Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (8 page)

Shortly before Alix’s first birthday, her pleasant childhood came to an abrupt end. Her brothers Frittie and Ernie were playing together when the two-year-old Frittie slipped from a windowsill and fell twenty feet onto a balustrade. He died a few hours later from a brain hemorrhage. The fall itself was not enough to kill the toddler. His cause of death was far more sinister. Frittie suffered from hemophilia, the dreaded disease that prevents blood from clotting. Had he not been a hemophiliac, he may have survived the fall. The confirmation of Frittie’s illness came shortly before the accident when a small cut on his ear bled unstoppably for three days. What was even more tragic about his death was the fact that he inherited the disease from his mother.

In the makeup of hemophilia, it is carried by women but is suffered only by men—only in infinitesimally rare cases, when first cousins married, had female sufferers been reported. Princess Alice had herself inherited the defective gene from Queen Victoria. Alice’s brother Leopold, Duke of Albany, was a hemophiliac. Leopold had defied the odds and survived into adulthood—and even married and started a family. Moved by Frittie’s death, he sent Alice his condolences. “I know too well what it is to suffer as he would have suffered, and the great trials of not being able to enjoy life or to know what happiness is,” he wrote. “I cannot help saying to myself that it is perhaps well that the dear child has been spared all the trials and possible miseries of a life of ill health like mine.”
³⁴
Princess Alice was overcome with grief over the fact that she was partly responsible for her son’s death. She described to Queen Victoria the pain of losing her child: “The horror of my darling’s sudden death at times torments me too much … He was such a bright child … I miss the little feet, the coming to me … and Ernie feels so lost, poor love.”
³⁵

At the time Frittie died in 1873, hemophilia was a little-understood disease that had only recently been acknowledged by medical science. A more comprehensive understanding of it did not emerge until after 1918. Frittie’s diagnosis as a hemophiliac brought with it a moment of grim realization not only for Alix’s parents but for all of Queen Victoria’s descendants. There was no doubt that the Duke of Albany’s case was not an isolated incident within the royal family. The defective genes causing hemophilia were being passed on by the queen of England herself. The fact that hemophilia was not apparent in the families of either of her parents has led many to wonder whether or not the disease actually began with Queen Victoria. John Van der Kiste, one of the most widely known modern royal biographers, made this assertion about hemophilia in his book,
Queen Victoria’s Children
: “Medical and scientific theory [
sic
] have singled Queen Victoria out as the first royal carrier of haemophilia. The gene may have originated in her by spontaneous mutation, or it may have been inherited through her mother, though no instances of it have been traced in the Duchess of Kent’s relations. Leopold was the only victim among the Queen’s children and therefore the only male carrier.” Van der Kiste also asserted that because her father was a member of the British royal family, had he or any of his relatives been hemophiliacs, it is doubtful they could have hidden it from the public.
³⁶

Surprisingly, out of Queen Victoria’s four sons, Leopold was the hemophiliac, but over time, it would be discovered that three of her daughters—Vicky, Alice, and Beatrice—were all carriers who passed it on to some of their children. It was eventually proven that two of Victoria’s grandsons and six of her great-grandsons were hemophiliacs. It has been generally agreed upon that Victoria never knew that she was the source of the defective gene, instead blaming her husband’s lecherous Coburg relatives. On a personal level, Alice realized in the wake of Frittie’s death that any of her daughters could be carriers. What no one knew at the time was that Alix was indeed a carrier, and the consequences of that fact would one day help destabilize one of the most powerful empires the world had ever known.

2
“
Sleeping Beauty
!”
 

(1873–83)

I
n Britain, Princess May and her siblings continued to enjoy a relatively stable family life untainted by political upheaval, war, or illness. Like most Victorian children, their first years were spent largely in their nursery. From an early age, May and her brothers showed ample proof that they had inherited their father’s volatile temper. The boys were especially boisterous and could be regularly spotted wrestling on their nursery floor. These opportunities afforded young May the chance to hone her natural tact and diplomacy, as she was often required to play peacemaker between her rowdier brothers.

