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

by Justin C. Vovk

  Part 2

  The Age of Empires

  (1894–1914)

  6

  “A Little Scrubby Hessian Princess”

  (April–November 1894)

  Once Alix accepted Nicky’s proposal, a team of advisers began sedulously planning the biggest wedding of the last quarter century. The marriage of a Russian heir to the throne was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and Saint Petersburg was preparing for it to be a day of special magnificence. Nicky’s mother, Empress Marie Feodorovna, had experienced all the fanfare when she arrived in Russia from Denmark for her own wedding in 1866. She was greeted in Kronstadt by an exuberant imperial family and feted with parties, parades, and tributes before a glittering wedding at the Winter Palace. Now that Tsarevitch Nicholas was preparing for his own nuptials, Russia’s imperial family determined to make his wedding to Princess Alix just as grand.

  A few weeks after the engagement became official, Alix made it a point to contact her future mother-in-law. In a letter dated April 21 and addressed to her “Darling Auntie,” Alix thanked Marie for her touching letter. After saying “how happy” she was, Alix wrote about the struggle she endured with her conscience over converting and her hope that she “would grow to love the Orthodox religion and make Nicholas a good wife.” Marie later told Nicky to tell Alix to call her Mama or Motherdear, rather than Auntie, since she “is already like a daughter to me.”290 As an engagement present, the empress sent her an emerald bracelet and a jewel-encrusted Fabergé egg.

  By the summer of 1894, Alix was beginning to come to terms with her religious conversion, but Queen Victoria was ill at ease about the upcoming wedding. She detested the idea of her favorite granddaughter marrying into their “barbaric court,” as she called it. It helped that she thought highly of Nicholas, whom she asked to call her “Granny.” She already felt a family connection to him as well. His mother, Minnie, was the sister of the queen’s daughter-in-law the Princess of Wales. And although the queen spoke kindly of Minnie and Nicky, she detested the Romanov family as a whole. In a telling letter to one of her granddaughters, she poured out her anxiety about Alix’s fate.

  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 vy. unsafe Throne, her dear life & above all her Husband’s constantly threatened & unable to see her but rarely; it is a great additional anxiety in my declining years! Oh! how I wish it was not to be that I shld lose my sweet Alicky. All I most earnestly ask now is that nothing shld be settled for her future without my being told before. She has no Parents & I am her only Grandparent & feel I have a claim on her! She is like my own Child …291

  Queen Victoria reiterated this in a letter to Nicky: “As she has no parents, I feel I am the only person who can really be answerable for her. All her dear Sisters … looked to me as their second Mother.”292 Her fears about Alix’s future in Russia were well founded. Over the previous fifty years, the tsarist empire had become a breeding ground for revolutionaries, making it the birthplace of what, in modern parlance, we call terrorism. Those who took up the Russian revolutionary cause came to be known as Nihilists, because along with totally rejecting “authority as well as religious and moral values,” they advocated “the destruction of social and political institutions.”293 These Nihilists succeeded in several of their deadly missions. The Winter Palace had been blown up once before, and Nicky’s grandfather, Alexander II, had been targeted for assassination six times. Eventually, the Nihilists succeeded in murdering Alexander II, whose broken body was returned to the Winter Palace. The assassins tried three times to blow up the tsar’s carriage with bombs. In the process, they wounded dozens of spectators. Only when the sympathetic, liberal Alexander attended to the injured did the Nihilists succeed in their mission.

