Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (95 page)

Following the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev’s
glasnost
, statements made by several former guards from the Ipatiev House led to the discovery in the Koptyaki Forest of the remains of nine individuals believed to be Nicholas, Alexandra, three of their five children, and their retainers. In 1992, a year after the fall of the Soviet Union, two of the skeletal remains recovered from Koptyaki were conclusively identified as those belonging to Nicholas and Alexandra. The confirmation came by testing their mitochondrial DNA against samples provided by several of their surviving relatives. In 1994, a series of similar tests was performed to compare Anna Anderson’s DNA from a preserved strand of hair and some tissue with that of the tsar and tsarina. There were enough discrepancies to rule out the possibility of relation. Additional analyses comparing Anderson’s mitochondrial DNA with the Duke of Edinburgh—whose grandmother Victoria was Tsarina Alexandra’s sister—confirmed the impossibility that Anna Anderson was in any way related to the Romanovs. It was later revealed she was a Polish-born German factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska.

After nearly nine decades of searching, the bones of the missing Romanovs were found in 2008. Tests later identified the two missing bodies as belonging to Grand Duchess Anastasia and Tsarevitch Alexei. It had previously been believed the remains were those belonging to Marie. Since the fall of Communism in 1991, sentiment toward the imperial family in Russia has been on a meteoric rise. On July 17, 1998—the eightieth anniversary of their deaths—the family’s bodies were exhumed and brought back to Saint Petersburg for an epic state funeral in Catherine’s Chapel at the Saints Peter and Paul Fortress. Their coffins were draped in the yellow flags of the Imperial House of Romanov.

Alexandra, Nicholas, and their family were later canonized in the Russian Orthodox Church amid the sounds of the
Panikhida
, the Orthodox requiem for the dead. The Ipatiev House was later torn down and replaced by the onion-domed Cathedral of the Blood, built in their honor. The Romanovs were not the only imperial family to be revered as saintly. On October 3, 2004, the Roman Catholic Church beatified Emperor Charles I, whom they have since named Blessed Charles of Austria. Since that time, a number of miracles have been attributed to him, paving the way for his being named a saint. Zita’s beatification process began in 2009.

The lives and legacies that Augusta Victoria, Mary, Alexandra, and Zita left have proved timeless. The stories of their lives, their romances, and their fates have captivated audiences worldwide for decades. Whole new generations are being drawn to the stories of these four remarkable women. Nearly a century has passed since December 1916, when these four women reigned concurrently, but even now, in the twenty-first century, their legacies are rising again like a phoenix from the ashes. In 2011, descendants of both Mary and Dona were married in elaborate, traditional ceremonies that evoked strong images of Europe’s royal past. In April, the wedding of Queen Elizabeth II’s grandson Prince William to Catherine Middleton brought a tremendous resurgence of popularity for the House of Windsor. In August, Dona’s great-great-grandson was married in a church on the grounds of the Neues Palais in Potsdam, marking the first major dynastic wedding for the Hohenzollerns in over forty years. “People are longing for things they don’t get out of the republic,” said one of the broadcasters at the wedding. “People are looking for little princes and princesses who are born and will be of some importance for the rest of their lives.”
¹⁴⁶⁰

Decades have passed since these women graced Europe’s last four imperial thrones. Yet for everything that is known about their lives, there are still so many issues that divide historians, academics, and general readers. Was Queen Mary a totally inept mother, or was her parenting more dictated by her husband’s wishes? Was Augusta Victoria a xenophobic, pruddish bigot or caring, compassionate
Landesmutter
? Is it possible she was both? This book has humbly tried to—if not answer—at least shed some light on these questions. Were these women perfect? Certainly not. One only has to do a cursory review of their lives to discover the criticisms and accusations leveled against them. What can be said for certain, however, is that during their tumultuous lives, Augusta Victoria, Mary, Alexandra, and Zita faced criticism, persecution, poverty, and death, but they resolved to meet their challenges with dignity, grace, and courage. Driven by duty, they accepted their lives as their own, taking whatever came their way. Devoted, dutiful, and committed to the imperial cause above all else, the lives of these four royal women were a requiem to the age of empires.

