The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (5 page)

deference to royal grief, had other things on its mind.

Princess Alix was twenty and highly marriageable and gossip

began circulating about a possible match between her and the young

Prince George, second son of Bertie, Prince of Wales. Three years

previously, a surprisingly determined young Alix had vigorously

resisted the queen’s attempt to marry her off to Bertie’s heir, Eddy, Duke of Clarence. Victoria had been extremely put out that Alix,

by then in love with Nicky, should turn down the opportunity of

being a future queen of the United Kingdom. As the last of the four

daughters of the House of Hesse yet to be married, Alix’s prospects

were hardly the best. Never mind; perhaps she could be persuaded

to marry George instead, thought the queen, particularly once the

unfortunate Eddy succumbed to pneumonia in January 1892. It

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didn’t work; Alix was adamant, and when George settled instead for

Eddy’s disconsolate fiancée May of Teck, it soon became evident

where Alix’s affections were firmly fixed. She only had eyes for the

Russian tsarevich. Queen Victoria’s anxiety at the prospect of such

a marriage mounted. She had been highly mistrustful of Russia since

the Crimean War, looking upon Britain’s former enemy as ‘false’

and ‘unfriendly’ and much of its population ‘half oriental’. Russia

was ‘a corrupt country, where you can trust no one’.25 She fired off

exhortatory letters to Alix’s eldest sister Victoria, demanding she

and Ernie intervene to prevent it: ‘for the younger Sister to marry

the son of an Emperor – would never answer, and lead to no happi-

ness . . . The state of Russia is so bad, so rotten that any moment

something dreadful might happen.’26

In Russia, Alix’s other sister Ella was meanwhile quietly working

against the queen’s plan to subvert the match. She had seen the

lovelorn Nicholas at first hand and despite the fact that his father

Alexander III and his wife were also, at this time, opposed to the

match, Ella gave it her full support. In the midst of all the behind-

the-scenes discussion of her future, Alix maintained a stony silence, locked into a personal vow made to her father before his death, that

she would never change her religious faith. Since Louis’s death she

had become more devoted than ever to Ernie, for whom she was

now performing a similar central role at the Hesse court. Behind

the impenetrable, dignified
froideur
that she projected, Alix was proud of the high standards she set for herself; proud of her own

purity of heart and her independence of thought and moral integrity.

‘Of course, I am gay sometimes, and sometimes I can be pleasant,

I suppose,’ she admitted to a visitor from Romania, ‘but I am rather

a contemplative, serious being, one who looks into the depths of all

water, whether it be clear or dark.’27 But such high-mindedness and

virtue carried with it a fatal flaw: Alix had not learned ‘that virtue must be amiable’.28 She already took herself and life far too seriously.

There would be more than enough deep dark waters for her to

negotiate in the years to come.

*

In 1894 another royal wedding drew Alix and Nicky together once

more. Her brother Ernie at last found a suitable bride in his cousin

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Victoria Melita (daughter of Queen Victoria’s son Prince Alfred)

and the extended royal family of Europe gathered en masse in

Coburg in April for the celebrations. It was here, after much earnest and tearful persuasion from Nicky, that Alix finally succumbed,

backed up by the reassurances of Ella, who herself had now converted

to Russian Orthodoxy. Perhaps also there was another reason: Alix

knew that her pre-eminence in the Hesse court was over with Ernie’s

marriage: ‘life will indeed be very different for me, as I shall be

feeling myself de trop’, she told the queen.29 In the months that

followed it became clear that she did not much like playing second

fiddle to her new sister-in-law the grand duchess, but marriage to

Nicky was far more than a welcome escape. Alix had at last allowed

herself to be happy. She put to the back of her mind ‘all those horrid things which were said about cousins marrying’ (she and Nicholas

were third cousins) and refused to worry about the ‘disease which

poor Frittie had’ which had been ‘so frightening’. ‘Who else is there to marry?’ she asked a friend; she at least had the great good fortune to be marrying for love.30

Love also won over Alix’s dictatorial grandmother Victoria. She

quickly cast aside her disappointment and the considerable personal

loss to her of someone she had considered her own child – no doubt

remembering that she too had married for love back in 1840. She

pushed her instinctive fears for her granddaughter on that ‘very

unsafe Throne’ – and with it the dangers of political unrest and

assassination – to the back of her mind and focused on the job in

hand.31 Her beloved Alicky must prepare for the onerous public role

to come and Victoria immediately ordained that she enter a period

of retreat in England with her. And so the summer passed: quietly

sewing, reading, playing the piano and going for drives with

Grandmama. Alix also began taking lessons in Russian with Ella’s

lectrice
, Ekaterina Schneider, sent specially from Russia, and entered into earnest discussion with Dr Boyd Carpenter, Bishop of Ripon,

on how to reconcile her Lutheran faith with conversion to Russian

Orthodoxy.

