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

by Julia P. Gelardi

  Thereafter, Pauline and Waldorf paid Missy an annual visit in Romania. Their enthusiasm for Romania helped to cement Missy’s growing appreciation for her adopted country. But as attached as she was to both siblings, there can be no doubt that Marie’s feminine nature naturally gravitated to Waldorf, who did not hide his admiration for the woman who became a cherished friend.

  Those watching Waldorf and Missy closely during this time could have easily concluded that the crown princess was falling for the rich Astor and putting her marriage in peril. But however distant Ferdinand and Marie had become, the fact was that separation was not an option for the couple. Such a move would have been far too damaging to the Hohenzollern dynasty in Romania. Carmen Sylva was convinced that Missy herself did not want to leave Nando. She wrote to a friend about the crown prince and princess that “They are not going to divorce and [she] wants to be a Queen! She feels young and strong and daring!”3

  Being unhappy in her marriage had certainly left Missy vulnerable. But if Carmen Sylva is to be believed, it would appear that by the time she met Waldorf, she had already determined to stay with Nando and work alongside him for Romania.

  Waldorf and Missy opened their hearts to each other during many an intimate ride through the pine-clad forests of Sinaia, the summer resort at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. But despite their shared love of horses and riding, this was not the only thing Missy found attractive about Waldorf. In fact, what seems to have drawn her to the Astor heir was that there was an air of sadness about him; and though he had, in Missy’s own words, “large velvety brown eyes and a charming smile,” the “tall and exceedingly slim” Waldorf also possessed “a certain shyness of manner which added to his charm.”4

  Marriage being out of the question, Waldorf inevitably looked elsewhere for someone to marry. He found a flame-haired American divorcée, Nancy Shaw, whose vitriolic and mercurial temper would cause her to run afoul of friend and foe alike. As one of the five celebrated Langhorne sisters of Virginia, Nancy was to make a name for herself as the first female member of the British House of Commons. As Nancy Astor, she was also to become famous for her acerbic tongue.5

  Missy, though overcome with a sense of sadness at the thought that she and Waldorf could never be as close as when he was single, nevertheless graciously accepted the woman Waldorf chose to be his wife. In fact, she gave Nancy a nudge in Waldorf’s direction when the former Langhorne belle could not make up her mind whom to marry, as Waldorf was not the only one interested in becoming Nancy’s second husband. In an act of magnanimity that was devoid of jealousy— one that illustrated the depth of Missy’s feelings for Waldorf—the princess took it upon herself to try to win Waldorf’s happiness. Marie boldly took pen in hand and wrote to Nancy, addressing her in her early letters as Mrs. Shaw.

  In 1906, she wrote to present Waldorf’s case. In this long and candid letter to a stranger, the crown princess told the dithering Nancy that “I feel as if I could not but help him to fight for his happiness.” Even Marie admitted her tactic was “an unconventional step,” and she hoped Mrs. Shaw would accept it in the spirit intended. “I quite realise that you may find it impertinent of me to seem to mix up with what hardly seems my business, but knowing Waldorf in the middle of the struggle for his happiness, I felt as if even if you could not help you would listen to me.” Marie then launched her case for Waldorf, explaining, “I long for his happiness…I think you will have understood that there are not many like him, and that one may go far before one meets his like.”

  Marie of Romania’s unconventional letter might have helped to propel Nancy Shaw. Not long after it was written, Nancy Shaw became officially engaged, to the relief of Marie, who felt free to call Waldorf’s fiancée Nancy.

  Soon Nancy was on the receiving end of full-blown accounts from Missy of her embattled existence in Romania, one in which the princess depicted herself as a caged butterfly, emphasizing how much the Astor friendship meant to her. Eager to latch on to anyone closely associated with Waldorf, the crown princess wrote as if Nancy had been a lifelong friend. She did not hide the travails of being crown princess but also admitted that her exuberance and desires needed to be tempered:

  we solitary royalties have a heart like other human beings and need love and affection like others, but we seldom get it as we are supposed to be happy enough in our so cold grandeur…

  I am rather an unconventional person, that I have realised, but being so lonely and so apart from the rest of the world, has made me a bit of an original….

