by Theo Aronson
But Alexander was determined. He became more determined still during the visit to Athens of the old Duke of Connaught, Queen Victoria's last surviving son. The Duke had come to deliver to King Alexander, on behalf of King George V, the Order of the Bath. Alexander, having heard that the Duke was going to make use of this opportunity to propose a marriage with King George V's only daughter Mary, the Princess Royal, was extremely apprehensive. But nothing was said and, on being introduced to Aspasia Manos, the old Duke made an appreciative comment to the effect that, had he been a few years younger, he would have fallen for her himself.
In November 1919, King Alexander and Aspasia Manos were secretly, and morganatically, married. King Constantine and Queen Sophie were considerably upset by the news.
Within less than a year, however, they recieved far more distressing news of their son. While trying to break up a fight between his dog and a pet monkey, King Alexander had been bitten in the leg by the monkey. The bites began festering and a specialist was called in. There was talk of amputating the leg. Desperately worried, Queen Sophie begged permission to be allowed to go to her son's bedside. It was refused. She arranged for King Constantine's mother, Dowager Queen Olga, who had joined them in Switzerland, to go in her stead. But Queen Olga arrived too late. In excruciating pain, the twenty-six-year old King Alexander died on 25 October 1920.
So Greece was without a king. Acting swiftly, Venizelos sent an emissary to the National Hotel in Lucerne to offer the crown to Alexander's younger brother, King Constantine's eighteen-year-old son, Paul. It was refused.
Prince Paul's refusal of the crown came at an awkward time for Venizelos. New elections were scheduled for the following month. Venizelos, fresh from his triumphs at the Peace Conference in Paris (by his untiring efforts he had fulfilled – on paper – almost all Greek national aspirations) was expecting a landslide victory for his Liberal Party. But with Prince Paul having refused the throne, the electoral contest rapidly developed into one between the supporters of Venizelos and those of King Constantine.
The result of the election, held on 14 November 1920, was a complete rejection of Venizelos. Even in his own constituency he was defeated. Disgusted, he left Greece and went into self-imposed exile.
The new government promptly appointed the Dowager Queen Olga as Regent and arranged for a plebiscite to be held on the question of King Constantine's return. The result of the plebiscite of 5 December 1920 exceeded King Constantine's wildest hopes: he gained over ninety-eight per cent of the votes.
On 19 December 1920, the train bringing back King Constantine and Queen Sophie steamed into the station at Athens. For hours the streets had been packed with a vast multitude, chanting Erchetai! Erchetai! – He is coming! He is coming! When the King stepped onto the beflagged platform, so tall and imposing in his bemedalled uniform and plumed helmet, they went wild with enthusiasm. For half an hour the royal family battled against the excited crowd in order to reach the open carriages drawn up outside the station. The drive to the Old Palace was a triumph. Church bells clashed, flowers rained down and cheer upon tumultuous cheer rang out. On reaching the Old Palace, the King was lifted shoulder-high by the crowd and carried indoors.
King Constantine was deeply moved by this riotous show of affection but Queen Sophie was less impressed. 'The level-headed Queen Sophie,' writes that champion of the Greek royal family, Arthur Gould-Lee, 'on whom the manner of her son's death and the unjust treatment of the war years had left a bitter imprint, remembered the demonstrations that had attended the Conqueror-King's triumphant entry into Athens in 1912, and she asked whether all this excitement was not too exuberant to last.'
She could hardly know, he continues, 'how quickly her doubts were to be confirmed'.
2
There was very little rapport between the two Balkan Queens, Sophie of the Hellenes and her cousin, Marie of Romania. Sophie, reserved, unaffected and soured by her experiences, was very different from the stagy and self-confident Marie. Where the Greek court was run along the most unpretentious lines, the post-war Romanian court was lush, formal and colourful. Meals, in the Greek royal household, were simple family gatherings; in the Romanian they were grand occasions, attended by equerries, ladies-in-waiting and numerous guests. The palace in Athens was hardly more than a large town house, and Tatoi not unlike a suburban villa, but Cotroceni and the royal homes at Sinaia were vast, ornate and opulently furnished. Athens was still a small provincial city; Bucharest was the Paris of the Balkans. And whereas Queen Sophie's family was still living under a cloud of Allied disapproval, Queen Marie's was basking in the sunshine of international acclaim.
