Queen Victoria's Matchmaking

by Deborah Cadbury

  But one evening, not long after the massacre in St Petersburg, Grand Duke Sergei and Ella were leaving the Bolshoi Theatre where they had attended a performance for one of her charities. Glitteringly attired for the event, they sank back into the soft, white silk interiors of the carriage. Outside it was snowing. Unknown to them, Sergei’s place of execution had already been selected: Voskresensky Square. The bomb throwers were waiting for the signal. The grand duke’s closed carriage could be readily identified at a distance by its bright white lamps. Keeping watch near the theatre was Ivan Kalayev, a former student of St Petersburg University and a member of the ‘Terrorist Brigade’, a combat arm of the Socialist Revolutionary Party of Russia. His hands grasping one of the bombs were numb with cold. He saw Sergei’s carriage and raised an arm. But as it drew alongside, he glimpsed Ella and two children inside and aborted the plan.45

  Two days later, on 17 February, Ella was inside the Kremlin. The sounds of the city outside were muted by the heavy snowfall. She was accustomed to the familiar sound of snow ice falling from the Kremlin roofs in the thaw. Suddenly there was a different noise, so close at hand, a tower in the Kremlin might have collapsed. Then silence, ‘so crushing that for some seconds we did not stir’, recalled Ella’s niece, Maria. The ‘vague unease’ that Ella had felt all day turned into sudden dread. Sergei had only just left. She ran out of the building. At the Nikolsky Gate there was a small crowd. People tried to stop her going near, but Ella would not be held back. Before her was a scene beyond comprehension.46

  There on the white snow beside the remains of a destroyed carriage was a disembodied hand, a foot, part of a torso . . . Irrationally, she fell on the snow and began to pick up the body parts as if she could somehow repair the damage. There was no sign of her husband’s head or shoulders or his left arm. The crowd that gathered witnessed the grand duchess, apparently ‘calm-faced’, as though removed from the scene in a private world. The shock was too immense; her emotions could not keep up with the sight before her. A slight figure in a blue dress stained with blood, she ‘rummaged around in the snow, which for a long while afterwards continued to give up small bones and bits of cartilage, pieces of body and splinters from the carriage’, Nicholas’s cousin, Konstantin, wrote later. Sergei’s rings were on his severed hand and now she carefully removed them. All that ran through her mind, she told her sister, Victoria, was that she must ‘hurry, hurry’ since Sergei ‘hates blood and mess’.47

  A stretcher was fetched and what could be found of his body was gathered up. A coat was placed over the remains. They were taken to the Chudov monastery where Ella began to pray. She was joined by her niece, Maria, who described Ella as ‘white, her features terrible in their stricken rigidity’, the expression in her eyes creating ‘an impression on me I will never forget’. She was too shocked to cry. Maria was struck by the misshapen lines of the coat over the remains. There could not be very much left of her uncle, she realised, it seemed such ‘a very small pile’. Beneath the stretcher, blood oozed and dripped to the floor.48

  Family members greeted the news as though struck by lightning. Alix was unable to comfort her sister. The tsar gave the order that it was too dangerous for close family in Moscow. ‘Alix of course wants to go,’ recalled her sister-in-law, Xenia. ‘Mama too, but . . . its too risky . . . Poor Ella . . . and she is all alone there.’49 However, Ella’s oldest sister, Victoria, left for Moscow as soon as she heard the news. The German emperor met her en route in Berlin. He was ‘very kind and thoughtful’, observed Victoria, ‘and much worried about Ella for whom, since student days, he had a strong devotion’. Victoria found her sister ‘very brave and collected’ but unable to sleep or eat. Ella’s only comfort was the chapel, as though her prayers removed her to another world.50

  The badly injured terrorist, Ivan Kalayev, had been arrested at the scene. A few days after the murder, Ella went to see him in prison. She was escorted through the damp, dark passages, but she entered the cell alone in order to speak with him.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘I am the wife of the man you have killed,’ she replied.51

  In those moments of meeting the assassin, Ella came face to face with the full implications of ‘propaganda of the deed’ and the enormity of change that it called for. She told her sister, Victoria, that she was trying to save the murderer’s soul. Sergei had always felt ‘great distress for people dying unconfessed’, and she hoped to ‘awaken a feeling of repentance in him for the murder’.52 Kalayev took her icon, but would not repent. He believed his own death would serve a wider purpose. ‘Learn to look the advancing revolution in the face,’ he told the judge later.53

  Shut in the foetid cell, noting the intransigence of the doomed youth who embraced death as the only way to give his life meaning, royalty came face to face with anarchy. Ella could no longer escape what she had scrupulously avoided in her formative years: the great juggernaut hurtling towards them as Russia’s oppressed and impoverished masses demanded change and would not be contained by the old social order with its privileged elites.

