Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (9 page)

A month after the grand duchess’s death, Alix and her family visited the queen in January 1879, once the doctors decided it was safe for them to travel. “Next week the dear Queen expects the poor Grand Duke and his motherless children over,” the Duchess of Teck wrote, “and I shall be most thankful for them all when the dreaded painful first meeting is over.”
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A few days later, Alix’s aunt Beatrice, Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, sent the Duchess of Teck a note when the Hesse family arrived: “I cannot tell you how sad the meeting yesterday with Louis and the Children was. For the first time to miss darling Alice, and to see him alone [
sic
]. It all brought our terrible loss so vividly before us.”
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During the visit, Grand Duke Louis came to Kensington Palace to see Mary Adelaide. The duchess was deeply moved by his demeanor, which she described as “utterly broken hearted.”
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Grand Duke Louis found himself at a loss caring for his five young children alone. One of his family’s few refuges was Wolfsgarten, a hunting lodge between Darmstadt and Frankfurt. The grand duke purchased the building after Alice’s death. In time it became the family’s preferred residence over the New Palace. In Alice’s absence, Queen Victoria stepped into the role of loving matriarch. She embraced the grand duke as her own son and frequently invited him and his children to stay with her in Britain for prolonged periods. She also decreed that Alice’s sister Helena would visit Darmstadt every year to provide the family with a maternal presence. The children, in turn, would spend part of every holiday they took in England with Princess Helena and her family. In time, Balmoral Castle in the fog-laden Scottish Highlands and Osborne House, the queen’s vacation home on the Isle of Wight, became as comforting and familiar to Alix as the New Palace in Darmstadt. Alix later said her visits to Balmoral and Osborne were “the best part of the year.”
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The years that Alix spent at her grandmother’s side shaped the very foundation of the woman, and eventually the empress, she became.

She visited Windsor Castle in March 1879 for the wedding of her uncle, the Duke of Connaught, to Princess Louise of Prussia. Unlike Buckingham Palace, which was a relatively new building, Windsor Castle had been an iconic home of the English monarchy since the eleventh century. A fortresslike abode with high stone walls, it remains the longest-used royal residence in Europe. Princess Alix’s visit here revealed to her for the first time the true opulence of her maternal ancestry. Before this, she had only known the isolated but comfortable world at Darmstadt, where she and her sisters sewed their own socks and waited on themselves. In Britain, as a granddaughter of the queen, Alix was fondled over and treated to incomparable luxury. Despite the glamour of London, she preferred peace and quiet. While she was in Britain, she enjoyed playing quietly with her siblings or having personal time with her grandmother, who was affectionately known as “Gangan.”

Princess Alix became a true by-product of the Victorian court who espoused the highest morals of the era. She was conservative in her personal and political views—withdrawn, almost cold, when out in public. But in private, she burned with well-guarded emotion. She also echoed her grandmother’s extremely shy personality by hating one of the most integral duties of royalty: being on display. Once, when Alix was asked by the queen to play the piano for a room full of dinner guests, she was overcome with anxiety. Her “clammy hands felt literally glued to the keys,” she told a friend later in life.
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She described it as “one of the worst ordeals of her life.”
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Even in the relative quiet of the Hessian court, Alix’s shyness showed itself. Her “shyness became so crippling that visitors to Darmstadt sometimes took the little princess’s tied tongue for arrogance.”
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Princess Marie of Edinburgh, her cousin, wrote that Alix’s “attitude to the world was perpetually distrustful…strangely empty of tenderness and, in a way, hostile…She held both great and small at a distance, as though they intended to steal something which was hers.”
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Alix’s aunt Vicky, Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, was less sympathetic toward the princess than her grandmother. Vicky felt the death of Alix’s mother left her spoiled and overindulged, leading to her being obdurate, melodramatic, and self-centered. Vicky’s opinion of Alix was somewhat ironic, given her failure raising her three eldest children, but not everything she said was inaccurate. What Vicky perceived as self-centeredness was actually Alix’s intense insecurity. She was terrified to open up and care for others out of fear she would lose them. In the end, the only person who seemed to fill that void in her life was Queen Victoria. It is not surprising Alix came to idolize her grandmother. She began using English as her first language in an effort to distance herself from the painful memories of Darmstadt. The queen, in turn, became Alix’s English refuge. She described the queen as “a combination of a very grand person and Santa Claus.”
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Queen Victoria undoubtedly became the woman she loved most in the world, and the queen was just as devoted to Alix. She was very affectionate toward her Hessian grandchildren, even more so than toward many of her English grandchildren—the Prince and Princess of Wales’ children never enjoyed the same level of intimacy with the queen that Alix and her siblings did. Not until the arrival of other grandchildren years later did the queen come to be affectionately known as “Gangan” by a wider group of her descendants. As the years passed, the queen’s love for her Hessian grandchildren grew deeper. She hoped they would come to see her as a second mother. She emphasized this point when she wrote to Alix’s sister, Princess Victoria, hoping she would look upon the queen as “a loving
Mother
(for I feel I
am that
to you beloved Children far
more
than a Grandmother).”
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Dona Holstein’s parents struggled to carve out a life for their family at Dolzig Palace in the years following the end of the Second Schleswig and the Austro-Prussian wars. Duke Frederick VIII was overcome with depression but—like the Duke of Teck—was tenderly attached to his children and sought comfort and consolation with his son and daughters. The Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein was unable to cope with her family’s misfortunes as easily as her husband—a quality that would later be recognized in Dona. The birth of her daughter Louise Sophie in 1866 only worsened her somber ennui. Ada became moody, erratic, and gloomy. What we now know as postpartum depression is a possible explanation of what was causing havoc on the duchess’s personality, creating a chasm between Ada and her children that would only widen with time. Contemporary accounts show that Dona and her sisters were much closer with their father than they ever were with their mother.

