On December 29, 1937, Marie suffered a relapse; for six days the doctors were unable to stanch her internal hemorrhaging. Eventually she recovered enough to travel to a sanatorium in Italy, where a specialist from the Weisser Hirsch Clinic in Dresden was asked to look in on her. Dr. Stoermer was horrified. Declaring that Marie had been misdiagnosed from the start, he insisted that she be moved to his clinic ASAP for the treatment that could prolong, but unfortunately not save, her life.
Marie did indeed have cirrhosis of the liver (a rare type not caused by alcohol abuse). But according to the German physicians, her primary ailment was a condition that had resulted from it—esophageal varices, dilated blood vessels that encroached on her esophagus. Dr. Stoermer’s colleague, Dr. Warnerkrose, was convinced that Marie had “been given the wrong treatment from the beginning. I can only say that the doctor who did that had to have done it purposely. He can’t have been that stupid.”
And then, with his mother’s life in the balance, Carol sent word that he could not permit her to journey to Dresden for treatment unless it was sanctioned by Roumanian doctors. Marie vehemently protested this decision, but Carol nonetheless delayed her departure until she was examined by her adopted countrymen, who eventually approved her admission to the clinic in Dresden. From this facility, just prior to her July 15, 1938, return to Roumania, Marie wrote a farewell letter to Barbo Stirbey, her mentor, and perhaps former longtime lover. When she’d first told him of her incurable illness the previous July, he wrote from Switzerland to say how sorry he was not to be able to be there for her. “. . . [N]ever doubt the boundlessness of my devotion,” he assured Marie, adding the acronym “Ilymmily”—for, I love you, my Marie, I love you.
The return from Dresden to Sinaia, Roumania, by rickety train caused Marie to bleed again almost immediately. Always knowing how to dress for every occasion, she cleverly disguised her body, wasted away with illness, beneath a filmy pearl gray gown. Too weak to walk, but too proud to be carried on a stretcher, she was borne out of the rail station in a chair.
She lingered for a day at Pelisor Castle in Sinaia, watching the door of the former nursery and waiting for her favorite children to arrive. But Carol had deliberately not notified them of the gravity of her condition in time for final farewells. Instead, only her two oldest children were present at the end, those whom she loved least and who had been the most self-absorbed.
On July 18, 1938, at 5:38 p.m., eight minutes after requesting the Lord’s Prayer to be recited in English and whispering to Carol to be “a just and strong monarch,” Marie of Roumania peacefully died. Within the hour, the news was broadcast to her former subjects, at which, according to a contemporary reporter, “[a] moving silence reigned in the streets.”
Now that she was gone, Carol decided to honor his mother. Marie had requested that her mourners wear mauve, her favorite color, and that all flowers placed on her coffin be red. Carol complied with her wishes.
Her body was taken to Bucharest on July 20, where it lay in state in the white drawing room at the Cotroceni Palace, guarded by a quartet of officers from Marie’s regiment, the Fourth Hussars. Over the next three days, thousands of people filed past her bier to pay their final respects. The third day was reserved solely for factory workers.
But the pomp-filled funeral was delayed for three days to allow foreign royals and dignitaries time to travel to Roumania. To the sound of low-flying aircraft, trumpets, and church bells, a grand cortege comprised of Orthodox clergy, crippled veterans, sisters of the Red Cross, and Knights of the Order of Michael the Brave accompanied the gun carriage bearing Marie’s catafalque to the rail station for her final journey to Curtea de Arges. Six black horses pulled the carriage. One of Marie’s own favorite horses, its saddle empty, pranced behind it.
The train’s five-mile route was lined with peasants holding lit candles to pay their respects. They tossed so many flowers onto Marie’s coffin that the soldiers guarding it were nearly smothered with blossoms.
Marie’s bier, covered by a plain slab of white marble engraved with the sign of the cross, was interred in the vault beside Ferdinand’s at the monastery of Curtea de Arges. But according to her wishes, her heart was placed in a golden casket embellished with the emblems of the provinces of Greater Roumania, and taken to the Orthodox chapel in the gardens of the home she had built in Balcic overlooking the sea. The box was transferred to a wooden church at Marie’s beloved Castle Bran in Transylvania after the Bulgarians took over the Dobruja region in 1940. Communist sympathizers defiled the marble sarcophagus and the coffer containing Marie’s heart in 1968. After that, the jeweled casket containing her heart was brought to Bucharest and eventually placed in the custody of the National Museum of Roumanian History, although it is not on public display.