  In the late nineteenth century, Russia was a land of incredible contrasts infused with vibrant mixtures of European and Asiatic cultures. The imperial family, nobility, and the society elite tended to follow European trends, while many of the population living outside the larger cities were inclined to semimystic cultural traits more indicative of Russia’s neighbors in the Far East. Even the natural world in Russia was dichotic. In the summer months, known as the White Nights, the sun went down only for a few short hours. The opposite was true in the long winter. Endless nights blanketed the vast, snow-covered landscape as the wealthy and elite traveled around in muffs and heavy fur coats. The country was so vast that an old proverb claimed that the sun never set on the Russian Empire. Imperial Russia, or Rossiiskaia Imperiia as it was known in the Russian language, “was a colossus anchored to traditions a hundred years out of date. At 8.6 million square miles it covered almost one-sixth of the world’s surface, had a population of 120 million (the combined populations of Britain, France and Germany) and a standing army of over 1 million men. Its tsars lived on an unparalleled scale of public splendour; its grand duchesses staggered under the weight of their diamonds, its social season was more spectacular than anything in Europe.”294 By the end of the nineteenth century, the Russian tsar “was undoubtedly the wealthiest monarch in the world.”295

  Of the 120 million people living in the Russian Empire, more than 80 percent were peasants, made up primarily of Slavs, Poles, Ruthenians, and a melting pot of nearly eighty other ethnic groups living on a vast, relatively unpopulated swath of land stretching from Moscow to Saint Petersburg; smaller groups inhabited the eastern provinces, such as Siberia. The people themselves mostly lived in poverty. In 1894, fewer than 20 percent of Russians could read or write. The country’s power rested solely with the tsar and his court, punctuated by the influence of the incredibly powerful Russian Orthodox Church. Priests dominated the larger cities but virtually controlled the tinier parishes, where loyalty to the imperial family was preached on a regular basis. For the Russian people, the tsar was God’s personal representative on earth. He was the Batiushka Tsar—the father-emperor—whose very existence was tied into the lives of Russia and its people. Even Russian folksayings were anchored on the relationship between God and the tsar: “Without God the world cannot be; without the Tsar the earth cannot hold.”296

  This belief stretched back four hundred years to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453. Ivan the Great, the Grand Prince of Moscow, married a niece of the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, and adopted many of their practices in order to strengthen his new claim as the tsar—or Caesar—of All the Russias in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Moscow itself came to be seen as the Third Rome, after the First and Second (Constantinople), rising like a phoenix from the ashes of history. It received greater prominence when Peter the Great assumed the title emperor and declared Russia an imperial power in 1721.297 From then on, it became the mission of all the tsars not only to defend Christendom by recapturing Constantinople from the Turks but to protect all Slavs in the Balkans. This became known as Pan-Slavism. Catherine the Great had planned to take this vision a step further. Not only did she plan to retake Constantinople and resurrect the Byzantine Empire, she also intended to unify Russia with the Slavic Balkans, thus creating the largest empire in the world at that time, stretching from the Sea of Japan to the Adriatic. Although the practicality of a Russo-Balkan empire fizzled out, it was an ambition to which the Romanovs held. Pan-Slavism became a central tenet in Russian politics by the 1840s. It would eventually set the country on course for war in 1914.

  This dual mission inexorably tied the Russian Orthodox Church to the monarchy, giving the tsars absolute power over church and state, the likes of which few other dynasties ever experienced. “Theoretically the tsar’s power was unlimited,” wrote one of Nicholas II’s biographers, “the Romanovs liked to think of Russia and its empire as one enormous feudal estate in which everything derived from them.”298 This absolutism went a step further in Russia and became autocracy, the total supreme power of the state concentrated in the hands of one individual—the tsar. Romanov autocracy could be se
en in the details of the day-to-day business of ruling. Unlike other monarchs, the Russian tsar “had neither a personal secretariat nor a private secretary, stamped his own envelopes and communicated with staff and ministers through hand-written notes.”299 The chimeric nature of the autocratic power wielded by the tsars turned Russia into a hotbed of revolutionary ideologies over the centuries. Unwilling to give up a drop of power, the Romanovs were vehemently opposed to liberal ideas, which they perceived as a direct attack on their God-given prerogatives. In response to this autocracy with which the Romanovs became synonymous, revolutionary attacks against members of the imperial family became commonplace by the 1890s; half a dozen tsars had been murdered since the dynasty came to power in 1613. This was the world into which Alix of Hesse was marrying. It was a world Queen Victoria understood all too well.

