The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (6 page)

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Yanyshev, arrived from Russia to give Alix instruction in the Russian Orthodox religion. He had a hard time of it; Alix was a rigorous

and questioning pupil. Her evangelical upbringing had taught her

to dislike dogma and she refused adamantly to make a formal state-

ment renouncing her Lutheranism as heretical. A compromise had

to be reached.

With the wedding scheduled for the spring of 1895, Alix antici-

pated having several quiet months back home in Hesse to prepare,

but plans were dramatically changed with news from Russia that

Alexander III had fallen dangerously ill and was not expected to

live. By now reconciled to the marriage, he wished to see Alix before he died and she left Hesse in great haste, making the long train

journey south to Simferopol in the Crimea accompanied by her

loyal friend Gretchen. After she had joined Nicky at the Romanov

palace at Livadia, the couple was formally betrothed in front of the

dying tsar. Alexander’s death on 20 October
*
was followed the day after by Alix’s formal acceptance into the Russian Orthodox Church.

As Nicholas was now tsar the marriage was brought forward. But

it did not take place as the couple would have wished, in private,

in Livadia.42 The Russian grand dukes objected; court protocol

demanded a formal ceremony in the capital. And so in a bitterly

cold St Petersburg, after three weeks of exhausting and excruciat-

ingly protracted court mourning for the late tsar, Nicholas and

Alexandra were married on 14 November in front of hundreds of

invited guests at the chapel of the Winter Palace.

Alix could not have looked more beautiful or serene that day –

tall and statuesque in her white-and-silver brocade dress, the train

heavily trimmed in ermine and the imperial mantle of cloth of gold

across her shoulders, her lovely figure complemented by her limpid

blue eyes and her wavy reddish gold hair enhanced by the diamond-

encrusted wedding crown. British envoy Lord Carrington was deeply

impressed: ‘She looked the perfection of what one would imagine

an Empress of Russia on her way to the altar would be’, he informed

* All events taking place in Russia prior to February 1918 are given according to the Old Style, Julian calendar then in use there. Where confusion might arise, New Style dates are added in brackets.

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MOTHER LOVE

Queen Victoria.43 Other witnesses noted the commanding stature

of the princess alongside her shorter and rather delicate-looking

consort; to all intents and purposes she appeared to be the one with

the physical strength, a woman of considerable presence, ‘much

above the traditional level of Duchy Princesses’.44

There was, however, something about the royal bride’s solemn,

guarded look and the thin tight mouth that told a different story,

of a strong, determined personality fighting a natural, but violent,

antipathy to being on public display after having enjoyed the

domestic privacy of the Hessian court for so long. Alix endured the

ordeal, but at the end of her wedding day, much like her grand-

mother Victoria before her, she retreated to bed early with a head-

ache. For others who had attended the proceedings that day, such

as Princess Radziwill, it had been ‘one of the saddest sights I ever

remember having seen’. So long as the authoritarian Alexander III

had lived the Russian aristocracy had felt safe, but their sense of

security had vanished with his untimely death, and had been replaced

with ‘the feeling of approaching calamity’.45

After a few nights spent in the relatively cramped surroundings

of Nicholas’s bachelor apartments at the Anichkov Palace in St

Petersburg (their own at the Winter Palace still being redecorated)

the newly married couple travelled to the Alexander Palace at

Tsarskoe Selo. They ensconced themselves in the dowager empress’s

apartments in the east wing, where Nicky himself had been born

in 1868, for four blissful days of absolute privacy, ‘hand in hand and heart to heart’, as Nicky told his brother-in-law Ernie.46 Alix had

also written shortly before her wedding assuring Ernie that ‘I am

so happy & never can thank God enough for having given me such

a treasure as my Nicky’.47 The obscure and serious-minded Alix of

Hesse, whom even her own grandmother had described as ‘ein

kleines deutsches Prinzesschen with no knowledge of anything

beyond small German courts’, had won for herself not only one of

the greatest royal catches but the richest man in the world.48

But in leaving Darmstadt prematurely the new tsaritsa had arrived

in Russia ignorant of its customs and profound superstitions, with

a limited knowledge of its language and having made the enormous

leap of faith from the militant austerity of her devout Lutheranism

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FOUR SISTERS

to the mystical and opulent rituals of Russian Orthodoxy. The

cultural divide was enormous. Princess Alix of Hesse encountered

the same problems – on a much grander scale – that her mother

before her had first met in Darmstadt, and – for that matter – her

grandfather Prince Albert, who as a homesick Coburger had arrived

in an alien English court fifty-four years before. Alix’s adoptive

country was as wary of her as a German and an interloper – the

fifth princess of German blood to become a Russian empress in

barely a century – as England had been of the obscure Saxe-Coburg

princeling Albert.

She might have embraced Orthodoxy with all her heart, but Alix

was English through and through, with English habits, English

sentiments and a no-nonsense English approach to family life bred

in the bone by her mother and grandmother before her. Such a

background would have served her well had she remained within

the familiar sphere of her Western-European bloodline, but Russia

– despite the seductive beauty of its landscape, which she already

loved – was unknown territory, a country legendary for its turbulent

history and for the overpowering wealth and grandeur of its court.

Fin-de-siècle
imperial St Petersburg was a far cry from the comfortable domesticity of the Neues Palais and the rose gardens of

Darmstadt.

