“There’s Nothing Wrong with Falling from Grace”: The Global Network of Monarchists Helping Deposed Kings and Queens

In Omaha, Nebraska, in the financial-aid department of Metropolitan Community College, Nick Behrens answered his office telephone. The caller introduced herself: it was Princess Margareta of Romania. Behrens was dumbfounded, but, as he recalled not long ago, the princess “was so very gracious, and I remember her saying that the needs there were so immense because of how Ceauşescu left the country: the illnesses, the orphanages, the AIDS, the lack of infrastructure, no tourism, no way for people to make money.”

The year was 1990. The Communist governments of Eastern Europe were falling, and Behrens, like many other members of the International Monarchist League—a private organization based in the United Kingdom, with members in many countries whose aim is, “quite simply, to support the principle of monarchy”—was full of hope. After the Iron Curtain fell, monarchists believed, a string of thrones across the Balkans might be restored.

In Pittsburgh, one monarchist organized grassroots fund-raisers to support Romania’s King Michael I. (After he was forced to abdicate in 1947, King Michael had made his living in exile, first as a chicken farmer in Britain and later as a pilot and a stockbroker in Switzerland.) Inspired by the man in Pittsburgh, Behrens asked himself, “What can I personally do, as just one middle-class person in Omaha, Nebraska? I’m not wealthy, but I wanted to help in some way.” He decided to give an organ recital at his church and take up a collection for the king. For the occasion, Behrens learned to play Romanian songs, including a national anthem, “Trăiască Regele” (“Long Live the King”). To persuade the audience to make donations, Behrens planned to deliver brief remarks describing the needs of the Romanian people, including the royal family. So he addressed a letter to King Michael’s eldest daughter, requesting details about her philanthropic work in the country. Princess Margareta did not have any brochures to send, so she called Behrens on the telephone to answer his questions, a mere two days before the recital took place.

From the audience at Pearl Memorial United Methodist Church, Behrens raised $1,600. Not long after the princess received the funds—as on every future occasion when Behrens sent gifts to the family, during the years before King Michael returned to live (but not rule) in Romania—a personal thank-you note, hand-signed by one of the Romanian royals, was delivered to the mailbox on Behrens’s front porch.

Last year, the population of planet Earth included half a dozen living former sovereigns of modern nation-states whose monarchies had been abolished in their lifetimes. King Michael died in December, six weeks after his 96th birthday, and then there were five: Constantine II, King of the Hellenes; Fuad II, King of Egypt and the Sudan; Gyanendra, King of Nepal; Jamshid bin Abdullah Al Said, Sultan of Zanzibar; and Simeon II, Czar of the Bulgarians. Along with the other non-reigning royals, including numerous pretenders—a pretender is an aspirant to an abolished Crown—these deposed figures inhabit a rare dilemma: how to live like kings and queens without a monarch’s means and infrastructure.

The challenge is harder for some than for others. A variety of individuals and organizations try to help. According to persistent rumors, after King Constantine was deposed, a small group of wealthy Greek families tithed, in effect, for his benefit. The last king of Rwanda, Kigeli V, in stark contrast, lived his final days in exile in suburban Washington, D.C., on food stamps and in public housing. But many people, including some affiliated with the International Monarchist League, contributed to his support. One bought him a custom suit. (The king stood more than seven feet tall.) Other members of the league organized a speaking tour for him. When the tour stopped in Omaha, King Kigeli spent the night at the home of Nick Behrens.

Not having much money is a problem, because paid employment is inherently awkward for those born to rule. Many choose occupations where royal status is an obvious asset. Pretenders to the thrones of Burundi, Afghanistan, China, Iran, Iraq, Korea, Laos, Austria-Hungary, Montenegro, Westphalia, and Mecklenburg-Strelitz, to name a few, have worked in politics or government. One pretender was a psychologist, and then went into forestry. Several are vintners.

Prince Ermias Sahle-Selassie, one of a few pretenders to the throne of his grandfather Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, worked for some years in a special department of Christie’s in London. His clients were heads of state, seeking to purchase gifts to give to other heads of state. But even this position, the prince said, had its awkward moments: “I was in Swaziland with the king, advising him on gifts, and he said, ‘You have to meet some cousins of mine in Johannesburg.’” So they flew to South Africa and went to a gala where Nelson Mandela (a former ally of Haile Selassie’s) introduced Prince Ermias to Robert Mugabe, “about whom I was ambivalent because he was harboring the man who killed my grandfather.”

