Royalty Digest

This is a very disparate article, based on a large batch of books I recently acquired from a Manchester dealer. The owner was a Miss Grizel Gray of Walmer who seems to have started collecting in the early 1920s and been an obsessive reader of Royal books until well into the 1990s. It would be interesting to know whether anyone came across her, for she wrote to publishers, authors and newspapers upon the subject, usually to pick up mistakes. Many of the titles were very interesting, very scarce titles but they were virtually all distinguished by vast numbers of newspaper cuttings, written notes and pasted in pictures which, while not much helping the value of the books, held a great deal of interest. Rather than keep them until relevant subjects turned up, I thought I would simply string lots of them together into a couple of articles, providing something for everyone.

Let us start with Marie, Grand Duchess of Russia's book A Princess In Exile, a bestseller both here and in the States around 1932. In a cutting from the Evening Standard of March 11th, 1932 we find Marie flying 3,000 miles to be with her son Prince Lennart when he married Miss Karin Nisavandt. Neither Marie nor her brother Grand Duke Dimitri, who was also in London, attended the registry office wedding or heard Lennart renounce his royal rank. "Romanoffs," she told the press, "do not recognise register office weddings." Neither she nor her brother attended the Dorchester reception either, on the grounds that they hadn't been invited. Before the happy couple left for Lake Constance as Mr. and Mrs. Bernadotte, Marie sat in her Piccadilly hotel hoping they would call, but they didn't. It will be remembered that the Grand Duchess had a short and rather stormy marriage to Prince Wilhelm of Sweden in her younger days, hence the Bernadotte. The couple did receive telegrams from both Marie and King Gustav of Sweden, Lennart's grandfather.

Grand Duchess Marie in the early days
of her mariage to Prince Wilhelm

Marie talked to the press at some length. Her basic objection was the lack of a religious service, but there seems to have been little contact with her son and she was unaware that he was leaving that afternoon, instead of the following day. A friend explained some of the background. After the Russian Revolution, the Swedish Court had returned Marie's jewels but held onto her large dowry, upon which Lennart was living rather well while his mother worked as a dressmaker in New York. Her two books, both very popular, gave her back her independence. An ink note at the end of one chapter quotes Axel Munthe saying how intensely annoyed the Queen of Sweden was when Marie's reminiscences were serialised in a popular Swedish weekly magazine. She summoned Munthe and tried to get him to stop it. Another note quotes Rebecca West, in a review in the Sunday Telegraph of June 13th, 1974, as saying that Munthe was the lover of the Queen of Sweden. She certainly appears discreetly in the book The Story of Axel Munthe visiting him in the Mediterranean.

Another cutting in the same volume, from the Daily Mail of January 3rd, 1952, reports a luncheon in Sweden with Prince Wilhelm, his "life friend Mme. Jeanne de Tramcourt" and Prince Lennart (who seems to have dropped the 'Mr. Bernadotte' at this stage). Afterwards 67-year-old Prince Wilhelm was involved in an accident in a snowstorm in which the lady was killed. There is another note on an endpaper stating that both Marie and Dimitri were buried in a vault at Mainau in Germany belonging to her son 'Count' Bernadotte. Yet another cutting records her death in Switzerland in 1958 and that she had been estranged from Lennart for twenty years.

Further on, in an undated cutting, we discover Dimitri attending the funeral of Sir Charles Marling, a British diplomat who was said to have saved his life twice at the time of the Revolution. It will be recalled that Dimitri had been banished to the Persian frontier, where he met Sir Charles, Britain's envoy to Teheran. Not only did the Briton protect the Grand Duke in Persia, he and his wife also nursed him through a near fatal attack of typhoid on the way back to Britain. Another note has Clare Sheridan, the artist, clearly enjoying telling Dimitri that she had been teaching art in Russia in what had been his private chapel.

Prince Wilhelm and Prince Lennart (with the family cat)

There is another written quotation from a book on Coco Chanel by Claude Ballen as follows: "Those Grand Dukes were all the same - they looked marvellous, but there was nothing behind. Green eyes, fine hands and shoulders, peace-loving, timorous, they drank so as not to be afraid. They were tall and handsome and splendid." Dimitri died at Davos from TB in 1942. Wilhelm's death on June 5th, 1965 is in another cutting: he would have been 81 on June 17th. The batch had a copy of Marie's other book, Things I Remember, which also contains cuttings and quotations. Antoine, the hairdresser, is quoted as saying that, "in spite of handsome clothes, Grand Duchess Marie looked bourgeoise. Most Russian women of the old aristocracy have a look in their eyes as though they were gazing off a long way, at some far-off, widespread steppe, if you will. But not the Grand Duchess Marie, who is an energetic, middle-sized, strongly-built woman with a masculine voice."