Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (38 page)

This latest separation from her children brought May’s parenting into the public eye yet again, once more earning her no shortage of criticism. Shortly before Ena and Alfonso’s wedding, May was faced with a parenting crisis of sorts with each of her children. David began showing signs of deafness in one ear; Bertie’s stammer was becoming worse, as too were his knock-knees, which required him to wear painful splints day and night; Mary had become a disruptive influence on her brothers during their lessons; Harry had uncontrollable fits of both crying and laughing; and George broke down sobbing in his mother’s presence. Unlike most modern-day parents, May refused to address these issues, at least until after the visits to Spain and Norway. One of May’s biographers observed the following:

Modern psychologists believe that George and Mary took too little trouble to understand their children. Whereas Edward and Alexandra spoiled the grandchildren, their son and his wife wished to see a return to sound Victorian educational standards and moral behaviour. Implicit obedience was exacted from sons. Disobedience brought instant retribution. It seemed as though in rooting out the bad they sometimes overlooked the good in their offspring.… Consequently they committed blunders over their sons’ training which, except in degree, differed little from the academic extremism which made George III’s sons what they became and was incredibly repeated by Victoria and the Prince Consort in the case of Edward.
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The Empress Frederick once wrote that May “does not seem to have the passionate tenderness for her little ones wh. seems so natural to me.” She also said May “has something very cold and stiff—& distant in her manner—each time one sees her again one has to break the ice afresh.”
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This was an ironic statement coming from Vicky, since she herself had been on the receiving end of some very harsh criticism for her own mothering in the way she raised Wilhelm II, Charly, and her other children. May was not a hands-on mother who ever made maudlin displays of affection the way Queen Alexandra did. The princess’s distaste for and repulsion of illnesses meant she took a stiff, inflexible, sometimes even unsympathetic approach with her children when they were sick. Her expectation was for them to respond to it the same way she would.

It would be ungenerous to say that the Princess of Wales was a cold, distant mother and nothing else. She made an effort to create a tranquil home life for her children—free from scandals, drama, and the other tribulations that plagued her own childhood. Nonetheless, her parenting style is somewhat ironic given how affectionate her own parents were. Historians seem to be divided over Princess May as a mother. Some praise her virtues like her strength, others criticize her aloofness. Few seem to have found middle ground. A careful review of all the facts shows that Princess May was both. There certainly is no doubt that she lacked maternal instincts toward young children—the same was often said of Queen Victoria, but in her later years the queen became very affectionate with her grandchildren. Affectionate is a word that would never be associated with May—even later in life. But those qualities for which May was criticized—her reserved emotions, outward calm, and ostensible aloofness—would become invaluable assets in the decades ahead. These qualities would even help the British monarchy survive one of the greatest crises in its history.

10
Life’s Unexpected Trials
 

(1905–10)

T
he humiliating end to the Russo-Japanese War was only the beginning of Alexandra’s problems in Saint Petersburg. The war had once and for all stripped away the facade of impenetrability that surrounded the Romanov dynasty. In June 1905, the crew of the battleship
Potemkin
, docked at Odessa on the Black Sea, mutinied. In no time, the revolt spread into Odessa itself, where fighting to suppress the uprising resulted in two thousand people dead. Before the crew of the
Potemkin
could be apprehended, the “crew sailed the ship to Romania and liberty.”
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For the first time, Russia’s disaffected masses began to see that autocracy was more vulnerable than they had been led to believe. Things got so bad that “between Bloody Sunday and the late fall, Nicholas and his military advisers assigned 15,297 companies of infantry and 3,665 squadrons of cavalry, with 224 cannon and 124 machine guns, to suppress strikes and peasant riots.”
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Almost all essential services in Moscow and Saint Petersburg shut down. Banks, grocery stores, public transportation, telegraph stations, and even running water stopped functioning because the workers had walked off their jobs. Mob violence swept cities and towns as people sang “La Marseillaise” and began crying out for a republic and an end to autocracy. Instead of fighting pockets of revolutionaries, the government was forced to contend with a mutinous population that numbered in the millions. Unrest soon spread beyond Russia into its imperial territories. Within a few months, Riga and Warsaw were on strike.

