Happy Birthday to Hope Cooke, Queen of Sikkim, who turns 85 today! The American Writer and Historian was the last Queen of Himalayan Kingdom of Sikkim before it was annexed by India in 1975.
Born in San Francisco to John J. Cooke, a flight instructor, and Hope Noyes, an amateur pilot who passed away in a plane crash in 1942, Hope Cooke grew up under a succession of governesses across the New York City Apartment of her maternal grandparents, finishing school in Iran, were her uncle was the American Ambassador.
In 1959, she was a freshman majoring in Asian Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and went to India, where she met Palden Thondup Namgyal, Crown Prince of Sikkim, two years before their engagement was announced. In the Spring of 1963, she married the Crown Prince of Sikkim after she renounced her United States citizenship.
Becoming the Queen of Sikkim just a few months after her marriage, Sikkim was under strain due to annexation pressures from India, which led to their deposition in 1975, and the former Queen returning to New York with their children and failing to regain her US citizenship despite her divorce in 1980.
The former Queen wrote an autobiography, Time Change and began a career as a lecturer, book critic, and magazine contributor, later becoming an urban historian of New York City, teaching at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Birch Wathen, a New York City private school. She remarried in 1983 to Mike Wallace, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, but later divorced. Hope Cooke now lives in Brooklyn and currently works as a writer, historian, and lecturer.
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