Born to Rule: Five Reigning Consorts, Granddaughters of Queen Victoria

by Julia P. Gelardi

  Just as Sophie of Greece’s mother was there for her daughter, so was the Duchess of Coburg looking out for the interests of her daughter. The duchess, however, never hesitated to show her disapproval of her daughter’s wayward life and always gave Missy a piece of her mind. Missy may come to her mother for sympathy and help, but in the Duchess of Coburg’s eyes, she had to do so on her mother’s terms, which meant listening and acting upon the duchess’s reprimands and sage advice.

  Though the Duchess of Coburg had raised Missy to be ignorant of marital life, once married, Missy managed to share her marital woes with her mother. “All intimate life with a man is difficult for me,” she once confessed. “My husband sees me cry…he is awfully sorry, he wants to console me, he has every intention to do so, his heart is full of love, he begins to kiss me then he forgets that, and tries to console me by giving way to just that, that I dread most on earth.” When she wanted Nando to read to her, Missy complained, “he hurries it over only to get to bed for other amusements which he does not perhaps think is a one-sided amusement.”

  Later, the duchess vented her rage at King Carol when the scandal over Lieutenant Cantacuzene swirled. In 1897, Missy embroiled herself in a romance involving a lieutenant Zizi Cantacuzene, a member of her household. The scandal became widely known and was ended by King Carol. While Missy’s mother admitted that there was no excuse for Missy’s lapse of judgment, the duchess nevertheless took a swipe at her son-in-law. The “worst of all” of Nando’s faults was “his sensual passion for Missy [which] finished by …repulsing her.…Nando will himself avow,” fumed Marie, “that he treated his wife like a mistress, caring little for her emotional well-being in order to constantly assuage his physical passions.” And to top it off, Missy had to contend with Nando’s own extramarital escapades which were, according to the duchess, “a positive fact.”59

  When, in the fall of 1897, Missy found herself pregnant, it was to her mother that she fled for refuge. As this was at the height of her affair with Cantacuzene, the uproar caused by the pregnancy prompted Missy to leave Romania. Nothing was ever known of the child born at Coburg. One historian has suggested that it may have either been sent to an orphanage or was stillborn at birth. Whatever happened, the story of this mysterious child of Marie of Romania was one secret “she apparently took with her to the grave.”

  A precedent had been set when Missy fled to Coburg and to the protection of her mother in 1897. That was why, when Missy found herself pregnant again late in 1899, the duchess did not hesitate. Her instructions were set out with precision: “My plan is to take you immediately to Coburg, where we can wait until you give birth…I will take care of the rest.” True to her word, the duchess, like the Romanov that she was, fired off a warning to King Carol, telling him “she would not allow Missy to have a miscarriage at Cotroceni [Palace in Bucharest].”

  When King Carol held his ground and still refused to allow the crown princess to leave for Coburg, Missy pleaded with him to let her go. Already exhibiting a dynamism that was to distinguish her from her other royal cousins, Missy defiantly confronted King Carol and told the king “right to his face” that “she wanted a divorce, and that the child she was carrying was Boris’s.” The romance that had been kindled in May 1896 while Missy and Nando were in Moscow had continued on and off its erratic course. Missy’s threat worked. The king was aghast. For once, this grizzled veteran of Balkan political intrigue and bizarre behavior was thrown off course—and by a sprightly young woman who was clearly his subordinate. To have such a scandal tainting the House of Ho-henzollern was unthinkable for the old king.

  In the end, King Carol met his match in the combined onslaught of the Crown Princess of Romania and her mother. So, Missy gave birth in the more tranquil surroundings of Coburg to her second daughter in January 1900— named Marie, though all her life she would be known as Mignon. In the weeks before the birth, Missy’s attitude toward her husband and her need to follow her duties as a wife and princess had undergone a transformation.

  Just as Missy was willing to make a go of her marriage, Crown Prince Ferdinand was also overcome by a desire to make amends. Well aware that he had not been an imaginative or understanding husband to his young wife, and conscious of the need to deflect any more scandal on his royal house, Nando swallowed his pride. Where Mignon was concerned, “in the end, Ferdinand reluctantly agreed to accept the child as his own.”63

  Queen Victoria was not deaf to the scurrilous stories sweeping Europe concerning Marie of Romania. As Marie wrote: “In these days she was following my career with grandmotherly affection, but also with the anxious severity of one who wished that those of her House should do it every honour, no matter where they were placed.”

