Queen Victoria's Matchmaking

by Deborah Cadbury

  Nicholas wandered around the grand interiors of Gatchina Palace ‘in a daze’. He felt as though there was no longer ‘any possibility of happiness in the whole world’, he wrote in his diary.87 ‘All my hopes are shattered by this implacable obstacle.’ He struggled to appear calm at dinner with the family. Inside he felt ‘his whole future life is suddenly decided’. His immediate impulse was to go at once and see her in Darmstadt. Then he vacillated. Alix had written with equal finality to his sister, Xenia, acknowledging that she loved him and that ‘to hurt one whom one loves is fearful and yet I don’t want him to go on hoping, as I can never change my Religion’. He turned to Ella for help but she had already been briefed by Alix not to provide encouragement. Ella felt compromised, prompting Sergei to write to Nicholas: ‘Everything is over and my wife asks you not to mention this again.’ Days passed and Nicholas could not bring himself to write to Alix accepting her decision. ‘It is hard sometimes to submit to the will of God,’ he wrote in his diary.88

  It was late December before Nicholas felt calm enough to reply to Alix. He had been in such a ‘sad state of mind’, he told her. He felt so close to his cherished dream being realised, ‘then suddenly the curtain is drawn and – you see only an empty space and feel oh! So lonely and beaten down!!’ He pleaded with her. ‘Oh do not say “no” directly, my dearest Alix, do not ruin my life already! Do you think there can exist any happiness in the whole world without you! After having involuntarily! kept me waiting and hoping, can this end in such a way?’89

  Whether Queen Victoria’s warnings influenced Alix’s letter of rejection to the tsarevich is not clear. Alix seemed determined to come to her own decisions without the aid of interested parties. She was most unwilling to meet with her beloved grandmother. After declining to join the queen for George’s wedding, she turned down a second invitation to visit that autumn. ‘Your 2 [Ernie and herself] are terribly sorry not to come this year,’ Alix wrote on 14 October. ‘I hope you will forgive us for not coming . . .’90 She may well have felt angry about the strong influence the queen held over Ernie, but her feelings for her grandmother were inescapably bound up in the conflict she felt about her judgement.

  It is perhaps no accident that the week before Alix sat down to write her letter of rejection to Nicholas, Europe was set alight by a renewal of anarchist violence – a persuasive echo of the queen’s warnings. On 8 November 1893 at the Liceu Opera House in Barcelona, two bombs were hurled from the gallery into the stalls killing thirty people in the deadliest attack yet seen.91 The perpetrator, an anarchist, Santiago Salvador French, claimed he sought revenge on ‘bourgeois elites’ who perpetuated injustice by supporting the state.92 It was as though a sudden fissure had opened up in the smooth facade of European civilisation, giving a glimpse of a great tide of anger and resentment welling up beneath in the oppressed lives of the masses. Like volcanic springs, flashpoints of terror ignited across the continent. Hundreds were arrested in Sicily, and in Paris the dynamite conspiracy that had opened with attacks on the judiciary now reached the heart of government as a nail bomb was thrown by an anarchist in the French National Assembly. Royalty stood out as the most powerful symbol of privilege of all and the rising levels of extremist violence may well have contributed to Alix’s caution.

  In the muffled interior of the Kremlin palaces, that unbrechable fortress of autocracy, the noise and alarm of Europe’s troubles were easy to forget. Ella did not see – or perhaps did not want to see – the growing dangers. Having acted as go-between and knowing Alix’s feelings, she wrote a letter to Queen Victoria that could be interpreted as disingenuous. Ella urged the queen not to raise the subject of Nicholas with her sister and omitted to mention that the question of a proposal had come to a head. She may have been trying to allay the queen’s fears or perhaps was seeking to prevent Alix gaining confidence in her decision by mulling it over with her grandmother.

