The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra(6)

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During her lifetime, Princess Alice had had strong feelings about the future for her daughters; she wanted to do more than educate them to be wives. ‘Life is also meaningful without being married’, she had once told her mother, and marrying merely for the sake of it was, in her view, ‘one of the greatest mistakes a woman can make’.21

As she grew into a teenager, the best that the beautiful but poor Princess Alix of Hesse could have hoped for to relieve her from the unchallenging tedium of Darmstadt provincialism was marriage to a minor European princeling. But everything changed when on her first visit to Russia in 1884 (for the marriage of her sister Ella to Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich), Alix’s third cousin, Nicholas Alexandrovich, heir to the Russian throne, had taken a shine to her.

He was sixteen and she was only twelve, but thereafter Nicky, as she would always call him, remained besotted. Five years later, when Grand Duke Louis took Alix back to Russia on a six-week visit, Nicky was still stubbornly determined to win her as his wife. The shy schoolgirl had become a slender, ethereally beautiful young woman and Nicky was deeply in love. But by now – 1889 – Alix had been confirmed in the Lutheran faith prior to coming out, and she made clear to Nicky that despite her deep feelings for him, marriage was out of the question. Virtue prevailed. She could not and would not change her religion, but she did agree to write to him in secret, their letters being sent via Ella as intermediary.

The royal marriage stakes at that time were unforgiving to girls 15

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FOUR SISTERS

who did not grasp a golden opportunity when it presented itself; as one contemporary newspaper observed, ‘Love in royal circles is not an epidemic affection’.22 It seemed that Alix’s inflexibility was going to deprive her of the one thing so many of her young royal contemporaries craved – a marriage based on love and not expediency. To a forlorn Nicky there seemed an insurmountable gulf between them and he allowed himself to be temporarily distracted by other pretty faces. For her own part, Alix was enjoying a degree of status back home, as a big fish in the very small Hesse pond. Her widowed father, whom she adored, increasingly depended upon her, as the only unmarried daughter, to take on formal duties for him at the Hesse court. Alix became his constant companion; the little time she did not spend in her father’s company was devoted to study, to painting and drawing, making and mending her own modest dresses, playing the piano (at which she was most accomplished) and a great deal of quiet, religious contemplation. And so, when Louis suddenly collapsed and died aged only fifty-four in March 1892 ‘dear Alicky’s grief’ was ‘terrible’, as Orchie confided to Queen Victoria. Worse, it was ‘a silent grief, which she locked up within her’, as she did most things.23 Alix’s concerned grandmama gathered her orphaned granddaughter to her bosom, vowing that ‘while I live Alicky, till she is married, will be more than ever my own child’.24 Alix joined her, in deep mourning, at Balmoral for several weeks of quiet, womanly commiseration. But by this time the press, paying little deference to royal grief, had other things on its mind.

Princess Alix was twenty and highly marriageable and gossip began circulating about a possible match between her and the young Prince George, second son of Bertie, Prince of Wales. Three years previously, a surprisingly determined young Alix had vigorously resisted the queen’s attempt to marry her off to Bertie’s heir, Eddy, Duke of Clarence. Victoria had been extremely put out that Alix, by then in love with Nicky, should turn down the opportunity of being a future queen of the United Kingdom. As the last of the four daughters of the House of Hesse yet to be married, Alix’s prospects were hardly the best. Never mind; perhaps she could be persuaded to marry George instead, thought the queen, particularly once the unfortunate Eddy succumbed to pneumonia in January 1892. It 16

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didn’t work; Alix was adamant, and when George settled instead for Eddy’s disconsolate fiancée May of Teck, it soon became evident where Alix’s affections were firmly fixed. She only had eyes for the Russian tsarevich. Queen Victoria’s anxiety at the prospect of such a marriage mounted. She had been highly mistrustful of Russia since the Crimean War, looking upon Britain’s former enemy as ‘false’

and ‘unfriendly’ and much of its population ‘half oriental’. Russia was ‘a corrupt country, where you can trust no one’.25 She fired off exhortatory letters to Alix’s eldest sister Victoria, demanding she and Ernie intervene to prevent it: ‘for the younger Sister to marry the son of an Emperor – would never answer, and lead to no happiness . . . The state of Russia is so bad, so rotten that any moment something dreadful might happen.’26

In Russia, Alix’s other sister Ella was meanwhile quietly working against the queen’s plan to subvert the match. She had seen the lovelorn Nicholas at first hand and despite the fact that his father Alexander III and his wife were also, at this time, opposed to the match, Ella gave it her full support. In the midst of all the behind-the-scenes discussion of her future, Alix maintained a stony silence, locked into a personal vow made to her father before his death, that she would never change her religious faith. Since Louis’s death she had become more devoted than ever to Ernie, for whom she was now performing a similar central role at the Hesse court. Behind the impenetrable, dignified froideur that she projected, Alix was proud of the high standards she set for herself; proud of her own purity of heart and her independence of thought and moral integrity.