Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  Later that year, Marie and Ferdinand received a visit from her brother, Alfred, who had brought along their cousin, Russian Grand Duke Boris, two years Marie’s junior. The duo stayed long enough for Marie and Boris to commence a flirtation that did not pass unnoticed. The news of a possible royal affair even reached Coburg. Marie was smitten by her Russian cousin’s carefree personality and sentimental nature, his tremendous charm, enchanting smile, and his husky voice with its slight lisp that she loved to mimic. They would remain friends for many years, and, according to Marie’s memoirs, Boris would “occasionally declare with a deep sigh that I had been the first love of his life.”

  Defending her conduct to her mother, Marie explained how different her temperament was from her husband’s. “Perhaps,” she wrote, “I have not been as nice to Nando as I ought to have been, and am too easily irritated. . . . What is so difficult is that he always first says no to everything.” Marie assured the duchess that she still loved Ferdinand—she just wasn’t in love with him anymore. At the same time, she conceded that there was no other man she’d prefer to be married to, and admitted that “the pleasant thing . . . with other men is just that they have no right over you . . . . I am born with a desperate desire of my own physical bodily liberty,” she would later insist. “My husband sees me cry, he is awfully sorry, he wants to console me, he has every intention to do so, his heart is full of love, he begins to kiss me then he forgets that, and tries to console me by giving way to just that, that I dread most on earth.”

  Was Marie admitting to her mother that she abhorred having sex with her own husband? How un-Victorian to speak of such matters! How unroyal to admit her unhappiness!

  Of course, Marie was married to a very Victorian and very royally entitled man, and therein lay the crux of their connubial problems: “What does one find, a man intensely in love with you, & who has the right to ask everything of you, when you ask him to read to you in the evening he hurries over it only to get to bed for other amusements which he does not perhaps think is a one-sided amusement, when one wants to talk with him, he is reading the newspapers, when one says one is lonely, he says you have the children, he is perfectly devoted to you, and yet he will not give up even a cigar to sit a moment with you!”

  The devoted, yet clueless Ferdinand came down with typhoid fever in May of 1897, and the family prepared for his imminent demise. He had the strength to pull through, although the disease, and his lengthy convalescence, left him much altered in appearance. Nando’s physique was gaunt, his face pale and haggard, and he had lost almost all of his hair. Only thirty-two, he appeared significantly older.

  Ferdinand was an invalid for so long that King Carol had assigned an aide-de-camp to attend to Marie’s needs as crown princess. It was a pure case of sending the fox to guard the henhouse. The dashing Lieutenant Zizi Cantacuzène was already an officer in Marie’s regiment of Hussars. He was short, dark, and a flamboyant dresser, and his sense of mischief at a time when Marie sorely needed her own spirits lifted made for a combustible combination. Soon the pair were spending a good deal of time together, a fact duly noted by a governess to the royal children, who reported to the king the crown princess’s untoward behavior with her aide-de-camp.

  In Roumania, extramarital affairs, even royal ones, didn’t raise more than an eyebrow and a shrug. It was a lusty society and such things were de rigueur. However, Marie’s German and English relations found it utterly unacceptable (despite the fact that nearly all of her male relatives had mistresses). Women were expected to behave with complete propriety. And Marie’s antics with her aide-de-camp engendered gossip across Europe. As Marie’s aunt Vicky (the German empress, and Kaiser Wilhelm’s mother) wrote to her daughter, who was then crown princess of Greece, “I think Missy of Roumania is more to be pitied than you. . . . The King is a great tyrant in his family, & has crushed the independence in Ferdinand so that no one cares about him, & his beautiful & gifted little wife, I fear, gets into scrapes, & like a butterfly, instead of hovering over the flowers, burns her pretty wings by going rather near the fire!”

  The king had granted the crown princess permission to chaperone Zizi’s thirteen-year-old orphaned cousin about Bucharest, which permitted Marie to spend even more time with her aide- de-camp. But after she was criticized for using the child as a screen to shield her adulterous affair, and she had lost the letter proving that the visit had been vetted, Marie’s romance with Zizi Cantacuzène became a cause célèbre. Queen Victoria scolded King Carol for letting the gossip spread across the globe. His Majesty warned Marie, “We of course all know that Nando may not be so very entertaining. But that does not mean that you may find your entertainment elsewhere.” Zizi was transferred to a different regiment that was posted out of the country.

