The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra(9)

As Nicholas was now tsar the marriage was brought forward. But it did not take place as the couple would have wished, in private, in 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 excruciat-ingly 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 * All events taking place in Russia prior to February 1918 are given according to the Old Style, Julian calendar then in use there. Where confusion might arise, New Style dates are added in brackets.

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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 23

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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 24