Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (7 page)

At the center of Europe’s newest imperial power was the Prussian royal family, the Hohenzollerns. Selected by popular vote, King Wilhelm I of Prussia became the first German emperor—this specific wording was chosen rather than emperor of Germany, which was deemed unacceptable by the empire’s other rulers, as it offended their own statuses as heads of state.
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The Hohenzollerns, now both kings of Prussia and German emperors, became the foremost dynasty on the continent, ruling the preeminent imperial power. With its provenance in Bismarck’s
Realpolitik
and its foundation established through militarism, German-speaking Europe’s imperial forge was now complete. Germany was no longer an existential anomaly but was now a physical, geopolitical empire whose borders were vast, covering more than three hundred thousand square miles. In the west, it bordered France, Belgium, and Luxembourg and ran along the entire Baltic Sea up to Lithuania and Russia. It shared its southern border with Switzerland and Austria-Hungary.

Governing this vast new empire was no small feat, since united Germany now faced the same internal problems as the other great empires. Ethnic divisions required monitoring, since smaller states like Hesse and Mecklenburg felt little affection for Prussia or the Hohenzollerns. Religious sentiments were also volatile. Many of the northern states were fanatically—and in the case of Prussia, militantly—Lutheran. The south, however, was still Roman Catholic and felt some remaining connection with the nearby bastion of Catholicism in Europe—Austria. Keeping Germany’s new political system together was a series of complex royal, national, and federal trellises based around its constitution. Progressives snickered at the word’s use in this case, since the German “constitution” was not so much a constitution “in the traditional sense” as much as a “treaty between those sovereign territories that had agreed to form the German empire.” In essence, it could be described as “little more than a confederation of principalities (
Fürstenbund
).”
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Since it was now a federated empire, Germany was comprised of its constituent member states, each of whom still enjoyed a measure of autonomy. States as diverse as Bavaria, Mecklenburg, or the Ernestine duchies
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retained a certain legal and constitutional independence but only as part of a larger body. The independence of these states was pronounced enough that they still maintained their own ambassadors. Conversely, foreign courts sent their own envoys to Dresden, Munich, and the other constituent capitals.

From among these states, it was Prussia that became the standard-bearer of the empire. As part of Germany, Prussia comprised “65 per cent of the surface area and 62 per cent of the population,” giving it “
de facto
hegemony.”
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The Prussian capital of Berlin was the natural choice for the seat of the new imperial government, which was now responsible for foreign policy, the military, and other imperial matters. The individual rulers of the constituent states still maintained domestic and ceremonial duties as their royal prerogatives, but the political, administrative, and monarchical composition of the new German Empire was more or less grafted onto the setup of the Hohenzollern monarchy in Prussia, which had already been in existence for 170 years. While the empire did have something akin to a parliamentary body, the Reichstag, it was merely an evolution of the increasingly superfluous Prussian
Landtag
. It had little authority to govern beyond budgets and taxation, though it could enact some legislation. Its official power was also heavily counterbalanced by the Bundesrat, the council of the empire’s sovereign princes, whose approval was required to enact legislations. The ultimate power rested with the emperor. He was something of a neoabsolutist ruler. Even the imperial chancellor—the first of whom was, naturally, Otto von Bismarck, who was created a prince in 1871 by Wilhelm I for his role in uniting Germany—was answerable only to the crown rather than the Reichstag. Almost half a century later, this structure would prove to be imperial Germany’s Achilles’ heel.

In the year following the end of the Franco-Prussian War, when Dona Holstein was thirteen and May Teck was five, another child joined the rarefied circle of Europe’s last imperial consorts. On June 6, 1872, a baby girl was born to Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt and his wife, Princess Alice, at the New Palace in Darmstadt, capital of the small German state of Hesse.
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The baby’s proud parents named her Victoria Alix Helena Louise Beatrice, or simply Alix for short. At her Lutheran christening on July 1, Alix’s godparents were chosen: her maternal uncle and aunt the Prince and Princess of Wales; the Tsarevitch and Tsarevna of Russia; her maternal aunt Princess Beatrice of England; her great-great-aunt the Duchess of Cambridge; and Princess Anne of Prussia.

The baby’s mother, Alice, was the third child of Queen Victoria, and she chose the names in honor of each of her sisters—Alix was the Germanicized form of Alice. Little Alix’s father, Louis, was the nephew of the Grand Duke of Hesse, and he was second in line to the throne after his father. He and Alice were married, almost sight unseen, in 1862. The union had been largely orchestrated by Alice’s father, Prince Albert, who dreamed of the day Germany would be unified under a liberal, parliamentary monarchy following Britain’s example. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert used their greatest asset to help bring about their Pan-German vision: royal marriages. Their eldest daughter, Vicky, had married the heir to the Prussian throne, but it did not take long for that dream to flounder; she was viewed with bitterness and suspicion in Berlin for her unwillingness to forsake her Englishness and become a true Prussian. Alice, it was hoped, could redeem the dream, but when Prince Albert died unexpectedly from typhoid fever in 1861, Germany’s champion was gone, and the possibility of marriage between the royal houses of England and Hesse looked bleak. In response to her father’s death, and to escape her mother’s intense mourning, Alice hastily agreed to marry Prince Louis. The ceremony on July 1, 1862, was held in the dining room at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England. Queen Victoria described it as being more like a funeral than a wedding. So consumed was the queen by her own continuing grief over Albert’s death that she barely noticed Alice’s departure from the family circle: “Much as she has been to me … and dear and precious as a comfort and an assistance, I hardly miss her at all, or felt her going—so utterly alone am I.”
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Though their marriage was loving and genuine, a gulf emerged between the couple—Princess May’s maternal grandmother, the Duchess of Cambridge, described it as “an insignificant match.” Like her father, Alice was intellectual, cultivated, and a gifted erudite. By contrast, Louis, in the words of one British politician, was a “dull boy” from “a dull family in a dull country.”
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It was well known that the prince was shy, tongue-tied, and easily influenced by others, especially by his mother-in-law, Queen Victoria. Life in Darmstadt was also a far cry from the abundant surroundings of Alice’s childhood in England. The semipenurious nature of the Hessian court was highlighted by the fact that Louis and Alice’s first home was a little house on some dingy street in Darmstadt’s Old Quarter. They would be forced to wait until a proper residence could be built for them.