Not too many months after Marie died, Roumania fell to the Fascists. After the end of the Second World War, the country became a victim of Communist expansion. Two years after Marie’s death, on September 6, 1940, the same year Roumania lost several of the gains Marie had scored after World War I—including Bessarabia, the northern part of Transylvania, and Southern Dobruja—Carol was forced to abdicate his throne. Without a country to rule, he fled Roumania and sought refuge from Hitler. Der Führer denied him, because Carol’s mistress, Elena Lupescu, was half-Jewish. Carol and Elena went on the run through Europe, then traveled to Mexico, and ultimately ended up in Brazil, where Carol finally made an honest woman of Elena.
The day after Carol’s abdication, his son by his second wife, Princess Helen of Greece, technically became King Michael I of Roumania for the second time, although the country was then governed by the pro-Nazi dictator Ion Antonescu, who had allied Roumania with the Axis Powers. In August 1944, Michael staged a coup, ousting Antonescu and claiming his family’s throne. On August 23, now under King Michael’s sovereignty, Roumania declared war on Germany and joined the Allies. Michael did not attend his father’s funeral when Carol died in 1953.
Once upon a time, in some circles the mere words “Marie of Roumania” conjured a certain magic. As the late English writer and historian Lesley Blanch put it, “. . . she formed a whole generation—every man was in love with her, every artist inspired by her, every woman wished to look like her.”
While juggling the responsibilities of sovereignty, motherhood, and marriage, as well as steering her country through a world war, Marie published numerous magazine articles and more than fifteen books—allegorical romances, attempts at more literary novels, fairy tales, short stories, poetry, and finally her own memoirs in various iterations. Some of Marie’s short stories were adapted for other media, including ballet, theater, and film. In the sixteen syndicated articles she wrote in 1925, all under the title “A Queen Looks at Life,” Marie dished just enough royal gossip to keep readers interested, and dispensed advice that nowadays would be viewed as feminist, championing equality of the sexes in everything from marriage to infidelity. “I am not a conventional Queen, I admit, I must often make your dear old royal blood curdle, but my heart is in the right place, Georgie, dear,” she told her cousin and former adolescent flame George V of England in 1926.
Marie had come to Roumania for her royal marriage as “a foolish, pliable, clinging, credulous innocent.” And it took her years to fall in love, if not with her husband, then with her adopted kingdom instead. In time, as she ripened and matured, Marie came to realize that she had made another marriage as well: to her subjects. Their health and welfare were as important to her as those of her own husband and family. Rarely has a royal woman who was intended to be a mere consort made such a journey. She became queen “at a moment when the whole of Europe was on fire and flames were licking our every frontier.” And until she drew her final breath, she was Roumania’s wife and mother as well, “with every drop of [her] blood!”
The marriage of Ferdinand and Marie, like that of an earlier Ferdinand—the king of Naples—and his wife, Maria Carolina of Austria, a
s well as the mismatched union of Henry VI of England and Margaret of Anjou, have earned their inglorious stripes primarily because the spouses’ traditional gender roles were reversed for most of their lengthy marriages. The queens were the warriors and the decision makers.
When the going got tough, it was the formidable and charismatic Marie and not her diffident husband who stepped up to the plate and went to bat for the adopted homeland she had grown to love. And she did so in spite of the facts that her marriage was personally unrewarding and her husband and in-laws did not treat her kindly. Given her astounding success in Roumania, one can only imagine what Marie might have done had she been permitted to wed her childhood crush instead—the future George V of England! Would her other youthful swain, Winston Churchill, have been able to control himself?
