The Romanov Sisters Page 6

  Professional English nannies were sticklers for routine and did not like being usurped in their roles, and the arrival on 18 December of Queen Victoria’s hand-picked recruit, the redoubtable Mrs Inman, was not a happy one. Nicholas remarked that his wife was worried that ‘the new English nanny would in some way affect the way of things in our daily family life’. And sure enough she did, for the protocols of royal nannying demanded that ‘our little daughter will have to be moved upstairs, which is a real bore and a shame’.48 The day after Mrs Inman arrived baby Olga was duly removed from Nicholas and Alexandra’s ground-floor bedroom to the nursery and Nicholas was already writing to his brother Georgiy, complaining that he and Alexandra ‘[did] not particularly like the look of Mrs Inman’. ‘She has something hard and unpleasant in her face,’ he told him, ‘and looks like a stubborn woman.’ Both he and Alexandra thought she was ‘going to be a lot of trouble’, for she had immediately started laying down the law: ‘she has already decided that our daughter does not have enough rooms, and that, in her opinion, Alix pops up into the nursery too often.’49

  For the time being, the only sight the Russian people might be likely to get of their tsar and tsaritsa would not be at court in St Petersburg but wheeling their baby in the grounds of the Alexander Park. The world beyond knew even less of them. The British press had hoped that the tsaritsa’s informal approach to mothering might have a positive effect politically: ‘The right feeling shown in the young wife’s decision is likelier to rally the mothers of Russia to her Majesty’s side than many more imposing actions on the part of the Czar’s Consort. And with their support the Empress may go far.’50 It was an ambitious hope, but one that would fall on fallow ground; for the fact that the empress had not produced a firstborn son was already a source of disfavour among many Russians.

  In the new year of 1896 and much to her dismay, Alexandra was obliged to abandon the intimacy of the Alexander Palace and transfer to her newly renovated apartments at the Winter Palace for the St Petersburg season. Although Ella had taken a hand in their design, the unworldly and inexperienced Alexandra did not take to the grand, ceremonial ambience of the palace. Nor was she warming to Mrs Inman. ‘I am not at all enchanted with the nurse’, she told Ernie:

  she is good & kind with Baby, but as a woman most antipathetic, & that disturbs me sorely. Her manners are neither very nice, & she will mimic people in speaking about them, an odious habit, wh.[ich] would be awful for a Child to learn – most headstrong, (but I am too, thank goodness). I foresee no end of troubles, & only wish I had an other [sic].51

  By the end of April Alexandra was forced to give up breastfeeding Olga in preparation for travelling to Moscow for the arduous coronation ceremony: ‘that is so sad as I enjoyed it so much’, she confided to Ernie.52 By this time the domineering Mrs Inman had been sent packing. Nicholas had found her ‘insufferable’ and on 29 April noted with glee that ‘we were delighted finally to be rid of her’. Motherhood clearly became Alexandra, as her sister Victoria of Battenberg noted when she arrived for the coronation in May 1896. Alix, she told Queen Victoria,

  is looking so well & happy, quite a different person & has developed into a big, handsome woman rosy cheeked & broad shouldered making Ella look small near her – she feels her leg a little from time to time & gets a headache off & on – but there is nothing left of the sad & drooping look she used to have.53

  As for baby Olga, Victoria thought her ‘magnificent & a bright intelligent little soul. She is especially fond of Orchie smiling broadly whenever she catches sight of her.’54 Although Orchie was still in evidence, in fading hopes of a role, a new English nurse was taken on temporarily while a replacement for Mrs Inman was sought.55 Miss Coster was the sister of Grand Duchess Xenia’s nanny and arrived on 2 May. She had an extraordinarily long nose, and Nicholas didn’t much like the look of her.56 In any event, nanny or no nanny, Alexandra was still doing things determinedly her own way, now insisting that baby Olga ‘has a salt bath every morning according to my wish, as I want her to be as strong as possible having to carry such a plump little body’.57 After the exertions of Moscow another important trip was approaching: a visit to Grandmama at Balmoral, where baby Olga could at last be formally inspected.

