by Theo Aronson
To Queen Marie, all this was extremely distressing. In a mere twenty years, the Germany against which she had made such a valiant, defiant stand was once again all-powerful. Was it for nothing that she had made so many sacrifices, suffered so much heartbreak and fought such desperate battles? And Romania, too, which she had seen so gloriously aggrandized after the First World War, was now an unstable, cruelly divided country, dictatorially ruled by a self-indulgent sovereign who had lost the respect of his people. Was another war about to ravage the Continent? 'If the instinct of destruction wins the upper hand,' she wrote, 'then Europe will go down and all the horror of Russia will sweep over everything that was beautiful and worthwhile living for. This thought is so frightful that my only prayer is not to have to live to see it.' Withdrawn from public life, the Queen devoted herself to writing her memoirs and tending her magnificent gardens. 'I know nothing,' she would say, when asked about Romanian affairs.
But, of course, Queen Marie was still a woman of exceptional style and personality. Nothing could ever alter that. Her guests would be no less impressed by her setting: the gold walls, the panels of Madonna lilies, the great bowls of orange flowers. Although she had turned sixty in 1935, she was still a striking-looking woman. Her hair, fashionably short and sleekly waved, was now silvery-gold, but her eyes were clear, her smile radiant and her figure supple. In her long dresses of gold or flame or salmon, she still moved with extreme grace. She had the litheness, it was said, of a girl of twenty. Her conversation was as colourful as it had ever been. Talking to Beverley Nichols of her love for her famous terraced garden at Balcic on the Black Sea, she said, 'I behave disgracefully. I break important engagements because of it. And the only excuse I can make is the true one. "I can't come because . . . because I have a rendezvous with a rose".'
What would she have liked to have been, asked her visitor, if she had not been a queen. 'I should have been a painter,' answered Marie. 'All my emotions are visual. If there is anything good in my books, it comes from that. I see things so clearly that it almost hurts . . . and, let me tell you, I have seen a lot!'
In the spring of 1937 Queen Marie fell ill. By the summer she seemed to have recovered but that October, at Balcic, she suffered a severe haemorrhage and had to be moved to Bucharest. From then on, although from time to time she rallied, she was never really well. For most of her days she was bedridden. Yet her gaiety and her interest in things remained unimpaired. Once, leafing through a fashion magazine, she saw a picture of an evening wrap made by Revillon of Paris; it was a floor-length cape of ermine, lavishly bordered with Canadian red fox. 'How I should love to have this if I were well!' she exclaimed. 'But I shall never wear anything of that kind again.' Hoping that the possession of the cape might help her mother to fight her illness, Marie's daughter Ileana bought it for her for Christmas. Queen Marie was delighted. But she was never able to wear it; the cape lay always across her bed.
In the spring of 1938 she went again to Balcic. Here she lay in the pale sunshine on the terrace overlooking the Black Sea, surrounded by those tall-stemmed white lilies that she loved so much. She had long ago decided that although, after her death, her body would lie among the other members of the dynasty in the church at Curtea de Arges, her heart must be removed, placed in a jewelled casket and buried in the chapel she had built at Balcic. She had always looked upon the little town of Balcic, won from Bulgaria in the First World War, as her own. Here, her heart would be more accessible to her people than it would be in the royal mausoleum. During her lifetime, her subjects had been able 'to bring their sorrows and their wishes to her heart'; 'she wanted it to be so even after her death.'
From Balcic she travelled to a sanitorium at Dresden. Once again, she seemed to be picking up, but the improvement did not last long. Indeed, the entire course of Marie's illness was not only erratic but somewhat mysterious. At Dresden it was finally diagnosed as esophageal varices (dilated blood vessels) resulting from complications caused by alcoholic poisoning. Yet the Queen had never touched liquor and had always followed a strict regimen. How could this poisoning of the liver have come about? The fact that the illness had been wrongly treated until Marie's arrival at Dresden gave rise to rumours that its causes had been unnatural; the suspicions were strengthened by the fact that no autopsy was performed after her death. At Dresden the doctors did what they could, by way of blood transfusions, to repair the neglect, but it was too late. The Queen was clearly dying. Yet even now her thoughts were for the happiness of others. 'Poor doctor! I am so sorry for him,' she sighed. 'He is so disappointed,' And when someone who had at one stage caused the Queen much distress, came to visit her in hospital, Marie received her 'with open arms'. 'You see,' she explained to her astonished daughter Ileana, 'there is so little left to me except to be kind.'
