Alexandra Read online

  The draughty corridors of Windsor Castle were full of noise and bustle that January, for the wedding of the queen’s son Arthur was only weeks away and the many members of Victoria’s large family were gathering to attend it. Vicky and Fritz and their children arrived from Berlin, Bertie and his family came from Sandringham, and Victoria’s daughter Helena and her husband and children who lived on the Windsor grounds joined the others for meals and excursions. In addition, relatives of Arthur’s bride, Princess Louise of Prussia, arrived – in all, at least three dozen visitors, plus their entourages of servants.

  Despite Arthur’s insistence that his sister Alice’s death had ‘thrown a sad gloom’ over his approaching marriage, the wedding promised to be a magnificent affair, celebrated with a degree of pomp not seen at the old castle since the Prince Consort died. Arthur was Victoria’s favourite son; of her other three, Bertie was an ageing roué, Alfred a stodgy nonentity who had had the audacity to marry the daughter of the Russian emperor (‘The murder is out!’ the queen exclaimed when she heard of his engagement), and young Leopold, intellectual and engaging, was afflicted with the bleeding disease which earned him the epithet ‘child of anxiety’. For Arthur, her ‘good’ son, the queen would have a grand celebration, and would, for the first time since the start of her widowhood, add a long white train to her black gown, to be held up by train-bearers.1

  To six-year-old Alicky and her sisters, brought up on plain food and taught to sew and cook and wait on themselves, entering the opulent precincts of Windsor Castle was akin to entering fairyland. The vast, high-ceilinged halls and spacious salons, the endless corridors decorated with imposing art works, trophies from colonial wars, and regimental insignia overawed them and all but forced on them an awareness of their Hanoverian roots. When all the relatives gathered at the long dining table laid with gleaming silver, polished candelabra and banks of hothouse flowers, and with the queen, her ample chest adorned with flashing diamonds and sapphires, presiding at its head, the sense of dynastic force was strong indeed.

  To little Alicky, however, who disliked crowds and always sought isolation and quiet, the bustle of Windsor was uncongenial. There were too many faces, too much stimulation. She much preferred spending time alone with her cousin Marie-Louise, Helena’s daughter, or with Ernie, or with her benevolent sister Ella, talking and playing games. The animals on the Windsor grounds attracted her, and as the weather was mild that winter she was able to go walking and riding in a pony cart through the extensive park – though she could not walk far, for her injured legs were weak and tired easily.

  What little time she spent on her own with her royal grandmother, ‘Gangan’, was agreeable, for when not presiding over a family occasion or enforcing family discipline Gangan could be very loving and comforting. Alicky was one of Gangan’s favourites among her twenty-seven grandchildren; the little girl’s cheerful if somewhat reserved nature, her good manners and the beauty of her delicate features were all pleasing. To Gangan Alicky was a ‘dear little thing’, to be hugged and joked with, fed on biscuits and chocolate sponge cake. To be sure, the queen subjected Alicky, as she did all her grandchildren, to considerable scrutiny. She had to be certain that the child’s education and character formation were progressing satisfactorily. But once Alicky passed those tests, she was rewarded with approval and affection, and she had the pleasure of basking in Gangan’s warm smile and hearing her rich, deep-throated laugh.

  Setting aside a time for solemnity amid all the family activity, the queen took her grandchildren and their father to see the memorial she had commissioned for their mother, then in the process of being carved. It was a tall granite cross, plain and austere, with the inscription ‘To the dear memory of Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, Princess of Great Britain and Ireland, . . . by her sorrowing mother Queen Victoria.’ No doubt she took them to visit Albert’s tomb as well, for she visited it herself often and insisted that all her grandchildren, most of whom had never known their grandfather, pay their respects to his cherished memory.

  The weeks went by, and the day of the wedding came. Arthur and Louise were joined together in St George’s Chapel, fêted in the dining hall, and sent off in a carriage with congratulations and trunkloads of gifts. The wedding had been splendid, though the ever-critical queen had detected minor flaws – the bride’s rotted teeth and ‘ugly’ nose, her father’s vulgarity, the embarrassing estrangement between her parents – and Victoria’s temper seemed to worsen after she discovered that the other wedding she had hoped to arrange, that between Grand Duke Louis and her daughter Beatrice, was destined never to take place. Under British law, it was prohibited for a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister.