  * * *

  On the surface the visit to Scotland would be an entirely private family visit,* but the logistics were a security nightmare for the British police, totally inexperienced in dealing with high-risk Russian tsars legendary as the target of assassins. The Russian royals arrived just as hysterical stories appeared in the British press of a ‘dynamite conspiracy’ led by Irish-American activists working with Russian nihilists, to kill the queen and the tsar too.58 Thankfully the ‘plotters’ were arrested in Glasgow and Rotterdam prior to the visit, and press suggestions of an attack on the tsar were later proved erroneous, but the scare underlined fears for the safety of the imperial couple – two of the most closely guarded monarchs in the world. In the run-up to the visit, the queen’s private secretary Sir Arthur Bigge had consulted closely with Lieutenant-General Charles Fraser, superintendent of the Metropolitan Police, who submitted a special report outlining the provision of detectives in addition to Nicholas’s own three Okhrana men. Ten police constables were to be on patrol in and around Balmoral Castle throughout the visit; railway employees would patrol the entire route of the tsar’s train and all bridges and viaducts be supervised by local police. Assistant Commissioner Robert Anderson admitted to Bigge that he was glad that the tsar was ‘at Balmoral and not in London. I should be very anxious indeed if he were here.’59

  On 22 September (NS) Nicholas and Alexandra arrived at the port of Leith on their yacht the Shtandart in the midst of a chilly Scottish downpour. ‘The sight of the Imperial baby moved every female heart in the crowd, and there was an animated display of pocket handkerchiefs’, reported the Leeds Mercury.60 Bonfires burning from hill to hill greeted every stage of the journey by train from Leith to Ballater, where a guard of honour made up of Highland pipers and men of the Royal Scots Greys (of whom Nicholas had been made an honorary colonel on his marriage to Alexandra) met the couple. But the bunting decorating the station was sadly bedraggled by the heavy rain by the time they arrived. The rain, although ‘repellent’ as Nicholas recorded in his diary, did not, however, dampen the spirits of the crowds who gathered to watch the five carriages of the Russian entourage – one exclusively for the use of Grand Duchess Olga and her two attendants – pass by.61 As they approached Balmoral the bells of nearby Crathie Church rang out and bagpipes played, as a line of estate workers and kilted Highlanders stood holding burning torches along the roadside in the rain. And there on the doorstep was Grandmama waiting to greet them, surrounded by many of her extended family.

  Everyone at Balmoral was charmed by the chubby and happy ten-month-old Olga, including her admiring great-grandmother. ‘The baby is magnificent’, she told her eldest daughter Vicky in Berlin; all in all she was ‘a lovely, lively grandchild’.62 ‘Oh, you never saw such a darling as she is,’ wrote the queen’s lady-in-waiting Lady Lytton, ‘a very broad face, very fat, in a lovely high Sir Joshua baby bonnet – but with bright intelligent eyes, a wee mouth and so happy – contented the whole day.’ Lady Lytton thought Olga ‘quite an old person already – bursting with life and happiness and a perfect knowledge how to behave’.63 The British press remarked on Alexandra’s ‘pride and joy at having a little daughter to bring with her’ as being ‘almost pathetic to witness’.64 ‘The tiny Grand Duchess takes very kindly to her new surroundings,’ reported the Yorkshire Herald, ‘and it is said that the moment she saw her great-grandmother she delighted that august lady by adopting her as her first and most willing slave.’65 Queen Victoria was so smitten that she even went to see Olga taking her bath, as did other members of the royal household, all of whom admired a happy and informal Russian empress enjoying the pleasure of her child – so totally in contrast to her normal stiff and haughty manner.

  Nicholas meanwhile was havin
g rather a miserable time of it, suffering from neuralgia and a swollen face – caused by the decayed stump of a tooth (he was fearful of the dentist). He complained during the visit that he saw even less of Alix than at home, because his uncle Bertie insisted on dragging him out grouse-shooting and deer-stalking all day in the cold, wind and rain. ‘I am totally exhausted from clambering up hills and standing for ages … inside mounds of earth’, he wrote in his diary.66

  During their stay baby Olga had been trying to take her first steps and her two-year-old cousin David – son of the Duke of York and the future Edward VIII – had taken a shine to her, going to see her daily and offering an encouraging hand, so that by the time the family left, Olga was able to toddle across the drawing room holding his hand. Queen Victoria noted the children together with marked interest. It was a pretty pairing; ‘La Belle Alliance’, she is said to have approvingly remarked to Nicholas. The imagination of the British press quickly ran riot, with claims even of an informal betrothal.67