  ‘Now about Alix. I touched the subject – all is as before,’ Ella wrote evasively, ‘& if ever any decision is taken which entirely settles this affair I shall of course, write directly. The best is to leave her alone as of course it is a very very sore heart one touches – well all is in God’s hands & dearest Grandmama, if ever she accepts – your motherly love will be what she longs for most – alas the world is so spiteful & not knowing how long & how deep this affection on both sides has been – the spiteful tongues will call it ambition – what fools as if to mount this throne was enviable. Only love pure and intense can find strength to [take such a] a serious step. Will it ever be I wonder?’93

  Ella underlined once again why she favoured this match. Nicholas came from a model family, she wrote, ‘all heart and religion which . . . brings them nearer to God’. She believed the dangers were overestimated. ‘It will be a tough school but one that prepares for a future life & thank God, much is exaggerated.’ Above all she wished it, ‘because I like the boy’. It is perhaps telling that Ella referred to twenty-five-year-old Nicholas as ‘the boy’ as though her initial impressions had left an indelible mark. Ten years had elapsed since she had arrived in Russia and Ella still saw only his strengths, his charm, gentleness and unswerving affection for Alix. His weaknesses were not yet apparent to her: his inability to assert himself, his lack of authority and his unfitness to rule. Nor did she seem aware of the degree to which he followed the reactionary thinking of his father, although she did know of the cruelties to which this could lead in the treatment of the Jews of Moscow. Nicholas’s ability to lead could have a direct bearing on her sister’s safety as a future tsarina, yet such thoughts had not occurred to her. Queen Victoria had evidently raised the possibility of Alix being the target of a terrorist attack, prompting Ella to blur the line between practical issues of safety and spirituality. ‘Are not our lives always in His hands?’ she replied. ‘And may we not all die suddenly. “L’homme propose et Dieu dispose”.’ 94

  Despite Ella’s omissions, by Christmas the queen had the satisfaction of learning that her choices for Alix and Ernie were falling into place. In fact, Ernie was so eager to oblige that his letter on 18 December 1893 almost reads like a proposal to his grandmother. As instructed, he had courted Victoria-Melita, who had been ‘so dear and kind’, he told the queen, that he was ‘certain that if I wanted to ask her now she would say yes’. But the actual proposal – which had not yet happened – appeared to be secondary to fitting the wedding arrangements around the queen. ‘You see I simply could not bear the idea that my wedding would be without you,’ he told Queen Victoria. ‘It would make me too unhappy.’ Ernie had everything planned. He wanted the queen to agree to come to the wedding on her return from Florence in the spring, and when the timing was arranged he aimed to ‘engage myself as soon as possible’. As though his grandmother were the bride herself, Ernie pressed her to agree. ‘Do please say yes . . . it would make me the happiest being on earth . . . Please, please darling Grandmama, say yes.’ He asked her to telegraph using just the word ‘yess’ to show she agreed with his plan. ‘Ever your most devoted Grandchild . . . Please say Yess!!!!’95

  Queen Victoria did say ‘Yes’.

  On 9 January Ernie duly proposed and Ducky dutifully accepted.

  Everything was falling into place for the perfect spring wedding. It would be in Coburg – the birthplace of Grandpapa Albert, the place Queen Victoria felt to be the family’s second home. She had not been back there since her husband’s death, but now her devoted grandson hoped to make everything feel right for her.

  As for Alix, over the winter the queen learned the truth about her rejection of Nicholas through her daughter-in-law, Alexandra. ‘I wonder if poor dear Alicky has talked to you abt the end of Niki’s hopes,’ Queen Victoria enquired of Victoria of Battenberg in February 1894. The queen was put out that ‘our dear Ella always encouraged him instead of doing the reverse’. Over ten years Ella had done all in her power to oppose her grandmother and pave the way for her younger sister to join her in Russia. Now Ella had lost. Queen Victoria kn
ew that Nicholas was ‘miserable’ about Alix’s decision.96 But her granddaughter had made the right choice. Whatever Nicky’s great charm, the country was too dangerous. The matter was at an end.

  *On 25 June 1895, Hélène eventually married Prince Emanuele, Second Duke of Aosta, a match that did not quite live up to her parents’ original expectations.

  10

  Nicholas and Alix

  ‘My blood runs cold . . .’

  Queen Victoria on Alix’s engagement, October 1894

  In April 1894, Nicholas telegraphed ahead that he was on his way to Coburg. Ostensibly, he was to represent the tsar at Ernie’s wedding, but for the tsarevich there was a far more crucial reason for his sudden trip. He wanted to speak to Alix.

