Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (26 page)

The emotional turmoil of Alexandra’s failed pregnancy was soothed when she and Nicholas accepted an invitation from Queen Victoria to visit Scotland. It became a major continental tour that included a visit to France and finished with a much-awaited trip to see Alexandra’s brother, Ernie, in Darmstadt. At the beginning of September, Nicholas, Alexandra, and their entourage of several hundred docked in the port town of Leith, a district in northern Edinburgh. The tsar and tsarina were welcomed by the Prince of Wales, their mutual uncle, but they still had much traveling to do before they reached journey’s end. From the dockside at Leith, the royals drove in a downpour to Edinburgh Station, where a train took them more than seventy-four miles west to Ballater. From there, an entire squadron of Scots Greys escorted the group for the eight mile drive to Balmoral in open carriages. When they finally reached the castle, everyone was soaking wet from the pouring rain. Despite the cold, damp climate, the imperial couple received a tenderly warm welcome from the queen. And although she had early reservations about Alexandra’s marrying into the Russian imperial family, Queen Victoria soon became quite fond of Nicholas II. “It feels funny to me,” Nicholas wrote to his brother, “the extent to which I have become part of the English [royal] family. I have become almost as indispensable to [the Queen] as her Indians and her Scotsmen; I am, as it were, attached to her and the best thing is that she does not like me to leave her side … She exudes such enormous charm.”
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The accommodations that had to be set up at Balmoral for the imperial family and their entourage were enormous. Their security detail alone included hundreds of “plainclothes secret servicemen, plus twenty-four constables and four sergeants from the Metropolitan Police.”
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Outside the castle walls, an entire man-made village had to be built to handle the overflow of servants. Even the British royal family was not immune to the hardships imposed by the imperial visit. Accompanying the queen had been the Prince and Princess of Wales, George and May, and numerous other relations. So crowded was Balmoral that the Duke and Duchess of York had to lodge at an inn down the road. Even the castle servants were forced to sleep three or four to a bed.

For the month of September, Nicholas and Alexandra were swept up in a whirlwind of activities planned by their British relatives. Nicholas went hunting with the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York—a pastime the tsar did not enjoy. He was left feeling even more miserable because of a toothache and a cheek that was “much swollen from irritation at the stump of a decayed molar.”
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Meanwhile, Alexandra spent long hours in the company of her grandmother. Queen Victoria was relieved that, after two years as empress of Russia, Alexandra had not let the position go to her head. She wrote to the Empress Frederick, “Dear Nicky and Alicky are quite unspoilt and unchanged and as dear and simple as ever and as kind as ever. He is looking rather thin and pale and careworn, but sweet Alicky is in great beauty and very blooming. The baby is magnificent, bigger than she and Ella ever were, and a lovely, lively [great-]grandchild;”
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but privately, the queen later admitted that Alexandra’s recent experiences in Russia had made her distant and aloof. Courtiers at Balmoral during the visit could not help but be swept up in the grandeur of the occasion. While attending church one Sunday morning, Lady Lytton observed that it was “very interesting seeing the two pews full of the Royalties and the Emperor and Empress standing by the Queen even in the Scotch [Church] where all is simple and reverent.”
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The last day of the visit was emotional for Alexandra and Victoria. They passed the rainy, misty day quietly in one of the castle’s salons. When the rain finally broke, Nicholas and Alexandra planted a tree in the garden to commemorate their visit. The queen recorded in her diary, “in the afternoon [we] drove out with them, alas! for the last time.”
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Nicholas and Alexandra’s generosity shone forth in the parting gifts they left for the Balmoral staff. The tsar left a staggering tip of £1,000 for the master of the household to distribute among the staff. To the queen’s physician, Sir James Reid, who cured his toothache, he left a gold cigarette case decorated with the imperial crest studded with diamonds. The empress left a sachet of flawless diamonds and pearl jewelry for the ladies-in-waiting. These gifts, though, were not as lavish as one would think under the circumstances. When the tsar’s ancestor and namesake, Tsar Nicholas I, visited Queen Victoria early in her reign, he left £2,000, a diamond parure worth another thousand, and freely distributed rings, brooches, and other jewels.

When the time finally came for the Romanovs to depart, Scottish attendants dressed in formal kilts held blazing torches aloft to illuminate the imperial family’s departure into the night. Both the tsar and tsarina—Nicholas in a gray Scottish uniform and Alexandra in a glittering pink dress trimmed with white fur—looked stately and dignified as they said their farewells. “It has been such a very short stay and I leave dear kind Grandmama with a heavy heart,” she wrote shortly before her departure. As if she had some preternatural instinct that she would never see Victoria again, she added, “Who knows when we may meet again and where?”
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Capping the Russian imperial couple’s tour abroad was the highly anticipated state visit to France, the tsarist empire’s newest ally. When Nicholas and Alexandra drove through the streets of Paris, they were greeted with cheering crowds. French president Félix Faure bestowed a number of gifts on the imperial family. To two-year-old Grand Duchess Olga, he gave a set of accessories that included a tiny comb, brush, and mirror for one of her prized toy dolls. To the tsarina, Faure presented a Gobelin tapestry of Marie Antoinette and her children. This ironic piece of décor, based on the portrait done by Madame Vigée Le Brun, later hung in Alexandra’s drawing room in the Alexander Palace on the grounds of Tsarskoe Selo. Nicholas was well received in Paris, but once again, despite her best efforts, Alexandra was a flop. Painfully self-conscious, she shied away from the people’s thunderous welcome. Her only effort to align herself with France’s republicanism backfired when she refused to meet a group of
grande dames
with ties to the old monarchy. What she did not realize was that France enjoyed an unusual mixture of republican and royalist elements. There were still many facets of French society connected to the old Bourbon and Bonaparte dynasties. In response to this slight, the French people withdrew their acclamations of Alexandra. The press promptly started criticizing everything about her. Even her accommodations came under scrutiny. She had been staying in Marie Antoinette’s apartments at Versailles, but after this incident, the public declared she was no longer worthy of that honor. For all her failed efforts in France, Alexandra Feodorovna meant well. But fatigued, nauseous, and weak, she had little energy to carry her through the visit. The news of her condition arrived shortly before leaving Balmoral. Alexandra was pregnant again.