  On one of the finer days of their visit the first and only cinematograph film of Nicholas and Alexandra with Queen Victoria was made in the courtyard at Balmoral, filmed by William Downey, the royal photographer. Before leaving, the couple planted a tree to commemorate their visit. Alexandra had enjoyed being back in Scotland and was sad to go: ‘It has been such a very short stay and I leave dear kind Grandmama with a heavy heart’, she told her old governess Madge Jackson. ‘Who knows when we may meet again and where?’68

  * * *

  On 3 October (NS) the imperial family took the train south to Portsmouth where they boarded the Polyarnaya zvezda for a five-day state visit to France. From Cherbourg to Paris, they were greeted by huge crowds lining the streets, and arrived in the capital to a grand reception at the Elysée Palace hosted by President Faure. The French were fascinated that such distinguished monarchs should have their baby on tour with them rather than leave her behind in the nursery. Olga was so adaptable and had such a placid temperament that she travelled well, sitting on her nurse’s lap in an open landau. Her smiling presence, with her nurse helping her wave her hand to the crowd and blow them kisses, endeared her to everyone. ‘Our daughter made a great impression everywhere’, Nicholas told his mother. The first thing President Faure asked Alexandra each day was the health of la petite duchesse. Everywhere they went little Olga was greeted by shouts of ‘Vive la bébé’; some even called her La tsarinette.69 A polka was specially composed ‘Pour la Grande Duchesse Olga’ and all kinds of souvenirs and commemorative china were on sale, featuring her picture as well as that of her parents. By the end of Nicholas and Alexandra’s foreign tour, the little Russian grand duchess was one of the most discussed royal children in the world. She was certainly the richest, with it being alleged that £1 million (something like £59 million today) had been invested in her name in British, French and other securities when she was born.70 Nicholas had certainly settled money on his daughter, as he would for all his children, but it would be far less than the outlandish amounts suggested and was, effectively, money left them in Alexander III’s will.71 Nevertheless rumours of Croesus-like riches being heaped on the child led to fanciful ideas put about in the American press that little Olga was rocked in a mother-of-pearl cradle, her nappies fixed with gold safety pins set with pearls.72

  After a private nineteen-day visit to Ernie and his family in Darmstadt in October, Nicholas and Alexandra returned to Russia overland on the imperial train and promptly retreated to their quiet life at Tsarskoe Selo, where they celebrated Olga’s first birthday in November. Alexandra was by now pregnant again and her second pregnancy proved a difficult one. By December she was suffering severe pain in her side and back and there were fears of a miscarriage.73 Ott and Günst were summoned and confined Alexandra to bed; there was a total clampdown on news and it was early the following year, 1897, before even members of the imperial family were told.

  After a long and wearying seven weeks of bed rest, Alexandra was finally allowed outside in a wheelchair. She was not sorry to have to miss the winter season in Petersburg, but in PR terms this was a disaster. Her absence from view and the rumours of her continuing poor health had done their work in further eroding what little goodwill she enjoyed in Russia. Superstition and rumour began to gain a foothold and persisted ever after, focusing on the tsaritsa’s desperate hopes for a boy. One story in circulation was that ‘four blind nuns from Kiev’ had been brought to Tsarskoe Selo at the suggestion of the Montenegrin princess, Militza (wife of Grand Duke Petr Nikolaevich), who herself was a fan of faith healing and the occult. These women, it was said, had brought with them ‘four specially blessed candles and four flasks of water from a well in Bethlehem’. Having lit the candles at each corner of Alexandra’s bed and sprinkled her with the Bethlehem water, they assured her she would have a boy.74 Another tale suggested that a deformed and half-blind cripple called Mitya Kolyaba, who had supposed powers of prophecy that only became apparent during violent epileptic fits, was also brought in to work a miracle on the empress. On being taken to see her he had said nothing, but had later prophesied the birth of a male child and was sent gifts by the grateful imperial couple.75 But nothing could allay either Alexandra’s rising anxiety or the pressure she was under, made worse when her sister Irene, Princess Henry of Prussia, gave birth to a second boy in November and her sister-in-law Xenia produced her second baby – a son – in January.

