King ousted at gunpoint by Stalin’s henchmen
King Michael of Romania: b Sinaia, Romania, October 25 1921; m Princess Anne of Bourbon-Parma; 5d; d December 5, 2017, aged 96.
King Michael of Romania 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’etat 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.
He was born Prince Michael of Romania at Peles Castle, Sinaia, in the Carpathians, the only child of Crown Prince Carol of Romania and his second wife, the beautiful 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. 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 birth was premature and for a while it seemed neither mother nor child would live. But all was well and the Romanian throne seemed secure. Then, in 1925, Crown Prince Carol eloped with his mistress Magda Lupescu, and renounced his rights to the throne ‘‘irrevocably’’ from Milan.
A serious constitutional crisis was temporarily averted by an Act of Succession appointing the young Prince Michael to succeed his grandfather, King Ferdinand. But after the king died in 1927 Prince Carol began to plot to regain the throne.
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 learnt Romanian. He took his first photographs at 3, rode at 4, drove a car at 6 and seemed to accept his position placidly, attending military parades and long meetings, and choosing his moment to ask his mother if he might ‘‘go and play now’’.
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 which led in 1930 to Prince Carol returning to Romania. Parliament revoked the 1926 Act of Succession, Carol became King and Michael Crown Prince.
But the next years were difficult for mother and son. Queen Helen was banned from Romania, settling in Florence. King Carol had promised he would leave Lupescu abroad, but she followed him back and proceeded to machinate behind the scenes. ‘‘I had the indignity of sharing my life with that awful woman,’’ King Michael recalled years later.
King Carol turned against many of his own family. But he was able to do some good, instigating economic reforms which brought a degree of prosperity; encouraging the arts and rebuilding the royal palace and other parts of Bucharest.
But at the same time, his reign ultimately evolved into a personal dictatorship in which he ruled as an absolute monarch.
On September 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, the man who had ousted King Carol, wielded the real power as leader of the Senate.
Queen Helen returned from Florence to help her son. This included a visit to Hitler, 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 Antonescu 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 pro-British, and it was his wish to overthrow Antonescu and bring Romania into the Western camp.
During the war the pair spent their time visiting hospitals and giving heart to those injured or dispossessed in bomb attacks. They were kept under intense scrutiny at all times.
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.
On August 23, 1944 King Michael asked Antonescu to meet him in the royal palace, where he presented him with a request to take Romania out of the Axis alliance. When Antonescu refused, he was arrested and replaced as prime minister by General Constantin Sanatescu, who presided over a national government.
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.
King Michael remained king for two more years, co-operating uneasily with the government.
There, on December 30, 1947, he was summoned back to Bucharest from Peles Castle. When he arrived at the Elisabeta Palace, he found it surrounded by troops loyal to the communists. Groza and other senior communists gave him no choice but to sign a pretyped instrument of abdication. Later the same day, the government announced the ‘‘permanent’’ abolition of the monarchy, and its replacement by a People’s Republic.
Some weeks later he and his family arrived in London. 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 Alarmed by his popularity, the government of Ion Iliescu refused to sanction any further visits. In 1997, after Iliescu’s defeat, however, his citizenship was restored and he was allowed to visit Romania again. – Telegraph Group