  A sad pall hung over Missy’s life when in 1899 her brother, Alfred, died in tragic circumstances after a botched suicide attempt. Then, in July 1900, Marie’s father died of cancer. By the fall of 1900, there was little doubt that Queen Victoria was declining rapidly, and in mid-January 1901, it became obvious that the end was at hand. The Kaiser hastened from Germany to her bedside at Osborne House. Of the five granddaughters, only the eldest, thirty-one-year-old Maud, and the youngest, thirteen-year-old Ena, could be present at Osborne for the death vigil. On the morning of 22 January 1901, the final curtain descended on the life of Queen Victoria. Family and close retainers gathered in hushed reverence by the bedside. When the queen died, Kaiser Wilhelm, exhausted from holding up his grandmother for the last two hours, turned his attention to his cousin, Princess Victoria Eugenie. Moved by what he had just witnessed, and wishing to seize the moment, forty-three-year-old Wilhelm solemnly told the somber-faced thirteen-year-old girl that “I am the eldest grandchild and you are the youngest.” He then sat Ena on his knee and they both contemplated their dead grandmother— the longest reigning monarch in English history.

  The draped coffin containing the queen’s body was laid in the dining room, which contained an altar and religious paintings. On top of it lay Victoria’s famous diamond encrusted crown, and surrounding it were six massive candlesticks. At each corner of the bier stood a tall grenadier guardsman, “looking as though [they were] marble statues, their gloved hands crossed over rifle butts, the weapons’ muzzles on the toe of each man’s left boot.” There was an overpowering scent from the funeral wreaths—white lilies from Princess Louise, blue hyacinths from Princess Beatrice, and an enormous one of white laurel from Kaiser Wilhelm. With the “red velvet hangings covering the walls and the sparkle of the Imperial and Garter jewels twinkling” from the queen’s coffin, “the gloomy old Dining Room took on an other worldliness.”66 Princess Ena’s memory was seared by this magnificent display, which mixed death, obeisance, patriotism, and grandeur. “For me,” she recalled years later, “it was one of the most awesome sights of my childhood.”

  From the Isle of Wight, Queen Victoria’s body was then taken to London, where a million souls paid their last respects to the sovereign who had reigned for nearly sixty-four years. Yet despite the huge crush of humanity, complete silence prevailed. Princess Maud thought it all “terribly sad and impressive, the crowds of people…and not a single sound and all in black, and mauve the houses.”

  The emotional funeral was held at Windsor Castle on a bitingly cold February day. The thirteen-year-old Ena naturally found the funeral procession “extremely impressive.”

  All over the British Empire and Europe, services were held to commemorate the passing of such a significant contemporary figure. In Athens, a requiem service was held at the English Church of St. Paul’s, attended by members of the Greek royal family. A remembrance service was also conducted on the day of the funeral in St. Petersburg, attended by the tsar, tsarina, and Ella. By the end, Alix and Ella were emotionally drained; a witness noted how the sisters were “visibly much affected on leaving the church.”70

  When the tsarina received condolences from the Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, his words touched a chord in her heart. She cabled her reply: “Your kin
d words of comfort in my great sorrow have sunk into my heart, and I am deeply affected by your true appreciation of my love for my grandmother, who was as a mother to me.—Alexandra.”71 In a letter to her sister Victoria, Alexandra poured out her sorrow: “How I envy you being able to see beloved Grandmama being taken to her last rest. I cannot believe she is really gone, that we shall never see her any more. It seems impossible. Since one can remember, she was in our life, and a dearer kinder being never was.”72

  “In a way she was the arbiter of our different fates,” wrote Marie of Romania. “For all members of her family her ‘yes’ and her ‘no’ counted tremendously. She was not averse from interfering in the most private questions. She was the central power directing things.…She was a tremendous presence…and her places, whilst she breathed within their walls, had something of shrines about them, which were approached with awe not unmixed with anxiety”73