  Since the New Year there had been a different atmosphere in the palace at Gatchina. Alexander III had fallen ill with an ailment that was not easy to diagnose. Until this time, the evident vitality of the forty-nine-year-old tsar had created a blanket of security for those around him. Now Nicholas found his peace of mind revolved around his father’s health. ‘Thank God, we were able to breathe again today,’ he wrote in his diary in January 1894 when his father improved. The tsarevich had been excluded from state matters by his father and was wholly unprepared for his future role. Nicholas did not even have the support of a consort at his side. Four months after Alix’s first letter of rejection, his sister, Xenia, tentatively sounded her out once again.

  Alix was unbending. ‘Darling, why did you speak about that subject, which we never wanted to mention again?’ she replied to Xenia on 11 April. ‘It is cruel as you know it never can be – all along I have said so. It cannot be – he knows it – and so do not I pray of you, speak of it again. I know Ella will begin again, but what is the good of it, and it is cruel always to say I am ruining his life.’ To make Nicholas happy she would have to commit a sin.1 Nicholas heard about this repeat of her refusal just as he was about to leave for Coburg and was ‘very upset’, according to his cousin, Konstantin. He begged his mother not to force him to attend Ernie’s wedding but the tsarina persuaded him to go. His mother wrote later that they parted with such ‘a bad and desperate feeling . . . that my heart bled as I saw you go’.2

  Nicholas set out from St Petersburg accompanied by Ella, Sergei and other members of the Romanov family. It was a 1,200-mile trip, the imperial train driving at full steam through the endless countryside of Russian Poland and north-east Europe. Inside the luxuriously appointed carriage it was stiflingly hot and the tsarevich felt confined in the close atmosphere, unable to take his daily walk and clear his head. Alix had written that the subject must never be raised again, but he had to have the conversation with her, ‘which I have so longed for and yet so feared’.3 He dreaded to hear what she might say. After two days’ travel they were in southern Germany and approaching Coburg. He went to change into his uniform.

  There she was on the platform, all but lost amongst the large family reception party: the bride and groom, the bride’s parents and sister, Missy, a guard of honour and a battalion of soldiers. At twenty-one Alix was the accepted beauty in the family, although not everyone agreed with this view. May’s brother, Dolly, perhaps unkindly, observed to his mother that although she was ‘very handsome’, she ‘looks very much like an actress’.4 But Alix was no actress. Her intensity, her shyness, her inability to disguise her feelings: these traits had not left her. Suddenly, she and Nicholas were together on the platform going through the formality of a family greeting, enveloped in the noise and steam and crowds as they faced up to the awkwardness of seeing each other after her last painful rejection.

  Queen Victoria had not yet arrived to assert any influence. The queen was travelling north to Coburg from Florence, much rested after a spring holiday. Her days in Italy had passed uneventfully. She could almost have been an elderly tourist out with her daughter, except for the retinue of ladies and servants in discreet attendance. She and Beatrice had taken breakfast on sunlit terraces overlooking vineyards and cypresses below and explored the grounds of their house, the queen taking turns in the donkey chair. They had driven through quaint old streets to see Michelangelo’s sculpture of David and the Villa Medici and to gaze through the arches of the Ponte Vecchio at the sun setting over the Arno. The queen had found it ‘too lovely’, so peaceful, so quiet, the lilac-scented air ‘too delicious’, the setting ‘quite heavenly’.5 She did not leave Florence until 16 April, a few days before the wedding, unaware of the unwelcome proceedings already unfolding.

  On his very first morning Nicholas seized his moment. Ella arranged for them to meet in her rooms. Alix struck him at once as having grown ‘noticeably prettier, but looking extremely sad’, he told his mother later. After a few minutes, Ella left them alone. The moment had come and Nicholas endeavoured to convey the strength of his feelings. ‘I tried to explain that there was no other way than for her to give her consent and that she simply could not withhold it,’ he wrote later. ‘She cried the whole time and only whispered now and then, “No I cannot.”’6

  Nicholas could not bring himself to accept her ‘no’. Her fervent conviction that to deviate from her spiritual path would be a sin was beyond any kind of rational argument, but for two hours ‘I went on repeating and insisting . . .’ Alix wept but could not bring herself to accept his proposal. His appeal was irrelevant, from another sphere of thought. This was a question of faith and conscience, she said. Her Christian beliefs were immutable. To him it was as though she was struggling with unworldly forces bound up with her religious conviction that pushed her almost beyond endurance. He waited until she was ‘calmer’ before leaving her, profoundly saddened. All his hopes had come ‘to nothing’.7

