Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (23 page)

The day after Ernie and Ducky were married, April 10, Wilhelm drove Alix to the house where Nicky was staying. They met in a room overlooking the palace gardens as a spring thunderstorm roared outside. Nicky presented Alix with a bouquet of flowers he swiped from a nearby table. It was here that she told him she accepted his proposal. “The first thing she said was … that she agreed!” wrote an ecstatic Nicky. “Oh God, what happened to me then! I started to cry like a child, and so did she, only her expression immediately changed; her face brightened and took on an aura of peace.”
²⁷⁷

The first thing Alix did after accepting Nicky was to write a note to Queen Victoria. “Please do not think that my marrying will make a difference to my love for You,” she wrote. “Certainly it will not, and when I am far away, I shall long to think that there is One, the dearest and kindest Woman alive, who loves me a little bit.”
²⁷⁸
Later in the day, Nicholas and Alix went to the queen’s room to receive her blessing, which she gave wholeheartedly. Afterward, the queen wrote,

[I was] quite thunderstruck, as though I knew Nicky much wished it, I thought Alicky was not sure of her mind. Saw them both. Alicky had tears in her eyes, but looked very bright, and I kissed them both … People generally seemed pleased at the engagement, which has the drawback that Russia is so far away … But as her mind is made up, and they are really attached to one another, it is perhaps better so.… He is so sensible and nice, & expressed the hope to come quietly to England to see Alicky at the end of June.
²⁷⁹

Alix and Dona’s mutual cousin, Princess Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, recalled seeing her after she accepted the proposal: “I remember I was sitting in my room. I was quietly getting ready for a luncheon party when Alix stormed into my room, threw her arms around my neck and said, ‘I’m going to marry Nicky!’”
²⁸⁰
“I am more happy than words can express,” Alix wrote to her old governess. “At last after these five sad years!”
²⁸¹
Perhaps for the first time in his life, Nicky “displayed a sustained effort of will, carrying forward, until victory against strong parental opposition, his personal battle for happiness.”
²⁸²
Shortly after Alix accepted the proposal, Nicky and a number of his relatives attended a service of thanksgiving in the private Orthodox chapel of Ducky’s mother, the Duchess of Coburg.

“Alicky is quite radiant and beaming with joy,” the Empress Frederick wrote to her daughter Sophie. “The moment Nicky arrived I saw by her face that she would [accept him]—though it was so strange to refuse him first, and to swear to everyone that though she was very fond of him, she would never take him.… I could not help chuckling to myself that William did not think Alicky so very sinful to accept Nicky, and with him the necessity of conforming to the Orthodox Church. Of course, I made no remarks!”
²⁸³
It struck many as hypocritical but not overly surprising that Wilhelm pushed Alix toward Nicholas. When her sister Ella converted from Lutheranism after marrying Grand Duke Serge, Wilhelm and Dona branded her a “traitor to her faith and her Fatherland” for embracing the Russian Orthodox faith.
²⁸⁴
In reality, Wilhelm’s influence actually had very little to do with Alix’s change of heart. For one, the fact that Ducky was now the Grand Duchess of Hesse meant Alix would just be in the way in Darmstadt. She and her sister-in-law respected one another but were never friends. Her staying on would only cause problems between herself and the newlyweds. “I would only be in their way here,” Alix said forlornly.
²⁸⁵
Ducky was not the only person’s influence Alix feared in Darmstadt after the wedding. Ducky’s mother, Marie, was the formidable Russian-born wife of Queen Victoria’s son, the Duke of Edinburgh, who became the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in 1893. Alix was worried that her aunt Marie would end up “playing the dictator around Darmstadt” once Ducky had settled in.
²⁸⁶

When it came to the question of religion, “Ella’s painless religious conversion undoubtedly helped settle her younger sister’s mind. But in the end, Alix’s unbounded love for Nicholas was the strongest factor in her decision to agree to his proposal.” That love meant she was committed to helping him rule Russia, for better or worse. Nicholas was a weak-willed man who was easily dominated by others. The resolute Alix saw this and was determined to be a strength to him. She believed “she could best serve God by helping Nicholas become a better tsar.”
²⁸⁷
In the end, Alix accepted Nicky

because it came to her that she and she alone could make him envisage duty from the only possible point of view; that her very passion for him was strong enough to evoke qualities she considered dormant; that in marrying him she would be able to guide and to counsel; that in their joint happiness they would fulfill their high duty to the utmost. And, as she reflected on those points, she came to see that she would not violate her conscience … it was her true vocation to love and to serve him. Therein lay God’s will for her.
²⁸⁸

She knew her destiny was, as Wilhelm said, at Nicky’s side. She wanted every day of her life to be spent serving God’s purposes for her family and for Russia: “Thus, in reconciling herself to her conversion to Orthodoxy, Alix wielded this irrevocable decision to a greater calling. She was to be an instrument of God, sent to transform the future Nicholas II and the Russian Empire. In tandem, she and Nicky would work for the greater good of Russia.”
²⁸⁹
The union of Nicholas of Russia and Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt would permanently reshape the course of history.

Part 2
The Age of Empires 

(1894–1914)

6
“
A Little Scrubby Hessian Princess
”
 

(April–November 1894)

O
nce 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 seen 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.