Musings about royalty in Montenegro and finding imaginary parallels with romantic revels in Ruritania

Ronald Coleman and Madeline Carroll in the 1937 Hollywood version of ‘The Prisoner of Zenda’

Patrick Comerford

I have been writing in recent days about Prince Milo Petrović-Njegoš (1889-1978) of Montenegro and his ‘wingman’ Major Marko Zekov Popović (1881-1934), who are buried in Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick, and Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

I was being interviewed in Christ Church Cathedral last week by Montenegrin television for an historical documentary about these dashing, debonair and swash-buckling Balkan aristocrats, and how their escapades captivated society in London and Dublin in the 1920s and 1930s.

My interviewers wondered how many people in Ireland know even a little about Montenegro. I suggested it may be difficult for the ordinary person on the street in Dublin to distinguish between Montenegro, Macedonia, Moldova and Moldavia. In a similar way, they might confuse or find it difficult to tell apart Budapest, Bucharest and Belgrade.

The common perception of Montenegro, until it recently became a desirable tourism and holiday destination, may have been of some Balkan Ruritania. Many might even have difficulty in pinning it on the map. Indeed, asking some people to place a pin on Ruritania might be as absurd as asking them to put their finger on Ruthenia.

As we talked about the comparisons between Montenegro and Ruritania, the crew decided to interview me separately about the meaning of Ruritania in English-speaking countries.

Ruritania first emerges in popular literature in 1894 as a centre of political and court intrigue in Anthony Hope’s novel The Prisoner of Zenda, ‘being the history of three months in the life of an English gentleman.’ It is set in the fictional Balkan kingdom of Ruritania, and the name ‘Ruritania’ has since entered the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the novelist’s and dramatist’s locale for court romances in a modern setting.’

Ruritania came into existence on an overcast day in November 1893, somewhere between Saint Martin’s Lane in Covent Garden and Brick Court in Middle Temple. Anthony Hope Hawkins, a young barrister who wrote light fiction under the name Anthony Hope, was sauntering back to his father’s vicarage from court when the outline came to him of a story of lookalikes set in a fictional Central European kingdom.

Out of this grew The Prisoner of Zenda, which Anthony Hope completed in his father’s vicarage. It is an adventurous tale about an aristocratic English tourist who bears a strong resemblance to the King of Ruritania and who is persuaded to impersonate him in order to foil a coup by his half-brother, Michael, Duke of Strelsau.

The Revd Edwards Comerford Hawkins (1827-1906): ‘The Prisoner of Zenda’ was written in his vicarage

The novel captivated its first readers and became the publishing sensation of 1894. It went on to become a bestseller and inspired scores of tales of royal intrigue in pocket principalities.

The novel was a runaway success. Soon, stage versions of Zenda drew eager audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, it was made into plays that toured around for many years. In Britain, at St James’s Theatre, George Alexander transformed Edward Rose’s adaptation of Zenda into a sumptuous romantic spectacle and reinvented himself as a matinee idol.

By the early 1900s, Anthony Hope Hawkins’s street reverie had become the ‘Ruritanian romance’, an established subgenre on page and stage. It was well placed to conquer the new medium of film.

‘The Prisoner of Zenda’ was an instant success at its publication in 1894

There is a distant family connection, of course. Anthony Hope Hawkins was a son of the Revd Edwards Comerford Hawkins (1827-1906), a journalists’ parson and a writer with a strong Irish background, and the only son of a Hertfordshire doctor. Dr Frederick Hawkins of Hitchin, his sister Anne, and their cousin Susanna Hawkins all married into the Comerford-Casey family of Cork and Liverpool, their spouses being two sons and a daughter of Edwards Casey of Cahirgal and Elmgrove Grove, Cork, and his wife, Jane Comerford.

The Comerford-Casey family fortune came from the soap industry in Liverpool, but medicine and the law became the main professions of the family members, who moved with ease between their homes in Cork, Hitchin and Liverpool.

The foundations for Zenda and Ruritania may be found in early family stories of how there had been so many look-alike Comerford-Casey and Hawkins cousins that they often played at passing themselves off as each other.

It came as no surprise when Edwards Comerford Hawkins entered the ministry of the Church of England – four of his first cousins were ordained too: the Revd Henry Ernest Casey, the Revd George Edwards Comerford-Casey, the Revd William Henry Casey, and the Revd Henry Hawkins.

Edwards Comerford Hawkins became the headmaster of Saint John’s Foundation School in 1861, and by 1872, when Saint John’s moved to Leatherhead in Surrey, Hawkins had transformed it into an English public school.

Hawkins was also a well-known journalist and writer, contributing to Smith’s Dictionaries and publishing Spirit and Form in 1881. An invitation from the Dean of Westminster in 1883 to become Vicar of Saint Bride’s, the journalists’ church in Fleet Street, had obvious attractions.