  Unwilling to part with her beloved granddaughter forever, the queen invited Alix to stay with her at Windsor Castle immediately after the engagement. She spent many days questioning Alix about every detail of her relationship with Nicholas, which the princess duly reported in letters. The correspondence that began between Nicky and Alix was voluminous, to say the least. They wrote back and forth to each other daily, sharing their hopes, fears, trials, and anxieties. Alix made it a particular point to express her thoughts on God and man’s lot in life. “What sorrows this life does bring, what great trials and how difficult to bear them patiently,” she wrote. “Suffering always draws one nearer to God, does it not, and when we think what Jesus Christ had to bear for us, how little and small our sorrows seem in comparison, and yet we fret and grumble and are not patient as He was.”300 Letters like these reveal Alix’s deep love for God and her commitment to her Christian faith. That faith sustained her through many ordeals, including the most perilous, which were yet to come.

  The love Nicholas and Alix had for one another only grew stronger with each passing day, prompting them to open up to each other about every aspect of their lives. In the summer, Nicky told Alix about some of the more sordid dalliances of his youth. He mentioned a liaison he had with a ballerina named Mathilde Kschessinska, which was widely known among Russian courtiers. But Alix was quick to forgive his indiscretions.

  What is past is past and will never return. We all are tempted in this world and when we are young we cannot always fight and hold our own against the temptation, but as long as we repent, God will forgive us.… Forgive me for writing so much, but I want you to be quite sure of my love for you and that I love you even more since you told me that little story, your confidence in me touches me oh so deeply.… [May] I always show myself worthy of it.… God bless you, beloved Nicky …301

  During Alix’s time in England, the tsarevitch paid her a visit. Her met here at Walton-on-Thames, where her sister Victoria had a holiday cottage. From there, they drove to Windsor where the tsarevitch met with the queen. Nicky’s arrival coincided with the imminent arrival of George and May’s first child. Before the due date, the Duchess of York had the satisfaction of returning to White Lodge for the delivery, where she would be in familiar surroundings. There had been a great deal of speculation over where the birth would take place. May immediately dismissed Buckingham Palace because it was too public. York Cottage was more private, but moving in there for the delivery meant the duchess would be under the thumb of her domineering mother-in-law. In the end, George agreed to White Lodge. It was no small sacrifice, since he was often frustrated by the Duchess of Teck’s indecorum and the duke’s growing invalidity and surliness. And so it was at White Lodge, just shy of their first wedding anniversary on June 23, 1894, that the Yorks became the proud parents of a healthy baby boy.

  “Yesterday at 10 o’clock a son was born to Georgie and May,” Nicholas reported happily in his diary. He and Alix were chosen as godparents. Queen Victoria—whose dislike of newborn infants was well known—even admitted that “the Baby, who is a vy. strong Boy” was “a pretty child.”302 The baptism was held on July 16 in the Green Drawing Room at White Lodge. As the archbishop of Canterbury held the baby at the font, he was christened Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David. Each of his names had illustrious forebearers. Edward was for his late uncle Eddy; Albert for his great-grandfather the prince consort; Christian was for another great-grandfather—the king of Denmark; and George, Andrew, Patrick, and David were chosen for the patron saints of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, though he would always be known simply as David. Nicky recorded of the ceremony, “Instead of plunging the infant into the water, the archbishop sprinkled water on his head.… What a nice, healthy child.”303

  The following day, more than fifteen hundred visitors came to White Lodge to see Queen Victoria’s latest great-grandchild, who was now third in line to the throne. So many visitors flocked in after a few days that a tent was set up on the lawn of White Lodge to accommodate everyone. The queen wrote to her daughter Vicky that it was the first time in English history “that there should be three direct heirs, as well as the sovereign [still] alive.”304 All the ceremoniousness of David’s birth could not wipe away May’s shock and exhaustion at carrying and delivering her first child. Childbirth in the Victorian age was never easy. Nor was it any easier for royal mothers, who were forced to submit to stupefying etiquette at the expense of their own comfort and, sometimes, the health and safety of both themselves and their children. For May, her “nerves had been shattered by the birth and she was suffering from post-natal depression.”305 Only after a holiday at the Hotel Victoria in Saint Moritz did she recover herself.

