Born to Rule: Five Reigning Consorts, Granddaughters of Queen Victoria

by Julia P. Gelardi

  With Princess Ileana married and making her permanent home outside of Romania, Marie grew increasingly lonely. Of the few retainers left to her, she could at least count on the presence of a certain General Zwiedineck. But loyal retainers could not make up for family; and Marie craved for close family ties. With Ileana gone, who was she to turn to amongst her children? Mignon—“my little Serbian Queen,” as Marie liked to call her—was in Belgrade. Elisabetta, the exiled Queen of Greece, had turned out to be a great disappointment to her mother. Carol—well, Carol was just incomprehensible. So what of Nicky?

  Queen Marie had placed great hopes in her second son, Prince Nicolas. But like nearly all her children, Nicky failed his mother. Not because of any great omission on Marie’s part in raising him; the young man, after all, had escaped the damaging influence of King Carol I and Queen Elisabeth that had so ruined Nicky’s two older siblings. It was just that Nicky did not seem to have inherited any of the strengths of either parent and indeed showed some of their weaknesses. His tenure as regent was a failure. Lacking in ambition, ability, and duty, Nicky simply gave in to Carol’s desire to return and usurp the throne from Michael. This was a bitter blow to Marie. She had nursed strong hopes that Nicky might help Carol turn his life around. Queen Marie had once admitted to Loie Fuller that she hoped Nicky would be helped by the aid of Dr. Frank Buchman. A well-known American Evangelist, who had been transformed by the power of Christ, Buchman preached that selfishness and pride had to be eliminated so that one could work in the service of Christ. This kind of thinking greatly appealed to Marie, who saw in Buchman a kindred soul. Years later, she was to distance herself from Buchman. But Marie’s faith in the 1920s was such that she recommended him to Loie, saying he would be “a healing hand.” Marie also noted that he was “teaching our Nicky to become one day perhaps the saviour of his own brother.”5 But Prince Nicolas never became Carol’s saviour. And worse was to come when Nicky presented his mother with his choice of a wife.

  Queen Marie’s interest in the philosophy of men like Buchman reflects her own deep-seated faith in God. It was her faith that helped sustain her through her ordeals. Always transparent in her dealings with others, Marie could never comprehend why they behaved maliciously toward her and chose to misunderstand her motives. Shortly before King Ferdinand died, the queen complained that “life has become a battle, a sad battle against forces working in the dark.” She confessed that she might sometimes feel beaten; but she did not despair, thanks to her faith in God:

  On all sides I feel danger, it is all about me like an air that poisons even the strongest lungs, but in spite of that, deep within me my faith, my hope are still green, there is an invincible something which I am built upon, or out of, which cannot, will not, does not despair….

  The God within us! that is what really counts…that fundamental something which makes us part of the “beyond,” which leads us upwards in spite of ourselves…towards a light out of which we came and to which we surely return if we do not allow our spirits to go down in the mine! A light which shines in our souls, a beacon signalling to us from somewhere beyond this quarrelling, hating, doubting, betrayed and betraying, sad suffering world.6

  It was through Buchman that Queen Marie met Dr. Samuel Shoemaker. Both Buchman and Shoemaker were leading lights in the Oxford Group at Oxford University, which in turn influenced Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Marie’s interest in Shoemaker’s approach to faith led her to include a Sunday visit to the Calvary Church in New York (where Shoemaker was rector) during her hectic American tour. When Shoemaker visited her at Cotroceni Palace earlier, she had promised that she would hear him preach in his church if she ever reached America. Marie fulfilled her promise, arriving at the Calvary Church on a rainy Sunday morning in October 1926. Shoemaker had hoped that the large congregation who had come to honor the queen “would feel themselves drawn closer to The King of Kings before they left the church.” According to Marie’s American host, “the Queen was much interested and later said that the hour was one of almost heavenly peace and beauty.”7 Marie herself noted in her diary that the “church was a sweet rest. Lovely singing, service neither high nor low, just what I like.”8