She was, however, far from well, already suffering the sciatic pain

that would plague her throughout her life. This was a cause of some

concern to her grandmother and other relatives. ‘Alix is again lame

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and cannot walk at all, she had even to drive to church’, wrote the

Duchess of Coburg to her daughter during the visit. ‘What a deplor-

able health she has’.32
*
Rumours had already been circulating that Alix had inherited her mother’s sickly physique and nervous constitution, a fact that could not be advertised abroad when the wife of

the future heir to the Russian throne should, above all things, be

robust enough to produce healthy babies. She suffered also with

inflammation of the ear (otitis), from frequent nervous headaches

that turned to migraines, and poor circulation. But it was the sciatic pain – often so severe that it was impossible for her to walk, ride,

or play tennis – that was the real problem. Alix rarely complained

about her ‘wretched legs’, but they frequently consigned her to long

hours lying down or reclining on a sofa.33 The European press had

already got wind of her health problems and gossip was – and had

been – circulating for some time, to the point where an official

statement was issued in the summer of 1894 asserting that reports

on the princess’s poor health were ‘absolutely without foundation’.34

But Queen Victoria was taking no chances. Vigilant as she always

was about her own health, she was a great believer in bed rest at

every opportunity. She regretted that Alix had not been ordered ‘a

strict regime of life as well as diet’ sooner (the fault of the family doctor at Hesse – ‘a stupid man’), nor had she been able, the previous autumn, to take her granddaughter for a rest cure to Balmoral ‘which

is the finest air in the world’ – Alix having previously found Scotland a tad too ‘bracing’.35 The queen had no doubt that all the stresses

and strains of the young princess’s engagement to Nicky had ‘tried

her
nerves very much
’ and so, after Alix arrived from Darmstadt, on 22 May she was despatched to Harrogate to take the waters.

Alix’s incognito as the ‘Baroness Starkenburg’ failed to convince

anyone and word was soon out, fuelling further speculation in the

press. ‘Princess Alix would not have buried herself at a Yorkshire

watering-place in the height of the London season if she was in

* The former Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna, a daughter of Alexander II, who had married Queen Victoria’s son Prince Alfred. She took the title Duchess of Edinburgh until Alfred inherited the throne of Coburg in 1893, his older brother Bertie having relinquished his right of succession to it.

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perfect health’, commented the
Westminster Budget
:

The anxiety of the Court to contradict the report that [she] is

in delicate health is unquestionably due to an apprehension that

it may cause her engagement to be broken off. It is a
sine qua

non
that the wife of the heir to the throne of Russia should be of a thoroughly sound constitution, and his marriage to anyone

not in good health is positively prohibited by the Romanoff

family statutes.36

Alix’s four-week stay in Harrogate with her lady-in-waiting,

Gretchen von Fabrice, was, despite the press attention, a happy one.

She made the most of the home comforts of a roomy, terraced villa

at Prospect Place in High Harrogate – the fashionable end of town.

But every morning she had to run the gauntlet of prying eyes

watching her – some even through opera glasses – as she went down

the hill by bath chair or carriage to the Victoria Bathing House for

sulphur or peat baths and glasses of the evil-smelling sulphurous

waters. Every afternoon she would re-emerge, to be taken on excur-

sions in a special Coventry Cycle Chair (a combination of bath chair

and pedal cycle), to admire local beauty spots and be further invig-

orated by the bracing Yorkshire air. A detective followed by bicycle

at a discreet distance.37 Soon, however, Alix had to adopt avoidance

tactics, as she told Nicky: ‘They stand in a mass to see me drive out and tho’ I now get in at the backyard, they watch the door and then

stream to see me . . . when I go into a shop to buy flowers, girls

stand and stare in at the window.’38 The crippling embarrassment

she felt was made doubly so by the fact that she was in a bath chair

and felt vulnerable. For most of her stay it poured with rain and

the pain in her legs was little better by the end of it, but she remained at all times cheerful and polite to the attendants and local people

whom she encountered, all of whom remembered her as ‘affable

and unassuming, nothing stiff or formal about her’.39

Shortly after her arrival at Prospect Place, Alix had been delighted

to discover that her hostess, Mrs Allen, had just given birth to twins, a boy and a girl. She felt this was a lucky sign and asked to see the babies. She was extraordinarily informal around the household,

insisting that they treat her like an ordinary person, and ‘tripping

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and singing about the house, like a happy English girl, just home

from school’,

now popping into her bedroom, and alarming the servant by

helping her to make the bed; then startling Mrs. Allen by tapping

at the kitchen door, with a pretty ‘May I come in,’ dandling the

lucky twins, or standing with her back to the fire, like a Yorkshire

man, whilst she chatted as to the cooking operations, or held

lengthy discussions along with the Baroness Fabrice as to the

best way of dressing and training children.40

At the Allens’ request Alix agreed to stand as godparent for the

twins at their christening on 13 June at St Peter’s Church, Harrogate, when they were given the names Nicholas Charles Bernard Hesse

and Alix Beatrice Emma. Afterwards, she presented the children

with generous gifts of gold jewellery, as well as photographs of

herself and her fiancé, so that when they grew up the children would

see who they were named after.41
*
It was a happy interlude, filled with hopes for her own future life as a wife, surrounded by the

children she longed for; a time when Princess Alix was her natural

self – open, loving and generous to those who mattered within her

own private, domestic world.

In mid-June, Alix was joined in England by Nicky – ecstatic to

find himself at last ‘in the embrace of my destined one, who seemed

to me even more beautiful, even more dear, than before’, as he told

his mother.41 For three idyllic days by the River Thames at Walton,

staying with Alix’s sister Victoria and her husband Louis of

Battenberg, the couple spent time walking; sitting on a rug in the

shade of a chestnut tree, with Nicholas reading aloud as Alix sat

sewing; or going for drives, the latter, for once, unchaperoned. Then they joined the queen at Windsor and travelled on to Osborne with

her, during which time Nicholas’s domestic chaplain, Father

* A year later when the twins had their first birthday Alix sent gifts of Russian gold and enamelled cutlery, serviette rings and salt cellars bearing the imperial coat of arms and the babies’ initials, as well as two matching pink and blue petti-coats that she herself made specially for the occasion. Further presents followed from Russia in 1910 when the twins were confirmed and again in 1915 when they reached twenty-one.