  I have felt lately, that life is so much stronger than I am…my endeavours to make myself useful or popular or to help others, all has seemed to crumble away from me, and only leave me more tired and older. My one pride is, that outwardly no one could ever realise how sad all my inward self is, I always look…pleased and energetic.7

  Nancy Astor accepted Marie’s offer to become friends. However, they would never be close. Missy did not quite realize what she was contending with when she had urged Nancy Shaw to become Waldorf’s wife. Once married, Nancy wished to keep the effusive Marie at arm’s length. The new Mrs. Astor saw to it that letters between Waldorf and Marie ceased. It was reported that Nancy Astor said, “Marie of Rumania used to write to Waldorf every day at the time I first met him. I thought this too much on our honeymoon and I said I’d go home if it went on.”8 The domineering Nancy, it seemed, was uncomfortable with an expansive crown princess playing such an important role in Waldorf’s life. Nancy quickly let Waldorf know in no uncertain terms that she was not going to share him with Romania’s future queen. But Waldorf did not give in that easily.

  When the issue of godparents came up for Waldorf and Nancy’s first child, Waldorf understandably wanted Missy to be one of them. But Nancy refused, causing one of their earliest marital rows. Nancy complained to her sister that her husband wanted “that lunatic Princess” as a godmother. In the end, Waldorf refused to budge and Nancy conceded. “I hate it but I gave in to Waldorf,” she admitted. She also could not resist a dig at Princess Marie, telling her sister, “I hear her hair is v. yellow these days and her cheeks v. pink.”9

  The one thing Marie of Romania learned gradually during these years, and wrote about in 1926, was the necessity of forbearance for someone in her position:

  One of the great lessons royalty has learned through the ages is PATIENCE—a huge, never-ending, all comprehending, all forgiving patience. Without it their task would overpower and crush them. If that patience fails them, then they will crumble. And royalty has to stand being hedged in, limited in their rights, limited in their freedom, cramped by their traditions which become a form of servitude. But their traditions are also their armour. If they rid themselves of their traditions, they take off that which defends them not only against others, but also against their own passions, desires and urge toward greater liberties.10

  These were hard-won lessons that Marie had learned so many years before, when she was still a young princess in a strange and distant land among unforgiving taskmasters.

  By the early years of the twentieth century, paralyzing strikes, demonstrations, and mutinies were engulfing Russia. Workers in the cities became increasingly militant while peasants in the countryside agitated against injustices. Driving the metropolitan workers was fury at an absence of political rights; the peasantry for their part were roused by their enduring poverty. Into this potent mix came war in the Far East, a conflict that erupted after years of escalating tensions in Asia between the Russian and Japanese empires. From 1904 to 1905, Russia was embroiled in what became known as the Russo-Japanese War.

  Many Russians greeted the war with confidence, including Tsarina Alexandra.Russia, in their minds, would handily defeat its Asian enemy. Writing to her brother, Ernie, Alix explained how “we did everything to avoid it [war], but it seems it had to be, & it has done our country good.”11 The tsarina’s naive assessment was to prove devastatingly wrong.

  In the meantime, in the empire’s capital,
an act of civil disobedience brought about by frustration with their daily existence set a large group of the tsar’s subjects on a march to plead their case. What began as a peaceful demonstration, however, ended in a brutal bloodbath.

  January 1905 was characteristically freezing cold in St. Petersburg. This, though, did not prevent a large group of people from assembling outdoors. Animated by a desire to present the tsar with a list of their grievances in hopes he would listen to them and implement change, a large gathering of workers, mothers, and children (some 200,000), led by a priest, Father Gapon, began an unarmed march toward the Winter Palace. They advanced in a manner that was not aggressive, driven by a belief that the tsar would listen to their demands, such as calls for an eight-hour work day and a constituent assembly. Evidence of the marchers’ loyalty to their sovereigns was visible in the portraits of the tsar and tsarina seen among the crowd. But waiting soldiers were ordered to suppress the crowd. Armed infantrymen repeatedly shouted orders for people to disperse, but were ignored. The infantrymen then fired indiscriminately, killing and wounding hundreds, whose mangled bodies scattered in front of the palace, blood staining the snow on the ground. That tragic day would forever be known as “Bloody Sunday.” The government’s brutal response to Father Gapon’s march was a disaster. In fact, it was nothing short of a massacre.

