King Carol II of Romania
The stereotype of a Balkan monarch and a serial
eloper, Carol II was notorious for his colourful personal life and, as the 1930s progressed, his flirtations with fascist trappings. The imaginary
Ruritania could almost have been designed for the Romanian king, and if Carol had had anything to do with it, probably would have been.
A Boy Named Carol
Carol was born in
1893 into the House of
Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. His mother, the celebrated
Queen Marie of Romania, was then the seventeen-year-old Crown Princess, and had hardly been in the country nine months. Her husband,
Ferdinand, had only come to Romania to succeed his childless uncle
Carol I.
The most glorious Hohenzollern had been
Frederick the Great, and Carol was no exception to the Hohenzollern men's tradition of enrapturing themselves with military matters. By the age of three or four, Carol was already marching around in front of columns of palace guards waving a little sword, and several regiments used to send him child-size uniforms.
Carol enjoyed giving orders to his several younger siblings even more, and enjoyed annoying his sisters by setting up
toll booths in the palace corridors when they were playing with their toy horses. Unfortunately,
Ileanna and
Mignon are likely to have remembered these as among their happiest moments with Carol.
Marie and the elder Carol fell out over Carol's education: Marie had engaged in a string of affairs which had called into question the parentage of all but her two eldest
children, and Carol believed she was hardly fit to undertake the upbringing of the future ruler. Moreover, she had a habit of falling out with the boy's
governesses.
Instead, the king contracted a Swiss tutor,
Arnold Mohrlen, who turned out to harbour socialist tendencies and verge on
republicanism to boot. It took the court doctors to convince Carol of his error of judgment, and Mohrlen was eventually dismissed, at which a cache of
love letters he had been writing to the ten-year-old prince were discovered.
Approaching manhood, Carol developed the all too familiar royal
playboy's fascination with skiing, hunting and sports cars; his great-uncle would later have to talk him out of a penchant for the risky innovation of
aviation. Itching to experience army life, he joined Marie when she nursed in
cholera camps during the
Second Balkan War in
1913.
The following January, Carol was sent to
Potsdam, again in accordance with family tradition, to join the
First Guard Regiment. Marie gave him a number of gifts for his regimental comrades, and was displeased to hear that he had made himself some
pocket money by hawking the presents off around the barracks by auction.
Baby Father
Carol was recalled to Romania when
World War I broke out, and Marie attempted to set him up with the Russian Grand Duchess
Olga Nicolaevna, the youngest daughter of
the Tsar. In October 1914 - a month after the
boy racer had accidentally run down a child in
Bucharest - Carol became crown prince on the death of his namesake.
By August
1916, when Romania entered the war on the side of the
Triple Entente, Carol had started life as he meant to go on by fathering a baby on a high-school girl,
Maria Martini. However, Martini proved to be only an
overture before his first great love, the marvellously named
Zizi Lambrino, whom he was unable to marry due to constitutional provisions that the heir to the throne could only wed a foreign princess.
The fate of his Russian relatives in
Ekaterinburg convinced Carol that the Romanian monarchy had not much more of a future, and he eloped with Lambrino across the border in October
1918, marrying her in a secret ceremony in
Odessa for which his bride ran up her own dress. The escape constituted
high treason, but Ferdinand was content with shutting his son up in the
Horaita Monastery for 75 days.
Ferdinand and Marie attempted to keep the newlyweds apart as much as possible, but the determined Carol faked a hunting accident and even shot himself in the leg to get out of a
state visit to
Japan. He could still not resist dashing off to fight
Hungary in August
1919, when Hungary's neighbours took advantage of
Bela Kun's collapsing Communist uprising, but left behind his official letter of
abdication.
No doubt at the king and queen's behest, the Romanian secret police then contrived to re-introduce Carol to Maria Martini, whom he repaid by leaving her with a second child. Lambrino herself gave birth to a son,
Mircea, in January
1920, but by then Carol had already promised to give her up after another of Marie's matchmaking schemes came to fruition.
Carol and his sister
Elisabetha both married into the Greek royal family, as part of Marie's strategy to link the Romanians by marriage to the other powerful states nearby; in the European press, the project earnt her the title of 'Mother-in-law of the Balkans'.