  In mid-March the visitors to Windsor began to disperse. Queen Victoria sent her Hesse grandchildren back to Darmstadt, escorted by their Uncle Leopold, and promised to send their Aunt Helena to Hesse to visit them later in the year. She had obtained from Louis a guarantee that the children would return to England for their summer holiday. In the interim she had given instructions to their English governess, Margaret Jackson, to send her frequent written accounts of their activities, and to notify her at once of any untoward behaviour.

  By the next time there was a large family gathering, in the spring of 1884, Alicky was nearly twelve years old and her place within the large circle of her extended family was much better defined. In an era in which women were valued primarily for their looks, little Alicky was attracting much admiration. She was slender and tall for her age, with thick reddish-blonde hair, a smooth fine complexion and grey-blue eyes whose direct, intelligent gaze was both intriguing and daunting. By any measure, she was a beautiful child, and it was clear that she would soon become a beautiful young woman. Most observers thought that her sister Ella, whom she closely resembled, had a lovelier face, but both sisters were exceptional, eclipsing their numerous cousins, and Alicky’s full loveliness had yet to unfold. Where Ella was cheerful and outgoing, Alicky was inward-turned, with a wistfulness that added to her appeal.

  Alicky drew and sketched well, and played the piano with skill – though she cringed and suffered terrible ‘torment’ whenever her grandmother insisted that she play for others. (Her ‘clammy hands felt literally glued to the keys’, the adult Alexandra told her biographer and lady-in-waiting Sophie Buxhoeveden. It was ‘one of the worst ordeals’ of her life.2) A good and disciplined student, she was quick to learn her lessons in literature, history and religion. Though she showed only average ability in French, her English was fluent (albeit spoken with a strong German accent) and she excelled at needlework.

  Beyond the exercises she wrote out in the schoolroom, Alicky was being taught other lessons: from strict yet loving Mrs Orchard (‘Orchie’), with her starched, ironed caps and aprons, she learned the importance of orderliness, tidiness, punctuality and cleanliness; from her governess Margaret Jackson (‘Madgie’), an irascible but liberal and cultivated woman who believed in the then progressive idea that girls should have access to the same education as boys, she learned how to speak her mind and arrive at her own opinions.

  By Baroness Wilhelmine Grancy, her spare, elderly lady-in-waiting, Alicky was taught self-reliance and strict attention to duty. One must never waver, Baroness Grancy frequently said; one must never let down one’s guard, never relax, always be self-disciplined and ‘not give in, either physically or morally’.3 Where another child might have rebelled against such strictures and the rather grim view of life they bore, Alicky absorbed Baroness Grancy’s teachings, with their attitude of granite self-control. They reinforced the philosophy of life she had observed in her sainted if overburdened mother, who had taken on duty after duty and had never spared herself, never wavered, never given in.

  Alicky was turning out to be an idealist like her mother, one who perceived that larger truths and richer beauties lay beyond the appearances of things – truths and beauties to be glimpsed through art, faith and the power of deeply felt emotion. She was carried away by the music of
Wagner, which she ‘adored’, into realms beyond the quotidian. She was greatly affected by the power of the sacred, as impressed on her with considerable forcefulness by her religious teacher Dr Sell. Unlike more extroverted children, Alicky tended to dwell on serious things, to strive after what she saw as nobler, higher pursuits – and, in the process, to be hard on herself if she did not live up to her ideals.

  What brought the Hesse and Hanover relatives to Darmstadt in April of 1884 was yet another wedding, that of Alicky’s oldest sister Victoria to their cousin Louis of Battenberg. Queen Victoria approved of the match, for although Louis lacked a distinguished title and his parentage was a disgrace – his father, Alicky’s uncle Alexander, had married a woman of no social rank, causing a scandal – still his personal qualities were outstanding and he was a serving officer in the British navy. For some time the queen had believed that the oldest of the Hesse girls was ‘so talented’ that she should marry an extraordinary man, not merely one who was a ‘good match’.4 The handsome, charming Louis was in every way appropriate.

