Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  While Marie was playing the diplomat in Western Europe, a Russian military buildup was amassing on Roumania’s eastern borders. Ferdinand was relying on his wife’s ability to secure foreign aid. Their kingdom was beset with problems from within and from without. If she could not guarantee the return of Transylvania, their subjects would revolt. If Crown Prince Carol abdicated the succession for love of Zizi Lambrino, it would weaken their dynasty’s claims to the throne.

  On December 19, 1919, Marie got her treaty, enabling her to return to Roumania with everything she asked for and more: all of Transylvania, almost all of the Bukovina, Bessarabia, two-thirds of the Banat, and the southern part of Dobruja. Roumania’s square mileage went from fifty-three thousand to a hundred and fourteen thousand, more than doubling her population as well. The treaty made Roumania, at that time, the fifth-largest nation in mainland Europe after France, Spain, Germany, and Poland.

  On January 20, 1920, Zizi Lambrino bore the crown prince a son. Carol had formally renounced the throne the previous August while his parents were touring Roumania’s front lines. Relations between the sovereigns and their heir had sunk to a level of outright hostility. Because Zizi could never have a proper marriage with a member of the ruling house, Marie deemed her an interloper intent on destroying the dynasty. Ruthless as it was, for the sake of Roumania the only way to salvage the situation was to enforce a separation between Zizi and Carol. Although the prince had once again changed his mind about the succession and returned to the familial fold, his parents sent him on an eight-month world cruise.

  At least Marie and Ferdinand’s oldest daughter was making a good match. In the autumn of 1920, at the age of twenty-five, the fat, selfish, and indolent Elisabetha became engaged to Crown Prince George of Greece. Marie invited George to bring his siblings to Roumania with him for the announcement of his marriage. By that time, the tall, blond, mustachioed Carol, twenty-seven, had returned from his cruise. He promptly fell in love with George’s twenty-four-year-old sister, Princess Helen, a willowy brunette known within the family as “Sitta.”

  Predictably, things didn’t sit too well with Zizi when Carol told her about Sitta. Zizi demanded a massive settlement and a title for their son, whom Carol had never even bothered to visit. She did not receive the latter request.

  Elisabetha wed Prince George on February 27, 1921. On March 10, in Athens, Carol was united with Sitta. She was the first princess of Greece to be married in her own country. After a tremendously difficult birth, on October 25 she produced a son, Prince Michael, named for Mihai, the hero who had united Moldavia, Wallachia, and Transylvania in the sixteenth century. Recuperating from the ordeal of childbirth, and with their marital home not yet fully renovated, Helen remained in Greece with the new baby for several months. By the time she returned to Bucharest, Carol had already been unfaithful.

  Meanwhile, on June 8, 1922, Marie and Ferdinand married off their modest and unfashionable daughter Mignon to Alexander, the king of Yugoslavia. That September, following the overthrow of Greece’s King Constantine, Crown Prince George became the new monarch, making Ferdinand and Marie’s oldest daughter the queen of Greece. With Marie on the Roumanian throne and two of her daughters now occupying the thrones of Yugoslavia and Greece, even though it was the twentieth century, she was making advantageous geopolitical matches as if the world had never changed for the royal houses of Europe, proud of her nickname, “Mother-in-Law of the Balkans.”

  Ironically, Marie and Ferdinand had not yet been formally crowned. King Carol had died in October 1916, during the Great War, and Roumania’s dire circumstances during the conflict had not permitted any sort of coronation festivities.

  The event finally took place in 1922, but not without some religious wrangling. The Catholic Church (Ferdinand’s Hohenzollern dynasty were Catholics) would not permit the king to be crowned in a Roumanian Orthodox Church by a Roumanian Orthodox priest, but it was the kingdom’s official religion. Marie solved the problem by staging their coronation outdoors, in the shadow of the church, cleverly spinning their public relations so the monarchs could claim that they wanted as many of their subjects as possible to be able to witness the spectacle.