  Alexandra echoed these sentiments, admitting to a confidante that her grandmother “was very forceful.”74 Maud, the eldest of the five cousins, was the one who perhaps felt most awed by the queen’s character. Maud’s son, King Olav V, later described the relationship by saying, “I had the impression that my mother and her sisters were somewhat afraid of her.”75

  As for the youngest of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters, Ena of Battenberg was so accustomed to living by the side of the woman she called “Gangan” that she admitted years later to feeling as if the queen were some sort of deity, for “it seemed that my grandmother was not destined to die, that she belonged to those immortal beings who follow to the other side of time.”76 But perhaps Marie of Romania best summed up what Queen Victoria had meant in the lives of her granddaughters when she wrote: “what a wonderful, unforgettable little lady she was.”77

  PART TWO

  Trials and Tribulations (1901-1914)

  Seven

  SPLENDID ISOLATION

  WITH THE DEATH OF QUEEN VICTORIA, A NEW AGE WAS USHERED in. But where her five special granddaughters were concerned, a loving, reliable, and oftentimes wise influence had gone from their lives. Nowhere was this loss of wise counsel more profoundly felt than in faraway St. Petersburg, where Alexandra, Russia’s increasingly isolated empress, had yet to endear herself to her country.

  Queen Victoria had once written to Princess May of Teck that “the trials of life begin with marriage.”1 And to the Tsarina Alexandra’s sister, she wrote similarly in 1887: “I never can look but with gt. Anxiety upon marriage. Life becomes so full of trials & difficulties in the happiest marriage.”2 For Tsarina Alexandra, who was fortunate in having the happiest of marriages, her immediate anxiety centered on the fact that with each passing year, she had yet to fulfill her dynastic obligation by providing Russia with the much-anticipated male heir. It was said that she could be found sobbing “for hours at a stretch,” murmuring to herself, “Why, why will God not grant me a son?”3

  Tsarina Alexandra’s latest pregnancy ended successfully with the birth of a hefty eleven-and-a-half pound baby. But again, it was a daughter. “What a disappointment!” noted Grand Duchess Xenia. “A fourth girl! They have named her Anastasia.”4

  The Romanovs were not the only ones let down, for Anastasia’s birth was greeted with equal consternation in England, where the Daily Mail boldly underscored the news with the headline: illuminations, but disappointment. “There is much rejoicing,” noted the newspaper, “although there is a popular undercurrent of disappointment, for a son had been most keenly hoped for.” And where Nicholas and Alexandra were concerned, “the legitimate hopes of the Czar and Czarina have so far been cruelly frustrated, whatever may be their private parental feelings towards their four little daughters…[who] had been born into an expectant world with distressing regularity.”5 This was not to say that her daughters did not bring Alexandra happiness. On the contrary, she doted on them. In a letter to the Bishop of Ripon, she wrote of her pride in them, telling him that she would “be so happy” to “show you our little four leaved clover. Our girlies are our joy & happiness, each so different in face & character. May God help us to give them a good & sound education & make them above all brave little Christian soldiers fighting for our Savoiur.

  But the nagging void left Alix prone to the influence of two of the most colorful members of the Romanov clan: Militza and Anastasia (“Stana”), daughters of King Nicholas of Montenegro. Not content with the conventional practices and beliefs offered by Orthodoxy, Militza and Stana were easily deceived by a parade of charlatans and “holy men” who appealed to their bizarre sense of the supernatural. Alexandra was drawn to the pair at a time when she was at her lowest ebb over her inability to produce a son, allowing her to believe in quacks introduced or recommended by the two grand duchesses. This included a certain Philippe Nazier-Vachot, a one-time butcher from France, said to have the ability to manipulate an unborn child’s sex. He was dismissed in 1903 after being unmasked as a charlatan.

  In 1903 the two women urged the tsarina to seek the intercession of a certain Seraphim, a holy man who had been dead for seventy years. It was imperative, insisted Militza, that Seraphim be declared a saint in order for Alexandra to benefit from his prayers. Never mind that it was too soon for Seraphim to be made a saint, never mind that there was opposition from the church against such a move. Undeterred, Alexandra convinced her husband to press for Seraphim’s case.