  The king sent Marie and Ferdinand off to Coburg for an enforced vacation and commanded them to reconcile. The crown prince returned to Roumania first. Soon after his arrival, he sent urgent word to Marie that their oldest child, Prince Carol, had been stricken with typhoid. She rushed back to Bucharest, only to have her way barred by the same governess who had ratted out her liaison with Zizi.

  But Nando defended his wayward wife. For perhaps the first time ever, he stood up for something, ordering the governess to “Stand aside. The Crown Princess is the child’s mother.”

  If only this remark had been the beginning of a true understanding between the spouses. Each owned a share of the responsibility for the failure of their marriage. Marie did not keep her passions in check. But she was yoked to someone it was so difficult to admire. As her mother wrote to King Carol, Ferdinand’s “laziness, his . . . antipathy for all work, for any serious endeavor and . . . worst of all, his sensual passion for Missy [which] finished by . . . repulsing her,” were hardly a recipe for success. “Nando will himself avow that he treated his wife like a mistress, caring little for her emotional well-being in order to constantly assuage his physical passions.” Lest Carol should imagine that Marie’s adultery with Zizi, if indeed their flirtation had gone that far, condemned her more than Ferdinand, the duchess reminded the king that “as a positive fact,” she knew Nando had enjoyed his own extramarital liaisons.

  When Marie became pregnant for the third time in 1899, she personally begged King Carol’s permission to bear the child in Coburg, surrounded by her family. When he predictably refused, she made the stunning declaration that it was her cousin Boris’s baby she was carrying. At this, the king relented, and at Gotha on January 9, 1900, Missy gave birth to her third child, Marie, who would always be nicknamed “Mignon” in honor of the opera the crown princess had attended that evening.

  Although Marie of Roumania had never felt much love for her first two children, with Mignon, there was a rush of maternal instinct. Because Mignon was born during a time when she had been deeply unhappy, Marie always referred to this daughter as “the child of my flesh.” Whether Mignon was really his child or Boris’s, Nando never disavowed her paternity, and she would become his favorite child—but he reproached his wife for the girl’s birth in more subtle, passive-aggressive ways than openly accusing her of infidelity.

  For years after her return to Roumania with the newborn Mignon, Marie was treated like a prisoner. “Nando shuts me up completely,” she wrote to her mother in 1902. “[P]erhaps I am paying for former mistakes, but it is almost unbearable . . . it really is an exile down here. . . . And there is not only one jailor, they are all jailors.”

  Marie’s social life could not have been quite as dire as she made it out to be, because during this period, she became great friends with the American-born British expat, future politician, and business tycoon Waldorf Astor and his younger sister, Pauline. The Astors were devoted Roumaniaphiles. And Marie found Waldorf, then in his early twenties and younger than she, uncommonly handsome, and his manners impeccable. She clearly fell in love with him, and her affection and admiration were in some measure reciprocated. However, no substantive pr
oof has yet been discovered that would confirm the torrid affair alluded to in the gossip of the day. Their relationship more than likely remained platonic, replete as it may have been with overt flirtation and naughty verbal innuendo. Yet even a whiff of sexual scandal was enough to mar Marie’s character; a very married European crown princess had to watch every step, regardless of her husband’s conduct.

  During his bachelor days, Waldorf Astor, along with Pauline, schooled Marie by example in how to practice economy. So it was the crown princess, and not the fearful Nando, who in the winter of 1903, having discovered the atrocious state of their finances, demanded explanations and accountability for their debt. Marie, in particular, was a fashionista, comprehending the importance of style, especially as an element of diplomacy, and accepting as gospel her mother’s maxim that “Clothes play a great part all over the world . . . so never forget to dress carefully for festive occasions, it belongs to a princess’s duties.” Marie had always asked for whatever she wanted and been given it; but then the bills came, and she was shocked to be informed that there was no money to pay them. Why hadn’t she been told ahead of time that they lacked the funds to afford all the luxuries she requested? Had she known this, she never would have asked for them! Their creditors must be paid on time, arrears erased, and a lifestyle of perpetual debt must cease. For the first time, Carol was impressed with something Marie did, least of all to summon the courage to approach his forbidding mien.