The youngest Hawkins boy, Anthony Hope Hawkins, went to Saint John’s while his father was headmaster, before going on to Marlborough and Balliol College, Oxford. The Oxford reformer Benjamin Jowett was then Master of Balliol, and Hawkins’s contemporaries included Lord Curzon, future viceroy of India, and Edward Grey, later a leading Liberal politician. Among his more immediate circle at Balliol were LT Hobhouse, who became an academic and theorist of Liberalism, JA Spender, future editor of the Westminster Gazette, Cosmo Lang, later Archbishop of York and of Canterbury, and Sir Charles Mallet, liberal politician and Hawkins’s biographer.

For a while, Anthony Hope Hawkins practised at the bar and shared chambers with a future Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith. Despite a brief flirtation with politics – he failed as the Liberal candidate in Wycombe, South Buckinghamshire, in 1892 – young Hawkins found his real interest was in journalism and writing. He began contributing short stories and society sketches to the Westminster Gazette, and as he balanced wig and pen in Fleet Street Anthony lived with his widowed father at Saint Bride’s Vicarage.

From childhood, Anthony was fascinated with look-alikes and doubles. Later he followed the Titchborne case as his cousin, Sir Henry Hawkins, exposed the claimant to the title as a fraudster.

On the afternoon of 28 November 1893, after winning a case in Westminster County Court, Anthony was walking back to the Temple, playing in his mind with the word ‘suburb’ and the Latin phrase rus rur (countryside), entertaining thoughts of an unknown, unnamed foreign kingdom. As he walked on, two men passed him by separately, one after the other, both sharing uncannily similar features.

He wondered what might happen if they had the same name, swapped places and walked off, each in the other’s direction, passing himself off as his lookalike.

Back at his father’s vicarage, he began to create Ruritania, and within a month, using the name Anthony Hope, he had finished a new novel about two Rudolfs, The Prisoner of Zenda: being the history of three months in the life of an English Gentleman. When it was published in April 1894, The Prisoner of Zenda was an instant success. Hawkins made up his mind – he gave up the wig for the pen, and more Ruritanian novels followed, including The Heart of Princess Osra (1896), Rupert of Henzau (1898), The King’s Mirror (1899) and Quisanté (1900).

Hawkins married Elizabeth Somerville Sheldon, an American 22 years his junior, in 1903. A year later, Edwards Comerford Hawkins retired from Fleet Street, and died at 78 on 12 February 1906. Two years later, Anthony’s first cousin, Kenneth Grahame, published The Wind in the Willows in 1908.

For his wartime propaganda work, Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins was knighted in 1918. His writing career was waning, but he lived comfortably on the film rights and royalties from new editions of The Prisoner of Zenda until his death on 8 July 1933.

The first film versions of The Prisoner of Zenda were produced in 1913, 1915 and 1922. But the finest screen version was made in Hollywood in 1937, four years after the author’s death, and starred Ronald Colman, David Niven and Douglas Fairbanks.

Anthony Hope, the author of the Prisoner of Zenda, lived at 41 Bedford Square from 1903 to 1917 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

I wondered last week about the coincidences that mark the popularity The Prisoner of Zenda and the appearance of Prince Milo and Major Popović in literary and social circles in London and Dublin.

When Milo moved to London in 1926, he took up a job as a bank cashier and a renting a basement room at No 44 Bedford Square in Bloomsbury. Three storeys up, in much higher society, lived the celebrity hostess Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Morrell (1873-1938), whose circle of literary and artistic friends included Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Dora Carrington and Gilbert Spencer.

No 44 had once been the home of the former Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, with whom Anthony Hope Hawkins had once shared chambers. All must have known that Anthony Hope, author of The Prisoner of Zenda, had lived from 1903 to 1917 at 41 Bedford Square. He died on 8 July 1933.

Milo ran an antiques shop near Grosvenor Square with the half-Irish Doreen Powell. They spent many hours together in Claridge’s, the Ritz, the Connaught and the Savoy, and he even reacquainted himself with the flirtatious Wallis Simpson – they had first met in Shanghai.

When Milo moved to Dublin in the 1930s, The Prisoner of Zenda was finding popularity with a new generation through the release of the 1937 Hollywood version of the film starring Ronald Colman, David Niven and Douglas Fairbanks.

The film’s success may have been due in part to good timing: it was released only a year after the British abdication crisis, which also involved two look-alikes sitting on the throne within months of each other, Edward VIII and George VI, all because of Milo’s flirtatious friend Wallis Simpson. Continental Europe was beset by intrigues involving dark Teutonic forces, and Milo even claimed he had been offered – but declined – the throne of Montenegro when Mussolini tried to install a puppet monarchy.

Ruritania and The Prisoner of Zenda continue to conjure images of a romantic middle Europe and a mythical time when history wore a rose and politics still danced to the waltz. It could even be the Montenegro that Prince Milo wanted his social and literary circles to imagine.