PRINCESS VICTORIA MELITA OF SAXE-COBURG AND GOTHA
AND
ERNEST LOUIS, GRAND DUKE OF HESSE
MARRIED: 1894–1901
AND
KIRILL VLADIMIROVICH, GRAND DUKE OF RUSSIA
MARRIED: 1905–1936
Marie of Roumania would forever recall a remark her favorite sister once made about the institution of holy matrimony. Victoria Melita had declared, “To be entirely happy in marriage, the same things must be important to both.” Unfortunately, it mattered little to royal parents whether their children and their prospective spouses possessed common interests, which is one reason so many of these marriages were doomed to failure and nearly perpetual unhappiness. At least Victoria Melita got a second chance at a happy ending, but the heavy cost may not have been worth the price of her connubial bliss.
Victoria Melita was named after her paternal grandmother and for the island on which she was born—Malta (formerly Melita, the ancient Greek word for honey). Sadly, her journey through life was far from sweet. This princess, always called “Ducky” within the royal family, was the second of four daughters born to Queen Victoria’s second son, Alfred (“Affie”), the seafaring Duke of Edinburgh, and his wife, Marie, a daughter of Czar Alexander II. Ducky was a year younger than her blond, glamorous, and highly romantic sister Missy, who became the queen of Roumania. She was also the taller of the two, with chestnut hair, and large blue eyes set into an olive complexion. Her sober disposition, even from girlhood, gave the impression that she was the older one of the pair. Unlike many royal sisters who rarely, if ever, saw each other after their marriages, Ducky and Missy remained best friends, traveling across Europe to reunite during times of need, when illness or the calamities of war did not prevent their journeys.
Ducky’s parents did not have a happy marriage. The Russian-born Marie, Duchess of Edinburgh, later Duchess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was a squat, homely, no-nonsense woman, certain of her supremacy over anything English or German, especially her husband’s family, even though the Romanovs had married German women for the past two centuries. (By Victoria Melita’s generation, only one percent Russian blood coursed through their veins.) The duchess was quite a character: She smoked in public and was the only member of the Royal Mob, as Queen Victoria referred to her vast brood, their spouses and offspring, who was not cowed by Her Majesty. Ducky’s father, who spent most of her childhood at sea, was a foul-tempered hedonist, a raging alcoholic, and a philanderer. Affie’s personality, described as “[r]ude, touchy, willful, unscrupulous, improvident and unfaithful,” was so objectionable that his own mother found it difficult to like him. The Duchess of Edinburgh would admit that she never felt like anything more than Alfred’s “legitimate mistress,” a degrading position for the daughter of a Russian czar.
Although Ducky was her mother’s favorite child, sharing her passion for all things Russian, and eventually converting from the Anglican faith in which she was raised to the duchess’s Orthodox religion, she physically resembled her father, inheriting Affie’s slender figure and chiseled features. Ducky also inherited—from somewhere—a strong sense of justice. Austere and unbending, even as a girl, she would always be a defender of the weak and an espouser of lost causes.
Victoria Melita and her siblings were brought up in Malta as well as in England, at their father’s Kentish estate, Eastwell Park, and their London residence, Clarence House. Yet after Alfred prepared to inherit his uncle’s duchy and the family moved to Coburg, the duchess embarked on a crusade to Germanize her children. This met with considerable criticism from her husband’s English relatives—even though Queen Victoria herself had wed a German first cousin. Moreover, Her Majesty had married for love. Despite her own Russian ancestry, Ducky’s mother planned to unite her offspring to Germans. Because Marie’s religion did not permit the intermarriage of first cousins, none of her children would be wedding any Romanovs.
However, in the early autumn of 1891, when Missy and Ducky accompanied their mother to St. Petersburg for a family funeral, Ducky, then nearly fifteen, fell in love. It was not only Russia that infatuated her, but a Romanov first cousin—Kirill, a son of her mother’s brother, the Grand Duke Vladimir. The feeling was mutual. But the duchess was a strict mother hen. She cautioned her girls against damaging their reputations by succumbing to the dark charms of their persuasive Russian relations, who were undoubtedly also “kissing the maid behind the parlor door.”
