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

by Justin C. Vovk

  Zita’s second son, Robert, inherited the Habsburgs’ possessions in Italy when he was declared Archduke of Austria-Este, a title that was last held by the ill-fated Franz Ferdinand. Archduke Robert died in 1996. He was survived by his wife, Margherita, their four children, and eighteen grandchildren. Archduke Felix remained actively involved in Austrian politics, lobbying the government to return all of the Habsburg family’s possessions that were seized in 1919. He lived in Mexico City until his death in September 2011, only two months after Otto. Carl Ludwig, Zita’s fourth son, died in Brussels in 2007. He was buried next to his mother in the Habsburg family vault in Vienna. Archduke Rudolf, the empress’s first child born in exile, worked as a Wall Street broker and a banker for many years. His wife, Xenia, died in a car crash in 1968. In 1971, he married for the second time, to Princess Anna von Wrede, with whom he had a daughter. He died in Switzerland on May 16, 2010.

  Empress Zita’s two surviving daughters each married into royal families. Charlotte, who had married the Duke of Mecklenburg in 1956, worked as a welfare worker in Manhattan’s East Harlem for many years. She sometimes used the name Charlotte de Bar in honor of the alias her mother used when they fled France during the Second World War. She died in a car crash in Munich four months after her mother in 1989. She and her husband, George, had no children. The youngest Habsburg, Elisabeth, married Prince Heinrich of Liechtenstein. She died in Graz, Austria, in 1993.

  Following her death, Augusta Victoria’s legacy continued to live on in Germany. Women, especially those belonging to the Right Wing, cherished her memory. They made pilgrimages to her tomb at the Antique Temple where they laid wreaths, prayed, and sang songs in her honor. They praised her “as the passive sufferer, the compassionate mother of her children and ‘her’ people, the self-sacrificing wife, the charitable and religious woman—in short: the incarnation of German women’s loyalty and selfless grandeur.”1451

  In the Netherlands, the former Emperor Wilhelm II continued to live at Huis Doorn. In 1922, he married for the second time, to the impoverished Princess Hermine of Schönaich-Carolath.1452 Eighteen years younger than Wilhelm, Hermine was the fifth child of Prince Henry XXII of Reuss-Greiz. At the age of twenty, she married the older, unimportant Prince Johann Georg of Schönaich-Carolath, who died unexpectedly in 1920. Although the Hohenzollerns and German monarchists protested the marriage, Wilhelm was happy with his second wife, to whom he granted the courtesy title of German empress. She insisted upon being addressed this way, even though her husband had long since abandoned using his own titles. Hermine’s relationship with Dona’s children was not easy, but she assured Sissy that she would “in piety and reverence uphold the memory of the dear, irreplaceable Kaiserin and respect the inner and essential ties between father and children [existing because of] the death of the noble Kaiserin.”1453 In an effort to ingratiate herself with her stepchildren, Hermine hung Dona’s portrait in her boudoir. She later suggested that a biography of the late empress be commissioned. Wilhelm’s second marriage lasted almost twenty years, until his death from a series of heart attacks at Doorn on June 4, 1941. In an interesting twist, a second link between Wilhelm and Hermine took place when Wilhelm’s grandson Karl Franz married Hermine’s daughter Princess Henriette. The couple married in 1940 and had three children before divorcing in 1946.

  Contrary to the hopes of the Hohenzollerns, the monarchy in Germany was never restored under Adolf Hitler. Any possibility of a Hohenzollern restoration in Germany ended forever in January 1934 when Hitler outlawed all monarchist organizations. In Wilhelm’s eyes, Hitler’s actions were tantamount to a declaration of “war against the house of Hohenzollern.”1454 That did not stop any of his sons from continuing to serve the Nazis. After the Second World War, Auwi was arrested by American authorities and charged with war crimes. He was sentenced to two years of hard labor. Augusta Victoria of Germany and Alexandra of Russia were already connected by their respective marriages. Two generations later, the descendants of these two empresses were again united when Dona’s great-grandson Franz Wilhelm—the son of Prince Karl Franz and Princess Henriette—married the Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, the current claimant to the Russian throne (though her claim is highly disputed by the various surviving branches of the Romanov dynasty).