  The queen had long since decided whom Ella and Alicky would marry. Her grandson Willy, who would one day inherit the German imperial throne, was in love with Ella; as his wife she would occupy a splendid position at the pinnacle of continental royalty. And Alicky would make the ideal bride for Bertie’s oldest son Eddy, who would one day be King of England.

  Queen Victoria arrived in Darmstadt prepared to celebrate the wedding of Victoria of Hesse and to further her other matrimonial projects. But she was not only thwarted but severely vexed to discover that Ella, with her father’s full consent, had turned her back on her arrogant, bombastic cousin Willy and become engaged to Serge Alexandrovich Romanov, brother of Tsar Alexander III.

  There had been close connections between the court of Hesse and that of St Petersburg for generations. Romanov rulers had a preference for brides from small Protestant German states, for such marriages were unlikely to involve either major political entanglements or religious conflicts. (The Protestant women invariably converted to Orthodoxy.) In the previous generation, Tsar Alexander II had married the Hessian princess Maximiliane Wilhelmine, who took the name Maria Alexandrovna, and Serge, Ella’s fiancé, was their fifth son.

  So in choosing to marry Serge, Ella was fitting into a long established dynastic pattern, and was moreover marrying a familiar relation, for both Serge and his mother, the former Princess Maximiliane, were frequent visitors to Darmstadt.

  But in Queen Victoria’s eyes Ella was making a disastrous mistake. German princesses, she insisted, withered and suffered in frigid Russia, where the Romanovs and their courtiers were as icy as the long hard winters. Had not Maximiliane been miserable in her marriage to Tsar Alexander II? Was it not common knowledge that the tsar, having been excessively in love with his wife in his youth, had subsequently made her miserable with his infidelities, and had even moved his mistress Princess Dolgorukoy into the Winter Palace, humiliating the poor tsarina and virtually forcing her to seek refuge with her Darmstadt relations?5

  It was common knowledge, the queen said, that marriages between Russians and Germans were doomed. Her own son Alfred, who had married Serge’s sister Marie, had lived to regret his choice and Marie too was unhappy.

  Behind the queen’s fulminations was a deep and intense personal dislike and distaste for all things Russian – including the reigning tsar himself, Alexander III, who heartily returned her dislike and called Victoria a spoiled, self-indulgent old woman.6 Given this antipathy, Ella’s decision to marry Serge seemed extremely ill-advised.

  Hardly had the queen begun to recover from her aggravation at Ella than she was given cause for fresh outrage. She learned that her heretofore favourite son-in-law Louis, Alice’s devoted but wayward widower, had had the audacity to marry his mistress Alexandrine von Kolemine, a beautiful divorcée nearly twenty years his junior.

  Word of the clandestine marriage leaked out and spread like an infection through the family gathering. The fact that Madame von Kolemine was a charming person and much liked by Louis’s children made no difference to Louis’s relations, all of whom regarded his secret wedding – held under their very noses – as an insult to family honour and reacted angrily. The German empress ordered Vicky and Fritz to leave Darmstadt immediately and return to Berlin. Others among the wedding guests departed hurriedly as well, leaving Louis in no doubt that from then on he would be persona non grata at their courts and homes. Queen Victoria, taking it upon herself in her role of matriarch to repair the damage the foolish Louis had done, sent Bertie to Louis to inform him that he had no choice but to separate from the woman with whom he had disgraced himself and seek an annulment of his marriage. To Madame von Kolemine the queen sent a much harsher message, before leaving Darmstadt for calmer climes.

  All the family turmoil must have been confusing to soulful, sensitive Alicky, who was just on the threshold of young womanhood and whose idealistic, Wagnerian sensibility drew her towards love as towards a magnet. But love – whether it was her father’s rebellious love for Alexandrine von Kolemine, or Ella’s sensible, safe love for the avuncular Serge, or the love she knew her grandmother expected her to develop for her cousin Eddy – love was so upsetting. There were so many unhappy marriages, so much pain arising from mismatched husbands and wives, so much bitterness created within the extended family when love refused to follow the dictates of social etiquette. And the consequences of love and marriage that Alicky observed among her relations were so different from the nobler love stories she saw on the operatic stage, where romance took on a sacred, doomed quality and became the central element in the characters’ lives.