Yet in 1921, the royal houses of Greece and Romania were doubly united. Sophie's eldest son, Crown Prince George, married Marie's eldest daughter Elizabeth, and Marie's eldest son, Crown Prince Carol, married Sophie's eldest daughter Helen. All four young people were, of course, great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria.
This was not Crown Prince Carol's first marriage. In 1918, at the age of twenty-four, the feckless young man had married a Romanian mondaine called Zizi Lambrino. Queen Marie was furious. Not for the world was she going to allow the marriage to stand. She insisted that it be annulled. Brushing aside her husband's uncertainties and Carol's protestations, she plunged into the problem of annulment. 'I have had many difficult battles to wage,' she asserts, 'but this was the most terrible of all, because it meant that we had to fight against one of our own, to save him against his own will.' When her husband's Ministers suggested that Carol be disinherited and that the succession pass to his brother Nicholas, she would not hear of it. Referring to herself, sometimes as a tigress and sometimes as a lioness, she tells how she fought for 'her son and her country'.
'Gentlemen,' ran her impassioned answer to their suggestion that Carol be passed over, 'that must not be, not for the country nor for Carol. It is Carol who was born the ruler of Romania . . . Carol is of royal blood. A marriage among the people is for him impossible. It is for a ruler to remain above the people, a demi-god. Carol was born the ruler of Romania. And it is his duty to be.'
As always, she had her way. An annulment was pushed through the Romanian Supreme Court. The 'demi-god 'was packed off on an extended tour around the world and the heart-broken Zizi (with their baby Mircea) sent to Paris. She was not quite so heartbroken, however, as to refuse the generous sum of money granted her by the Romanian government.
With the somewhat tarnished Prince Carol once more on the market, Marie made sure that she did the choosing of a bride this time. Her choice of Princess Helen seemed eminently sensible: the Greek princess was an attractive, affectionate and lively young woman. 'She is sweet and she is a lady,' announced Marie. 'Besides, she's one of the family, since we're all descended from Grandmama Queen.' And, what was of even more importance to Queen Marie, she was the daughter of a reigning house.
For the same reason, Queen Marie had engineered the match between her daughter Elizabeth and Crown Prince George. After the death of King Constantine, George would be King of the Hellenes and Marie had no doubt that her classically beautiful Elizabeth would make a splendid Queen.
That neither of the marriages would be love matches, would not have bothered the ambitious Queen Marie unduly. Royalties had more important things to think about than love. But the more sensible Queen Sophie was not nearly so sanguine. She was particularly disturbed at the prospect of a marriage between the worldly Carol and the unspoilt Helen. She distrusted the hot-house atmosphere of the Romanian court and the decadent life of the Romanian capital. Her children had been raised along simple, 'English' lines; Queen Marie's in an aura of poetry and pageantry. Time and again Queen Sophie cautioned Helen against the match but Helen, attracted to Carol and anxious for a new life, insisted. 'Had I listened,' said Helen afterwards, 'I would have been spared years of misery.'
The two weddings were celebrated in March 1921. King Constantine and Queen Sophie did not attend Crown Prince George's wedding in Bucharest, but Queen Marie
, all dazzling smiles and floating draperies, came to Athens for Carol's wedding to Helen on 10 March. King Ferdinand did not accompany his wife. Carol and Helen were married in the Metropolitan Cathedral and, after a honeymoon at Tatoi, left for Romania.
While Queen Marie was in Athens, King Constantine and Queen Sophie were one day subjected to an embarrassing and humiliating experience. A large royal party was walking at the foot of Mount Hymettus when Lord Granville, the new British Minister, approached. With the Allied Powers still refusing to recognize King Constantine, Granville had never paid an official call on the King. A meeting such as this, however, was different and as Granville was an old friend of the Greek royal couple, they prepared to give him a cordial greeting. But he ignored them. Going up to Queen Marie, he greeted her warmly. Then, without the slightest sign of recognition, he turned and left. Constantine and Sophie were appalled.
