Marie of Romania

Biography

In 1892 Marie’s cousin, the future King George V, proposed to her, and she refused. Her mother opposed a marriage between first cousins and did not want her daughter to remain in England. George, Queen Victoria thought, had waited too long and so “lost Missy”.

Marie was born on 29 October 1875 at Eastwell Park in Kent, the daughter of Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, and Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna, a daughter of Alexander II. At home she was known as Missy. Her father served in the navy and was seldom at home, and the children were brought up by their mother. Many years later Marie wrote that she had not known the colour of her father’s hair until she saw a portrait. The girls detested French, and in painting and drawing they were taught only superficially, although they had inherited a talent for both from Queen Victoria. From 1886 the family lived in Malta, where her father commanded the Mediterranean Fleet; Marie called it the happiest time of her life. In 1889 the family moved to Coburg, where her father had been invited by his childless uncle, Duke Ernest II. Her mother set about “Germanising” the daughters and made them be confirmed in the Lutheran church. On the other hand, more attention was paid in Coburg to painting and music.

A bride for Crown Prince Ferdinand, nephew and heir of King Carol I of Romania, was being sought by the king himself. The engagement took place in 1892. The wedding on 10 January 1893 at Sigmaringen Castle was held three times over: a civil ceremony, a Catholic one and an Anglican one. Queen Victoria wrote to another granddaughter, Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, that the country was “very insecure” and that the morals of Bucharest society were “quite awful”.

Romania received her coldly. Carol I forbade her to make friends, Ferdinand stood in awe of his uncle, and in Bucharest she spent long hours, by her own account, moping alone in “heavy German rooms”. From 1896 the couple lived at Cotroceni Palace, which Marie furnished to her own designs; in 1903 they opened Pelișor Castle in Sinaia. She learned Romanian easily and wore folk costume, which, it is said, started a fashion among young aristocratic women. She gave birth to her first child, Carol, in October 1893; Elisabeth, Maria, Nicholas, Ileana and Mircea followed. The king and queen took the two eldest children from their young parents to bring them up. Of those years Marie later told her husband: “It is such a shame that we had to waste so many years of our youth just to learn how to live together!”

During the Second Balkan War of 1913, complicated by a cholera epidemic, she travelled between Romania and Bulgaria, working in hospitals. She later called this first encounter with an epidemic a turning point in her life. Carol I died on 10 October 1914, Ferdinand became king and Marie queen. She pressed for an alliance with the Entente, the coalition of Britain, France and Russia, and got her way: on 17 August 1916 Ferdinand signed the treaty, and on 27 August Romania declared war on Austria-Hungary. The French minister to Romania, Count Saint-Aulaire, wrote that she “embraced war as another might embrace religion”. On 2 November 1916 her youngest son, Mircea, died of typhoid fever at Buftea. Bucharest fell, and in December the court moved to Iași. There Marie put on a nurse’s uniform every day, met the wounded at the railway station and sent them on to the hospitals. In 1918 she vehemently opposed the signing of a separate peace in Bucharest.

To the Romanian soldiers she remained the “Mother of the Wounded”.

On 1 December 1918 the assembly at Alba Iulia resolved on the union of Transylvania with the Old Kingdom. In March 1919 Romania, whose delegation under the prime minister, Ionel Brătianu, had left Paris after a clash with Georges Clemenceau, sent the queen herself to the peace conference. Clemenceau told her: “I don’t like your Prime Minister.” She answered: “Perhaps then you’ll find me more agreeable.” From Paris she went to London, stayed with George V at Buckingham Palace and met Lord Curzon, Winston Churchill and Waldorf and Nancy Astor. Woodrow Wilson was not impressed by her. Greater Romania nonetheless received international recognition. The coronation took place in 1922 in a cathedral built specially for it at Alba Iulia. Ferdinand, a Catholic, refused an Orthodox rite, and the ceremony was held outside the cathedral: he placed the crown on his own head and then on the kneeling Marie. Her Art Nouveau crown, of Transylvanian gold, was made by the Parisian house of Falize to a design by the painter Costin Petrescu. In 1926 Marie was received into the Romanian Orthodox Church.

In the autumn of 1926 she arrived in the United States with Nicholas and Ileana: New York, Philadelphia, the dedication of the Maryhill Museum of Art, and an official dinner at the White House that, by contemporary accounts, had some awkward moments. She came back from the trip dreaming of returning to America. To my mind, the delight she recorded in her diary explains her popularity across the Atlantic better than any newspaper review.

Ferdinand, gravely ill, died on 20 July 1927 in her arms. Marie refused to join the regency council for her young grandson Michael and afterwards found herself in the background. When in 1930 her son Carol II deposed Michael, he removed his mother from politics and tried to destroy her popularity. She withdrew to Bran Castle and to the palace called The Quiet Nest at Balchik, where she built the chapel of Stella Maris. In those years Marie took an interest in the Baháʼí Faith and corresponded with its head, Shoghi Effendi; her daughter Ileana later denied that her mother had converted.

In the summer of 1937 Marie fell ill. In the spring of 1938 she was treated in Italy, then in Dresden; she insisted on returning to Romania and travelled by train, declining the aeroplane offered by Hitler. She died on 18 July 1938 at Pelișor Castle. She was buried at Curtea de Argeș, and her heart, at her own wish, was placed in a golden casket in the Stella Maris chapel at Balchik. In 1940, when Southern Dobruja was ceded to Bulgaria, the casket was moved to Bran Castle.