In July 1938, she had a sudden relapse. Realizing that she was dying, she asked to be taken back to Romania. On the journey home, her train was forced to halt for almost fourteen hours while the Queen suffered another haemorrhage. She died at her palace of Pelishor, at Sinaia on 18 July 1938, a day after arriving home. She was sixty-three.
It was as well perhaps, that she died then. Had she lived another ten years, Queen Marie would have witnessed the total collapse of everything to which she had devoted her life. She was spared so many tragedies: the outbreak of the Second World War, the abdication of her son Carol in 1940, the unhappy reign of her grandson Michael – first as the tool of the fascists and then of the communists, the loss of part of Transylvania to Hungary and of Dobrudja (including her house at Balcic) to Bulgaria, the Germano-Romanian campaign against Russia, the horrors of the Russian advance and occupation of the country, the abdication of King Michael, the fall of the monarchy and the conversion of Romania into a communist satellite state. All this would have broken her heart.
That same heart, buried in her chapel at Balcic, was hurriedly removed by a faithful aide-de-camp a few hours before the Bulgarians took possession of the territory. In its jewelled casket, it was carried to the late Queen's castle of Bran. Here her daughter, Princess Ileana, placed it in a chapel carved out of the rock in the hillside. 'There it stood apart and alone,' she says, 'a shrine easily accessible to all.'
With the death of this indomitable granddaughter of Queen Victoria, it seemed, said one contemporary, as though 'a light has gone out of the world'. It did, indeed. Affected and maddeningly self-satisfied Queen Marie might have been, but she was never mean, never unkind, never vindictive. Her aim was to spread joy, light and colour; in this, she never failed. She would have been, writes someone who knew her, 'an outstanding figure into whatever rank of life she had been born. A woman who has lived fully and loved deeply, who has braved the crowd, and commanded it. And though life has brought her many days in which her crown lay heavily upon her, she has worn it always with grace.'
Meriel Buchanan, the daughter of Sir George Buchanan, British Ambassador at St Petersburg during the First World War, tells a curiously touching anecdote concerning Queen Marie. Lady Buchanan, Meriel's mother, would often bring home to her young daughter the slips of paper on which, in one of those artless parlour games of the period, guests would be asked to write a suitable epitaph for each of the others present. On one of these slips was an inscription which Meriel had never forgotten. A young Russian grand duke had written his epitaph for Marie of Romania.
'A star danced when she was born.'
2
For year after year, always on the fringe of the turmoil in central Europe, Queen Maud of Norway had been living her simple, quiet, well-ordered life. By the year 1938 she and her husband, King Haakon, had reigned in Norway for thirty-three years. She was sixty-seven that year, he sixty-four. Their only son, Crown Prince Olav, was in his mid-thirties, married to a Swedish princess, and the father of three children.
Life in the palaces of Norway was extremely unpretentious. This was due as much to the personal preference of the King and Queen as it was to the character of Norway itself. King Haako
n, tall, thin and hawk-faced, was a man of democratic habits and simple tastes. It was this democratic bearing, plus the fairness, conscientiousness and intelligence with which he carried out his duties, that made King Haakon such an ideal constitutional monarch. He had long ago stilled the republican sentiments of some of his subjects. Monarchist Norway was a contented and well-run democratic, socialist state.
Natural and unassuming, the King moved among his subjects with the minimum of fuss. Once, on arriving at the British Broadcasting Corporation in London to record a message to the British people, the King announced himself to the receptionist. While she was telephoning through to the person whom he had come to see, the girl turned round to ask, 'Where was it you said you were the king of?'