Prince Ermias now lives near Washington, D.C., where he serves as head of the Crown Council of Ethiopia in exile. Traditionally, the Crown Council selected the emperor from among the members of Ethiopia’s Solomonic dynasty, the oldest royal bloodline in the world. According to the Bible’s first Book of Kings, the Queen of Sheba visited King Solomon in Jerusalem “to test him with hard questions,” and, according to Ethiopian tradition, she returned home bearing Solomon’s child. The child, Menelik I, ruled Ethiopia in the 10th century before Christ. His reign ushered in 225 generations of Solomonic rule that ended with Haile Selassie’s downfall, in 1974. At that time the Crown Council was dissolved, and many of its members were imprisoned and then killed. Reconstituted in exile in 1993, the council now serves as a cultural and humanitarian organization. Prince Ermias was chosen to lead the council in 1997. He says he makes no claim to the Crown but that he would be willing to rule should he be asked.

For 20 years, Prince Ermias has also worked for a small think tank in Old Town, Alexandria, in Virginia, called the International Strategic Studies Association, and he now serves as co-patron of its Center for the Study of Monarchy, Traditional Governance, and Sovereignty. Both groups were founded by an Australian named Gregory Copley, who was introduced to Prince Ermias in London through a mutual friend, Prince Idris bin Abdullah al-Senussi, one of the two main pretenders to the Libyan throne.

In an 18th-century building that was originally a tavern, the center occupies a small warren of offices—”the suite where Al Haig had his presidential-campaign headquarters,” Copley said—where Prince Ermias recently told me about his own experience of exile, and how he was helped through it. The day we met, the prince wore glasses with a smoky tint to the lenses, a trim blue suit, and a tie covered with rows of tiny elephants raising their trunks and holding tiny umbrellas above their heads. He is a youthful 57-year-old, built just a bit more solidly than his grandfather, but similarities between the geometries of their bodies make for a striking resemblance: the slight upward tilts of the head and chest.

When the coup took place and much of his extended family was murdered or incarcerated, Prince Ermias was 14 years old. He and his mother had moved to England, and he was at boarding school. The emperor’s fall was gradual, and its increments frequently made headlines in the English papers. This provoked classmates to tease Prince Ermias so mercilessly that he would hide in corners of the campus where no one would see him cry. He preferred the company of teachers to the companionship of peers.

He and his mother “were very fortunate because we had a home” in Kensington, where, at various times after the coup, as many as eight family members lived together in the three-bedroom flat that he called “a mini refugee camp.” Other Ethiopians often came to visit, to pay their respects and offer emotional support, and these visitors sometimes volunteered to help with cooking. Contrary to some popular reports (most influentially, The Emperor, by Ryszard Kapuściński, which has been widely criticized for fabrications), Ermias says the Selassies smuggled no money out of Ethiopia before the emperor fell. He and his mother had brought silverware, some art, and other practical items of sentimental value to England. They sold these, and they sold their house, to keep themselves afloat. Gifts from the Jordanian royal family paid for tuition when he went to graduate school.

Not until his early 30s did Prince Ermias make a real friend who had experienced the same kind of dispossession he had. The friend was Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah of Iran. “I met him, curiously, through the son of King Simeon, who was living in Washington; the son of King Constantine, who was going to Georgetown at that time; and King Felipe of Spain now, who was also a student then in Washington.” Sometimes they stayed in together and listened to music; sometimes they went out. “It was very interesting. It was a privilege that we continued the friendship that our families had,” Ermias said. Being a part of this group provided him with a kind of existential relief: “Silent comfort. You don’t have to introduce yourself. You don’t have to explain yourself. Silent comfort.”

In the English countryside of Berkshire, on the grounds of his house “built just about when the American colonies were beginning to be settled, in 1620,” Nikolai Tolstoy reports each day for work at the desk in his library, a three-room stone structure that once was a wagon shed. He is 82 years old, head of the senior branch of the celebrated Russian family, and a distant cousin of the novelist Leo Tolstoy. His inherited title, Count of the Russian Empire, was originally granted by Peter the Great. A historian and an expert on Celtic mythology, Tolstoy has published 11 books, including scholarly and fictional works about Merlin, and he recently completed the second volume of a biography of his stepfather, Patrick O’Brian, author of the Aubrey-Maturin series of historical novels.

