by Theo Aronson
No wonder then, that the young couple found happiness only in each other's company. More and more did they cut themselves off from other people, withdrawing into their own private world. The lavish entertainments and decadent morals of the Russian aristocracy were not to their taste; they preferred a simple, domestic, almost bourgeois life. For this, of course, Alicky always had the example of her grandmother, Queen Victoria. Victoria, too, had been deeply in love with her husband and had resented any time spent away from him. Regarding home life as all-important, the Queen would have no truck with what she looked upon as a wicked and worthless aristocracy. During all the years that Alicky had known her grandmother, Queen Victoria had lived a quiet, secluded life, shunning, not only society, but all public duties which she did not consider absolutely essential.
A move, in 1895, to the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, some fifteen miles south of St Petersburg, gave the young couple their first real home. They needed it, for the Empress was pregnant. The parents hoped for a male heir but the child that was born in November 1895 was a girl. Their disappointment was short-lived. With both Nicky and Alicky still in their twenties, there was plenty of time for more children. The girl became the Grand Duchess Olga Nicolaievna.
Just over five months later, in May 1896, the Emperor and Empress travelled to Moscow for their coronation. It was an occasion of overwhelming splendour, of almost barbaric magnificence. The scene in the Ouspensky Cathedral was breathtaking. 'Wherever the eye rested,' enthused one observer, 'gold, nothing but gold, with here and there the flash of a precious stone, red, blue or green . . . Alone the figures of the Emperor and Empress stood out in symbolic significance, two shining apparitions imbued for an hour with transient glory. And the thousand tapers reflected in the glittering iconostas were like stars in God's Heaven.'
Of these two almost god-like figures standing in all this blaze of light, that of the Tsaritsa was the more impressive. She seemed transported. For the intense, emotional, mystical Alexandra, the coronation was a ceremony of deep personal significance: a symbolic union between herself and Holy Russia. When the Tsar lifted the nine-pound, jewel-encrusted Imperial Crown of Russia from his own head and placed it for a moment on hers, Alexandra felt that she had been transformed. She had become Matushka – the Mother of the Russian people.
'How well I can still see Alexandra standing in all her glory, side by side with the Emperor in the golden cathedral in which they were crowned,' wrote her cousin, Marie of Romania. 'The very atmosphere seemed golden, a golden light enveloped the glittering assembly come to render homage to these youngest amongst the sovereigns of Europe, golden also were Alexandra's robes. All eyes were fixed upon her; a beautiful woman is always a source of interest and how much more so when she stands, crowned before all eyes, a figure apart, raised above her sisters, anointed, imbued with a glamour few ever achieve. And Alexandra was beautiful, she was also tall and dignified, actually dwarfing the Emperor standing beside her. The heavy vestments he wore seemed to overwhelm him, the prodigious crown of his ancestors to be too heavy for his head; instinctively one remembered the giant stature of those gone before him; his face was pale, but there was the light of the mystic in his eyes. But his young wife stood steadily upright, her crown did not appear to crush her, and the golden flow of her mantle, cascading from her shoulders, made her appear even taller than she was. Her face was flushed, her lips compressed; even at this supreme hour no joy seemed to uplift her, not even pride; aloof, enigmatic, she was all dignity but she shed no warmth. It was almost a relief to tear one's gaze from her to let it rest upon the Emperor, whose caressing eyes and gentle expression made every man feel his friend.'
The glories of the coronation gave way, almost immediately, to stark tragedy. On the day after the ceremony, the Tsar was due to attend a vast open-air gathering, held in a field outside Moscow. Hundreds of thousands of people were encamped on the field, anxiously waiting for the free coronation mugs, cake and beer that were to be distributed amongst them. The distribution began at about six in the morning. At first slowly and then more and more insistently, the people pressed forward to receive their gifts. A rumour to the effect that there would not be enough for all started a panic. The crowd surged forward. As the field, which was normally used for military manoeuvres, was criss-crossed with shallow trenches, people stumbled into them, fell and were trampled on by those coming behind. A squadron of Cossacks proved helpless against the frantic mob; within minutes hundreds of people had been trampled to death and thousands more injured. Only the arrival of more soldiers prevented further disaster.