  While ruminating on these complexities, Alicky prepared to make an important journey. She was to go with her sisters and brother and father to St Petersburg, to attend Ella and Serge’s wedding.

  It was to be by far the longest journey she had ever made, much longer than her trips to Balmoral. For three days the train rode eastwards along the sparsely populated Baltic seacoast, where the air was chilly even in June and a damp mist hung low over the villages. Gradually the coastal plain gave way to low-lying swampland, cratered with small lakes, the only vegetation thickets of rough marsh grass and tall reeds. Many years later, the adult Alexandra recalled riding ‘up the long ugly stretches of country from the Russian frontier to Petersburg’, an interminable expanse of barren waste and marshland, the bleak landscape turned a silvery grey in the eerie northern summer light.7

  The desolate landscape mirrored the sadness Alicky felt in losing her ‘greatly beloved Ella’, the sister she was closest to. Tall, beautiful blonde Ella, always the peacemaker in the Hesse family, must have been something of a surrogate mother to her much younger sister Alicky. Ella’s outgoing nature and generosity – she was, as the adult Alexandra remembered her, ‘the personification of unselfishness’ – strengthened the bond between the sisters, and the thought that after her marriage Ella would be living very far from Darmstadt must have deepened Alicky’s habitual melancholy.8

  But the splendours of St Petersburg, with its flowing canals and immense baroque palaces, the entire city bathed in a unique watery luminescence, quickened Alicky’s aesthetic sense and the excitement with which the Petersburgers greeted Serge’s bride-to-be helped to raise her subdued spirits.

  Ella’s wedding, held in the high-ceilinged chapel of the Winter Palace amid white pilasters crowned with gold, far surpassed any royal event Alicky had ever witnessed, even those at Windsor Castle. The wealth in jewels, gowns and furnishings was of an opulence she had not known existed, while the richness of the Orthodox service surpassed any religious ceremony she had ever seen. Long-bearded, golden-robed priests in tall headgear presided over the lengthy ceremony, during which the vast room was filled with the scent of incense and the ethereal sound of choral singing.

  Ella, in her bridal gown of shining silver, her long fur-trimmed train and white veil, seemed already transformed from a relatively humble Hessian prin
cess into a fairytale Russian grand duchess. Her heavy necklace of large jewels had belonged to Catherine the Great, and there were other reminders of the Romanov imperial past throughout the room. Alicky, standing and watching in her white muslin dress, a wreath of roses in her hair, was thoroughly caught up in the mystique of the ceremony; afterwards, taking out her diary, she made a sketch of herself dressed in a long bridal gown.

  For a few days following the wedding the Hesse children went to stay with Tsar Alexander and his family at the imperial palace of Peterhof on the Gulf of Finland. The palace was a playground of gardens, fountains, lakes and small ornate summer houses, and Alicky and her brother Ernie spent time wandering through the grounds with the tsar’s children Georgy, Xenia and Michael, aged fourteen, nine and six, and even with the oldest of the tsar’s children, sixteen-year-old Nicky, who recorded in his diary some of what they did together.

  ‘The weather today was wonderful,’ he wrote. ‘We lunched as usual with all the Darmstadts. We jumped with them on the net. At three o’clock we all went out in the four-horse break. Papa led the way in the family charabanc with Aunt Marie and Victoria [Alicky’s sister].’ They made an excursion to a peasant village and rode through the low-lying countryside, stopping to dine on black bread and milk. Later, at supper, Nicky noted that ‘sweet little Alix’ came to join them.9

  The shy, warm, charming Nicky felt drawn to his twelve-year-old second cousin, whom he called Alix; she too was shy and reserved, though when they went sight-seeing she was the one most eager to see and do everything, and she laughed heartily at Georgy’s practical jokes. For her part, Alicky too was captivated, though when Nicky gave her a gift, a brooch, she felt she could not keep it, and gave it back.

  The brooch had been a keepsake, a token of affection. And there was another token of their mutual affection: their names, scratched into a pane of glass in the Italian summerhouse. By the time Alicky and her sisters and brother left for Hesse, a pact had been sealed. ‘We love each other,’ Nicky wrote in his diary. Alicky’s diary was filled with page after page of sketches, all of brides in white veils and long white gowns, marching to imagined music.