Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (33 page)

The list of places visited continued to mount—Calgary, Banff, Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Hamilton, London, Niagara Falls, Belleville, and Kingston. Thousands flocked to local train stations as the royal carriage made one stop after another. The royal couple visited many of the same places that Edward VII had when he visited Canada more than forty years earlier. The most interesting part of the colonial tour was May’s encounter with nearly two thousand representatives of North America’s western native tribes. Anticipation of the royal visit prompted a gathering of the Black Foot, Blood, Piegan, Sarcee, Stony, and Cree natives, the likes of which had not been seen in Canada in two decades. The couple was welcomed at a marquee built by the tribes themselves bearing the inscription “
Kitaisimatsimpmom
—We Greet You.” George and May entered a pavilion, where they were met by six tribal chiefs. The only blemish that marred the day’s theatrical events occurred when Joseph Samson, chief of the Cree Nation, refused to shake hands with May, since “a woman was deemed unworthy in their eyes of consideration upon an occasion of such solemnity.”
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After boarding a train for Halifax, the duke and duchess sailed from the East Coast back to England in November 1901. When the
Ophir
arrived, May was somewhat pale because the Atlantic crossing had been a stormy one. On the eight-month voyage across the globe, they “covered 45,000 miles, laid 21 foundation stones, received 544 addresses, presented 4,329 medals, reviewed 62,000 troops, and shook hands with 24,855 people at official receptions.”
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In a speech to the Lord Mayor of London, George expressed his happiness at returning home and what the journey meant to him.

We rejoice at being home again, and our hearts are full of thankfulness for the protection which has been vouchsafed to us during our long and deeply interesting journey.… Our journey has extended over 33,000 miles by sea and 12,500 by land. Everywhere we have been profoundly impressed by the kindness and affectionate enthusiasm extended to us, by the universal declarations of loyalty to the Throne, and by the conscious pride in membership of our great Empire which so unmistakably declared itself. We have gained great, pleasant, and profitable experience, and we have made many friends.
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George was under no illusions as to who really deserved the credit for the success of the 1901 colonial tour. Shortly after their return, he wrote to May, “Somehow I can’t tell you, so I take the first opportunity of writing to say how deeply I am indebted to you darling for the splendid way in which you supported and helped me on our long Tour. It was you who made it a success.”
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Much to the delight of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, the couple’s return coincided with the king’s birthday on November 15. A few days after the celebration, Edward VII conferred on George and May the coveted titles Prince and Princess of Wales. “May purred with pleasure at her elevation …” wrote one of her biographers.
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Many felt it was long overdue and that the couple should have been feted immediately when George’s parents ascended the throne. Unlike his own parents, the king wanted to ensure that his heir was properly trained for the day he would become king. Throughout his six decades as Prince of Wales, Edward was denied all but the most cursory role as heir to the throne. Queen Victoria was fiercely protective of her sovereign prerogatives, and it was widely known that, for many years, she felt her son was not up to the task of being king. In contrast, Prince George was given access to state documents by his father, which he in turn presented to May for her insights. Along with their elevation in status came an increase in the standard of living for May and her family. Parliament voted on providing the couple with an annual income of £100,000. To put this amount in context, in 1901 “a farm labourer earned no more than forty pounds a year, and a domestic servant half that.”
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In today’s money, George and May enjoyed an annual income of more than $11 million.
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Their new titles and fortune meant a change of address for the new Wales family. They moved from their modest yet comfortable official residence, York House at Saint James’s Palace, to the palatial, red-brick Marlborough House, located a few blocks away from Buckingham Palace. George’s parents had lived there for decades, after Queen Victoria asked Parliament in 1849 to allow the Prince of Wales to live there when he turned nineteen. After £60,000 worth of renovations, George’s parents moved in after their wedding and remained there until they ascended the throne in January and, naturally, took up residence at Buckingham Palace. Now, it was home to May as she raised the next generation of Britain’s royal family, which expanded on December 20, 1902, with the birth of her fifth child at York Cottage, a son whom she named George Edward Alexander Edmund.

As Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma grew into a vivacious, kind young woman, one of the things that made a profound impact on her life was religion. Years later, she would take as her personal motto “More for you than for me.”
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Her family was devoutly Roman Catholic. From the age of eight, Zita undertook catechism lessons under a certain Father Travers, which were followed by her First Communion in 1902 in the chapel at Pianore. Faith was more than just a religious practice to the Duke and Duchess of Parma. They encouraged Zita and her siblings to seek after God with all their hearts and to make prayer and faith the very foundations of who they were. To help make this a reality for their children, the duke and duchess took their family to Rome in 1903 for the Silver Jubilee celebrations in honor of Pope Leo XIII. Only ten years old at the time, Zita recalled “the splendid ceremony, the chants, the grandeur of it all.”
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Like Alexandra of Russia, religion for Zita was not simply a pair of gloves to be taken on and off. It was a serious commitment to God. She and her sisters were trained from an early age to serve and minister to those in need not in spite of their royal position but because of it. Duke Robert I was one of those truly remarkable, enlightened royals who believed it was the duty of all people of high position to benefit and help those less fortunate. He made it a point to donate 10 percent of his income to the poor.