  When told by Constantin Pobedonostsev, Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod and one-time tutor to the tsar, that Seraphim’s canonization was premature, according to one contemporary, “the Empress responded that the Emperor could do anything.”7 Where Seraphim’s canonization was concerned, Alexandra was right. She succeeded in having Seraphim made an Orthodox saint in an impressive ceremony at Sarov in the summer of 1903, and later bathed in the waters of the Sarov River in hopes that she would at last conceive a male child. These efforts seemed to have reaped their intended reward, for within months of Seraphim becoming a saint Alexandra Feodorovna found to her satisfaction that she was again with child.

  For Sophie, the year 1901 was a tragic one. Quick on the heels of Queen Victoria’s death came the agonizing decline of the Empress Frederick. Sophie lived out again the tragic long good-bye to a much-loved parent as she watched her mother slowly succumb to the painful ravages of the same disease that had claimed her father’s life in 1888. Vicky’s tortures increased, compelling her to write: “My own Sophie…the terrible nights of agony are worse than ever, no rest, no peace. The tears rush down my cheeks when I am not shouting with pain.…It is fearful to endure. My courage is quite exhausted, and this morning I cried for an hour without ceasing.”8

  In spite of her intense suffering, the Empress Frederick never ceased to help and bring comfort to her daughter in Athens in a barrage of letters, for Sophie’s own letters were sometimes tinged with a sense of frustration over a variety of subjects. Mother urged daughter to think of her accomplishments and to be patient in expecting change: “Do not forget darling that you have many a nice success to be thankful for. In 10 years, much has been done.…Changes can only come gradually, and slowly.…In Greece you are still suffering from the effects of the Turkish rule. Countries and states are not made in a day, and long and many are the struggles they have to go through…you must not lose heart.” As for Sophie’s country and future subjects, the empress continued, “The Greek people are splendid, I admire them more than I can say…Greece is worth fighting and suffering for.”9 The empress’s words did not go unheeded. Many years later, after Sophie did indeed suffer much as Greece’s queen and had to live out her final years in exile, the one thing she missed the most living away from her adopted country was the Greek people themselves, whom she had come to cherish. “She adored the people,” recalled her daughter, Katherine.10

  The final death struggle of the Empress Frederick was heart-breaking. The morphine given by the doctors barely eased her suffering. Sophie was at her mother’s side that summer of 1901, knowing full well that the end was at hand.
It was not an easy vigil. Despite the beautiful gardens and view surrounding the Friedrichshof, nothing could blunt the agonized wait as the empress drifted off to her final rest. Even the guards stationed outside were so affected by the cries they heard that they pleaded to be moved farther off.

  On 5 August 1901, the Empress Frederick was finally released from her earthly torment. Sophie had just stepped outside with her sister, Mossy, for a breath of fresh air. They were called back to their mother’s room. But by the time they returned, it was too late. The empress had wished to have the words of the English burial service said over her and in this her son, the Kaiser, agreed. He, along with the rest of the family, gathered around her coffin to hear the Bishop of Ripon read the service.

  If Sophie thought that all was to be calm in the aftermath of her mother’s death, she was mistaken. Unbelievably, once again she had to endure the callous treatment of the Kaiser. Just as he had done in 1888 immediately after his father died, Willy ordered soldiers to ransack his mother’s home for her papers. The empress, however, had had her papers spirited away to England right under the Kaiser’s nose in an episode worthy of any cloak and dagger mystery.

  The weeks and months prior to her mother’s death had been physically and emotionally exhausting for Sophie of Greece. Moreover, the fact that when the empress died, Sophie was five months pregnant with her fourth child made it all the more important that the trauma did not overwhelm her. Nevertheless, Sophie made sure not to forget individuals who had been kind to her mother and the family. One of those who expressed her sympathy at the death of the empress was an old governess of Sophie’s. Typical of the compassionate manner in which Sophie had been raised, the crown princess wrote a touching reply, notable for its wrenching honesty, in which she spoke of “my terrible grief!”