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

by Justin C. Vovk

  Religion was not the only challenge facing Ena. Like Princess May, Ena of Battenberg had morganatic blood on her father’s side. Grand Duchess Augusta thought little of May’s Battenberg relatives, prompting her to write, “So Ena is to become Spanish Queen! A Battenberg, good gracious!”548 Ena also shared similarities with another of her reigning cousins—Alexandra of Russia. Like the tsarina, Ena’s life in Spain would be stained by tragedy. She too was a carrier of hemophilia and would pass it on to two of her sons, albeit with far less calamitous consequences for the Spanish royal family.

  For this significant wedding, George and May were representing the British royal family. Ordinarily, an event of this magnitude would have required the presence of the king and queen, but their presence at such a controversial event was unfathomable. The death of the queen’s father, the king of Denmark, in January 1906 gave the monarchs a get-out-of-jail-free card to send the Prince and Princess of Wales instead. When they arrived in Spain, it became clear that the country’s reputation as the most rigidly formal court in Europe was well earned. Their apartments at the Royal Palace in Madrid—which contained more than 250 suites for visiting dignitaries alone—were guarded by halberdiers standing at each of the marble pillars stretching down the wide hallways in every direction. Every time the Wales’ left their rooms, the guards would sound a clap and shout to one another, “Arriba Princesa! Arriba Principe!!”549

  The morning of the wedding, May 31, 1906, was pristine with a sunny, cloudless blue sky. Thousands of people congested the streets of Madrid. In the courtyard of the Royal Palace, bejeweled state carriages ferried their royal passengers to the Church of San Jeronimo, near the famous Prado Museum. As heirs to the British throne and cousins of the bride, George and May were seated in the front row of the long, narrow church. The ceremony was a strict but haunting Catholic service, followed immediately by a nuptial mass performed by Cardinal Sancha, the archbishop of Toledo. After the three-hour ceremony, as the bridal carriage made its way through the crowded streets, tragedy struck when a madman, perched on the fourth-floor balcony of an overlooking house, threw a bomb at the king and his new queen. Ena and Alfonso were unharmed, but dozens were wounded, and a number of people were killed. By the time Alfonso and Ena arrived at the palace, the queen was hysterical. “I saw a man without any legs! I saw a man without any legs!” she kept muttering.550 The reception that followed was eerily silent, despite the presence of five thousand guests. Ena’s aunt Princess Marie of Erbach-Schönberg recalled how “every attempt at cheerfulness failed miserably.” The one person who shone out was the Princess of Wales. She “was superb and remained calm, giving Ena the support that she badly needed.” According to Princess Frederica of Hanover, May “was the only one to show proper feeling.”551

  After lunch, the guests retired to their rooms to inform their relatives they were safe. May wrote the following to her aunt Augusta:

  Well we have been thro’ a most unpleasant experience & we can only thank God that the anarchist did not get into the church in which case we must all have been blown up! Nothing could have been braver than the young people were, but what a beginning for her [Ena].… I saw the coach one day, still with blood on the wheels & behind where the footmen were standing—apart from the horror of this awful attempt the visit to Madrid was most interesting but oh! the heat was nearly as bad as India & made one feel quite exhausted.… I liked seeing the fine pictures, palace, Escurial, Armoury etc.552

  It was three days before Ena and Alfonso’s would-be assassin, Matteo Morral, was apprehended. When cornered by police, Morral shot and killed a police officer before committing suicide. For those three days while Morral was still on the loose, tension among the visiting royals remained high. Princess May was one of the few guests who ventured out in public, unafraid that Morral would make another attempt on the lives of the king, his new queen, or their guests. Even Prince George refused to be seen in public, but his wife’s courage made a profound impact on everyone around her. “She was magnificent, as brave as a lion,” remarked Ena’s brother Alexander of Battenberg. “She was frightened of nothing.”553 May’s experiences in Spain were once-in-a-lifetime preparations for her future as queen and empress. Her actions under these circumstances, demonstrated in the presence of some of the highest-ranking royals in the world, established her reputation for bravery, dignity, and levelheadedness.

