by Theo Aronson
The reception was held in the splendid Round Room in Kensington Palace. It was not inappropriate that from here, where one summer morning in 1837 the young Victoria had heard that she had become the Queen of England, her great-granddaughter should set out to add Sweden to those other countries – Germany, Russia, Greece, Spain, Norway, Romania and Yugoslavia – in which her descendants had worn crowns.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Ruritania
1
Hardly had Queen Marie of Romania experienced, quite literally, the crowning moment of her life – the Coronation at Alba Julia – than her glittering world began to fall apart.
Her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, who, on the abdication of King Constantine in 1922, had become Queen of the Hellenes, did not long enjoy her new position. Within eighteen months her husband, King George II, had been deposed and Greece declared a republic. The couple came to live in Romania. The collapse of one of her dynastic dreams upset the ambitious Marie considerably. 'George should never have left Greece;' she would declare, 'once you leave a country you are forgotten. The great thing is to stay in the capital. . . .' He was, she would complain, 'a good man wasted'.
Distressing her still further was the fact that the marriage between George and Elizabeth was breaking up. Exile was emphasising their differences: Elizabeth, like her mother Queen Marie, was romantic, temperamental, gifted, while George had a great deal of the realism, honesty and simplicity of his mother, Queen Sophie. 'My daughter and he don't get on,' sighed Queen Marie, 'it is a pity but they are both rather obstinate. That is quite a good quality in a king, but not in a queen.'
Much more worrying for the Queen, however, was the behaviour of her son, Crown Prince Carol. His marriage to another of Queen Sophie's children, Princess Helen of Greece, was breaking up even more rapidly than that of George and Elizabeth. They, too, were very different types. None the less, on 25 October 1921, Helen had given birth to a son. The boy had been christened Michael, in honour of that Romanian national hero, Michael the Brave, the first man to unite the Romanian people. For Queen Marie, this was a gratifying moment: the succession had been secured.
Hardly had his son been born, however, before twenty-nine-year-old Crown Prince Carol resumed his old feckless and dissolute ways. Drawn again to that easygoing society in which he had found his first wife, Zizi Lambrino, Carol took up with the wife of an army officer. Her married name was Tampeanu, but she had been born Elena Wolf, a surname which was later Latinized to Lupescu. Plump, pale-skinned and titian-haired, Elena was hardly a beauty but she had a certain quality, part-voluptuous, part-sophisticated, which appealed to Crown Prince Carol. In fact, he was soon besotted by her. Having caught the Prince's interest, Elena quickly rid herself of her husband. On the divorce being granted, she reverted to her maiden name of Lupescu.
The romance, which was to be the talk of Europe for almost two decades, was under way. For such a colourful, Ruritanian, highly romantic affair, Carol and Lupescu hardly looked the part. He was already showing signs of developing into the chinless, jelly-jowled and watery-eyed creature that he was to be in middle age while she, with her heavy body and mouthful of outsize teeth, was no heart-melting ingénue. None the less, to the bewilderment and humiliation of his wife Helen, and to the titillation of the world, Carol threw himself into the role of princely lover with gusto.
No less bewildered and humiliated was Queen Marie. At first she had blamed Crown Princess Helen for not being able to hold her husband's interest. But once the full extent of her son's feelings for Elena Lupescu became apparent, Marie was seriously alarmed. The scandal could do the dynasty untold harm. King Ferdinand, hoping that the affair would work itself out, advised patience. But this was not Marie's way. Although Carol was now too old to take any notice of her dictates, there were other ways of bringing him to heel. She let him know, in an indirect fashion, that the King and his government were about to take the sternest measures unless he immediately ended his liaison with Madame Lupescu. Faced with this threat, Carol decided to get Elena out of the country. She applied for a passport. The government decided to grant it. They had an idea that Lupescu, fired by some finer feeling, had decided to end the affair by leaving Romania. Marie was more sceptical. She felt sure that if Elena went, Carol would follow her. The government, however, was confident that they would be able to keep him in the country.
