Free Prisoners of the North by Pierre Berton

him, as they reminded others, that on the face of it he was Colonel Boyle, King of the Klondike—commander of men, mining magnate, soldier of fortune, confidant of a queen. He wore his uniform like a second skin and he had no intention of peeling it off.
    There is little doubt that in the final months of 1918 the Saviour of Romania had fallen deeply in love with its queen. He saw her periodically as he moved in and out of Jassy. They managed to spend hours together after rides through the countryside. He told her about the Yukon, which she had long confused with Alaska, and the great gold dredges of the Klondike (but not about the wife he had left behind with whom he did not bother to correspond—a later revelation that shook Marie). He spoke of returning to the North and read to her from the works of Service, long passages of which he knew by heart. One of the Queen’s biographers has called her “the Last Romantic.” That she admired him and felt sustained by him there is no doubt. But was their relationship physical?
    Boyle’s two leading biographers differ. Certainly there were whispers about “Colonel Lawrence of Romania,” as the catty court ladies dubbed him behind his back. The Romanian court was a hotbed of sexual intrigue, the by-product of a network of arranged marriages consummated in the interests of the state. Affairs, both grand and fleeting, were common and expected. The Queen herself enjoyed a long-standing relationship with Prince Barbu Stirbey, a courtier with a lengthy pedigree, but she did not distribute her favours widely, if at all. In Boyle she discovered “an unexpected touch of early Victorian Puritanism that added much to his quaintness.”
    It is possible, as William Rodney has suggested, that in his relations with Marie, Boyle saw himself as a white knight, too chivalrous to sully this, the most important relationship of his life, with mere carnal appetite. Leonard Taylor, who had access to a newly discovered cache of Boyle papers after Rodney’s book was published, disagrees. “That they became lovers seems certain,” he wrote, pointing out that “both were full-blooded passionate individuals who made their own rules.… They were living at a pace only those who have survived a war can understand. When you may be dead tomorrow there is every reason to live today.”
    Given the situation, it is hard to dispute Taylor’s assessment. Though the sentimental and elegant queen might have seemed unapproachable to a Romanian courtier, Boyle was not a man to let such class restraints deter him. To her, the Yukoner appeared the epitome of rugged masculinity. To him, she was almost the direct opposite of his previous partners—a highly intelligent woman of the world who before her death would publish no fewer than sixteen books and innumerable articles in magazines ranging from Ladies Home Journal to the Paris Review . The fact that they came from totally different worlds only increased their mutual attraction.

    Queen Marie (left) in peasant costume with Joe Boyle and Princess Ileana .
    In June 1918, the two were thrown together by an unexpected circumstance. Boyle, who hadn’t had a real holiday since he left Great Britain, was felled by a near fatal stroke that left him partially paralyzed. For a fortnight his life hung in the balance. Marie was devastated. “I felt my heart die within me,” she wrote; “Boyle, my great strong invincible friend.”
    He had been stricken in Kishinev (now Chisinău, the capital of Moldova), but as soon as he could move she had him installed in a small cottage on the grounds of the summer palace in the Romanian hill country. There he fought back against his condition, exercising his stricken arm and leg and smoothing out the paralyzed side of his face in front of mirrors—a minor spectacle made to order for Act Three of The Saviour of Romania . Finally he managed to shave himself with an old-fashioned razor and it was clear that he was recovering. Marie