Carol II of Romania

• 1. Introduction

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  Carol II of Romania left his country on the 6th of September 1940 with a train loaded with 30 truckloads of his personal fortune. As the train passed through Timisoara station, the Iron Guard opened fire in a failed attempt to kill him. That parting scene captures something essential about the man: a king who had plundered his own realm, despised by the very movement he had once cultivated and tried to use. His decade on the Romanian throne was a story of calculated manipulation that ultimately collapsed in on itself, stripping Greater Romania of territories on three fronts in a single year. How did the eldest son of King Ferdinand I end up deposed by his own son, return triumphant, declare himself dictator, and then flee under gunfire? And what drove a man who survived all that to spend his remaining years chasing a throne that was never coming back?

• 2. Born Into a Tug of War

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  Carol was born in Peles Castle, the eldest son of Crown Prince Ferdinand and Crown Princess Marie. From the beginning, his upbringing was not in his parents' hands. His great-uncle, King Carol I, was a stern and childless ruler who treated the young prince as a surrogate son and thoroughly spoiled him. Marie, who was only seventeen when Carol was born, resented the King's overbearing control but was blocked from any real role in raising her son.

  The Romanian historian Marie Bucur described the conflict between Carol I and Princess Marie as a collision between traditional nineteenth-century Prussian conservatism on one side and the liberal, modernist values of the 'New Woman' on the other. Carol I saw Marie's affairs with Romanian men as proof that she was unfit to raise a prince. Marie saw Carol I as a cold tyrant who would crush the life out of her son.

  Ferdinand, shy and easily overshadowed by the charismatic Marie, offered his son little counterweight. Carol grew up ashamed of his father, whom both his great-uncle and mother openly dismissed. The result, as Bucur described it, was a child who ended up simultaneously spoiled and deprived of love. The American historian Margaret Sankey noted that Carol inherited from his great-uncle a 'profound love of German militarism' alongside the belief that democratic governments were inherently weak. From his mother, he absorbed a taste for the bohemian and the informal. Neither set of values would fit easily onto a constitutional throne.

• 3. The Playboy Prince

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  By his teenage years, Carol had settled into the persona that would define him publicly for the rest of his life. He drank, partied, and chased women. By the time he was nineteen, he had fathered at least two illegitimate children with a teenage schoolgirl named Maria Martini. Photographs of him at parties, holding a drink in one hand and a woman in the other, circulated in newspapers around the world and made him a favorite of gossip columnists.

  To instill Prussian discipline, King Carol I had the prince commissioned as an officer in 1913 and assigned him to the 1st Prussian Guards regiment. The intervention did not work. Carol remained the 'playboy prince.'

  When Romania entered World War I, Carol deserted his post without permission in order to marry Joanna Marie Valentina Lambrino, known as Zizi, the daughter of a Romanian general, Constantin Lambrino. The ceremony took place on the 31st of August 1918 in the Cathedral Church of Odesa, then under Central Powers occupation. The marriage was annulled on the 29th of March 1919 by the Ilfov County Court, but Carol and Zizi continued living together, and their son Mircea Gregor Carol Lambrino was born on the 8th of January 1920.

  Carol's next marriage, to Princess Helen of Greece and Denmark on the 10th of March 1921 in Athens, was an arranged dynastic match. Helen and Carol were second cousins, both great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria, and third cousins through Nicholas I of Russia. Helen had known of Carol's past behavior but loved him regardless. Their only child, Michael, was born seven months after the wedding, sparking rumors about the timing. Carol and Helen drifted apart quickly. He found royal women too stiff and formal; he preferred commoners, whose informality, spontaneity, humor, and passion he valued far more than aristocratic polish.

• 4. Lupescu and the Lost Throne

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  Elena Lupescu, known publicly as Magda, became the defining relationship of Carol's adult life. The Roman Catholic daughter of Jewish parents who had converted to Christianity, she had previously been married to Army officer Ion Tampeanu. Carol began an affair with her that his enemies in the National Liberal Party exploited to argue he was unfit to rule.

  The National Liberals' opposition to Carol was not, however, purely moral. One of their leading figures was Prince Barbu Stirbey, who happened to be Queen Marie's lover. Carol despised Stirbey for humiliating his father, and the Liberals knew that Carol would not let them dominate politics the way previous Hohenzollern kings had. Their campaign against him was as much about preserving their own power as it was about his relationship with Lupescu.

  Because the Romanian constitution barred the crown prince from marrying a Romanian citizen, Carol could not make Lupescu his queen. Facing the choice, he renounced his right to the throne on the 28th of December 1925. His son Michael, then five years old, inherited the throne when King Ferdinand I died in 1927. Princess Helen divorced Carol in 1928. Carol moved to Paris and lived openly with Lupescu.