As a young wife and mother, May York’s life centered on a variety of homes. While in London, her family resided at the deceptively named York House. It is actually an entire wing of Saint James’s Palace on Pall Mall, a street in central London between Westminster and Buckingham Palace. Their main residence continued to be York Cottage, at the royal family’s Sandringham estate in the Norfolk countryside. Located six miles away from the port town of King’s Lynn on England’s east coast, York Cottage was a two-story manor house that was originally built as an annex known as the Bachelor’s Cottage for male guests visiting Sandringham. Much as May tried to personalize the place, she never came to see York Cottage as a true home, not in the way she did Kensington Palace or White Lodge. Being located only a few hundred yards from George’s parents’ Grand Manor, it offered the duke and duchess little privacy. During the daytime, there were nearly three dozen servants in the cramped house. May once said it was “so very nice but so small for my needs.”
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The house had few modern amenities. Bathrooms were in short supply. With the exception of the master bedroom and a few dressing rooms, the rooms contained no indoor plumbing for lavatories. George felt differently than his wife about the house. The subdued, demure Duke of York cherished its remoteness from London. He also liked being close to his parents, especially his mother, whom George and his sisters affectionately called “Motherdear.” What also appealed to George was the fact that Sandringham possessed thirty thousand acres upon which he could indulge his favorite pastime: hunting. George’s official biographer, Harold Nicolson, noted that “when he was Duke of York … he did nothing at all but kill [hunt] animals and stick in stamps.”
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Sandringham was so vast that it contained a menagerie of free-roaming animals, including an elephant, a bear, and a miniature Indian pony. For nearly two decades, May’s husband would insist on making Sandringham their family’s true home largely for that reason.

Life at York Cottage was a far cry from Tsarina Alexandra’s extravagant palaces in Saint Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo, Augusta Victoria’s austere surroundings in Berlin and Potsdam, or even Zita’s homes in Chambord and Tuscany. Regardless of its inconveniences, May still grew attached to her Norfolk home. It was at York Cottage that she gave birth to her second child on December 14, 1895. That afternoon cannons boomed from the Tower of London, and guns were fired in Hyde Park to announce the birth of a son. George recorded in his diary that day, “A little boy was born weighing 8lb at 3.30 … everything most satisfactory, both doing very well. Sent a great number of telegrams, had something to eat. Went to bed at 6.45 very tired.”
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The Duchess of Teck was thrilled at the arrival of another grandchild. “
A Boy!!! What Joy!!!”
she squealed with delight to her son Alge.
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The infant’s date of birth, December 14, was a deeply symbolic one for Queen Victoria. It fell on Mausoleum Day, the thirty-fourth anniversary of the death of her husband, Prince Albert. For Queen Victoria, December 14 was a sacred day, which she looked upon with a strange mix of reverence and apprehension. Her thirty-nine years of mourning for her beloved Albert has since become iconic. Since the day he died, she wore nothing but black and had his clothes laid out each morning as if he were about to walk into the room and start his day. When the queen’s newest great-grandchild was born on the hallowed day of her husband’s death, “the child’s grandfather, the Prince of Wales, announced the news of the birth with a kind of apology.” Queen Victoria was “rather distressed that this happy event should have taken place on a darkly sad anniversary for us.”
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“This terrible anniversary returned for the thirty-fourth time,” she wrote. “When I went into my dressing-room found telegrams saying dear May had been safely delivered of a son at three this morning. Georgie’s first feeling was regret that this dear child should be born on such a sad day. I have a feeling it may be a blessing for the dear Little Boy, and may he be looked upon as a gift from God.”
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In the end, May and George decided the child should be named Albert, in the prince consort’s honor. “I really think it would gratify her if you yourself proposed the name
Albert
to her,” wrote May’s father-in-law.
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Two days later, the queen received the news that the baby would indeed be named Albert, which she recorded gave her “the greatest pleasure.”
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At the infant’s christening three months later, he was given the names Albert Frederick Arthur George (“Bertie”). In consequence, Queen Victoria gave the child a marble bust of Prince Albert as a gift. The Duchess of Teck, however, did not approve of the child’s first name. She wrote prophetically that she hoped the infant’s last name, George, “may supplant the less favoured one [Albert].”
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