This they were unable to do. In November 1925, Queen Alexandra, the widow of King Edward VII, died in London. It was imperative that, as Crown Prince, Carol should represent his father at the funeral. No sooner had Carol set out for London than Elena, after a series of comic-opera ruses to throw the Romanian police off her scent, crossed the border into Hungary. The funeral over, the lovers were reunited in Milan. From here, in letters to his wife, his father and the Romanian government, Crown Prince Carol announced that he had no intention of returning home. This time even the long-suffering King Ferdinand lost patience with his son. Rejecting Princess Helen's offer to go to Milan to plead with her husband, the King sent the Marshal of the Court with an order for Prince Carol to end the affair and return immediately. Carol refused. He declared that he was severing all connections with the Romanian royal family and that he was renouncing his rights to the throne.
On the last day of the year 1925, a government communiqué announced King Ferdinand's acceptance of Prince Carol's 'irrevocable renunciation of the succession to the Throne and of all the prerogatives appertaining to that rank, including membership of the Royal family'.
The heir to the throne was now Carol's only son, the four-year-old Prince Michael.
Prince Carol's dramatic and much publicized disappearance from the scene turned an even brighter spotlight on to Queen Marie. As Princess Helen was no longer Crown Princess (she was granted the title of Princess Helen of Romania, Princess Mother) she appeared less often in public. This meant that Queen Marie appeared more. And lest the world begin to sympathize a little too much with the Prince who had given up a throne for love, Marie decided to draw some attention to the Queen who had retained her throne through a devotion to duty. She arranged to be invited to pay an official visit to the United States. In the spring of 1927, with her two youngest children in tow, she set out on her spectacular and much criticized tour.
Acting with that characteristic blend of charm and majesty, trailing her flamboyant dresses, making endless speeches, granting innumerable interviews, 'selling', as one critic puts it, 'rights to Queen Marie this and Queen Marie that', she moved across the States in a blaze of publicity. 'We take off out best Sunday hat to Queen Marie . . .' wrote the jaundiced Edward H. Packard. 'We take off our hats, here in America, to anyone who successfully "puts over" their proposition. If they are smart enough to separate us from our money, we like them so much the better. We are fond of being humbugged . . . We exploit everything and we love being exploited.' Queen Marie might talk about 'love, brotherhood and peace' but what she was after, claims Packard, was dollars. She was hoping for the cancellation of European debts to the United States, an American loan to Romania and 'to make an honest, albeit undignified dollar selling rights to the various deals she pulls off'.
Such criticism infuriated Marie. 'There are those,' she would say scathingly, 'who tried to turn my visit into ridicule and accuse me later on of having come to try and get money out of America. This was an ugly and ill-natured calumny . . . there are some who do not understand my sincerity and try to make of me an actress full of tricks.'
Her triumphant tour was cut short by the news that King Ferdinand was dying. She sailed at once for Europe. Nando, his spirit broken by his son's behaviour, was suffering from cancer. So hesitant and pessimistic in wartime, King Ferdinand, in the years that followed, had revealed himself as a somewhat endearing figure: modest, gentle and scholarly. His chief interest was botany. Yet, no less than his wife, he had a highly developed sense of duty, although his was of an altogether less showy variety. 'It was this innate sense of duty,' writes his daughter Ilean
a, 'that made him overcome his personal shyness and gave him an air of royal dignity which made him stand out among other men, in spite of his retiring nature.'
During the last two weeks of his life, Queen Marie seldom left her husband's bedside. She had often lost patience with him in the past but during the last few years their shared concern over their son's transgressions had brought them closer together. A few hours before Nando died, he spoke to her of Carol. Their son, he murmured in his wry fashion, was like a Swiss cheese: excellent for what it was but so full of holes. The King died, with his tired head on his wife's shoulder, on 27 July 1927.
His grandson, the five-year-old Michael, was now the King of Romania.
2
But of course, Queen Marie remained the most notable figure in the land. Sporting mourning clothes which from the front made her look like a nun but with trains so long that those coming behind nearly tripped over them, she continued to play her special part. 'If you're going to Romania,' said Princess Ghyka to the celebrated travel writer Rosita Forbes, 'of course you must meet the Queen. Whatever you think, she is a very significant part of the country.'
