter to inform her of two things: that he was giving Missy a dowry of a million French francs, and that he’d always harbored different plans for her future (perhaps an unspoken allusion to the much-desired match with her cousin George).
On the wintry morning of January 10, 1893, Missy and Ferdinand suffered through a trio of wedding ceremonies: civil, Catholic, and Protestant. Missy discovered that the Latin chants during the Catholic ritual had a hypnotically relaxing effect on her. This ceremony was much grander than the subsequent one. A British naval chaplain conducted the Anglican rite in a small anteroom of Sigmaringen Castle’s Ancestors’ Hall.
Missy’s still-flat teenaged bosom was tightly laced into her wedding gown with its bell-shaped skirt and stylish leg-of-mutton sleeves. The dress and train were constructed of corded white silk embellished with crystals, pearls, and silver sequins. She disliked lace veils, and therefore had received a special dispensation to wear one made of tulle. It was secured to her fashionably frizzled hair with a diamond tiara wreathed in the orange blossoms her grandmother had henceforth made a tradition for English brides. Throughout the long day, dressed according to her mother’s taste and not her own, Missy felt as though she were in a dreamworld, playing a role and lacking the dignity to live up to the weightiness of her “overpowering finery” and the gravity of the occasion.
Ferdinand’s father gave the newlyweds the nearby hunting Schloss of Krauchenwies for their honeymoon. The castle was picturesque and romantic in a German fairy tale sort of way, but Missy, more properly Marie of Roumania now, was terribly homesick for her family and was immediately overwhelmed with the burdens of being a wife. It was winter, with nothing to do. Both spouses were just getting to know each other and too shy to experiment. “Nando was not a man of high spirits, nor was he imaginative, so he was quite at a loss how to entertain so childishly young a wife.”
Evidently, their maiden efforts at marital sex were a disaster. Ferdinand was in love with Marie, but clearly more exuberant than sensitive to her needs in bed. She described him as “terribly, almost cruelly in love. In my immature way I tried to respond to his passion, but I hungered and thirsted for something more. . . . There was an empty feeling about it all; I still seemed to be waiting for something that did not come.”
Marie was waiting for the magic and fireworks. The tingling of arousal that she had naively dreamed might happen. The tenderness of marital lovemaking. She had hoped for a fairy tale. She got it, but the story was closer to Beauty and the Beast. Embarrassed at the way his clumsy attempts at passion were received, Ferdinand felt rejected by his child bride. Marriage was, as Marie would later describe, “a bad shock,” and it took her a long time to “adjust my . . . mind . . . to accept it.”
As Marie would soon discover, real life had hard edges. The palace in Bucharest that was to be her new home was surrounded by iron railings. The dimly illuminated “Altdeutsch and bad rococo” rooms, which Marie pronounced a “disaster” of bad taste, were hung with depressing religious paintings, although several of the canvases were El Grecos. The autocracy and austerity of King Carol’s persona permeated every aspect of life in the royal precincts of Roumania. No one was permitted to enjoy themselves. In fact, Carol had suggested that his nephew take only a Honigtag—a honey day, rather than a honeymoon, or month, to celebrate his nuptials.
According to der Onkel, the purpose of life was work and devotion to the governance of the realm. Ferdinand and Carol spent all day, every day, in governing; every night was spent discussing governing over “such huge cigars, you never could hope that they would come to an end,” while Marie grew sick from inhaling their fumes. Her only purpose was to make babies. At the formal balls and receptions, the king forbade her from dancing with any of the young men. Compelled to accept invitations only from the old geezers, the tall, blond, athletic, and free-spirited princess soon lost her desire to dance as well.
Neither Ferdinand nor Marie could choose their own servants; nor were they allowed the society of friends or acquaintances, because everyone in Roumania, except for the annoying bohemian queen, was a social inferior. Friends were dangerous, argued Carol. He decreed that his heirs should form no attachments outside the immediate family, as it might lead to their becoming allied with one or another of Roumania’s political parties. The crown prince and princess were not even permitted to visit anyone’s private residence or to set foot inside a foreign embassy. As a consequence of der Onkel’s rigidity and Ferdinand’s early disappointment over the Hélène Vacaresco incident, Marie wrote that “Nando . . . had lost his faith in people: he had become painfully suspicious and was on the defensive even against those who were attached to us. This attitude on the part of my young husband did much to make our early years difficult and painful; he trusted no one and felt that isolation was my only safety.”