  The political landscape shifted when the National Peasant Party under Iuliu Maniu won the 1928 elections with 78 percent of the vote. Maniu wanted to break the National Liberal hold on the regency council governing for the young Michael, and he saw Carol as the lever. Carol was allowed to return. On the 7th of June 1930, he came back to Romania in a coup d'etat engineered by Maniu. The following day, Parliament recognized Carol as king. He was Carol II. His five-year-old son was deposed. Maniu had demanded that Carol return to his wife Helen as the price of the throne. Carol broke his word immediately, keeping Lupescu at his side. Maniu resigned in protest in October 1930 and became one of Carol's most determined enemies.

• 5. The Camarilla and the Red Queen

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  Carol ruled not through formal government but through an informal body known as the camarilla: a circle of courtiers, diplomats, army officers, politicians, and industrialists who depended on royal favor for their careers. The most important member was Lupescu herself, whose political advice he valued highly.

  The British historian Richard Cavendish described Carol as 'Dashing, willful and reckless, a lover of women, champagne and speed,' a man who drove racing cars and piloted planes and on state occasions appeared in what Cavendish called 'operetta uniforms with enough ribbons, chains, and orders to sink a small destroyer.' The American historian Stanley G. Payne called him 'the most cynical, corrupt and power-hungry monarch who ever disgraced a throne anywhere in twentieth-century Europe.'

  Lupescu was known to ordinary Romanians as the 'Red Queen,' for the color of her hair. The British historian Rebecca Haynes described her as the person ordinary Romanians saw as 'the embodiment of evil.' Princess Helen was widely seen as the wronged woman; Lupescu was cast as the femme fatale. She was Roman Catholic but viewed as Jewish because of her parents' background, which added an antisemitic dimension to the public hatred directed at her.

  Lupescu's personality did not help her cause. She was, by most accounts, arrogant, manipulative, and extremely greedy, with an appetite for expensive French clothes, cosmetics, and jewelry at a time when many Romanians were suffering through the Great Depression. She also used her connections to the Crown to engage in corrupt financial transactions involving large sums of public money. Carol's biographer Paul D. Quinlan wrote that Carol was 'simply indifferent' to the harms Lupescu caused.

  The contemporary view of Carol as Lupescu's puppet was, however, an oversimplification. Lupescu was primarily interested in enriching herself and had no real interest in foreign affairs or social policy. Carol, by contrast, was genuinely absorbed in affairs of state and was careful not to display her too much in public. The Romanian historian Maria Bucur wrote that Carol's true passions were Lupescu, hunting, and cars. His palace was 'large but relatively simple,' she noted, nothing like the kitsch excess of Nicolae Ceausescu years later.

• 6. The Iron Guard and the Path to Dictatorship

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  For much of the early 1930s, Carol played the National Liberals, the National Peasant Party, and the fascist Iron Guard against one another. He had no intention of letting the Iron Guard come to power but found the movement useful as a disruptive force that weakened his other opponents. He even contributed to the 'Friends of the Legion' group that collected donations for the movement, until the Iron Guard's leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu began calling Lupescu a 'Jewish whore.'

  On the 29th of December 1933, the Iron Guard assassinated National Liberal prime minister Ion G. Duca, the first political murder in Romania since 1862. The killing shocked Carol. When Codreanu was brought to trial in 1934 and the jury acquitted him, Carol understood that Codreanu's revolutionary message was winning popular support and that the man would not play the assigned role of controllable disruptor.

  In the spring of 1934, Carol, together with Bucharest police prefect Gavrila Marinescu and Lupescu, was involved in a half-hearted plot to poison Codreanu's coffee. The plan was abandoned before being attempted.

  The December 1937 elections forced Carol's hand. No party achieved the forty percent threshold needed for a majority. Carol appointed the radical antisemitic poet Octavian Goga of the National Christian Party, which had won only nine percent of the vote, as prime minister. His calculation was deliberate: Goga would alienate democratic powers with his antisemitic policies, discredit parliamentary government, and hand Carol the pretext for seizing power. Carol wrote in his diary that the 'markedly stupid Goga could not possibly last long' and that Goga's failure would allow him to 'be free to take stronger measures which will free me and the country from the tyranny of party interests.'

