Marie of Romania

Marie was born Princess Marie of Edinburgh on 29 October 1875, daughter of a British duke and a Russian grand duchess, raised between Kent, Malta and Coburg. She turned down a marriage proposal from her cousin, the future George V, and in 1893 wed Ferdinand, crown prince of Romania, becoming immediately popular with the Romanian people. When World War I began, she pushed Ferdinand to join the Triple Entente and declare war on Germany in 1916; after Bucharest fell to the Central Powers, she fled to Western Moldavia with her family and worked as a nurse alongside her three daughters, tending soldiers stricken with wounds and cholera. After the war, with Transylvania, Bessarabia and Bukovina unified into Greater Romania, she traveled to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to campaign for international recognition of the expanded state, and in 1922 she and Ferdinand were crowned in a grand ceremony at Alba Iulia. In 1926 she toured the United States with two of her children, drawing enthusiastic crowds, but returned to find Ferdinand dying; he passed months later in 1927. Her eldest son Carol, who had renounced succession rights in 1925, returned in 1930 to depose hi