‘Russia I could not wish for any of you . . .’
Queen Victoria to Victoria of Hesse, January 1883
The momentous events in the German court frustrated Queen Victoria’s ability to implement Albert’s grand vision of matchmaking that she had faithfully followed as she guided six of their children into alliances with German royal houses. She had trusted in the wisdom of her late husband and felt his ideals to be her ‘law’. But twenty-five years after his death, as she now looked to the marriages of their grandchildren, her ability to fulfil his grand plan for the dynasty was more uncertain, her faith in foreign matches less sure.
Queen Victoria reacted with pragmatism, guided almost by instinct and convention rather than a carefully worked-out master plan. As her influence in the German court waned, her attention turned to the future of the British throne. The search to find the right consort for her British grandson, Albert Victor, known to his family as ‘Eddy’, was a delicate undertaking. The future British heir to the throne formed a marked contrast to the new German emperor. For all his flaws, Kaiser Wilhelm highlighted the youthful vigour and strength of the German regime. By the time he came to the throne in 1888, Dona had already given him four sons; a fifth was on the way, the virility and succession of the mighty Hohenzollerns proved beyond doubt. In press photographs the new German emperor invariably struck a defiant pose: the warrior dressed in full military regalia, eyes fixed, full-grown moustache stiff and upturned, the whole crowned with the distinctive Pickelhaube, or spiked helmet, a symbol of military success complete with eagle frontplate. Next to this, Wilhelm’s British cousin, ‘drawing-room Eddy’, with his swan-like neck, delicate physique, and that look he had of not being quite awake even in the most martial pose, appeared immature and enfeebled.
Queen Victoria hoped to bring out Eddy’s more regal attributes. She did not require a spouse for her British grandson who would help to shape the future of Europe like her daughter, Vicky. This spouse needed only to shape Eddy, to mould his lethargic, unformed character into something more traditionally kingly. There was not a great deal of choice because in the queen’s eyes it was essential that an heir to the British throne should marry from within the elite circle of European royalty. The queen did not have to search long for a suitable bride. Amongst her thirty-four grandchildren, there was one candidate who appeared to fit the post perfectly.
Discreetly bypassing Vicky’s two unmarried daughters in the warring German ruling house, Queen Victoria looked to the children of her second daughter, Princess Alice, the Grand Duchess of Hesse. The queen had strongly protective feelings towards her Hessian grandchildren that were intimately bound up with the misfortunes of their mother. Alice had followed her older sister, Vicky, to Germany in 1862, after marrying Prince Louis of Hesse, the heir to the small German Grand Duchy of Hesse and by Rhine centred around the town of Darmstadt. Alice and Louis had had a large family but their happiness had been destroyed in a few short weeks in 1878 when a diphtheria epidemic swept through central Germany. Their beloved youngest daughter, four-year-old May, succumbed to the disease, followed swiftly by thirty-five-year-old Alice. She died on exactly the same day – 14 December – as her father, Albert, seventeen years before; this coincidence chilled the queen as though it were an enigmatic portent.
Alice was survived by one son, Ernest, and four beautiful daughters. The oldest, Victoria of Hesse, named after her grandmother, was followed by Elisabeth, Irene and lastly Alexandra or Alix. At the time of Kaiser Wilhelm’s accession in 1888, only the youngest daughter remained unattached: Queen Victoria’s favourite, Alix, who was still free and available for Eddy. ‘My heart & mind are bent on securing dear Alicky for either Eddie or Georgie,’ the queen wrote on 2 March 1887 to the oldest daughter, Victoria of Hesse. ‘I hope to live to see one of darling Mama’s girls here.’1 Such a view, from Queen Victoria herself, whether expressed as a wish, an expectation or a demand, undoubtedly carried weight. The queen ‘was a tremendous, sometimes almost a fearful force’, observed another granddaughter, Princess Marie of Edinburgh. Members of the family ‘had to count with Queen Victoria, had to listen to her, and if . . . not exactly to obey, had anyhow to argue out all differences of opinion’.2
As Princess Alix of Hesse turned sixteen in June 1888 she certainly looked the part of a future queen. There was widespread agreement on her uncommon beauty. She was tall and elegant and on the cusp of maturity, her even features were finely chiselled, the rich colouring of her red-gold hair and blue eyes a striking combination. Her personality, too, seemed to fit. There was nothing gushing or trivial about Alix. She had an air of self-possession that made her appear slightly older than she was; at heart she was serious-minded, even intense. While Alix herself felt held back by her shyness, to the casual observer her reserve appeared to add to her regal manner. Occasionally her nervousness overwhelmed her, such as when the queen asked her to play the piano in front of a large gathering at Windsor. Alix’s flawless complexion coloured as she endured the unwelcome attention of being centre stage; she felt as though her ‘clammy hands’ were literally ‘glued to the keys’.3 But such youthful awkwardness did not seem out of the ordinary. Alix had many attributes in common with her grandmother; she could be self-willed, independent, and she came into her own in the close-knit family circle where she could let down her guard. From Queen Victoria’s point of view, Alix possessed many admirable qualities that formed something of a contrast to Eddy’s immaturity.
First among these was her sound education, which Queen Victoria had personally supervised. At the time of her mother’s death, six-year-old Alix was still too young to join her older sisters in the schoolroom. She remained in the nursery under the care of the devoted Mary Orchard, or ‘Orchie’, who endeavoured to fill the void, but Alix sometimes found her ‘silently crying’.4 The little girl once nicknamed ‘Sunny’ by her mother on account of her joie de vivre now understood that something fundamental in her life was missing. She described that period in her life later as ‘perpetual sunshine, then of a great cloud’.5 Queen Victoria tried at a distance to be the mother that her Hessian granddaughters had lost, especially for the youngest. ‘How I love you darling children, how dear you are to me & how I look on you as my own I can hardly say,’ she wrote in July 1880 to Victoria of Hesse. ‘You are so doubly dear as the children of my own darling Child . . .’6 Queen Victoria was not noted for being motherly when her own children were born, but as a grandmother the tragedy of the motherless family far from maternal help was hard to bear, and Alix became her special favourite.
