Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires

by Justin C. Vovk

  A few months later, the queen wrote again to Princess Victoria, frustrated by Alix’s lack of interest in Eddy: “We have just a faint lingering hope that Alicky might in time look to see what a pleasant home, & what a useful position she will lose if she ultimately persists in not yielding to Eddy’s really earnest wishes. He wrote to me he shld. not give up the idea (tho’ it is considered for the present at an end)—and: ‘I don’t think she shows how I love her, or she cld. not be so cruel.’”167 In the spring of 1890, Alix sat down to write Eddy a letter. Once and for all, she wanted to put an end to any notion of their getting married. Although it “pained her to pain him,” she wrote that she could not marry him, nor would they ever be truly happy as husband and wife. She reaffirmed her cousinly affection for him and left it at that.168 Her words did little to soothe the sting of rejection Eddy was feeling. He wrote to Prince Louis of Battenberg, Alix’s brother-in-law.

  For I can’t really believe Alicky knows how much I love her, or she would not I think have treated me quite so cruelly. I can’t help considering it so, as she apparently gives me no chance at all, and little or no hope; although I shall continue loving her, and in the hope that some day she may think better of what she has said, and give me the chance of being one of the happiest beings in the world. For I should indeed consider myself so, if I would only call her my own.

  ….Perhaps later you might be able to find out if there is any real reason why Alicky does not care for me, and if I have offended her in any way. For Ernie said there was none, which makes it all harder for me to understand.169

  “It is a real sorrow to us,” Queen Victoria wrote to the Empress Frederick once the matter was settled, “she [Alix] says – that if she is forced she will do it – but that she would be unhappy & he – too. This shows g[rea]t strength of character as all her family & all of us wish it, & she refuses the g[rea]test position there is.”170 One of the great historical ironies of Alix’s life was that she probably would have been much better as the queen of England than the empress of Russia. Trained by Queen Victoria, she fit the British idea of royalty exactly. It remains uncertain whether or not Alix ever realized how incredibly different her life—and history as a whole—would have been had she married Eddy.

  In truth, Eddy was never a contender for Alix’s affections. Her heart belonged to Nicky of Russia. Their romance was encouraged by her sister Ella, who enjoyed playing matchmaker between her sister and her husband’s nephew. When Queen Victoria caught wind of this, she was livid. She wrote Alix and Ella’s sister Victoria to “take care & tell Ella that no marriage for Alicky in Russia wld be allowed, then there will be an end of it.”171 By the end of the year, no one had been able to dissolve the prospect of marriage between Nicky and Alix. Frustrated with the whole thing, the queen told Princess Victoria, “Papa must put his foot down and there must be no more visits of Alicky to Russia—and he must and you and Ernie must insist on a stop being put to the whole affair.” Later, she explained to her granddaughter why she was so adamant about Alix not marrying Nicky: “The state of Russia is so bad, so rotten that at any moment something dreadful might happen and though it may not signify to Ella, the wife of a Thronfolger [heir to the throne] is in a most difficult and precarious position.”172

  Determined not to see her favorite granddaughter married to the Russian heir, Queen Victoria hatched another plan to get Alix married off to someone else. The new incumbent was Prince Max of Baden, a cousin of Emperor Wilhelm II. Tactless and unpopular but otherwise acceptable, Max was brought to Darmstadt on the queen’s order and was under the distinct impression that Alix had already accepted him. Alix—who had been completely unaware of the scheme up until that point—was horrified when she was told that Max had come with the explicit purpose of proposing to her. “I vividly remember the torments I suffered,” Alix told a friend years later. “I did not know him at all and I shall never forget what I suffered when I met him for the first time.”173 Sensing another forced romance, Alix summoned all of her defenses. Her icy outward demeanor became stronger than ever, prompting her to withdraw into herself. It took a combined plea from both herself and her sister Victoria to convince Max that she had no interest in him. His visit made a profound impression on Alix because she realized that the matchmaking would never come to an end until she was engaged or unless she made a declaration to never marry.