  Goga's government stripped Romanian Jews of their citizenship on the 12th of January 1938. Britain's minister Sir Reginald Hoare, France's minister Adrien Thierry, and President Roosevelt all registered formal protests. When Goga met with Codreanu on the 8th of February 1938 to arrange an electoral deal, Carol used it as the justification for his long-planned self-coup. On the 10th of February 1938, he suspended the constitution and seized emergency powers. Goga was sacked. The Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Elie Cristea, was appointed prime minister. A new constitution, drafted on the 11th, was approved in a plebiscite under conditions where silence was counted as a yes vote. The reported result was 99.87 percent in favor, against fewer than 5,500 votes against. The National Renaissance Front was formed in December 1938 as the country's sole legal party.

• 7. Oil, Alliances, and the Road to Collapse

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  Romania's foreign policy under Carol was anchored in a defensive alliance with France signed in June 1926, an alliance with Poland signed in 1921, and the 'Little Entente' uniting Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Carol regarded these as the best guarantee of Romania's independence. The logic rested on an assumption that if Germany moved aggressively in Eastern Europe, France would launch an offensive into the Reich from the west.

  That assumption eroded through the 1930s. When France began building the Maginot Line in 1930, doubts in Bucharest about French resolve began to surface. The Remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936 and then the Munich Agreement of the 30th of September 1938 shattered the remaining confidence. The American historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote that Weinberg summarized Carol's position: 'He admired and feared Germany, but feared and disliked the Soviet Union.'

  Germany had an enormous and specific interest in Romania: oil. Germany produced almost none of its own, and Romanian crude was essential to its military. In 1938, Romania produced 6.6 million tons of crude oil, and Germany's Four-Year Plan chief Hermann Goring had been told that Germany's synthetic oil plants would not be operational by 1940 as planned. His economic experts reported that the Reich needed to import 400,000 tons of oil per month while Germany had imported only 61,000 tons per month in the final four months of 1938. Romania held a card that Carol played skillfully.

  On the 17th of March 1939, the Romanian minister in London, Virgil Tilea, arrived unannounced at the office of British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax claiming his country faced an imminent German invasion. The 'Tilea affair' shifted British foreign policy away from appeasement. Carol denied any knowledge of the approach, but the resulting British warnings to Germany eased the pressure on Romania, and the German-Romanian economic treaty signed on the 23rd of March 1939 was, in the words of the historian D.C. Watt, 'very vague.'

  On the 13th of April 1939, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French premier Edouard Daladier jointly announced a 'guarantee' of Romanian and Greek independence. When the French marshal Maxime Weygand visited Bucharest on the 5th of May 1939 to discuss Romania joining the Allied 'peace front,' Carol told him plainly: 'I do not wish to let my country be engaged in a war which would result, in a few weeks, in the destruction of its army and the occupation of its territory.' He added that his forces lacked tanks, anti-aircraft guns, heavy artillery, and anti-tank guns and that his air force had roughly 400 outdated French aircraft no match for Germany's.

  The year 1940 destroyed what remained of Carol's position. Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina went to the Soviet Union. Northern Transylvania went to Hungary. Southern Dobruja went to Bulgaria. Germany's guarantee had come at too high a price. Carol's reputation collapsed with the territories. General Ion Antonescu, newly appointed as prime minister with Nazi backing, forced Carol to abdicate on the 6th of September 1940. On the night of the 30th of November 1938, Carol had already ordered Codreanu and thirteen other Iron Guard leaders murdered in prison, with officials claiming they had been 'shot while trying to escape.' The Romanians called that night 'the night of the vampires.' The Iron Guard's revenge attempt at Timisoara station as Carol's treasure train departed was the organization's answer to the king who had tried to use them and then had them killed.

• 8. Exile and the Last Marriage

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  After his abdication, Carol was permitted to leave Romania. He had acquired 30 truckloads of personal fortune during his reign, and he took all of it with him. The Western Allies blocked his attempts after World War II to reclaim the Romanian throne. He traveled extensively, living in various countries, and in 1947, while living in Brazil, he finally married Lupescu, the woman for whom he had given up the succession more than two decades earlier.

  Carol eventually settled on the Portuguese Riviera, where he died peacefully at the age of fifty-nine in exile on the 4th of April 1953. His son Michael I, whom Carol had deposed as a child and who had been deposed again after Carol's abdication, refused to attend his father's funeral. The reason Michael gave was disgust at Carol's treatment of his mother, Princess Helen.

  Carol had been made a Stranger Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter in 1938, the 982nd member since the order's founding, by his second cousin King George VI of the United Kingdom. The ceremony was one of the last formal recognitions of his standing among European royalty before everything came apart. Michael I outlived his father by decades, and it was Michael, not Carol, who became the symbol of Romanian royal dignity in the eyes of his countrymen.