But perhaps we should not forget the inspiration and motivation to write that the author first received from his father, the vicar-journalist Edwards Comerford Hawkins, or his Comerford and Casey family roots in Ireland.

Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, author of ‘The Prisoner of Zenda’, had firm roots in the Comerford family

Marko Zekov Popović: the mysterious major from Montenegro and his ashes in Dublin

Marko Zekov Popović (1881-1934) … moved from Montenegro to Italy, Mexico, China and London, but his ashes are in Dublin

Patrick Comerford

I spent a day in Dublin last week, being interviewed by a Montenegrin television station about Prince Milo Petrović, the dashing and charming political exile from the Balkan state who lived in Dublin in the 1930s and 1940s, moved to Connemara in the 1960s, and who eventually died in Limerick and is buried in the churchyard at Saint Mary’s Cathedral.

This promises to be a fascinating documentary about the man, his Ruritanian claims and his exotic life in exile, including his interesting love life and affairs in England, the US and Ireland and his exotic claims to be a member of the royal court of Montenegro.

Much of the interview time on Friday morning was spent in the chapter house in Christ Church Cathedral. Later in the day, we did some more filming in the cathedral’s atmospheric crypt. But, Inevitably, we spent a lot of Friday afternoon filming in the south ambulatory, where a gilded casket with the cremated ashes of Major Marko Zekov Popović is placed on a high ledge.

The inscription on a brass plate below the casket describes Popović as the ‘Hereditary Royal Standard Bearer of Montenegro’ and notes that he died in London on 26 October 1934.

But, I was asked, why were his ashes brought to Dublin? Who placed them in the cathedral? I found myself even questioning the exotic claims made for Popović in the few, short words on this small plaque.

Most of the available evidence in English for the life of Prince Milo was provided himself in his conversations with his daughter, Milena Thompson. They provide the substantial but often unsubstantiated biographical details and claims in her self-published account of his life.

But there is little evidence in English for the life of Major Popović, and many of his biographical details have only come to light in recent years through research in Montenegro by Novak Adžić, a lawyer and historian, and Dr Šerbo Rastoder.

Major Marko Zekov Popović (1881-1934) from Njeguš, who claimed the title of Alajbarjaktar or ‘Hereditary Royal Standard Bearer of Montenegro,’ was one of the prominent exiled advocates of Montenegro’s independence and identity after World War I. After the incorporation of Montenegro into a new state that would become Yugoslavia, he lived in exile from 1919 until he died aged 53 in London on 26 October 1934. Arguments continue about whether he died of natural causes or was poisoned and murdered.

Marko Zekov Popović was born in Njeguši in the Cetinje region of Montenegro on 20 April 1881, and would later claim he had inherited the position of hereditary alaibarjaktar of Montenegro’s army from his father Zeko Mašanov Popović.

Montenegro was a tiny Balkan principality whose independence was recognised by the Great Powers at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, and the country was unilaterally proclaimed a kingdom in 1910.

When Montenegro declared war on the Ottoman Empire in 1912, Marko Zekov Popović went to the front as a lieutenant in the Montenegrin army and took part in the first Balkan War in 1912-1913, which delineated the borders between Montenegro and neighbouring Serbia and Albania.

After a short period of peace, the Kingdom of Montenegro entered World War I in 1914 on the sallied ide of the Central Powers in 1914, and Popović became an artillery captain. Montenegro was defeated by the Austro-Hungarian army in 1916, King Nicholas went into exile in France and the occupation continued until October 1918.

At the end of World War I following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Popović was blocked from returning to Montenegro and was detained on a ship. The Podgorica Assembly in November 1918 voted to depose the exiled King Nikola and for the unification of Serbia and Montenegro under the Karađorđević monarchy. Montenegro became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia).

At the beginning of January 1919, Montenegrin loyalists, led by the former minister and president of the Montenegrin National Assembly, Jovan S Plamenac, and commander Krsto Zrnov Popović, launched the ‘Christmas Uprising against’ incorporation with Serbia in the new kingdom.

The armed struggle lasted for several days. In the fighting around Cetinje, Captain Marko Zekov Popović took part in the fighting in Katun and was one of the organisers of the uprising in the Katunska Nahija area. Citing his oath of loyalty to King Nikola, he refused to surrender and went into political exile.

A boat took Popović, Prince Milo Petrović and other supporters of King Nikola of Montenegro from Kotor to a refugee camp in San Giovanni di Medua. After arriving in Italy, Popović and other exiles settled in Monte Cava, near Rome. Some reports said they were plotting an invasion of Montenegro with Italian support.

Popović was still in Italy when the Montenegrin court and government-in-exile in Paris promoted him to the rank of major in the Montenegrin army on 19 July, backdating his promotion to 3 January 1919 NS (21 December 1918 OS).

