King Michael I of Romania: Deposed monarch was a symbol of hope for decades in exile

A distant cousin of the Queen, he was the last living head of state from the Second World War

Michael at the Romanian Parliament in Bucharest in 2011. Many looked to him as an ideal candidate for lead the nation after the Ceausescu regime collapsed in 1989, but it was not to be (AFP)

King Michael of Romania was proud to have broken the mould of one of Europe’s tawdriest royal dynasties. His English grandmother Queen Marie of Romania, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, was a shameless self-publicist who in the 1920s had a contract with an American newspaper syndicate. Marie’s son King Carol II was a royal rake who inspired a biography by Barbara Cartland called The Scandalous Life of King Carol. By contrast his son, Michael, was a shy, intensely serious man who loathed his playboy father.

Despite his natural diffidence, Michael proved on two occasions that he possessed considerable political courage. In August 1944, he engineered the overthrow of the fascist dictator Ion Antonescu in a royal coup d’état that allowed Romania to defect from the Axis side just as advancing Soviet troops were about to cross the border. Three years later, Michael doggedly resisted communist attempts to seize control of the state until the threat of a massacre of opposition politicians forced his abdication.

The memory of both these episodes encouraged many Romanians to regard the exiled Michael as an ideal candidate for head of state when the Ceausescu regime collapsed in 1989. Michael did nothing to dampen hopes of his restoration. In December 1990 he arrived in Bucharest on what he claimed was a private visit, and was greeted by rapturous crowds. Michael’s motorcade was turned back by police just outside the airport, and he was forced to return to his home in Switzerland.

A second visit to Romania in 1994 also had to be aborted. As these showdowns demonstrated, Michael was no match for Romania’s new President, Ion Iliescu, a former communist apparatchik who was determined to neutralise the former king. In 2003, Iliescu – serving his final term – struck a deal with Michael, allowing him to return to Bucharest provided he did not campaign for the return of the monarchy. Michael served as a goodwill ambassador for Romania, and successfully lobbying to receive £21m in compensation from the government for royal property confiscated by the communist regime.

Michael’s royal career was turbulent from the outset. His mother, the former Princess Helen of Greece, was disowned by his father shortly after Michael’s birth in October 1921. Carol had become infatuated with Magda Wolff, the daughter of a German immigrant, who later Romanised her name to Lupescu.

In December 1925, King Carol appalled his parents by joining Magda in Italy, where she had been dispatched by King Ferdinand in a futile attempt to end the affair. Offered a choice between the throne or his mistress, Carol renounced his succession rights and settled in exile with Magda.

When King Ferdinand died in July 1927, five-year-old Michael was proclaimed king. A regency council had been formed, consisting of the Romanian patriarch, the president of the Supreme Court and Michael’s uncle Prince Nicholas: but in what was formally a constitutional monarchy, real power after December 1928 rested with the new prime minister Juliu Maniu, whose centre-right National Peasants’ Party, formed two years earlier, swept the board in the general election.

Maniu was soon intriguing against the council, and within a few months he had secretly made contact with the exiled Carol, who had no intention of keeping his word regarding the succession. In June 1930, with Maniu’s connivance, Carol flew into Bucharest on board a plane piloted by the French air-ace Lalouette. Arriving at the royal palace, Carol informed Michael he was now the crown prince, and declared himself king.

Michael’s mother was sent into exile, and Magda Lupescu returned to Bucharest. In 1938, encouraged by Magda, Carol overthrew the corrupt parliamentary regime and established a royal dictatorship with strong fascist tendencies.

Throughout this period, Michael was firmly under Carol’s tutelage. Yet none of Carol’s vanity and arrogance rubbed off on his son. Where Carol nourished absurd delusions of grandeur (he had a special button to call the palace elevator, marked “M” for Majesty), the adolescent Michael was timid and unassuming.

In November 1938 the British public caught a fleeting glimpse of Michael, then 17, when he accompanied his father on a state visit to London. At Buckingham Palace he met his distant cousins Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, with whom he swapped notes about stamp collecting (the only interest Carol had passed on to him).

In September 1940, Carol reluctantly abdicated, propelling Michael to the throne for a second time. Carol’s position became untenable when he buckled to intense pressure from Hitler and Stalin (not yet at war) and conceded about 40 per cent of Romanian territory to the Soviet Union in the east, Hungary in the west and Bulgaria in the south. Faced with an uprising by the Fascist Iron Guard – a rival to his own royalist movement – Carol fled Bucharest in a sealed train, accompanied by his mistress, his stamp albums and much of Romania’s national art collection.

In a last bid to avert a coup by the Iron Guard, Carol had entrusted power to Ion Antonescu, a nationalist army general. Antonescu soon established his own pro-German dictatorship, having persuaded Hitler in January 1941 to sanction a massacre of the Iron Guard, which had outlived its usefulness to the Führer. Antonescu agreed to the stationing of about 500,000 German troops on Romanian territory and in June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the puppet Romanian dictator declare his country’s own “holy” war against Bolshevism.