Tolstoy is chancellor of the International Monarchist League, a group that is, to put it gently, loosely organized. One senior member of the league’s leadership was quite surprised when he directed a recent inquiry about the group to the e-mail address of an associate, only to learn that the associate had died several years earlier. “We have meetings and local branches all over the country,” Tolstoy said, and the meetings are attended by “people of all shapes and sizes,” though he is not sure where the most vibrant local chapters are located. The group has no physical headquarters: “There’s just everyone in their homes.”

Tolstoy joined the Monarchist League in the 1980s. At that time, he said, “it was quite an eccentric organization. When we had dinner, vast amounts of medals and ribbons and stars would appear on people’s chests, mostly I think self-awarded.” He has steered the group in a more intellectual direction. Although the league’s remit encompasses monarchy worldwide, Tolstoy keeps a concerned eye on Britain. “The fundamental purpose of the league is to remind supporters of monarchy that it’s dangerous to rely purely on sentiment,” he explained. “There may come a day when the monarchy is challenged. Were it to be so, it could find itself in a weak position if people simply thought the monarchy was sentimental, a tourism attraction, and not something more vital.” The league, he pointed out, supports monarchs or heirs only in countries that have traditionally had monarchs. “We have no interest whatsoever in suggesting that there should be an American monarch or a Swiss monarch. In a country where government is strongly republican, that would be revolutionary. That isn’t something that we even contemplate.”

Though not a political activist, as an intellectual Tolstoy has some of the warrior in him. He leaps to protect sovereigns even from semantic indignity—courteously refusing, for instance, to abide the term “pretender.” “It actually arises from a linguistic distortion of the 18th century, when the Stuart heir to the throne living in exile on the Continent was known by the French as a prétendant,” Tolstoy explained, “a neutral term meaning claimant. The corresponding, or seemingly corresponding, word in English has strong connotations of being mysterious, or false.” Instead of “pretender,” “I would say ‘claimant,’ or ‘heir.’ ‘Heir’ would be my usage.”

Tolstoy is also chairman of the Russian Monarchist League, though “how active they are I’m not in a position to say.” He perceives “very strong monarchist sentiment in Russia, though very little monarchist political activity.” Tolstoy is on good terms with Grand Duchess Maria—who lays claim to the title Curatrix of the Imperial Throne of Russia—and with her son, Grand Duke George, whom he refers to as “the heir.” (Maria calls her son “the Csarevitch.”) Maria has been a guest in Tolstoy’s house. “In our guest book, I think it’s in successive months, we had Grand Duchess Maria and her father, and then we had Svetlana Stalin, brought here by the great-nephew of the founder of the K.G.B.,” Tolstoy said. He paused here to chuckle.

“There is no question that George, naturally if the opportunity were offered, would welcome” the chance to return to the Russian throne, in Tolstoy’s view. “Nothing would be more good for Russia than a constitutional monarchy. It would provide a fair focus of loyalty for the people, one that is above or outside politics, and a sense of continuity over time.” Monarchy provides, for Tolstoy, just this sense of continuity. Asked which among the living heirs he knows best, his answer streams with memory: “I suppose the King of Serbia, or he would be king, King Alexander. Or the Duke of Braganza, who—wait a second, trying to think—oh! The Prince of Liechtenstein, whom I have known for a very long time, very well. I can’t keep it straight, who else . . . ?”

On the matter of how former monarchs manage to get by, Tolstoy initially deflected the question: “I think in most cases they wouldn’t want their names given. It may be slightly embarrassing.” But if such gifts were seen as adding to the dignity of monarchy—as evidence of devotion that binds many sovereigns and subjects—wouldn’t it be important to know about them? The rich Greeks’ tithe for Constantine—”Yes, yes, I know about that,” he interrupted—would be one example; what are some others? He answered, “In Russia, I’m pretty sure that well-heeled supporters of the monarchy do support the Grand Duchess Maria and her son.”