Popović and a 70-strong group of exiles in Italy signed a declaration in Gaeta on 20 April 1920, addressed to the exiled Prime Minister Jovan S Plamenac, then on a political mission in London, pledging to continue the fight for an independent Montenegro.

The exiled King Nikola died in exile in Antibes on 1 March 1921, and Popović was a member of the delegation of exiled Montenegrin troops at his burial at the Russian Orthodox Church in San Remo in Italy later that month.

King Nikola and the Kingdom of Montenegro are mentioned briefly by F Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, when Jay Gatsby reminisces on his heroic endeavours during World War I, for which the king confers on him the highest honour of the kingdom, the Orderi di Danilo.

But the exiled Montenegrin army in Italy was disbanded in 1921. After Mussolini’s fascists came to power, the Montenegrin refugees were told to leave Italy. Popović left with Prince Milo Petrović Njegoš in 1922, and they went from one exile to another, first staying in Mexico, then travelling to China, before finally moving to London, where they were living in 1925. They were accompanied by the journalist and publicist Jovan-Jovo Čubranović.

Meanwhile, the Committee for the Defence of Montenegro was formed in Dublin in 1924, and was active in representing the three friends in promoting Montenegrin independence, organising forums and lectures, and lobbying political circles and the press. They argued there was no international treaty by which Montenegro had ceased to exist as an independent state.

They formed the Montenegrin Party (federalists), and Čubranović spoke as a member of the Montenegro National Defence in Dublin in 1925, demanding the withdrawal of Serbian troops from Montenegro.

Another prominent exile, Milo Vujović, formed the Montenegro People’s Party of Peasants and Workers and published the newspaper Crnogorski Glasnik or Montenegro Herald in Detroit. In San Francisco, Nikola Petanović-Naiad founded the Alliance for a Free and Independent Montenegro and edited the monthly magazine The Montenegrin Mirror or Crnogorsko Ogledalo in 1927-1931. Petanović published articles by Marko Zekov Popović and wrote about him as one of the key exiled figures in the Montenegrin struggle. Other committees lobbied throughout Europe and North America

Eventually the exile groups turned on the late King Nikola, claiming he had ruined the freedom of Montenegro and its people, bringing them ‘to the brink of ruin’ and treacherously serving the interests of Belgrade.

Reports in the Montenegrin Mirror throughout 1931 regularly refer to the activities of Major Marko Zekov Popović and ‘his unwavering, consistent and courageous fight for the right, honour and freedom and independence of Montenegro.’

An anonymous feature in the Montenegrin Mirror in June 1931 says Popović ‘will one day become a legend and future writers among the southern Slavs will compete by telling about his life.’ It said that since the fall of the Montenegrin state, he and Prince Milo had ‘visited every important country in the world.’

The urn and plaque in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, commemorate Marko Zekov Popović, the Hereditary Royal Standard Bearer of Montenegro (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Major Popović died in London on 26 October 1934. Some of his fellow exiles said he had been killed or poisoned. He was cremated, and his ashes in a small casket were brought to Dublin and placed on a shelf in the south ambulatory in Christ Church Cathedral. I noticed once again last week the curious coincidence that below the shelf with the urn and ashes of Popović, the niches are filled with Byzantine-style icons of archangels by the Revd Olive Donohoe, presented to the cathedral in 2019.

But the presence of his urn and ashes left me with more questions about Popović than answers while I was being interviewed last week.

Why was an Orthodox Montenegrin cremated after his death in the 1930s, at a time when cremation was not only frowned on but condemned by all Orthodox churches?

Why was Popović not buried in London with a funeral in an Orthodox church – Serbian, Greek or Russian – instead of being brought to Dublin?

Why did Prince Milo bring the ashes to Dublin and place them in an Anglican cathedral?

And why is Popović described as holding such a Ruritanian-style office? It is difficult to imagine that as Montenegro only ever had one king it could have had many hereditary office-holders.

Perhaps Prince Milo was creating facts on the ground – or on the cathedral shelf – assembling the appearance of a retinue of courtiers, with his own special, highly-decorated and lavishly-styled ‘wingman,’ adding to the romantic veneer of his presence among the circles in which he wanted to move in after moving from London to Dublin.

It is telling that the film The Prisoner of Zenda, which popularised the term ‘Ruritania’, was released in 1937, just as these ashes were being placed on this shelf in Christ Church Cathedral.

But more about Ruritania and Montenegro on another day.

Marko Zekov Popović … why did his ashes end up on a shelf in Dublin?

Talking to Montenegrin television in Dublin about the ‘Ruritanian’ life of Prince Milo

Prince Milo of Montenegro … he lived out his final years in Dublin, Connemara and Limerick

Patrick Comerford

I have spent the past two or three days in Dublin, making a documentary with a television station in Montenegro about the unusual story of Prince Milo, a claimant to Balkan royalty who lived in Dublin and Connemara and who is buried in Limerick.