  The queen now became a producer; glamour was her specialty, and the coronation, already without precedent (for taking place outside of a church, and six years after the monarchs’ ascension), was going to be one for the history books. “I want nothing modern that another Queen might have. Let mine be all medieval,” she declared. All of the royal women in the procession were asked to wear gold. The other women were directed to wear silver and mauve, Marie’s favorite color. The coronation assumed a Byzantine flavor when the other European princesses invited to participate in the ceremonies wore mantles of royal blue, crimson, or brilliant orange over their golden gowns. Over Marie’s reddish-gold sheath, she wore a heavy mantle embroidered with metaphorical emblems—local crests and sheaves of wheat that represented “the chief richness of our land.”

  No look would be complete without the jewelry. The queen accessorized with her coronation present from Ferdinand: a lengthy diamond chain from Cartier, with an enormous sapphire dangling at the center. Placed over a veil of delicate gold mesh, also in the Byzantine fashion, Marie’s four-pound crown was a copy of one worn by Princess Despina, the wife of a sixteenth-century Wallachian prince. Heavily embellished with emeralds, rubies, moonstones, and turquoises, it featured huge gem-studded golden pendants that hung down over each of Marie’s ears. In her own words, she carried off her weighty ensemble “splendidly.”

  In the center of the public square in Bucharest, a colorfully carpeted platform had been erected below a dramatically swagged and tassled canopy decorated with the royal coat of arms. There, in the presence of three hundred thousand of their subjects, Ferdinand, wearing a purple velvet mantle over his ensemble of red velvet and ermine, and Marie in her glittering wardrobe, were crowned. Although the queen described the festivities as modest compared to some she had experienced (and they probably paled in comparison to the one she had attended in 1896 for Russia’s Nicholas and Alexandra), Ferdinand and Marie’s coronation cost Roumania roughly the equivalent of a million dollars.

  Officially king and queen nearly thirty years after their marriage, and now grandparents, Marie and Ferdinand were no more compatible than they had been back in 1893. But at least they had settled into a routine. Marie deferred to her husband in public so that he no longer felt inferior, not only in her eyes, but in everyone else’s opinion. Privately, he had come to acknowledge that her extroverted nature made her better equipped than he to cope with the world. Marie had even come to terms with Ferdinand’s long-standing, yet purely physical liaison with Mrs. Martineau, their stout landscape gardener, assuring the horticulturist that she was the only woman Marie could trust with the king. Perhaps Her Majesty was forgetting another one of her husband’s paramours, Aristitza Dissescu, the elegant wife of a university professor who, according to Marie, had declared Ferdinand to be the “love of her life.”

  The Roumanians couldn’t conceive of their boring, asexual king being interested in anyone, or vice versa. Ironically, because everyone loves a love affair, it was Marie and not Ferdinand who became internationally renowned for rampant infidelity. Owing to the queen’s beauty and vivacity, stories of her adultery made sense to people, so they refused to believe they hadn’t read or heard the whole truth. As Marie would tell a friend in 1929, “It is only through books and certain things that have been said of me that I realized that such immense importance was given to that one thing which has played little part in my life, that chase after ‘sexual excitement,’ if that is the right technical expression?”

  The genuine sexual predator was Crown Prince Carol, whose own royal marriage was now on the rocks, thanks to his new mistress, a half-Jewish, blowsy redheaded commoner named Elena Lupescu, who had deserted her own husband for another man before she’d met Carol.

  It was
the last thing Ferdinand and Marie needed, as the king’s health began to decline in 1925. That January he had a hernia operation, and two months later he was diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism. Marie sent for his favorite child, Mignon, to cheer him up. Aware of Mme. Dissescu’s devotion to Ferdinand, Marie even permitted her husband’s sometime-mistress to visit his bedside.

  Four days before Christmas, Carol deserted his family and ran off with Elena Lupescu. Just as he had done when he eloped with Zizi, he cast himself in the role of the persecuted victim. But by now, his parents were fed up with him. On December 31, Ferdinand convened a special meeting of the Crown Council and made plans in the event of his imminent demise for a regency council to rule on behalf of Helen and Carol’s then-four-year-old son, Prince Michael.

