Romania’s last king
BY THE TIME HE WAS 30, KING MICHAEL HAD BEEN OVERTHROWN TWICE, LUNCHED WITH, AND DEFIED, HITLER, AND LAUNCHED A SUCCESSFUL COUP
AFTER BEING FORCED INTO EXILE, KING MICHAEL WAS DESCRIBED BY ONE OF HIS DAUGHTERS AS ‘AN UPROOTED OAK TREE OR AN AMPUTATED SOUL, BECAUSE HE’S NEVER FELT AT HOME ANYWHERE SINCE LEAVING HIS COUNTRY.’
• King Michael of Romania, who has died aged 96, acceded to his country’s throne on July 20, 1927, aged five, reigned for three years until 1930, and then again from 1940 to 1947.
A tall, handsome, dignified man with a somewhat hangdog look, by the time he reached 30, King Michael had been overthrown twice, lunched with, and defied, Hitler, dined with Mussolini, launched a successful coup d’état against Hitler’s Romanian stooge Ion Antonescu, and finally been forced to abdicate at gunpoint by Stalin’s henchmen, after which he went into exile in Switzerland. Latterly he became widely known due to his many, often frustrated, attempts to revisit the country of his birth.
He was born Prince Michael of Romania at Peles Castle, Sinaia, in the Carpathians, on Oct. 25, 1921, the only child of Crown Prince Carol of Romania and his second wife, Princess Helen, daughter of King Constantine of Greece. They were an ill- matched pair: Crown Prince Carol was over- sexed and neurotic, Princess Helen rather distant.
By descent, Prince Michael was a close lineal heir to the British throne, being, through his paternal grandmother Queen Marie, a descendant of Queen Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh. Though later excluded from the British line of succession by his marriage to a Roman Catholic, he was 16th in line to the British throne at the time of his birth. He was also a second cousin of Prince Philip of Greece (the future Duke of Edinburgh), who once spent the summer with him when they were boys.
Prince Michael’s birth occurred on the first anniversary of the death of his uncle, King Alexander of Greece, from the effects of a monkey bite. The entire regiment of chasseurs, commanded by Crown Prince Carol, stood godfather to the prince.
Then, in 1925, Crown Prince Carol eloped with his mistress, Magda Lupescu, and renounced his rights to the throne “irrevocably.”
A constitutional crisis was temporarily averted by an Act of Succession appointing the young Prince Michael to succeed his grandfather, King Ferdinand. But after King Ferdinand died in 1927, Prince Carol began to plot to regain the throne.
Michael was proclaimed king before the National Assembly. Princess Marthe Bibesco, the Proustian scholar, painted a memorable picture of the boy seated on the throne, his feet not touching the floor. Princess Helen stood on the dais beside him, “her face quite white under the black veil.” All was well until the boy king saluted the bald old parliamentarians, who shouted out: “Long live King Michael!”, at which point he buried his face in the folds of his mother’s dress.
Princess Helen sustained the infant king throughout his short first reign, while his uncle Prince Nicholas served as Regent. A sturdy, serious and intelligent child, he spoke English as his first language but also learned Romanian. He took his first photographs at three, rode at four, drove a car at six and seemed to accept his position placidly.
While King Michael and his mother were popular, the Regency was not, and after Juliu Maniu, leader of the National Peasant Party, became prime minister in November 1928, he opened negotiations that led in 1930 to Prince Carol returning to Romania. Parliament revoked the 1926 Act of Succession, Carol became king and Michael Crown Prince. Queen Helen left her son with his father in Romania, anxious that he should not become a victim of contention between his parents. It was agreed that he would visit her twice a year.
But the next years were difficult for mother and son. Queen Helen was banned from Romania, and at the age of 36, settled above Florence, in the Villa Sparta.
King Carol had promised that he would leave. Lupescu abroad, but she followed him back. “I had the indignity of sharing my life with that awful woman,” King Michael recalled years later. “It was forced on me.”
King Carol turned against many of his own family, including his mother, Queen Marie. But he was able to do some good, instigating economic reforms that brought a degree of prosperity; encouraging the arts and rebuilding the royal palace and other parts of Bucharest. But his reign ultimately evolved into a personal dictatorship in which he ruled as an absolute monarch.
Crown Prince Michael represented his father at the Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and accompanied him on his state visit to Britain in 1938. There were similar visits to France, and to Adolf Hitler in Germany. In carrying out such public duties, Crown Prince Michael presented a façade of unsmiling composure.
On Sept. 8, 1940, King Carol, under intense Nazi pressure, abdicated and King Michael began his second reign, just short of his 19th birthday. Though he was nominally head of state, the pro- Nazi Marshal Ion Antonescu wielded the real power as leader of the senate. Queen Helen returned from Florence to help her son. This included a visit to Hitler at Berchtesgaden, during which the Fuhrer told her: “A man is not fit to rule over a country until he is at least 40. Your son has a long time to develop himself, and it is your task to see he is prepared in the right way!”
