Marie of Romania: a female corrective to the strongman

In the summer of 1938, the dowager Queen of Romania was dying in Dresden, although she never used that word. Marie was too important to die.

There was always a stream of visitors, including the ‘pretty wife’ of ‘that horrid little demagogue’, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Party’s chief propagandist. Frau Goebbels requested an audience in Marie’s sanatorium. Of course she did; no one had mastered image-control quite like the Queen of Romania. Twenty years earlier, as a defeated Germany shrank behind shorn borders and relegated its Kaiser to a life of ignominy in Holland, his cousin Marie was at the height of her prowess. Unafraid to take the fight to the enemy, arriving triumphant on horseback to reclaim Bucharest in December 1918, she was universally hailed as the ‘vivid and unforgettable’ personality of the First World War. Marie shot to fame in the dark days of the conflict, when a thirst for celebrity heroics saw her emerge on the global stage to become the world’s most recognisable woman.

Today, as we lament our insecure world, where populist impulses strain democratic systems and strongmen proliferate – hogging the limelight, flagging grievances, starting ‘short wars’ – history reminds us that the human condition has long sought the bulwark of a strongman model in the face of fast-changing events. For better and for worse, Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler are two obvious examples. It is the extraordinary rise and renown of Queen Marie of Romania that insists on a gender corrective.

In the middle of the First World War, Romania’s peasant army, their beleaguered government and king, visiting diplomats and politicians, all fed off her supreme confidence. Foreign correspondent Stanley Washburn quickly discovered Marie was ‘the most important man in Romania’; Lady Astor later echoed the same sentiment: ‘Queen Marie is the strongest woman in Europe since Catherine the Great.’ By March 1919 she had been summoned to the Paris Peace Conference, where Marie led an unforgettable royal drama; according to American writer Mabel Potter Daggett, one ‘all the more conspicuous because the leading lady was the only lady in it’.

Her incomparable success is ironic given conventional wisdom insists the Great War was a watershed moment for royalty, when the collapse of several imperial dynasties underscored the beginning of the end for heavyweight monarchy, with Britain’s beleaguered George V the ‘only emperor still standing on his balcony’. In this context, Marie, a mere consort from the ‘unpromising Balkans’, whose legacy was subsequently buried by Romania’s communists, has too often got lost.

It is a regrettable omission, with the queen’s transformation into a global celebrity, (one worthy of a showdown with US President Woodrow Wilson and the front page of Time magazine), providing an invaluable blueprint for leaders seeking domination in a noisy world. Marie, an early adopter of a changing media landscape, needed a fulsome ego to capitalise on it. On that front she did not disappoint: ‘I feel strong, it is a grand feeling, sometimes I feel almost a monster because I am based on a mighty desire for truth.’

The value of unequivocal Queen Marie was apparent from the outbreak of the conflict. Invidiously trapped between two warring empires – Austria-Hungary and Russia – both home to large Romanian diasporas, her country remained neutral for the first two years of war. The situation was further complicated by the Romanian royal family’s identity, with the death of their Hohenzollern German monarch, Carol I, in October 1914, witnessing an unprecedented transfer of influence to Marie, the country’s new consort. Marie, though married to Carol’s German nephew, the notoriously weak King Ferdinand, quickly overshadowed her husband, her allegiance lying with the Entente. Granddaughter of Queen Victoria, born in England, and first cousin of Britain’s George V, Marie had a British pedigree matched in Russia on her maternal side, where Tsar Nicholas II was also a first cousin.

An ambitious queen keen to prove her worth beyond artistic endeavours, Marie did not waste Romania’s neutral years. Back-channelling on behalf of Prime Minister Ion Brătianu, she pushed what Tsar Nicholas termed Romania’s ‘enormous territorial demands’ in a package of flattery and familial charm that always elicited a response. (The queen’s dynastic heft and charm offsetting what George V considered the vulgarity of a ‘woman making politics off her own hook’.) By the time Romania, with an eye on Hungary’s Transylvania, took the plunge and joined the Entente’s war, their queen was more than ready for the fight, confidently declaring ‘war promotes heroism!’.

