LETTERS Not on your Nelly
Sir: A distant tremor on the Richter scale could be detected coming from the direc- tion of the Lausanne tomb of that most dear, beautiful and royal (she was a great- granddaughter both of Queen Victoria and King Christian IX of Denmark, a grand- daughter of the Emperor Frederick of Germany and a daughter of King Constan- tine of the Hellenes) of ladies, the late Queen Helen of Romania, on the publica- tion in your issue of 16 April of Tony Lambton's historical howler about Esmond Harmsworth, later Rothermere, to the effect that 'the Romanians offered him their crown'. After the first world war and until the communists' abolition of the monarchy in 1957 the Romanian throne was occupied successively by the father-in- law, the only son, the wayward husband and then again the son of Lambton's one-time Tuscan acquaintance and guest, whose library of cosy English light reading, when her financial advisers forced her to leave her beloved Villa Sparta at Fiesole, he himself acquired for his own pretty place of exile outside Siena.
As some schoolboys used to know, it was the first Lord Rothermere's vociferous post-St Germain and Trianon Treaties campaign in the Daily Mail on behalf of Hungary – after the fiasco of poor Emper- or Karl's attempt to return – that was to cause the Crown of St Stephen to be offered to his son, who, after trying it on his handsome head during a cautiously brief visit to Budapest, proved to be far too nervous a Nelly to accept it.
Alastair Forbes
Beefsteak Club, London WC1
Previous page