  Queen Sophie of Greece had also found Shoemaker’s words uplifting and sent his book of sermons to the British clergyman, the Reverend R. W Cole. “I think the sermons magnificent,” she wrote to Cole, “& hope you will like them.”9 Sophie recommended two other works to the Reverend Cole: “There are two books I should like you to read and think they will interest you—one In Touch With Christ by James Reid, M.A. St. Andrews Presbyterian Church Eastbourne. The other, Twice Born Ministers by S. M. Shoemaker—Rector of Calvary Church New York, the one who wrote Religion that Works. I find them very interesting, fine; I think you will enjoy them.”10 Central to the theme of both is the transformative nature of Christianity.

  The former Queen of the Hellenes had taken these works to heart and was deeply immersed in her relationship with God. She described herself to the Reverend Cole not as a royal personage but simply as a “poor old sinner—who am just like everybody else.”11

  Like Tsarina Alexandra of Russia, who had felt her own Christian faith intensely, especially in times of pain, Queen Sophie found renewed strength in her close relationship with God. Attending religious services and reading works on Christianity comforted her. Her prayers were also a source of strength. Sophie admitted how she loved “the old prayers of the 17 cent[ury]” which she kept on her table to read so that she might “find strength & comfort.”12

  Sophie came to know Reverend Cole and his family when she visited England in the 1920’s. Her youngest daughter, Princess Katherine, was then in school at Broadstairs in Kent. The Reverend Cole preached at an Anglican parish church in the village of Birchington, some seven miles from there. Toward the last years of Queen Sophie’s life, she and Cole corresponded, providing her with a link to England. When she received photographs of the church at Birchington, Queen Sophie was thrilled and commented to Cole: “The one of the interior, I love particularly. It makes me so dreadfully home sick—when I see the sweet peaceful little church I loved to attend the services there.”13 Though herself a convert to Orthodoxy from Protestantism, Sophie occasionally attended Anglican services while in England and also at the English Church in Florence. She missed the moving services and sermons at Birchington and did not hesitate to tell the Reverend Cole so:

  The lovely services I loved so much—Thursdays, Saturday evenings—Sundays at 12:15, Sunday evenings, etc.

  How often we speak of you all & like to think back at our delightful time in Birchington.

  Love to think back to the happy days in Birchington & we wish we were there again…yesterday a year ago we were in Birchington.14

  Even Margery Bennett, Princess Katherine’s governess, wrote to Reverend Cole to let him know of Queen Sophie’s affection for his church: “Her Majesty so often speaks of Birchington & everyone she knew there, & only this morning, as I walked back from church with her, she was talking of you & your work, & wishing she could be back at the little church that she loved so much.”15

  Not surprisingly, Queen Sophie believed in the power of faith and prayer. When the depression and turmoil in Europe of the 1930s made for worrying news, Queen Sophie wrote to the Reverend Cole that the world was “still in a great mess.” Yet she was convinced that it could change for the better: “Only prayer & Religion can put that right again.” She never wavered in her belief. A year later, she repeated the same thoughts, saying: “What a mess the world is in & a lot of prayer is needed to lead people on the right way”17 This strong faith of Sophie’s echoed that of her grandmother, who in 1878 told Sophie’s own mother: “The mere abstract idea of goodness will not help people to lead good lives, only belief in God.”18

  Queen Marie of Romania remained an Anglican, though she had been confirmed in the German Protestant Church. But as the daughter of a Russian Orthodox mother, wife of a Roman Catholic, moth
er of children and queen of subjects belonging to the Romanian Orthodox Church, it was not surprising that Marie was drawn to other teachings in her quest to reach a deeper relationship with God. She discovered some of her answers in the Baha’i religion, which she encountered in 1926 in the midst of Prince Carol’s scandals. Marie found one of its central tenets particularly appealing: surrounded by a diversity in faith among family members, she valued the emphasis on religious unity. Marie admitted that “I really pray better at home with my Baha’u’llah books and teaching which have brought me such a message lately, the message in fact that I have always been waiting for—it has become a joy and comfort to me.”19 She tried to explain the religion’s attraction for her and where she stood in the spectrum of faiths: “this dissatisfaction with every religious form made of me a great appre-ciator of the Baha’i teachings, so that I have even been called a Baha’i! But I am nothing except myself, though officially I am Anglican, but call myself a Protestant. When asked what sort of Protestant, I throw out my hands and smile a smile that might mean anything.”20