  Only a matter of days after the Wales returned to England from Spain, they were off again. This time, they were aboard the royal yacht Victoria and Albert bound for Norway, where George’s sister Maud and her husband, Haakon554, were being crowned the first queen and king of Norway, which had recently declared its independence from Sweden after nearly a century. “A letter this time from the far North! we do love to travel about to be sure,” May wrote to Aunt Augusta. “We had lovely weather at first but then it turned cold & we had much wind & rain which was unpleasant for landing from the yacht in evening dress when the boat jumps up & down!”555 In the months leading up to the ceremony, May and Maud were in close contact. As early as March 1906, a full three months before the coronation, Maud confided to May her fears about the very public ritual. “It all haunts me like an awful nightmare this Coronation and that it is just to be ours of all people,” Maud wrote. “Think of me alone on my throne, having a crown to be shoved on my head which is very small and heavy by the aged Bishop, and a Minister and also has to be put on by them before the whole crowd!! and oil to put on my head, hands and bosom!! Gracious, it will be awful!”556

  The coronation was performed at Trondheim, the site of Norway’s medieval coronations. The local fjordic scenery lent itself well to creating a festive atmosphere in Trondheim, which was only a few hundred miles from the Arctic Circle. The ceremony on June 22, 1906, tested the easily rattled nerves of May’s demure sister-in-law. The new queen consort of Norway shared May’s dislike of public attention, but unlike the Princess of Wales, Maud had much more difficulty acquitting herself with ease in the spotlight. One witness thought Queen Maud looked quite pale “as she walked up the long choir, returning the salutations on each side of her.” Not surprisingly, Aunt Augusta did not approve of May’s attending the coronation. After separating from Sweden in 1905, Norway had voted to elect Maud’s husband as king, but such a notion proved too much for the grandiose Augusta. She bluntly told May, “A revolutionary Coronation! such a farce, I don’t like your being there for it, it looks like sanctioning all that nasty Revolution.… How can a future K. & Q. of E. go to witness a Coronation ‘par la grace du Peuple et de la Révolution!!!’ makes me sick and I should say, you too.” May did not feel as strongly as her aunt, though, and wrote back that “the whole thing seems curious, but we live in very modern days.”557

  This latest separation from her children brought May’s parenting into the public eye yet again, once more earning her no shortage of criticism. Shortly before Ena and Alfonso’s wedding, May was faced with a parenting crisis of sorts with each of her children. David began showing signs of deafness in one ear; Bertie’s stammer was becoming worse, as too were his knock-knees, which required him to wear painful splints day and night; Mary had become a disruptive influence on her brothers during their lessons; Harry had uncontrollable fits of both crying and laughing; and George broke down sobbing in his mother’s presence. Unlike most modern-day parents, May refused to address these issues, at least until after the visits to Spain and Norway. One of May’s biographers observed the following:

  Modern psychologists believe that George and Mary took too little trouble to understand their children. Whereas Edward and Alexandra spoiled the grandchildren, their son and his wife wished to see a return to sound Victorian educational standards and moral behaviour. Implicit obedience was exacted from sons. Disobedience brought instant retribution. It seemed as though in rooting out the bad they sometimes overlooked the good in their offspring.… Consequently they committed blunders over their sons’ training which, except in degree, differed little from the
academic extremism which made George III’s sons what they became and was incredibly repeated by Victoria and the Prince Consort in the case of Edward.558

  The Empress Frederick once wrote that May “does not seem to have the passionate tenderness for her little ones wh. seems so natural to me.” She also said May “has something very cold and stiff—& distant in her manner—each time one sees her again one has to break the ice afresh.”559 This was an ironic statement coming from Vicky, since she herself had been on the receiving end of some very harsh criticism for her own mothering in the way she raised Wilhelm II, Charly, and her other children. May was not a hands-on mother who ever made maudlin displays of affection the way Queen Alexandra did. The princess’s distaste for and repulsion of illnesses meant she took a stiff, inflexible, sometimes even unsympathetic approach with her children when they were sick. Her expectation was for them to respond to it the same way she would.