Rosita Forbes went and, like everyone, was impressed by this 'beautiful, warm-hearted, preposterous woman who delighted in being a Queen'. While the silver teapot (in the shape of a partridge) stood untouched and cooling on the laden tray, Queen Marie held forth on every subject under the sun. 'It is customary now,' wrote the visitor afterwards, 'to criticize this English-and-Russian-born Balkan Queen for her love of display and her love of being admired, for her extravagance, her political ambitions, her business deals, and her plain speaking.' But Rosita Forbes could not join in that criticism; she thought Queen Marie admirable, a real force for good in Romania.
But in spite of appearances, the widowed Queen Marie was no longer quite the force she had once been. With the proclamation of her little grandson as King, a Regency had been set up. As the Romanian constitution excluded women from acting as regents, neither Queen Marie nor Princess Helen could fill the role; therefore three somewhat ineffectual regents were appointed. Real power, however, lay with the long-standing Liberal Prime Minister, Ion Bratianu. As Queen Marie and Bratianu had always been allies, matters, for a few months after King Ferdinand's death, remained much as before. But in November 1927 Bratianu died and his much less authoritative brother, Vintila Bratianu, became Prime Minister.
With Vintila Bratianu's accession to power coinciding with a worsening of the country's economic state, a rival party – the Peasant Party – began gaining ground. The Peasant Party, led by Juliu Maniu, tended to champion the absent Prince Carol, for no stronger reason than that the late Ion Bratianu and his Liberal Party had opposed him. Therefore they started agitating for Carol's return.
In November 1928, a year after Ion Bratianu's death, the Liberal government resigned and the Peasant Party came to power. On their installation, Queen Marie's influence waned considerably.
With her grandson, the little King Michael, her influence was also not as strong as she would have liked. Although Queen Marie and her daughter-in-law were on friendly enough terms, Princess Helen's ideas on the raising of her son were very different from Queen Marie's. Helen, very much Queen Sophie's daughter, wanted him brought up strictly, quietly and as privately as possible; Marie wanted him to be the centre of a wide, colourful and varied circle. As a result, Helen kept the boy away from his grandmother's flamboyant court. The inevitable English nanny, Miss St John, took him to see Queen Marie every morning, but that was all. This Queen Marie resented.
In the meantime, Prince Carol had been nagging Princess Helen for a divorce. At first, she had refused to consider it but finally, as a result of various pressures, she agreed. The marriage was dissolved on 21 June 1928.
Maniu, the new Prime Minister, who had been so vocal in opposition, was proving to have rather less to say now that he was in power. The country continued to flounder in its economic difficulties. Anxious to provide some sort of panacea for Romania's ills, Maniu decided to recall Prince Carol. It was generally known, by now, that Carol was eager to come back. Maniu's condition for Carol's return was that he leave Madame Lupescu behind. With this proposal, Queen Marie is said to have been in agreement. She had a strong sense of dynastic continuity and, as much as anyone, realized that Romania needed a stronger national symbol than that of a weak-kneed regency and a little boy. She probably hoped that Carol, having had his fling with Elena Lupescu, would be ready to leave her and to come to some sort of arrangement with Princess Helen and their son. Secret negotiations were opened with Carol.
Somewhat surprisingly, Prince Carol agreed to the proposed conditions. Madame Lupescu would be left behind. On 6 June 1930, four and a half years after his flight from Romania, Carol flew in to Bucharest.
There followed an extraordinarily confused series of events. Amidst scenes of frenzied acclamation, Carol was proclaimed King. ('How can Papa be King when I am King?' asked Michael, not unreasonably.) Within a month Elena Lupescu was back in the country and luxuriously installed in a house at Sinaia. Princess Helen was all but placed under arrest and her son, once again Crown Prince, encouraged to spend more and more time with his father. In an effort to get her to leave the country, Helen was subjected to every sort of pressure. Finally, tried beyond endurance, she fled. Michael was not allowed to go with her. After spending a few weeks in England, the heartbroken Helen joined her mother, the exiled Queen Sophie, in Florence.