From an early age Alix was encouraged to write regularly to her grandmother. Her letters bearing news of birthdays or pets were neatly written out on pencil-drawn lines with scrupulous attention to such details as large loops on the ‘G’ and ‘d’ of ‘Grandmama’.7 Unlike her sisters, Alix invariably signed herself ‘your loving and grateful child’, rather than grandchild, with a generous scattering of circles and crosses for hugs and kisses, underlining the closeness of the bond.8 As she progressed to the schoolroom, accounts of her progress contained much to please her grandmother. Under her English governess, Margaret Jackson, she applied herself energetically, perhaps aware of the thorough monthly reports demanded by the queen. With her serious approach, her retentive memory and a natural fluency in both English and German, Alix made good progress. Lessons started as early as 7 a.m. and covered a wide range of academic subjects including history, mathematics and literature, as well as all the expected accomplishments including painting and the piano – for which Alix had an instinctive flair. The Hesse children were exposed to a wide range of ideas; their intellectual mother had studied such controversial works as the French Enlightenment philosopher, Voltaire, the German theologian, David Strauss, and the English art critic, John Ruskin, whose essay Unto This Last challenged the inequalities of capitalism.9 Alix’s oldest sister, Victoria, remembered once lecturing bemused relatives on ‘the advantages of socialism’.10 As a child Alix was taught to think of others and proudly told her grandmother at Christmas 1879 that she was ‘learning to knit mittens for poor people’.11 In the schoolroom she wrestled with such texts as François Guizot’s History of the Republic of England and of Cromwell and John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Queen Victoria enlisted the help of her oldest Hessian granddaughter, Victoria, to help her supervise the others at a distance. There was no danger of spoiling the children. Victoria of Hesse by her own admission ruled ‘with a rod of iron’ and could be relied upon to give the queen a full account of progress.12 After her own studies in French and German, she would help Alix with her lessons and drawing. She encouraged her younger siblings to turn to their grandmother for advice. Her tactful letters repeatedly expressed her gratitude to the queen ‘for all your love and kindness’ and her desire ‘to please you in all I do & by teaching the others the same & by looking up to you as I would to dear Mama were she still with us’.13 Victoria of Hesse did her best to ensure her grandmother’s wishes over matters of discipline were also met. ‘I am very sorry to hear that the others were lazy at Balmoral,’ she wrote after one visit. Her sisters ‘are very sorry to have vexed you about their lessons and wish me to tell you . . . that they will work hard now’.14
Alix grew up with a love of all things British. Portraits of British forebears, of kings and queens and Grandpapa Albert hung on the walls of the Neues Palais in Darmstadt. Aunts and uncles frequently visited from Britain, and presents from the queen arrived with unfailing regularity to mark each passing birthday and Christmas: dresses, jewellery, lace, pretty items for her dressing table, a dolls’ tea service. Alix in turn drew pictures, knitted comforters and painted frames for the queen. She looked forward to her visits to see the ‘best and dearest of grandmamas’ who appeared to her both ‘a very august person and . . . a Santa Claus’.15
Leisurely holidays with her beloved grandmother enjoying the pleasures of life at Osborne House, Windsor and Balmoral were a key part of her childhood; they were perfect little kingdoms, apparently untouched by calamity, seemingly in a time of their own. The Hesse children played with their Wales cousins who were close to them in age. ‘We formed a regular scale,’ recalled Victoria of Hesse. She was the oldest, followed by her cousin, Eddy, her sister, Ella, and cousin George. The ‘nursery party’ consisted of the two younger Hesse girls, Irene and Alix, and the younger Wales girls, Louise, Victoria and Maud.16 Adventures exploring the Highlands invariably ended with a visit to ‘the merchants’, the children’s name for a little shop near Balmoral filled with essentials such as sweets and notepaper. The two elderly women who ran the shop took a particular delight in the motherless Hesse children, and the bounty that emerged from such visits in the form of mouth-watering scones or sweets appeared to Alix years later to capture the essence of her holidays with ‘Grand-mama Queen’. It was an enchanted world ruled by benign influences presenting a picture of long-held peace.17
In the summer of 1888 Queen Victoria invited her favourite granddaughter to join her at Osborne and then Balmoral in Scotland. Opportunities were planned for Alix to see a great deal of her British cousin, Prince Eddy. The queen was hopeful about the possibilities for her favourite granddaughter. Might she fall in love – or at least, form an attachment – to her British cousin? ‘A good long stay with us here wh wld be delightful wld do her the gst good . . .’ she insisted in June 1888 to Alix’s oldest sister Victoria.18 The magic of Balmoral in summertime was the perfect background for Eddy and Alix to spend some time together. Alix could not fail to see the desirability of the British throne and the young prince who would inherit it one day.
But in seeking Alix for Eddy, Queen Victoria unexpectedly found herself opposed by another of Alix’s older sisters, Elisabeth or ‘Ella’. Alix’s future was intimately bound up with the choices already made by Ella, who had the temerity to act expressly against the advice of ‘Grandmama Queen’ when it came to matters of the heart. The conflict between Ella and her grandmother had run for almost a decade and was charged with their differences over that great empire rivalling Britain’s power in the east: Russia. The outcome of this clash would have a decisive impact on Europe’s history – and on Eddy’s choice of bride.
Ten years earlier when Queen Victoria’s second daughter, Alice, died, the older Hessian granddaughters were unmarried and on the point of coming out into society. In 1878 Victoria of Hesse was fifteen, Ella was fourteen and Irene was twelve: all ‘fast growing out of a Child’ in the queen’s words. This was a critical time in the life of a Victorian princess, and the queen had been most anxious to guide her older granddaughters in Germany. ‘Dear Papa will, I know, be teazed & pressed to make you marry,’ she warned. But they should not marry too young, and above all, not seek ‘to be married for marrying’s sake & to have a position’. The oldest, Victoria, she knew, had far too much sense to fall into such a trap but, she warned, this was a ‘very German view of things’ and she wanted her granddaughters to be ‘prepared & on your guard when such things are brought before Papa’.19
The queen’s struggles to influence her Hessian granddaughters at a distance were compounded by the fact that the second Hessian daughter, Elisabeth, or ‘Ella’, was widely regarded as the most eligible princess in Europe. She combined perfect beauty with a composed and guileless manner and was seldom in opposition to anyone. In the 1870s Ella had inspired Germany’s highest-ranking prince, her cousin, Wilhelm. He regarded his Hessian cousin as ‘the most beautiful girl I ever saw’. In the years before Wilhelm began his sudden pursuit of Dona in 1878 he had been besotted with Ella and reached the point where he told his mother ‘I shall make her my bride’.20 He was not alone in his admiration for Ella. ‘One could never take one’s eyes off her,’ wrote her infatuated younger cousin, Marie of Edinburgh. She regarded Ella’s beauty as almost mystical, ‘a marvellous revelation’, her features all ‘exquisite beyond words, it almost brought tears to your eyes’.21 Even the queen was prompted to observe in her correspondence with her daughter Vicky that ‘Ella is lovely – beyond all expression and so sweet and gentle’.22
While a student at Bonn University, Prince Wilhelm had found his feelings for his cousin Ella overpowering. Personal attributes that he had taken for granted, his willpower and ability to concentrate, became dissipated under the affliction of this uncontrollable new emotion. He was lost, obsessed, and ‘liebte sie wirklich’ – he ‘really loved her’ – observed Ella’s sensitive younger brother, Ernest.23 Wilhelm himself appears to have made a less favourable impression on his pretty Hesse cousins. He could disrupt the games they were playing on a whim and dominate them to the point of bullying. Whatever Ella’s feelings about him, she was invariably discreet in her letters to her grandmother. ‘We enjoyed his stay very much,’ she told the queen after one visit. She had been riding with him, ‘which was so nice’, and he ‘read to us all a very nice book’.24 By the spring of 1878, Wilhelm’s grandparents, the Kaiser and Kaiserin, his parents and Queen Victoria all understood that the future German heir ‘wished to marry Ella’.25
It has long been thought that Ella disliked Wilhelm’s attentions, possibly she was even repelled by her cousin, and turned him down. Almost certainly to save his pride, years later Wilhelm blamed his parents, claiming that he never actually proposed to her since his parents refused permission. Surviving letters reveal that Wilhelm’s switch to pursue Dona instead was so swift that it prompted concerns from his father, Frederick, who felt uncomfortable with his son’s ‘sudden changing of the saddle’, especially given that ‘he had already declared himself’ to Ella.26 An alternative reason for the dramatic change in Wilhelm’s feelings has been put forward by his biographer, John Röhl. It is known that the prince’s mother, Vicky, was opposed to the match, and Röhl speculates that her anxieties went well beyond a general dislike of first-cousin marriages.
