To his astonishment, ‘with her first words she consented!’ Nicholas told his mother. At last ‘my darling, adorable Alix’ relented. He found that he was crying, ‘like a child’, and she was too. Alix seemed different, ‘her face lit by a quiet content’, he wrote. Nicholas felt so happy it was as though ‘the whole world is changed for me: nature, mankind, everything, and all seem to be good and lovable . . . I could not even write, my hands trembled so . . .’ Alix too, seemed changed, becoming ‘gay and amusing and talkative and tender’. He felt overwhelming relief and gratitude. ‘I can’t thank God enough for His mercy,’ he wrote to his mother.14
Nicholas and Alix went immediately to Queen Victoria. She had just finished a leisurely breakfast with Beatrice when Ella arrived, ‘much agitated’ and ‘begging’ the queen to see Alix and Nicholas. ‘I was quite thunderstruck,’ the queen wrote in her diary when she heard the news. ‘As though I knew Nicky much wished it, I thought Alicky was not sure of her mind. Saw them both. Alicky had tears in her eyes but looked very bright & I kissed them both.’15
Alix had already shown early signs of the traits that would make her spectacularly ill-fitted for her future role: her acute suffering in large public gatherings that made her shun society; the mysterious pains that made it hard to function – only a few days before Ernie’s wedding she told the queen ‘I have to keep as quiet as possible on account of my legs’; her ability to cling to ideas once her mind was made up.16 All these characteristics would in time become magnified by her frightening experiences in Russia and lead her to play a crucial part in her and Nicholas’s downfall. Queen Victoria was better placed than Nicholas to understand Alix’s weaknesses, but even she had interpreted her granddaughter’s wilfulness as a strength, and half-believed, half-hoped she would grow out of her nervous complaints. Ironically, the tsar’s long-held desire to block the match meant that Nicholas had not had a chance to see her develop. The Alix he knew was the sixteen-year-old girl he had met in St Petersburg in 1889, who had responded to his attentions with an enchanting vivacity, becoming the adored, outgoing ‘Sunny’ of her youth. With characteristic self-deprecation Nicholas told Queen Victoria, ‘she is much too good for me’.
Over coffee that morning, surrounded by the timeless peace of the Ehrenburg Palace, the queen confronted the instinctive fear she felt for her granddaughter as her ten-year campaign came to an end. Her reservations remained deep-rooted, but she responded to Nicholas and Alix’s excitement. Of all the royal marriages of her grandchildren, this most undesirable match was unmistakably a love match. The queen was still thinking partly of herself when she wrote in her diary that night that ‘Russia is so far’, and also of Alix, ‘the position is such a difficult one’, but she was now resigned to the match: since they ‘are really attached to one another perhaps it is better so’.17 Each morning the couple joined her in the palace for coffee. The queen was full of practical guidance, urging Nicholas to ease the way regarding religious differences and accepting the bizarre quirk of fate that the heir to a country she had long regarded as Britain’s enemy could now call her ‘Granny’.
For the rest of their stay in Coburg, Alix and Nicky were inseparable. Those who saw them together were in no doubt of their feelings. For Nicholas it felt like ‘walking in a dream, without fully realising what has been happening to me’. He drove with his fiancée out in the carriage in the warmth of the spring sunshine, he took her in the charabanc to The Rosenau, the birthplace of Grandpapa Albert, they watched the lawn tennis, drank tea and sat side by side at the banquets. He felt ‘utterly enchanted’ with her, ‘brimming with pleasure’ just to sit beside her on a bench for hours by the pond. Nothing was too much trouble. He summoned a choir across Europe from the Imperial Guard to sing for her. The tsarina was much moved by his letters home and ‘shed tears of joy’. She and the tsar wrote affectionate messages to Alix to welcome her ‘as their own dear child’.18 Magnificent Romanov gifts soon followed: a bracelet studded with exquisite emeralds and a bejewelled Fabergé egg.
