She was the granddaughter of two of the most powerful monarchs of the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria of Britain and Tsar Alexander II of Russia, yet she would live to see the monarchies of Europe collapse one by one. Born into a world of glittering royal weddings and endless dynastic obligations, Marie would become the last queen of Romania, a woman who entered her adopted country as a stranger and left it as one of its most beloved figures. Marie was born on October 29, 1875, at Eastwell Manor in Kent, England. Her father was Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, a son of Queen Victoria, and her mother was Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna of Russia, a daughter of Tsar Alexander II.
Her childhood was spent moving between England, Germany, and Malta, where her father served as commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean fleet. She remembered the years on Malta fondly, but her home life was cold, as her mother remained distant from her children. There was never any question that Marie would marry into one of Europe’s other royal houses. For a time in the early 1890s, she was considered as a bride for her first cousin George, the second son of the Prince of Wales.
But when George’s elder brother Albert Victor died in 1892, George suddenly stood directly in the line of succession to the British throne and was betrothed to Mary of Teck, who had been due to marry Albert Victor before his death. A new match was arranged for Marie instead, this time with Prince Ferdinand of Romania, crown prince of the young kingdom. By late 1892, the arrangement was sufficiently advanced that Marie left England at just seventeen years old. It was the last time she would ever call England home.
She and Ferdinand were married at Sigmaringen Castle in southern Germany on January 10, 1893, in a ceremony performed as both Catholic and Protestant services to accommodate their different religious upbringings. From there, they traveled by train into Romania. Romania was then a new state. For centuries it had been ruled as part of the Ottoman Empire, but it had gained its independence following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878.
The German prince Karl Friedrich Ludwig of the House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen had been crowned King Carol I. He was now Marie’s father-in-law, and one day Ferdinand would succeed him. Marie arrived in a land that held an almost mystical place in the European imagination. Around the same time, Bram Stoker was writing Dracula in London, setting his famous vampire novel in Transylvania.
But the troubles Marie faced in Bucharest were not vampires. King Carol was a domineering figure, and her new husband was pleasant but timid, never challenging his father. The marriage produced children quickly, beginning with a son named Carol, born in October 1893, just nine months after the wedding. But the early years were difficult.
King Carol and Queen Elizabeth insisted that royal children be raised in a separate household, and Marie’s infants were taken from her care almost immediately after birth. Over time, she grew into her situation and became well liked by the Romanian people. Her marriage remained cordial, though she engaged in several affairs from the late 1890s. One affair, with Lieutenant Gheorghe Cantacuzene, is believed to have resulted in a pregnancy.
Marie briefly stayed with her mother in Germany, almost certainly to give birth to an illegitimate child who was sent to an orphanage. As she grew older, Marie became increasingly determined to resist her father-in-law’s autocratic behavior. The opportunity came in the summer of 1913, when the Second Balkan War broke out after Bulgaria declared war on Greece. Romania quickly allied with Greece in a conflict that lasted barely a month.
Marie began working in the Romanian field hospitals established for wounded soldiers. Cholera swept through the wards, making the hospitals more dangerous than the battlefield. Marie ignored the warnings and became a nurse, tending to the sick for several weeks. She held the hands of dying patients, nursed the ill, and refused to wear a mask, arguing that to do so would dehumanize the sick in their final moments.
Her reputation in the country soared. On October 10, 1914, King Carol I died, and Ferdinand succeeded him as king. Marie became queen consort, but it soon became clear across the capitals of Europe that it was Marie who truly determined the policies emanating from the royal palace in Bucharest. She became queen in the middle of a profound crisis.
A few months before Carol’s death, the First World War had broken out following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Sarajevo. Old King Carol had favored joining the war on the side of the Central Powers, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, but his government had decided Romania should remain neutral. Marie was clear in her own view: Romania should enter the war on the side of Britain, France, and Russia. It took months of persuasion to convince the political parties in Bucharest, but in August 1916, Romania entered the war.
According to the account, the final decision came when Marie told Ferdinand in no uncertain terms that Romania was joining on the side of the Allies. The war went badly for Romania. At first it held its own against larger neighbors while aiding Russia on the Eastern Front. But when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917 and Russia left the war, Romania found itself surrounded by the Central Powers.
The country was occupied, and in May 1918 it signed the Treaty of Bucharest, ceding extensive territory, disbanding much of its army, and leasing its vast oil wealth to Germany. Marie, who had returned to nursing under the Red Cross when Romania entered the war, was bitterly opposed to the treaty but could do little to resist the Central Powers. Ultimately, Romania lost the war but won the peace. In 1917 the United States had joined the war on the Allied side, and by 1918 it was clear Germany would be defeated.
Romania re-entered the war on November 10, 1918, one day before the armistice that ended the conflict. During the peace negotiations in Paris, the Romanian delegation initially clashed with France over the post-war settlement in the Balkans. Marie then traveled to France to personally oversee matters. She charmed the Allied leaders, and under the Treaty of Neuilly and other peace agreements of 1919 and 1920, Romania had all its former territory restored and gained extensive lands in Dobruja, Bessarabia, and Bukovina.
A Greater Romania was formed. When Ferdinand and Marie were crowned king and queen of this enlarged state at Alba Iulia on October 15, 1922, they ruled over ten million more subjects and an additional 295,000 square kilometers of land. Their time as king and queen did not last as long as it might have. In 1927, Ferdinand died prematurely of cancer at sixty-one.
Marie had long been the power behind the throne, and during the mid-1920s she had worked to spread Romania’s influence, even undertaking a much-publicized tour of the United States. She married her children into several prominent European noble houses, though generally their marriages are believed to have been agreeable to them. The last years of her reign were troubled by the question of succession. In early 1926, her eldest son, Crown Prince Carol, renounced his succession rights following a very public extramarital affair, the latest in a string of scandals.
Many believed it was just as well that the succession would pass to his young son, Michael. But when Ferdinand died two years later, this became a problem, since Michael was just five years old. Marie tried to take a back seat and turned down the offer to join the regency government appointed to rule on Michael’s behalf. This led to accusations that she was plotting a coup against her own grandson, but the claims were unfounded.
In the end, it was not Marie but Michael’s own father who overthrew him. Carol returned to Romania from abroad, decided he wished to rule after all, deposed his son in 1930, and was crowned King Carol II. Marie was initially relieved that this might bring some stability to the succession issue, but she was surprised when Carol shut her out and refused to give her any significant role in the new government. She largely retired to her estate by the Black Sea and spent much of the rest of her life there.
In 1937, the queen dowager was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, though she had abstained from alcohol her entire life. She died just weeks later at the age of sixty-two. Marie had spent much of her later years writing, a habit she had begun decades earlier, and by the time she died she had published thirty-four books and many short stories. Her popularity waned in her final years, in large part due to a campaign by authorities in Bucharest to denigrate her legacy.
Carol II ruled until 1940, when he was forced to abdicate as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia dismembered the country as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to divide Eastern Europe. He was succeeded by his son Michael, who found himself king for the second time. When Michael was finally deposed in 1947, the Romanian monarchy came to an end and a communist regime took power.
Although the monarchy outlived Ferdinand and Marie’s reign by twenty years, neither Carol II nor Michael had married during their reigns, and so Marie remained the last queen of Romania.