To Queen Marie, with her clear ideas on royal obligation and discipline and her conviction that royalties should behave like demi-gods, these sordid and highly publicized domestic manoeuvrings were extremely painful. Nor had even she escaped her son's high-handedness. Jealous of her still considerable reputation at home and abroad and of the devotion she inspired in the hearts of most Romanians, he moved against her as well. He dismissed several of the officials in her service, including the Marshal of her Household, and forbade her to see certain of her close friends. His wishes, he warned her, were always to be loyally respected.
And, because of her concern for the dynasty and the country, Marie acquiesced. Carol must be given every opportunity to lead Romania out of its difficulties. Revealing an uncharacteristic humility, she effaced herself and withdrew from the court. Indeed, with Madame Lupescu's influence now all-powerful, there was not much else that she could do. She spent more and more time away from Bucharest; in her romantic castle of Bran or in her blazing white villa at Balcic on the Black Sea. In public, she never complained. Nor did she ever speak bitterly. 'I have had such a lot of happiness,' she would say, 'and battles too, of course, but that is all part of living.'
3
When the distraught Helen joined her mother in Florence in the autumn of 1931, Queen Sophie had been living there for almost eight years. Her home was a rented house, the Villa Bobolina on the Via Bolognese. With the sixty-one-year-old Queen Sophie lived her two youngest daughters, Irene and Katherine. In behaviour and appearance, Sophie was still very much the Queen. Her bearing was stately, her manners exquisite. The black, mauve and silvery grey of the mourning which she always wore for King Constantine suited her elaborately dressed white hair. But although Queen Sophie might look as regal as ever, her attitudes had mellowed during her long period of exile from Greece. No longer was she that stiff-backed, icily controlled woman of the war years; 'suffering,' according to her daughter Helen, 'had given her a tolerance and understanding of human frailty.'
'Poor misjudged Queen Sophie is one of the best of women;' wrote the Infanta Eulalia, 'her patience in adversity was wonderful, and her stoical philosophy enabled her to regard her life entirely as a state of omnia vanitas, in which nothing was lasting.'
One day, at a royal wedding reception, Queen Sophie was placed beside King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, the enemy against whom her husband, King Constantine, had fought during the Second Balkan War. Apprehensively, her family watched the two of them in conversation. Their fears proved groundless: Sophie and Ferdin
and got on so well that they could hardly be separated after the luncheon.
'But what did you find to talk about?' asked one of Sophie's brothers-in-law.
In surprise, but with no trace of 'bitterness in her voice or on her face', she answered briskly, 'Why, old times, of course.'
All reservations too, about the morganatic marriage of her dead son, King Alexander of the Hellenes, to Aspasia Manos, had long since faded. She doted on their only child, the little Princess Alexandra. For a while this granddaughter and her mother lived in Florence and each day the little Princess would be brought to visit Queen Sophie. 'I had a wonderful time with Amama [the Queen] who adored and spoiled me outrageously,' remembered Alexandra. When she was older she was sent, as Queen Sophie's daughters had been sent, to boarding-school in England. She hated it. Only a visit from her grandmother ('looking lovely as ever') could brighten her days.
If Queen Sophie had come to accept one morganatic marriage, she was still conscious enough of the status of the dynasty not to countenance another. As her eldest son, ex-King George II, and his wife, Elizabeth of Romania, had no children, the heir to the Greek throne was now George's brother, Queen Sophie's third son Paul. Prince Paul, who turned twenty-nine in 1930, had been living in London for some years. From here, Queen Sophie heard rumours that her son had fallen in love with an English girl and that he intended marrying her. The Queen hurried to London. Tactfully but firmly she explained to Prince Paul that it would never do. Not only were morganatic marriages to be avoided at all costs but any such marriage – by the heir to the throne – would be interpreted as an acceptance of the fact that the monarchy was unlikely to be restored in Greece. This would be a blow to the hopes of King George II and the monarchists. Prince Paul, impressed by his mother's reasoning and anxious to avoid causing her any further distress, agreed to postpone the matter. Queen Sophie returned to Florence and the affair died a death.