Friday 29 April 2005

Klondike Joe and The Queen of Roumania

Queen Victoria was in despair of her second son Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh. Young Affie was not, to her horror, safe around women. But Affie was only your basic 18-year-old male, set to inherit the German Duchies of Coburg and Gotha. And he had his eye on Princess Alix of Denmark, whom Mama had targeted to marry his older brother Bertie, the Prince of Wales. Affie had been offered the throne of Greece, which Victoria had turned down for him. The field of suitable princesses was pretty narrow. It was Alix and her sister Dagmar, who had married the heir to the Russian throne, who found her for him. Grand Duchess Marie was 15, not pretty, the only daughter of Tsar Alexander II and the richest princess in Europe. Affie was 24. Neither the Tsar nor Victoria wanted this. He didn�t want his beloved assistant leaving for England, and Victoria didn�t trust Russians .It was four years before Affie brought the subject up again. The Tsarina set about finding a Russian prince for her but no such luck. The wedding took place in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg and the new Duchess of Edinburgh returned to live in England. 

Queen Victoria was miffed when Marie Alexandra Victoria, Princess of Britain, was not named after her. Affie and Marie had named their first child Alfred after his father. This child would be known as Missy. Victoria Melita (Ducky), Alexandra (Sandra) and Beatrice (Baby Bee) followed.  

When she was 16 the Duchess took Missy to Russia for a family funeral. Marie wanted her daughter to learn about her Russian heritage and Missy was dazzled. She was also introduced to her attractive cousins, one of whom wanted to marry her. But staying in Russia was not part of Mama�s plans for her. Her cousin Prince George of England wanted to marry her too. Victoria loved the idea as did the fathers Bertie and Affie. But Marie, who did not want Victoria controlling her daughter�s life the way she had controlled her own, began negotiations for the German Kaiser�s cousin Ferdinand, Crown Prince of Roumania. She did not consult Missy, but had them meet as if by chance at a dinner.  

Ferdinand was a German prince who would have loved to stay in Germany forever, but when the only child of his Uncle Carol, the King of Roumania, died his father Leopold handed the succession to his eldest son Wilhelm, who refused it. Then it was handed to Ferdinand, who was too weak to say no to something he had no training for. He went to Roumania where his autocratic uncle drilled him in politics and duty. His only friend was his aunt�s lady-in-waiting, Helene. But according to the Roumanian constitution the heir to the throne must marry a foreign Princess. So it was Helene or the throne. Ferdinand gave up the girl and set off across Europe with a list and photographs of possibilities. Missy was first on the list, and the one he chose. The Royal family was horrified when Missy turned down Cousin George�s proposal from Munich, where Marie pushed her together with Ferdinand as much as possible.  

Missy knew she�d made a terrible mistake in marrying Nando. His family was oppressive. King Carol refused to let the couple have outside friends and Missy was extremely lonely. Even the birth of her first son Carol failed to bring her out of her funk of resentment and imprisonment. Her only escape was travel, such as to her cousin Nicholas II�s coronation in Russia and to her sister Ducky�s wedding to Grand Duke Ernst of Hesse (Ducky turned out just as miserable in her marriage as Missy in hers.). But Missy was determined to make things work. She gave birth to her last child in 1913. King Carol did not fail to notice that his heir�s wife had a better grasp on the political situation of Roumania than his heir did and he put her together with his prized adviser Prince Barbo Stirbey, hoping that those two together would keep Nando in line. Barbo quickly became her favourite, but it was platonic. Marie long ago learned how to avoid sticky romantic entanglements. 

World War II placed the government in Bucharest in a very precarious position. King Carol was in opposition to declaring war on Hungary and protecting the Roumanians of Transylvania. His pro-German ministers expected him to abdicate, but instead he got sick and died in his sleep on October 9, 1914. On October 10 Missy became Queen Marie of Roumania, and when she arrived at the side of her Uncle�s casket she vowed to love his country,��bravely and fearlessly we shall carry on your work. Amen�. The Dowager Queen Elizabeth survived him by only 17 months. Now Marie was truly Queen of a country that was not ready for war by any means. B y 1918, deserted by their allies, including cousin King George, Marie saw off the last of the Allied Missions, which had been ordered out of the country as one of the five major points in the Treaty of Bucharest. The French Mission left on March 9, and that night Marie had dinner with them and a member of the transport mission in Russia, one Colonel Joseph Boyle. Of him Marie wrote, �a curiously fascinating man who is afraid of nothing�a real Jack London type.� Before they parted he had pledged to her that although everyone else may have deserted her he would not. 