Vicky knew that her youngest brother, Leopold, suffered from haemophilia, a life-threatening disease in which the slightest injury can cause severe bleeding owing to the body’s inability to form blood clots. She had also witnessed at first hand the suffering of her sister Alice’s youngest son, Friedrich, who was also a haemophiliac and had died at the age of two in 1873 in a tragic accident. It is possible that Vicky consulted medical experts to understand how both her brother and her nephew suffered from the same inherited disease although they had different parents. At the time the specific mechanism of inheritance through the gene was not yet understood, but enough had been observed about the transmission of haemophilia through the female line for Vicky to piece together the possibility that her enchanting Hesse nieces might be carriers of the disease, like their mother Alice. If Vicky explained this to Wilhelm, this could account for his dramatic change of heart. The prospect that his own Hohenzollern heirs might be sickly or die would be enough to stop his courtship of Ella in its tracks. However, there is no proof that Vicky consulted medical experts or if she did, whether they were in a position to give this advice. It is also intriguing that if she did have suspicions she failed to pass them on to her mother, who remained unaware of the risk. When Wilhelm married Dona in 1881, the queen was still thinking of Ella and did not consider the possibility that her beautiful Hessian granddaughters might be carriers of the disease. ‘I could not think with regret of what might have been,’ she wrote to Vicky. Unlike the submissive Dona, she believed her granddaughter Ella had more spirit and might have held some influence for the good over Wilhelm. ‘But I will say no more about that painful past. That is over.’27
After Wilhelm’s courtship, beautiful Ella continued to turn the heads of Europe’s princes. Queen Victoria found it ‘very unfortunate’ that her Hessian granddaughter turned down ‘good Fritz of Baden’, an ‘excellent’ prince ‘so good & steady, with such a safe, happy position’.28 Two Danish dukes also failed to win Ella’s hand. Yet all was not lost; the queen began plotting in favour of Prince Charles of Sweden. But before long, Queen Victoria heard that Ella was to be paid the compliment of a visit from one of her dashing Russian cousins: twenty-five-year-old Sergei, the younger brother of the tsar, Alexander III. The fact that Sergei was a Russian grand duke, with all the associated glamour and power, was the most damning thing Queen Victoria had against him. He was very tall – a Romanov trait – and his photograph revealed his even, chiselled features, and his arresting eyes gazing at the camera giving nothing away. It was said that he had a sensitive nature like Ella and took a keen interest in Russian and Italian art.
Queen Victoria may have been shrouded in black and many years a widow but she did know what it felt like to receive the attentions of a Russian grand duke. Sergei was the fifth son of Tsar Alexander II, the very Romanov who forty years earlier had come to England and led the queen onto the dance floor for a mazurka. After those memorable few days at Windsor in the spring of 1839 the Russian tsarevich had left Windsor for Darmstadt and chosen a Hessian princess, Marie, as his bride (who years later became Sergei’s mother and Ella’s great-aunt). Even at a distance of 1,000 miles Queen Victoria sensed trouble. Would Ella align herself with the very country that the queen most feared, Russia?
Of all the warnings Queen Victoria had issued since the death of their mother Alice, she had taken particular care to alert her Hessian granddaughters to the dangers of Russia, and her fear about a Russian marriage for any one of them almost amounted to an obsession. Long before the assassination of Sergei’s father, Alexander II, she pointed out that their ‘dear mama . . . had such a horror of Russia & Russians’. She urged them not to ‘get at all Russian’ from the inevitable social engagements that arose through their Russian relatives.29 Victoria of Hesse had replied by return that there was no chance of that. Even if her Russian cousins ‘were a hundred times more kind they would not make us a bit Russian, they have such odd manners and say such odd things to each other and even once about the English that it made one quite angry’. Apart from ‘considering themselves perfect’, Victoria of Hesse found her Russian cousins to be ‘lazy’, with no clue ‘how to amuse themselves’ and totally ignorant of ‘what to say’.30
Queen Victoria would not let the matter rest. Her objections to the Russians were zealously woven into her correspondence with Victoria of Hesse, to be passed around the family in the hopes of instilling into the innocent unmarried princesses the dangers of marrying into Russian royalty. For the queen had long viewed Russia as ‘our real enemy & totally antagonistic to England’.31
Ever since the Romanovs came to power in the seventeenth century, Russia had expanded at an average rate of 20,000 square miles a year, becoming the world’s largest country two centuries later. To the east, Russian borders reached across the Bering Straits to Alaska. In Europe, the imperial bear had swallowed up Poland and Finland, and to the south-east it menaced the Ottoman Empire, while along its southern border, Russia’s expansion in Asia threatened the Persian Empire and Britain’s ‘Jewel in the Crown’: India.
This expansionism brought imperial Russia and the British Empire repeatedly into conflict and fuelled the queen’s concerns about Russian aggression. One key battleground arose from the weakness of the Ottoman Empire, ‘the Sick Man of Europe’, which for six centuries had ruled lands around the eastern Mediterranean, at its greatest extent dominating the peoples of south-east Europe and the Balkans, north Africa and west Asia, who now questioned Turkish rule. This gave rise to ‘the eastern question’, which flared up in different forms across the nineteenth century. A cartoon in Harper’s Weekly captured British fears, showing a large Russian bear sporting an imperial crown, licking its lips in contemplation of a sickly and sleepy-looking Turkey, with an Islamic crescent moon on its head. ‘Which is the gobbler?’ read the caption.32
In the first half of the nineteenth century Tsar Nicholas I had built up the largest army in the world numbering one million men, and when he crossed the Danube in 1853 into Romania, which was under Ottoman rule, he stumbled into the Crimean War. ‘The power and encroachment of Russia must be resisted,’ the queen urged her cautious prime minister, Lord Aberdeen, in March 1854.33 Two days later Britain joined the Turks, the French and the Sardinians against the Russians. For the first time the bloodthirsty horrors of the battles of the Crimean War such as at Alma and Balaklava were reported by the mass media and they shaped perceptions at home of a heroic British lion standing up to a tyrannical Russian bear. The queen was ‘in the greatest anxiety’ as Britain and her allies advanced on Sevastopol, a Russian stronghold and naval base on the Black Sea.34 But the long siege in fact exposed Russian weaknesses. The health of Tsar Nicholas I went into decline and he died of pneumonia in March 1855.