  Even as the Russian revolution unfolded in 1905, Bertie, now Edward VII, was extending dynastic ties to the thrones of Europe with the assurance of a nineteenth-century monarch, spurred on occasionally in competition with the Kaiser. Queen Victoria’s matriarchal mantle had fallen gently around Bertie’s shoulders as the ‘Uncle of Europe’ on account of the number of his nieces and nephews who occupied positions of power. Appearing resplendent and secure in his dynastic power, he gloried in visiting his many continental relatives. In the summer of 1905 in the peaceful surroundings of Buckingham Palace he confided his thoughts to his long-standing friend, Louis of Battenberg, almost as though discounting the forces of revolution in Russia. ‘I pass over any allusion to the events in the Far East and Russia,’ he wrote on 15 July. ‘They are a matter of History’ and a subject ‘too sad’ to discuss.54 He preferred to dwell on the bright prospects for the dynasty as Queen Victoria’s many granddaughters continued to forge new royal connections in Europe.

  ‘The King of Spain’s visit was a great success,’ Bertie continued knowingly to Louis.55 When the king of Spain, Alfonso XIII, had revealed that he was looking for a bride, the British king and the German emperor had vied with each other to find a suitable consort. Wilhelm II had rushed to Spain to draw attention to the many eligible German princesses, under the guise of reviewing the Spanish fleet. The German emperor was reeling from the expansion of British interests in the Mediterranean and the brilliant success of his Uncle Bertie’s recent trips in France, Spain and Italy. But it was Bertie who had the satisfaction of seeing Alfonso apparently charmed by a British princess: Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Ena, who was now eighteen.

  As the Spanish royal romance blossomed, Bertie was enchanted by another glorious prospect that suddenly opened up in Scandinavia. As he explained to Louis, ‘the great political event is the separation of Norway from Sweden and the former are determined to have my son-in-law, Charles of Denmark, as their king’.56 Sweden and Norway had been united as one country under a Swedish king for almost a century, but by 1905 the Norwegians had had enough. They declared their independence and were looking for a monarchy of their own. Once again, the familiar fault lines in the family between Bertie and Wilhelm deepened over the issue. Bertie wanted his youngest daughter, Maud, and his Danish son-in-law, Charles, to occupy the Norwegian throne. This was opposed by the Kaiser, who considered one of his six sons eminently qualified for the role. But Prince Charles became the favourite and Bertie urged him to hurry to Norway in August 1905 ‘to prevent someone else taking your place’.57

  To Bertie’s frustration, Charles and Maud were not keen. Apart from Maud’s desire to spend more time in her home country, they interpreted the events in Russia with rather more caution. There had been socialist demonstrations in Vienna, Berlin and other European capitals in support of the Russian revolution. Any new monarchy in Europe must reflect the wishes of the people, Princ
e Charles reasoned. The Norwegian people had not been consulted and might prefer a republic. To the alarm of traditionalists in the family, he threw the matter open to a vote.

  The result of the Norwegian plebiscite in November 1905 was overwhelmingly in his favour. Charles and Maud set out for their new country as King Haakon VII and Queen Maud of Norway. No one had anticipated that the retiring Princess Maud would become the third of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren to become a head of state, after Kaiser Wilhelm and Empress Alexandra. But for some who had served in Queen Victoria’s court, the very idea of an elected monarch was unnervingly modern. It was just ‘too horrible’, observed the Duchess of Mecklenburg, ‘for an English princess to sit upon a Revolutionary Throne’.58

  Meanwhile Alfonso XIII’s courtship was progressing and in January 1906 he asked Bertie’s permission to marry Ena. Beatrice accompanied her daughter to France as she prepared for her conversion to the Catholic faith and everything augured well for the young couple. Princess Ena would be the fourth of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren to be crowned, but the traumatic events of her wedding day would underline the tremblingly delicate balance of European stability and the position of monarchy within it. It would provide one of the most haunting images of collision between the nineteenth-century vision of royal matchmaking and the powerful modern forces for change.

