A landowning class can not continue if there is land reform. To prevent that, a Royal from outside is brought in, who has little connection to the peasants, doesn’t even speak their language or attend their church. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
Todays stamp has an impressive look. A celebration of King Carol I forty years on the throne. So here is the King taking his oath years before, in French. There are others of him leading the army and attending church, not the Romanian Orthodox one. Carol apparently took the trappings of his office very seriously. His Queen once joked he wore his crown to bed. That shows on the stamps. That the people were so beaten down that his German royal house lasted 80 years is the tragedy that this stamp puts a brave face on.
The stamp today is issue A27, a 1 Bani stamp issued by the Kingdom of Romania in 1906. The stamp is part of a 10 stamp issue in various denominations. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 65 cents in its mint condition.
Romania was a coming together of Wallachia and Moldavia under the Moldavian Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza. There was a token allegiance paid to the Ottoman Empire but the Prince was working for European recognition of the new country. The people were overwhelmingly peasant, Orthodox Christian and spoke Romanian, which is a derivative of French.
Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza was a leftist reformer who sought land reform and was greatly influenced by the Europe wide insurrections of 1848. The landowning class, the Boyars were successfully fighting him on land reform . There were ethnically of German stock and so tended to side with the Germans on the European issues. The peasants were heavily with the French. The Prince sought more power to get his reforms through but the left was loosing patience with him. A coup occurred in 1866 supported by the right and some on the left and forced Cuza to abdicate and into exile.
The right wing of the coup plotters then recruited a German Prince Karl to be a new Prince and he served first as Prince Carol and later as King Carol I in a 48 year reign. He was an able soldier and won some extra land at cost of Bulgaria and succeeded in putting down forcibly the frequent peasant uprisings. He built the elaborate German style Peles Castle. He also prevented any land reform.
He did not get along well with his German Queen and after a Princess died young there was no further issue. The prospect of being King of Romania was not appealing either to Carol’s brother nor his brother’s son who both renounced any claims to the succession. Finally Carol found another German nephew Ferdinand who was willing. King Carol wanted to side with the Germans in World War I against the will of his people but he died in 1914 and since Ferdinand had a British wife he listened more to his people, or at least his wife.
The monarchy was exiled after World War II. After the cold war the current would be Royals initiated a court case to have the Royal properties returned to them personally. Peles Castle is now owned by them though still open as a museum. The current would be royal Princess Margareta grew up in Switzerland and is named after a Danish Royal grandmother. She tries harder than her ancestors in that she was baptized Romanian Orthodox and does speak Romanian. She even married a Romanian after a five year relationship with former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The Romanian government as yet to accede to becoming a constitutional monarchy.
Well my drink is empty and I will pour another and ponder this idea of bringing in a foreign King. He seemed to be a strong and lasting leader, but the good he did was only for a few. Come again for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2018.