Grandmama of Europe: The Crowned Descendants of Queen Victoria

by Theo Aronson

  A fanfare of trumpets, echoing down the arched corridors, would herald her arrival. Into the room, with a flutter of white draperies and a flash of golden embroideries, she would sweep. Beside her, the brilliance of the setting would fade. Queen Marie was forty-three at the end of the First World War and by all accounts she seems to have been as beautiful as ever. One guest talks of her rose-petal complexion which is said to have been washed in an extract of her favourite white lilies. Her hair, which many mistakenly assumed to be a wig, was a deep, vibrant gold, or as one breathless admirer put it, 'more of the tone of rich autumn leaves, with glints of sunshine'. Her clothes, which were designed with little regard for fashion but all for effect, were flamboyantly regal. 'So she made,' writes another dazzled guest, 'a splendid figure, oriental surely and almost barbaric in her beauty.

  Her vivacity was exceptional; her charm outstanding. There was an indefinable radiance about her. She might have been showy and self-satisfied but she was never unkind, never tactless, never haughty. Her air was warm and friendly; she was, says Rosita Forbes, 'the very spirit of enjoyment'. 'I defy anyone,' writes Mrs Philip Martineau, 'to meet that radiant personality and come away with anything but wonder and admiration in their heart.' Her manner was the same to all: to visiting royalties or to the thousands of peasants who so adored her. Dressed in her somewhat fanciful version of Romanian national costume, she would alight from her superbly appointed train at some small wayside station. She would step down onto embroidered carpets strewn with flowers to be given a riotous welcome by the assembled peasant women. She delighted in the warmth of their reception no less than they in the warmth of her manner.

  'Why do you all like her so much?' a bemused visitor once asked the mayor of a mountain town. He looked at the inquirer 'as if I had questioned the divinity of Bethlehem's Mary', and replied simply, 'Because she is so good.'

  With the troops Queen Marie was no less popular. Here the trailing draperies would be exchanged for a superbly tailored, if slightly theatrical, uniform and a tall fur busby. Mabel Draggett, accompanying the Queen on a military inspection, claims that 'in every man's face was worship and reverence and wonder at her. I watched their eyes. Those beautiful, dark Romanian eyes all followed her as if a magnet drew them. The devotion they offered Her Majesty was as to a goddess divine . . . .'

  'That,' said Marie briskly when the inspection was over, 'is what I call a good day's work for the King. It is when you have the army with you that King and country are safe.'

  Her interests were wide-ranging. She was an accomplished linguist, she was a talented painter, she was an imaginative gardener; she was forever designing, restoring and furnishing houses. Her golden rooms at Cotroceni near Bucharest and Pelishor at Sinaia, her romantic castle of Bran in the Carpathian mountains, her idyllic white villa at Balcic on the Black Sea all bore witness to her gifts as a decorator. She was a superb horsewoman. Her writing was fluent, vibrant and stylish. She somehow found the time to write dozens of children's books as well as her own monumental memoirs.

  Her guests would always be treated to readings from her famous war diary. The time for this would be after dinner, in her boudoir. The scene, says one of her listeners, would be one of 'barbaric splendour'. They would sit in semi-darkness on low, massive pieces of furniture, especially 'antiqued' by charring wood and rubbing it with a wire brush. On the floor would be great jars of pink peonies. The Queen would be seated on a divan strewn with furs and cushions. She might be wearing a filmy dress with a heavy, antique girdle; over her shoulders would be flung a glittering cape of rose and flame, embroidered with gold. Her huge 'Book of Memories', bound in gold, would be unlocked and, in her beautiful voice, she would read about the sufferings of those war years: the death of little Mircea, the flight to Jassy, the privations, the hopelessness and the horrors. By the end of the evening, everyone – and the Queen not least of all – would be in tears.

  But Queen Marie was more than simply a decorative, vivacious and accomplished woman with a flair for winning hearts. Very much a Coburg, she took her royal duties seriously and to them brought an energy, intelligence and acumen extremely rare in royalties. As the Count de St Aulaire, French Ambassador to the Court of St James's, once said, 'She has all the brain-power of a man, and all the allurement of a woman.' Her grandfather, the Prince Consort, had once claimed that his eldest daughter – Marie's aunt, the Empress Frederick – had a man's head on a woman's shoulders; the same could have been said of Queen Marie.

