In June 1892, members of Queen Victoria’s household were shocked to read in the newspapers the announcement of the engagement of sixteen-year-old Missy of Edinburgh to the twenty-six-year- old heir to the throne of Roumania. For some months there had been much speculation about the young princess’s future; her name had already been linked with several continental princes, including ‘the odious Gunther,’ brother of the German Empress Dona and by the summer of 1892 the Prince and Princess of Wales were under the definite impression that Missy was on the verge of accepting their son, George’s proposal of marriage. The sudden announcement of her engagement brought a swift and unexpected end to all speculation.
“It seems to have come very rapidly to a climax,” wrote a stunned Queen Victoria, “The country is very insecure, the Society dreadful & she is a mere Child & quite inexperienced.”
The Prince and Princess of Wales, believing that George had been snubbed, were incensed but when the they berated Missy’s father, Affie, for his part in settling the affair, they soon learned that he had had no say whatsoever in the matter. His wife, the Anglophobic Duchess of Edinburgh and Coburg, had engineered and arranged everything without so much as consulting her husband. Her own unhappy marriage to unfaithful Affie, left the Duchess with a very low opinion of English princes and, determined to keep Missy from the overbearing influence of her grandmother, she had long ago decided that her daughter would marry a German. Ferdinand of Hohenzollern Sigmaringen, a German-born cousin of the Prussian Imperial family, suited the Duchess’ purpose in every respect. Unassuming to the point of dullness, he was living a lonely existence in Bucharest as heir to his uncle, the childless King Carol of Roumania. According to Vicky, he was popular in Roumania and: ‘Is very nice and good and behaves so well to the King and Queen as is as much liked there as they are capable of liking any foreigner.’
The Duchess had little doubt that her sparkling daughter, ten years his junior, would make an instant impression on the shy young man and arranged a meeting at the home of their mutual cousin, Charlotte of Prussia.
The first encounter appeared unpromising. Unaware of what was expected of her, Missy paid little attention to the prince, who seemed far more engrossed in the scintillating conversation of the more sophisticated Charlotte. But the Duchess refused to give up hope and immediately arranged a further meeting in Munich. Now, in a more romantic setting, Missy, uninhibited by her cousin, found the opportunity to shine. Munich was, as she later recalled:
“…the town of towns for this sort of thing…We were both young, there was love in the air, it was springtime and Mamma had a happy, expectant face.”
By the time they met again that summer at Cousin Willy’s Potsdam palace, the brief courtship culminated in the prince’s proposal. Eager to please her mother, Missy accepted him.
If Queen Victoria was stunned by the news, her Court was horrified. Apart from Missy’s youth, stories of the strange goings-on in Bucharest, made the prospect of sending the innocent girl to Roumania appear even more unsavoury. Ferdinand’s aunt, Queen Elizabeth, was a somewhat eccentric figure who, writing under the pseudonym, Carmen Sylva, had earned a considerable reputation as an author. She surrounded herself with Bohemian friends who shared her literary tastes, among them a young poetess named Hélène Vavarescu. So alarmed was King Carol by his wife’s extreme attachment to the mystical Hélène, that he had exiled the Queen from Court and sent her back to her mother the Princess of Wied.
Throughout her three-year banishment, Queen Elizabeth refused to abandon her protégé and actively encouraged her nephew, Ferdinand, to fall under her spell. Although Hélène was not the most stunning of women, being, in Vicky’s opinion, ‘…not at all handsome, short, rather fat and not distinguee looking, but has fine large oriental eyes and beautiful teeth, with very marked eyebrows and black hair,” the lonely prince fell unashamedly in love. Marriage to a mere poetess was out of the question for the heir to the throne, yet even at the time of his engagement, it was rumoured that Ferdinand’s infatuation remained undiminished.
“Disgusted to see the announcement of the marriage of poor pretty P. Marie of Edinburgh to the P. of Rumania!!!” wrote one of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting, “It does seem too cruel a shame to cart that nice pretty girl off to semi-barbaric Roumania and a man to the knowledge of all Europe desperately in love with another woman.”
With her usual concern, Queen Victoria decided to discover the facts for herself and invited Ferdinand and Missy to Windsor. Satisfied by the appearance and manners of the tongue-tied prince, she commented that ‘Missy looked very pretty, and seemed very happy about her engagement,’ and gave the couple her blessing.
In early January 1893, an excited, if nervous Missy arrived in Sigmaringen with her million franc dowry. In the presence of the usual gathering of royalties the wedding ceremonies took place according to both the Protestant and Roman Catholic rites and the couple departed for their honeymoon. The wrench of leaving her family to begin a new life with a virtual stranger was heart-rending for the young bride, and her diffident groom did little to ease the tension. The wedding night proved disastrous:
“I tried to respond to [Ferdinand’s] passion but…there was an empty feeling about it all; I still seemed to be waiting for something that did not come.”
Matters did not improve in the coming weeks and it was not only in the bedroom that phlegmatic Ferdinand disappointed his exuberant bride. When the brief honeymoon was over, the couple moved on to Bucharest where Missy quickly realised that her husband lived so much in awe of his uncle that he dared not contradict him in anything. When the king forbade the young couple from entertaining or attending social functions to avoid creating an unpleasant rivalry among the Roumanian aristocracy, Ferdinand meekly yielded to his order. Missy’s familiar ladies-in-waiting were dispatched home and the adolescent Crown Princess found herself isolated in a foreign country with a husband she barely knew.
