The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (4 page)

nursing of the wounded and founded the Frauenverein (Ladies’

Union) for the training of women nurses. ‘Life’, Alice resolutely

told her mother in 1866, ‘is meant for work, and not for pleasure.’8

The duty that had ruled her father’s life had become the watchword

of her own.

Alice produced seven children in rapid succession with the same

kind of stoicism with which her mother had given birth to her own

nine. But there the similarities ended; unlike Queen Victoria,

Princess Alice was a practical, hands-on mother who took an interest

in every aspect of her children’s daily lives, down to managing the

nursery accounts herself. And, like her elder sister Vicky – and much to Queen Victoria’s ‘insurmountable disgust for the process’ – Alice

insisted on breastfeeding several of her babies, causing the queen

to name one of her prize cows at Windsor after her.9 Alice also

studied human anatomy and childcare, in preparation for the inev-

itability of nursing her own brood through childhood illnesses. There seemed to be no limits to her devotion as a mother, but she did not

spoil her children; she allowed them only a shilling a week pocket

money until their confirmation, after which it was doubled. She was

an advocate of frugality, much like Queen Victoria, though in Alice’s case economizing was often out of brutal necessity. The house of

Hesse was far from wealthy and Alice often knew the ‘pinch of

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poverty’.10 But at the Neues Palais, built during 1864–6 with money

from her dowry, she created a warm home-from-home, furnished

with chintz fabrics and unremarkable pieces sent from England and

cluttered with family portraits and photographs.

Born on 6 June 1872, Princess Alix – the sixth child of the family

and future Empress of Russia – was a pretty, smiling, dimpled girl

who loved to play. They called her Sunny and from the start her

grandmother looked upon her as a golden child. Alicky was ‘too

beautiful . . . the handsomest child I ever saw’, thought Queen

Victoria, and she made no attempt to disguise her favouritism.11

Although Princess Alice was much more closely involved in her

children’s upbringing than many royal mothers, her various welfare

and charity projects consumed a lot of her time, and her children’s

day-to-day life was organized by their English head nurse Mrs

Orchard.

Victorian values reigned in the plainly furnished Darmstadt

nursery: duty, goodness, modesty, hygiene and sobriety, accompanied

by generous amounts of plain food, fresh air (whatever the weather),

long walks and pony rides. When she had time Alice walked with

her children, talked with them, taught them to paint, dressed their

dolls and sang and played the piano with them – even when little

fingers, as she laughingly complained, ‘thrust themselves under hers

on the keyboard to make music like big people’.12 She taught her

daughters to be self-sufficient and did not believe in spoiling them; their toys were unostentatious and brought from Osborne and

Windsor. Moments of idleness for the Hesse girls were always filled

by something their mother deemed useful – cake-making, knitting,

or some kind of handicraft or needlework. They made their own

beds and tidied their rooms and there was of course always regular,

obligatory letter-writing to
Liebe Grossmama
and regular visits to her at Balmoral, Windsor and Osborne. Other, more frugal family

seaside holidays – of donkey rides, paddling, shrimping and sand-

castles – were spent at Blankenberge on the treeless, winds -

wept North Sea coast of Belgium; or at Schloss Kranichstein, a

seventeenth-century hunting lodge on the edge of the Odenwald.

When it came to her children’s religious and moral development

Princess Alice took a very personal hand and inspired high ideals

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in them, her greatest wish being that they ‘should take nothing but

recollections of love and happiness from their home into the battle

of life’.13 Life’s battle included being taught to appreciate the sufferings of the sick and poor, visiting hospitals with armfuls of flowers every Saturday and at Christmas. But Alice’s own life was increasingly one of chronic pain – from headaches, rheumatism and

neuralgia, as well as overwhelming exhaustion brought on by her

commitment to so many worthy causes. The last child of the family,

May, was born two years after Alix in 1874, but by then the happy

childhood idyll at Darmstadt was over.

Gloom had irrevocably settled over the family, when at the age

of two Alice’s second son Frittie had, in 1872, shown the first

unmistakable signs of haemophilia; his godfather, Queen Victoria’s

fourth son Leopold, also was blighted by the disease. Barely a year

later, in May 1873, the bright and engaging little boy, on whom

Alice had absolutely doted, died of internal bleeding after falling 20

feet (6 metres) from a window. Alice’s consuming morbidity there-

after – a species of
douleur
so clearly in tune with that of her widowed mother – meant that a mournful dwelling on the dead, and on the

trials and tribulations rather than the pleasures of life, became part of the fabric of the young lives of the surviving siblings. ‘May we

all follow in a way as peaceful, and with so little struggle and pain, and leave an image of as much love and brightness behind’, Alice

told her mother after Frittie died.14

The loss of one of her ‘pretty pair’ of boys opened up a four-year

gap between the only other son, Ernie – who also was for ever

haunted by Frittie’s death – and his next sibling Alix.15 With her

three older sisters growing up and inevitably distancing themselves

from her, Alix instinctively gravitated to her younger sister May and they became devoted playmates. With time, Princess Alice took

solace in her ‘two little girlies’. They were ‘so sweet, so dear, merry, and nice. I don’t know which is dearest,’ she told Queen Victoria,

‘they are both so captivating.’16 Alix and May were indeed a conso-

lation, but the light had gone from Alice’s eyes with Frittie’s death and her health was collapsing. At a time when she and her husband

were also becoming sadly estranged, Alice retreated into a state of

settled melancholy and physical exhaustion. ‘I am good for next to

nothing,’ she told her mother, ‘I live on my sofa and see no one.’17

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The accession of Prince Louis to the throne of Hesse in 1877 and

her own promotion to grand duchess brought only despair at the

additional duties that would be placed upon her: ‘Too much is

demanded of me,’ she told her mother, ‘and I have to do with so

many things. It is more than my strength can stand in the long

run.’18 Only Alice’s faith and her devotion to her precious children

was keeping her going but her air of fatalistic resignation cast a

shadow over her impressionable daughter Alix.

