Queen Marie: The Queen Who Chose Romania

Queen Marie was not born in Romania, yet she came to love the country deeply and to serve it during some of the hardest moments in its history.

Born on 29 October 1875 at Eastwell Park in Kent, England, she was a granddaughter of both Queen Victoria of Great Britain and Tsar Alexander II of Russia. In 1893, she married Crown Prince Ferdinand and moved to a country that was initially unfamiliar to her. She became Queen of Romania in 1914 when Ferdinand took the throne.

Over the years, Marie discovered Romania far beyond its palaces and ceremonies. She travelled through villages, met ordinary people, and took note of folk dress, churches, plains, mountains and local customs. In her book My Country, published during the First World War, she gathered those impressions into a warm portrait of Romania and of its rural life. The book is not a historical study. It is the personal testimony of a woman who had learned to think of Romania as her own country.

The Queen at the Front

In 1916 Romania entered the First World War on the side of the Entente. Marie supported that alignment and encouraged Ferdinand in a decision that was especially difficult for a king who came from a German family. Her influence was considerable, but the decision itself belonged to the King and to the institutions of the state, not to the Queen alone.

When the war brought wounds, hunger, displacement and epidemics, Marie did not remain behind the protection of the crown. She supported the organisation of ambulances and medical services, worked alongside the Red Cross, and visited field hospitals, including wards where patients were suffering from typhus. She went close to the front and among the soldiers, exposing herself to the dangers of both combat and contagious disease. The Romanian people gave her the names by which she is best remembered: the Mother of the Wounded, and the Soldier Queen.

She was not a physician, and she did not direct the medical system by herself. Relief for the victims of the war was the shared work of doctors, nurses, the Red Cross, foreign missions and volunteers. What Marie brought was mobilisation and presence: she drew people and resources into the effort, coordinated charitable work, sat at the bedsides of the sick, and did what she could to hold up the morale of soldiers and civilians alike. Contemporary accounts and later historical research agree that she organised charitable activity for the wounded and ill, brought women of the Romanian elite into that work, and built lasting links with the French, British and American relief missions.

A Bereaved Mother in a Wounded Country

Her courage did not mean the absence of suffering. In the autumn of 1916, Mircea, the youngest of the royal family's six children, died at the age of only three, carried off by typhoid fever. Not long afterwards Bucharest was occupied, and the royal family, the government and much of the administration withdrew to Moldavia.

At Iași, the Queen lived two dramas at once: that of a mother who had just buried her child, and that of a sovereign surrounded by refugees, famine, cold, wounded men and disease. Looking back on that period, she described herself as a queen with empty hands, standing in the middle of despair. It remains one of the most striking images she left of those months.

Even so, she kept working. Her wartime diaries return again and again to the same resolve — that she refused to be defeated, that despair was not in her nature, and that she had to keep working without pause. Whatever else the war took from her, it did not take that.

A Voice for Romania

After the war, Marie used her prestige and her international connections to support Romania's interests in Paris and London. In 1919, during the Paris Peace Conference, she met political leaders and influential figures and set out her country's sacrifices and its hopes.

Her mission did not by itself secure the recognition of Greater Romania. Those decisions were reached through negotiations between governments and the Great Powers, shaped by political and military realities and by the acts of union of 1918. But the historian Ioan Scurtu has argued that the Queen's intervention did improve Romania's standing and gave Western leaders a chance to hear its case. Marie described her own purpose in a phrase that has stayed with her ever since: she had come, she said, to give Romania a face.

In 1922, at Alba Iulia, she and Ferdinand were crowned King and Queen of Greater Romania. For Marie, the ceremony was the fulfilment of a hope for which the country had paid an enormous price.

The Country She Learned to Love

Marie did not modernise Romania by running its government. Her influence worked through other channels: diplomacy, health and charitable work, the promotion of folk art, cultural projects, and the way she represented her country abroad. In her writing, Romania appears not simply as a state she was obliged to represent, but as a landscape of the heart.

In The Country That I Love, she takes an imaginary reader across the geography of Romania, from mountain to plain and from hill to sea. She pauses at the Danube, which she calls the great and noble river and one of the prides of the country. Reaching the coast, she simply exclaims: the sea — and admits the pull it has always had on her, born as she was on an island.

Her love for Romania was never blind. She saw poverty, illness, injustice and the suffering of the war years, and she wrote about them. Precisely for that reason, her attachment was never merely decorative. She tried to turn the prestige of the crown into help, encouragement, and a voice for the people she had met in hospitals, villages and trenches.

Born in England, Marie became Romanian by choice, by work and by destiny. Romania gave her a crown, and asked her in return for courage, sacrifice and grief. She answered — not only as a queen, but as a woman who, through the darkest years, refused to abandon her country.

Further Reading

Marie, Queen of Romania. The Story of My Life. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934.

Marie, Queen of Romania. The Country That I Love: An Exile's Memories. Duckworth, 1925.

Marie, Queen of Romania. My Country. 1916.

Scurtu, Ioan. Regina Maria, Ion I.C. Brătianu și președintele Wilson la Conferința de Pace de la Paris. 2019.

Bălăican, Delia. "Sănătatea românilor supusă «gravității excepționale» a încercărilor războiului (1916–1918)." Revista Bibliotecii Academiei Române, 2017.