The Tsar was appalled. His first thought was to cancel the ball which was being given by the French Ambassador that evening. He could not possibly attend a ball while the ditches were packed with dead and the hospitals crowded with wounded. But his uncles decreed otherwise. They insisted that he attend. France was Russia's ally and the French government had spent vast sums of money on that evening's entertainment. To offend France would be to make matters worse. The irresolute Nicholas gave way and within hours of the disaster, he and Alexandra were dancing in the opening quadrille. They did so with anguish in their hearts. 'The Empress appeared in great distress, her eyes reddened by tears,' reported the British Ambassador to Queen Victoria. But to those who did not witness the grief of the imperial couple – and even to some of those who did – the presence of Nicholas and Alexandra at the ball that evening was taken as a sign of their callousness. Not only were they ill-fated, they were obviously heartless.
A complete change from the dramas of the coronation came later that year, when Nicholas, Alexandra and the ten-month-old Olga visited Queen Victoria at Balmoral. Although there was some attempt at ceremonial (the Prince of Wales, not the Queen, had insisted on this) it was very much of the matter-of-fact, Highland variety. As the carriages splashed through the rain-lashed dark from Ballater station to the castle, bonfires blazed on the surrounding hillsides, church bells pealed and the Crathie and Ballater Volunteers, together with the Balmoral Highlanders, held flaming torches. To the music of the pipes, the imperial couple entered the castle.
Although the Tsar was able to assure his mother that Queen Victoria was 'kinder and more amiable than ever', the visit was not an unqualified success. The Prince of Wales insisted on dragging his nephew out to shoot in all weathers; Nicky was almost permanently drenched and had 'on top of it, no luck at all'. Political talks between the Queen, the Tsar and the British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury (Victoria would not allow her fifty-four-year-old heir to attend them) proved unsatisfactory. The British found Nicholas far too indecisive. One of Alicky's sisters (Princess Victoria of Battenberg), who was at Balmoral for the visit, once heard Nicky saying that he envied a constitutional monarch, 'on whom the blame for all the mistakes made by his Ministers was not heaped'. The Tsar, she went on to say, 'would have made a remarkably good constitutional sovereign.' And indeed, if Nicky could have changed places with his cousin Georgie, there is little doubt that he, too, would have died peacefully in his bed after a successful reign, instead of in that cellar at Ekaterinburg after a turbulent one.
Alicky enjoyed the visit to her grandmother rather more. Looking handsome in white serge, she was able to display both her plump-cheeked little daughter and her spectacular jewellery ('all her own property', noted the approving Queen). To mark the visit, they were all photographed: Grandmama looking benign, the Prince of Wales jovial, the Tsar handsome and the Tsaritsa – with her baby on her knee – lovely but as cold as ice.
At the end of September, the imperial couple quitted the relative simplicities of royal Balmoral to face a magnificent reception by republican France. 'It has been such a very short stay and I leave dear kind Grandmama with a heavy heart,' wrote Alicky to her old governess. The Queen was no less depressed. The fact that her granddaughter would no longer be able to pay her regular visits upset the old Queen considerably. 'I have a right to her,' she would complain.
Indeed, with each marriage,
it seemed as though her Continental granddaughters were moving farther and farther away. Germany, in which many of them had spent their childhood, had been so reassuringly close. Only the Channel had separated the Queen from those familiar, gemütliche German courts. But with them going to such far-off, and improbable, countries – Sophie to Greece, Marie to Romania, Alicky to Russia – those frequent visits between the Queen and her granddaughters had become a thing of the past. That her matriarchy was spreading to the farthest rim of Europe was not a source of unmixed satisfaction to the matriarch herself.
