Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (28 page)

Things were just as bad between Alexandra and Dona. The two empresses never got along, and this latest visit only reminded them of that. In fact, Alexandra’s hatred for Dona was one of the only things she had in common with the members of the Russian court, whom the latter failed to impress with her lack of style. “Thank God the German visit is over,” Nicholas wrote to his mother afterward. “On the whole Wilhelm was very cheerful, calm and courteous, while she [Dona] tried to be charming, and looked very ugly in rich clothes without taste; the hats she wore in the evenings … were particularly impossible.”
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At the end of the visit, Wilhelm and Nicholas were better off than they had been before, but there was no doubt that Dona and Alexandra were worlds apart.

By the autumn of 1897, the Duchess of Teck’s health was once again failing her. In her heart, she knew her time was growing short. “Oh, I don’t want to die,” she cried. “My children, my husband, need me.”
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In October, tests revealed a malignant tumor, prompting her doctors to perform emergency surgery. Follow-up tests revealed the operation was unsuccessful. The doctors decided to perform another emergency surgery, less than forty-eight hours after the first. The combination of two high-risk operations in only two days proved too much for the elderly duchess. She passed away from heart failure at 3:00 a.m. on October 20, 1897. In a letter to the duchess’s sister, Grand Duchess Augusta, the Princess of Wales described the scene after Mary Adelaide died.

Everyone plunged in the most terrible grief – poor man [Duke of Teck] heart-broken utterly crushed, poor darling May & her two brothers calm but in perfect despair – Uncle George [Duke of Cambridge] very much upset – Bertie was also there having come up from Newmarket with the former – [Bertie’s] Sister Louise also there … so nice & feeling – We had a long talk together. Darling May who so far bears up wonderfully well took me upstairs at once into Mary’s room! Where she was lying in her
last
sleep. She looked
so
beautiful & peaceful with such a happy expression on her dear face.
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“I dread to think how we can live without her,” May wrote to her aunt Augusta. “For Papa it is cruel & his sad state makes it so much worse. He was so dependent on Mama for everything & now God knows what he will do.”
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Queen Victoria wrote to one of her granddaughters, “You mourn dear Aunt Mary Teck with us, as I’m sure you wld. She was a true, warm friend & so clever and charming … Poor Uncle Teck is in a most sad & anxious state which is a terrible trouble to the poor sons & dear good May.”
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Consumed with grief, May York rushed to be with her aunt Augusta, who was in the south of France at the time. The death of her sister came as a crushing blow to the grand duchess, who was living through an already unbearable period in her own life. Her granddaughter Princess Marie became pregnant by a palace servant and was being blackmailed. In this situation, the Duchess of York’s giving nature came to the fore once again. She took it upon herself to care for her Mecklenburg cousin, bringing her back to England with her and allowing her to be in an environment where she felt safe and protected.