Much of Friday was spent in Christ Church Cathedral and in the crypt abd the chapter house as I was interviewed and spoke about Prince Milo, whose story has all the veneer of a Ruritanian romantic novel. And the invitation to take part in this documentary follows a lecture on Prince Milo I gave in Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick, five years ago (20 March 2018) as part of the cathedral’s 850th anniversary lecture series and the ‘Lunch Time History Focus’ programme.

Prince Milo’s grave in the churchyard at Saint Mary’s Cathedral is one of the most unusual graves in any churchyard in Ireland. The simple headstone of Prince Milo of Montenegro faces the great west door of the cathedral, and lies beside the boundary wall, looking out onto the banks of the River Shannon. But residents and visitors alike share the same bewilderment, often asking who was Prince Milo, where is Montenegro, how did he end up in Ireland, and why is he buried in Limerick.

For many people in Ireland, it may be difficult for people to tell apart Montenegro, Macedonia, Moldavia and Moldova. Indeed, this was a problem for Donald Trump at a summit six years ago (2017), and these geographical challenges have allowed a conman posing as a royal pretender to hoodwink high society on the Riveria.

The grave of Prince Milo of Montenegro at the west wall of the churchyard of Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Montenegro, whose name means ‘Black Mountain,’ is a former Yugoslav republic and a sovereign state in the Balkans in south-east Europe. It has a short Adriatic coastline and it is encircled or surrounded by Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo and Albania. The capital and largest city is Podgorica, while Cetinje is designated as the Old Royal Capital.

Montenegro is a member of the UN, NATO, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Council of Europe and the Central European Free Trade Agreement.

In the ninth century, there were three mediaeval Serbian principalities in what is now Montenegro: Duklja, Travunia and Rascia. In 1042, the archon Stefan Vojislav led a revolt that resulted in the independence of Duklja from the Byzantine Empire and the establishment of the Vojislavljević dynasty.

Later, large portions of what is now Montenegro were ruled by the Ottoman Empire from 1496 to 1878. But in the 16th century, Montenegro developed a unique form of autonomy within the Ottoman Empire, allowing Montenegrin clans freedom from some restrictions. Nevertheless, the Montenegrins were disgruntled with Ottoman rule, and in the 17th century, raised numerous rebellions, which culminated in the defeat of the Ottomans in the Great Turkish War at the end of the 17th century.

Montenegro achieved de facto independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1711. From 1852, it was known as the Principality of Montenegro, although it only received formal international recognition as an independent principality in 1878. In 1889, Czar Alexander III said Prince Nikola of Montenegro was Russia’s ‘sole sincere and true friend’ in the Balkans.

The country declared itself the Kingdom of Montenegro on 28 August 1910. At the end of World War I, the king was deposed and Montenegro was forced into the newly-formed Kingdom of Serbia and Montenegro, which later became Yugoslavia.

The Montenegrin line of succession and family tree are difficult to disentangle

Prince Milo Petrović-Njegoš (1889-1978) was a prince of Montenegro and a direct descendant of Radul Petrović, brother of Danilo I (1675-1735), the first Vladika or Prince-Bishop of Montenegro from 1696 to 1735.

But the family tree of Montenegro’s royal family is difficult to disentangle. The first claimants to princely status were the Bishops of Cetinje. As Orthodox bishops, they were unmarried and both their episcopal and princely status passed from uncle to nephew, nephew to uncle, or cousin to cousin in an obscure, indeed whimsical and often capricious, line of succession, in which a bishop’s family member was chosen as his successor on the basis of favouritism rather than seniority, age, ability or even literacy.

All members of the family claimed the title of prince, and the Petrović family only began to take on the trappings of other European royal families during the reign of Danilo Petrović Njegoš (1826-1860). He came to office in 1851 after a dynastic power struggle, and as Danilo II he was the Metropolitan or Prince-Bishop of Montenegro. He stood down as bishop in 1852, declared himself Montenegro’s hereditary monarch, and as the renumbered Danilo I reigned as Prince of Montenegro from 1851 to 1860.

During his reign, Montenegro became, nominally, a secular state or a lay principality instead of a bishopric-principality. A constitution was introduced although, in fact, Danilo ruled as an absolute monarch, with all the trappings of an almost Ruritanian-style monarchy yet with the grip of a Balkan despot or tyrant.

Prince Milo was never in the direct line of royal succession

Prince Milo was never the son of a king or a reigning prince. His title of ‘Prince’ comes from being a member of this unusual family, and he was born in Njeguši on 3 October 1889, the son of Đuro Petrović and Stane-Cane Đurašković.

At the age of 12, he was sent to the Military Academy in St Petersburg, Russia, where he became a personal friend of Czar Nicholas II and Czarina Alexandra, and was introduced to various Romanovs and also to Rasputin.