  Although she was up and about again, Alexandra could not face a return to public duties, even in a wheelchair – her sciatica being aggravated by the discomforts of the pregnancy. ‘I am beginning to look a pretty sight already, & I dread appearing half high for the Emperor of Austria after Easter,’ she told Ernie, ‘I can only walk half an hour, more tires me too much, & stand I can’t at all.’76 She endured the pain with characteristic fortitude, for ‘what happiness can be greater than living for a little being one is going to give one’s treasured husband’. As for Olga, ‘Baby is growing & tries to chatter, the beautiful air gives her nice pink cheeks. She is such a bright little Sunbeam, always merry & smiling.’77

  At the end of May Nicholas and Alexandra decamped to Peterhof to await the arrival of their second child, which came on 29 May 1897, with Ott and Günst once more in attendance. The labour was less protracted this time, and the baby was smaller too, at 8¾ lb (3.9 kg) although forceps were once more needed.78 But it was another girl. They called her Tatiana. She was exceptionally pretty, with dark curly hair and large eyes, and she was the image of her mother.

  It is said that when Alexandra came round from the chloroform administered during delivery, and saw the looks on the ‘anxious and troubled faces’ around her, she ‘burst into loud hysterics’. ‘My God, it is again a daughter,’ she was heard to cry. ‘What will the nation say, what will the nation say?’79

  Chapter Three

  MY GOD! WHAT A DISAPPOINTMENT!… A FOURTH GIRL!

  On 10 June 1897 (NS) Queen Victoria sent a trenchant note to her daughter, Princess Beatrice: ‘Alicky has got a 2nd daughter which I fully expected.’1 While the queen may have been gifted with the art of prophecy, Nicholas accepted the arrival of a second daughter with quiet equanimity. It was, he wrote, ‘the second bright, happy day in our family life … God blessed us with a little daughter – Tatiana’. His sister Xenia visited soon after: ‘I went in to see Alix, who was nursing the baby girl. She looks wonderful. The little one is so dear, and she and her mother are like as two peas in a pod! She has a tiny mouth, so pretty.’2

  But elsewhere in the Russian imperial family a sense of gloom prevailed; ‘everyone was very disappointed as they had been hoping for a son’, admitted Grand Duke Konstantin. From the Caucasus, where he was taking the cure for his tuberculosis, Nicholas’s brother Georgiy telegraphed to say that he was disappointed not to have a nephew to relieve him of his duties as tsarevich: ‘I was already preparing to go into retirement, but it was not to be.’3

  ‘The joys of the Czar have been increased, but scarc
ely with satisfaction’, observed one British paper in response to the news. ‘The Czarina has yesterday presented his Imperial Majesty with a second daughter, which, to a monarch praying for a son and heir, is not comforting. Little wonder if the Court party is shaking its head, and the hopes of the Grand Dukes are rising.’4 While Nicholas showed no public signs of disappointment, a few days later the Boston Daily Globe reported that the tsar was ‘taking it very hard that he had yet again been denied a male heir’, and stated – totally erroneously – that he was ‘sunk in melancholia’. Meanwhile, it was claimed that the ambitious Maria Pavlovna, wife of Grand Duke Vladimir – and herself the mother of three boys – ‘had consulted a gypsy fortune teller, who had predicted that one of her sons would sit on the throne of Russia’.5

  It is little wonder that Nicholas and Alexandra detached themselves from such insidious gossip and kept well out of sight at Tsarskoe Selo. Alexandra was exhausted, though she recovered from this pregnancy rather quicker than the first. Now that she had two children to mother, the focal point of family life at the Alexander Palace increasingly became her Meltzer-designed mauve boudoir, the room where she spent most of her day. In it, as her family grew, Alexandra accumulated an eclectic mix of sentimental objects, and aside from occasional redecoration, nothing in the room would be altered in the twenty-one years that followed.

  Two high windows looked east, out onto the Alexander Park and the lakes beyond. Within and close to the windows was a large wooden plant holder full of vases of freshly cut, heavily scented flowers – in particular the lilac Alexandra adored. In addition there were roses, orchids, freesias and lilies of the valley – many specially grown for Alexandra in the palace hothouses – and ferns, palms and aspidistras, and other flowers in abundance filling vases of Sèvres and other china placed around the room. Simple white-painted lemonwood furniture, cream wood panelling and opalescent grey and mauve silk wall coverings and draped curtains were all carefully chosen to match the lilac hues of Alexandra’s upholstered chaise-longue-cum-daybed with its lace cushions. This bed was concealed behind a wooden screen to keep away draughts. Further into the room were a white upright piano and a writing desk, and the tsaritsa’s personal library of favourite books. But always, too, a basket of toys and children’s games were at hand, for this is where the family would usually gravitate in the evenings.6