  But what should have been an internal transition became a national crisis. Carol’s forfeiture of his succession brought every Ferdinand-and-Marie hater out of the woodwork, criticizing them politically and personally, and threatening to permanently topple their dynasty. No one had confidence in an ailing man and a toddler. In the wake of the backlash, Ferdinand was obliged to form a new government. The troublesome prime minister was swept out of office and his replacement was compelled to form a new cabinet.

  The crisis didn’t prevent Marie from touring America in 1926, the same year Dorothy Parker published her four-line poem “Comment,” with its tart allusion to the glamorous queen. But Marie’s U.S. appearance received mixed reviews. Some people wondered why she didn’t seem to be rushing home after getting word that her husband was ill. By the time she returned to Roumania at the end of the year, the doctors confirmed the worst: Ferdinand was suffering from terminal cancer of the lower intestine. His condition was inoperable, although silver tubes were inserted into the small intestine to draw out the poison. Marie informed their children that he had only a few months to live, but they decided not to tell the king, who handled his painful illness with grace and dignity.

  In January 1927, realizing that she and Ferdinand were about to celebrate their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, Marie wrote in her diary, “May God allow that it not be our last . . . we have lived to become firm and faithful friends, two wildly different characters that have managed to produce harmony out of what might have been something quite else . . . we have lived for the country & for our children and always knew how to keep passion sufficiently under so as never to harm these two loves of our lives.”

  Perhaps she was drawing the distinction between her own marriage and their son’s. While Ferdinand slowly deteriorated, receiving radiation treatments at the end of January, Elena Lupescu issued the monarchs an ultimatum: She would renounce Carol if he were reinstated in the succession. Marie wanted to love and indulge the prince, but the government had no desire for him to return, because they thought he would make a dangerous king.

  By this time, Marie had Ferdinand moved to the Pelisor Castle at Sinaia, where she believed the mountain air would be beneficial. She had become accustomed to sleeping outside his sickroom so that she could rise and go to him the moment she heard a sound. Around midnight on July 19, 1927, Ferdinand tried to get out of bed. “I am so tired,” he lamented to his wife. She took him in her arms and he died a few minutes later with his head resting against her shoulder.

  The following morning, Prince Michael, not yet six years old, was taken to Bucharest to be proclaimed king of Roumania in front of the country’s Parliament.

  Ferdinand’s body lay in state for four days. Marie decreed that no black should be used, so his coffin reposed on a red velvet pall. How different he looked to her in death. “Such a beautiful face with his noble features frozen into a stillness which gave him a grandeur which was not his in life,” Marie noted. “In life he was too modest, too timid, he always seemed to be excusing himself for everything he did. Now, without any more gestures he was calmly . . . accepting all the honours paid, all the flowers, prayers, tears.” Sentiment had cast a rosy glow over a rocky marriage of thirty-four years.

  The king was buried at the monastery of Curtea de Arges, a ninety-five-mile rail journey across the mountains. Carrying candles, a thousand peasants in colorful native costume participated in the funeral procession that escorted Ferdinand’s body to the church. His coffin was as modest as he had been. Laid across it was a single bouquet of faded pink roses with a card inscribed simply, Marie.

  After a brief outdoor service, Ferdinand’s coffin was interred in the vault. “One volume shut forever,” Marie wrote in her diary after she returned to Sinaia, “and now forward with courage, and with what remains to me of health and strength. . . .”

  The years immediately following Ferdinand’s death were unhappy ones for Marie. Sitta became determined to estrange her from little King Michael. Ferdinand and Marie’s second son, Prince Nicholas, who was one of Michael’s regents, had become a bad egg, resorting to street violence. And then, in June 1930, Prince Carol returned from his self-imposed exile—and successfully staged a coup, proclaiming himself King Carol II of Roumania.

  For the next several years, Marie’s relationship with her firstborn son grew tense, and her other children presented problems of their own. Carol greatly reduced his mother’s income, although he was aware that she had inherited no funds from his father. Then he delayed the payments, collecting the interest himself. He reduced her staff and tightened the security around her as if she were a spy, ordering her movements and conversations reported to him. A repressive autocrat, he refused to accept Marie’s advice, despite her decades of experience.