At the time, Ducky could never have known that she’d be meeting both of her husbands that fall! Shortly after the funeral, the family traveled to Balmoral to visit Queen Victoria. There, Ducky was introduced to another first cousin, Ernest Louis of Hesse, the son of the queen’s late daughter, Alice. Ernie, who shared the same birthday with Ducky (though he was eight years her senior), was lively and spirited and, well, gay, but at the time everyone just assumed he was lively and spirited. Quick-witted, intelligent, and the life of every party, Ernie also shared Ducky’s passion for art and interior design. The cousins got along like gangbusters, giving Victoria the impression that her two favorite grandchildren would make a perfect couple.
The Duchess of Coburg was eager to marry her daughters off when they were as young as possible—before they began to think too much for themselves. But Queen Victoria thought it was best to wait another year and a half before she began pressuring her “dear Ernie” to propose. By then, Ducky would be almost seventeen.
The duchess had been against the match until the spring of 1892, when, upon his father’s death, Ernie ascended his throne, becoming Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine. Now Ducky would be a sovereign, a role the duchess had always envisioned for her daughters. Marie snobbishly agreed to overlook the fact that Ernie was a grandson of Queen Victoria, meaning that he had English blood in him. But Ducky’s mother was a mass of self-contradictions where royal marriages were concerned. Just about everyone eligible to wed Ducky was related either to Queen Victoria or to the Romanovs. And Marie clung tightly to her religious beliefs when it came to nixing first-cousin weddings where one party was a Romanov, although she expressed no qualms about uniting her children with another first cousin from a different royal house! From the duchess’s perspective, holy water was more viscous than blood.
And yet in 1884, Ernie’s sister Elisabeth (known as Ella) had wed a Romanov grand duke. A decade later, his sister Alexandra of Hesse would marry their first cousin, Nicholas Romanov. So the Russian Orthodoxy’s religious strictures about first-cousin intermarriages, which were ostensibly for the same modern reasons we cite, went up in holy smoke on the occasion of their royal nuptials. It’s best not to try to make sense of the religious rigidity on this issue, because there were historical exceptions to every rule.
Ernie had been a sensitive child with a poet’s temperament, and had endured a considerable amount of trauma during his early years. The superstitious citizens of Darmstadt believed in the Curse of Hesse that was purportedly leveled upon the royal house centuries earlier by a mad monk. Angry that the dynasty placed ambition over faith, the monk condemned them to perpetual misery. Like Ducky, Ernie’s parents’ marriage had also been soured by infi
delity. But adultery was the least of his family’s problems. Ernie’s younger brother suffered from hemophilia, the dreaded disease of the blood that Queen Victoria had passed down to her youngest son, Leopold, and to two of her daughters. One afternoon, the four-year-old Ernie had been playing a game with his brother Frittie, a year younger, when the toddler hid behind the drapes in their mother’s bedroom. Moments later, Frittie fell through the open window. A healthy child might have recovered from his injuries, but a hemophiliac can easily bleed to death. Frittie was hemorrhaging internally, and within a few hours the child was gone. Frittie’s death would forever haunt Ernie; he would always blame himself for his brother’s fatal accident.
Tragedy struck again in 1878, when his mother died of a diphtheria epidemic that swept through their family. Only ten years old, Ernie was shattered. Queen Victoria took it upon herself to raise Alice’s half-orphaned children long-distance, and they became particular favorites of Her Majesty. But as she was unable to bring herself to discipline her “dear Ernie,” he grew up childlike and feckless, an indifferent student who coasted on his considerable charm and exceptional good looks. By the time Ernie reached maturity, he was tall and well-proportioned, with high cheekbones and a square jaw, deep blue eyes, and an abundant head of auburn hair.
If Ernie had been allowed to make his own path in life, he might have been an artist. At the universities of Leipzig and Giessen he’d been tremendously influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement championed by the Englishmen John Ruskin and William Morris, and he was an exceptionally accomplished painter and a talented poet. But duty and the military called, and Ernie was obligated to follow in his father’s footsteps. In 1884, he was made a second lieutenant in the Hessian Life Guards; two years later he joined the Prussian Foot Guards. Barely passing his military exams in 1888, he gave up the soldier’s life in 1892, when his father, Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine, died of a stroke. Ernie acceded to the throne at the age of twenty-three.
Inglorious Royal Marriages Page 41