  At the same time that Princess Alix was visiting Russia, Europe was hit by one of the biggest royal scandals of the nineteenth century. On the morning of January 30, 1889, the heir to the Austrian throne, Crown Prince Rudolf, was found dead along with his mistress, Baroness Marie Vetsera. Their bodies were discovered at the crown prince’s hunting lodge in the tiny village of Mayerling, fifteen miles southwest of Vienna. Rudolf’s father, the ultraconservative Emperor Franz Joseph, ordered his government to release an official statement in the Austrian newspaper Wiener Zeitung claiming the cause of death was apoplexy. This was later edited to be heart failure. No mention was made of the baroness whatsoever; she was quickly buried privately at the abbey cemetery in nearby Heiligenkreuz. Few people believed the official story, and it did not take long for rumors to begin to circulate. One of the more outlandish conspiracy theories was that Freemasons had perpetrated the murder to seek revenge on the Habsburgs for their devoted adherence to Catholicism. The more popular theories claimed that Rudolf “had been seriously wounded out shooting and could not live; that he and his mistress had been found in bed dead from cyanide poisoning; that he had died after a duel; that he had been killed by a forester for seducing his daughter; that he had been hit over the head with a bottle by his cousin the Archduke John …”174

  Investigators who arrived at Mayerling were eventually forced to conclude that Rudolf killed Marie, then shot himself in the head in a grisly murder-suicide pact. Various explanations for what could have possibly motivated such a tragedy were put forward. Some claimed Rudolf had been suffering from depression. Others mentioned the fact that his mother, Empress Elizabeth, came from the Wittelsbach dynasty of Bavaria, whose members reportedly suffered from mental instability for a confounding forty generations.175 A more widely circulated rumor, even to this day, was that the crown prince had contracted a venereal disease and found killing himself preferable to a long, lingering death from his supposed illness.

  The blood-chilling details of the Mayerling Incident left royals and commoners alike shaking their heads in disbelief. Murders and assassinations were one thing, but for a crown prince to take his own life was a tragedy that no one ever imagined. Wilhelm and Dona took the news quite badly—Dona broke down sobbing when she was told. The emperor and empress had been close friends with the crown prince and had even attended his wedding to Princess Stéphanie of Belgium in 1881 as honored guests. One of Wilhelm’s staff reported how “very shocked” he was and that he could “even now scarcely believe that it was suicide.” When Wilhelm later made his first visit to Rudolf’s grave, Dona wrote to him, “A friend of your youth in the same position in life, and how different, thank God, the course of your lives! One can easily see there what a difference it makes whether someone has built on the right ground or not!!”176

  After Crown Prince Rudolf’s death, Emperor Franz Joseph was hard-pressed to find an heir to the throne, since Rudolf had been his only son. The laws of succession in Austria decreed that the succeeding heir should have been the emperor’s next brother, Maximilian, but he had met an equally sad end as Rudolf. A die-hard adventurer who “had been tempted to become an Emperor of sorts,”177 the blond, handsome Maximilian became the first and only emperor of Mexico in 1864 after the country declared its independence from Spain. Sadly, Maximilian’s reign lasted only three turbulent years before he was overthrown and executed by firing squad on a hilltop in Querétaro, Mexico. Since Maximilian had no children, the succession passed to Franz Joseph’s next brother, Archduke Charles Louis, but he renounced his rights to the throne in favor of his eldest son, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on February
1. If Franz Joseph thought that his dynastic affairs would settle down in the months and years after his son’s death, he was terribly mistaken.

  When Wilhelm II ascended the Prusso-German throne in 1888, Dona became the first of Europe’s last imperial consorts to become an empress. Only twenty-nine at the time, she was the youngest reigning consort in Europe, as well as the youngest empress of modern Germany.178 Only a year after Frederick III’s death, the new empress hosted her first major public event. In the summer of 1889, a coterie of royals converged on Berlin for the wedding of her sister Princess Louise Sophie to Prince Frederick Leopold of Prussia, one of the emperor’s many extended relatives. The grand but brief ceremony at the Stadtschloss was followed by a glittering wedding banquet attended by hundreds of guests. After a brief honeymoon, the newlyweds became familiar faces at the Prussian court. Unlike Dona’s mother and brother, Louise Sophie’s presence in Berlin and Potsdam was welcome. The princess, besides being beautiful, was well received by the people and only increased their rising affection for their young empress.