Yet to meet the royal couple was to appreciate the absurdity of the Allied attitude. Soon after the two weddings, Queen Sophie played hostess to Mrs Philip Martineau, an Englishwoman much in demand in royal circles for her expert knowledge of gardens. Having come on from the Romanian court, where all was glitter, Mrs Martineau was immediately struck by the simplicity of life in Athens. She was particularly struck, however, by Queen Sophie herself. In England, Sophie's reputation was such that the visitor had expected to meet an aggressive, masterful German Hausfrau; indeed, Mrs Martineau had at first refused the invitation to Athens because of Queen Sophie's reputation. She was thus astonished to find – in an extraordinarily English setting – a small, fragile and sad-eyed woman, dressed in deepest mourning for her son Alexander. She had an air of majesty but she was certainly not the virago of Allied propaganda.
'Could this be the belligerent German we had always read of, who was supposed to have taken a knife to her husband in order to make him throw over the Allies?' asked the bewildered Mrs Martineau. 'We found her gentle and quiet, full of thought and kindness for her guests, and the most feminine and charming lady, ever ready to efface herself and her own views.'
Of course, they discussed gardening: Sophie's own typically English garden surrounding her palace, and her schemes for the afforestation and landscaping of Athens. While at Tatoi, Mrs Martineau was shown where part of the forest had been set fire to during the war.
'Why should they do this, Ma'am?' she asked.
As though 'numb with pain', Sophie replied, 'They said I had a private wire to my brother concealed here.'
King Constantine, noted Mrs Martineau, looked ill and tired, with dark pouches under his eyes. He was 'very bitter about his treatment'.
During this period, Aspasia, the widow of Queen Sophie's son Alexander, gave birth to a daughter. It was Sophie's first grandchild. By now the Queen had overcome her earlier reservations about the match and she devoted herself to the mother and child. At her suggestion, King Constantine arranged for the title of Princess to be bestowed on his late son's morganatic wife. The baby girl was given the name of Alexandra.
Twenty-three years hence yet another link was forged between the royal houses of Greece and Romania when this granddaughter of Queen Sophie married the grandson of Queen Marie: the ill-fated King Peter II of Yugoslavia.
3
King Constantine had inherited a difficult political situation. Venizelos, in his stubborn pursuit of 'The Great Idea' – the aggrandizement of Greece – had landed a large army in Turkey and occupied the area around the old Greek city of Smyrna. This he had done with the blessing of the Allied Powers. Once King Constantine was restored to the throne, however, the Allies, only too glad of an excuse to wash their hands of what they now realized was a questionable scheme, withdrew their support. This placed King Constantine in an awkward position. Having had his fill of military adventures, Constantine would have liked nothing better than to bring the troops home. But he dared not. To give up the territory already won from Turkey and so expose Smyrna's large Greek population to the angry Turks would be to risk losing his crown. Yet to continue to fight the Turks without Allied support would mean almost certain defeat.
His position was further complicated by the fact that his General Staff was anxious to deal the enemy a quick, knockout blow before they had time to build up their army, and by the knowledge that it was his refusal to join battle during the First World War that had cost him his throne.
'They have arranged it,' he commented bitterly, 'to seem that it is only me who holds back Greece from recovery.' So he surrendered to pressure.
To inject some morale into the Greek forces, it was decided that King Constantine must take over supreme command. Towards the end of May 1921, after a Te Deum in the Cathedral in Athens, he set off for Turkey. But it was going to need more than a Te Deum to save the situation. The fifty-three year-old Constantine was no longer the 'Conqueror-King', the 'Son of the Eagle' of the Balkan Wars. He was ill and tired and dispirited. Assisted by Queen Sophie, who had established herself on a small yacht off the Turkish coast and who daily, and in burning heat, visited the hospitals ashore, he did what he could. It was not much. Within four months he collapsed and had to return to Athens.