When Alexander II became tsar, he aimed to recover his father’s losses and in 1871 regained access for his fleet in the Crimea. A few years later the troubled ‘eastern question’ resurfaced yet again when Slavic Christian minorities in Serbia and Bulgaria, which were part of the Ottoman Empire, rose up against their Turkish masters. Alexander II backed the Slavs against the Turks whereas British allegiance lay with the Turks, who supported their interests in the Mediterranean. Queen Victoria believed Britain must ‘remove from Russia the pretext for constantly threatening the peace of Europe on the Eastern or Oriental question’ by creating an independent buffer state out of the rebellious Turkish-ruled principalities of eastern Europe.35
War broke out in April 1877 when Russia joined the Serbs in the fight against the Ottoman Empire. In less than a year Alexander II’s troops were advancing on Constantinople, which many in Britain, including the queen (but not her prime minister, Disraeli), saw as grounds for war. Whoever controlled this ancient city, sited so strategically between east and west, controlled Britain’s short cut to India through the eastern Mediterranean. The queen’s obsessive hatred of the Russians was well known to the tsar through her second son, Alfred, who shared her letters with his wife, Marie, the tsar’s daughter. Incensed, Alexander, the man who had once led her round the dance floor, now saw her as that ‘old madwoman the Queen, that tramp!’ The tsarina joined in his condemnation, seeing Queen Victoria’s remarks as ‘worthy of a fish-wife’.36 Britain sent battleships to the region. Europe was catapulted to the brink of war. The crisis was resolved in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin where, despite Russia’s victory over the Turks, its control in the Balkans was checked by other European powers. Amongst the agreements reached, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro were recognised as newly independent countries in the Balkans, liberated from years of Turkish rule. The Principality of Bulgaria was also established with the tsar’s nephew, Alexander of Battenberg, on its throne.
A second key area of conflict between imperial Russia and the British Empire was in central Asia. The struggle for control from Constantinople eastwards, across the deserts and mountain ranges to Afghanistan and the mountain passes of the Himalayas, became known as the ‘Great Game’, and it captured the imagination of the Victorian public with tales of spectacular derring-do in unmapped and hostile lands. But Russia’s continued expansion overland brought them gradually to within twenty miles of British India. The queen who rarely left the confines of Windsor, Osborne and Balmoral was in thrall to her ‘Jewel in the Crown’. She pressured her prime minister, Disraeli, to pass the Royal Titles Act, making her ‘Empress of India’ in 1876, dismissing opposition to her claim in her usual grand manner. ‘I am all for it, as it is so important for India,’ she wrote in her journal on 17 March 1876.37 She feared Russian encroachment. ‘How can we ever trust the Russians?’ was her continual lament.38
It was not just Russia’s expansionism that worried the queen, but its autocracy. The tsar’s absolute power was deemed ordained by God and as integral to the order of things as the stars in the heavens. The tsar chose ministerial appointments and wielded power over all aspects of policy including war. Although Alexander II had been in the process of introducing reform and he emancipated the serfs in 1861, a vast peasant underclass continued to subsist in harsh conditions on the land, their ranks swollen by another type of worker in the factories and mills of Russia’s newly industrialising cities, whose plight was equally desperate. A great gulf remained between the working masses and the elite. The glaring injustices of Russian society brought in their wake the terrifying spectre of terrorism.
New ideas opposing autocracy were in ferment; students, radicals, Marxists, anarchists and nihilists loathed the absolute power of the tsar and the extremes of social injustice thriving in his kingdom. One Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, met Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in London, and believed their communist ideal of a ‘state of the proletariat’ did not go far enough. For Bakunin, any state – whether capitalist or communist – should be abolished altogether in favour of ‘collective anarchism’, which aimed for equality by diffusing power through local independent assemblies or ‘communes’.39 Bakunin’s vision called for a revolution so total – starting in Russia and spreading across Europe – that all of civilisation must go up in flames before a new society, phoenix-like, could spring from its ashes. Russia’s university towns of St Petersburg, Moscow and Kiev became home to a secret, subterranean network of radical anarchist groups fired with such far-reaching ideals.
The Congress of Berlin, in which a hard-won victory appeared to have been snatched from Alexander II, proved to be a flashpoint for discontent. A wave of attacks came in quick succession in the late 1870s. The governor of St Petersburg, General Feodor Trepov, and the district prosecutor in Kiev, M. Kotlyarevsky, were shot at point-blank range; both survived. Not so lucky was the police spy, A. Nikonov, and the governor general of Kharkov, Prince Kropotkin, and the Chief of the Third Department in charge of political security, General N. V. Mezentsov. The tsar, who had already suffered two attacks on his life in 1866 and 1867, was targeted again in April 1879, directly in front of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Humiliated in front of a large crowd in Palace Square, the tsar was forced to duck and dive to dodge the five bullets that rang out in broad daylight.
Alexander II proclaimed a war on terror. The most reforming tsar in generations now extended police powers. In his efforts to restore order he, in turn, was increasingly held responsible for ‘tsarist terror’ as radicals were hunted down and punished, invariably paying with their lives. In this febrile atmosphere in June 1879, the secret court of the terrorist group People’s Will met at Lipetsk and condemned the tsar to death. Alexander II was an ‘enemy of the people’ and revolutionaries aimed to destroy his rule with terror: ‘propaganda of the deed’. The astonishing scale of their attacks highlights the level of pre-planning and organisation that miraculously took place right in front of the police. When the People’s Will set out to blow up the imperial train in November 1879, they prepared attacks on three possible sites through which the tsar might pass from the Crimea. For the fifth attempt on the tsar’s life a terrorist posing as a carpenter secretly smuggled enough dynamite into the Winter Palace to fill an entire trunk. On 13 March 1881 the sixth attempt on his life finally succeeded, ironically just at a time when the tsar had committed to introducing constitutional reform.