Unlike other upper-class families of the era, who gave the care of their children almost exclusively over to governesses, the Duke and Duchess of Teck were actively involved in raising their children. This was due, at least in part, to their strained finances, which meant their children could never be formally educated or cared for in the same way other royals were. Their parents did make a concerted effort to bring in some household staff—they were eventually able to hire a single governess, the Hanoverian-born Anna Mund. When the children were little, this absence of formal staff suited the duke very well, since he loved nothing more than to poke his head into the spacious, airy nursery at Kensington Palace, or to play on the floor with his sons; formal nurses and tutors would have frowned upon such indecorous intrusions. While Mary Adelaide was somewhat less hands-on than her husband, she was keen to ensure her children grew up with great probity. Thanks to her influence, paramount in May’s formative years was a strong sense of noblesse oblige, which suited the kindhearted princess, who was praised for being “a personable young woman, thoughtful, studious and observant.”
³⁷

When the family went off to White Lodge, their Richmond Park estate on the outskirts of London, an even less disciplined atmosphere prevailed than at Kensington. Visitors to White Lodge often found May and her brothers playing with their more famous cousins, the children of the Prince and Princess of Wales. As children of the future king, they were in the spotlight far more often than the Teck children and were much more conscious of their vaunted position. More rambunctious than the Tecks, it was not uncommon to see “the Wales brood on the warpath, sliding on tea trays and ringing bells to call the servants endlessly.”
³⁸
Their behavior, though, was not always endearing. The Wales cousins had become so unruly that the Teck children—and most of their other childhood friends—got into the habit of putting their best toys away in the nursery cupboard before a playdate to ensure they were not manhandled, damaged, or completely destroyed.

Playdates were not the only time May saw her more famous cousins. The Duchess of Teck and the Princess of Wales were regularly seen out and about doing charity work with their daughters in tow. During one charity bazaar at Kew Gardens, May and her mother ran their own booth with Princess Alexandra and “the Wales girls”—Maud, Victoria (“Toria”), and Louise. When a wealthy lady bought a fan with Princess May’s portrait on it, she asked the young girl to autograph it. “With pleasure,” she replied excitedly, “but are you not mistaking me for one of my cousins of Wales?”
³⁹
These childhood memories that May created with her cousins marked the beginning of some ultimately historic relationships. She became lifelong friends with Princess Maud and got to know two young princes who would change the course of her life. These boys were Princess Alexandra’s sons Albert Victor (“Eddy”) and George (“Georgie”). The two brothers would have a profound impact on May Teck’s life, with one of them destined to be her fiancé and the other her husband.

In the years following the death of Alix’s brother Frittie, her mother, Alice, did everything in her power to give her children as loving and secure a home as possible. The greatest support for Alix’s family during this time was the redoubtable Queen Victoria. She and Alice wrote to each other on a regular basis. The princess asked her mother for advice on everything from proper eating habits for her children to her choices of tutors and governesses.

As Alix grew into a young girl, her cheeriness did not dwindle. She was allowed to prosper and thrive in the cultivated atmosphere that prevailed in Darmstadt. Princess Alice insisted on modeling life in Hesse after the British court. Alice emphasized to her mother her attempts to mimic life in England: “I try to copy as much as is in my power all those things for my children that they may have an idea when I speak to them of what a happy home ours was.”
⁴⁰
The New Palace was decorated with British trimmings. Meals were thoroughly English with common staples like rice puddings and baked apples. Alice boasted to Queen Victoria that “the decoration and domestic arrangements were so English that it was hard to realise one was in Germany.”
⁴¹
Even the head of the children’s nursery, Mary Anne Orchard, came straight from England. A bare-bones, straight-laced woman who had no taste for extravagance, Mrs. Orchard made sure Alix and her siblings were brought up with simple tastes. “The children’s bedrooms were large and airy, but plainly furnished,” wrote Robert Massie in his definitive biography,
Nicholas and Alexandra
.
“Mrs. Orchard believed in strict daily schedules with fixed hours for every activity.”
⁴²
Mrs. Orchard was not the only Englishwoman employed at the Hessian court. Princess Alice also brought a woman to Darmstadt named Miss Jackson, who served as Alix’s governess. It was under Jackson’s tutelage that the young princess first took an interest in politics, “which later was to prove fatal.”
⁴³
Alice’s efforts to model Darmstadt after the British court came at a high price. The expenses she incurred were well beyond the financial resources available to her and Louis. Eventually, her requests to Queen Victoria for money put a difficult strain on their relationship.