By the summer of 1922 the Turks, under the inspiring leadership of Mustapha Kemal Pasha, were ready to attack the invader. With their lines of communication dangerously stretched, the Greeks could not hold their positions. In considerable disorder, they fell back on Smyrna. The city fell to the Turks on 9 September 1922. For the following five days it was savagely sacked. It is estimated that some 300,000 Greeks lost their lives during those five horrifying days.
The effect on King Constantine's position was immediate. A few days after the fall of Smyrna the defeated Greek army revolted. Again their King was made the scapegoat. His abdication was demanded. Constantine acceded. Once more he and Queen Sophie packed up and left the palace. This time, however, there was no frantic crowd flinging itself at the wheels of their car to prevent their departure. From the very same little port from which they had sailed into exile five years before, Constantine and Sophie once more quit Greece. On this occasion their eldest son remained behind, for he had just been sworn in as King George II of the Hellenes.
The second rejection finished Constantine. A few weeks later, in a hotel room in Palermo in Sicily, he died from a haemorrhage of the brain. In his hand was clutched a small leather pouch containing Greek soil.
Even now, Queen Sophie did not relax her self-control. Keeping in check her own grief, she consoled her heartbroken daughters. She let no one see her sorrow. But she had still more heartbreak to contend with: the Greek government refused to allow the body of her late husband to be brought back to Athens and buried with the honours due to a king. His coffin was therefore taken to Naples and placed in a chapel in the Orthodox Church. A year later, when Queen Sophie went to live in Florence, she brought the coffin to lie in the crypt of the Russian Orthodox Church. She did not doubt that, sooner or later, her son, King George II, would be in a position to give his father's remains a state funeral and that they would be buried on that quiet hill-top at Tatoi.
But in just over a year after King Constantine's death, King George II was also in exile. Convinced that he was in a plot to overthrow the government, extreme republican elements began agitating for his dethronement. New elections brought to power an even more unsympathetic National Assembly and on 25 March 1924, it passed a resolution abolishing the monarchy and declaring Greece a republic. The decision was ratified by a plebiscite the following year. The volatile Greeks, who four years before had voted nearly 100 to 1 for King Constantine's return, now agreed to a complete abolition of the monarchy.
Not without justification had Queen Sophie wondered whether all the excitement of their triumphant return had not been 'too exuberant to last'.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Marie of Yugoslavia
1
'I'll be a Queen all right,' Marie of Romania once said to King Alfonso XIII of Spain. 'And I'll be it splendidly. For that's the way I believe Q
ueens ought to be.'
She was as good as her word. Of all the queens of post-war Europe, none was more brilliant than Queen Marie of Romania. Utterly free of the shyness that plagued so many of Queen Victoria's descendants, she played her royal role for all – and rather more than – it was worth. Not for her the reserve of Queen Sophie or the diffidence of Queen Maud or the naturalness of Queen Ena. To meet her was to be without the slightest doubt that one was in the presence of a queen.
Like her Uncle Bertie, the late King Edward VII of England, who used to say that if he knew nothing about art he knew something about arrangement, Marie knew exactly how to create the right setting. It might not have been conventionally regal but it was undoubtedly impressive. Gold, she maintained, was the colour for royalty; orange, the colour best suited to her personality. Therefore it was against a background of shades ranging from primrose to flame that she invariably presented herself. Guests, awaiting her arrival, would be ushered into one of her famous gold rooms. The architecture of these rooms would be Byzantine; their atmosphere sumptuous, Eastern, self-consciously Bohemian. Squat, elaborately carved columns would support shadowy, vaulted ceilings, all a-glimmer with gold leaf. Golden lamps would swing on golden chains. Great bronze and copper vases, filled with chrysanthemums, marigolds and orange dahlias, would stand on floors of intricate mosaic. Against the walls would hang panels, painted by the Queen herself, of tall-stemmed white lilies on a dull gold ground. Instead of conventional chairs there would be huge divans, covered with gold stuffs and piled high with cushions of yellow, apricot, orange and vermilion. In the warm half-light would glitter chains, crucifixes and exotically jewelled icons. It was all somewhat redolent of a scene from an Elinor Glyn novel or, as the traveller, Rosita Forbes, once put it, 'Holly wood-esque'.