The golden lives of the Romanovs were now ruled by fear, their beautiful palaces invaded by unknown terrors. Yet this was the very family into which Queen Victoria feared her pretty granddaughter, Ella, might be tempted to marry. The queen knew that the older Hessian princesses were fully aware of the horror of Alexander II’s death. The truth of her warnings must have been clear to them. When their father, Louis of Hesse, had set out for St Petersburg to comfort his Russian relatives, the princesses had turned to their grandmother. The tsar’s death was ‘too dreadful – how I pity poor Aunt Marie & the present tsar who can never feel sure of his life’, sixteen-year-old Ella had written to her grandmother. ‘I will be so glad when he [papa] is back from this dreadful Petersburg.’40
Their father had returned with news of the changed lives of the Russian royal family. St Petersburg was a city in fear. Rumours ran wild of further attacks and bombs or torpedoes embedded in the ice. The new emperor, Alexander III, and his Danish wife, Dagmar, now the Empress Maria Feodorovna (the sister of Princess Alexandra), were almost imprisoned by the extensive security of their Anichkov Palace, which was being further fortified against mines with a trench. Queen Victoria had learned further details from her British ambassador. ‘The poor emperor is scarcely allowed out and his only exercise is to walk round a not very large walled garden,’ Lord Dufferin reported to her in March 1881. He found it hard to see ‘any end to these fearful uncertainties’.41 Dufferin was convinced that a reactionary policy ‘was impossible . . . some kind of constitution must be introduced’, a view that was widely shared.42 Sir Henry Eliot, the British ambassador to Vienna, told the queen that the Russian Empire was ‘diseased to the core, financially and politically’. The only thing that could save Russia from revolution was ‘the granting of some sort of constitution’.43
Alexander III disagreed. He was not listening to the foreign ambassadors. Nor to the nihilists who warned him to ‘beware the fate that has befallen his late father’ and granted him a mere three months to introduce a new constitution.44 The first conspirators arrested cockily ‘boasted that though the heads of the conspiracy were taken, the tail would accomplish the object in view’.45 Their chance was swiftly denied them. The new tsar was no intellectual; he saw things clearly and simply and was forceful in getting things done. He deplored the reforms introduced by his father. This had only served to raise expectations that could not be met. Instinctively, he felt it was time to put the genie back in the bottle, dismiss imported foreign notions of a constitution, and re-establish the Russian way of doing things. Autocracy had made Russia great for 300 years. It was time to reassert tsarist control with a vengeance.
Those responsible for his father’s murder were hunted down and hanged. Liberals were dismissed or took their leave from the new tsar’s government. Anti-Semitism was rife; the Jews were wrongly blamed for Alexander II’s death, prompting a wave of pogroms. Far from curbing the violence, Alexander III tacitly supported it, introducing tough restrictions on the Jewish community. He also created a new instrument of state security, the notorious Security Bureau, ‘the Okhrana’, a secret police force whose covert operations and double dealings were of such labyrinthine complexity and secrecy that many came to fear its reach. Undercover agents and agents provocateurs sought to infiltrate terrorist and revolutionary groups, and offices were dedicated to perlustration – intercepting the mail of suspects.
Although the tough stance adopted by Alexander III created a semblance of order, Queen Victoria recognised this had required punitive repressive measures. She continued to warn the Hesse princesses of the ‘dreadful state Russia is in’. This was no place for her granddaughter. In her cautionary missives the queen highlighted the ‘very depressed bad state of Society’ and the fears that swirled around the Russian throne and the Romanovs’ stupendous wealth, which she saw as provocative, incendiary, and bound to lead to trouble.46 From grand dukes down, she believed the society was corrupt. ‘Russia, I cd not wish for any of you & dear Mama always said she wd never hear of it,’ she declared to Victoria of Hesse in January 1883.47 By now Ella had turned down several suitors and the queen remained concerned that her granddaughter might fall for one of her Russian cousins, Sergei or Paul, sons of the murdered tsar. Victoria of Hesse tried to abate the queen’s fears. ‘I do not think she cares for one of the Russian cousins,’ she replied disingenuously.48
But during the spring of 1883 Ella succumbed to the attentions of the imposing Russian grand duke and accepted Sergei’s proposal of marriage. Queen Victoria was shocked. Ella was revealing a will of steel behind her apparently compliant manner. It was hard for the queen to settle her mind to the match. She decided on a plan and invited her headstrong granddaughter to come and stay. In the relaxing privacy of the Scottish Highlands, far from worldly pressures, the queen intended to use all her powers of persuasion to turn the young, inexperienced Ella away from this dangerous path.
Elisabeth of Hesse arrived at Windsor Castle on 22 May 1883 and the queen found the very sight of her granddaughter brought back ‘endless dear recollections’.49 It was not long before they were speeding by train towards Balmoral, the queen lifted into her carriage on account of a swollen foot.
This was an unsettling time for Queen Victoria. It was her first return to Balmoral since the death of her special favourite, John Brown, earlier in the year. Ironically, while the queen was seeking considerable control over her granddaughters’ choice of suitors, she herself had refused to listen to anyone’s objections over the unconventional relationship that had developed between her and John Brown since Prince Albert’s death. Queen Victoria’s biographer, Lytton Strachey, has described this relationship as an extension of her own control. A relationship with her servant, no matter how dominating, never cost her independence. When she succumbed to Mr Brown’s instructions to wear her wrap or step down from the carriage, ‘was she not displaying, and in the highest degree, the force of her volition?’50 Now he, too, had died. His arm was no longer there to support her, the visceral relief of his physical presence close at hand was gone. She had lost ‘the dearest, most devoted and invaluable friend I ever had’, she admitted to Victoria of Hesse. She felt quite ‘deranged’ by his loss, ‘we were so devoted to each other’.51 Although tired from her journey on that very first evening, the queen insisted on visiting John Brown’s grave. Sensitive Ella obliged her grandmother. She understood that his presence had brought her closer to Albert, as though the proximity of his gillie inexplicably reconnected her to the dead, and now it was as if two ghosts walked with them around Balmoral, the queen leaning on two sticks to ease her lameness.
Ella had a secret that challenged her grandmother’s control and that she rather dreaded to disclose: news of yet another marriage. Her oldest sister, Victoria of Hesse, was planning to accept Prince Louis of Battenberg, a brother of Alexander, Prince of Bulgaria. The queen was indeed offended. She felt herself to be a mother to her Hessian granddaughters, but she was not being consulted like a mother. ‘Darling Victoria, I cannot be silent,’ the queen began in protest on 19 June 1883. But her protest was muted. It was hard to object to the charismatic Louis. The queen did not share the arrogance of the Hohenzollerns, who dismissed all the handsome Battenberg princes for not being of royal blood ‘a little like animals’.52 Quite the reverse, the queen decided that her oldest Hessian granddaughter had ‘done well to choose a Husband who is quite of your way of thinking & who in many respects is as English as you are’. The only drawback was the want of ‘the fortune’, she wrote, but ‘I don’t think that riches make happiness, or that they are necessary’.53 While she came round rapidly to Victoria of Hesse’s choice in marriage, when it came to Ella’s grand duke, the queen’s emotions were powerfully engaged.
Alone with her all-powerful grandmother, dressed in forbidding black, projecting, as always, an air of unfathomable wisdom, Ella’s confidence in her choice did indeed begin to waver. Her grandmother’s diminutive height and evident discomfort on account of her foot was no indication of her strength. Her throne was safe; her empire the envy of the world; her advice almost universally respected. Perhaps the state of Russia was too uncertain? Perhaps Grand Duke Sergei was not what he seemed? Days turned into weeks at Balmoral, Ella slowly absorbing her grandmother’s views as they took drives out in the open carriage and turns around the estate, the queen in her pony chair. Inevitably, some of the foreign news that breached the sanctuary of Balmoral created openings to discuss Ella’s future, such as accounts of the coronation of the new Russian tsar, Alexander III, a forceful reminder of the murder of his father. The queen lost no opportunity to reiterate her concerns and Ella was left in no doubt of her grandmother’s astute perceptions.