Haakon's answer would have come without a flicker of irritation or pomposity.
Queen Maud was no different. Of the ostentatious and luxury-loving characteristics of her father, King Edward VII, she had nothing. Nor did she have Queen Alexandra's obsession with clothes. Queen Maud was a small, shy, simply dressed woman with no taste for ceremonial. 'I am so glad that I am Queen of a country in which everybody loves simplicity,' she once exclaimed to the visiting Infanta Eulalia. Her life in Oslo, says one of her friends, was 'far less pretentious than that of many well-to-do women in other countries'. Accompanied only by a lady-in-waiting, she would move freely about the streets of the city, doing her own shopping. 'It's easier,' she would say, 'and, in any case, I've no one to send.'
The same informality marked her life at home. Meals in the Royal Palace in Oslo were plain and frugal. No hordes of liveried servants hovered about the dining-room. Parties and receptions were kept to a minimum. Only a small section of the royal garden was reserved for the family's use; the public could wander about the palace grounds at will. Indeed, so accessible was the Palace that it was quite possible to peer up at the ground floor windows.
The Queen had never conquered her fear of public appearances. She would stand for minutes fiddling with her long white gloves before forcing herself to enter a reception room or the royal box at a gala performance. On great public occasions she usually looked stiff, almost disgruntled. Those who did not know Queen Maud found her somewhat forbidding.
Yet, in an intimate circle, she was charming and full of fun; one Norwegian Prime Minister spoke of her 'warm and generous personality'. Age had obliged her to give up riding and ski-ing for more sedentary pastimes, such as chess, photography, book-binding and leatherwork. But she was still a passionate gardener and she greatly enjoyed fishing. To get away from Oslo to the family's wooden chalet in Kongseteren was one of her delights.
Over forty years of life in Scandinavia had made Maud no less English. Her tastes were still those of her English girlhood. She spoke English without a trace of Norwegian accent. The royal family's private apartments were furnished in English country house style. Her greatest joy was still her annual winter holiday at Appleton, her home at Sandringham. There, says one contemporary, 'she indulged her love of English country life, which had gained that hold over her heart that no subsequent affections or experiences can entirely supersede'.
It was while Queen Maud was on her usual holiday to Norfolk in November 1938 that she was suddenly taken ill while shopping. She was rushed to hospital for an operation. King Haakon came over from Norway at once. The operation successfully carried out, the Queen seemed to be improving, but very early on the morning of 20 November, she died of heart failure. It was thirty-three years, to the very day, since she had become Queen of Norway.
A private funeral service was held in her childhood home, Marlborough House. Then, in bitter cold and driving rain, her coffin was borne in procession through the streets of London. A train carried it to Portsmouth where it was put aboard H.M.S. Royal Oak. Still in stormy weather, it was taken across the North Sea to Norway. The Queen was buried in the chapel of Akerhus Castle, which was henceforth to be the royal mausoleum.
One wonders whether Queen Maud, like her cousin Queen Marie of Romania, would have liked her heart to have been buried elsewhere. In England, at her beloved Sandringham, perhaps?
3
Since the assassination of her husband, King Alexander of Yugoslavia, in 1934, his wife Mignon – Queen Marie – had all but retired from public life. Her husband's cousin, the aesthetic Prince Paul, was now Regent for her young son, King Peter. Until the boy turned eighteen in 1941, he was expected to play no part in national life. He was still in the hands of his tutors.
This cessation of her public duties (for which the Queen had never had the slightest taste) allowed Mignon to live the sort of life she preferred. By 1938, having established her two younger sons, Tomislav and Andrej, at Sandroyd Preparatory School in England (from where they went on to Oundle and then Cambridge) the Queen was spending a great deal of her time in Britain. She found herself a cottage – the Old Mill House in Grandsden near Cambridge – and there settled down to a life of relative obscurity. Sharing her home was her inseparable friend, Mrs Rosemary Creswell; a woman whom King Peter calls his mother's 'old school friend'. Away from the public gaze, and not always in the best of health, Queen Marie paid less attention to her appearance then ever. She became increasingly stout and untidy. Her greying hair was cropped short, her bulky body was usually enveloped in a tent-like 'gown-cum-wrap'. She seldom wore dresses; her feet were usually stuffed into moccasins. Of the transcendentally beautiful child whom Queen Marie of Romania used to photograph against massed peonies or hydrangeas, only the intense blue eyes gave evidence.