  It would be ungenerous to say that the Princess of Wales was a cold, distant mother and nothing else. She made an effort to create a tranquil home life for her children—free from scandals, drama, and the other tribulations that plagued her own childhood. Nonetheless, her parenting style is somewhat ironic given how affectionate her own parents were. Historians seem to be divided over Princess May as a mother. Some praise her virtues like her strength, others criticize her aloofness. Few seem to have found middle ground. A careful review of all the facts shows that Princess May was both. There certainly is no doubt that she lacked maternal instincts toward young children—the same was often said of Queen Victoria, but in her later years the queen became very affectionate with her grandchildren. Affectionate is a word that would never be associated with May—even later in life. But those qualities for which May was criticized—her reserved emotions, outward calm, and ostensible aloofness—would become invaluable assets in the decades ahead. These qualities would even help the British monarchy survive one of the greatest crises in its history.

  10

  Life’s Unexpected Trials

  (1905–10)

  The humiliating end to the Russo-Japanese War was only the beginning of Alexandra’s problems in Saint Petersburg. The war had once and for all stripped away the facade of impenetrability that surrounded the Romanov dynasty. In June 1905, the crew of the battleship Potemkin, docked at Odessa on the Black Sea, mutinied. In no time, the revolt spread into Odessa itself, where fighting to suppress the uprising resulted in two thousand people dead. Before the crew of the Potemkin could be apprehended, the “crew sailed the ship to Romania and liberty.”560 For the first time, Russia’s disaffected masses began to see that autocracy was more vulnerable than they had been led to believe. Things got so bad that “between Bloody Sunday and the late fall, Nicholas and his military advisers assigned 15,297 companies of infantry and 3,665 squadrons of cavalry, with 224 cannon and 124 machine guns, to suppress strikes and peasant riots.”561

  Almost all essential services in Moscow and Saint Petersburg shut down. Banks, grocery stores, public transportation, telegraph stations, and even running water stopped functioning because the workers had walked off their jobs. Mob violence swept cities and towns as people sang “La Marseillaise” and began crying out for a republic and an end to autocracy. Instead of fighting pockets of revolutionaries, the government was forced to contend with a mutinous population that numbered in the millions. Unrest soon spread beyond Russia into its imperial territories. Within a few months, Riga and Warsaw were on strike.

  There was little doubt that control was slipping from the government’s hands. Throughout the summer, foreign newspapers were reporting rumors that the tsar would be deposed, with Alexei taking his place under the regency of four senior grand dukes. In the end, it was Count Serge Witte, one of Russia’s most able statesmen, who devised a solution. He called it the October Manifesto. This document promised the people civil liberties, such as freedom of religion and speech, as well as Russia’s first elected assembly, whose votes would be required to make law. When Witte presented the manifesto to Nicholas, only one other person was present: Alexandra. “The Empress,” the count recalled, “sat stiff as a ramrod, her face lobster-red, and did not utter a single word.” Determined to preserve autocracy, Nicholas II was unwilling to sign the manifesto. It fell to his cousin Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaievich (“Nikolasha”), the levelheaded, tall, imposing commander of the Russian military, to force the tsar to accept progress. Furious that his cousin was unwilling to accept reforms, Nikolasha stormed into the Winter Palace and declared, “I’m going now to the Czar and I will beg him to sign the manifesto and the Witte program. Either he signs or in his presence I will put a bullet through my head with this revolver.”562 Pressed between a rock and a hard place, the tsar accepted the manifesto on October 17, 1905. With the stroke of a pen, he ended three centuries of absolute rule by the Romanovs. In a letter to his mother, Nicholas II poured out his justification for accepting the end of autocracy in Russia.

  There were only two ways open: To find an energetic soldier and crush the rebellion by sheer force … that would mean rivers of blood and in the end we should be where we started … The other way out would be to give the people their civil rights, freedom of speech and press, also to have all laws confirmed by State Duma—that of course would be a constitution. Witte defends this very energetically.

