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  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 and cannot walk at all, she had even to drive to church’, wrote the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg to her daughter during the visit. ‘What a deplorable 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), 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 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 excursions in a special Coventry Cycle Chair (a combination of bath chair and pedal cycle), to admire local beauty spots and be further invigorated 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 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.* 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 Yanyshev, arrived from Russia to give Alix instruction in the Russian Orthodox religion. He had a hard time of it; Alix was a rigorous and questioning pupil. Her evangelical upbringing had taught her to dislike dogma and she refused adamantly to make a formal statement renouncing her Lutheranism as heretical. A compromise had to be reached.

  With the wedding scheduled for the spring of 1895, Alix anticipated having several quiet months back home in Hesse to prepare, but plans were dramatically changed with news from Russia that Alexander III had fallen dangerously ill and was not expected to live. By now reconciled to the marriage, he wished to see Alix before he died and she left Hesse in great haste, making the long train journey south to Simferopol in the Crimea accompanied by her loyal friend Gretchen. After she had joined Nicky at the Romanov palace at Livadia, the couple was formally betrothed in front of the dying tsar. Alexander’s death on 20 October* was followed the day after by Alix’s formal acceptance into the Russian Orthodox Church. As Nicholas was now tsar the marriage was brought forward. But it did not take place as the couple would have wished, in private, at Livadia.42 The Russian grand dukes objected; court protocol demanded a formal ceremony in the capital. And so in a bitterly cold St Petersburg, after three weeks of exhausting and excruciatingly protracted court mourning for the late tsar, Nicholas and Alexandra were married on 14 November in front of hundreds of invited guests at the chapel of the Winter Palace.

  Alix could not have looked more beautiful or serene that day – tall and statuesque in her white-and-silver brocade dress, the train heavily trimmed in ermine and the imperial mantle of cloth of gold across her shoulders, her lovely figure complemented by her limpid blue eyes and her wavy reddish gold hair enhanced by the diamond-encrusted wedding crown. British envoy Lord Carrington was deeply impressed: ‘She looked the perfection of what one would imagine an Empress of Russia on her way to the altar would be’, he informed Queen Victoria.43 Other witnesses noted the commanding stature of
the princess alongside her shorter and rather delicate-looking consort; to all intents and purposes she appeared to be the one with the physical strength, a woman of considerable presence, ‘much above the traditional level of Duchy Princesses’.44

  There was, however, something about the royal bride’s solemn, guarded look and the thin tight mouth that told a different story, of a strong, determined personality fighting a natural, but violent, antipathy to being on public display after having enjoyed the domestic privacy of the Hessian court for so long. Alix endured the ordeal, but at the end of her wedding day, much like her grandmother Victoria before her, she retreated to bed early with a headache. For others who had attended the proceedings that day, such as Princess Radziwill, it had been ‘one of the saddest sights I ever remember having seen’. So long as the authoritarian Alexander III had lived the Russian aristocracy had felt safe, but their sense of security had vanished with his untimely death, and had been replaced with ‘the feeling of approaching calamity’.45

  After a few nights spent in the relatively cramped surroundings of Nicholas’s bachelor apartments at the Anichkov Palace in St Petersburg (their own at the Winter Palace still being redecorated) the newly married couple travelled to the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. They ensconced themselves in the dowager empress’s apartments in the east wing, where Nicky himself had been born in 1868, for four blissful days of absolute privacy, ‘hand in hand and heart to heart’, as Nicky told his brother-in-law Ernie.46 Alix had also written shortly before her wedding assuring Ernie that ‘I am so happy & never can thank God enough for having given me such a treasure as my Nicky’.47 The obscure and serious-minded Alix of Hesse, whom even her own grandmother had described as ‘ein kleines deutsches Prinzesschen with no knowledge of anything beyond small German courts’, had won for herself not only one of the greatest royal catches but the richest man in the world.48

  But in leaving Darmstadt prematurely the new tsaritsa had arrived in Russia ignorant of its customs and profound superstitions, with a limited knowledge of its language and having made the enormous leap of faith from the militant austerity of her devout Lutheranism to the mystical and opulent rituals of Russian Orthodoxy. The cultural divide was enormous. Princess Alix of Hesse encountered the same problems – on a much grander scale – that her mother before her had first met in Darmstadt, and – for that matter – her grandfather Prince Albert, who as a homesick Coburger had arrived in an alien English court fifty-four years before. Alix’s adoptive country was as wary of her, as a German and an interloper – the fifth princess of German blood to become a Russian empress in barely a century – as England had been of the obscure Saxe-Coburg princeling Albert.

  She might have embraced Orthodoxy with all her heart, but Alix was English through and through, with English habits, English sentiments and a no-nonsense English approach to family life bred in the bone by her mother and grandmother before her. Such a background would have served her well had she remained within the familiar sphere of her Western-European bloodline, but Russia – despite the seductive beauty of its landscape, which she already loved – was unknown territory, a country legendary for its turbulent history and for the overpowering wealth and grandeur of its court. Fin-de-siècle imperial St Petersburg was a far cry from the comfortable domesticity of the Neues Palais and the rose gardens of Darmstadt.

  Nevertheless, for the sake of love, ‘gentle simple Alicky’ had summoned up all her courage to leave the shelter of her brother’s quiet and peaceful residenz in Darmstadt to become ‘the great Empress of Russia’.49 To counter her apprehensions about the unfamiliar court practices she was presented with, she closed the door to the hostile world outside and everything in it that frightened her. Instead, she clung to those few close, familiar things in which she took comfort, and to her role as Nicholas’s devoted ‘little wifey’. For now, the world – and Russia – could wait.