  At the time of Queen Mary’s death in 1953, only three of her children were still alive. The Duke of Windsor lived in exile with Wallis for the rest of his life. During World War II, he scandalized his family by expressing pro-Nazi sympathies. “I have not one drop of blood in my veins which is not German,” he reportedly boasted in the 1930s.1455 In response, he was made governor-general of the Bahamas and thus sent far away from Britain where he could not cause any further trouble for the monarchy. In the 1950s, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor returned to France, where they died in 1972 and 1986, respectively. Queen Mary was never fully reconciled with Edward, even though he did attend her funeral, and she never met Wallis face-to-face again. The couple had no children. Throughout the remainder of her life, Princess Mary, Countess of Harewood (as she was styled after 1932) remained an honorary member of the British Armed Forces. In 1965, she died from a massive heart attack. The queen’s last surviving son, the Duke of Gloucester, served as governor-general of Australia. He died in 1974. His wife, Alice, survived him by thirty years, dying in 2004 at the age of 102. At the time of her death, she was the oldest person in history to be part of the British royal family.

  Queen Mary’s granddaughter Elizabeth II has reigned since 1952. On May 12, 2011, she became the second-longest-reigning sovereign in English history—the first continues to be Queen Victoria. Should Elizabeth be on the throne in 2015 at the age of eighty-nine, she would not only surpass Queen Victoria but would also become the longest-reigning female monarch in history. In June 2012 she celebrated her Diamond Jubilee. An estimated 1.2 million people arrived in London on June 3 to watch as a flotilla of one thousand boats paraded down the Thames to pay tribute to the queen and the royal family. The 2012 Diamond Jubilee surpassed even Queen Victoria’s in 1897.1456 The queen and Prince Philip have been married for sixty-five years. Her mother, Elizabeth, was styled as the queen mother until her death in 2002 at the age of 101. Mary’s great-grandson Charles remains heir apparent and Prince of Wales. Now sixty-two years old, Charles—like his mother—reached a milestone of his own in 2011: he is currently the longest-serving heir to the throne in British history. His personal life has been buffeted by many scandals, especially his highly publicized wedding to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, from whom he was divorced in 1996. Their equally publicized, vitriolic separation “was the single most important event in the history of the British monarchy since the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936.”1457 In 2005, Charles married Camilla Parker-Bowles, who is styled as HRH the Duchess of Cornwall.

  In Russia, the grisly murders of Nicholas, Alexandra, and their family at Ekaterinburg in 1918 were, sadly, only the beginning of the Bolsheviks’ murderous rampage against the House of Romanov. In the weeks and months that followed, seventeen members of the imperial family—cousins, aunts, and uncles of the tsar—were rounded up and brutally executed. Alexandra’s sister Ella was arrested by the Cheka on Lenin’s orders. The grand-duchess-turned-nun was dragged out in the middle of the night, blindfolded, and thrown into an abandoned iron mine in Alapaevsk with other Romanovs and political prisoners. The group was killed by two hand grenades and a brushwood fire. It was later reported by some of the killers that, up until the end, Ella and the others could be heard singing hymns from the bottom of the dark mine shaft.

  The shroud of secrecy and misinformation that surrounded the deaths of Alexandra Feodorovna and her family led to decades of speculation over their fate. In June 1920, Count Benckendorff, the former grand marshal of the imperial court, reported in his diary, “I am still without definite news with regard to the fate of the Emperor, Empress and their children.”1458 Much of the misinformation can be traced to the fact that not all of the bodies were buried t
ogether; an error on the part of the murderers meant that two bodies were buried separately from the rest. Those that were buried together were placed in a hidden grave deep in the Koptyaki Forest. It was not until 1920, after three official investigations, that some of the details came to light regarding the ultimate fate of the Romanov family. Even the official reports were based on conjecture and circumstantial evidence, all of which was cast into doubt a few years later by an event that would precipitate one of the greatest royal mysteries in history.