While Ferdinand meekly acquiesced to his uncle at every turn, Marie chafed against it. “Cast out from Paradise,” and wallowing in self-pity, she “felt like a prisoner behind iron bars peeping out upon” the “impossibly happy world” she’d left behind. Her lazy husband was tiresome. Her daily routine, taking nearly every meal with King Carol, relieved by only a few breaks for kissing and fondling with Nando, was tiresome. Eager as the Duchess of Edinburgh had been to marry her off to Ferdinand, she had neglected to educate her daughter about the birds and the bees. After only two weeks of marriage, the crown princess complained to her lady-in-waiting that she felt sick and miserable. The older woman immediately diagnosed her condition, and Marie was shocked to discover that she’d already become pregnant. Royal mothers are supposed to be delighted at the prospect of bearing an heir; it’s the raison d’être for their marriages. Not so Marie of Roumania. She took the news “tragically,” feeling as though she “had been trapped.”
During Marie’s first pregnancy, a tremendous family contretemps took place behind the scenes regarding her delivery. The Roumanian clergy wanted to control the birth of the potential heir to their throne and insisted that the crown princess endure a natural childbirth, suffering in agony for the sins of Eve. Queen Victoria and Marie’s mother wouldn’t hear of it. They secured the services of one of England’s royal physicians, Dr. Playfair, who had been successfully tranquilizing his patients with the innovative painkiller chloroform.
Thanks to chloroform, Marie had “a very easy time,” in Playfair’s words, giving birth to a son on October 15, 1893. The doctor, however, wasn’t the one enduring her labor pains; Marie herself reported that the chloroform availed little. Missy “felt like turning my face to the wall, unwilling to take up a life again in which such pain could exist.” She didn’t share her adopted subjects’ enthusiasm for the new heir, and was annoyed by the thunderous cannon fire that announced Prince Carol’s safe arrival into the world. She felt no sense of elation or accomplishment, but rather that she was the victim of a grand conspiracy—the collaborators being her biology, her family, and her destiny. It was the same fate as every female royal—to be a well-dressed, bejeweled broodmare. Perhaps Marie also believed she had been led to the sacrifice too young. Prince Carol’s christening day on October 29, 1893, was also her eighteenth birthday.
Despite Marie’s determination at the time to never become pregnant again, within three months of giving birth to the prince, she was once more enceinte. “One feels so humiliated at being so ugly. I don’t know if all women suffer so much under it as I do! Perhaps it is not right but I cannot help it,” she lamented in a letter to her mother. On October
12, 1894, Marie bore a daughter—this time without anesthesia, at the insistence of the Roumanians, including their queen Elisabeth, for whom the baby, Elisabetha, was named.
But even after two children with Ferdinand, Marie had yet to find her moorings in Roumania. At the time, she felt she had “no real identity; people seemed to dispose of me according to their will. . . .” She was “. . . in harness . . . merely a little wheel in a watch which was keeping Uncle’s [King Carol’s] time but a little wheel which had to do its part, relentlessly, and no one tried to surround that part with any glamour or make it seem worth while; it was all work and no play, I was with a vengeance the stranger in a stranger land. Everything I did seemed always to be wrong and no one understood that when you were young and life runs like fire through your veins, you wanted . . . to laugh, to be foolish with companions of your own age, to use your own faculties, to be a separate entity, someone with a mind of her own, with her own thoughts, her own habits, tastes, ideals, desires.” This is the lament of every princess in Marie’s shoes, before and since.
Marie was finally able to take a break from her restrictive social life in the summer of 1896, during a trip to Russia with her husband for the imperial coronation of her cousins Nicholas and Alexandra. Romanovs made Nando nervous, but Marie, dressed in gold lamé to witness the solemn ritual, was enthralled. This vacation was a revelation. By day, she dazzled everyone with her equestrienne daring. During the evenings, she was the belle of every ball, and it was then and there that she discovered her power to attract and enchant men. Modesty did not come easily. “I rejoice in my beauty. Men have taught me to,” she boldly told one of her many admirers.
Inglorious Royal Marriages Page 37