As the twentieth century dawned, May learned she was pregnant again. This news was especially welcome because her family was deeply saddened by the death of her father, the Duke of Teck, in January 1900. The death of his wife in 1897 had precipitated the duke’s final collapse. In his last three years, he retreated entirely from public life. After spending some time with relatives in Germany, he returned to White Lodge and lived in near seclusion under the care of a doctor and two male nurses. He even refused to see his children except for brief periods every few months. To console herself during her pregnancy and in an effort to keep her spirits up, May remained in close contact with her aunt Augusta, who became a second mother to the duchess after her parents died. The Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz wrote to her niece that her “old loving heart will be with you in the ensuing century as it is and ever has been in this.”
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Just five months after her father died on May 17, 1900, May went into labor again. She delivered a son, Henry, whom the family affectionately called “Harry,” a common British nickname for Henry. Emperor Wilhelm II was asked to be the godfather as a sign of the closer relationship George and May had with Wilhelm and Dona. Things were going so well between the two couples that, later that year, the Yorks were invited to Germany for Crown Prince Willy’s confirmation in the Lutheran Church. “I think I have done my duty and may now
stop
,” May wrote to Aunt Augusta after this delivery, “as having babies is highly distasteful to me …”
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Queen Victoria, once again chosen as godmother, recorded in her journal that Harry “is a very pretty little boy.”
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The queen grew to love her York great-grandchildren immensely. She even insisted that they take long holidays with her at Osborne House. May’s eldest son, David, had vivid memories of his great-grandmother. As an adult, he recalled that “such was the majesty that surrounded Queen Victoria, that she was regarded almost as a divinity of whom even her own family stood in awe. However, to us children she was ‘Gangan,’ a childish interpretation of ‘great-grandmama.’”
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The birth of Prince Harry was not the only great-grandchild the queen received at that time. Less than a year earlier, on June 26, 1899, Tsarina Alexandra gave birth to her third daughter, Marie, at the Peterhof Palace, Russia’s eight-hundred-foot-long answer to Versailles. The arrival of another girl was deeply upsetting in Russia. Alexandra’s sister-in-law Grand Duchess Xenia summed up the public sentiment: “What a disappointment that it isn’t a son. Poor Alix!” Queen Victoria likewise understood the dynastic misfortune of another daughter. “I regret the 3rd girl for the country,” she wrote to the tsar. “I know that an Heir would be more welcome than a daughter.”
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In England, May York found that, despite her consistent pregnancies, Queen Victoria began relying upon her more than ever. The queen was now nearly blind, and although she had innumerable relations upon which to rely, there was something about May that attracted her. The duchess’s critics accused her of being too simple and unaffected, too attached to the common man, to be a proper queen and empress. But Victoria saw her as a mirror for herself and had the utmost faith in her. “Every time I see them I love and like them more and respect them greatly,” the queen wrote of the Yorks. “Thank God! Georgie has got such an excellent, useful, and good wife.”
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May was eager to please, admitting as much to her old governess: “Only give me a chance, & I will do things as well as anybody—after all, why shouldn’t I?”
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Queen Victoria’s opinion of “Dear May” was that she was “so dear &
und passt so gut zu uns
” (“and fits in so well”).
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While the Duchess of York was being groomed by Queen Victoria, Empress Augusta Victoria was weathering a difficult period in her life, one that has been studied by historians and psychologists alike for decades. Stress, overwork, and constant childbearing were taking their toll on the thirty-nine-year-old empress. She was also becoming concerned about her marriage. Though there was no doubt of the love between the emperor and empress, Wilhelm had taken to regularly traveling abroad, usually without his wife. For a woman whose identity was so intimately connected with her husband, this was upsetting. All these factors led the empress to a minor breakdown in 1897. Her children’s military governor, Major General Adolf von Deines, reported, “H.M. broke down from exhaustion and suffered not only a slight influenza attack, but such a nervous shock, that simply taking it easy will no longer help her.”
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Although Wilhelm and his staff had hoped otherwise, Dona’s behavior did not improve after she recovered from her bout of influenza. On the contrary, the atmosphere within the Prussian royal family became even more highly charged. It comes as little surprise that one of the major catalysts continued to be Wilhelm himself. His announcement that he would be making his first visit to Britain in 1899 after five years sent Dona—normally the model of submissive, wifely behavior—into such a nervous fit that she claimed she was too ill to go. In what was becoming a common occurrence, she pressured her husband to cancel the trip altogether. As with his mother, Wilhelm had a complicated relationship with his English relatives and their country. Perhaps more than any other nation or its people, the emperor desperately craved British affections. Dona had come to resent having to share her husband with a country for which she held little love. In the broader picture, Dona’s refusal to join her husband in visiting Britain was based upon the ongoing, politically charged Boer War. The empress publicly sided with the Dutch against the British, who were portrayed as violent aggressors. She told Bernhard von Bülow, the German chancellor, that British “mammonism” was strangling “the brave and godly Boers.”
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In the end, Wilhelm refused to accept Dona’s recalcitrance. He flat out ordered her to accompany him, which she did in November along with two of their sons. The state banquet given for the Hohenzollerns in Saint George’s Hall of Windsor Castle was “unusually brilliant” but “very formal.”
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Dona sat next to the Prince of Wales, the person in the British royal family she hated the most.

The situation had not improved any later that year when Nicholas II and Alexandra paid a visit to Potsdam. It was one of the rare times that the tsar and tsarina ever set foot in Germany. Achieving the visit was no easy feat. It took Bernhard von Bülow months to convince the tsar to come to Potsdam. The visit was a failure at best. Wilhelm’s unpredictable personality took hold, which led him to overshadow the visit by signing a treaty with Britain over the disputed Samoan Islands in the Pacific. Nicholas, who had agreed to come out of familial loyalty to Wilhelm, was not impressed by this snub and responded with jokes that did not go over well at the Prussian court. Alexandra, whose health was poor the entire trip, was deeply offended when Dona personally insulted her by refusing to escort the tsarina to the Charlottenburg station when she and Nicholas returned to Saint Petersburg. This served as the last straw for Alexandra, who never wanted to lay eyes on Dona again.

Two family deaths in 1900 only worsened Dona’s high-strung personality. The first loss was her mother, Ada, who died at Dresden in January, reportedly from pleurisy. “Now poor dear Aunt Ada has died,” the Empress Frederick wrote to her daughter Sophie, “and Dona seems in great grief, and to feel her poor Mother’s death even more than I expected. I am truly so sorry, she was an old friend of mine since our young days, she was 3 years older than I am. She was so kind-hearted and good-natured, and very pretty in her youth.”
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The second family death that affected the empress was that of her cousin Prince Christian Victor of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, who died in October from enteric fever while he was serving with the British Sixtieth Rifle division in South Africa. “I could not believe it,” Queen Victoria wrote when she heard of her grandson’s death. “It seemed too dreadful and heart-breaking, this dear, excellent, gallant boy, beloved by all, such a good as well as a brave and capable officer, gone.”
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