  In February 1920, a woman appeared in Berlin who was eventually believed to be Alexandra’s youngest daughter, Grand Duchess Anastasia. The woman, who took the name Anna Anderson, convinced many royalists that she was the grand duchess, having escaped execution in Siberia. Not everyone was convinced. Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, Anastasia’s aunt, had no doubt this woman was an imposter. Tsarina Alexandra’s siblings Princess Irene of Prussia and Grand Duke Ernest Louis of Hesse concurred. Anderson generated enough interest that several plays and films romanticizing her life—including the Academy Award winning Anastasia starring Ingrid Bergman—have been created. When she died in Virginia in 1984, state authorities made a surprising and unexpected de facto acknowledgment of her identity in her death certificate. The document listed her given names as Anastasia Nicholaievna, her parents as “Czar Nikolai” and “Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt,” her place of birth as Peterhof, and her occupation as “Royalty.”1459 In keeping with her wishes, her remains were cremated.

  Following the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost, statements made by several former guards from the Ipatiev House led to the discovery in the Koptyaki Forest of the remains of nine individuals believed to be Nicholas, Alexandra, three of their five children, and their retainers. In 1992, a year after the fall of the Soviet Union, two of the skeletal remains recovered from Koptyaki were conclusively identified as those belonging to Nicholas and Alexandra. The confirmation came by testing their mitochondrial DNA against samples provided by several of their surviving relatives. In 1994, a series of similar tests was performed to compare Anna Anderson’s DNA from a preserved strand of hair and some tissue with that of the tsar and tsarina. There were enough discrepancies to rule out the possibility of relation. Additional analyses comparing Anderson’s mitochondrial DNA with the Duke of Edinburgh—whose grandmother Victoria was Tsarina Alexandra’s sister—confirmed the impossibility that Anna Anderson was in any way related to the Romanovs. It was later revealed she was a Polish-born German factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska.

  After nearly nine decades of searching, the bones of the missing Romanovs were found in 2008. Tests later identified the two missing bodies as belonging to Grand Duchess Anastasia and Tsarevitch Alexei. It had previously been believed the remains were those belonging to Marie. Since the fall of Communism in 1991, sentiment toward the imperial family in Russia has been on a meteoric rise. On July 17, 1998—the eightieth anniversary of their deaths—the family’s bodies were exhumed and brought back to Saint Petersburg for an epic state funeral in Catherine’s Chapel at the Saints Peter and Paul Fortress. Their coffins were draped in the yellow flags of the Imperial House of Romanov.

  Alexandra, Nicholas, and their family were later canonized in the Russian Orthodox Church amid the sounds of the Panikhida, the Orthodox requiem for the dead. The Ipatiev House was later torn down and replaced by the onion-domed Cathedral of the Blood, built in their honor. The Romanovs were not the only imperial family to be revered as saintly. On October 3, 2004, the Roman Catholic Church beatified Emperor Charles I, whom they have since named Blessed Charles of Austria. Since that time, a number of miracles have been attributed to him, paving the way for his being named a saint. Zita’s beatification process began in 2009.

  The lives and legacies that Augusta Victoria, Mary, Alexandra, and Zita left have proved timeless. The stories of their lives, their romances, and their fates have captivated audiences worldwide for decades. Whole new generations are being drawn to the stories of these four remarkable women. Nearly a century has passed since December 1916, when these four women reigned concurrently, but even now, in the twenty-first century, their legacies are rising again like a phoenix from the ashes. In 2011, descendants of both Mary and Dona were married in elaborate, traditional ceremonies that evoked strong images of Europe’s royal past. In April, the wedding of Queen Elizabeth II’s grandson Prince William to Catherine Middleton brought a tremendous resurgence of popularity for the House of Windsor. In August, Dona’s great-great-grandson was married in a church on the grounds of the Neues Palais in Potsdam, marking the first major dynastic wedding for the Hohenzollerns in over forty years. “People are longing for things they don’t get out of the republic,” said one of the broadcasters at the wedding. “People are looking for little princes and princesses who are born and will be of some importance for the rest of their lives.”1460

  Decades have passed since these women graced Europe’s last four imperial thrones. Yet for everything that is known about their lives, there are still so many issues that divide historians, academics, and general readers. Was Queen Mary a totally inept mother, or was her parenting more dictated by her husband’s wishes? Was Augusta Victoria a xenophobic, pruddish bigot or caring, compassionate Landesmutter? Is it possible she was both? This book has humbly tried to—if not answer—at least shed some light on these questions. Were these women perfect? Certainly not. One only has to do a cursory review of their lives to discover the criticisms and accusations leveled against them. What can be said for certain, however, is that during their tumultuous lives, Augusta Victoria, Mary, Alexandra, and Zita faced criticism, persecution, poverty, and death, but they resolved to meet their challenges with dignity, grace, and courage. Driven by duty, they accepted their lives as their own, taking whatever came their way. Devoted, dutiful, and committed to the imperial cause above all else, the lives of these four royal women were a requiem to the age of empires.

