Marriage To The Crown Prince of Sikkim
In 1959, Cooke was a freshman majoring in Asian Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and sharing an apartment with actress Jane Alexander. She went on a summer trip to India and met Palden Thondup Namgyal, Crown Prince of Sikkim, in the bar of the Windamere Hotel in Darjeeling, India. He was a recent widower with two sons and a daughter, and, aged 36, nearly twice her age. They were drawn to each other by the similar isolation of their childhoods. Two years later, in 1961, their engagement was announced; but the wedding was put off for more than a year because astrologers in both Sikkim and India warned that 1962 was an inauspicious year for marriages.
On 20 March 1963, Hope Cooke, a Protestant, married the Crown Prince of Sikkim in a Buddhist monastery. She renounced her United States citizenship but after her husband was deposed she requested that it be restored, which it apparently was via private bill.
She was dropped from the Social Register but the marriage was reported in National Geographic magazine. The New Yorker followed the royal couple on one of their yearly trips to America.
He became monarch of Sikkim nine months later but was deposed in 1975 and confined to his palace under house arrest. They soon separated. Cooke returned to Manhattan, where she raised her children, Palden and Hope Leezum. The royal couple divorced in 1980, and Namgyal died of cancer in 1982 in New York City.
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