The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (11 page)

take from the nurse’s arms her youngest daughter, keeping the baby

beside her on the chaise-longue’. The older children would sit and

look at photograph albums ‘of which there was at least one on every

table’. Everything was extremely relaxed; Nicholas sitting opening

and reading his sealed dispatches, as Alexandra passed round the

glasses of tea.28

Although Alexandra’s attitude to family life was unusually informal

for an empress, she was certainly glad of Miss Eagar’s presence; for

by March 1899 her pregnancy was proving extremely uncomfortable.

The baby was lying in an awkward position that aggravated her

sciatica; yet again she was spending most of her pregnancy in a bath

chair.29 On 9 May the family left Tsarskoe Selo for Peterhof to await the arrival of the new member of the family, which was mercifully

quick and straightforward. At 12.10 p.m. on 14 June 1899 another

robust girl was born, weighing 10 lb (4.5 kg). They called her Maria,

* Maria (or Marie) Pavlovna was often referred to as ‘the younger’ in order to differentiate her from Maria Pavlovna ‘the elder’, the wife of Grand Duke Vladimir.

In order to avoid confusion, the older Maria Pavlovna will be referred to throughout as Grand Duchess Vladimir.

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in honour of her grandmother, and Alexandra was soon happily

breastfeeding her.

Nicholas registered no obvious air of dismay, his religious fatalism

no doubt playing a part in his phlegmatic response. Nevertheless,

it was noticed that soon after the baby was born ‘he set off on a

long solitary walk’. He returned, ‘as outwardly unruffled as ever’,

and noted in his diary that this had been another ‘happy day’. ‘The

Lord sent us a third daughter.’ God’s will be done; he was recon-

ciled30 Grand Duke Konstantin, however, once again expressed what

Nicholas was probably feeling deep inside: ‘And so there’s no Heir.

The whole of Russia will be disappointed by this news.’31

‘I am so thankful that dear Alicky has recovered so well’, wrote

Queen Victoria on receiving the telegram, but she could not conceal

the dynastic issue it raised: ‘I regret the 3rd girl for the country. I know that an Heir would be more welcome than a daughter.’32 ‘Poor

Alix . . . had another daughter, and it seems she was so ill the whole time with it poor thing’, wrote Crown Princess Marie of Romania

to her mother the Duchess of Coburg. ‘Now I suppose she will have

to begin over again and then once more she will shut herself up

and it discontents everyone.’33

When the European press got news of the arrival of yet another

daughter they had a field day. The talk in St Petersburg, alleged

Lloyds Weekly Newspaper
, is

that the birth of a third daughter to the Czar is regarded as an

event of great political importance. Absurd as it may sound, there

is a strong party there which waited only for this event to resume

their mischievous intrigues against the Czarina, in whom they

hate the Princess of Anglo-German blood. The influence of the

Empress-Dowager, whose relations with her daughter-in-law are,

as is known, anything but cordial, is expected to increase.34

Another paper came up with a more chilling claim: ‘it is reported

that the Dowager-Empress, who is evidently superstitious, on her

arrival at Peterhof, met the Czar with the accusatory words: “Six

daughters have been foretold unto me: to-day the half of the

prophecy has been fulfilled.”’35 At home in Russia the birth of a

third daughter certainly fuelled the widespread superstitious belief

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that Alexandra’s arrival in Russia – in the dying days of Alexander

III – had been a bad omen for the marriage: ‘The birth of three

daughters in succession with the empire still lacking an heir was

seen as proof that their forebodings had been well founded.’36 A

manifestation of how close rampant superstition lay beneath the

surface of official Orthodoxy was brought home to Margaretta Eagar

at Maria’s christening a fortnight later. After the baby was dipped

in the font three times, ‘the hair was cut in four places, in the form of a cross. What was cut off was rolled in wax and thrown into the

font.’ Eagar was told that ‘according to Russian superstition the

good or evil future of the child’s life depends on whether the hair

sinks or swims’. She was happy to note: ‘Little Marie’s hair behaved

in an orthodox fashion and all sank at once, so there is no need for

alarm concerning her future.’37

Nicholas put a brave face on it and sent his wife a note: ‘I dare

complain the least, having
such happiness
on earth, having a treasure like you my beloved Alix, and already the three little cherubs. From

the depth of my heart do I thank God for all His blessings, in giving me you. He gave me paradise and has made my life an easy and

happy one.’38 Such depth of feeling did not square with the confident claim of the Paris correspondent of
The Times
that the tsar was

‘weary of rule’. Apparently so dejected was Nicholas at the birth of

another daughter that he had declared himself ‘disappointed and

tired of the throne’ and was about to abdicate. ‘The absence of an

heir excites his superstitious feelings,’ it went on to explain, ‘and he connects himself with a Russian legend according to which an heir-less czar is to be succeeded by a Czar Michael, predestined to occupy Constantinople.’39

*

As things turned out Margaretta Eagar coped happily with the arrival

of the new baby. She found her charges most endearing, particularly

the precociously bright and quizzical Olga. The two older girls were

fine-looking children and Tatiana had a particular delicate beauty.

But it was the new baby who stole Margaretta’s heart: Maria ‘was

born good, I often think, with the very smallest trace of original sin possible’.40 And who could resist her? She was ‘a real beauty, very

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big with enormous blue eyes’, according to the Duchess of Coburg;

a gentleman at court went one better, remarking that little Maria

‘had the face of one of Botticelli’s angels’.41

By 1900 the three little Romanov sisters were attracting consid-

erable attention abroad, with much discussion of which was the

prettiest, cleverest, or most endearing. ‘The flower of the flock, as far as looks are concerned . . . is Grand Duchess Tatiana’, was the

opinion of the British magazine,
Woman at Home
. ‘She is a real beauty, with dark pathetic eyes, and wistful little mouth. But the

Grand Duchess Olga, the eldest, is such a hearty, merry child,

everybody loves her.’ The author of the article wondered, as others

had done since the Balmoral visit, ‘whether she is destined to be

our future Queen Consort!’.42

Although Alexandra had plenty of staff at her disposal, she

continued to spend so much time in the nursery that ‘they began

to say at court that the empress was not a tsaritsa but only a mother’.