Prince Nikola I of Montenegro upgraded himself among the royal families of Europe in 1910 by proclaiming himself King of Montenegro. He became known as ‘the father-in-law of Europe’ because his daughters married into so many royal families: Princess Zorka married King Peter I of Yugoslavia; Princess Elena married King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy; and other daughters married into Russian and German royal and noble families, including the Romanovs and the Battenbergs.

Prince Milo was a distant cousin of this extended, minor European royal family, and during World War I he was the commander of the Lovćen Brigade, leading his troops into Albania in 1916.

Montenegro became a part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1918. After Montenegro was absorbed into the new Yugoslavia, Prince Milo left Montenegro in 1919, and for more than half a century he moved around the world as an exile, engaged in a diplomatic campaign to secure the restoration of the recognition of Montenegro as a sovereign, independent state.

His distant cousin, King Nikola, died at Cap d’Antibes in the south of France, in 1921. Meanwhile, Milo was a wandering exile, moving from the Cote d’Azur, to Italy, Mexico, Shanghai, Beijing, and back again to Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. In Mexico, Milo was offered a home by the Mexican dictator. In Shanghai, he befriended Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek and Noel Coward. In Beijing, he flirted with Wallis Simpson, and they remained lifelong friends. In Italy, Milo’s cousin was Queen Elena, the wife of King Victor Emmanuel III, who became a puppet monarch in the hands of Mussolini.

Milo eventually moved to London in 1926, taking a job as a bank cashier and a renting a basement room at No 44 Bedford Square. Three storeys up, and in much higher society, lived the celebrity hostess Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Morrell (1873-1938), whose circle of literary and artistic friends included Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Dora Carrington and Gilbert Spencer.

Helena Grace Smith and her daughter Milena

At an exhibition in the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly, Milo met both Doreen Powell, who would become his protector and patron, and Helena Grace Smith from Haworth in Yorkshire, who had returned briefly from the US to London.

Milo pursued Helena to the US, and they were married in Santa Barbara, California on 3 September 1927. A year later, their only child, Milena, was born in Los Angeles, and she was named at birth after the last Queen of Montenegro.

But Milo abandoned his young family the following year and returned to England. He settled back into London, where he ran an antiques shop near Grosvenor Square with the half-Irish Doreen Powell. They spent many hours together in Claridge’s, the Ritz, the Connaught and the Savoy, and he even reacquainted himself with the flirtatious Wallis Simpson; clearly, he had no intention of returning to Helena and Milena in Santa Barbara.

In California, Helena received her PhD at the University of Southern California in 1934; in London, Milo gathered a circle of Montenegrin friends around him, including Major Marko Zekov Popović.

Fleet Street feted him, and headlines proclaimed him as ‘The King Without a Throne.’ But it was his cousins, Prince Danilo (1872-1939), who renounced his claims in 1921 in favour of his nephew, and Prince Michael (1908-1986), who had inherited the royal claims of their predecessors while living in exile in France. Prince Michael survived arrest and internment on Hitler’s orders for refusing to head up a puppet state in Montenegro.

When the Italians invaded Yugoslavia at the beginning of World War II, Mussolini planned on setting up a puppet monarchy in an ‘independent’ Montenegro. When Prince Michael Petrović-Njegoš spurned the offer of the throne, it is said, it was then offered to Milo. But there is no evidence to support this suggestion, and instead Milo had chosen to move from London to Dublin.

Prince Milo in Dublin in March 1941

He first took a room in the Shelbourne Hotel on Saint Stephen’s Green, and then bought or rented a two-storey house on Arranmore Road, off Herbert Park in Dublin, while Doreen Powell moved into Harcourt Terrace. In Dublin, Milo acquired a Daimler, ZH 4685, and he and Doreen set up another antiques shop.

Prince Milo and his Daimler, ZH 4685, in Dublin

Milo’s daughter says it was at one of their dinner parties that he began what became, after Doreen Powell’s death, an affair with a woman named in his biography as Blanche Drummond, 12 years his senior. However, Turtle Bunbury and other genealogists and historians name the woman at the centre of this mid-20th century society scandal and source of gossip as Gladys (née McClintock), wife of Henry Arthur Bruen of Oak Park in Carlow. She was from Rathvinden House, in Leighlinbridge, Co Carlow, and the Bruens had been married for 26 years.

Turtle Bunbury says Gladys and Milo were introduced to each other by Doris Kane Smith and her husband, the solicitor Samuel ‘Sammy’ Roche, who lived at Bennekerry House, on the Carlow-Tullow road.

In May 1945, shortly before the end of World War II, Milo invited his 16-year-old daughter in California, Milena, to visit him in Ireland. But her mother was totally opposed to the visit and to any possibility of reconciliation.

Prince Milo’s former home near Roundstone, Co Galway, was on the market recently with an asking price of €470,000

Milo and Gladys moved into a house she owned in Errisbeg, near Roundstone in Connemara. There in the 1960s, they became friends with David Allen, who ran Mullen’s auction house in Bray for many years, and his wife Noreen, who ran Clifden Antiques.