What came next was a nightmare. Within weeks, the Central Powers had retaliated in a pincer movement from south and west, clueless generals and ill-clad troops were overturned on two fronts, the prime minister ‘was a bag of bones’, King Ferdinand refused to visit the frontline, promised reinforcements never arrived, and death was hurled from a ‘glorious gorgeous sky’. Unhelpful Britain blamed Romanian characteristics – ‘excitability, instability, venality, unreliability’ – and within four months the Germans had occupied Bucharest.

Everyone buckled except Marie: ‘I wish I were a man, if only I could blow my soul into Ferdinand’s.’ She wrote to heads of state (‘you alone can help us and must help us, Nicky’), shored up her prime minister and king, and toured makeshift-hospitals in head-to-toe nursing whites. Diplomats and journalists were agog. In a gridlocked war with heroes in short supply, Marie scaled up her royal image into an astonishing wartime currency. ‘No imitation helper’, the queen’s heroics captured hearts and minds. According to French diplomat Saint-Aulaire, ‘she treated war as if it was a religion’, and The Times journalist Washburn was struck by her hands-on involvement. Detail mattered: including holding the boot of an injured soldier ‘while it was amputated’. Apparently ‘the sawing of the bone was the most unpleasant sound she had ever heard, and she became quite faint when the boot with the leg in it came off in her hands’.

A natural over-sharer (in later life, Marie’s memoirs caused a storm), the queen effortlessly platformed her beauty and pain for the lost cause of her people: when Mircea, her youngest son, died of typhus, the tragedy became content in a war of words that Marie was destined to win. Her best-selling book My Country, serialised in The Times, reminded industrialised England why Romania, a bucolic land ‘of vast plains, of waving corn, of deep forests’, was worth fighting for, and when the government was forced to flee the capital, refugee Marie led by example in the northern city of Iaşi. Give in? ‘Rather I would have died with our army to the last man – have I not English blood in my veins?’ she told the astonished British king.

Marie instinctively embraced the ‘rags’ (her cousin’s expression) George sought to avoid, leaning into a new media world, welcoming visiting cinematographers, moving slowly through hospitals to maximise her visibility and making sure the light was just right for photographs. High-risk appearances on the frontline and touching the wounded in typhus-infested hospitals set her apart from other royal families and helped win over an America not yet distracted by glamorous First Ladies and the cult of Hollywood. Ladies’ Home Journal, Century Magazine and the Sphere celebrated ‘Rumania’s Heroic Soldier Queen’, who more than answered her own lament: ‘what can a woman do in a modern war? It is no more the time of Jeanne d’Arc’.

Politically instinctive, Marie understood that Tsar Nicholas’s abdication in 1917 left the Romanian monarchy exposed, and credited herself with the latter’s survival. In stark contrast to the deposed Tsarina, she was always ‘showing myself as much as I can’. Likewise, Marie pushed her king to grant agrarian reforms and embrace change. Self-styled the ‘Empress of all Romanians’, the queen coolly observed that ‘all those worth something are coming more and more to the conclusion that it is around the throne help can be found’. This consolidated position gave her the strength to resist Romania’s capitulation in March 1918 after Russia’s withdrawal from the war. Marie volubly denounced surrender, insisting the king did not sign the Treaty of Bucharest and withdrawing into the mountains to prevent any association with an ignominious peace. Recognised by the British Foreign Office for her ‘spirit of resistance’, Marie drew an acknowledgement from Germany’s Field Marshal Mackensen that ‘she has been and still is our worst enemy’. It was the queen’s multi-layered exceptionalism – popular at home, a pin-up for small nations everywhere, a royal icon in a fast-changing world, and a solitary woman in a man-made hell – that left Marie uniquely well-placed to champion Romania’s territorial claims at the end of the war.

The original influencer was summoned to the Paris Peace Conference in late March 1919 by her Prime Minister Brătianu. Amid the victors, big and small, who streamed into the French capital to divide the spoils of war, the Romanian leader had been singled out for condemnation. An ‘unpleasing’ chauvinist, a ‘bearded woman’, a vulgar haggler who lauded his swollen nation’s claims and led resistance against the Minorities Treaties, Brătianu responded to the West’s attempts to denigrate and mock him by weaponising Marie.