  The opportunity was slipping away from the tsarevich. Queen Victoria arrived later that day in an unsettled frame of mind. On her approach to Coburg for the final leg of her journey from Munich, she found ‘many conflicting feelings filled my heart’. Memories from long ago were as fresh as if from yesterday. Her first time in Coburg with Albert returned with great vividness. Remembering his joy as he had ‘painted out everything’ for her, the warmth and beauty of Italy receded and her habitual feeling of loss returned.8 The Kaiser, of course, had laid on a smart reception. A squadron of her Prussian Dragoon Guards welcomed her at the station and escorted her to Schloss Ehrenburg, the seat of the House of Saxe-Coburg and where Prince Albert had been brought up. A large party was waiting for her: the tsarevich, Sergei and Paul from Russia, Ernie of Hesse, Ferdinand of Romania among the princes, and Victoria of Battenberg, Ella, Irene and Missy, Crown Princess of Romania among the princesses. To Missy it was as though her grandmother, encased in black, spread her ‘sober glory’ over the wedding party.9

  Dismayed at the outcome of the morning, the tsarevich felt ‘weary to his bones’. The next day he talked again with Alix, but this time ‘touched as little as possible on yesterday’s question’. He felt grateful that she was still prepared to meet.10 But word of what had transpired between Nicholas and Alix began to make its way around the royal gathering. Alix had turned down not just the future heir to the British throne but also the Russian heir – twice. By the time Ernest and Victoria-Melita exchanged their own wedding vows on 19 April, for many the day was eclipsed by the tense exchange between Nicholas and Alix. Nicholas wrote to his mother later that he felt ‘in a state of painful anxiety’ and Alix seemed sorrowful, tormented by some ‘final struggle’. While Ernie was convinced that there was still hope, the tsarevich seemed gripped by some kind of anxious fatalism. He told his mother the very solicitude of relatives ‘made me even more afraid of something evil happening’.11

  For the German emperor, this was no time for Alix’s conscience or Nicholas’s defeatism. Tantalisingly within his grasp was a rich prize: his German first cousin on the Russian throne. Wilhelm believed in blood relations to enhance politics. He was distantly related to the tsarevich, but the closeness of his blood ties to Alix might help to ease the strained relations that had developed
between the two countries since he had dismissed Bismarck, and point the way to a new course.12 More important still, if he succeeded as matchmaker he would also acquire a new psychological weapon: Nicky’s gratitude and indebtedness, a powerful card to call in later. The Kaiser visited Alix’s rooms determined to change her mind.

  According to Victoria of Battenberg he had a long conversation with Alix in which he challenged her religious scruples. The irony of this was not lost on Victoria. The Kaiser had been so enraged by his sister Sophie’s conversion to the Orthodox Church that he had banned her from Germany and called her ‘fahnenfluechtig’ – a deserter. Without appearing to see the contradiction, the German emperor now ‘proved to Alix that it was her bounden duty for the sake of the peace of Europe’ to sacrifice her conscience. Europe’s future was at stake, he reasoned. Supercharged by his political ambition, he persuaded her that the difference between the two faiths was ‘only superficial’.13 Ella added to the pressure, highlighting similarities between the Russian Orthodox Church and their Lutheran faith. She was convinced her sister was in love and this would be her last chance to accept Nicholas. The forceful arguments of her relatives, the knowledge that her own life at Darmstadt was about to change, the tsarevich’s absolute certainty: Alix’s resolve began to weaken.

  The following morning the Kaiser took the tsarevich in hand. Nicholas must ask again more forcefully, Wilhelm insisted. He felt a sword was called for and an impressive uniform of course, one that would make a statement and dazzle the most reluctant princess. Above all, Nicholas must appear masculine, confident and in charge. There must be no more introspection, only the glorious charisma of the winner. And some flowers perhaps: the romantic gesture to sweep her off her feet. Finally, the German emperor brought Alix to the house where Nicholas was staying. The tsarevich was ready to repeat his proposal. With the Kaiser, Ella, Sergei and other Romanov uncles waiting expectantly in the very next room, Alix and Nicholas were left alone again.