When Gladys Bruen died in 1969, however, she was buried in the Bruen mausoleum in Carlow and Prince Milo stayed on in the house in Errisbeg, where he became a virtual recluse. Nevertheless, he continued to maintain his friendship with David Allen, who agreed to buy the house and land, allowing the prince to continue living there until he died.

For most of his life, Prince Milo was estranged from his only daughter, Milena. But as an adult she renewed her acquaintances with him after 39 years, and she visited him in Ireland several times from 1967 on.

Barrington’s Hospital in Limerick, where Prince Milo of Montenegro died 45 years ago (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Milo died 45 years ago this year in Barrington’s Hospital, Limerick, on 22 November 1978, and was buried in a small plot he had bought nearby in the churchyard at Saint Mary’s Cathedral. Only two people were present at his funeral: his daughter Milena, and Reginald Miley, a retired banker living in Ballinteer, Dublin, and one of the few friends he had left in life. The modest and unassuming stone marking his grave is fading and in the rain it is almost impossible to read the wording.

His Connemara home, now known as the Prince’s Cottage, was on the market recently with an asking price of €470,000.

Princess Milena published ‘My Father, the Prince’ in 2001

Meanwhile, Princess Milena, a retired school principal, continued to live in California with her husband Malcolm Thompson. Like her father, she hoped to see Montenegro become an independent country once again.

In 2001, she published her biography of her father, My Father, the Prince. She died in Los Angeles on 14 February 2005.

The urn and plaque in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, commemorate Marko Zekov Popović, the Hereditary Royal Standard Bearer of Montenegro (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

But the story does not end there, for there is a strange connection with Montenegro that links the humble gravestone at Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Limerick with an ornate casket in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

Marko Zekov Popović was the Hereditary Royal Standard Bearer of Montenegro, a member of the Montenegrin National Committee, and the author of Where is Montenegro? The Martyrdom of a Small Nation (1926).

When Popović died in London on 26 October 1934, he was cremated, despite Orthodox traditions. His ashes were later brought to Dublin by Milo when he moved to Ireland. In Dublin, Milo placed these ashes in an ornate casket on a shelf in the south ambulatory in Christ Church Cathedral, with an accompanying plaque. Part of Friday’s television interviews included answering questions about why this urn or casket ended up in a Church of Ireland Cathedral in Dublin 90 years ago when the man never lived in Ireland.

Montenegro … a former Yugoslav republic with a short Adriatic coastline between Croatia and Albania

Meanwhile, what ever happened to Montenegro?

At the end of World War II, the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia was succeeded in 1945 by the Federal People’s, later Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

After the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia formed separate, independent states, while the republics of Serbia and Montenegro together established a federation as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, renamed in 2003 as Serbia and Montenegro.

A year after Princess Milena died in 2005, an independence referendum was held on 21 May 2006, and Montenegro declared independence from Serbia on 3 June 2006. It was officially named the Republic of Montenegro until 22 October 2007.

When Donald Trump brusquely shoved aside the Prime Minister of Montenegro, Dusko Markovic, at the NATO summit in Brussels in 2017, it was yet another rude rebuff for the tiny Adriatic state, almost a century after the Western allies had forced it to be subsumed into the greater Kingdom of the Southern Slavs or Yugoslavia.

Russia’s President Putin must have been pleased with Trump’s rude behaviour. Montenegro’s government accuses Russian intelligence of plotting a failed coup in October 2017, while Moscow accuses Markovic and his government of being a mafia clique.

As the Economist reported, the meeting in Brussels in 2017 was supposed to be a celebratory preparation for Montenegro’s entry into the western alliance that year. But perhaps the Montenegrins had the last laugh when Trump lost the presidential election.

Prince Milo in London in 1930

‘An Irishman’s Diary’: Edwards Comerford Hawkins

The Revd Edwards Comerford Hawkins (1827-1906): The Prisoner of Zenda was written in his vicarage

Patrick Comerford

I was writing yesterday about Captain Basil Maclear (1881-1915) of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, who was capped 11 times for Ireland, who died on a battlefield in 1915 and who was descended from the Comerford family of Cork and Wexford. The following feature about his cousins, the Revd Edwards Comerford Hawkins and Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, was published as ‘An Irishman’s Diary’ almost 10 years ago in ‘The Irish Times’ on 13 February 2006:

An Irishman’s Diary:
Edwards Comerford Hawkins

Yesterday [12 February 2006] was the 100th anniversary of the death of the Rev Edwards Comerford Hawkins, a journalists’ parson and a writer with a strong Irish background.

His fame as a Victorian writer and journalist has vanished in the intervening century, but his literary reputation continues vicariously through a more famous son and nephew.