  When King Ferdinand was due to open the first parliament after the war, Queen Marie insisted on her right to take her place beside him. 'I have given this country six children,' she said to the Ministers. 'I have been your inspiration and mainstay through the war. Now it seems no longer fitting that I sit in a box in the background at the opening of Parliament. I wish to stand side by side with the King when His Majesty assembles the government.'

  And from then on, she actively involved herself in the running of the country. There was no aspect of Romania's affairs in which she was not keenly interested. She had, it was claimed, 'a positive genius for finance' and an organizing ability which left the Ministers 'gasping with admiration'. It was in no small measure due to her promptings that King Ferdinand introduced two revolutionary measures after the war: universal suffrage, and that agrarian reform which had already been promised to the troops. With her strong feeling for the peasants, Marie was especially insistent on this more equal redistribution of the land.

  None of this, of course, is to claim that Queen Marie was fired with an egalitarian spirit. She was very much a child of the Victorian era. 'I do not believe in equality,' she would announce bluntly. 'God makes one class higher than another. Some of us have been born to high places. Mine happens to be the highest of all. And if I were to resign my job tomorrow, who could do it better?' Who, indeed?

  One of her greatest triumphs was at the Peace Conference in Paris. With Romania having been on the winning side during the war, Marie felt that the country should be richly rewarded. At last the dream of a Greater Romania – Romania Mare – could become a reality. At last the Romanian people, a Latin enclave in a Slav world, could be united under one crown. Already Bessarabia, Transylvania and Bucovina had asked to be annexed to Romania; it remained for the victorious powers in Paris to agree to these annexations.

  Suspecting that little Romania was being ignored at the conference table, Queen Marie decided to go to Paris herself. Arriving with sixty dresses, thirty-one coats, twenty-two fur pieces, twenty-nine hats and eighty-three pairs of shoes, she put up at the Ritz. 'I have come,' she announced imperiously, 'to give Romania a face in the affairs of nations.' It was a face not easily ignored.

  Statesmen, politicians and diplomats flocked to her suite at the Ritz. 'I don't like your Prime Minister,' growled Clemenceau. 'Perhaps you will find me more agreeable,' answered Marie deftly. No one remained impervious to that blend of charm and determination. Whether or not her presence in Paris made any real difference, there is no denying that when she went back all sorts of concessions, financial as well as territorial, had been granted to Romania. Queen Marie had arrived in Paris as Queen of eight million subjects; she left as Queen of eighteen million. Romania had more than doubled its size. She had indeed become 'Empress of all the Romanians'.

  So spectacular an achievement, decided Marie, should be marked by an equally spectacular ceremony. Why not a coronation? She and Nando had never been crowned. Now that all Romanians were united, the ceremony would have a deeper significance. Into the project, Queen Marie poured all her taste, imagination and energy. 'Do yourselves the honour to give me that which best represents your own ancient Romania,' she instructed the men assembled to stage the ceremony. 'I want nothing modern that another Queen might have. Let mine be all medieval.'

  And medieval, more or less, it was. Alba Julia, the city in recently-won Transylvania where, over three centuries before, Michael the Brave had briefly united the Romanian people, was chosen as the mo
st evocative site for the ceremony. 'To my country,' wrote one of Marie's daughters, 'my parents' Coronation at this shrine of Romanian independence was symbolic of their position as the embodiment, the inspirers, and the executors of an age-old dream.'

  As Alba Julia had no cathedral, Queen Marie had one built. Its style, of course, was Byzantine; its walls dazzlingly white. Byzantine, too, in its splendour, was the Coronation ceremony. The date was 15 October, 1922. Poor King Ferdinand, fighting down his distaste for such public display, arrayed himself in conventionally regal robes of red velvet and ermine. On his head he wore the crown which had been fashioned for his uncle, King Carol. For Queen Marie, on the other hand, everything had been especially designed. Her dress was of gold tissue; her robe of gold lined with ermine. Her crown was a copy of a medieval crown. Worn fashionably low on the brow, it was a massive, ornate, barbaric concoction of solid gold set with chunky precious stones. While she knelt, for what must have been the one and only time in her life, before her husband, he placed this monumental crown upon her golden head.