The Bourbon-Parma princesses made regular visits to textile factories where they bought up unused pieces of fabric and then personally sewed them into clothes to be handed out to peasants living in the villages near their estates. Around Pianore, where the standard of living was especially low and the people were desperately poor, Zita and her sisters routinely handed out clothing, food, and medicines to many who were sick with tuberculosis. The Duchess of Parma insisted her daughters think of themselves as “Little Sisters of the poor.” Each night after returning home, she made sure her daughters promptly changed all their clothes and disinfected themselves with alcohol. When someone once asked the duchess if there was any danger of infection to her daughters, she famously replied, “Love of one’s neighbour is the best disinfectant.”
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For the Bourbon-Parma family, religion truly began at home. Three of Zita’s sisters—Adelaide, Francesca, and Maria Antonia—became nuns, as did her maternal grandmother, Queen Adelaide of Portugal, whom she called “Mère Adelheide.” In light of such a devout upbringing, it came as no surprise that Princess Zita’s education was thoroughly religious. In 1902, Duke Robert sent her to a boarding school at Zangberg in Upper Bavaria to complete her formal schooling. Her parents felt it was suitable since the school itself was administered by Salesian nuns from the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary. Though most children would have been terrified to be sent off to a strange school at the age of ten in a country they did not know, for Zita, it was just another family affair. Her sisters were studying at Zangberg as well, and it was close to the homes of so many of her French and Austrian relatives. At Zangberg, from dawn until dusk, every part of Zita’s studies in history, art, languages, and music were submitted to the careful eyes of the nuns. “She always kept others at a certain distant [
sic
],” one of the nuns recalled of Zita, “and, though she had a fiery temper, never gave the slightest difficulty to the nuns or teachers.”
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She learned to play the piano but actually preferred the organ, which she played every Sunday at Mass. The princess fit in perfectly, and she felt safe and content during her time in Bavaria.

The grief that Tsarina Alexandra experienced over not having produced a son only grew worse with time. In spite of the damaging episode with Philippe Vachot, she still was drawn to the circle of mystics to which Stana and Militza belonged. It did not take long for Militza to introduce Alexandra to the teachings of another holy man, this one a monk named Seraphim of Sarov, who died in 1833. According to the Montenegrin sisters, it hardly mattered that he had been dead for decades. They claimed Alexandra must seek Seraphim’s intercession to conceive a son, but more than that, it “was imperative,” insisted Militza, “that Seraphim be declared a saint in order for Alexandra to benefit from his prayers. Never mind that it was too soon for Seraphim to be made a saint, never mind that there was opposition from the church against such a move.” Determined against all odds, Alexandra pleaded with Nicholas to use his position as head of the Russian Orthodox Church “to press for Seraphim’s case.”
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Against the concerns of the chief procurator of the Holy Synod, the tsarina succeeded in having Seraphim made a saint. At a moving ceremony in Sarov, a Baroque monastery east of Saint Petersburg, the relatively unknown Seraphim was canonized amid strong-voiced choirs and priests burning incense. Thousands of peasants walked for days to reach the monastery at Sarov, hoping with fervent prayers that Seraphim could heal their lame, sick, and infirmed. And by all accounts, he did. According to a number of witnesses, mute children became able to speak, people with crippled limbs could walk again, and even those appearing to suffer from insanity were healed. On the last night of Seraphim’s canonization ceremony, Alexandra “bathed in the waters of the Sarov River in hopes that she would at last conceive a male child.” In this, she was not alone; she was joined by Nicholas, the dowager empress, Ella, the tsar’s sister Olga, and many other members of the imperial family who made their way down to the river under the moonlight in groups of twos and threes. In the end, the “efforts seemed to have reaped their intended rewards, for within months of Seraphim becoming a saint Alexandra Feodorovna found to her satisfaction that she was again with child.”
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During her fifth pregnancy, she was racked with anxiety over whether or not she would deliver a boy. This undermined the empress’s already-fragile health. She was never well during her pregnancies, and her added anxiety afflicted her with very real pain in her back, legs, and head—her mother, Alice, had endured very similar symptoms, leading many to speculate about the genetic predisposition for illness in Queen Victoria’s bloodline. For days at a time, Alexandra would withdraw to her now-famous Mauve Boudoir in the hundred-room, white-and-yellow, neoclassical Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. Of all the rooms in all the palaces Alexandra called home, it was her Mauve Boudoir that was truly her refuge. Decorated entirely in mauve—the curtains, the linens, the flowers spread throughout the room—it was filled with books, chintz, lounges, and two pianos. She spent many hours alone resting or on her knees in prayer beneath jewel-encrusted icons. She would not see anyone, save for her husband, daughters, and a handful of close friends. “Why,
why
will God not grant me a son?” she sobbed to Nicholas.
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