Peter II of Yugoslavia: A Reign of Eleven Days
On 27 March 1941 a group of Yugoslav officers overthrew the regency, declared a seventeen-year-old schoolboy to be of age, and put him on the throne. Belgrade came out into the streets to celebrate. Eleven days later the German army was in the country and the new king was running for the coast. He never governed again, and he is buried — after a detour of forty-three years and five thousand miles — in a mausoleum at Oplenac.
A Godson of Kings
Peter was born in Belgrade on 6 September 1923, the first son of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and Queen Maria, a daughter of the Romanian royal house. The christening was a map of interwar dynastic Europe: his godparents included King Ferdinand I of Romania, Queen Elisabeth of Greece and King George V of the United Kingdom. He was tutored at the Royal Palace in Belgrade and then sent to Sandroyd School at Cobham in Surrey — an English preparatory education for the heir to a Balkan federation barely five years old.
That schooling ended abruptly. On 9 October 1934, on a state visit to Marseille, Alexander I was assassinated. Peter was eleven. He left Sandroyd and returned home a king in name, with real authority vested in a regency headed by Prince Paul.
Eleven Days
Paul's regency spent the late 1930s trying to keep Yugoslavia out of the coming war by not offending Berlin, and in March 1941 signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. The reaction inside the officer corps was immediate: on 27 March, General Dušan Simović led a coup that swept the regency away and proclaimed Peter of age. It was a genuinely popular act in Belgrade, and a catastrophic one. Germany invaded on 6 April 1941, and within weeks the country was overrun and dismembered.
Peter and his government left — first to Greece, then Palestine, then Egypt, reaching London by June 1941. He was seventeen years old and the head of a government-in-exile of a state that no longer appeared on any map. In London he finished his education at Cambridge and joined the Royal Air Force. Inside occupied Yugoslavia, as the Serbian royal house's own account has it, he was regarded as the symbol of resistance to Nazism — a function he could perform precisely because he could do nothing else.
The Impossible Choice
The war then took his throne a second time, and no coup could reverse this one. Peter initially backed General Draža Mihailović and the Chetniks as the legitimate resistance under his crown. Reports reaching London of Chetnik accommodation with Axis forces steadily eroded that position, and Allied support shifted to Josip Broz Tito's Partisans. By the war's end the king in London had been comprehensively outmanoeuvred by the guerrilla commander in the field, who had an army, a territory and a political programme, none of which Peter possessed.
He married Princess Alexandra of Greece and Denmark, daughter of King Alexander of the Hellenes, on 20 March 1944. Their son, Crown Prince Alexander, was born on 17 July 1945. On 29 November 1945 the Yugoslav Constituent Assembly deposed him and proclaimed a republic. He was twenty-two, and had been a reigning monarch, in any practical sense, for less than a fortnight of his life.
Twenty-Five Years of Afterwards
The rest is the long, unglamorous arithmetic of a deposed monarch without a state. Peter settled in the United States, living for a period around Chicago and later working in public relations in New York. In 1955 he published a memoir, *A King's Heritage*. In 1967 he took a job with Sterling Savings and Loan in Los Angeles. Depression and alcoholism ran through those decades and produced cirrhosis of the liver; his wife Alexandra attempted suicide in 1963. He died in Denver, Colorado, on 3 November 1970, aged forty-seven, after a failed liver transplant.
He was buried at the Saint Sava Monastery Church in Libertyville, Illinois — the only king interred on American soil. On 26 May 2013, long after the fall of the state that had deposed him, his remains were brought back and reburied in the Royal Family Mausoleum at Oplenac in Serbia.
Why Peter Is Called a Genius
He is not one, and the honest thing is to say so plainly. Nothing in the record — not the English preparatory schooling, not the wartime Cambridge studies, not the RAF service, not the memoir — supports a claim of exceptional intellectual or creative capacity. He was never given the chance to demonstrate political skill, and in the one arena where he was genuinely tested, the contest with Tito for Allied backing, he lost comprehensively.
What can be said accurately is narrower and more interesting. Peter functioned as a symbol at a moment when symbols were doing real work. The coup of 27 March was carried out in his name, which made his accession the visible face of Yugoslav refusal to submit to Germany; his presence in London gave occupied Yugoslavs a legitimate person, rather than an abstraction, to attach their resistance to. That is a genuine historical role. But it belongs to the office and to the moment, not to the boy. He had no army, no territory, no independent revenue and, at seventeen, no political formation whatsoever. The officers who made him king did not consult him, and the Allies who abandoned his cause did not need to.
The counter-case is simply the full biography: a reign of eleven days, an exile of twenty-nine years, a fatal drinking problem, and a death in a Denver hospital at forty-seven. To call Peter II a genius would be to confuse the significance of a crown with the capacities of the man wearing it. His actual distinction needs no inflation — he was the last king of a country that itself no longer exists, deposed at twenty-two, and he spent the remaining half of his life as the living remainder of a Yugoslavia that monarchists and communists had both finished with.
Legacy
The monarchy Peter lost was never restored, and the federation he briefly reigned over has since broken into seven states. What survives is smaller and stranger: a memoir written by a man in his early thirties looking back on a life already over; a grave in Illinois that was, for forty-three years, the only royal tomb in the United States; and a reburial at Oplenac in 2013 that amounted to the Serbian state's belated settlement with a dynasty it had spent half a century writing out of the record.
Achievements
- Knight grand cross of the order of the crown of Italy
- Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus
- Educated at University of Cambridge
- Worked as king and monarch