Nevertheless, for the sake of love, ‘gentle simple Alicky’ had

summoned up all her courage to leave the shelter of her brother’s

quiet and peaceful
residenz
in Darmstadt to become ‘the great Empress of Russia’.49 To counter her apprehensions about the unfamiliar court practices she was presented with, she closed the door

to the hostile world outside and everything in it that frightened her.

Instead, she clung to those few close, familiar things in which she

took comfort, and to her role as Nicholas’s devoted ‘little wifey’.

For now, the world – and Russia – could wait.

Except in one respect: shortly after Alexander III’s death, Nicholas

had issued a proclamation commanding his subjects to swear the

oath of allegiance to him as their new tsar. His younger brother

Grand Duke Georgiy Alexandrovich, he proclaimed, would bear the

title of tsarevich ‘until it please God to bless our approaching union
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with the Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt with the birth of a son’.50

In the dynastic scheme of things, Alix’s primary and most urgent

duty was to provide a male heir to the Russian throne.

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N

From her very first days in Russia, Princess Alix of Hesse was deter-

mined to counter anything she saw as a threat to the quiet family

life that she had envisaged for herself and Nicky. Family had been

her only security when death had taken those most dear from her;

she was far from home, lonely and apprehensive, and dreaded being

exposed as an object of curiosity. But in protecting her own deeply

held insecurities by retreating, at every opportunity, from public

view, she only succeeded in accentuating her already marked air of

chilly reserve. Alexandra Feodorovna, as she was now styled, found

herself at the receiving end of hostile looks from a Russian aristoc-

racy that was already critical of her English upbringing and manners

– and, to their horror, her poor French, which was still very much

the language of their elite circles.1 Worse, this insignificant German princess had, in the eyes of the court, displaced the much loved and

highly sociable former empress, Maria Feodorovna – a still vigorous

widow in her forties – from her central position at court.

From the first, Alexandra found the strain of fulfilling her cere-

monial duties almost intolerable, such as in January 1895, when she

had to face a line of 550 court ladies for the New Year
baise-main
ceremony at which they all processed to kiss her imperial hand. Her

visible discomfort and habit of recoiling in horror when anyone

tried to get too close were quickly misinterpreted as manifestations

of a difficult personality. Her new sister-in-law Grand Duchess Olga

Alexandrovna later recalled: ‘Even in that first year – I remember

so well – if Alicky smiled they called it mockery. If she looked grave
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LA PETITE DUCHESSE

they said she was angry.’2 And so, in response, Alexandra retreated

behind the protective wall of domesticity, preoccupied with the one

thing primarily expected of her – getting pregnant. Everyone was

watching for the telltale signs. Grand Duke Konstantin

Konstantinovich pointedly noted in his diary within weeks of the

wedding that ‘the young Empress again felt faint in church. If this

is for the reason the whole of Russia longs for, then praise be to

God!’3 Sure enough, by the end of February Alexandra was confiding

to Ernie (whose own wife was about to give birth to her first child

in Darmstadt and to whom Alexandra was sending the imperial

accoucheur
Madame Günst to attend her): ‘I
think
now I can have hopes – a certain thing has stopped – and I think . . . Oh I cannot

believe it, it would be too good and too great a happiness.’ She

swore Ernie to secrecy; her sister Ella had ‘fidgeted in December

already about it’ and her other sister Irene too, but she would tell

them in her own time.4 As for her old nurse, whom she had brought

with her from Darmstadt, ‘Orchie watches me the whole time in a

tiresome way’. Within a week of this letter, Alexandra was ‘feeling

daily so terribly sick’ that she could not attend the funeral service for the young Grand Duke Alexey Mikhailovich who had died of

tuberculosis, and thereafter she was frequently confined to bed with

violent nausea.5 Orchie coaxed her to have the occasional mutton

chop, which more often than not would send her fleeing from the

dining table to vomit. Alexandra was fearful that she was being

watched for signs of her legendary poor health, and again begged

Ernie not to tell anyone about how severe her morning sickness

was.6 From now until her due date tsarist officialdom protected

Alexandra’s health and welfare behind a wall of silence; there were

no announcements or bulletins in the Russian press and the people

at large knew nothing of her condition.

For the time being the couple was still living at the Anichkov

Palace in St Petersburg. Alexandra spent her days here resolutely

hidden away from view in a ‘big armchair in a corner, half-hidden

by the screen’, reading the
Darmstadter Zeitung
,
sewing and painting, while her adored husband dealt with his ‘aggravating people’. She

resented Nicky’s absence on official business for even a couple of

hours in the morning (echoes of her grandmother Victoria’s solipsism

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and inability to let her beloved Albert out of her sight). But she did have him to herself in the afternoons: ‘whilst he usually reads his

heaps of papers from the ministers, I look through the begging

letters, of which there are not [a] few & cut out the stamps’, the latter act a mark of her ingrained Hessian frugality.7 The business

of state seemed an irritating diversion – ‘a horrid bore’.8 Evenings

were spent listening to Nicky reading aloud, after which, while he

decamped to his study for more paperwork, Alexandra would spin

out the time playing the board game halma with her mother-in-law

until Nicky returned for more bedtime reading. What few perfunc-

tory duties Alexandra was obliged to fulfil – meeting foreign depu-

tations or line-ups of ministers – were now made doubly unpleasant,

for she was feeling dreadfully sick and suffering constant headaches.

Nevertheless, the tsaritsa had every reason to be confident that

she would produce the expected son before the year was out. The

statistics certainly favoured it, there having been plenty of boys born to the previous three Romanov tsars. Male children were crucial in