  Nando was little help. Self-effacing to a fault, he had adopted the tactic of concealing his impressive intellectual gifts in the areas of botany and languages, both modern and ancient. Maddeningly, he was playing the fool so as not to appear superior to anyone. Nando had been so browbeaten by his uncle that he hid his light under a bushel in every aspect of his life. Someone had to step up and take the reins in the marriage, or the royal household would fall to pieces and be governed by the staff. Pauline Astor noted that it was Marie who ran Bucharest’s Cotroceni Palace, because Ferdinand was unable to give orders or make decisions.

  Neither spouse was perfect, but the Roumanians seemed far more willing to give Marie a pass. During a military parade, when Ferdinand clumsily fell off his horse right in front of the reviewing stand, the public stared, der Onkel glared, and Nando received a round of derisive applause the way a pimply adolescent would if he dropped his tray in the middle of a crowded cafeteria. The police had to help the hapless prince to his feet. The king had Ferdinand so cowed that he would stammer when he greeted people, his hand trembling with unregal trepidation.

  In contrast, Anne-Marie Vavaresco, Princess Callimachi, who knew Marie her entire life, had the highest praise for her, and reflected the Roumanians’ general attitude toward adultery. “I believe she was the most beautiful woman I ever saw, held her in total admiration, and . . . [e]ven her faults, moral or physical, turned out to her advantage. . . . Her love affairs and caprices were never considered a grievance by the people. On the contrary . . . the Roumanians, with their natural lack of morality, felt relieved at not having a saint for their Queen.”

  Even Marie’s cousin, England’s Edward VII, who enjoyed his own share of infidelities, shrugged at the rumors of her extramarital dalliances. Lecturing his nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm (whom no one in the family liked), Bertie, as the king was known, said jocularly, “A little coquetry and a flirtation every now and then were surely permissible in a young and pretty woman. Moreover rumours were always exaggerated.” Ferdinand was getting what he deserved for behaving like a pedant, particularly with a wife like Marie. “It is not wise to play the schoolmaster everywhere,” Bertie added.

  Bertie was right, especially about the exaggeration. The Roumanians, for whom infidelity was commonplace, ascribed many more romances to their crown princess than she actually enjoyed. This presented a problem in the summer of 1903, when she was pregnant with her fourth child and expecting the annual visit of Waldorf and Pauline Astor. Would people assume that Waldorf was the baby’s father?

  Marie gave birth on August 7 to her second son, whom she and Nando named Nicholas, after her cousin, the Russian czar. Of all their children, with his light blue eyes and hawk-shaped nose, Nicky most resembled Ferdinand’s Hohenzollern side of the family.

  After four children and nearly eleven years of marriage, Marie had ceased writing to her mother that she didn’t love her husband. By now she was informing the duchess that they were “very good friends,” and hoped they could “work together in spite of what is missing.” Yet Nando, now Roumania’s Inspector of the Cavalry, remained a social stuffed shirt, a stickler for court etiquette, in awe of King Carol, and scolded his wife for every imagined breach. She, meanwhile, remained exasperated and infuriated by his indecisiveness. Unable to control Marie’s headstrong impulses, Ferdinand vented his own frustration on her, which only made Marie react all the more, perpetuating the vicious cycle.

  But in 1907, the royal couple was compelled to think of something other than themselves. The peasants revolted, and that spring Marie’s eyes were finally opened to the world outside the high walls of their palaces and the gilded railings of their opera boxes. She met the man who would awaken her slumbering innocence, or ignorance, of the plight of her subjects, and instill in her not only an understanding of Roumanian politics, but of patriotism. His name was Prince Barbo Stirbey—and finally Marie had something to be passionate about. In more ways than one.