The Queen's routine became as casual as her clothes. She woke late and, having breakfasted in bed, remained there throughout the day, dozing, reading the papers, writing letters and smoking innumerable cigarettes. Not until half past seven in the evening did she appear downstairs, wearing one of her voluminous 'tents' and slippers. Dinner over, she would settle down – always with a huge box of cigarettes beside her – for an evening's bridge or talk. She was skilled at both. 'Her conversation,' wrote one long-suffering listener, 'would get more and more animated as the night wore on. By midnight she would be in full voice . . .' Her talk, delivered in that blunt, emphatic fashion, could be fascinating. Queen Marie might have had little of her mother's poetic turn of phrase but, in her own way, she could be just as interesting. Utterly without affectation, she preferred, for some obscure reason, to be called 'Paiky' by her friends.
Mignon was on one of her visits to Yugoslavia when Germany attacked Poland in September 1939.'What do you think will happen now?' her son, the fifteen-year-old King Peter asked her on hearing the news. Yugoslavia would wait and see, she said, what Britain and France did. But even when Britain and France declared war on Germany, Yugoslavia did nothing. There was not much that she could do. The Regent, Prince Paul, might have had British sympathies but his country lay at the mercy of Germany and Italy. His only hope was to sit tight. Yugoslavia declared its neutrality. Assuming that the country's neutrality would be respected, the Queen returned to England in November 1939.
She was still there when, in the spring of 1941, Yugoslavia became the scene of an extraordinary series of events. France, by now, had fallen and Italy was at war with Greece. Everywhere, except against embattled Britain, Hitler was victorious. The Yugoslav Regent and his government, unable to withstand German pressure any longer, signed an agreement with the Axis Powers in March that year. The move sparked off a revolution in Belgrade. On 27 March, a group of officers overthrew Prince Paul and his government and assumed control in the name of the seventeen-year-old King Peter II. The young King, who approved of the coup but who had been told nothing about it, was astonished to hear a voice, not unlike his own, broadcasting a proclamation to the people of Yugoslavia to the effect that he was party to the revolution. The rebels, unable to gain access to the young King, had been obliged to fake the broadcast by using a young officer with a voice similar to the King's.
The Yugoslav coup infuriated Hitler. He was determined to put defiant Yugoslavia in its place
. Postponing his planned assault on Russia by four weeks (the delay was to prove fatal to the Third Reich) he attacked Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941. Within a week, and with unbelievable ferocity, he had crushed it. King Peter and his government were forced to flee. They escaped, first to Greece, which was also on the point of collapse, and then to England.
Queen Marie met her son at an airfield close to Grandsden where she lived. They had not seen each other for almost two years. Together, they returned to Old Mill House. For the first few weeks after his arrival, the house was the scene of considerable activity as Peter conferred with his government-in-exile. But gradually, as is the way with exiled sovereigns, there was less and less for him to confer about. The underground resistance to the Germans which was springing up in Yugoslavia was doing so quite independently of him. Indeed, of the two resistance groups – the Cetniks and the Partisans – the latter, as communists, were determinedly anti-monarchical. News of the exploits of the Partisan leader, Tito, which first came to Peter's ears during these early months of exile, could not have brought him much comfort.
To keep her son occupied, Mignon decided that he must continue his studies. After all, he was only just eighteen. For his coming of age, the British government had arranged a special service in St Paul's Cathedral. That scrap of ceremonial over, the boy was packed off to Cambridge. His mother arranged a room for him above the garage of her cottage and here he spent the occasional weekend.