  'I am a winner in life,' she declared to someone when the Coronation was over. 'Somebody has to lose. But I am a winner . . . .'

  And so, for a time, she was.

  2

  Having established her country, Queen Marie began to think in terms of establishing her dynasty. Already she was being referred to as 'the brains of the Balkans': could she not, by judicious marriages of her children, become the most influential figure in south-eastern Europe? Her eldest son, Carol, married to the daughter of the King of the Hellenes, would one day be the King of Romania. Her eldest daughter Elizabeth, married to King Constantine's eldest son George, would one day be Queen of the Hellenes. To her third child, her daughter Marie, the Queen now turned her attention.

  Marie, known as Mignon, turned twenty-three in 1922. As a child, Mignon had been exceptionally pretty, with a Greuze-like face: china-blue eyes, fair hair and a pale complexion. Queen Marie, a talented photographer, had delighted in photographing this angelic-looking child against backgrounds of pastel peonies or hydrangeas. With Mignon's quiet prettiness went what Marie called a 'smiling, passive, docile, sweet, patient and indolent' nature; her daughter had, she said, 'a peasant endurance'. In other words, she had very little of her mother's sparkle and energy. Mignon's was a calm, steady temperament.

  During the war years, Mignon's qualities of steadfastness and imperturbability had been of considerable value to her mother in her hospital work. 'She will do anything and has no wish to shine,' wrote Marie, 'she will just as readily wash the windows, sweep the floor, or serve up the meals, as hold a man's leg when it has to be cut off. Mignon has no pretensions.'

  Mignon was happiest when doing something practical. Pretty, placid and unselfish she might have been, but through her nature ran an honest-to-goodness, no-nonsense, almost masculine streak. Marie complained that her daughter was not at all romantic and Mignon seems to have had very little time for conventionally feminine pursuits. She did not really care about her looks. Her prettiness did not last much longer than her girlhood. Too fond of food, she tended to put on weight; uninterested in clothes, she wore whatever she felt comfortable in. Her manner was tomboyish; her talk peppered with schoolboy slang. Although, like her mother, she painted and sculpted, Mignon seems to have been more interested in motor cars and tractors. More often than not, to the despair of her lady-in-waiting and dresser, she was to be found in a pair of dirty overalls with smudges on her face.

  'Her driving,' one of her sons afterwards wrote, 'was excellent and very fast; I never knew a better woman driver.' When she rode, it was like the Romanian peasant women, with legs astride the saddle. Indeed, with each passing year, the name Mignon seemed less and less appropriate for this anything but daintily pretty young woman.

  No less than most of Queen Victoria's continental grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Mignon had had an English-style upbringing. Queen Marie always spoke English to her children; an English nanny, Miss Green, had been followed by an English governess and English tutors; Mignon had completed her education by spending a year at Heathfield, the girls' school near Ascot in England.

  It was through this easy-going daughter ('she fills the house with good cheer and sunshine,' reported Marie) that the Queen intended to expand her dynasty still further. She did not need to look far.

  3

  Romania's neighbour-in-arms during the First World War had been the kingdom of Serbia. Like Romania, Serbia's loyalty to the Allied cause had been richly rewarded. With the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the war, the Croats and the Slovenes had been united with the Serbs under the Serbian King, Peter I. In time, this single Slav state was to be known as Yugoslavia.

  King Peter I had been a member of the Karageorgeovitch family, the dynasty which had originally won Serbian independence from the Turks. During his eighteen-year-long reign, King Peter I had bestowed a certain respectability on the Serbian court at Belgrade. His task had not always been easy. The Serbs were a proud, rugged, turbulent people with a marked tendency towards assassinating their kings. Indeed, King Peter I's eldest son and heir, George Karageorgeovitch, could be counted amongst the most turbulent of them all. His brutal kicking of a valet while in an uncontrollable rage was merely one of his eccentricities. In 1909 George had been prudently declared unsuitable and struck off the line of succession.