  The popularity Dona enjoyed was sharply countered by the continuing tensions within the Prussian royal family. Unlike her husband, who had been trained all his life to one day wear the crown, Dona was learning as she went, having had only a few years in Prussia to learn what was expected of her. As a consequence, she clung to Wilhelm more tightly than ever to guide, influence, and protect her. This had the understandable effect of widening the gulf of hostility that separated her and Wilhelm from Vicky and her side of the family. “I am sorry to say poor Dona is not a help but an obstacle,” Vicky told Queen Victoria. “Her pride is so great that she thinks she knows better than everyone, because she is the Empress, and she is always on the defensive, and ridiculously exigeante.”179 This pride Vicky sensed from Dona—usually in response to some criticism from the dowager empress—also alienated Wilhelm’s sisters, who resented Dona’s interfering in their lives. “She meddles in every thing the family does,” Vicky wrote later, “every little trifle is reported to her & she orders & directs in a way very galling for the others.”180 Lamar Cecil, one of Wilhelm II’s biographers, agreed with Vicky’s assessment of Dona. “By almost all accounts,” he wrote, “including those of her admirers, the Kaiserin was very self-conscious of her high position and determined that everyone acknowledge it.” He concluded that this was “undoubtedly a legacy of her being descended from a minor house scorned by Wilhelm’s Hohenzollern and Hanoverian ancestors.”181

  This Hohenzollern family war was not purely a domestic Prussian issue but would also have a lasting impact on German foreign relations. The seeds of future international discord were sown in October 1889 when the Prussian royal family traveled to Athens for another family wedding. This time, Wilhelm’s sister Sophie was marrying the heir to the Greek throne, Crown Prince Constantine (“Tino”). The ceremony was truly an affair en famille that brought together Sophie and Tino’s cousins from Britain, Germany, Denmark, and Russia. It was the first time in centuries that Athens had seen so splendid a naval display. Dozens of yachts, cruisers, and battleships from Britain and Germany anchored themselves near the port at Piraeus. When Wilhelm and Dona arrived on their imperial yacht, the unimaginatively named Hohenzollern, they created a debacle. Accompanied by a deliberately oversized suite of sixty-seven attendants for the emperor alone, the pair made it a point to offend almost every member of the Greek royal family. Dona was icily cold to Tino’s mother, the affable and pious Queen Olga. As a former Romanov grand duchess, Olga was on the receiving end of Dona’s antipathy for all things Russian—an antipathy possibly rooted in a perceived snub her husband had received on a trip to Saint Petersburg. Her husband did not fare any better. Wilhelm II infuriated Tino’s father, King George I, when he brought his own Lutheran pastor to perform the wedding, insisting that no sister of the emperor would be married in a Greek Orthodox ceremony. The king was so furious he refused to even meet with Wilhelm or Dona face to face, “a slight for which Wilhelm never forgave him.”182

  During the Greek trip, Dona began to show signs of health problems. Still a relatively young woman, she suffered muscle weakness, exhaustion, a general frailty, and nervous anxiety. The emperor was not surprised by her fragile constitution. He generally viewed women as weaker than, less robust than, and generally inferior to men—a true Hohenzollern misogynist. It is also likely that he knew when he married Dona that her health would be an issue, given her father’s death from cancer and her mother’s litany of maladies. The empress’s five pregnancies in six years—each of which was more difficult than the last—did not help her situation. At the time of the visit to Greece, Dona was in between pregnancies, but it was still tiring.