So who was this steely-eyed superhero anyway? All that is known of him is that he was born in Canada, had an ex-wife, a current wife, four children and a fortune made in the Klondike gold fields in the 1890s. He had been a sailor, prizefighter, fight promoter and now rich soldier of fortune. At the beginning of the war Joe equipped a machine-gun battery and sent it off to Europe at his own expense. Offering his services to the British Foreign Office and being rejected, he joined the American Society of Engineers as part of their mission to Russia. He made himself a British army colonel�s uniform with lapel badges made of the pure gold he had mined in the Yukon. 

When he got to Russia he took hold of the horribly bungled railway system which the Russians blamed for their losses due to supplies and men not getting speedily to the Front. Joe�s strong-arm tactics in fixing this got him the Order of Stanislaus. Then he was sent to sort out the food crisis in Roumania. At the time the Roumanian army consisted of over a million Russians, and they with millions of Roumanian refugees were all trapped in a corner of Moldavia and were starving because those railroads were frozen. Joe sorted that out by transferring the provisions from the railcars to boats, and sailed supplies around to the people. He was awarded the Russian Order of St. Vladimir for this. 

Back in Russia in 1917, he paired up with Captain George Hill, attached to the British Artillery Mission at Stavka, Russian Army HQ. Hill had discovered a plot by German agents to incite local Bolsheviks to murder or send away all the allied military missions in the area and Boyle helped him foil their plans. The last holdout on the Eastern Front was Roumania. When they reached Petrograd on their way there Boyle and Hill were told by the Roumanian Minister to Russia that Roumania�s entire reserves had been sent to Russia for safekeeping in case Bucharest had to be evacuated, and had been impounded by the Bolsheviks. This consisted of about $20 million in gold reserves and paper currency, crown jewels and Foreign Office archives. No details are available but somehow Boyle and Hill got hold of a big chunk of the currency and archives and drove them over 1500 miles by train to Roumania in the dead of winter. For this King Ferdinand conferred the Grand Cross of the Order of Roumania on Boyle and the Star of Roumania on Hill. 

Requested to bring about a peace treaty between Russia and Roumania the two men headed back, only to fall into a trap set by German agents. Mutinous sailors from the Russian Imperial Black Sea Fleet had just murdered their officers and thrown them into the sea, and were out for blood. They were convinced that these two were advance men for the British fleet, on its way to get revenge for what they had just done. But as Hill later wrote of Boyle, �he was a born fighter, a great talker and blessed with an exceptional amount of common sense.� He used all this to harangue the sailors and by the time he was done they had been reconverted back to the Allies� cause. So with Treaty in hand he arrived back in Roumania on March 9, in time to dine with the Queen and the French Mission.  

A friendship was struck that night between Klondike Joe and Marie. Marie hated the government and made no bones about it. She was always looking for ways to bolster her people�s morale. She had no wish to bear the cross of martyrdom she felt she and Nando were forced to carry. She spent most of her time at her little wooden cottage at Cotofanesti so she wouldn�t have to pretend to go along with what the boys in the provisional capital of Jassy were up to. Boyle was a frequent guest. He bought cows for villagers so they would have milk. He gave away plenty of his own money. He built houses. He made repairs to what needed fixing. He neither smoked nor drank and was a good influence on Marie�s nine-year-old daughter Ileana.  

In June 1918 Joe had a stroke while flying to look for supplies and was in hospital. Now she was so dependent on him, Marie was afraid that if someone so strong and formidable as Joe could be felled, what hope had she? But he recovered. Meanwhile Marie, the self-proclaimed �most beautiful Queen in Europe�, had gained weight, her blonde hair was fading and falling out, the silky skin that had made her famous no longer bore the shining radiance of her youth. She had always relied on her beauty, as a �royal duty�, to please people. That reliance was coming to an end and it depressed her. On August 1, Joe returned to Marie�s to recuperate. He spent hours in front of a mirror, forcing the muscles on the damaged side of his body to work like the other side. His strength had always been the basis of his confidence and now that was gone. Marie set about restoring his self-image. At the age of 51 Joe fell in love with Marie. If Marie ever did it was only briefly. Although he wasn�t physically strong he still had his brains, and together with Prince Stirbey the three of them worked together to make sure Nando didn�t let the occupying forces compromise them. 