Windsor was ‘in all its summer glory’, observed the queen when she and Ella returned there in June.54 The queen’s favoured spot was beside Albert’s tomb in the royal mausoleum at Frogmore. She loved to take breakfast under the trees in the grounds with Ella and Beatrice, and long hours could be spent there talking and writing. When the inevitable showers fell, Queen Victoria was carried into the mausoleum, followed by her two companions, where the conversations continued under the nearby influence of the revered Prince Albert. In the third week of July, Ella travelled with the queen to Osborne and it was mid-August before she prepared to return to Germany. ‘Dear Ella, who had been 3 months with me, seemed quite distressed to leave,’ the queen noted on 16 August.55 Within a week of her departure, the visit had the desired effect. Ella broke off her engagement.
Queen Victoria was jubilant. It was not the kind of triumph that she could broadcast too loudly, but nonetheless she wrote at once to Victoria of Hesse. She and Auntie Beatrice, ‘for no one else shall know abt it, are delighted . . . at Ella’s refusal of Serge . . . Anything is better than making an unhappy marriage.’56 Two days later it was still on her mind. ‘I rejoice that she has acted as she has done abt Serge,’ she wrote. Realising that she was blamed by her Russian daughter-in-law, the Duchess of Edinburgh, who was Sergei’s sister, for this ‘insult’, the queen was at pains to deny her role in the matter. ‘I did not set her [Ella] agst Serge,’ the queen protested. ‘But I did tell her to reflect well before she accepted him & to remember the climate and the state of the Country & that (contrary to what she wished . . .) her living out of Russia cld only be the exception to the rule – I shall never deny having said this . . .’57
But a tsar’s son was not about to be thwarted by a British queen. Within days, Grand Duke Sergei arranged to call on Ella in Germany. Queen Victoria heard of his visit and sent a flurry of letters. ‘I am rather distressed that Serge is . . . coming,’ she told Victoria of Hesse on 4 September 1883. ‘I can’t tell you how I dread that marriage for her. Believe me it wld be misery for her as the climate, Society etc are pernicious there – And darling Mama . . . never wld hear of one of her girls going there’.58 Still anxious a few days later, she issued a much stronger warning. If Ella married Sergei, ‘in fact it will be her ruin’.59 Dreading the outcome of his visit, she could not resist writing for the third time in a week to Victoria of Hesse. Ella, she feared, would ‘be taken in – for Heaven and Earth will [be] moved to get hold of her . . . Believe me when I speak so strongly against it’.60
In the presence of her handsome grand duke, eighteen-year-old Ella felt confused. Sergei conveyed the authority of a man seven years older, his forceful presence not lightly dismissed, his grey-green eyes conveying his sensitivity and reserve. Had she treated him badly? She trusted him as a cousin; he shared her passion for music and literature; his character, Ella decided, was ‘true and noble’.61 Such a delightful partner seemed to offer immense security. She accepted him once again, despite the conflict she felt with her grandmother. Grandmama queen was old and a widow of many years: what did she know of romance? Entombed in her isolation, seeking out her constant reminders of grief: how could such a woman understand the irrepressible feelings of youth?
It was left to Victoria of Hesse to be the bearer of this unwelcome news. The response from across the English Channel was swift and strongly worded. A series of cautions were sent to Victoria of Hesse for ‘our sweet but undecided & inexperienced Ella’. The queen warned once again of ‘the very bad state of Society & its total want of principle . . .’ She judged the Russians to be ‘so unscrupulous’ and ‘totally antagonistic to England’.62 A month later she was still worrying that Ella ‘will be quite lost to me . . .’ Ella must set conditions: to live out of Russia as much as possible and not to marry before the age of twenty. The queen was much vexed that Ella was being ‘changeable and unaccountable’.63
Ella summoned up the courage to write on 13 October 1883. She was now convinced her happiness lay with Grand Duke Sergei. Despite the weeks of coaching at Balmoral, Ella wanted to go her own way. The queen could not bring herself to respond immediately. She had received Ella’s letter, she told Victoria of Hesse, ‘but I really do not feel quite able to answer her yet – as I do feel this prospect so very deeply’. Ella should have taken good ‘Fritz of B [Baden] . . . she wld not easily find so good a person’.64 Possibly to shield her sister from their grandmother’s forceful impact, Victoria of Hesse wrote to the queen that Christmas to reassure her that on the terms of the marriage ‘nothing is settled decidedly’.65
The Russian groom was in no doubt about how to dazzle his German princess with a flamboyant extravagance that brought a whole new meaning to the word ‘excess’. When Grand Duke Sergei returned to Germany in February 1884 for the public announcement of his engagement to Ella, he brought such a stunning collection of Fabergé jewels that they would have filled a shop window. There were rare and glittering gems to adorn his bride, some once worn by famous Romanov predecessors. In a romantic scene he asked her to try them all, and once her delicate throat and wrists were sparkling with gems he painstakingly decorated her dress, pinning each treasure in place until the very weight was almost a burden. As if this magnificent gift was not enough, millions of pounds were settled on Ella in the form of personal funds from the tsar himself, with an estimated value of some £700 million today. Ella was now richer than Queen Victoria herself. Her younger sister Irene reported to their grandmother, perhaps a little enviously, that Sergei had given Ella ‘most beautiful jewels’, exquisite Indian shawls, as well as the very bracelet that their great-aunt, the Empress Marie, had received from the late Tsar Alexander II on their engagement.66 For young women brought up without extravagance, the Russian grand duke had opened a door through which a seductive world without boundaries was glimpsed, where life appeared to be lived in a more glorious way.
Queen Victoria understood the high price of all this. Almost as though she had a premonition, she could not stop herself lamenting Ella’s choice. Her granddaughter was a gentle, trusting young woman with no experience of the dangerous world out there, walking unknowingly towards a cliff edge. In New Year 1884 the queen turned to Victoria of Hesse’s future husband, Louis of Battenberg, the horrific assassination of Sergei’s father still not far from her thoughts. The terrible state of Russia was ‘shown by this most horrible last nihilistic murder’, she told Louis. She had learned that Sergei’s palace was very near the Anichkov Palace in St Petersburg, so ‘it makes one shudder to think of her [Ella] going there’.67 At the same time Queen Victoria endeavoured to accommodate her granddaughter’s wishes. There were formalities to go through, photographs were exchanged, and plans made for her to meet Sergei. Ella tactfully agreed to sit for a portrait for her grandmother. ‘It will be a pleasure to sit for you,’ she wrote politely.68
But such efforts to appease her grandmother received a serious setback in late April 1884, when Queen Victoria arrived at Darmstadt for the wedding of Victoria of Hesse to Prince Louis. The older members of the Hesse family had an explosive secret that they could not bring themselves to reveal immediately. Ella and Irene met their grandmother at Darmstadt Station, and waiting at the door of the Neues Palais were Alix and her good-looking brother, Ernest, who had grown ‘immensely tall’. All the handsome Battenberg brothers had gathered; the groom, Louis, was accompanied by Alexander of Bulgaria – who at the time was under consideration as a husband for Moretta – and their younger brother, Henry. Queen Victoria was also introduced to Grand Duke Sergei, who she found ‘very tall and gentleman-like’ but ‘pale and delicate looking’.69 Everything was going well until a few days before the wedding, when it fell to the unfortunate bride to reveal the bombshell. There was to be a second Hessian wedding on the same day as her own: her father, Louis of Hesse, wanted to marry his mistress, Alexandrine de Kolemine. This woman had the drawback of being both divorced and Russian. Queen Victoria was stunned.