CHAPTER TEN
Maud of Norway
1
In 1896 Bertie, the Prince of Wales, turned fifty-five. In the same year his mother, Queen Victoria, turned seventy-seven. She had been Queen for almost sixty years; indeed, the following summer would see her celebration of her Diamond Jubilee. Yet even now she was not prepared to involve her heir in the workings of the monarchy. He was kept at arm's length as much as ever. His position was made still more humiliating by the fact that while his opinion counted for almost nothing, the world listened attentively to whatever his nephews – the bombastic Kaiser Wilhelm II and the irresolute Tsar Nicholas II – might care to say. In vain he protested to the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, and to the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, that he was not kept well enough informed; they, with the example of the Queen to guide them, rarely thought of telling him anything and certainly never of consulting him. Once, when in his frustration the Prince exploded at not being informed that his candidate for a diplomatic post had been rejected in favour of another, his secretary assured Lord Salisbury that the Prince of Wales 'really only requires to have things properly explained to him, and he is then always most reasonable'.
But Bertie could still give his mother grounds for doubting his political wisdom. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, Britain was becoming increasingly isolated in Europe. She was engaged in fierce colonial rivalry with France and, largely through Kaiser Wilhelm II's blundering behaviour, was at odds with Germany. Deciding that Britain should make a gesture of friendship towards Germany, the Prince begged his mother to send a telegram of congratulation to Prince Bismarck on his eightieth birthday. She refused to do any such thing. Somewhat tartly, she pointed out that she had never sent Bismarck congratulations before, that he was no friend of hers or, for that matter, England's, and that any such telegram would infuriate the French, who loathed Bismarck. The Prince's impulsive idea was dropped.
More and more, as the years went by, did the Queen come to rely on her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice (whose husband, Prince Henry of Battenberg, died early in 1896) rather than on the Prince of Wales. The Queen's eyesight was failing but, in her determination to keep control of things, she insisted that Princess Beatrice read out all telegrams, dispatches and memoranda. She would not even allow her private secretary to do this for her. 'Apart from the most hideous mistakes that occur . . .' complained one of the Queen's assistant private secretaries, 'there is the danger of the Queen's letting go almost entirely the control of things which should be kept under the immediate supervision of the Sovereign.'
And the one person who should have been helping her – the Prince of Wales – she refused to take into her confidence. Only once, during his long period of waiting, did the Prince stand in for his mother on a constitutional occasion. This was when, at the age of fifty-seven, he presided over an urgent ten-minute Privy Council meeting to sign a British declaration of neutrality in the Spanish-American War of 1898.
If Bertie was no more actively engaged in affairs of state, socially he was as occupied as ever. Yachting and horse-racing were his chief sporting activities during the 1890s. His enthusiasm for yachting ensured that the season at Cowes was always brilliant, and in 1896, amidst thunderous cheering, his horse Persimmon won the Derby. As money always opened the doors to Marlborough House, new fortunes brought him new friends: besides the Rothschilds and the Sassoons, he now befriended men like Ernest Cassel, Louis Bischoffsheim, Horace Farquhar and Thomas Lipton. Nor was his love life in any way less active. When his long-standing mistress, Lady Warwick, forsook his arms to embrace socialism instead, the Prince turned to another beauty, the twenty-nine-year-old Mrs George Keppel. Alice Keppel was to remain with him to the end.
Unaltered, too, were the looks and the way of life of Alexandra, Princess of Wales. Now in her early fifties, she looked, says Lord Carrington, 'too pretty – about thirty-five apparently'. Her figure was still extraordinarily youthful, her face unlined and her clothes superb. Her manner was as abstracted as ever; she was just as charming, as impulsive, as unpunctual and as scatter-brained. She would donate huge sums to charity yet insist that her maids darn her stockings. She would treat her daughters, whom she loved dearly, with a shameful lack of consideration, yet lavish attention on a servant. That sense of the ridiculous, so characteristic of the Danish royal family, she never lost. Once, at a court ball, the tubby Prince of Wales and the enormously fat ex-Queen Isabel of Spain were followed in by the stork-like King Leopold II of the Belgians and the slender Princess of Wales – both of whom walked with a stiff leg; 'a pretty sight indeed!' reported Alexander to her son Prince George, 'we all waddled and limped together – you would have laughed . . . .' And when the Princess once caught sight of her husband and his mistress Alice Keppel – both distinctly plump – sitting solemnly side by side in an open carriage like two pouter pigeons, she was suddenly overcome by a fit of helpless laughter.