  His queen, Sitta, left Roumania forever on July 17, 1931. Ten days later, Marie attended the wedding of her favorite child, Ileana, to Archduke Anton of Austria. Carol had introduced the couple, and orchestrated their lavish nuptials.

  That October 28, Prince Nicholas illegally eloped with Jeanne Doletti, a Roumanian divorcée. When he returned to Bucharest a married man, King Carol II declared that Nicholas could no longer be a member of the royal family or a Roumanian citizen. Marie was disgusted by Carol’s hypocrisy. Nicholas left the country, but when he returned in 1932, Carol had him arrested and sentenced to one year’s exile. Carol also refused to allow his sister Ileana to give birth in Roumania, because her husband was a Hapsburg, and the Austrians had been Roumania’s enemy during the First World War.

  In the early 1930s, as Carol grew more unpopular with his people, Communism threatened from the east; to the west Hitler was on the rise; and in the south, the dictator Benito Mussolini’s Fascisti were changing the face of Italy. Marie, who had been born a Victorian and had seen so many shifts in Europe’s political landscape over the course of her life, began to pen her memoirs, and spent her time traveling. Failing to see the perils of Nazism, Marie insisted on withholding judgment of the party until she saw how things transpired, although two of her younger sisters had already become pro-Hitler. There had even been rumors that Victoria Melita had attended Nazi rallies with her husband, Kirill, and had sold “some of her remaining valuables [after the war] . . . to raise funds” for the party.

  Marie was in London attending a flower show on October 9, 1934, when she received the news that her son-in-law, Mignon’s husband, King Alexander of Yugoslavia, had been assassinated in Marseille by a Macedonian terrorist. He was succeeded by his eleven-year-old son, Peter, then just a schoolboy at Sandroyd in Wiltshire. Peter II would be Yugoslavia’s last king.

  As the years between the two World Wars progressed, Marie continued to be disappointed in her children and their spouses. Prince Nicholas, whom she described as “entirely & sinfully indifferent to his duties,” had returned to Roumania with his acquisitive wife, Jeanne, who “can only sit upon historical chairs or eat off tables that ought to be in a museum and drink out of historical glass & eat off historical china.”

  Queen Elisabetha of Greece was creating a scandal by divorcing her husband, George, to wed a Greek businessman. Ileana, and the freshly widowed Mignon, dwelled
elsewhere. Had Marie and Ferdinand failed as parents, or were the lives of royal children, or the pitfalls of royal marriages, just as fraught as those of commoners?

  In the spring of 1935, the second volume of Marie’s autobiography The Story of My Life was published to mixed reviews. The following winter, it was translated into Roumanian. Requests followed for foreign-language editions in Polish, Czech, German, French, Hungarian, Swedish, Italian, and Japanese. “I feel rather like a hen who has hatched ducklings!” Marie exclaimed proudly.

  During the winter of 1936–37, King Carol II perpetrated such a humiliating restriction on his mother—barring her from all communication with the Roumanian government—that she felt compelled to send him a lengthy letter spelling out every abuse she had suffered at his hands since he took the throne. He had kept the income Ferdinand wished her to have after his death. Carol had, without her knowledge or consent, deprived her of the title of queen, demoting her to Queen Mother. The infuriated Marie, who once had world leaders eating out of the palm of her hand, was abasing herself before her firstborn son and heir. “I was Queen of this country and have my definite position recognised by parliament, it is my right also to the title of Regina Marie which Papa wished me to have.” After enumerating everything she had withstood, Marie held out the olive branch, hoping for a reconciliation; Carol never seems to have replied to her letter.

  At the age of sixty-one, Marie collapsed with internal bleeding in March of 1937. Unable to locate the source of the hemorrhaging, her doctors hypothesized that she might be suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, although she rarely drank alcohol. While Marie was bedridden, Carol exiled his brother Nicholas again for the sin of contracting a morganatic marriage with a commoner, the same transgression he had himself committed with Zizi Lambrino—not to mention his elopement with Elena Lupescu while he was still married to Princess Helen of Greece! The king’s hypocrisy was staggering. Rumors flew that Marie’s condition was caused from a stomach wound she received when she tried to break up a gunfight between her two sparring sons. The incident never happened.