  From all over Russia they cried for it, they begged for it, and around me many—very many—held the same views … There was no other way out than to cross oneself and give what everyone was asking for. My only consolation is that such is the will of God, and this grave decision will lead my dear Russia out of the intolerable chaos she has been in for nearly a year.563

  The reactions to the manifesto were swift and sharp. “That was the end, the end of the dynasty and the end of the empire,” wrote Sandro, Alexandra’s brother-in-law. “A brave jump from the precipice would have spared us the agony of the remaining twelve years.”564 The Russian aristocrat Princess Galitzine observed that “something great was crashing—as if all Russian tradition had been annihilated by a single blow.”565

  Under the October Manifesto, Russia convened its first parliament, the Duma, in April 1906. Dressed in her imperial finery with pearls, diamonds, sash, and a flowing train, Alexandra accompanied Nicholas and Minnie to the opening session in the Saint George Room of the Winter Palace. As the imperial party entered the hall, the looks of hatred for the tsar and tsarina from the Duma members were unmistakable. “They looked at us as upon their enemies, and I could not make myself stop looking at certain faces, so much did they seem to reflect an incomprehensible hatred for all of us,” the dowager empress admitted.566 This was a sentiment that Sandro agreed with. “I saw burning hatred in the faces of some of the parliamentarians,” he recalled.567 Members of the imperial family were not the only ones to notice the hostility in the Duma. Count Vladimir Fredericks, the head of the imperial household, observed, “They gave one the impression of a gang of criminals who are only waiting for the signal to throw themselves upon the Ministers and cut their throats. What wicked faces! I will never again set foot among those people.”568 The reaction of the Duma was not surprising when its composition is examined. One contemporary noted that “out of the nearly 493 members, 380 have been elected. Of these, the Government can count on the support of 20.”569 The existential realities of both the Duma and the Romanov monarchy meant that these two forces would be diametrically opposed. “The Romanovs ruled Russia by dint of superstition disguised as religious faith,” wrote one Russian historian. “As democrats, they made no sense at all.”570

  Russia’s mounting woes weighed heavily on Tsarina Alexandra, but there were more than political tribulations burdening her. She was deeply troubled by Alexei’s hemophilia, which Russia’s forty court doctors were powerless to combat. There was nothing that medical science could do for the heir to the throne. If Alexandra was going to find any relief for her son—whom she and Nicholas affectionately called “Baby”—she wou
ld have to do it herself. That relief came in the form of an unkempt, scraggly peasant from Siberia named Gregory Rasputin. Born Gregory Efimovich Novik and raised in the distant village of Pokrovskoie in the remote Russian wilderness, Rasputin—a epithet which meant “Vagabond” or “the Debauched”—was tall and burly with mysterious, dark eyes and a long, disheveled black beard. His meeting with Alexandra and Nicholas came in 1905, after it was arranged through a mutual friend, Anna Viroubova. “We’ve made the acquaintance of a man of God, Grigory from the Tobolsk Guberniya,” the tsar wrote in his diary.571

  Rasputin’s arrival on the scene provided an answer to the empress’s prayers. Day in and day out, she was consumed by grief over her son’s health. Her feelings were largely ones of guilt for having passed the defective genes for hemophilia on to Alexei. This only exacerbated her own health problems, which were getting worse: “For days on end, she could be found in the Mauve Boudoir lying on her sofa, suffering from very real and acute pains in the head, back, legs, or heart.”572 Added to these were difficulty breathing, panic attacks, neuralgia in her facial muscles, and constant earaches. The distress over her son’s dangerous disease caused Alexandra to suffer a complete breakdown, both physically and mentally. Her ailments, many of which had come and gone throughout the years, completely overtook her. There were many theories as to their origins. Her physician, Dr. Eugene Botkin, believed the symptoms were psychosomatic. Others ascribed them to a childhood injury that had never healed properly; shortly after her mother’s death, little Princess Alix fell through a glass window, leaving her legs shredded and bleeding. This caused her to walk with a pronounced limp for many years. Others—mostly modern scholars—have theorized she was a victim of porphyria, the genetic disorder that is believed to have afflicted King George III and Dona’s sister-in-law Charly. Whatever the source, Alexandra’s symptoms had a very real impact on her body. Her five pregnancies, almost back to back, also took a heavy toll on her. These pregnancies were almost constant for ten years, and each proved worse than the last. Under circumstances such as these, it is not surprising that Alexandra succumbed to an endless list of maladies. Her poor state of health was also a constant source of worry for Nicky. He once admitted to his mother that he was “completely run down mentally by worrying over her health.”573