Still only 19, Michael later presented himself as effectively Antonescu’s prisoner during Romania’s alliance with Hitler – he once reluctantly met Hitler for lunch. That version of events was fiercely disputed by his younger half-brother Prince Paul, the son of Carol and Magda Lupescu.

In 2005, Paul unsuccessfully attempted to stop Romania’s parliament granting Michael a compensation package for property confiscated by the communists, arguing that he had been a war profiteer who had connived at the deportation of Romanian Jews to extermination camps.

This was vehemently denied by Michael in a 2011 interview with the BBC. He said that he had no power to influence outcomes at that time as he was excluded from decision-making.

The charge remains unproved; but the claim by some of Michael’s supporters (though never Michael) that he had actively opposed Antonescu before 1944 was equally far-fetched.

In August 1944, with Axis troops in headlong retreat on the Soviet front, Michael finally steeled himself to overthrow Antonescu. According to Michael’s later account, when the news reached Bucharest that the Soviet army were about to cross the Romanian border, he summoned Antonescu to the royal palace, and ordered him to negotiate an armistice with the allies. Antonescu refused, at which point Michael told him: “You leave me with only one alternative.”

This was the cue for guards to enter the room and seize the dictator. Antonescu’s supporters, oblivious to the coup, were then brought to the palace and locked in the vault that had once housed Carol’s stamp collection. Four hours later Michael broadcast to the nation, announcing a ceasefire on the Soviet front. In gratitude, Stalin later awarded Michael the Order of Victory.

Stalin’s recognition of Michael as the legitimate head of state, at least for the time being, reflected the weakness of the Romanian Communist movement, whose leaders had spent most of the previous two decades in Moscow. In March 1945, under pressure from Stalin’s emissary Andrei Vishinsky (notorious as the chief prosecutor in the pre-war Moscow show trials), Michael was obliged to appoint Petru Groza as his new prime minister. Groza was the head of a supposedly non-Communist party, the Ploughmens’ Front, but in reality he was Stalin’s stalking horse.

When Groza’s intentions became clear, Michael tried to force his resignation. Groza refused, and in protest at what he saw as a breach of the constitution, Michael went on strike, refusing to sign any decrees.

“The Russians sent me threatening notes and sent complaints to the United States and Britain,” he later recalled. “Finally the Russians dispatched to Bucharest Vishinsky, and the Americans dispatched Averell Harriman [ambassador to the Soviet Union]. To fix things up, Harriman thought we ought to have elections. I privately warned him that elections must be properly supervised, otherwise the Communists, with the help of the Red Army, would take over. Harriman ignored my warning.”

As Michael feared, the elections in November 1946 were rigged, allowing the government bloc to claim 71 per cent of the vote. The Communists were awarded all the key portfolios in the cabinet, with the exception of the foreign ministry. It was only a matter of time before they demanded Michael’s removal.

A year later, when Michael travelled to London for the wedding of his cousin Princess Elizabeth, to another relative, Prince Philip of Greece, the Communists assumed he would bow to the inevitable and not return to Bucharest. That was also the advice of the British king, George VI, who feared for Michael’s life. Yet Michael felt it was his duty to return to Romania. Nine days later, he was confronted at the royal palace by Groza and the real power in the country, the Romanian Communist Party leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.

Michael’s continuing presence in Romania was “an obstacle to the development of Communism”, Gheorghiu-Dej told the king: it was time for him to abdicate. Michael replied that this was a constitutional question which must be settled by the people. “Not necessary,” Gheorghiu- Dej continued, “since it is clear that the people’s happiness would be guaranteed in a people’s democracy.”

When Michael refused to sign the abdication document that was thrust in his face, Groza gave him half an hour to reconsider. By now, troops had surrounded the palace and the royal telephone had been disconnected. Still Michael held out, until Groza threatened to arrest all opposition politicians and have them shot, with the king held responsible for the bloodshed. A few hours later a “people’s republic” was declared, and on 30 December 1947 Michael left for Britain. Having “abdicated” under duress, he never accepted the document’s validity.

In exile, Michael at least had the consolation of a happy marriage and family life. At the wedding of Princess Elizabeth (where he was briefly, and absurdly, linked with Princess Margaret), he had met an Italian princess, Anne of Bourbon-Parma. They were married in 1948, and had five daughters. She died last year. In other respects, Michael found exile frustrating. Short of money, his first venture was to rent a small farm in Hertfordshire belonging to a British friend.

Four years later the project collapsed and he joined the Lear aircraft company in Geneva (where the family settled), selling executive jets for the European market. But Michael was not cut out to be a salesman and increasingly he relied on his investments and the generosity of Romanian exiles, one of whom gave “scholarships” for his two eldest daughters to complete their education.

He was frustrated, too, by the political situation in Romania, which for a long period seemed to offer no hope of return. With the death of this well-intentioned, but politically naïve, king, any chance of restoring the Romanian monarchy has certainly disappeared.

Michael (Mihai) I of Romania, exiled king, born 25 October 1921, died 5 December 2017