  Endnotes

  Introduction

  1. Miranda Carter, George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I (New York: Knopf, 2009), p. 65.

  2. Abbas Milani, The Shah (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. vi–vii.

  Part 1: Unlikely Empresses (1858–94)

  1: Imperial Forge

  1. The title hereditary prince was commonly used to denote the heir of a sovereign dukedom, the ducal equivalent of a crown prince. On more than one occasion it was used for the heir to a kingdom when the succession was in question.

  2. John Van der Kiste, Queen Victoria’s Children (Stroud, Gloucester: The History Press, 2009), p. 27.

  3. Prince Ernest was one of many sovereign princes who were mediatised, or dispossessed of his realm, when Napoleon reorganized Europe in 1806. Ernest I and others like him were allowed to hold on to their titles and rank, but they no longer actually had a sovereign territory to govern.

  4. Queen Victoria to Princess Feodora of Leiningen, January 6, 1853, in Queen Victoria: A Personal History, Christopher Hibbert (London: HarperCollins, 2010), p. 263.

  5. David Bagular, Napoleon III and His Regime: An Extravaganza (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), p. 218.

  6. Princess Michael of Kent, Crowned in a Far Country: Portraits of Eight Royal Brides (New York: Touchstone Books, 2007), p. 116.

  7. Gillian Gill, We Two—Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009), pp. 95–96.

  8. Hibbert, Queen Victoria, p. 281.

  9. Gill, We Two, p. 98.

  10. Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), p. 57.

  11. Daphne Bennett, Vicky: Princess Royal of England and German Empress (London: Collins & Harvill Press, 1971), p. 212.

  12. Prince Francis of Teck to Princess Amélie of Teck, December 4, 1867, in Queen Mary: 1867–1953 (London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), James Pope-Hennessy, p. 7. The date given by Pope-Hennessy (above) may
be a typo, since he claims it was written in the April before Princess May was born.

  13. Statement of Dr. Arthur Farre and Edward H. Hills, May 27, 1867, in Her Royal Highness Princess Mary Adelaide Duchess of Teck: Based on Her Private Diaries and Letters (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900), ed. C. Kinloch Cook, vol. 2, p. 1.

  14. David Duff, Queen Mary (London: Collins, 1985), p. 26.

  15. Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary, p. 23.

  16. Kathleen Woodward, Queen Mary: A Life and Intimate Study (London: Hutchinson, n.d.), p. 18.

  17. Letter of Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, undated, in Her Royal Highness, Cook, p. 415.

  18. On its own merits, the request had precedent. When Queen Victoria’s third daughter, Princess Helena, was married in 1866 to Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg (Dona Holstein’s uncle), the queen elevated the groom to the rank and style of Royal Highness from the vastly inferior Serene Highness; and their children bore the style of Highness. In Francis Teck’s case, the queen rightly feared that an elevation would set a dangerous precedent. Any of her numerous relatives could marry without concern for the monarchy or foreign policy and then expect the queen to elevate their spouses in the same way she may have elevated Francis.

  19. Queen Victoria to Princess Mary Adelaide of Teck, May 18, 1866, in Queen Mary, Pope-Hennessy, p. 25.

  20. The calculation is based upon http://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/exchange/result_exchange.php (viewed on April 14, 2011). It is also interesting to note that Queen Victoria, upon the marriage of her daughter Louise a few years later, requested she receive a stipend of only £6,000 per year.

  21. Queen Victoria to Crown Princess Victoria of Germany, April 15, 1874, in Queen Mary, Pope-Hennessy, p. 29.

  22. Viktoria Luise, Duchess of Brunswick and Lüneburg, Princess of Prussia, The Kaiser’s Daughter, trans. and ed. Robert Vacha (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977), p. 53.