In November 1878 an epidemic of diphtheria descended upon

the Hesse children; first Victoria, then Alix fell sick, followed by all the others bar Ella, and then their father too. Alice nursed each of

them in turn with absolute devotion; but even her best nursing skills could not save little May, who died on 16 November. By the time

she saw May’s little coffin taken off for burial Alice was in a state of collapse. For the next two weeks she struggled to keep the news

of May’s death from the other children, but a kiss of consolation

for Ernie on telling him the news may well have been enough for

the disease to be transmitted to Alice herself. Just as her children

were recovering Alice succumbed and she died on 14 December, at

the age of thirty-five, achieving the longed-for
Wiedersehen
with her precious Frittie.

The trauma for the six-year-old Alix of seeing both her mother

and her beloved little playmate May taken from her within days of

each other was profound. Her treasured childhood tokens were taken

from her too – her toys, books and games all destroyed for fear of

lingering infection. Ernie was the closest to her in age but now

under the separate control of tutors as heir to the throne, and she

felt her isolation acutely. Her eldest sister Victoria recalled happier times to their grandmother: ‘It sometimes seems as if it were only

yesterday that we were all romping about with May in Mama’s room

after tea – & now we are big girls & even Alix is serious & sensible

& the house is often very quiet.’19

It would be Grandmama, the solid and reassuring Mrs Orchard

– known to Alix as Orchie – and her governess Madgie (Miss Jackson)

who would fill the terrible void of her mother’s death, but the little girl’s sense of abandonment ran very deep. Her sunny disposition

began to fade into an increasing moroseness and introspection, laying the foundations of a mistrust of strangers that became ever more

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deeply engrained as the years went by. Queen Victoria was anxious

to act as a surrogate mother, for Alix had always been one of her

favourite granddaughters. Regular visits to England by Alix and her

siblings, especially to Balmoral in the autumn, had consoled Victoria in her own lonely widowhood, and such regular proximity allowed

her to supervise Alix’s education, her tutors in Hesse sending her

regular monthly reports. Alix herself seemed content to play the

role of the ‘very loving, dutiful and grateful Child’, as she so often signed her letters to the queen, and she never forgot a birthday or

an anniversary, sending numerous gifts of her own exquisite embroi-

dery and handiwork.20 England, which she visited often, became a

second home to her.

*

During her lifetime, Princess Alice had had strong feelings about

the future for her daughters; she wanted to do more than educate

them to be wives. ‘Life is also meaningful without being married’,

she had once told her mother, and marrying merely for the sake of

it was, in her view, ‘one of the greatest mistakes a woman can make’.21

As she grew into a teenager, the best that the beautiful but poor

Princess Alix of Hesse could have hoped for to relieve her from the

unchallenging tedium of Darmstadt provincialism was marriage to

a minor European princeling. But everything changed when on her

first visit to Russia in 1884 (for the marriage of her sister Ella to Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich), Alix’s third cousin, Nicholas

Alexandrovich, heir to the Russian throne, had taken a shine to her.

He was sixteen and she was only twelve, but thereafter Nicky, as

she would always call him, remained besotted. Five years later, when

Grand Duke Louis took Alix back to Russia on a six-week visit,

Nicky was still stubbornly determined to win her as his wife. The

shy schoolgirl had become a slender, ethereally beautiful young

woman and Nicky was deeply in love. But by now – 1889 – Alix

had been confirmed in the Lutheran faith prior to coming out, and

she made clear to Nicky that despite her deep feelings for him,

marriage was out of the question. Virtue prevailed. She could not

and would not change her religion, but she did agree to write to

him in secret, their letters being sent via Ella as intermediary.

The royal marriage stakes at that time were unforgiving to girls

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who did not grasp a golden opportunity when it presented itself; as

one contemporary newspaper observed, ‘Love in royal circles is not

an epidemic affection’.22 It seemed that Alix’s inflexibility was going to deprive her of the one thing so many of her young royal contemporaries craved – a marriage based on love and not expediency. To

a forlorn Nicky there seemed an insurmountable gulf between them

and he allowed himself to be temporarily distracted by other pretty

faces. For her own part, Alix was enjoying a degree of status back

home, as a big fish in the very small Hesse pond. Her widowed

father, whom she adored, increasingly depended upon her, as the

only unmarried daughter, to take on formal duties for him at the

Hesse court. Alix became his constant companion; the little time

she did not spend in her father’s company was devoted to study, to

painting and drawing, making and mending her own modest dresses,

playing the piano (at which she was most accomplished) and a great

deal of quiet, religious contemplation. And so, when Louis suddenly

collapsed and died aged only fifty-four in March 1892 ‘dear Alicky’s

grief’ was ‘terrible’, as Orchie confided to Queen Victoria. Worse,

it was ‘a silent grief, which she locked up within her’, as she did

most things.23 Alix’s concerned grandmama gathered her orphaned

granddaughter to her bosom, vowing that ‘while I live Alicky, till

she is married, will be
more
than
ever my own child
’.24 Alix joined her, in deep mourning, at Balmoral for several weeks of quiet,

womanly commiseration. But by this time the press, paying little