In November 1940 An- tonescu adhered to the Tripartite Pact in Berlin and, in June 1941, together with the Axis allies, declared war on the Soviet Union. King Michael like his father, was proBritish, and it was his wish to overthrow Antonescu and bring Romania into the Western camp.
At first he and Queen Helen were forced to pay courtesy visits to Hitler in Berlin and to Mussolini in Rome. During the war they visited hospitals and gave heart to those injured or dispossessed in bomb attacks. The king took flying lessons in secret and qualified as a pilot. They were kept under intense scrutiny at all times, their telephone calls bugged, and much of their contact with the outside world came via BBC broadcasts.
King Michael’s opportunity to remove Antonescu came three years later, after heavy losses on the Eastern Front led Antonescu to embark on inconclusive separate peace negotiations with the Allies, emboldening opposition factions. On Aug. 23, 1944, King Michael asked Antonescu to meet him in the royal palace, where he presented him with a re- quest to take Romania out of the Axis alliance. When Antonescu refused, he was promptly arrested by soldiers of the guard, being replaced as prime minister by Gen. Constantin Sanatescu.
With Antonescu overthrown, German troops were offered a peaceful exit from the country, but the Germans considered the coup “reversible” and tried to turn the situation by bombing Bucharest. The Romanians, by then on the side of the Allies, then directed their forces against the Germans, helping to hasten the Red Army’s advance into Romania.
When the fighting ceased the Russians reneged on their alliance and captured 100,000 Romanian officers and men. By 1945 King Michael’s country was in the power of Moscow. As the family biographer, Air ViceMarshal Arthur Gould Lee, put it, they had “jumped from the frying pan of German subjection into the fire of Soviet Communist vassalage.”
King Michael was awarded a medal as “Hero of the Soviet Union” for his stand against the Nazis. He remained king for two more years, co- operating uneasily with the new government while campaigning for his country’s freedom behind the scenes. As relations deteriorated, he lived under virtual house arrest. In November 1947, the communists gave the King and Queen Helen permission to travel to London to attend the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Prince Philip, an occasion during which King Michael met Princess Anne of Bourbon- Parma, who would become his wife. The communist authorities clearly hoped that he would remain in Britain, yet he rejected any offers of asylum and decided to return to Romania.
There, on Dec. 30, 1947, he was summoned back to Bucharest from Peles Castle by Romania’s communist leader, Petru Groza. When he arrived at the Elisabeta Palace, he f ound it surrounded by troops loyal to the communists. Groza and other senior communists demanded that he sign a pretyped instrument of abdication. Unable to call in loyal troops, and with a gun being held to his head, King Michael signed the document. Later the same day, the government announced t he “permanent” abolition of the monarchy, and its replacement by a People’s Republic.
On Jan. 3, 1948, King Michael was forced to leave the country. Some weeks later the family arrived in London, where King Michael repudiated his act of abdication and renewed his claim to the throne, but in vain.
In June 1948 King Michael was married, in Athens, to Princess Anne of BourbonParma, daughter of Prince Rene of Bourbon Parma and his wife, Princess Margrethe of Denmark, and a niece of Queen Alexandra. They had five daughters.
In the early days of his exile, King Michael rented a house in Hertfordshire in England. But he was unsettled, one of his daughters later describing him as “an uprooted oak tree or an amputated soul, because he’s never felt at home anywhere since leaving his country.”
In 1956 the family moved to a villa on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, where King Michael pursued various occupations — he was a test pilot for Lear Jets, started an electronics company and became a stockbroker.
During the long years of exile, he remained a beacon of hope to Romanians all over the world.
After Ceausescu’s fall in December 1989, the king nurtured hope of returning to Romania as a constitutional monarch. But several attempts to revisit the country failed. In 1992, however, he was allowed to visit Romania for Easter where he was greeted by huge crowds — a speech he gave from his hotel window drew an estimated one million people to Bucharest. Alarmed by his popularity, the government of Ion Iliescu refused to sanction any further visits.
In 1997, after Iliescu’s defeat by Emil Constantinescu, however, his citizenship was restored and he was allowed to visit again. In October 2011, to mark his 90th birthday, King Michael delivered a speech before the assembled chambers of the Romanian Parliament. An opinion poll in January 2012 placed him as the most trusted public figure in Romania.
His long years of waiting weighed heavily on him, but he was sustained by a devout patriotism, and the devotion of his wife, who died in 2016, and his daughters, who survive him.
HE REMAINED A BEACON OF HOPE TO ROMANIANS ALL OVER THE WORLD.