  Tsarina Alexandra, who was at Tsarskoe Selo with Nicholas, was aghast at the bloodshed. “It is a time full of trials indeed,” she wrote one sister. Alexandra also explained her views on domestic politics, showing she was not averse to the idea that reforms had to be introduced. But she added that

  Reforms can only be made gently with the greatest care and forethought.…Things are in a bad state and it’s abominably unpatriotic at the time when we are plunged into war to break forth with revolutionary ideas. The poor workmen, who had been utterly misled, had to suffer, and the organisers have hidden as usual behind them. Don’t believe all the horrors the foreign papers say. They make one’s hair stand on end—foul exaggeration. Yes, the troops, alas, were obliged to fire. Repeatedly the crowd was told to retreat and that Nicky was not in town…and that one would be forced to shoot, but they would not heed and so blood was shed.…It is a ghastly thing, but had one not done it the crowd would have grown colossal and 1000 would have been crushed.12

  The violent demonstration outside the Winter Palace brought home to the tsarina the burdens carried by her husband: “My poor Nicky’s cross is a heavy one to bear, all the more as he has nobody on whom he can thoroughly rely and who can be a real help to him.” Alix felt it her duty as wife and empress to serve and aid her husband as best she could. “On my knees I pray to God to give me wisdom to help him in his heavy task.” But she viewed what was happening through the prism of the dichotomy that she felt divided the capital from the rest of Russia: “Petersburg is a rotten town, not an atom Russian. The Russian people are deeply and truly devoted to their Sovereign and the revolutionaries use his name for provoking them against landlords, etc., but I don’t know how.” Since Nicholas II needed help, Alix was overwhelmed with an urge to do something practical. “How I wish I were clever and could be of real use!” she sighed. “I love my new country. It’s so young, powerful, and has so much good in it, only utterly unbalanced and childlike.”13

  Alix was right to worry about her beloved country. She needed only to look nearer home for a grim reminder that the forces of nihilism were still set on destroying the ruling dynasty. For decades, assassinations had dotted the Russian political landscape; there had been no letup on this method of intimidation used by the enemies of the tsarist government. Tsarina Alexandra’s fears of instability could only have been exacerbated when Serge, Ella’s husband, was murdered. In a scene reminiscent of the 1881 brutal assassination of Tsar Alexander II in St. Petersburg, his son met the same fate seventeen years later in Moscow. But whereas Alexander II, the “Tsar-Liberator,” had his admirers, Grand Duke Serge was almost universally loathed. Long hated for his reactionary views and policies, Nicholas II’s uncle was blown to bits by a bomb as he rode away from the Kremlin in a carriage. Serge’s murder was another reminder for Alix that the throne of Russia, and her husband’s fate, hung by the thinnest of margins. Little did she know just how dangerously thin that margin would be in the years to come.

  In 1901, Alexandra’s brother Ernie, the Grand Duke of Hesse, and his wife, Ducky, were divorced, angering Alix. When Ducky married Grand Duke Kyril, a cousin of Nicholas II, in 1905, the tsarina was appalled that the Romanovs had admitted a divorcée into the family. Unlike Alix, Missy sympathized with Ducky. In the midst of this scandal involving Crown Princess Marie of Romania’s sister, Missy gave birth to her fourth child and second son, Nicolas. The baby was named after the tsar in the hope that this might soften his stand against Ducky and Kyril.

  The birth of Missy’s latest child in August 1903 offered yet more fodder for the gossips. Speculation was rife that baby Nicky’s father was not Crown Prince Ferdinand. The gossip was further fanned when Waldorf’s sister, Pauline, and an Astor family friend, Dr. Madge, returned to Romania in July to assist at the birth. Whatever the truth of Nicolas’s paternity, Ferdinand accepted the child as his. And as time passed, Prince Nicolas did not appear to look like the Astors but, instead, came to resemble the Hohenzollern side of the family, with their protruding ears, piercing eyes, and hawkish noses.

