Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (24 page)

“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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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 your own mind and don’t let others forget who you are.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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Queen Victoria, who had watched over Alix and Nicky with so much loving care, was grief-stricken by the news. She noted in her diary, “Poor dear Nicky and darling Alicky. What a terrible load of responsibility and anxiety has been laid upon the poor children!” She concluded in her usually perceptive manner, “I had hoped and trusted they would have many years of comparative quiet and happiness before ascending to this thorny throne.” In a letter to the Empress Frederick, she expressed the same worry: “What a horrible tragedy this is! And what a position for these dear young people. God help them! And now I hear that poor little Alicky goes with them to Saint Petersburg and that the wedding is to take place soon after the funeral. I am quite miserable not to see my darling child again before, here.
Where
shall I
ever
see her again?”
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In his grief, the truth of Nicholas’s feelings came out. He sobbingly asked his brother-in-law Grand Duke Alexander (“Sandro”), “what am I going to do.… What is going to happen to me … to Alix, to mother, to all of Russia? I am not prepared to be a Tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling. I have no idea of even how to talk to the ministers.”
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The panicked frenzy in the Crimea was quelled by the efforts of Nicky and Alix’s uncle Bertie. According to Nicky’s sister Olga, it was he who “quietly began calming down the tumult that met them on their arrival … The last days at Livadia would have been beyond anyone’s endurance were it not for the presence of the Prince of Wales.”
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At 10:00 a.m. on the day after Alexander III died, Alix converted from Lutheranism into the Russian Orthodox Church. After the set of questions and responses, Alix was given absolution by the priest. He then anointed her with oil on her temples, eyes, nose, lips, ears, hands, and feet. Those spots were then touched by a sponge dipped in holy water. Once the service was over, Alix, Nicholas, and the dowager empress took Holy Communion together. Contrary to her worries, her conversion was remarkably painless. Her sister Ella made it a point to reassure a concerned Queen Victoria that the ceremony was “so beautiful and touching,” and Alexandra looked “very calm.”
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That day, Nicholas issued his first official decree as emperor. He signed an imperial decree that confirmed Alix in her new faith, along with a new name and title. She was now “the truly believing Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna.”
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These were her official Russian names, but to friends and family she would always remain Alix.

The funeral for Alexander III was on a scale never before seen in Russian history. Sixty-one royals, including the kings of Denmark, Serbia, and Greece, made the long journey to Russia to pay their last respects. The Duke of York was summoned at his father’s behest to be a pallbearer at the funeral. It was the first time since their wedding that George and May were separated, and it was a difficult time for them both. To ease his homesickness, George wrote some twenty letters to May in the few weeks he was away. In each of them, he begged her to give him some news from home. In one of his letters to May, George described some of the funeral practices of the Russian court in the days leading up to the funeral: “Every day, after lunch, we had another service at the church. After the service, we all went up to [the] coffin which was open and kissed the Holy Picture which he [Alexander’s body] held in his hand. It gave me a shock when I saw [his] dear face so close to mine when I stooped down. He looks so beautiful and peaceful, but of course he has changed very much. It is a fortnight today.”
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From the Crimea, the tsar’s body made a seventeen-day journey to the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan—the largest church in Saint Petersburg—where it was laid to rest after a four-hour ceremony. Tens of thousands of soldiers lined the streets of Saint Petersburg, which were packed with sobbing peasants. The city itself was draped in black, with funeral arches lining the procession route. George wrote to May about the experience of assisting with the emperor’s final interment. “We carried him and lowered him down into the vault,” he wrote, “and it was most impressive and sad, and I shall never forget it. Darling Aunt Minny was so brave and stood the whole time and never broke down once.”
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A week after Alexander III’s body was laid to rest, plans went ahead for Nicholas and Alexandra’s wedding. Under normal circumstances, Alix would have returned to Darmstadt to await the end of the official mourning period for Alexander III before marrying the new tsar. This was changed not out of disrespect for the late tsar but to consolidate Nicholas’s reign. As the new monarch, it was imperative for him to begin his rule with stability and solidarity. The best way he could see that happening was to make Alexandra his wife as quickly as possible. Nicholas was determined that they should be married in the relative privacy at Livadia. His mother agreed, but it was his uncles—Serge and the other brothers of the late emperor—who quashed such a notion. It was the duty of a tsar to marry in the splendor of Saint Petersburg, they insisted. Burly and intimidating like Alexander, Nicky’s uncles were a force to be reckoned with. He relented. Queen Victoria was racked with anxiety over Alexandra’s fate. “Tomorrow morning poor dear Alicky’s fate will be sealed,” she wrote on November 13. “No two people were ever more devoted as she and he are and that is the
one
consolation I have, for otherwise the dangers and responsibilities fill me with anxiety and I shall constantly be thinking of them with anxiety.… I daily pray for them.”
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The wedding took place on the cold, gray morning of November 14, 1894, at the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. At 8:00 a.m., a twenty-one-gun salute was fired across the Neva River, signaling the start of the nuptial procession. Nicholas II, accompanied by the Prince of Wales, made the mile-and-a-half journey to the Winter Palace from his mother’s home, the Anichkov Palace. Behind the tsar and his uncle were a dozen state carriages transporting the various guests, including the king and queen of Denmark, the king and queen of Greece, the Grand Duke of Hesse, the Duke and Duchess of Coburg, the Princess of Wales, the crown prince and princess of Romania, and numerous other princes and princesses. “The list of the palace procession does not give a full idea of the scene,” wrote one witness. “Representatives of many nationalities were present in the halls [of the Winter Palace]. These consisted of Turks, Japanese, Chinese, Parsees, Bohkarians, and men of all colors and diversified garbs.”
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