There was little doubt that control was slipping from the government’s hands. Throughout the summer, foreign newspapers were reporting rumors that the tsar would be deposed, with Alexei taking his place under the regency of four senior grand dukes. In the end, it was Count Serge Witte, one of Russia’s most able statesmen, who devised a solution. He called it the October Manifesto. This document promised the people civil liberties, such as freedom of religion and speech, as well as Russia’s first elected assembly, whose votes would be required to make law. When Witte presented the manifesto to Nicholas, only one other person was present: Alexandra. “The Empress,” the count recalled, “sat stiff as a ramrod, her face lobster-red, and did not utter a single word.” Determined to preserve autocracy, Nicholas II was unwilling to sign the manifesto. It fell to his cousin Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaievich (“Nikolasha”), the levelheaded, tall, imposing commander of the Russian military, to force the tsar to accept progress. Furious that his cousin was unwilling to accept reforms, Nikolasha stormed into the Winter Palace and declared, “I’m going now to the Czar and I will beg him to sign the manifesto and the Witte program. Either he signs or in his presence I will put a bullet through my head with this revolver.”
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Pressed between a rock and a hard place, the tsar accepted the manifesto on October 17, 1905. With the stroke of a pen, he ended three centuries of absolute rule by the Romanovs. In a letter to his mother, Nicholas II poured out his justification for accepting the end of autocracy in Russia.

There were only two ways open: To find an energetic soldier and crush the rebellion by sheer force … that would mean rivers of blood and in the end we should be where we started … The other way out would be to give the people their civil rights, freedom of speech and press, also to have all laws confirmed by State Duma—that of course would be a constitution. Witte defends this very energetically.

From all over Russia they cried for it, they begged for it, and around me many—very many—held the same views … There was no other way out than to cross oneself and give what everyone was asking for. My only consolation is that such is the will of God, and this grave decision will lead my dear Russia out of the intolerable chaos she has been in for nearly a year.
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The reactions to the manifesto were swift and sharp. “That was the end, the end of the dynasty and the end of the empire,” wrote Sandro, Alexandra’s brother-in-law. “A brave jump from the precipice would have spared us the agony of the remaining twelve years.”
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The Russian aristocrat Princess Galitzine observed that “something great was crashing—as if all Russian tradition had been annihilated by a single blow.”
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Under the October Manifesto, Russia convened its first parliament, the Duma, in April 1906. Dressed in her imperial finery with pearls, diamonds, sash, and a flowing train, Alexandra accompanied Nicholas and Minnie to the opening session in the Saint George Room of the Winter Palace. As the imperial party entered the hall, the looks of hatred for the tsar and tsarina from the Duma members were unmistakable. “They looked at us as upon their enemies, and I could not make myself stop looking at certain faces, so much did they seem to reflect an incomprehensible hatred for all of us,” the dowager empress admitted.
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This was a sentiment that Sandro agreed with. “I saw burning hatred in the faces of some of the parliamentarians,” he recalled.
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Members of the imperial family were not the only ones to notice the hostility in the Duma. Count Vladimir Fredericks, the head of the imperial household, observed, “They gave one the impression of a gang of criminals who are only waiting for the signal to throw themselves upon the Ministers and cut their throats. What wicked faces! I will never again set foot among those people.”
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The reaction of the Duma was not surprising when its composition is examined. One contemporary noted that “out of the nearly 493 members, 380 have been elected. Of these, the Government can count on the support of 20.”
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The existential realities of both the Duma and the Romanov monarchy meant that these two forces would be diametrically opposed. “The Romanovs ruled Russia by dint of superstition disguised as religious faith,” wrote one Russian historian. “As democrats, they made no sense at all.”
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Russia’s mounting woes weighed heavily on Tsarina Alexandra, but there were more than political tribulations burdening her. She was deeply troubled by Alexei’s hemophilia, which Russia’s forty court doctors were powerless to combat. There was nothing that medical science could do for the heir to the throne. If Alexandra was going to find any relief for her son—whom she and Nicholas affectionately called “Baby”—she would have to do it herself. That relief came in the form of an unkempt, scraggly peasant from Siberia named Gregory Rasputin. Born Gregory Efimovich Novik and raised in the distant village of Pokrovskoie in the remote Russian wilderness, Rasputin—a epithet which meant “Vagabond” or “the Debauched”—was tall and burly with mysterious, dark eyes and a long, disheveled black beard. His meeting with Alexandra and Nicholas came in 1905, after it was arranged through a mutual friend, Anna Viroubova. “We’ve made the acquaintance of a man of God, Grigory from the Tobolsk Guberniya,” the tsar wrote in his diary.
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Rasputin’s arrival on the scene provided an answer to the empress’s prayers. Day in and day out, she was consumed by grief over her son’s health. Her feelings were largely ones of guilt for having passed the defective genes for hemophilia on to Alexei. This only exacerbated her own health problems, which were getting worse: “For days on end, she could be found in the Mauve Boudoir lying on her sofa, suffering from very real and acute pains in the head, back, legs, or heart.”
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Added to these were difficulty breathing, panic attacks, neuralgia in her facial muscles, and constant earaches. The distress over her son’s dangerous disease caused Alexandra to suffer a complete breakdown, both physically and mentally. Her ailments, many of which had come and gone throughout the years, completely overtook her. There were many theories as to their origins. Her physician, Dr. Eugene Botkin, believed the symptoms were psychosomatic. Others ascribed them to a childhood injury that had never healed properly; shortly after her mother’s death, little Princess Alix fell through a glass window, leaving her legs shredded and bleeding. This caused her to walk with a pronounced limp for many years. Others—mostly modern scholars—have theorized she was a victim of porphyria, the genetic disorder that is believed to have afflicted King George III and Dona’s sister-in-law Charly. Whatever the source, Alexandra’s symptoms had a very real impact on her body. Her five pregnancies, almost back to back, also took a heavy toll on her. These pregnancies were almost constant for ten years, and each proved worse than the last. Under circumstances such as these, it is not surprising that Alexandra succumbed to an endless list of maladies. Her poor state of health was also a constant source of worry for Nicky. He once admitted to his mother that he was “completely run down mentally by worrying over her health.”
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In her moments of despair, Alexandra turned to her faith. She was convinced that all was in God’s hands, and according to Anna Viroubova and some of the other mystic members of the Romanovs, so was Rasputin. Father Gregory, as they called him, reputedly had the power to perform miracles. These included (but were not limited to) curing disease, healing wounds, and even stopping the flow of blood. This ability, combined with his own personal endorsement as a supposed miracle worker from God Himself, made this Siberian monk, this cipher, invaluable to Alexandra of Russia.