Life in the gloomy and gaudy Byzantine palaces was intolerably tedious for such a high-spirited girl and when, much to her surprise, she became pregnant within a fortnight of her wedding, her loneliness was more acute than ever. Contrary to Missy’s wishes that the baby should be born at her country estate, Sinaia, King Carol insisted on her remaining in Bucharest, and resolved to make all the arrangements even to the appointment of midwives and doctors.
Homesick and friendless, Missy could hardly wait for her mother’s arrival but the appearance of the Duchess merely exacerbated the tension. Not only did the Duchess override all King Carol’s plans, insisting that the baby should be born at Sinaia, but was equally determined to resist Queen Victoria’s attempts to provide an English midwife.
“I had terrible fights with Granny dear about an English nurse…but will not give up the [Russian] one I have already engaged and will bring her with me, instead of the old gossip Granny wants you to have.”
Whatever Missy made of her mother’s choice of midwife, she was at least grateful that the Duchess insisted that she should be given chloroform during labour. Within months of the birth of a son, Carol, in October 1893, Missy was pregnant again and consequently denied the possibility of any social life whatsoever. What was more, as she suffocated in the stifling atmosphere of the Court, her husband, she soon discovered, was happily enjoying affairs with various other women.
The return of the eccentric Queen Elizabeth did little to ease Missy’s plight. With more than a hint of jealousy for the Crown Princess’s youth and charm, the Queen went out of her way to crush Missy’s spirit. Though childless herself, she constantly interfered in the upbringing of Missy’s children, even appointing the nursery staff and giving them instructions to report to her any misdemeanour on the princess’ part. Matters came to a head when the Queen insisted on keeping a governess of whom Missy did not approve. At her wits’ end, Missy ‘ran home to mother’ in Coburg and refused to return until the woman was dismissed.
Such behaviour earned the Crown Princess the reputation of being ‘neurotic and arrogant’ but with her ‘instinctive sense of self-preservation’ she refused to be crushed. By the time she returned to Bucharest, she was determined to take charge of her own life and make use of her many talents. She had never doubted her own fascination and, if Ferdinand did not give her the attention she craved, numerous admirers were constantly on hand to flatter and reassure her.
“Princess Marie was…famous for her beauty,” wrote the Russian Prince Felix Youssoupov, “she had wonderful eyes of such a rare shade of greyish-blue that it was impossible to forget them. Her figure was tall and slender as a young poplar and she bewitched me so completely that I followed her about like a shadow.”
The youthful Prince Felix was not the only one to express his devotion to the beautiful Crown Princess and rumours - fuelled largely by the malevolent tongue of Cousin Charlotte who had recently arrived in Roumania - spread that she had embarked on an affair with a Russian cousin, Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich. When the news reached Coburg, her horrified mother demanded an explanation. Affronted by the accusations Missy vehemently denied any wrongdoing, but even she knew that her passionate personality could not long endure a disappointing marriage to a prematurely aging husband.
“What does one find,” she wrote in frustration, “a man intensely in love with you & who has the right to ask everything of you, when you ask him to read to you in the evening he hurries over it only to get to bed for other amusements, when one wants to talk to him, he is reading he newspapers, when one says she is lonely, he says you have the children, he is perfectly devoted to you and yet he will not even give up a cigar to sit a moment with you!”
The romance with Boris may have been innocent enough but, unlike Sophie in Greece, Missy was not prepared to accept the prevalent view that there were different moral codes for men and women. She had done her duty by providing the country with an heir, and now, aware of her husband’s infidelities, she sought lovers of her own. Tales of her penchant for handsome young men circulated through the Courts of Europe, leading Cousin Willy to refer to her as a ‘meddlesome little flirt’ and ‘English harlot.’
Though the rumours were exaggerated, Missy made little effort to conceal her affairs and so complacent was her husband that he happily employed her long-term lover, the dashing Prince Barbo Stirbey, in his household. For her part, Missy often praised the beauty of Ferdinand’s mistresses. Their mutual acquiescence suited all parties and allowed the Crown Prince and Princess to become good friends.
Whatever her opinion of Ferdinand, Missy loved their six children: Carol, Elizabeth, Nicolas, Marie, Ileana and Mircea (the youngest of whom was probably fathered by her lover Prince Stirbey). Thriving on adulation herself, she lavished praise upon them, refusing to reprimand them and spoiling them so terribly that the result would eventually be disastrous not only for Missy personally but for the whole country.
Her relationship with her eldest son bore striking similarities to that of Aunt Vicky and Cousin Willy. At an early age, Carol was taken from Missy’s care to be placed under the supervision of tutors appointed by the King. The most prominent and influential of his teachers was a repressed homosexual who fell in love with his pupil and filled him with such an inflated sense of his own importance that his arrogance rivalled that of the Kaiser. Like Willy, too, Carol simultaneously worshipped and resented his mother, one moment gazing adoringly at her, the next going out of his way to wound her.
Missy’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth was, like Cousin Charlotte, a difficult and moody child who grew into a cold, unaffectionate woman, intent on stirring up trouble for her family. As was the case with Aunt Vicky, Missy’s chief consolation came from her younger children all of whom, like Moretta, Sophie and Mossy, remained devoted to their mother.
It was characteristic of Missy that, out of a seemingly desperate situation she had risen and would continue to rise in the estimation of her husband’s future subjects. Outwardly she and Ferdinand played the role of a happily married couple and, as Crown Princess, her personal charm endeared her to the people of ‘semi-barbaric’ Roumania in a manner that could never be rivalled by her more puritanical cousin, Sophie, Crown Princess of neighbouring, civilised Greece. With her natural flair and verve, Missy compensated for a loveless marriage in the arms a fervent lover - an example that would soon be followed by her younger sister, Ducky.
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