  While the Duchess of York was convalescing after her first delivery, Alix was enjoying a contented life at Windsor Castle throughout the summer of 1894. With Nicky by her side—and accompanied by the Yorks when May felt up to it—she set off for picnics at Richmond Park, excursions into the countryside near Sandringham, and river cruises down the Thames. Alix also made it a point to take Nicholas to Henley to visit her sister Victoria. Alix’s brother-in-law Prince Louis of Battenberg was an up-and-coming officer in the Royal Navy who renounced his German national identity at the age of fourteen and became thoroughly English. According to Nicky, the time he and Alix spent together was filled with “paradisiacal happiness” for them both.306 Like so many other times in Alix’s life, the idyll did not last long. In the autumn, news arrived that Nicky’s father, the immense, herculean Tsar Alexander III, was dying. For months, he had been suffering from insomnia, headaches, and weakness in the legs. The doctors diagnosed him with nephritis, inflammation of the kidneys. The news greatly alarmed the Romanovs because the tsar, towering at six feet five inches tall, had always been in the best of health; Alexander was so strong that he had been known to bend metal fire pokers with his bare hands to amuse his children. In October, the imperial court had moved to the warm climate of the Crimea where the tsar was expected to recuperate. Queen Olga of Greece offered him the use of her Villa Mon Repos on the island of Corfu, but it was considered too unsafe to move the tsar. In no time, Nicky’s father was on his deathbed, nearly blind and incapacitated.

  Nicky immediately summoned Alix to Livadia, the Romanovs’ palace on the Black Sea, where the imperial family was holding a vigil. Ordinarily, the arrival of a future tsarevna into Russia would be treated with the utmost care and ceremony, but the court was entirely wrapped up in the drama surrounding the tsar’s declining health. But Nicky was overjoyed to have Alix with him. “My God, what a joy to meet her in my country and to have her near,” he wrote. “Half my fears and sadness have disappeared.”307

  For the next ten days, the court held its breath. Alix was Nicholas’s great strength and support. Timid and weak-willed, he had never been properly trained as a tsar. He struggled with making the simplest decisions. The doctors virtually ignored him as heir, instead going straight to the empress or the tsar’s brothers. “Be firm and make the doctors … come alone to you every day … so that you are the first to know,” she told him. “Don’t let others be put first and you left out.… Show y
our own mind and don’t let others forget who you are.”308 These words began Alix’s lifelong exhortation of Nicholas. “Tell me everything my soul,” Alix wrote to him in a note. “You can fully trust me, look upon me as a bit of yourself. Let your joys and sorrows be mine, so that we may ever draw nearer together.”309

  On October 20, 1894, the day Nicholas dreaded all his life finally arrived when Alexander III died. One of his last acts had been to summon Nicky and Alix to his bedside to give them his blessing. Despite being unable to stand, the tsar insisted on donning a full imperial uniform, stating it was “the only fitting garb in which to greet a future Russian empress.”310 With Alexander gone, his son was now Tsar Nicholas II, the eighteenth ruler of the Imperial House of Romanov. That night, he wrote in his diary, “God, God, what a day. The Lord has called to him our adored, our dear, our tenderly loved Papa. My head turns, it isn’t possible to believe it.… It was the death of a saint, Lord assist us in these difficult days. Poor dear Mama.”311 The Duchess of York was deeply saddened when she was told. “This news is too awful,” she wrote to George, “& I feel for you all with all my heart.… My head gets quite bewildered in thinking of all our dear ones [Nicky and Alix] in their sorrow & misery.”312 The Prince and Princess of Wales arrived a few days later to find that Minnie, now the dowager empress, had locked herself in her rooms in grief. Princess Alexandra would not leave her sister’s side for the next nineteen days and even slept in her bedroom at night. She described the Romanovs’ crisis as an “unspeakable agony.”313