  Once she returned to Germany, Dona had little time to rest or recover herself. Shortly before Christmas 1889, Wilhelm’s uncle the Prince of Wales and his son George arrived for a state visit. Wilhelm, who dressed in a British admiral’s uniform for most of the visit, insisted that Dona throw as many grand parties as she could for them. The presence of Wilhelm’s English relatives did not appeal to the empress. Since her marriage, she began subscribing to the Anglophobia that saturated the Prussian court and was made worse by Vicky’s unabashed English patriotism. On a personal level, Dona still resented being forced to take precedence after the queen of Hawaii at Queen Victoria’s jubilee. She also despised Wilhelm’s aunt—the Princess of Wales—for her very public anti-German views. As the daughter of King Christian IX of Denmark, whose accession to the throne in 1863 sparked the Second Schleswig War, Princess Alexandra never forgave the Holsteins or Prussia for “stealing” the duchies from her father, which she believed were his rightful inheritance. Whereas Dona and Vicky represented disparate ideologies, Dona and Alexandra loathed one another for deeply personal reasons.

  By the time Bertie and George visited Germany, the empress’s views toward Great Britain bordered on Anglophobia. In her estimation, both that country and its royal family “meant immorality, hypocrisy and liberalism.”183 She felt there was no greater embodiment of that hypocritical liberalism than her uncle-in-law, the popular and charismatic Prince of Wales, whom she decried as “disgusting and immoral.”184 During Bertie’s visit, Dona’s low opinion of him was confirmed when he declined Wilhelm’s invitation to be made an admiral in the German navy. The move was driven by the Princess of Wales, who insisted her husband refuse any such offers. This was an unforgivable offense in the empress’s opinion. Always the peacemaker, Prince George accepted an honorary commission in a Prussian dragoon regiment. It is interesting to note that Dona held George in esteem, despite her dislike for his mother and father. Perhaps it was because he could not have been more different than his fashionable, forward-thinking parents. Whatever the reason for it, when George accepted the honorary commission, the Princess of Wales was furious. The letter she wrote to her son about it accurately conveys her feelings: “So my Georgie boy has become a real filthy blue-coated Picklehaube German soldier!!! Well, I never thought to have lived to see that! But never mind; as you say, it could not have been helped—it was your misfortune and not your fault—and anything was better—even my two boys being sacrificed!!!—than Papa being made a German Admiral—that I could not have survived—you would have had to look for our poor old Motherdear at the bottom of the sea.”185

  Once Bertie and George returned to London, Dona’s life still continued to be a whirlwind. At the start of the New Year, she informed her husband she was pregnant for the sixth time. This coincided with the downfall of Wilhelm’s chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Since Wilhelm ascended the throne, he and the Machiavellian chancellor had constantly been at loggerheads. Eventually, Wilhelm forced Bismarck’s resignation after years of growing hostility toward Russia. Wilhelm, who strongly disliked Tsar Alexander III, was convinced that Russia was preparing an invasion of Germany. Bismarck—who had once been the Prussian ambassador to Russia—was not so shortsighted and realized Germany’s survival depended on cooperation between Berlin and Sa
int Petersburg. In the end, the emotionally driven Wilhelm won out after Bismarck’s government, the Kartell, was smashed in the most recent elections in the Reichstag. A few days later, the emperor visited Bismarck and demanded his resignation. Wilhelm was relieved by Bismarck’s dismissal, writing that it felt like “at last I had gotten rid of the tutor who wished to rule me with the same iron hand he had used in ruling Prussia and, later on, Germany.”186 Desperate to remain in power, the elderly Bismarck visited his old nemesis the Empress Frederick to ask for help. “I am sorry,” Vicky replied, “you, yourself, Prince Bismarck, have destroyed all my influence with my son. I can do nothing.”187 Surprisingly, the foreign press was ambivalent about Bismarck’s departure from the political scene. He may have annexed hundreds of thousands of miles of land to Prussia, but he also had a strong ability to keep the German government in check. He was also fiercely devoted to the German nationalist cause, so when peace served Germany’s purpose, he supported it. No one was certain what impact this would have on the future. Even the emperor was forced to admit that dismissing Bismarck may have been a faulty move: “I have discovered in regard to foreign politics the retirement of Prince Bismarck has not left the German Empire upon the best of terms with its neighbours, nor with any definite policy.”188