Even when dealing with day-to-day official business in the mauve

boudoir, she would often be dandling one child on her knee or

rocking another in her cradle, ‘while with the other hand she signed

official papers’.43 She and Nicholas were hardly seen by members

of their own entourage. When her ladies did have a moment’s

conversation with the empress alone, she only ever had two topics

of conversation – Nicky and her children. As Princess Baryatinskaya

recalled, it was only when talking of how ‘deeply interesting’ she

found it to ‘watch the gradual development of a child step by step’

that Alexandra’s mournful shyness was ‘for once subsumed in a

moment’s true pleasure’.

Maria Feodorovna strongly disapproved of so much mothering

by her daughter-in-law. An empress should be visible, performing

her ceremonial duties, but Alexandra stubbornly refused to put

herself or her children on show, although she genuinely wished to

play an active role in philanthropic work, as her mother Alice had

done. Her social projects included establishing workhouses for the

poor, crèches for working mothers, a school for training nurses at

Tsarskoe Selo and another for housemaids. Having a particular

concern about the high infant mortality rate and the welfare of

women during pregnancy, she also set about organizing midwives

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for rural areas.44 The illustrated magazines, however, were left to

create their own fantasy figure of the ‘womanly woman, who lives

in a secluded mansion and nurses her own children’. The tsaritsa

was to be commended, readers of the
Young Woman
were told, for she was ‘something more than a figurehead. Even if she had done

nothing else, she has nursed her own baby, and an Empress nursing

a baby is a sight worth living to see.’45

*

The first intimations of a possible crisis in the Russian succession

came in August 1899 when Nicholas’s brother the tsarevich, Grand

Duke Georgiy, died suddenly at Abbas Tuman in the Caucasus. A

manifesto was issued soon after, declaring that the next in line to

the throne was now Nicholas’s youngest brother Grand Duke

Mikhail, but he was only named as heir and not given the formal

title of tsarevich, in anticipation that Nicholas would soon have a

son. Gossip in Russia had it that this was a superstitious act on the part of the couple, out of a fear that to make Michael tsarevich

would in some way jinx them and ‘prevent the appearance in the

world of [their own] boy’.46

It is certainly clear that after Grand Duke Georgiy’s death, the

level of concern escalated, for the first time arousing real fears that the tsaritsa might never have a boy. After Maria was born letters of

advice began arriving – from England, France, Belgium, and as far

afield as the USA, Latin America and Japan – offering the secret of

begetting a son. Many correspondents solicited thousands of dollars

from the imperial couple in return for divulging their miracle pana-

ceas. Most of the theories on offer were in fact variants of those

much talked about since publication in 1896 of
The Determination

of Sex
by the Austrian embryologist, Dr Leopold Schenk. Himself the father of eight sons, of whom six had survived, Schenk considered this proof that his method worked. In October 1898 when

Alexandra had been trying to fall pregnant for a third time she had

apparently instructed one of her doctors in Yalta ‘to study Dr Schenk’s theory thoroughly and to communicate with him’; she had subsequently ‘lived exactly according to Dr Schenk’s precepts’, supervised at St Petersburg and Perhof by that Yalta doctor. The story first

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broke in an article on Dr Schenk in the American press in December

1898, which reported that he was ‘at present, with an assistant,

working in the court of Russia, where the Czar of all the Russias

longs for an heir’. The article claimed that it was ‘an open secret

in Russia that the Czarina . . . has placed herself under Dr Schenk’s treatment and is willing to await the result’.47

At a time when the genetics of conception were still not under-

stood, Schenk’s theories had been pooh-poohed by many of his

medical contemporaries but he stuck to his guns, arguing that the

sex of the child depended upon which ovary had ovulated: an unripe

ovum, released soon after menstruation, would produce female chil-

dren and a ripe one males. Schenk also believed that nutrition played a key role in the development of sexual characteristics, and his advice focused on the nutrition of the mother up to and during pregnancy.

A woman wanting a son, he argued, should eat more meat in order

to raise the level of blood corpuscles (perhaps Maria Feodorovna

had also read Dr Schenk’s book?), there being more in the male

than the female. Other unsolicited advice was offered from within

Russia, based on more superstitious practice.
*
‘Ask your wife, the empress, to lie on the left hand side of the bed’ wrote one correspondent, instructing that he, Nicholas, lie on the right -– a euphe-

mistic allusion to the popular belief that ‘if the husband mounts his wife from the left a girl will be born, if from the right a boy’ (the

‘missionary position’ in Russian being
na kone
‘on a horse’).48†

Whatever the efficacy of the remedies offered them, in October

1900, while they were staying in Livadia, Nicholas was pleased to

inform his mother that Alexandra was once again pregnant. As with

her previous pregnancies, she was receiving no one, he said, ‘and is

in the open air all day’.49 The happy couple’s quiet retreat was,

however, suddenly disrupted at the end of that month when Nicholas

* Over 260 such letters survive in RGIA, the State Historic Archive in St Petersburg.

† Such fanciful suggestions continued to be taken seriously in Russia well into the twentieth century; in his autobiography of 1990 the former Russian president Boris Yeltsin described how he was advised to ‘place an axe and a man’s peaked cap under the pillow to ensure that his wife had a boy’.