The queen’s strategy when she was seriously put out was to avoid entering into any direct discussion with the offending party, but to set out her views in writing. Although they were all under the same palace roof, grandmama queen was not to be seen. Instead a strongly worded invective emerged from her rooms. This strategy had the merit that she could not be contradicted. She asserted her authority, while avoiding any risk of a challenge to it. The deeply offensive marriage ‘would lower him [Louis of Hesse] so much that I cld. not have him near so much as before,’ she warned Victoria of Hesse. ‘To choose a Lady of another religion who has just been divorced . . . wld I fear be a terrible mistake . . .’ It would ‘shock’ the wider family and ‘do him immense harm in his own Country’.70
Her son-in-law would not listen. Ignoring the queen and somewhat insensitively overshadowing his oldest daughter’s wedding, Louis of Hesse went ahead with his own marriage secretly on the same day. Shocked guests called their carriages and departed, first among them the mighty Hohenzollerns who saw it as a terrible disgrace. The queen was angry; she felt her own presence in Darmstadt had been exploited to provide respectability to the arrangement. It was time to reassert her authority. She ordered Bertie to instruct Louis that his second marriage would be annulled. The queen herself wrote to the British ambassador to ensure the German authorities speeded up the elimination of this highly unsuitable Russian woman from the family tree. During the high drama, the queen failed to notice that her youngest daughter, Beatrice, or ‘Baby’, her most faithful companion, had fallen in love with the third fine-looking Battenberg brother, Prince Henry. This additional shock was kept from the queen for a few weeks.
Ella paid one final visit to her grandmother some weeks before her own wedding in June 1884. The small family party at Windsor was under strain. Almost frightening, almost absurd, her beloved grandmother would not speak to Beatrice, but pushed notes across the table to communicate, such was her acute distress at the idea of her youngest daughter’s proposed marriage. Ella’s imminent departure to the other side of the continent heightened her sense of loss.
‘I cannot say how sad we were leaving you,’ Ella wrote politely to the queen. Her grandmother’s farewell gift of a bracelet was a treasured memento ‘which has made me love you more than ever’.71 She left Windsor in its summer glory, the powerful image of her grandmother swathed in black, pushing notes across the table, a symbol of the controlling, restrictive, eccentric world she was leaving behind. Independent Ella was determined to go her own way. Exciting new horizons beckoned in Russia. ‘I think I know what I am doing,’ she told her grandmother, ‘& if I am unhappy, which I am sure will never be, it will be all my doing.’72
Twelve-year-old Princess Alix of Hesse felt excited and curious when she accompanied her family into the heart of the mysterious Russia for Ella’s wedding. Their reception in Russia in June 1884 was like something from the pages of a fairy story. The interior of the train conveying them ever further north-east towards St Petersburg on the Baltic coast was decked in white flowers, scenting the train like a hothouse. When the Hesse family arrived at Peterhof Station there was the Russian tsar himself, Alexander III, a great bear of a man, with his diminutive wife, the Empress Marie Feodorovna. Queen Victoria had warned her Hessian granddaughters that she ‘does not look upon [the Tsar] as a gentleman’.73 But the alleged ungentlemanly qualities of the Tsar of all the Russias were not on display. Alexander III welcomed the bride and her family with considerable warmth and appeared the quintessential family man.
Outside the station a show of Romanov wealth awaited them: golden carriages drawn by horses perfectly matched with white plumes and golden reins, the liveried postilions glittering and showy as princes in the summer sunshine. The scene cast its inevitable spell and Alix, who was fascinated by the journey, was ‘in a very cheerful mood’ as they travelled to the Peterhof Palace by the sea on the Gulf of Finland.74 The Peterhof was no modest, German ducal palace; everything proclaimed the imperial might of the family into which Ella was marrying. The palace had been modelled on Versailles by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century and completed with Romanov excess. High water fountains formed a dramatic cascade between the upper and the lower gardens. Inside, the exquisite interiors housed treasures that spoke of Romanov glory: paintings illustrating great Russian victories, gilded French antiques, finely crafted Chinese cabinets and Fabergé ornaments. The Hesse and Romanov families became further acquainted in this setting of lavish beauty beneath skies of such northerly latitude that the sun never fully set. It was as though darkness itself was banished as Ella was feted by her new Romanov relations in the all-night glow of St Petersburg’s luminous June skies.
After two weeks it was time for Ella to make her formal entrance into St Petersburg by the side of the popular new tsarina. Alix and other family members followed in a long procession of carriages that wound their way slowly through the streets to the magnificent Winter Palace. Victoria of Battenberg (formerly Hesse), by now somewhat dazed by the number of palaces, referred to it simply as ‘the Big Palace’.75 There was nothing to cloud their entry that summer’s day; no reminder that this was the very place where Alexander II had died after the terrorist attack by People’s Will. Victoria of Battenberg told her grandmother of the great enthusiasm of the peaceful crowds. She did not know that police had been drafted in from other cities to keep the Romanov clan safe.76
Wearing diamonds once owned by Catherine the Great, some so weighty that they hurt, the bride made her historic entrance into the chapel of the Winter Palace.77 The powerful mysticism of ceremony was hypnotic. The air seemed heavy with music as many priests were singing and chanting, interweaving melodies that soared upwards, filling the vast space with a sense of the sublime. Almost intoxicating, incense drifted over the congregation, obscuring richly coloured icons, but finally revealing the bride processing steadily through the crowd, her silver dress encased in jewels, a pink diamond tiara framing her face. Ella appeared elevated to a star on some vast and gilded stage. She seemed not to be made of common clay. ‘It was all like a beautiful dream,’ her sister, Irene, told their grandmother. The costumes were like ‘a scene out of the middle ages’. Ella seemed like the romantic ‘Circassian princess whose trousseau consisted of a Bushel of pearls’.78 Alix’s cousin, Princess Marie of Edinburgh, was equally entranced. ‘Her beauty and sweetness was a thing of dreams.’79
There was one person present who was not preoccupied with the bride: the sixteen-year-old tsarevich Nicholas, oldest son of Alexander III. The heir to the Russian throne found that his eyes were held by a young German princess standing near the altar in a white muslin dress. He could watch unobserved, catching glimpses of her even features framed by roses clipped to her blonde hair. It was Ella’s youngest sister, Alix. In the coming days, as Nicholas saw more of Alix in the many celebrations in the imperial palaces of St Petersburg, he singled out this new member of his immediate family as special.