  If Missy thought her problems in Romania were overwhelming, she need only look to neighboring Russia to see that despite the power her cousin Alix could wield as tsarina, there was no doubt that Alexandra struggled at being the empress. Though Missy was still a step away from the throne itself, her increasing confidence and forceful personality were making headway. The tsarina had yet to make the same kind of impact in Russia as Marie was already starting to do in Romania.

  Why was Missy’s star in the ascendant while Alix’s was still awaiting a jump start? Part of the reason stems from the fact that Marie of Romania undoubtedly had a great sense of charm and a joie de vivre that were so lacking in Alexandra of Russia. Though both women were undeniably beautiful, Missy’s ability to charm people placed her far ahead of the dour and introverted Alix. And in an era gradually marked by a newfound elegance and sophistication, coupled with an increasingly public acceptance of permissiveness, the extrovert Marie was bound to reap more admirers than the intransigent and unforgiving Alexandra.

  Two factors beyond the control of both women also made this possible. The first one lay in the very nature of the courts themselves and the high society of Bucharest and St. Petersburg, both of which were permeated by a degree of licentiousness and intrigue that would have been unacceptable at Queen Victoria’s court. Victoria’s court was rightly described at the time of her death as one in which the queen saw to it that “princes and courtiers should put levity far from them” and where the “Victorian ideal of simplicity and high seriousness” was admired and promoted.14 At the opposite end of the spectrum in Eastern Europe, and the very antithesis of “simplicity and high seriousness,” were the Romanian and Russian capitals over which Marie and Alexandra presided.

  Bucharest was more than once mentioned by firsthand observers, both homegrown and foreign, as a place where there was a distinct “laxity of morals.”15 According to a well-placed Romanian of the time, “morality has never been a strong point with my compatriots” and “passionate, violent, and usually short-lived affairs are so numerous and intricate that, unless you live on the spot, it is difficult to keep track of the unending intrigues of one’s friends.”16 St. Petersburg was equally decadent. In the season prior to the austere Lenten observations, “there was no livelier place in all Europe than the capital of imperial Russia, ‘cosmopolitan in its leanings but thoroughly Russian in its recklessness.’ “17 Missy’s dabbling in the odd flirtation with handsome admirers was very much in keeping with the way many of Romania’s elite carried on. After all, as one contemporary put it, “Roumania gossips, but rarely blames.”18

&
nbsp; For the more upstanding but luckless Alexandra, her opinionated dealings with the hedonistic elite of Russia served to drive a wedge between the tsarina and the large supporting cast of the imperial court. To the tsarina, numerous members of the upper echelons of society were outright moral frauds, since they paid mere lip service to the religion into which they were born; Alexandra, on the other hand, had embraced Russian Orthodoxy and practiced her religion with fervor and devotion. To accept these religious hypocrites was simply antithetical to the tsarina’s own truthful nature. That was partly why she had taken such a dislike to the haute monde of Russia. Sadly, Alexandra’s contempt was heartily reciprocated. Thus, it was to the tsarina’s misfortune that her high moral principles, derived from a genuine and profound approach to religion, were more scorned at Russia’s capital than admired.

  The increasingly divergent paths taken by these two royal consorts were also reflected in stark differences that arose in the leading royal court of the day— that of Edward VII. For just as the English court emerged from the strait-laced authoritarian atmosphere that permeated Queen Victoria’s reign and plunged head-on into a more permissive one presided over by the gregarious King Edward VII, so too did Marie and Alexandra personify the differences between the old world and the new. Whereas the prim and proper Alix continued to value the Victorian ideals promoted by her late grandmother, Missy embraced the liberal social mores espoused by her uncle.

  The ascension to the throne of the pleasure-loving Edward VII was, of course, another factor that was beyond Missy and Alix’s control. And on the surface, it would appear that the king’s presence on the international stage had no effect whatsoever on the way in which his nieces were perceived in Romania and Russia. Nevertheless, Edward VII’s accession did have some impact on the acceptance or ostracization of Marie and Alexandra in their respective capitals. Edward was the undisputed leader of society both in England and on the European continent. The king’s ability to maintain his acknowledged social standing, despite personal shortcomings in the area of marital fidelity, had the unintended side effect of helping Marie of Romania and hurting Alexandra of Russia.