To the wider world, the remarkable union bringing closer ties between the royal houses of Russia, Germany and Britain appeared to embody some shining new hope. The alliance ‘cannot fail to strengthen in the highest degree the guarantees of European peace’, enthused the Morning Post.19 The newly engaged couple ‘may exercise a commanding influence on the destinies of more than one continent’, forecast The Standard. As early as 1885 ‘Prince Bismarck tried to prevent the union for fear that England should reap some advantage from it’, continued The Standard, but the bride’s sister, Grand Duchess Sergei, had used ‘all her influence to bring it about’. The betrothal indicated ‘a complete change’ in the views of the tsar and was of ‘high political significance’ in linking the Russian heir to a cousin of a German emperor and a granddaughter of the queen, ‘who is also Empress of India’. Such a happy event will even ‘touch the heart of Asia and impress the Orient!’ On top of all this, after the recent ‘estrangement’ between the ‘courts of Berlin and St Petersburg’, credit must be claimed by the Kaiser for ‘the “new course” in Germany’, continued The Standard, noting his ‘delight and elation’. 20 Reuters observed that Emperor William ‘received an ovation’ from the huge crowds that gathered in Coburg. The people ‘vociferously cheered him waving hats and handkerchiefs’.21
In London, telegrams poured into the queen’s office in the same vein, among them one from Archbishop Benson, expressing the views of many that the match gave confidence ‘as to future peace and relations between such great nations’.22 The new Liberal Prime minister, Lord Rosebery, telegrammed ‘that much public advantage’ would arise from the ‘auspicious union’, a view that he repeated to the queen when they discussed the matter in person a couple of weeks later.23 The engagement, he felt sure, ‘must tend to Peace’.24
But the high hopes of the wedding masked a harsh new European reality. The old world where a marital alliance could influence foreign relations between countries was slipping away fast. Just a few months before the engagement, the Franco-Russian treaty had been ratified and formally announced. The Kaiser’s worst fears were realised as tsarist Russia and the Republic of France sealed their military alliance challenging Germany’s Triple Alliance with Austria and Italy. From the beginning the purpose of Bismarck’s intricate alliance system had been to isolate France and prevent a rapprochement with Russia. Just four years after his dismissal by Wilhelm II, a new kind of Europe was beginning to form, shaped by two opposing power blocs.
From her position as an outsider in the German court, Vicky saw the dangers clearly. As early as June 1894, just a few weeks after Alix’s engagement, she warned her mother ‘Wilhelm’s one idea is to have a navy which shall be larger and stronger than the British navy.’ Vicky saw this as a danger that would destabilise the balance of power in Europe. She saw flash points too, arising over the race for colonies. Her son’s desire for colonial expansion was making Germany ‘quarrelsome and pretentious’. African colonies ‘are of no use to Germany, only an expense and a trouble’, she continued, prompting the Germans to suspect the English of ‘falseness and treachery’. Although Bismarck had once opposed colonialism, he was speaking from his retirement in favour of it, Vicky explained, as a ploy for ‘stirring up German indignation against England’.25 For Vicky there was also the long-running fear over the ‘Eastern Question’, which ‘crops up again and again’, she despaired, papered over only with ‘palliatives’ by the Great Powers. After a visit to see her daughter, Sophie, in Greece, she foretold of the ‘dangerous’ threat to peace in the Balkans in South-East Europe. It would not take much, she wrote to her mother, ‘to have the east in a blaze’.26
Queen Victoria felt protective of Alix and invited her for a long stay in England after the momentous events at Coburg. She hoped to delay the marriage as long as possible and have time to prepare her granddaughter for her role. Not long after their return to Windsor Castle she took Alix out for a drive. Once they were alone, the queen could no
longer contain her curiosity. She had a tiresome cough and was finding the clear spring day ‘rather raw’, but this did not inhibit her. ‘She began by asking me so many questions,’ Alix wrote to Nicholas on 4 May 1894. ‘When, how, and where, and what had made me change my decision and so on, till I no longer knew what to say . . .’27 Queen Victoria’s efforts to understand her granddaughter’s worrying choice appeared to exhaust her. The queen eventually fell asleep in the carriage and Alix was free to gaze at the beauty of Windsor Great Park in the late afternoon sun, the glimpses of the castle through the dark trees ‘like a beautiful vision’, she told Nicholas. Beside her was her beloved granny, the woman who had come closest to a mother figure in her life and who could never be replaced. The English scene before her was redolent of the very essence of her childhood security that was fast slipping away.
