Carol II ( – 4 April 1953) was King of Romania from 8 June 1930 following a coup that deposed his son, until his forced abdication on 6 September 1940. As the eldest son of King Ferdinand I, he was crown prince from 1914 at the death of his granduncle King Carol I, until 1925 when he was forced by a marital scandal to renounce his right to the throne in favor of his son.
Carol's life and reign were beset with controversies, such as his desertion from the army during World War I. Another was his marriage to Zizi Lambrino, who was not of royal lineage. After the dissolution of his first marriage, he married Princess Helen of Greece and Denmark, daughter of King Constantine I of Greece, in March 1921, and later that year they had a son, Michael. Due to his notorious extramarital affair with Elena Lupescu, Carol was forced to renounce his succession rights in 1925. His father removed Carol from the royal house of Romania, and he was exiled to France along with Lupescu. Michael, aged 5, inherited the throne on the death of King Ferdinand in 1927. Princess Helen divorced Carol in 1928.
In the political crisis resulting from the deaths of King Ferdinand and the prime minister and the ineffective regency of Prince Nicholas of Romania, Miron Cristea, and Gheorghe Buzdugan, Carol was allowed to return to Romania in 1930. His name was restored in the royal house of Romania, and he deposed his son and claimed the throne as Carol II. The beginning of his reign was marked by the Great Depression. He weakened parliament, often appointing minority factions of historical parties to the government and attempting to form nationally concentrated governments, such as the Iorga-Argetoianu government. He surrounded himself with a corrupt circle of advisors, including his mistress Lupescu. Another political crisis followed the December 1937 elections, after which no coalition could be formed because of disagreements between the various large political factions. Following this crisis, Carol established a royal dictatorship in 1938 by suspending the 1923 constitution, abolishing all political parties, and forming a National Renaissance Front which consisted mostly of former members of the National Peasants' Party and the National Christian Party whom he had patronized. This government was the last of several attempts to counter the popularity of the fascist Iron Guard.
At the outbreak of World War II, Carol reaffirmed the Polish–Romanian alliance. Poland, which wished to follow the Romanian Bridgehead plan, declined Romanian military assistance. Following the fall of Poland and the involvement of the Soviet Union, Carol maintained a neutrality policy. After the fall of France, he shifted his policy in favor of re-alignment with Nazi Germany in hopes of avoiding a German invasion of Romania. The year 1940 marked the fragmentation of Greater Romania by the cession of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union, Northern Transylvania to Hungary and Southern Dobruja to Bulgaria. Although a German guarantee had been achieved, the cost destroyed Carol's reputation, his regime collapsed and he was forced to abdicate by General Ion Antonescu, the newly appointed Nazi-backed prime minister. Carol was succeeded as king by his son Michael.According to the 1938 Constitution – article 41, the crown prince Michael immediately had taken the Regency during the absence of his father. After his abdication, Carol was permitted to leave the country in a train loaded with 30 truckloads of his royal fortune. In a failed attempt to assassinate Carol, the Iron Guard shot at the train as it was passing through Timișoara station. After World War II, Carol II was forbidden to return by the Western Allies. For the rest of his life, he traveled the world, finally marrying Lupescu in Brazil in 1947. After settling in the Portuguese Riviera, Carol II died peacefully at the age of 59 in exile. King Michael I refused to attend the funeral out of disgust for Carol's treatment of Michael's mother Princess Helen.
Early life and boyhood in the 1890s
Carol was born in October 1893 in Peleș Castle as the son of the German-born Crown Prince Ferdinand and the British-born Crown Princess Marie. He was the first male member of the royal family to be born in Romania. However, he spent most of his childhood under the thumb of his domineering great-uncle, King Carol I, who blocked the younger Carol's parents from any role in raising him. Romania in the early 20th century had a famously relaxed "Latin" sexual morality, and Marié had a long series of affairs with various Romanian men with whom she could obtain more emotional and sexual satisfaction than with Ferdinand, who fiercely resented being cuckolded. The stern Carol I felt that Marie was unqualified to raise Prince Carol because of her affairs and her young age, as she was only seventeen when Carol was born, while Marie regarded the King as a cold, overbearing tyrant who would crush the life out of her son.
The childless Carol I, who had always wanted a son, treated Prince Carol as his surrogate son and thoroughly spoiled him, indulging his every whim. Ferdinand was a rather shy and weak man who was easily overshadowed by the charismatic Marie, who became the most loved member of the Romanian royal family. Growing up, Carol felt ashamed of his father, whom both his grand-uncle and mother pushed around. Carol as a child was caught in an emotional tug-of-war between Carol I and Marie, who had very different ideas about how to raise him. The Romanian historian Marie Bucur described the battle between Carol I and Princess Marie as one between traditional 19th-century Prussian conservatism as personified by Carol I versus the 20th-century liberal, modernist, and sexually deviant values of the "New Woman" as personified by Princess Marie. Aspects of both Marie's and Carol I's personalities were present in Carol II. Largely because of the battle between the King and Marie, Carol ended up being both spoiled and deprived of love.