Nicholas did not take after his Romanov relatives but bore a much more striking resemblance to his British cousin, Prince George, Eddy’s younger brother. Their mothers were sisters and the two cousins, George and Nicholas, although living far apart, could be mistaken for twins; the same short stature, dark hair and large, expressive eyes. Nicholas was just as bright and clever as George, Ella told the queen, ‘only a little calmer’.80 Polite, even-tempered, with an easy charm, there was a softness to Nicholas that Alix immediately warmed to. At formal events, Nicholas found that little Alix was often at his side. Although no longer a child, Nicholas was not too old to join in the younger children’s games. He had ‘a terrific romp’ on one occasion with ‘darling little Alix’ and her brother, Ernest, he wrote in his diary. ‘We jumped about together on the net . . . went completely wild on the maypole . . . fooled around a lot on the swing’ and even ‘told each other secrets’.81
Alix was accompanied by her governess, Miss Jackson, but there was far too much excitement to settle down to study. ‘I have been much with little Xenia [Nicholas’s younger sister] and her brothers and only come to our rooms at bedtime so Miss Jackson hopes that you will kindly excuse me not writing sooner,’ Alix apologised to Queen Victoria on 18 June. ‘It is very pretty here and I enjoy myself very much.’82 Alix wanted to see everything; she had a sense of fun and her happy laughter was heard everywhere. Nicholas was completely absorbed by Alix, ‘whom I really liked a lot’ he confided to his diary. Less than a week later he was sure. ‘We love each other,’ he wrote, the day they drew their names together on a window in the Italian House. Nicholas was ‘very very sad’ when it was time for her to go.83 He tried to give ‘darling little Alix’ a memento, a beautiful brooch. Confused by his token of affection, Alix later returned it.
For the tsarevich, the grand wedding of his Uncle Sergei in St Petersburg was a turning point in his life. His new ‘Aunt Ella’, now known as ‘Her Imperial Highness Grand Duchess Elisabeth Feodorovna’, was less than four years his senior. As their paths crossed at the Russian court over the following months they became close friends. Ella appreciated his gentle personality and gradually she came to think of the possibility of a union between her new nephew and her sister, Alix.
Queen Victoria was soon alarmed by reports that appeared to endorse her anxieties about Russian marital alliances. It was widely rumoured that Ella was not happy and that her supposedly devoted husband was having affairs with junior officers in his regiment. The queen was sufficiently troubled that she consulted the British ambassador in St Petersburg, who conducted enquiries but was unable to provide her with reassurance. The case remains unresolved today with Ella’s most recent biographer, Christopher Warwick, concluding that ‘the balance of probability still suggests that Serge was gay’.84 Apart from concerns over his sexual orientation, Ella’s relatives also worried about the powerful control he exerted over his young wife. Sergei ruled the household in a way that brokered no opposition and was known for his quick temper. There was ‘something almost menacing about him’, observed Ella’s cousin, Marie of Edinburgh, as though ‘there was a tyrant within him’.85
If Ella ever felt she had been taken in by her feelings of attraction to Sergei, she was not about to admit it. Innocent, trusting, but fiercely independent, she had wilfully ignored her grandmother’s advice. Now she had her pride. Possibly, too, she was confused. She had strong feelings for Sergei and when he reprimanded her, even in public, it was very easy to believe that she was wanting in some way. She lost no opportunity in her letters to her family to slip in a word about her happiness. ‘It makes me always so heartily glad when I hear how happy you both are,’ she wrote to her oldest sister’s husband, Louis of Battenberg, ‘it is so pleasant that we four enjoy the same perfect contentment.’86 She also enlisted her sympathetic brother, Ernest, to help scotch the rumours. Ernie, as he was known in the family, believed the hateful gossip originated with Ella’s original admirer, Kaiser Wilhelm, who was exploiting jealousy of Sergei’s elevated position within the Russian court.
Ella found it was not easy to reassure the queen. Her marriage remained childless and three years later her grandmother was still worried. ‘I’m glad Ella says she is happy,’ the queen wrote to Victoria of Battenberg on 15 February 1887, ‘but it is the whole position in such a corrupt Country where you can trust no one & where politics are so antagonistic to one’s own views & feelings wh. is so sad & distressing to us all.’87 She returned to her suspicions in her next letter. ‘Ella’s constant speaking of her happiness I don’t quite like,’ wrote the queen. ‘When people are very happy they don’t require to tell others of it.’88 But Ella was a fortress, her feelings resistant to any probing. She wrote to reiterate ‘the very deep love’ she felt for her grandmama, ‘as if you were my own Mother’, but gave nothing away. ‘All I can repeat is that I am perfectly happy.’89
Unexpected news during the spring of 1887 compounded the queen’s feelings of loss of control over her Hessian granddaughters. Without any discussion, Irene, the third Hessian daughter, became engaged to Wilhelm’s younger brother, Henry. ‘It is impossible for me to tell you what a shock your letter gave me!’ the queen wrote to Victoria of Battenberg in February 1887. ‘Indeed I felt quite ill.’ Queen Victoria was ‘deeply hurt’ at Irene’s behaviour. ‘How can I trust her again after such conduct?’ she lamented. The two older daughters had at least kept her informed of developments prior to any announcement. But Irene’s behaviour was ungrateful and out of order. After having been a mother ‘to a gt extent’ and been ‘so vy intimate . . . this want of openness has hurt me deeply,’ she wrote. It reminded her of Ella and Sergei’s engagement, ‘wh I grieve over as much as ever’.90
These concerns compounded her fears about ‘lovely Alicky’ and she soon returned to her theme. ‘You must prevent further Russians or other people coming to snap her [Alicky] up,’ she insisted to Victoria of Battenberg on 2 March 1887. She wanted her granddaughter settled in Britain. ‘I feel very deeply that my opinion & my advice are never listened to,’ she complained. ‘It was not before Ella’s marriage was decided on wh dear Mama wld never have allowed to come abt . . .’91 She remained concerned at Ella’s strong influence. Since their mother Alice’s death the Hessian sisters had developed a close bond. What chance did Prince Eddy have with Alix? And how could Alix ever be safe? The very idea of her marriage to the Russian heir, Nicholas, was of a different order of danger to any match with a Russian grand duke. Her favourite granddaughter would thereby be in a prominent and dangerous position.
All this charged history lay behind Queen Victoria’s invitation in the summer of 1888 to both Alix and Eddy to visit her at Balmoral. Ella too was invited, her grandmother perhaps hoping for a frank discussion, but Ella was unable to leave Russia. It is known that the queen wrote to Eddy ‘on the subject’, making her views plain.92 Although this letter has not survived, the lethargic prince understood that he was to appear at Balmoral ready to show some interest in his pretty young cousin. Queen Victoria was determined to avoid another unwelcome Russian engagement behind her back and intended to steer proceedings towards a favourable conclusion for Alix, Eddy and the British throne.