Endnotes
 

Introduction

1. Miranda Carter,
George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I
(New York: Knopf, 2009), p. 65.

2. Abbas Milani,
The Shah
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. vi–vii.

Part 1: Unlikely Empresses (1858–94)

1: Imperial Forge

1. The title
hereditary prince
was commonly used to denote the heir of a sovereign dukedom, the ducal equivalent of a crown prince. On more than one occasion it was used for the heir to a kingdom when the succession was in question.

2. John Van der Kiste,
Queen Victoria’s Children
(Stroud, Gloucester: The History Press, 2009), p. 27.

3. Prince Ernest was one of many sovereign princes who were mediatised, or dispossessed of his realm, when Napoleon reorganized Europe in 1806. Ernest I and others like him were allowed to hold on to their titles and rank, but they no longer actually had a sovereign territory to govern.

4. Queen Victoria to Princess Feodora of Leiningen, January 6, 1853, in
Queen Victoria: A Personal History,
Christopher Hibbert (London: HarperCollins, 2010), p. 263.

5. David Bagular,
Napoleon III and His Regime: An Extravaganza
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), p. 218.

6. Princess Michael of Kent,
Crowned in a Far Country: Portraits of Eight Royal Brides
(New York: Touchstone Books, 2007), p. 116.

7. Gillian Gill,
We Two—Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals
(New York: Ballantine Books, 2009), pp. 95–96.

8. Hibbert,
Queen Victoria
, p. 281.

9. Gill,
We Two
, p. 98.

10. Robert K. Massie,
Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), p. 57.

11. Daphne Bennett,
Vicky: Princess Royal of England and German Empress
(London: Collins & Harvill Press, 1971), p. 212.

12. Prince Francis of Teck to Princess Amélie of Teck, December 4, 1867, in
Queen Mary: 1867–1953
(London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), James Pope-Hennessy, p. 7. The date given by Pope-Hennessy (
above
) may be a typo, since he claims it was written in the April before Princess May was born.

13. Statement of Dr. Arthur Farre and Edward H. Hills, May 27, 1867, in
Her Royal Highness Princess Mary Adelaide Duchess of Teck: Based on Her Private Diaries and Letters
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900), ed. C. Kinloch Cook, vol. 2, p. 1.

14. David Duff,
Queen Mary
(London: Collins, 1985), p. 26.

15. Pope-Hennessy,
Queen Mary
, p. 23.

16. Kathleen Woodward,
Queen Mary: A Life and Intimate Study
(London: Hutchinson, n.d.), p. 18.

17. Letter of Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, undated, in
Her Royal Highness
, Cook, p. 415.

18. On its own merits, the request had precedent. When Queen Victoria’s third daughter, Princess Helena, was married in 1866 to Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg (Dona Holstein’s uncle), the queen elevated the groom to the rank and style of Royal Highness from the vastly inferior Serene Highness; and their children bore the style of Highness. In Francis Teck’s case, the queen rightly feared that an elevation would set a dangerous precedent. Any of her numerous relatives could marry without concern for the monarchy or foreign policy and then expect the queen to elevate their spouses in the same way she may have elevated Francis.

19. Queen Victoria to Princess Mary Adelaide of Teck, May 18, 1866, in
Queen Mary
, Pope-Hennessy, p. 25.

20. The calculation is based upon
http://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/exchange/result_exchange.php
(viewed on April 14, 2011). It is also interesting to note that Queen Victoria, upon the marriage of her daughter Louise a few years later, requested she receive a stipend of only £6,000 per year.

21. Queen Victoria to Crown Princess Victoria of Germany, April 15, 1874, in
Queen Mary
, Pope-Hennessy, p. 29.

22. Viktoria Luise, Duchess of Brunswick and Lüneburg, Princess of Prussia,
The Kaiser’s Daughter
, trans. and ed. Robert Vacha (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977), p. 53.

23. The formation of the German Empire did not inherently elevate the Hohenzollerns to the status of an “imperial family.” While the emperor and crown prince bore imperial rank and style, the rest of the Hohenzollerns continued to only be entitled to use the royal titles of Prussia. Going forward, the Hohenzollerns as a whole will be referred to as the Prussian royal family, distinguishing them from the emperor, empress, crown prince, and crown princess.

24. Christopher Clark,
Kaiser Wilhelm II: A Life in Power
(Kobo desktop version, 2009: retrieved from
http://www.kobobooks.com
), chap. 2, para. 1.