Once again, Alix was unwell, suffering from mysterious pains in her legs that made it difficult for her to walk easily. She left Windsor on 20 May to go to a spa in Harrogate for specialist treatment. On 9 June she wrote to the queen to say the pains were ‘no better’, but she still had high hopes ‘the good effects of the baths will show itself’ and was able to go out in her bathchair. The stress of leaving her grandmother was on her mind. ‘I am sure his parents will often allow us to come over to you. Why I could not bear the idea of not seeing you again . . . I cling to you more than ever now that I am quite an orphan . . . Please do not think that my marrying will make a difference in my love to you – certainly it will not.’28 Victoria of Battenberg, who went to visit Alix in Harrogate, thought her sister was suffering from ‘attacks of sciatica’.29 But the queen understood the anxiety that lay behind her granddaughter’s complaint and wrote full of concern to her future grandson explaining that Alix ‘requires great quiet and rest’. Alix’s heartbreak over her father’s death, concern for her brother, and the worry over her future, she told Nicholas, ‘have all tried her nerves very much’.30
It was almost too much for the queen. She poured out her distress on 25 May to Alix’s oldest sister:
Oh! Darling Victoria, the more I think of sweet Alicky’s marriage the more unhappy I am! Not as to the personality, for I like him very much but on acct of the Country, the policy & differences with us & the awful insecurity to wh that sweet Child will be exposed. To think she is learning Russian & will have probably to talk to a Priest – my whole nature rises up agst it – in spite of my efforts to be satisfied. – But I will try & bear it & make the best of it. Still, the feeling that I had laboured so hard to prevent it & that I felt at last there was no longer any danger & all in one night – everything was changed. Ella shld never have encouraged it originally as she did – at one time . . .31
The queen was reunited with Alix and Nicholas on 23 June at Windsor. It proved to be an eventful week. Hard on the heels of the family’s delight in the birth of George and May’s first son, Prince Edward, came shocking news from Paris. The French president, Sadi Carnot, had been brutally assassinated. The queen heard the gruesome details through the French ambassador. The president had been returning from a banquet in Lyon when the assassin had managed to leap onto the step of his carriage, his dagger concealed by a newspaper. Carnot had lingered a few hours before dying of his wounds. The assassin was an Italian anarchist named Sante Caserio, who, the queen was told, ‘glories in the deed’.32 This latest outrage was particularly unnerving because it had proved impossible to protect the president in his own carriage. Behind the thick walls of Windsor Castle the grand gathering that assembled a few days later on 29 June seemed almost invulnerable. They assembled in the Red Drawing Room: the future Austrian heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Russian heir, the British heir, the queen; princes resplendent in their uniforms, princesses decked in their finery. ‘Nicky led me in and I sat between him and the Archduke,’ the queen recorded in her journal. ‘Alicky looked lovely as always.’33 But how safe were they beyond the walls of palace, castle or schloss?
The violence of ‘propaganda of the deed’ that had exploded into public awareness with the deaths of Alexander II and now the French president stirred the queen’s anxieties for Alix’s future in ‘horrid Russia’. The tsarevich left on 23 July and there was one more week together at Osborne before the day came at last when Alix, too, had to leave. Victoria and Louis of Battenberg arrived after luncheon on 31 July, ‘alas! to take Alicky away’, the queen wrote. She felt she had ‘watched over [Alix] since May’ but was no longer able to protect the granddaughter she loved most.34 The carriage disappeared from view, taking Alix to Trinity Pier where she boarded the Victoria and Albert to sail onwards to Flushing in the Netherlands. For weeks afterwards the queen felt a sense of foreboding about ‘her dear life’. The queen begged Victoria of Battenberg that nothing further should be settled about Alix without her being consulted and pressed for Alix to return once more to see her before her marriage. ‘I have a claim on her! She is like my own child,’ the queen wrote. ‘All my fears abt her future marriage now show themselves so strongly & my blood runs cold when I think of her so young most likely placed on that very unsafe throne . . .’35
Relaxing with his family in his palace at Livadia in the Crimea, surrounded by stunning vistas of the Black Sea, Alexander III rallied in the late summer of 1894. For Nicholas it began to seem possible to believe in his father’s recovery. He received frequent letters from ‘my own darling Sunny’ that had him ‘in a mad state of excitement’. There was none of the English reserve that had characterised George and May’s engagement. He wanted her ‘madly’ he told her and would cover her ‘with greedy, burning loving kisses’. She replied to her beloved ‘Boysy’ that she would ‘kiss you gently always more and more, till there is no escaping for you any more’. He replied by return. ‘The state I’m in – a sort of gelatine!’36 But their elation, unchecked by responsibilities, was not to last. By late September it became clear that Alexander III was suffering from an acute form of nephritis, inflammation of the kidneys. He was confined to his bed, and priests joined doctors in attendance. Thoroughly alarmed, Nicholas urged Alix to leave Darmstadt and join him with his parents in the Crimea.