  With his removal from the scene, the succession had passed to his brother Alexander. In 1921, King Peter died. His thirty-two-year old bachelor son, Alexander, then became King Alexander II of Serbia.

  King Alexander was an exceptional man. Small, spare and dark, with eyesight so bad that he had always to wear a pince-nez, Alexander had the look of an alert bantam cock. The army was his passion. It was not so much that he was militant (although his record in the Balkan and First World Wars had been outstanding) as that he enjoyed a military atmosphere. He liked the discipline, the orderliness and the simplicity of army life. Nothing pleased him more than to be talked of as 'the Soldier-King'. Other than smoking heavily, he followed a spartan régime: he ate and drank sparingly; he cared not a jot for his own comfort. While the palace in Belgrade stood empty, he lived in a modest stone house opposite, in conditions of almost barrack-like austerity. He was seldom out of uniform. Yet they were not the theatrical, superbly tailored uniforms of such monarchs as King Alfonso XIII of Spain; they were old, simple and quite often darned. Nor was there anything showy about his conduct on the battlefield. At the front he had always behaved with coolness, calmness and an utter disregard for danger. He seemed to have no fear of death whatsoever. This same imperturbability marked his peacetime behaviour. He was a quiet, simply-spoken man who kept his own counsel.

  Loving the hard, masculine, almost monastic quality of military life, Alexander had very little interest in women. The death of his mother, Princess Zorka of Montenegro, when he was only a year old, meant that he had been raised by his austere old father, King Peter I. He had never known a woman's love. Nor does he appear to have sought it in later years. His name had never been coupled with that of any girl; his youth had been quite free of any sexual, or even amorous, scandal. His closest companion, and only confidant, was his cousin, Prince Paul, who shared his home with him. Not until the age of thirty-one did Alexander contemplate marriage, and then only because circumstances, and his anxious Ministers, demanded it. For the sake of the dynasty, it was essential that he marry. Having been forced into making the decision, the King looked for a suitable bride.

  To link himself, matrimonially, with Romania, would be the most sensible thing to do. Serbia and Romania had been allies in the war. Romania belonged firmly to the West, as Alexander wished Greater Serbia to belong. Emphasizing the Western, as opposed to the Balkan, flavour of Romania still more was the fact that its royal family – through Queen Marie – was related to the British royal family. That her daughters were the great-granddaughters of Queen Victoria counted for a great deal with King Alexander.
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  What Queen Victoria herself would have thought of the proposed alliance was another matter. Victoria might have tolerated the Battenbergs (who were, after all, merely a morganatic branch of the royal and respectable Hesse family) but the Karageorgeovitchs were quite a different proposition. Alexander's family had only just attained respectability. Not many generations before, his ancestors had been pig farmers; indeed, to his enemies, King Alexander was still 'the gypsy'. By allying itself to a member of Queen Victoria's family, the Karageorgeovitch dynasty could finally rid itself of its brigandish and upstart air.

  Between them, then, Queen Marie and King Alexander arranged the match: he would marry her daughter Mignon. Marie would have the satisfaction of seeing yet another of her daughters become a queen, and Alexander would move firmly into the charmed circle of long-established and generally accepted royalties. And to those countries in which the descendants of Grandmama Queen wore, or had worn, crowns, would be added yet another, somewhat improbable-seeming one: Greater Serbia, soon to be known as Yugoslavia. Alexander and Mignon were married in Belgrade, in the summer of 1922.

  Although any of King Ferdinand's and Queen Marie's three daughters would have met King Alexander's political and dynastic requirements, he was fortunate that Mignon was the one who happened to be available. Theirs was no love match but a certain similarity of temperament ensured that the marriage developed into a happy one. When they were first married, Mignon, to Alexander, was simply a pleasant-natured girl with a gratifyingly 'English' air about her. With the years, he would come to appreciate her more valuable virtues – her calm, her bravery, her unpretentiousness and her ability to mind her own business. She had none of the coy, cloying femininity which he would have found unbearable. Nor did she have any of her mother's political interests. Unlike Queen Marie, Mignon would never interfere; she would never try to influence her husband's decisions. Her independent, practical, almost masculine qualities suited him admirably.