25. The Ernestine duchies are a number of Saxon states whose founders were the numerous sons of Ernest, Elector of Saxony (1441–86). There had been almost two dozen Ernestine duchies since the fifteenth century, but by 1871 only four still existed: Saxe-Altenburg, Saxe-Meiningen, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. The word
Saxe
is the French form of
Saxony
(the German being
Sachsen
). Since the language of royalty until the nineteenth century was French, the German rulers identified themselves using French titles (i.e. Saxe-Coburg instead of Sachsen-Coburg).

26. Clark,
Kaiser Wilhelm II
(Kobo desktop version), chap. 2, para. 4.

27. Hesse was known after 1816 as Hesse and by the Rhine. Up until 1866, it was also more commonly referred to as Hesse-Darmstadt to distinguish it from the northern state of Hesse-Cassel.

28. Matthew Dennison,
The Last Princess: The Devoted Life of Queen Victoria’s Youngest Daughter
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), p. 50.

29. Hibbert,
Queen Victoria
, p. 441.

30. Robert K. Massie,
Nicholas and Alexandra
(New York: Atheneum, 1967), p. 29.

31. Sophie Buxhoeveden,
The Life and Tragedy of Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress of Russia
(London: Longmans, Green, 1928), p. 15.

32. Catrine Clay,
King, Kaiser, Tsar: Three Royal Cousins Who Led the World to War
(New York: Walker, 2006), p. 111.

33. Princess Alice of Hesse to Queen Victoria, undated, 1873, in
Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, Princess of Great Britain and Ireland
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1885), ed. Karl Sell, p. 313.

34. Van der Kiste,
Queen Victoria’s Children
, p. 28.

2: “Sleeping Beauty!”

1. Geoffrey Wakeford,
Three Consort Queens: Adelaide, Alexandra & Mary
(London: Robert Hale, 1971), p. 158.

2. Gelardi,
Born to Rule
, p. 8.

3. Woodward,
Queen Mary
, p. 52.

4. Dennison,
The Last Princess
, p. 51.

5. David Duff,
Hessian Tapestry
(London: Frederick Muller, 1967), p. 121.

6. Massie,
Nicholas and Alexandra
, p. 29.

7. Coryne Hall,
Little Mother of Russia: A Biography of Empress Marie Feodorovna
(Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier, 2001), p. 151.

8. Princess Alice of Hesse, to Queen Victoria, March 23, 1877, in
Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse
, ed. Sell, pp. 359–360.

9. Princess Alice of Hesse, to Queen Victoria, June 6, 1877, in ibid., p. 362.

10. Van der Kiste,
Queen Victoria’s Children
, p. 107.

11. Julia P. Gelardi,
In Triumph’s Wake: Royal Mothers, Tragic Daughters, and the Price They Paid for Glory
(New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 2008), p. 292.

12. Packard,
Victoria’s Daughters
, p. 167.

13. Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck, to the Countess of Hopetown, December 17, 1878, in
Her Royal Highness
, Cook, vol. 2, p. 105.

14. Queen Victoria to Princess Victoria of Hesse, December 14, 1878, in
Advice to a Grand-daughter: Letters from Queen Victoria to Princess Victoria of Hesse
(London: Heinemann, 1975), ed. Richard Hough, p. 9.

15. Gelardi,
Born to Rule,
p. 8.

16. Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck, to the Dowager Countess of Aylesford, January 17, 1879, in
Her Royal Highness
, Cook, vol. 2, p. 105.

17. Princess Beatrice to Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck, January 22, 1879, in
The Last Princess
, Dennison, p. 120.

18. Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck, to Lady Elizabeth Biddulph, February 25, 1879, in ibid., p. 107.

19. Buxhoeveden,
Alexandra Feodorovna
, pp. 8, 12.

20. Carolly Erickson,
Alexandra: The Last Tsarina
(New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 2001), p. 18.

21. Buxhoeveden,
Alexander Feodorovna
, p. 111.

22. Packard,
Victoria’s Daughters
, p. 286.

23. Peter Kurth,
Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra
(Toronto: Madison Press Books, 1998), p. 28.

24. Buxhoeveden,
Alexandra Feodorovna
, p. 110.

25. Gelardi,
Born to Rule
, p. 13.

26. Marie Bothmer,
Sovereign Ladies of Europe
(London: Kessinger, 2005), p. 198

27. Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen,
Imperator et Rex: William II. of Germany
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904), p. 52.

28. Axel von Schwering,
The Berlin Court Under William II
(London: Cassell, 1915), p. 57.