In 1877, Alix’s family underwent two drastic changes. First, Louis’s father, the heir to the Hessian throne, died in March. “These have been most painful—most distressing days, so harrowing,” Alice wrote to her mother. “The recollections of 1861 [when Prince Albert died], of dear Frittie’s death, when my dear father-in-law was so tender and kind, were painfully vivid.”
⁴⁴
Three months later, Alix’s great-uncle died, making her father Grand Duke Louis IV. With the accession of Alix’s father, her mother was now the Grand Duchess of Hesse, but it was not a role Alice relished. She told her mother that, when it came to being the new first lady of the land, “I am so dreading every thing, and above all the responsibility of being the first in every thing.”
⁴⁵
Her new position was not without its benefits, though. As the heads of state, Louis and Alice received a moderate improvement in their finances, since they now had access to the small Hessian treasury. Louis’s accession to the grand ducal throne only widened the chasm separating him and Alice. In a telling letter, Alice explained to Louis how happy she would have been “if I had been able to share my intellectual interests, and intellectual aspirations with a husband whose strong, protective love would have guided me round the rocks strewn in my way by my own nature, outward circumstances, and the excesses of my own opinions.” She added that she had tried to talk to him about more serious matters, but “we have developed separately—away from each other; and that is why I feel that true companionship is an impossibility for us—because our thoughts will never meet.”
⁴⁶
The difficulties Alix’s parents faced, both in their marriage and as the first couple of Hesse, were soon overshadowed by the greatest tragedy their family would ever endure.

A deadly strain of diphtheria invaded Darmstadt in November 1878, cutting straight to the heart of the grand ducal family. The entire family, save for Alice and Ella, fell ill. Queen Victoria sent her chief physician, Sir William Jenner, as did her daughter Vicky in Berlin. Alice nursed her family with the utmost care. It was the second time in her life she played the role of nurse. The first time, she lovingly took care of her father during his fatal battle with typhoid fever in 1861. Now, as she tended to her children, she wrote to Queen Victoria that the pain of “knowing all these precious lives [are] hanging on a thread, is an agony barely to be conceived.”
⁴⁷
On November 16, Alix’s sister May died from the illness. The poor toddler literally choked to death from the effects of the infection. Devastated, the grand duchess, who was exhausted and worn down from caring for her family, went to break the news to her son Ernie. Against her doctors’ orders, she tearfully embraced him, but this act of a grieving mother would cost Alice her life. She fell ill with diphtheria on December 7. On Friday, December 13, Grand Duke Louis was told his wife would not recover. The next morning, just before
8:30
a.m., Alice died. The date was December 14, “the horrible day” when her father died seventeen years earlier at Windsor Castle. The last two words Alice murmured were: “Dear Papa.”
⁴⁸

The Duchess of Teck, whose own children had once been ill with diphtheria, was grieved by the loss of Princess Alice. She wrote the following to the Countess of Hopetown:

Now again the shadow of a great sorrow has fallen upon us, in which the whole country warmly and touchly [
sic
] sympathises. Those poor bereaved ones, in that once so
happy
home, are never out of my thoughts, and my
very heart
bleeds for them. God help them! for He alone can! The poor Queen is so sadly shaken, though more composed than I expected, and very resigned.… I have just been summoned to Windsor to-morrow, to be present at the religious service which the Queen is going to have in the private Chapel of the Castle at the same hour (2.30) as that at which the last sad ceremony at Darmstadt is to take place.
⁴⁹

With her mother gone, Alix’s world imploded. The very heart and soul of her family was gone. Queen Victoria’s heart broke for her Hessian grandchildren. She poured out her grief in a letter to them: “Poor dear children for I write this for you
all
—You have all had the most terrible blow which can befall Children—you have lost your precious, dear, devoted Mother who loved you—and devoted her life to you & your dear Papa!”
⁵⁰

The deaths of her mother and sister were among the most important events that shaped Alix’s life. Before this, she was warm and loving, though possessing a stubborn streak. After these tragedies, she began to shut down, cutting herself off emotionally from other people. Even those objects that all children would cling to for comfort—toys, playthings, and clothes—were taken away from her during this horrible time. To prevent the spread of the diphtheria, they were burned. “In one fell swoop,” wrote one historian, “everything that had been familiar and comforting to the six-year-old Alix was suddenly and permanently wrenched from her. Alicky withdrew into herself—setting a pattern that would mark her propensity to withdraw and brood.”
⁵¹
This behavior was not purely spontaneous. When Alice was a young girl, she demonstrated a melancholy, oversensitive personality that, while giving her greater compassion for people than most of what Queen Victoria’s other children possessed, birthed somewhat darker moods that she ostensibly passed on to Alix.