  Queen Marie was not prepared to see her second son go down the same route as Carol when it came to choosing a wife. Like his father and brother before him,Nicolas fell for a Romanian commoner. Again like Ferdinand and Carol, Nicky wanted to marry his Romanian girlfriend; but he could not do so because of the country’s constitution. Encouraged by King Carol, Nicky went ahead and eloped with Joana Doletti a day before his mother’s fifty-sixth birthday.

  Marie was disappointed with Joana. A divorced woman, in the queen’s estimation she was nothing but “a hardhearted, painted little hussy whose one idea is money and luxury in every form, and who is eating up his fortune so that soon he will have nothing but debts.”21 Marie was also deeply hurt by Joana’s attempts to separate Nicolas from his mother. When Nicky eloped, Carol (although he had supported the move) promptly divested his brother of his military rank and forced the couple out of the country by striking Nicky off the royal family roster and stripping him of his citizenship. Marie had lost another child to exile.

  “I have put queer children into the world,” Marie once confessed. “I loved them enormously, everything was for them, but they do not recognise this and…well I am not going to talk about this because it would be making wounds bleed and I must get along somehow without losing faith & hope and my joy of life which still clings to me astonishingly”22

  Queen Marie could not understand how her two sons could have betrayed the ideals with which they were raised. For a time, she preferred to lay the blame largely on the women they became entangled with, but she also took responsibility for having failed to raise her children well. Writing in 1934 to a young American friend, Ray Baker Harris, Marie explained:

  I may be rash, sometimes even inconsiderate, but this is out of over-honesty, never with an intention to hurt. My fear of hurting has in fact been a shackle in my life and much of the trouble I have today with my children is that I always respected over-much their personalities and never wanted to tyrannize or oppress.…I was the thread upon which they were strung. My will, my faith, my ideal, my love, my sense of duty kept them straight.…But at his death they all came into their separate fortune, and they cut the string and each rolled into his own little corner and did his or her worst, except Ileana and Mignon. This is the truth, and, being the truth, it will make the later story of my life difficult to tell.23

  One person who heard some of this difficult story from Marie herself was her long-lost love, King George V.

  My life has been very difficult & very sad, so sad that it does not bear putting down in writing.…If ever we are to meet again in this world, I shall tell you everything…I did all I could; I see everything…I have struggled for over two years, swallowing every unkindness, every setback, but all in vain, there is some dark force against which all my good will shatters.…Lately I have been living in a world which I no more understand & which has become very lonely; Ileana married, Sitta gone, Nicky banished, but I struggle on, I look beaten, but am I really beaten? I was always a good fighter you remember. But fight against one’s flesh & blood?24

  Deeply moved by the plight of his once-beloved Missy, George replied with a letter referring to the latest cruelty heaped on Marie—Carol’s refusal to allow Ileana to give birth to her first child on Romanian soil:

  What a terribly sad letter yours is. In reading it the tears came into my eyes, as I fully realise all the misery you have gone through during the last two years. I have seen Sitta and George, and they have both told me of the many insults and unkindnesses that have been heaped upon you; even this last cruel act, that Ileana was forbidden to enter the country to have her baby in your house is cruel and disgraceful. I do hope that some day soon we may meet and then you will be able to pour your heart out to me.25

  Ileana had her baby, a boy, born in Austria (where she resided), with her mother by her side. Marie was now the grandmother of the former King Michael of Romania, three princes of Yugoslavia, and a baby Archduke of Austria.

