Princesses Behaving Badly

by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

  Either way, most accounts agree that the Austrian princess and French queen’s last words were, “Pardon me, sir, I did not mean to do it.” She wasn’t, however, talking about all her profligate spending (the porcelain cups in the shape of breasts, the little cottage where she and her friends liked to dress up as shepherdesses, all those Versailles parties) or what the frenzied revolutionaries felt was her evil influence on her weak and by-then 9-months-dead husband, Louis XVI. She was apologizing to the executioner, whose foot she’d just trod on.

  ELISABETH OF HESSE AND BY RHINE: THE PRINCESS WHO DIED SINGING

  Elisabeth was the granddaughter of Britain’s redoubtable Queen Victoria and a well-loved society beauty in her youth. She married in 1894, but the union was short-lived: her husband, Sergei, was killed by a bomb tossed by a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in February 1905; Elisabeth saw his blasted remains lying in the snow. A devout believer in Russian Orthodoxy, Elisabeth forgave her husband’s murderer, prayed for him, and even petitioned the court to commute his death sentence. Afterward, Elisabeth became a vegetarian and a nun, divesting herself completely of her vast fortune, even selling off her wedding ring, to build a convent.

  But the man who killed her husband wasn’t alone in his hatred of blue bloods, and by 1917 the Bolshevik movement had gained an unstoppable momentum. Being even faintly royal was tantamount to a death sentence, and in 1918 Elisabeth was arrested on the orders of Lenin; she’d been offered the opportunity to flee Russia but chose instead to remain with her order. For several months, Elisabeth was shuttled from town to town, under the brutal hands and ruthless eyes of the Red Army guard.

  The Bolsheviks, having heard about the tsar’s assassination, decided that the rest of the family needed to die as well. On the night of July 17, 1918, the same day the tsar and his family were killed (see “Franziska,” this page), Elisabeth and several other members of the Russian imperial family were woken by Red Army guards and bundled into the back of a cart.

  According to one of the assassins, a soldier named Ryabov, her murderers chose an abandoned half-flooded mine shaft some 65 feet deep outside a small village in the Russian countryside for their evil deed. Ryabov recalled that the princess and the others were thrown down the shaft in the hopes that they would drown or die in the fall; they didn’t, so their executioners tossed a hand grenade after them. Incredibly, the victims were still alive, so the soldiers tossed in another grenade. “And what do you think—from beneath the ground we heard singing! I was seized with horror. They were singing the prayer: ‘Lord, save your people!’ ” recalled Ryabov. “We had no more grenades, yet it was impossible to leave the deed unfinished. We decided to fill the shaft with dry brushwood and set it alight. Their hymns still rose up through the thick smoke for some time yet.”

  About three months later, White Army soldiers, the anti-Bolshevik forces, discovered the bodies in the mine. Elisabeth’s horrible death and divine life inspired the Russian Orthodox church to canonize her in 1981 and declare her a martyr in 1992 (after, notably, the fall of the Communist regime that killed her).

  NOOR INAYAT KHAN: THE RESISTANCE PRINCESS WHO DIED WITH “LIBERTÉ” ON HER LIPS

  Princess Noor Inayat Khan, heroine of World War II, deserves a whole chapter, a whole book to herself. The daughter of an Indian father and American mother, Noor was a descendent of Indian Tipu Sultan, the eighteenth-century “Tiger of Mysore” who held off the British East India Company with the first military rockets ever used. Though gentle—before World War II, she was a harpist, a children’s book writer, and a Muslim Sufi pacifist—she clearly inherited some of Tipu’s martial strength.

  In 1940, Noor joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and trained to be a wireless operator. Two years later, Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) deployed her to Nazi-occupied France as a wireless operator, armed only with a false passport and a pistol, codenamed “Madeleine.” At 29 years old, she was the first female wireless operator in occupied France. By the summer of 1943, as the Gestapo ferreted out cell after cell, she was doing the work of six operators and virtually running Resistance communications.

  Noor was betrayed by a contact and, after three months on the run, was caught by the Gestapo. She fought like a tiger and tried to escape, climbing out a bathroom window, but she was caught. Regarded by the Germans as uncooperative and dangerous, she spent 10 months in solitary confinement in chains, beaten, starved, tortured, and condemned to “Nacht und Nebel” (Night and Fog), the code reserved for people who were to be disappeared. But she never talked. Noor was executed by the Nazis on September 13, 1944, at Dachau prison camp, shot through the back of the head. Her last word was “Liberté.”

  Noor was posthumously awarded Britain’s George Cross, making her one of only three women from the SOE to receive the honor, and France’s Croix de Guerre for her bravery. It took a years-long campaign and the concerted effort of many people, but in 2012, Princess Anne unveiled a bronze bust of the spy princess that now graces a London park.

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