Empty-Handed Return

State visitors at Buckingham Palace for three days last week were Rumania's King Carol II and 17-year-old Crown Prince Mihai. In the years after Carol had divorced his wife and temporarily abandoned his throne to live in France with lissome, red-haired Magda Lupescu, daughter of a Jewish druggist, he was persona non grata to the British royal family. Queen Mary refused to have him in her house.

In recent years, however, Carol has settled down to his job as king in a manner calculated to please his distant cousins at London. Although when in Bucharest Mme Lupescu lives in a villa convenient to the royal palace, King Carol has made himself salesman for Rumania in the best British Empire tradition, dissolved the Rumanian Iron Guards (Nazis), booted out a premier who was too antiSemitic. All this has made him a little more acceptable to the British royal family. Last week Carol's first official call was on Queen Mother Mary at Maryborough House, where he presented gifts of lace and a necklace made of famed Rumanian black amber. Liberally dispersed were other gifts to the royal family--costumed dolls to the princesses, an amber cigaret holder to King George, an amber necklace to Queen Elizabeth.

The real purpose of Carol's visit was to wangle financial and political support for Rumania from the British Government and London financial circles. In the days before Munich, Britain and France were liberal with credits to the small States of Europe, in the belief that such grants could stave off German commercial expansion. But with the Munich Pact and British Prime Minister Chamberlain's open admission that it is Germany's natural position to dominate trade in the Danubian basin, Britain's purse strings have been pulled tight. Last week Carol reportedly asked: 1) loan of $75,000,000; 2) British capital to develop Rumania's oil fields; 3) increased British purchases of Rumanian oil and wheat; 4) the raising of the representative of the two nations from ministerial to ambassadorial status. He reputedly received nothing, although some sources speculated that Britain was considering an increase in her Rumanian purchases.

Peeved at having to return virtually emptyhanded, Carol and the Crown Prince canceled tentative plans for a longer private stay, headed back to Bucharest. On the way the King was expected to call on Chancellor Hitler and German economic experts, who will probably lose no time in reminding him that a recent German offer to develop Rumanian oil fields and purchase Rumania's entire wheat crop for the next two years, in exchange for German manufactured goods, still stands. But they have no money to lend him.

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