According to Greek Orthodox rites, when two pairs of siblings married their ceremonies had to be within an hour of each other to avoid bad luck; Marie separated the nuptials for a fortnight, so that she could attend them both. Carol duly married
Princess Helena of Greece in
Athens in
1921. The family succession was ensured seven months later when Helena had her only son Mihai, who would reign as
Michael, but the marriage became doomed when Carol met a certain
Helen Wolff in the cinema of his own cultural institute.
March on Bucharest
Wolff, better known as
Magda Lupescu, was an ambitious woman with an insalubrious past who had closely observed Carol's vacillations during the Lambrino affair. In
1925, Carol took advantage of
Queen Alexandra's death at
Windsor Castle to flee, after the funeral, to Paris, where it had been arranged Lupescu would be waiting.
His second elopement and abdication had been steadily encouraged by the leader of the
Liberal Party,
Ion Brătianu. Carol despised the Liberals because the love of his mother's life, a rich
boyar called
Barbu Ştirbey, was active in the party, and the feeling appears to have been mutual.
Under the name of
Carol Caraiman, a surname he took from the mountain overlooking his family's summer palace at
Siniai, Carol appeared to be settling into life with Lupescu, attracting much press attention and dividing his time between Paris and
Milan. However, rumours back home that he might return to lead a coup intensified after the deaths of King Ferdinand and Brătianu within a few months of each other in
1927. The boy Mihai became king, and his powers were held in trust by a
Regency Council consisting of Carol's brother Nicholas and two Brătianu placemen.
The government were especially concerned that Carol might appear at a major rally in the town of
Alba Iulia scheduled for May
1928. The event was organised by the
National Peasant Party, who were sympathetic to Carol, and it was feared he would turn the event into a march on
Bucharest in the style of
Mussolini's
march on Rome.
Carol had indeed fancied the mooted idea of making a dramatic entrance by aeroplane, but his plan was foiled when a private detective, disguised as a butcher, came across the leaflets that Carol was planning to drop on his arrival. Officials from the
Foreign Office in
London, where Carol was staying at the time, brusquely requested him to go home to Paris just as he was about to set off for Romania.
In
1930, the National Peasant leader
Iuliu Maniu invited Carol back home, conscious that Romanians were calling for a stronger leader than himself to cope with the onset of the
Great Depression. Carol was immediately proclaimed king, with an excited public welcome that even he himself had not quite expected, and which bewildered little Mihai when he heard reports of the ceremonies on the radio: Princess Helena had told him that his father was sick in Paris.
Dynasty of Scandal
Carol spent the first year of his reign engaged in the old Hohenzollern pursuit of family feuding; Marie's complaints that he was teaching Mihai to smoke and swear may have masked her resentment that he was not allowing her to be his
eminence grise. He dismissed Ileanna from her official positions at the Romanian
YWCA and
Boy Scouts, and only allowed her to marry
Archduke Anton of Austria on condition that they live abroad.
Anton, a dispossessed
Habsburg, had been reduced to operating a Spanish
petrol station, but the match still counted as
third time lucky for Ileanna. Her first suitor,
Prince Lexel of Pless, had been ruled out of contention after details emerged of an old homosexual affair, and Marie had vetoed her engagement to the
Prince of Asturias, the Spanish heir, when she realised her daughter would have to live under the same roof as the notorious seducer King
Alfonso XIII.
At Ileanna's wedding in July
1931, Carol took her to one side straight after the ceremony and informed her that her real father was Ştirbey, reducing the newlywed to tears.
By the time Princess Helena had played out an acrimonious
tug of love battle for Mihai, and Prince Nicholas had followed in his elder brother's footsteps by running off with a commoner of his own,
Jeanne Doletti, Romanians' references to their royal family as the '
dynasty of scandal' were beginning to look only too justified. Not for the last time, British royalists, left reeling by the abdication of
Edward VIII in
1936 to marry an
American divorcee, might have been able to tell them that
the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
The transformation of the once-austere house of Hohenzollern into a soap opera's
Christmas special was completed when Nicholas unexpectedly returned to Romania and was straight away banished by Carol and his
Crown Council, who suspected plots might be afoot to install Nicholas in his stead.
The two ministers who went to inform Nicholas of the king's decision also encountered Marie, who screamed at them that Carol had killed his father and now wanted to kill his brother and herself, before losing her composure entirely and swinging a punch at the Prime Minister,
Constantin Argetoianu.