Alexandra's relationship with her son, Prince George, now married to Princess May of Teck, was not quite as close as it had once been. Princess May, in her quiet, tactful, determined fashion, had succeeded in weaning her husband away from his adoring mother. The days when the entire Wales family had come bounding uninvited into York Cottage, Sandringham or York House, St James's Palace, were over. The tone of the Princess of Wales's letters to her son were now, if no less affectionate, somewhat less possessive.
Yet Alexandra was fond of her daughter-in-law. Sometimes thoughtless in her treatment of others, the Princess of Wales could appreciate thoughtfulness towards herself. And Princess May was invariably attentive. Princess Alexandra was always grateful for the subtle way in which her daughter-in-law would help when her deafness was proving especially distressing. 'You my sweet May are always so dear and nice to me,' she wrote on one occasion, 'and whenever I am not quite "au fait" on account of my beastly ears you always by a word or even by a move towards me make me understand – for which I am most grateful as nobody can know what I often have to go through . . . .'
This frustrating deafness ensured that the Princess spent her time almost entirely amongst people whom she knew well. When she was not at Sandringham, she would be paying extended visits to her relations – to her parents, King Christian IX and Queen Louise, in Denmark; to her sister, the Dowager Empress Marie, in Russia; to her brother, King George I, in Greece. She had a very strong sense of family, and nowhere, of course, was this sense stronger than in her own home. Although this home no longer held her son George or her eldest daughter Louise, now Duchess of Fife, in it were still her two unmarried daughters: Princess Victoria and Princess Maud.
By 1895, Princess Victoria was twenty-seven and Princess Maud twenty-six. 'Like Juno's swans, still coupled and inseparable,' ran one lyrical description, while their aunt, the Empress Frederick referred to them, with rather more accuracy, as 'two such Ducks!' Indeed, the two princesses were seldom seen apart. Pale carbon copies of their mother, but without her marvellous beauty, they looked alike, they dressed alike, they spoke alike. In company they were diffident although, according to Mary Gladstone, not at all 'stuck up') and in private they were playful. The two princesses, says one effusive observer, 'appeared so invariably together that they became a suggestive symbol of that close family life which is typical of our nation at its best, and nowhere finds greater expression than in the home life of the Royal Family'.
This was all very well, but several
members of the royal family were not at all satisfied with the unmarried state of the two Wales girls. 'Coupled and inseparable' they should not be allowed to remain forever. In 1894, the Empress Frederick had written to the Queen on the subject. Giving, first, the names of a couple of princelings whom 'darling Bertie's sweet girls' could not possibly marry, she gave the names of two whom they could; 'it would be desirable that they should marry some one of a reigning family,' she thought. In any case, she continued, 'it really is not wise to leave the fate of these dear girls dans le vague'.
To this the dear girls' grandmother replied that the Prince of Wales had assured her that he was 'powerless' to do anything about it. His wife, finding them 'such good companions', did nothing towards encouraging them to get married; nor, he added, had the girls themselves shown any inclination to do so. 'I think he is mistaken as regards Maud,' commented the perceptive Queen.
It was indeed the Princess of Wales who was standing in the way of her daughters getting married. With her fierce hatred of Germany, Alix was determined that no daughter of hers should marry a German. As most Protestant princes were German, this firmly held prejudice considerably narrowed the field. In addition, she had become far too dependent on her daughters to bear the thought of them leaving her. She loved them but this simply made her all the more possessive, demanding and inconsiderate. Princess Victoria, wrote one of her cousins, 'was just a glorified maid to her mother. Many a time a talk or a game would be broken off by a message from my Aunt Alix, and Toria would run like lightning, often to discover that her mother could not remember why she had sent for her, and it puzzled me because Aunt Alix was so good.'