At this point in her life, Dona’s day-to-day activities were still overseen by the ducal chaplain and her English governess. The governess’s efforts allowed Dona to become fluent in English by the time she was ten. Whether playing in the nursery or sitting through Bible lessons with the chaplain, discipline reigned supreme in the Holstein household. Like most princesses of that period, especially the German ones, Dona and her sisters were trained to be reserved, submissive, and obedient. The rare times that Dona misbehaved, the governess would use Otto von Bismarck’s name to scare her into obedience. All she had to do was “say ‘Bismarck kommt!’ when her charge was not amenable to nursery authority. The little Princess was at once ready to do anything she was told, for fear the enemy of her house might appear.”
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A few months before Dona’s eleventh birthday in 1869, her paternal grandfather, Duke Christian August II, died. The Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg’s last years had been disheartening ones. Increasingly infirmed, he and his wife rarely left their isolated estate, Primkenau Castle, where they had moved to following the end of the Second Schleswig War. The misfortunes that had fallen upon the House of Augustenburg became even more unbearable for Christian August when his wife died in March 1867. In a twist that truly evokes notions of a fateful romance, Christian August and his wife died on exactly the same day, March 11, two years apart. The duke’s death in 1869 meant Dona’s father now inherited his father’s entire estate. This included a small fortune and Christian August’s impressive Silesian castle, Primkenau, located near a town of the same name. Following his father’s funeral, Fritz sold Dolzig Palace to produce enough money to facilitate the move to the grander Primkenau. Located in the present-day, southwestern Polish town of Przemków, Primkenau was an iconic fairy-tale castle that sat deep in a verdant forest, nestled on the shores of a tiny lake. Visitors always described it as a “fair castle, looking, turret for turret and battlement for battlement, as if torn bodily from the pages of some quaint, beautifully illuminated volume of legends.”
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During Dona’s first summer at Primkenau in July 1870, the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Fritz was invited by his old friend Crown Prince Frederick Wilhelm of Prussia to serve in the military forces of the North German Confederation The offer was tantamount to semi-redemption for the duke, who was eager to fight for Prussia and Germany against France. The duke returned home from war in 1871 after the unification ceremony at Versailles and the eventual French surrender. By the time Fritz returned, Dona was nearly thirteen years old. She was slender, though perhaps a bit short for her age, with thick, golden-blonde hair, a smooth, porcelain complexion, but with tiny, round ears and a short, stout chin. Despite having a slim figure, observers always remarked on her round, pudgy cheeks and jaw, a trait all of her sisters inherited. She was never considered a classically beautiful child, but her regal bearing and queenly manner were unmistakable. Of all the children of the Duke and Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein, it was Dona who was described as possessing the most graceful, dignified carriage. The staff at Dolzig, and later Primkenau, observed that the princess was always aware of any situation she was in and the necessary behavior that was expected. A later contemporary of Dona’s noted that “she was always dignified; she never forgot herself.”
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As a young girl, Dona had a natural artistic ability for drawing and sketching, though this was not stressed heavily at any point in her education. Her taste in music was typical for the period, embracing traditional German composers and operas. She showed little interest or taste for the more classical Italian pieces. A good and disciplined student, though not terribly bright, she did her best to be attentive in her lessons. History most appealed to her when it revolved around Germany, especially Prussia—proof that the indiscretions of the past, courtesy of Otto von Bismarck, had by now been more or less forgotten by her. Books and newspapers were noticeably omitted from her education. Religious tutoring in the Evangelical Lutheran faith impacted her greatly. The black-and-white nature of God, the devil, sin, and salvation appealed to her way of looking at the world. All indicators are that German was her first language, though she spoke English fluently. She may have been tutored in French, but how long these lessons were carried out is hard to determine. Like most princesses, she also excelled in handicrafts like knitting, sewing, and crochet. Beyond the formal lessons in the schoolroom at Primkenau, Dona was being taught other lessons by her father. The idea of a German prince personally educating his daughter was truly a modern one in the nineteenth century. The duke insisted on taking an active role in Dona’s upbringing. He insisted on a vigorous exercise regimen that began early each morning. In good and bad weather alike, Fritz took Dona and Calma on long walks in the vast forests surrounding the castle.