  Queen Victoria’s ‘royal mob’ gathered in Madrid for the wedding on 31 May. The streets were festooned in vibrant Spanish colours, reds and yellows, while flags and tapestries hung from balconies and windows. Despite the searing heat, huge crowds jostled for a sight of the wedding procession from the Palacio Real: the plumed white horses, improbable gold carriages, the many royal celebrities including the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Prince George and Princess May, the Duchess of Coburg and of course the bride herself. Princess Ena in the bridal coach was wearing a white satin dress and long-flowing silver mantle exquisitely embroidered by forty Spanish women. Her pretty face, framed by orange blossom, could be glimpsed through her delicate veil of Alençon lace.59

  The royal party filled the Gothic church of San Jeronimo. Stepping in from glaring sunlight outside, the small space seemed confined and close although lit for the first time with electric light. It was ‘fearfully hot’, Princess May noted in her diary, although it was only 10.30 a.m. when they took their places. The service was long and three hours elapsed before the bride and groom emerged to return to the palace in the bridal coach.60 Bells rang out, cannon fired, and the cheering crowds craned forwards eagerly to catch a glimpse of their newly married queen and the king.

  No one quite caught the moment when everything changed. A bouquet was thrown directly at the bridal carriage. It was unclear at first whether it fell from a balcony above, a window, or was thrown from the crowd. But in an instant the bomb concealed in the flowers transformed the holiday gaiety of moments before into a war zone.

  ‘We saw the horses bolt and the crowd shrieking and surging and realised the truth,’ observed Mrs George Young, the wife of the Second Secretary, watching from the window of the British Embassy. The ambassador was lunching with military attachés and officers, who ‘gave some deep curses & in a twinkling were all out of the house’. The British soldiers surrounded the royal carriage and kept the king and queen from the frantic crowd. The new queen of Spain, dazed but unhurt, faced a scene of carnage. Fifteen people died that day and many more were injured. ‘The police appear to have lost their heads,’ continued Mrs Young, and the panic-stricken crowds ‘nearly lynched a harmless countryman whom they thought was the assassin’.61 The terrorist, Mateo Morral, killed himself and his guard when he was arrested two days later.

  The royal party learned that the bomber had tried to gain entry to San Jeronimo. Had he succeeded probably none of them would have survived. Princess May took note of the royal family’s close brush with death. ‘We can only thank God that the anarchist did not get into the church,’ she wrote to her aunt, ‘in which case we must all have been blown up!’62 The young bride was distraught. ‘I saw a man without any legs,’ Ena cried.

  It was not the entwined flags of Spain and Britain that prompted press comment but the bride’s bloodstained wedding dress, which like an ominous new flag symbolised the collision as the impetus to continue the old ways came up against a harsh modern reality.

  As her cousins continued to marry into Europe’s royal houses, Ella went further than any of Queen Victoria’s other grandchildren in turning her back on the whole idea of matchmaking. The dreams that had dazzled her in her youth no longer seemed a worthy way to spend a life. As she adapted to the fast-changing times, the grand duchess who once inhabited Russia’s finest palaces and commanded the admiration of all around her in her stunning gowns and Fabergé jewels could no longer be found. ‘Aunt Ella, beautiful, beautiful woman’, whose enchantment was like ‘a fairy-tale apparition’, according to Missy, Princess Marie of Romania, no longer wanted her birthright and everything that stemmed from it.63 Grand Duchess Elisabeth Feodorovna wanted to take Holy Orders and become a nun.

  Ella’s spiritual convictions became all-consuming. Over the next few years she sold her possessions, even – perhaps tellingly – her wedding ring.64 Her efforts became focused on creating her own Order, a perfect world in miniature dedicated to looking after others, which she named the Martha and Mary Convent of Mercy. She gathered around her like-minded women who were prepared to join her in dedicating their lives to Moscow’s most deprived communities.