  King George V’s letter was a reminder of those far-off days when he had been among the first young men smitten by her beauty and charm. At nearly sixty years of age, the still luminous Marie had one more conquest to add to her long roster of admirers—her aide-de-camp, General Zwiedineck. Many years her junior, the mustachioed general with the large eyes had taken over Prince Stirbey’s old job as head of the Queen’s Household. Marie was naturally flattered by Zwiedineck’s sudden admission of passion, but she kept him at arm’s length.

  Ileana’s new baby and Zwiedineck’s admission of his undying devotion were two of the few happy events that came Queen Marie’s way, for life in Romania with the tyrannical King Carol II made his mother increasingly edgy. She was so disgusted with Magda Lupescu that she not only refused to meet her, despite Carol’s numerous pleas; Marie also never acknowledged her except to a few intimates. When, not long before she died, the English author Beverly Nichols asked Queen Marie about Lupescu, her reply was characteristically that of a disapproving matriarch against the upstart. “At the mention of the name she became the very grande dame; the temperature of the room seemed to drop. ‘I have only seen her once,’ she said. ‘Years ago, at a ball.…She seemed quite insignificant, and she was wearing pink, which was hardly the colour to wear with that hair. I suppose she has what they call sex appeal.’ “ Nichols added: “She made ‘sex appeal’ sound like some very odious disease.”2

  With Lupescu hated in the country, it was only a matter of time before a strong opposition force against Carol II emerged. It did so in the form of what became known as the Iron Guard, a group backed and encouraged by Mussolini and Hitler under the leadership of Corneliu Codreanu. Marie watched in dismay as Carol tried to battle it out with Codreanu for the heart and soul of Romania, but was not surprised to find that legions flocked to join the Iron Guard. When Carol turned to his mother’s old friend, Jean Duca, for help, tragedy ensued: Duca was assassinated in December 1933 by the Iron Guard.

  Queen Marie was deeply saddened by the assassination. As for King Carol, Duca’s death sent his popularity dropping dramatically. Although Carol encouraged his mother to ride in the annual 10 May parade in order to help his image, he responded to her popularity among Romanians by persecuting the queen even more.

  If Carol hoped that this battle of wills might finally push his mother out of the country, he was wrong. Marie refused to concede. For a woman accustomed to fight for what was right to have done so would have been to admit defeat. That was simply not in her nature. Besides, she loved Romania and was prepared to suffer again for her country’s sake if there was any way she could help by staying put. Marie, however, had to have breathing space; so she fled to her favorite retreats at Bran and, especially, Balcic—“this peaceful corner I love.” There, she had built a simple chapel, the Stella Maris, and filled it with Byzantine decorations. She tended to her flowers, cruised the waters on her motorboat, and enjoyed “my solitude & independence…[in] a rea
l Fool’s Paradise.”27

  Marie also sought to escape from the scandal and intrigue of Carol’s court by visiting Ileana and Anton and their growing brood in Austria. Ileana sometimes obtained permission from Carol to return to Romania, but he kept those visits brief and few. This irritated his mother no end, as she pointed out to a friend: “Ileana adores to be home again, and it is a cowardly cruelty to try and keep her out of the country which adores her and which she so profoundly loves.”28

  The queen also liked to visit Belgrade, where she stayed with Mignon and King Alexander, her moody but intelligent son-in-law, who was a much more astute monarch than Carol. Alexander proved much more attentive to his mother-in-law than the ever jealous Carol back in Bucharest. The only problem for Mignon was that Crown Prince Peter lacked a proper education, a fact the boy’s grandmother noticed. At her insistence, Peter was sent to study as a boarder in England, where Marie felt he could be molded into a proper gentleman and become prepared to be Yugoslavia’s next king.

  In October 1934, Queen Marie was in England to promote her memoirs. Writing continued to provide an escape, whether it was voluminous letters to friends and relations or working on her autobiography. The queen was flattered to find that her memoirs not only sold well but were critically acclaimed for their lively style. The $50,000 offered by the Saturday Evening Post for serialization rights especially thrilled her.