1900 - 1921: Early marriages and love affairs
During his teenage years in the first decade of the 1900s, Carol (Romanian for "Charles") acquired the "playboy" image that was to become his defining persona for the rest of his life. Carol expressed some concern at the direction that Prince Carol was taking, as the young Prince's only serious interest was stamp collecting and he spent an inordinate amount of time drinking, partying, and chasing after women. Young Carol fathered at least two illegitimate children by the teenage schoolgirl Maria Martini by the time that he was 19 (in 1912). Carol rapidly became a favorite of gossip columnists around the world owing to the frequent photographs that appeared in the newspapers showing him at various parties with him holding a drink in one hand and a woman in the other.
To teach the prince the value of Prussian virtues, the King had the prince commissioned as an officer in 1913. His time with the 1st Prussian Guards regiment did not achieve the desired results, and Carol remained the "playboy prince". Romania in the early 20th century was an intensely Francophile nation, indeed perhaps the most Francophile nation in the entire world as the Romanian elite obsessively went about embracing all things French as the model for perfection in everything. To a certain extent, Carol was influenced by the prevailing Francophilia, but at the same time, he inherited from Carol I, in the words of the American historian Margaret Sankey, a "profound love of German militarism" and the idea that all democratic governments were weak governments.
Sometime before the First World War, the Romanian and Russian royal families held talks about the marriage of Carol, at that time the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Romania, to the Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia, the eldest daughter of the Russian emperor at the time, Tsar Nicholas II: Sergey Sazonov, the Foreign Minister of the Russian Empire between 1910 and 1916, wanted Olga to marry Carol to ensure Romania's position as an ally of Russia in the eventuality of a war, as Romania was an ally of Germany at the time. Both royal families, including the Tsar and his wife Alexandra, gave their support for the idea, and there were high expectations that the marriage would take place. However, neither Carol or Olga demonstrated an interest for the other: Carol wasn't fond of Olga's appearance, and Olga expressed her wish to remain in Russia (should the marriage have taken place, Olga would have become the Crown Princess, and later the Queen of Romania). This was best seen during the visit of the Romanian royal family to Russia in March 1914, and during a visit of Nicholas and his family to Romania a few months later.
After the failure of the planned joining of Carol and Olga, the idea of a possible marriage of a Romanian royal to a Russian royal faded until 1917, when Carol began showing interest in the younger sister of Olga, the Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna. In a visit to Russia in January of that year, he made a formal proposal to Nicholas for Maria's hand, but Nicholas "good-naturedly laughed the proposal aside", and argued that Maria "was nothing more than a schoolgirl". Maria was only 17 at the time, and shared her older sister's desire to marry a Russian and remain in Russia."Naryshkina diary", quoted in Dnevniki I, p. 50
In November 1914, Carol joined the Romanian Senate, as the 1866 Constitution guaranteed him a seat there upon reaching maturity."Ce citeau românii acum 68 de ani?" , Ziua, 29 November 2007. Known more for his romantic misadventures than for any leadership skills, Carol was first married in the Cathedral Church of Odesa, Ukraine, on 31 August 1918 (under the occupation of the Central Powers at that time), to Joanna Marie Valentina Lambrino (1898–1953), known as "Zizi", the daughter of a Romanian general, Constantin Lambrino. The fact that Carol technically had deserted as he left his post at the Army without permission to marry Zizi Lambrino caused immense controversy at the time. The marriage was annulled on 29 March 1919, by the Ilfov County Court. Carol and Zizi continued to live together after the annulment. Their only child, Mircea Gregor Carol Lambrino, was born on 8 January 1920.
On 10 March 1921, Carol next married Princess Helen of Greece and Denmark in Athens, Greece; his new bride was known in Romania as Crown Princess Elena. They were second cousins, both of them great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria, as well as third cousins in descent from Nicholas I of Russia. Helen had known of Carol's dissolute behavior and previous marriage, but her love for him was undeterred. The intent behind this arranged marriage was to help organize a dynastic alliance between Greece and Romania. Bulgaria had territorial disputes with Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia, and all three of the latter states tended to be close during the interwar period owing to their shared fears of the Bulgarians. Helen and Carol's only child, Michael, was born seven months after their marriage, sparking rumors that Michael was conceived out of wedlock. Apparently close at first, Carol and Helen drifted apart. Carol's marriage with Princess Helen was an unhappy one, and he frequently engaged in extramarital affairs. The elegant wallflower Helen found the bohemian Carol, with his love of heavy drinking and constant partying, rather too wild for her tastes. For his part, Carol disliked royal and aristocratic women, whom he found too stiff and formal, and had an extremely marked preference for commoners, much to the chagrin of his parents. Carol found low-born women to have the qualities that he sought in a woman, such as informality, spontaneity, humor, and passion.
Controversies surrounding Magda Lupescu (1920s)