At the end of March 1919, as the royal train pulled west across what had recently been the Austro-Hungarian empire – richer, greener ‘disputed lands’, not yet officially Romanian – Queen Marie quietly admitted to herself that ‘one woman’s word cannot change the face of such big events’. But the queen harboured no doubts about the decision to send her to Paris. ‘Yes, of course I was the one designated – Yes, I think I felt capable of holding my own. Even with the Great Three!’

On cue, and in front of adoring hordes, Marie swooped into the French capital and took up residency at the Ritz. From there she sallied forth, enjoying jocular back-and-forths, breakfast meetings and evening soirees with the world’s most significant political leaders. A brief interlude across the English Channel saw the queen stay in Buckingham Palace and add cousin King George to her list, before returning to Paris for a final showdown with President Wilson. It was a whirlwind month which history has failed to fully come to terms with.

Some encounters proved great events. French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau was adrenalised by the prospect of the Romanian queen: ‘I like that she speaks to the point. I will as well. We can say to each other whatever we want.’ The 77-year-old ran down the steps of Hotel Matignon to meet Marie, artfully dressed in the blue of France, over petticoats of silver silk, amid the rousing stir of La Marseillaise. Le jour de gloire est arrivé. Others were less enamoured. ‘Sanctimonious’ and ‘exceedingly unctuous and moral’, American President Wilson reluctantly accommodated Marie not once but twice, mansplaining on the subject of minorities and treating the consort ‘as a rather ignorant beginner who could profit from his advice’. (A queen who heckled her own politicians and king on the subject of the Jews, Marie knew Romania’s failings all too well.) She did not apologise, choosing instead to hit back. Was Wilson not a president whose country’s refusal to recognise Japanese workers’ rights scuppered a global solution to the Minorities Question? The president ‘bared his rather long teeth in a polite smile, drew up his eyebrows’ and feigned ignorance.

Neither covered themselves in glory, but that Wilson met Marie two times speaks to her agency. The most powerful man at the conference could not afford to ignore the Queen of Romania. A growing, unpredictable demos in France, Britain and America were the thrusting new consumers of a fast-growing mass media and in their droves they had latched onto left-field Marie; she was original clickbait in a world only just waking up to the power of media-speak and propaganda.

Back at the Ritz the queen was quick to check her metrics, savouring the extensive global headlines spread across a huge bed. ‘They made me smile for I certainly made them sit up as they say.’ Given her impact, it is extraordinary that conventional histories of the period have accorded Marie so little credit. Nick Lloyd’s Eastern Front ignores her entirely, Margaret MacMillan’s Peacemakers suggests that Paris ‘was as much about shopping for herself as for her country’, and George V’s biographer Jane Ridley insists Queen Marie was ‘a very theatrical personage… as neurotic and self-satisfied as her cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II’. A lazy tendency to fall back on the emotional-woman trope sees Marie’s peerless ability to harness the world’s media dismissed as a mere personality flaw, rather than a pioneering exemplar of the world we live in today.

Mid-war, the queen had wowed in sacrificial white, admitting that she was ‘a sort of banner raised for’ Romania. At the Paris Peace Conference Marie understood peacetime consorts must find a different way to shine, no matter how prostrate their country. When challenged by American journalist Potter Daggett over her shopping habit, the queen replied: ‘Perhaps it seems a good many… Still, I feel that this is no time to economise. You see, Romania simply has to have Transylvania. We want so much Bessarabia, too. And what if for the lack of a gown, a concession should be lost?’

That Greater Romania would emerge from the Paris Peace Conference a territorial winner, double its pre-war size and the fifth biggest country in Europe, spoke more to geopolitical realities on the ground than the optics supplied by the only queen emboldened in this period. But undoubtedly Marie gave a hidebound world pause for thought and provided star power for a frequently maligned country in the east of Europe. Testimony to her relevance, Marie’s flamboyant tendency to talk truth to power still resonates today. Upon arrival in London in April 1919 she challenged The Times: ‘You English – I can say so though I too am English in a sense – have a way of regarding distant Continental peoples with a sort of superior aloofness.’ How little things have changed in a world where a re-evaluation of this extraordinary queen is long overdue.