Though their marriage lacked the intellectual stimulation Alice craved, she and Louis were blessed with many children, each of whom they adored. When Alix was born in 1872, she joined three sisters—Victoria (b. 1863), Elizabeth (“Ella,” b. 1864), and Irene (b. 1866)—and two brothers, Ernest Louis (“Ernie,” b. 1868) and Frederick (“Frittie,” b. 1870). She was later joined by another sister, Marie (“May,” b. 1874). The birth of seven children so close together did not stop Alice from pursuing projects to improve the quality of life in Hesse. She was vitally important to the establishment of modern nursing practices in Germany. She established such a high reputation for nursing that some of the more progressive minds in Britain compared her to Florence Nightingale. In Darmstadt, she established her own facility, the Alice Hospital, which treated the city’s poor at no cost. Alice’s pioneering efforts in Hessian medical care in the 1870s proved invaluable during the Franco-Prussian War, when hundreds of wounded soldiers were sent to Darmstadt for medical attention.

The first years of Alix’s life were similar to those of May Teck’s. Both princesses were raised by loving parents who lavished upon them affection. In this atmosphere, little Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt thrived. So warm and loving was her disposition that many who met her could not help but call her “Sunny.” Princess Alice once described her daughter as “a sweet, merry little person, always laughing and [who had] a dimple in one cheek.”
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Others in the family, especially Queen Victoria with her infatuation for nicknames for her grandchildren, took to calling her Alicky.

Alix’s life in Hesse centered on Darmstadt, a medieval city of seventy thousand people located just a few miles from the bank of the Rhine River. Its narrow cobblestone streets wove through the city, converging in the center at the New Palace, which had been designed and built specifically for Alice and her family and was subsidized mostly by Queen Victoria personally. The parks that surrounded the palace were thickly dotted with trees and bushes. For vacations, Louis and Alice enjoyed taking their family to the closest thing they had to a holiday home—the gray, turreted castle of Kranichstein, forty miles northeast of Darmstadt. Its bucolic setting, with its dense forests, private lake, and free-roaming wildlife, afforded the family a respite from the hustle and bustle of Darmstadt.

At the time Alix was born in 1872, Hesse was ruled by her paternal great-uncle Grand Duke Louis III. The nation had changed shape numerous times throughout the centuries and had experienced a long and colorful history. For more than six hundred years, it was an important member of the Holy Roman Empire as a landgraviate, a feudal state ruled by an imperial count (or landgrave) that was answerable to the emperor. After the empire was dismantled in 1806, Hesse threw in its lot with Napoleon. As a reward for supporting the French Empire, Napoleon elevated Hesse to a grand duchy. Later, it was a partisan member of the German confederations until it joined with the other states as part of the German Empire.

The rulers of Hesse were known mainly for two traits. First, they had a talent for making bad alliances. In the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–48, the landgrave of Hesse sided with the Holy Roman emperor, who suffered a long, drawn-out, humiliating defeat. Two centuries later, the landgrave of Hesse took up the cause of revolutionary France during the Napoleonic Wars. When the Bonapartist forces were defeated, Hesse was forced to give up huge swaths of land at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 but was allowed to keep its grand ducal status. The final humiliation came when Louis III sided against Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. The outcome was nothing short of a disaster for the grand duke and his country. When Prussia emerged victorious after only two months, it seized the entire northern half of Hesse and deposited a regiment of Prussian soldiers in Darmstadt for six weeks. Thankfully, the general population was spared from violence by their Prussian occupiers, but the country was forced to pay an indemnity of 3 million florins. Princess Alice was forced to use most of her £30,000 dowry to go toward payment of this. The situation became so difficult for Darmstadt’s citizens that their burgomaster hung himself. As a consequence of all these factors, Alix grew up in the firm belief that Hesse was completely isolated “from the rest of Germany, which she looked on as Prussia and as a different country.”
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The second trait that the Hessian dynasty was famous for was its royal connections. Over the centuries, the family had succeeded in forging a number of matrimonial alliances. Alix’s father had married an English princess. The family tree also included a long list of reigning consorts, which included a queen of Prussia, an empress of Russia, an imperial electress, and four grand duchesses. This connection with Russia—Louis III’s sister was the Russian empress—was what saved Hesse from being permanently swallowed up after the war in 1866. One day, Alix would be able to add herself to this list of Hessian marital triumphs by becoming the last empress of Russia.