Alix hurried from Germany, accompanied by Victoria of Battenberg to Warsaw, where Ella took over as her escort. The Hesse sisters were oblivious to the lack of ceremony with which Alix was met in Russia. The life of the little palace at Livadia revolved around the dying tsar, who was anxious to greet his prospective daughter-in-law with affection and respect. Alexander III would not receive her in his sickbed but found the strength to dress in uniform and wait for her in a chair, no matter what pain it cost him.
Queen Victoria followed events anxiously from Balmoral, her drives out in clear, frosty weather punctuated with the news from Livadia. On 22 October she learned that Alix had arrived safely and that the emperor was ‘so pleased’ to see her.37 Reports in the British press sounded ominous. ‘Along the muddy roads leading to Livadia, wagons accompanied by soldiers passed, loaded with india rubber cushions’, reported the Daily Telegraph. ‘These were filled with oxygen gas for the imperial patient.’38 The telegrams that Nicholas and Alix faithfully sent each day showed that the tsar was weakening fast. Even so, she was ‘much startled’ on 30 October when Bertie and Alexandra announced that the tsarina had entreated them to set out at once. It was already too late. When the queen returned from her afternoon drive the next day, Beatrice was waiting with a telegram. Alexander III was dead. Although the news was expected, it still seemed ‘almost incredible’, the queen wrote in her journal. ‘How my heart bleeds for . . . poor dear Nicky and Darling Alicky. May God help them.’39
At Livadia the sound of the guns announcing the tsar’s death echoed across Yalta harbour, sounding doom-laden and incongruous in such a beautiful setting. Outside in the palace grounds, workmen prepared for the ceremony for the oath of allegiance. Inside, Alix witnessed the overpowering grief of her twenty-six-year-old fiancé, who ‘cried himself out on the day of his father’s death’. As they prepared f
or the Prayers for the Dead, she found the familiar pains in her legs had returned. Everyone in the palace understood that Nicholas was not equipped to be a tsar. For the new emperor, Nicholas II, it was as though his very soul was invaded by ‘a terrible feeling of oppression’. His brother-in-law, Sandro, felt there was nothing now to stop the country from ‘falling down a precipice’.40
Queen Victoria gleaned the bare facts in a succession of telegrams. Her granddaughter was received into the Russian Orthodox Church the very day after the death of the tsar. ‘I long to hear more about it,’ the queen wrote in her diary. Then came news that Alix, now Alexandra Feodorovna, would be travelling to Moscow and St Petersburg with her new family with the funeral train bearing the emperor’s remains. ‘Alicky must remain with her future husband & mother in law,’ Ella explained. Under pressure from Nicholas’s powerful uncles, the wedding was to take place after the funeral in St Petersburg. This news gave Queen Victoria ‘rather a shock’.41 There would be no last chance to see Alix before her marriage. ‘Where shall I ever see her again?’ she wrote despairingly to Vicky.42
Ella did her best to create for her sister the same idyllic reception as a Romanov bride that she herself had experienced ten years earlier. Her letters to her grandmother convey her enthusiasm as she described Alix’s sumptuous bridal costume. ‘The dress is in embroidered silver cloth . . . & very pretty,’ she wrote on 17 November. Alix’s hair would be piled high, apart from two long curls that would make ‘a pretty frame for her face’. Her cloak would be of dark ruby velvet and ermine. ‘I must say the latter is heavy and would be much prettier without,’ Ella commented. Nonetheless, with the myrtle blossom pinned on her dress and the ‘splendour of diamonds’ crowning her head, ‘Alix being tall will look perfectly lovely’. Her detailed sketches of her sister as a Romanov bride looked like something from the pages of the fashionable new American society magazine, Vogue. But even independent Ella could not quite conceal the exposure and insecurity they all felt without the protection of Alexander III. Nicky, she conceded, looked ‘thin and pale’, and she signed herself ‘your loving “Own Child”’, as though she, too, suddenly felt the need of a parent.43
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