With Crown Prince Willy married, it was not long before the Prussian royal family expanded again. In February 1906, Dona’s son Eitel-Fritz married Sophie-Charlotte (“Lotte”) of Oldenburg at the Stadtschloss. At both the civil and religious ceremonies held on the wedding day, the bride wore a pearl-white silk dress with a four-yard-long train and a crown of diamonds set in green velvet. The couple had met at Willy and Cecilie’s wedding when they were introduced to each other by the empress. Augusta Victoria considered Lotte a suitable choice for her son because not only was Lotte’s mother a Prussian princess but the empress considered the Oldenburg women to be “quiet, inoffensive, and suitable for a prince.”
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Their engagement was announced in October 1905 at Glücksburg, where the emperor and empress were attending the wedding of Dona’s niece to Wilhelm’s cousin the Duke of Coburg. Unlike Willy and Cecilie, Eitel-Fritz and Lotte were mismatched from the beginning. Since reaching adulthood, Wilhelm II had been concerned about rumors surrounding the wayward and immoral Eitel-Fritz. Dona was equally troubled. She even encouraged her son Oscar, who was by then serving in the Prussian army, to avoid visiting Potsdam too often because she was afraid that Eitel-Fritz would be a negative influence on him. The only remedy Dona and Wilhelm could think of was for Eitel-Fritz to get married as quickly as possible.

There was no facade that his marriage to Lotte was a love match. It was one of convenience over anything else, especially for the attractive and wealthy bride. Lotte had lived most of her life under the watchful eye of her burdensome stepmother, the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg. Eager to escape her life in Oldenburg, the prospect of marrying into the Prussian royal family appealed to her greatly. But it became clear within a matter of weeks of the wedding that the union was not a happy one. Eitel-Fritz continued his dalliances with other women, leaving his wife to occupy herself for days at a stretch. Gracious and proud, Lotte did not utter a word of complaint or animosity toward the prince or his family at the time. She simply retreated to her castle in the Tiergarten and painted, read, and entertained a few close friends. According to one contemporary, when Lotte “found out what a sorry personage she had linked her fate with she withdrew into a kind of haughty reserve, from which she has never emerged.”
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