page_title: Marie of Romania
section_title: Carol II's reign
hierarchical_section_title: Marie of Romania / Widowhood (1927–1938) / Carol II's reign
caption_attribution_description: Queen Marie of Romania, nee Princess Marie of Edinburgh
context_page_description: Marie of Romania, also known as Marie of Edinburgh, was the last Queen of Romania as the wife of King Ferdinand I.
  Born into the British royal family, she was titled Princess Marie of Edinburgh at birth. Her parents were Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia. Marie's early years were spent in Kent, Malta and Coburg. After refusing a proposal from her cousin, the future King George V, she was chosen as the future wife of Crown Prince Ferdinand of Romania, the heir apparent of King Carol I, in 1892. Marie was Crown Princess between 1893 and 1914, and became immediately popular with the Romanian people.
  After the outbreak of World War I, Marie urged Ferdinand to ally himself with the Triple Entente and declare war on Germany, which he eventually did in 1916. During the early stages of fighting, Bucharest was occupied by the Central Powers and Marie, Ferdinand and their five children took refuge in Moldavia. There, she and her three daughters acted as nurses in military hospitals, caring for soldiers who were wounded or afflicted by cholera.
context_section_description: On 6 June 1930, Carol arrived in Bucharest and made his way into Parliament, where the Act of Succession 1927 was duly declared null. Thus, Carol usurped the throne from his son, becoming King Carol II. Upon hearing of Carol's return, Marie, who was abroad, was relieved. She had been growing anxious with the direction in which the country was heading and viewed Carol's return as the return of the Prodigal Son. However, as soon as she arrived in Bucharest, she became aware that things would not go well. Carol refused to accept his mother's advice to take Helen back and never sought Marie's counsel during his reign, thus making the already existing breach between mother and son complete.
  Desolate and almost stripped of her belief, Marie turned to the religious teachings of the Baháʼí Faith, which she found "vastly appealing". She was particularly attracted by the idea of humanity's unification under one faith, given her own religiously divided family. Introduced to the doctrine by Martha Root, Marie carried on a correspondence with Shoghi Effendi, then head of the Faith, where she expressed herself as a follower of the Baháʼí teachings. Additionally, she made several public statements promoting the teachings of Baháʼu'lláh, describing him as a prophet similar to Jesus or Muhammad. This written correspondence has led Baháʼís to regard her as the first royal convert to their religion. Biographer Hannah Pakula notes that Marie "continued to attend the Protestant Church", even though she "prayed 'better at home with my Baha-u-llah books and teachings.'" In 1976, William McElwee Miller published a polemical book against the religion, which included selections from a letter written in 1970 by Marie's daughter Ileana denying any such conversion had taken place.
  In 1931, Prince Nicholas eloped with Ioana Doletti, a divorced woman. Marie strongly disapproved of her son's actions and felt hurt by Doletti's repeated attempts to keep Nicholas from communicating with his mother. Although she blamed the women in her sons' lives for a while, she also came to blame herself, for failing to educate them properly. However, she stubbornly and continually refused to meet Magda Lupescu, even after Carol's pleas. Until her last years, Marie seldom even mentioned Lupescu's name.
  With Carol's mistress hated throughout the country, it was only a matter of time before opposition to the King emerged. This opposition most prominently came under the form of the Iron Guard, a group supported by Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. After Carol turned to Ion Duca for help, the Iron Guard assassinated Duca in December 1933. After Duca's death, Carol's popularity plummeted and there were rumours that an attempt would be made on his life at the annual independence parade. In order to avoid this, he instead had Marie attend the parade, in what would be her final public appearance.
  After the parade, Carol set out to destroy his mother's popularity among Romanians and tried to push her out of the country. Marie, however, did not comply, instead retreating to either of two locales. The first was Bran Castle. Located near Brașov in southern Transylvania and given to her as a gift in 1920 by grateful local officials, she had it restored over the next seven years. The other was Balchik, where she had built a palace and a small chapel called Stella Maris and tended to her garden. She also visited Ileana and her children in Austria. Ileana rarely received permission from Carol to visit Romania; this irritated Marie greatly. She also spent some time in Belgrade with her daughter "Mignon" and her son-in-law, King Alexander. In 1934, Marie visited England once again, meeting the Duchess of York, later Queen Elizabeth, by whom she was enchanted.
caption: Marie in 1936, by Philip de László
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