In such circumstances, it was no surprise that Carol should seek advisers outside the palace, and Lupescu made sure that he turned to her own, the financiers
Max Auschnitt and
Nicolae Malaxa. Auschnitt's and Malaxa's
cartels, in which the royal couple had substantial shares, were perfectly placed to capitalise on the demand for Romanian oil that could only increase as Europe rearmed during the 1930s.
Carol spent much of his time doing up his palace, purchasing
mod cons such as a dental chair, an
electrotherapy chair and Californian air conditioning which never quite managed to work. Neither did his heating, laid on at vast cost; both systems turned out to have been installed by an engineer cousin of Lupescu's.
Archangel Michael
As the decade progressed, the strongest threat to Carol's regime emerged as the mystical fascists known as the
Legion of the Archangel Michael, who assassinated his prime minister
Ion Duca in December
1934, the month after he launched an overdue clampdown on the group. In response, Carol approved and financed a number of other parties which may have shared an aesthetic with the Legion but had little of its appeal.
Carol went on the political offensive in 1936, dismissing his veteran pro-French foreign minister
Nicolae Titulescu and, to interrupt the Legion's influence on young Romanians, placed all youth organisations under his own one. Prince Nicholas was exiled in
1937 after the Legion had expressed interest in him; that summer, Marie's health failed for the first time.
In December 1937, the fragmented
National Liberal Party failed to win their election threshold and Carol called in the virulently anti-Semitic poet
Octavian Goga to form a government instead. After six weeks in which so many Jews lost their jobs that the economy ground to a halt, Carol announced his conclusion that democracy had failed and instituted a
royal dictatorship in February
1938 complete with its own fascist-like party, the
Front of National Rebirth: to his gratification, much posturing on balconies in self-designed uniforms ensued. The Legion's charismatic leader,
Corneliu Codreanu, was thrown into prison and
shot while trying to escape in November.
He spent the rest of the year treaty-shopping between Britain and Nazi Germany, finding
Hitler rather more attentive than
Neville Chamberlain. Fearing Romania could become the next Nazi target after
Czechoslovakia, he signed an unfavourable economic pact with Germany in March
1939.
Despite the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the
Soviet Union, which suggested Soviet designs on Romania's
Bessarabia region, Carol initially thought he could keep Romania neutral during
World War II; after
the fall of France in July
1940, he discovered he had no choice but to join the
Axis if he wanted to keep Romania intact. Even this belated gesture did not prevent two-fifths of
Transylvania being awarded to
Hungary in the
Second Vienna Award that September, a concession which made Carol's position untenable.
Informed by his chief of staff, Marshal
Ion Antonescu, that his safety could no longer be guaranteed, Carol fled the country with Lupescu in a special train which was ambushed by vengeful Legionnaires at
Timisoara. The royal couple were shot at through the windows, and had to dive into the bathtub until they had crossed the Romanian border into
Yugoslavia, where their carriages were coupled to the
Orient Express and made their way to neutral
Switzerland.
Carol spent most of his wartime exile in
Mexico, where he attempted to set up a thoroughly unsuccessful
Free Romania movement on the model of
de Gaulle's
Free French. In August
1944, while Romania was being liberated by the Red Army, his 19-year-old son Mihai staged a coup of his own in Bucharest, and Carol occupied himself for the rest of the war by writing his history of interwar Europe,
Orbit of Satan.
In July
1947, Carol finally married Lupescu, who obtained the title of princess. Supposedly on her deathbed with
pernicious anaemia, she recovered a few days later, and at the end of the year - just as the Romanian Communists exiled Mihai - they moved to the
Portuguese resort of
Estoril. Carol's array of neighbours included the former Italian king
Umberto, the exiled Spanish monarch
Don Juan de Borbón, and the
Comte de Paris, the claimant to the throne of France.
Carol died in
1953, and secured entry to the Portuguese
Royal Pantheon because one of his grandmothers belonged to the Portuguese royal family. Apart from Princess Mignon's son and a reluctant Prince Nicholas, the chief mourners were his fellow exiles; even Mihai cried off, unable to bear Lupescu grieving at him. 24 years later, Lupescu was buried in the Pantheon at Carol's side.
On
February 13, 2003, Carol's remains were flown home to Romania after a
Romanian Orthodox ceremony at the Pantheon, and Lupescu's went with him. The pair were reinterred in
Curtea de Arges, 130 kilometres northwest of Bucharest.
Read more:
A. Eastermann, Carol, Hitler and Lupescu
Paul D. Quinlan, The Playboy King: Carol II of Romania