  Except in one respect: shortly after Alexander III’s death, Nicholas had issued a proclamation commanding his subjects to swear the oath of allegiance to him as their new tsar. His younger brother Grand Duke Georgiy Alexandrovich, he proclaimed, would bear the title of tsarevich ‘until it please God to bless our approaching union with the Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt with the birth of a son’.50 In the dynastic scheme of things, Alix’s primary and most urgent duty was to provide a male heir to the Russian throne.

  Chapter Two

  LA PETITE DUCHESSE

  From her very first days in Russia, Princess Alix of Hesse was determined to counter anything she saw as a threat to the quiet family life that she had envisaged for herself and Nicky. Family had been her only security when death had taken those most dear from her; she was far from home, lonely and apprehensive, and dreaded being exposed as an object of curiosity. But in protecting her own deeply held insecurities by retreating, at every opportunity, from public view, she only succeeded in accentuating her already marked air of chilly reserve. Alexandra Feodorovna, as she was now styled, found herself at the receiving end of hostile looks from a Russian aristocracy that was already critical of her English upbringing and manners – and, to their horror, her poor French, which was still very much the language of their elite circles.1 Worse, this insignificant German princess had, in the eyes of the court, displaced the much loved and highly sociable former empress, Maria Feodorovna – a still vigorous widow in her forties – from her central position at court.

  From the first, Alexandra found the strain of fulfilling her ceremonial duties almost intolerable, such as in January 1895, when she had to face a line of 550 court ladies for the New Year baise-main ceremony at which they all processed to kiss her imperial hand. Her visible discomfort and habit of recoiling in horror when anyone tried to get too close were quickly misinterpreted as manifestations of a difficult personality. Her new sister-in-law Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna later recalled: ‘Even in that first year – I remember so well – if Alicky smiled they called it mockery. If she looked grave they said she was angry.’2 And so, in response, Alexandra retreated behind the protective wall of domesticity, preoccupied with the one thing primarily expected of her – getting pregnant. Everyone was watching for the telltale signs. Grand Duke Konstantin Konstan-tinovich pointedly noted in his diary within weeks of the wedding that ‘the young Empress again felt faint in church. If this is for the reason the whole of Russia longs for, then praise be to God!’3 Sure enough, by the end of February Alexandra was confiding to Ernie (whose own wife was about to give birth to her first child in Darmstadt, and to whom Alexandra was sending the imperial accoucheur Madame Günst to attend her): ‘I think now I can have hopes – a certain thing has stopped – and I think … Oh I cannot believe it, it would be too good and too great a happiness.’ She swore Ernie to secrecy; her sister Ella had ‘fidgeted in December already about it’ and her other sister Irene too, but she would tell them in her own time.4 As for her old nurse, whom she had brought with her from Darmstadt, ‘Orchie watches me the whole time in a tiresome way’. Within a week of this letter, Alexandra was ‘feeling daily so terribly sick’ that she could not attend the funeral service for the young Grand Duke Alexey Mikhailovich who had died of tuberculosis, and thereafter she was frequently confined to bed with violent nausea.5 Orchie coaxed her to have the occasional mutton chop, which more often than not would send her fleeing from the dining table to vomit. Alexandra was fearful that she was being watched for signs of her legendary poor health, and again begged Ernie not to tell anyone about how severe her morning sickness was.6 From now until her due date tsarist officialdom protected Alexandra’s health and welfare behind a wall of censorship; there were no announcements or bulletins in the Russian press and the people at large knew nothing of her condition.

  For the time being the couple was still living at the Anichkov Palace in St Petersburg. Alexandra spent her days here resolutely hidden away from view in a ‘big armchair in a corner, half-hidden by the screen’, reading the Darmstadter Zeitung, sewing and painting, while he
r adored husband dealt with his ‘aggravating people’. She resented Nicky’s absence on official business for even a couple of hours in the morning (echoes of her grandmother Victoria’s solipsism and inability to let her beloved Albert out of her sight). But she did have him to herself in the afternoons: ‘whilst he usually reads his heaps of papers from the ministers, I look through the begging letters, of which there are not [a] few & cut out the stamps’, the latter act a mark of her ingrained Hessian frugality.7 The business of state seemed an irritating diversion – ‘a horrid bore’.8 Evenings were spent listening to Nicky reading aloud, after which, while he decamped to his study for more paperwork, Alexandra would spin out the time playing the board game halma with her mother-in-law until Nicky returned for more bedtime reading. What few perfunctory duties Alexandra was obliged to fulfil – meeting foreign deputations or line-ups of ministers – were now made doubly unpleasant, for she was feeling dreadfully sick and suffering constant headaches.

  Nevertheless, the tsaritsa had every reason to be confident that she would produce the expected son before the year was out. The statistics certainly favoured it, there having been plenty of boys born to the previous three Romanov tsars. Male children were crucial in a country where the succession laws, changed in 1797 by Tsar Paul I, were based on male primogeniture.9 The Russian throne could pass to a woman only if all legal male lines of descent were extinct. But in Russia at the time, beyond Nicholas’s two younger brothers Georgiy and Mikhail – who would be next in line – there were several more grand dukes with sons aplenty.