Count Tolstoy’s library contains so many books—some 10,000 volumes—that there is almost no space to hang pictures on the walls. In the main room, the lone large image, three feet tall and two feet wide, is a very fine 1748 engraving of “Bonnie Prince Charlie”—Charles Edward, the one whom the French called the prétendant,the last of the Stuarts to make a serious claim to the British throne. The prince, shown in armor, stands sentry among Tolstoy’s treasures, such as the “very, very fat, solid, nicely printed” 1,600-page volume by the Marquis of Ruvigny, The Titled Nobility of Europe, “a wonderful work for browsing. It was published in 1914—which is perfect, by chance—just before so many of the monarchies were toppled. I relish, for instance, reading the three pages of the titles of Franz Josef. It is a kind of poetry.” When asked, Tolstoy takes down this book and slowly reads, with a sprinkling of commentary: “‘Francis Josef I, by the grace of God Emperor of Austria, King of Bohemia, Galicia, Lodomeria, and Dalmatia. Of Illyria, Jerusalem, etc.’—et cetera! A good throwaway. Then it goes on for about eight lines until he takes it up again: ‘Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Croatia, Slavonia, Rama, Serbia’—just thrown in for luck, ha ha Ha HA!—‘Romania and Bulgaria, Grand Prince of Transylvania . . . ’”

Monarchy, as a social experience, is at least as much given as made. Subjects believe sovereigns receive their power, in the first instance, by grace. This faith is the most essential act of helping, the most fundamental act of caretaking, that monarchists perform for their monarchs. Nick Behrens told me, “People think of monarchists as snobs, but I don’t look at it that way. I think that the purpose of a monarchy is service, and family. The monarch is the head of the family, the nation, the people.”

Prince Ermias is often treated as such an embodiment. With the largest population of Ethiopian immigrants to the United States living in Washington, D.C., strangers on the street there sometimes look at him, recognize the late emperor, and reflexively genuflect in some way. What is it like to be on the receiving end of such generosity? How does a guy in Virginia even conceive of being an heir to the Solomonic dynasty? “It’s very hard,” he answered. “How quickly it melted away, after so many thousands of years. It’s amazing, all that history stacked up can just sort of evaporate into thin air.” At the same time, another part of him feels no doubt that history is on his side. “You know, when they were overthrowing my grandfather, he told them, ‘Today, my history stops, but the moment that you stop working for the Ethiopian people—maintaining their unity and protecting territorial integrity—that’s when your history will die, and mine will rise again.’ He said it on the spot. What other validation do you need?”

The prince feels no embarrassment about the help he has received. “I hope in this story people may find inspiration. There’s nothing wrong with falling from grace, which is a very human story,” he said. “I hope the story adds explanation to the heritage of the families who have sacrificed a lot for the nations.”

In recent years, the personal needs of some deposed European monarchs and pretenders have been answered with substantial restitution, formally and informally, from countries including Serbia, Albania, Greece, and Bulgaria. In Romania, royal estates such as Peleş Castle were returned to King Michael. Upon his death they passed to Margareta, who styles herself Her Royal Highness, Crown Princess and Custodian of the Crown.

Count Tolstoy expects that representatives of some of these royal houses, as well as Grand Duchess Maria and Grand Duke George, will travel to the Urals in Russia in July, to join a mass remembrance of the 1918 execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family. “My wife and I will go,” Count Tolstoy said. “Our son will go, too, and I think several of my family will be certainly attending from abroad, for the principal commemoration in the cathedral specially built in Ekaterinburg to commemorate the emperor and his family, after the stupid destruction of the house where the murders took place.” In 1977, on instructions from Boris Yeltsin, then first secretary of the local Communist Party, demolition workers took down the house, “which was becoming, even then, authorities felt, too much of a shrine to pilgrims.”

Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land is the official name of the cathedral where tens of thousands will observe “the centenary of the martyrdom.” It is referred to as martyrdom, Tolstoy explained, because the Russian Orthodox Church canonized the imperial-family members who were executed in Ekaterinburg. Also raised to sainthood were those who had faithfully served the deposed royals—the household servants who also died. These included a lady-in-waiting, a maid, a footman, a physician, a cook, and a tutor. Tolstoy did not mention the sainthood of the servants, though. Perhaps modesty forbade it.