  Ella’s faith followed the true path of ‘humility and love’, according to her friend, Prince Yusupov, in contrast, he thought, to Alix’s superstitious trust in faith-healers and mystics such as Rasputin. The sisters’ differences in their interpretation of their adopted religion drew them apart. Alix felt let down by Ella, believing that she had ‘lowered the dignity of the throne’.65 By leaving her palace and giving away much of her fortune, Ella’s actions revealed an implicit criticism of the excessive Romanov lifestyle in which Alix herself was trapped. Ella, the very person who had guided Alix to come to Russia in the first place, appeared to be distancing herself from the implications. The two sisters found themselves on opposing sides in a growing divide.

  As empress, Alix chose the path of upholding autocracy and did all she could to strengthen Nicholas’s resolve. Her son’s future depended on it. Her faith in its importance was strengthened by Rasputin, whose apparent skill in relieving Alexei’s pain lent weight to Alix’s belief in the God-given mystical power of the Russian emperor. Rasputin’s very existence was proof that God had sent her the help she needed to safeguard autocracy for her husband and her ailing son. In her terror, Alix’s thinking became fixed around this one central idea to which she clung as if her life depended on it. By contrast, Ella found the obligation to help her fellow man had become her life’s mission. Even when under instruction not to leave the Kremlin as violence spread in the autumn of 1905, she found a way to slip out to attend to the poor and the wounded.66

  It was almost as though Ella was seeking atonement or redemption. She could not entirely escape the knowledge that Alix’s life was infinitely harder because of her strong influence against their grandmother’s advice. There was also the terrible burden of the sins of previous generations of Romanovs, emperors and empresses whose fabled lives had come at great cost to ordinary people. Nor could Ella dismiss the possibility that her pride and vanity had helped draw her to Russia in the first place, charmed as she was, not just by Sergei, but by the glamour, the wealth, the life of unimaginable excess that had been paraded before her. Possibly, too, she saw her choice as a way out of danger; if she dedicated her life to the people she might be spared extremist violence. Whatever the truth, Ella appeared to those around her as an inspirational figure, whose faith gave her life meaning. She defended her new path to the tsar, ‘not as a cross but as a road full of light’, and explained her ‘longing to help those that suffer’.67

  When Victoria of Battenberg visited Ilinskoye, Sergei’
s country estate near Moscow, in 1906 she was struck by the changed atmosphere in Russia. Before her eyes, disintegrating forces were at work in Russia and the certainties of the old world were disappearing. She saw houses on fire, read of a wave of assassinations of high officials, and had an escort of mounted guards at the station. At Ilinskoye, electric lights ‘burned all night around the house’ as protection against incendiary attacks. Ella appeared to her one step removed from the horror, ‘distracted’ by her dedication to help others. Even the glamorous villas on her country estate, which once housed aristocratic guests, were now home to those wounded in the Russo-Japanese War.68 Victoria was at Ella’s side in 1908 when the foundation stone was laid for the church at her convent and visited again the following year when the site had blossomed to include a hospital, a dispensary, a home for orphan girls and a separate house for disabled veterans.69 Although Ella always claimed her devotion stemmed from her religious conviction rather than any ideological stance on the monarchy, her actions were the most far-reaching of any of her family and carried the implicit acknowledgement of a need for change. She saw herself as doing God’s work as she attended to the sick and poor of Moscow. Knowing she could make a difference was sufficient reward.

  The royal mob descended en masse on London in May 1910 for the funeral of the ‘Uncle of Europe’, but it was a last hurrah of a fading world, ‘the old world in its sunset’ in the words of Winston Churchill. After Bertie’s death, George became the fifth of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren to be crowned, with May (Mary) at his side as his grandmother had wished. Missy, Crown Princess Marie of Romania, was watching on 22 June 1911, as the forty-six-year-old George V and forty-four-year-old Queen Mary processed majestically down the long aisle of Westminster Abbey. They had emerged in middle age as the perfect example of what Queen Victoria required; sedate, upright, dutiful, upholding successful family values. From the Gothic choir stalls, Marie of Romania was struck by the serenity and dignity of the ceremony, ‘a feeling of undisputed might’ in which ‘no tragedy lay beneath, no sense of fear or sacrifice’. British institutions seemed strong, resilient, trustworthy, including the centuries-old monarchy itself. ‘The thrones they were mounting were, if I can so express it, seats of peace,’ she observed.70