On September 14, 1918 Marie and Nando heard the dreadful news that their eldest son Crown Prince Carol had secretly married his commoner girlfriend Zizi, whom Ferdinand had introduced him to, and then deserted his army post. He had left the country, a traitor, without one word to his mother. Carol had always been a bit of a boob and Marie figured Zizi had tricked him into it. The government wanted Nando to punish his son for desertion. Marie wanted him to give Zizi up until the end of the war, and then he could go off with her. It was only a temporary annulment that Boyle finally talked a broken-hearted Carol into. The succession itself was in danger when Roumania�s enemies chose to remove Carol from the succession and place his 15-year-old brother Prince Nicholas in, with a pro-German regency naturally. 

Despite the separation Carol never stopped pining for Zizi. Even after the war was over and the Royal Family had been restored, and Carol had been restored to his military post, Marie became convinced her son was not king material. She had allowed him and Zizi to live together. Zizi got pregnant and. Carol spent his time coddling her. He even refused an order for his unit to mobilize for an attack in Hungary. Boyle was sent to convince him to go. He said he would go if he could remarry Zizi. Marie and Nando refused. Carol's letter of abdication, dated August 1, 1919 meant that the throne would then go to Nicholas, anyway, and he definitely was not king material either. A month after the birth of his son Carol and Zizi broke up, the baby was given her surname and Carol was sent on an eight-month cruise. 

It was Boyle to whom Marie gave the credit for bringing her son back into the dynastic fold. For love of her he had interfered with the government, lobbied parliamentary leaders to prevent them acting on Carol�s abdication, bargained with both Carol and Zizi personally and did surveillance on her friends to keep them from publishing her love letters from Carol. Two months after Carol left on his trip Marie found herself between two loyalties-Boyle and Stirbey. She didn�t want to hurt either of them so she asked Boyle to leave the country. He never could understand why she was attracted to Stirbey, an opportunist in his eyes. But he had promised to leave after he had mopped up all of Carol�s messes and arranged financial support for Zizi and the child (not proper man�s work in his estimation). He kept his word. He went to work for Royal Dutch Shell, returning to Roumania just once more in 1921.They kept up a correspondence, she telling him all about her family�s activities. She told him that year of the marriage of her daughter Elisabetha to Crown Prince George of Greece in Bucharest, of his father King Constantine�s recall to the Greek throne; of Carol�s falling in love with and marrying George�s sister Helen (Sitta). On the day of their wedding Marie thought of Boyle, and wrote in her diary, �my faithful thanks and a thought of warm gratitude this day�. 

Joseph Whiteside Boyle died of heart disease in April 1923, and was buried in England. Marie made a pilgrimage to his graveside at Hampton Hill (he was later moved back to Canada in recognition of his status as a national hero). She had known he had been ill for two years, and by the time he returned from his last adventure in Soviet Georgia, rescuing an old employee from a communist prison, his formerly large frame had become skeletal. He had written to her a week before he died of his wish to go back to the Klondike, but did not want to come to Roumania. �Remember me as the man I was. I am no more Joe Boyle�. 

The press revered him after as a cross between Don Quixote and the playboy of the western world. Even the London Times referred to �his independent and chivalrous character�. Four of his friends laid a wreath on his grave in the name of the Queen of Roumania. Marie herself placed an ancient stone engraved with her name and an antique cross she took from a Roumanian monastery.  

A year after his departure from Roumania he had written to her, �I am gone, do not let me be a shadow on your life. You never owed me anything, always you gave and I am grateful and love you, remember that�.  

The Queen and the soldier of fortune understood each other. He put all his heart and soul into whatever he did and she recognized that bolstering influence on herself. She recalled the day of her father-in-law King Carol�s requiem mass. As she had looked down with contempt on all those who had rushed to collaborate with the Germans. Boyle had come up to her, looked her straight in the eye. and scolded her, �Your Majesty, you have been a good loser, let me also find you a good winner�.  

- The Court Jester