The only son of a Hertfordshire doctor, he was born on May 15th, 1827. Dr Frederick Hawkins of Hitchin, his sister Anne, and their cousin Susanna Hawkins all married into the Casey family of Cork, their spouses being two of the sons and a daughter of Edwards Casey of Cahirgal and Elmgrove Grove, Cork, and his wife, Jane Comerford. The Comerford-Casey family fortune came from the soap industry in Liverpool, but medicine and the law became the main professions of the family members, who moved with ease between their homes in Cork, Hitchin and Liverpool. There were so many look-alike Comerford-Casey and Hawkins cousins that they often played at passing themselves off as each other.

It came as no surprise when Edwards Comerford Hawkins entered the ministry of the Church of England – four of his first cousins were clergymen too. Rev Henry Ernest Casey became Vicar of Berrow; Rev George Edwards Comerford-Casey was a teacher at Nottingham High School before moving to Nice; Rev William Henry Casey was a curate in Liverpool; and Rev Henry Hawkins was a Victorian pioneer in mental health care. In 1861, Edwards Comerford Hawkins became headmaster of St John’s Foundation School. The school was founded in 1851 for the sons of poor clergy, but by 1872, when St John’s moved to Leatherhead in Surrey, Hawkins had transformed it into an English public school.

By now Hawkins was also a well-known journalist and writer, contributing to Smith’s Dictionaries and publishing Spirit and Form in 1881. An invitation from the Dean of Westminster in 1883 to become Vicar of St Bride’s, the journalists’ church in Fleet Street, had obvious attractions and Hawkins soon published a history of Wren’s church.

The youngest Hawkins boy, Anthony Hope Hawkins, went to St John’s while his father was headmaster, before going on to Marlborough and Balliol, Oxford. For a while, Anthony practised at the bar and shared chambers with a future Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith. Despite a brief flirtation with politics – he failed as a Liberal candidate in South Buckinghamshire – young Hawkins found his real interest was in journalism and writing. He began contributing short stories and society sketches to the Westminster Gazette, and as he balanced wig and pen in Fleet Street Anthony lived with his widowed father at St Bride’s Vicarage.

From childhood, Anthony was fascinated with look-alikes and doubles, and later he followed the Titchborne case as his cousin, Sir Henry Hawkins, exposed the claimant to the title as a fraudster. On the afternoon of November 28th, 1893, after winning a case in Westminster County Court, Anthony was walking back to the Temple, playing in his mind with the word “suburb” and the Latin phrase rus rur (countryside), entertaining thoughts of an unknown, unnamed foreign kingdom. As he walked on, two men passed him by separately, one after the other, both sharing uncannily similar features.

He wondered what might happen if they had the same name, swapped places and walked off, each in the other's direction, passing himself off as his look-alike.

Back at his father's vicarage, he began to create Ruritania, and within a month, using the name Anthony Hope, he had finished a new novel about two Rudolfs, The Prisoner of Zenda: being the history of three months in the life of an English Gentleman. When it was published just over three months later, in April 1894, The Prisoner of Zenda was an instant success. Hawkins made up his mind – he gave up the wig for the pen, and more Ruritanian novels followed, including The Heart of Princess Osra (1896), Rupert of Henzau (1898), The King’s Mirror (1899) and Quisanté (1900).

In 1903, Hawkins married Elizabeth Somerville Sheldon, an American 22 years his junior. A year later, Edwards Comerford Hawkins retired from Fleet Street. By now he was living in the shadow of his son’s glory and was largely forgotten as an author and journalist. Edwards died at 78 on February 12th, 1906. Fame and acclaim came two years later to his nephew, Anthony’s first cousin, Kenneth Grahame, with the publication of The Wind in the Willows in 1908.

For his wartime propaganda work, Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins was knighted in 1918. His writing career was waning, but he lived comfortably on the film rights and royalties from new editions of The Prisoner of Zenda until his death on July 8th, 1933.

The first film versions of The Prisoner of Zenda were produced in 1913, 1915 and 1922. But the finest screen version was made in Hollywood in 1937, four years after the author's death, and starred Ronald Colman, David Niven and Douglas Fairbanks.

The film’s success may have been due less to the literary merits of the original novel and more to good timing: it hit the cinemas only a year after the British abdication crisis, which also involved two look-alikes sitting on the throne within months of each other, romantic stories about a woman who had given up one man for another only to see one of them lose his throne for love, while at the same time Continental Europe was beset by intrigues involving dark Teutonic forces.

Ruritania and The Prisoner of Zenda continue to conjure up images of a romantic middle Europe and a mythical time when history wore a rose and politics still danced to the waltz. But perhaps we should not forget the inspiration and motivation to write that the author first received from his father, the vicar-journalist Edwards Comerford Hawkins, or his Comerford and Casey family roots in Ireland.

Patrick Comerford

This feature was first published as ‘An Irishman’s Diary’ in ‘The Irish Times’ on 13 February 2006.