  Tall and slender, Stirbey hailed from one of the oldest aristocratic families in Roumania; his ancestors had ruled the region of Wallachia long before Carol and Ferdinand’s Hohenzollern dynasty warmed the Roumanian throne. Two years Marie’s senior, with a dark mustache and a mysterious air, he was handsome and cultured, educated at the Sorbonne, where he had studied law. In a country of glib self-aggrandizers, he was celebrated for his modesty. Although Stirbey was married to a stunning cousin, he was a renowned lady-killer; the women of Bucharest rhapsodized about the “strange hypnotic quality” of his bedroom brown eyes. A former parliamentarian, he had turned his attention to cultivating his estate into a financial empire, investing the profits from his land into banking and venture capital.

  Marie of Roumania became the great love of Stirbey’s life, although it took some time for her to be conquered. She visited him often at his estate, and when they were apart he sent her numerous letters praising her beauty. She eventually immortalized him in the guise of a fictional character in Crowned Queens, one of her many literary works. In public, they had to silently communicate their attraction through layers of royal protocol.

  Meanwhile, Marie was having trouble with her children. She had never been an effective disciplinarian, and in any event, her two eldest had been whisked away to be raised under der Onkel’s aegis, denying both parents any input in how, or by whom, their own offspring were to be educated. This was having a highly detrimental effect on both children, but particularly on Prince Carol, who had been brought up from the cradle to believe that he was the most entitled creature on the planet. Marie did not mince words about her progeny; in fact, she described their deficiencies graphically. By the age of sixteen, Carol had developed his grandfather’s mania for order and rules, evinced a fascination for military uniforms and protocol, and demonstrated a marked cruel streak. Elisabetha was already monstrously overweight, and cared for nothing but jewelry and no one but herself. Haughty and unloving, she was such an unpleasant piece of work that Marie despaired of finding her a suitable husband. And Mignon, the third child, was also growing fat, and alarmingly indolent, lacking attention to her personal appearance, and so passive that Marie feared the girl needed protection from the malice of her older siblings.

  Nicky, child number four, was not only hyperactive and sickly, he was ugly, with a pinched face that reminded his mother of the visage of a wild beast. Nevertheless, when he was a little boy Marie found him “quite the most amusing creature alive,” impossible as he was to control or reprimand.

  In 1909
, at the age of thirty-three, Marie bore her fifth child, Ileana; the crown princess had hopes that with her dark blue eyes, snub nose, and rosebud mouth, the girl would develop into a beauty. Perhaps because Marie referred to Ileana as “the child of my soul,” it was rumored that Prince Stirbey was her father; he and Marie had become close two years earlier. But there is nothing in the prince’s correspondence to Marie that would prove his paternity. This is not the case with her final child, Mircea. Named for a fourteenth-century Wallachian hero, he was born in January 1913, after a difficult pregnancy, and is generally believed to be Stirbey’s son.

  Because Ferdinand and King Carol treated Marie as though she were nothing but a womb that changed clothes several times a day, as the occasion permitted, she was under the impression that she was “not intelligent” enough to understand politics and government or to do anything about them. Prince Stirbey and his sister, who was married to Roumania’s prime minister, set out to change Marie’s mind, convincing her that she’d merely been too indolent to apply herself. Now, instead of resenting all the evenings of postprandial cigars, she remained in Carol and Ferdinand’s presence to hear them discourse on Roumania’s vital interests, both foreign and domestic, receiving a crash course in governance, policy, and economics.

  In 1913, Carol appointed Prince Stirbey Superintendent of the Crown Estates, a position that brought him into almost daily, and wholly sanctioned, contact with the crown princess. The king intended for Stirbey to educate and guide Marie, so that she and Ferdinand, with Stirbey’s sagacious and pragmatic counsel, would govern Roumania prudently after his demise. It was the smartest thing Carol could have done for his country, if not for his nephew’s marriage.

  In the years just prior to the First World War, Roumania endured a series of conflicts known as the Balkan Wars. Bloodshed and disease were brought to the royal family’s doorstep. Marie stepped out of her comfort zone to help. Finally, she found a purpose. Desperate to be of use to her subjects, and unafraid of contracting the cholera raging about them, she tended to the sick, wounded, and dying, in muddy, makeshift hospital wards amid appallingly primitive and unhygienic medical conditions. The crown princess would also devote herself to nursing when the Great War upended their world not too many months later.