Gossip had shadowed the gregarious monarch from his days as Prince of Wales, leaving as he did an endless trail of mistresses in his wake, “for he was the very model of genial but remorseless infidelity”19 But herein lay the success with which Edward was able to deflect criticism on this front. Through a potent combination of bonhomie and refusal to indulge in hypocrisy where his matrimonial dalliances were concerned, Edward for the most part overcame criticism for being unfaithful to his ever patient wife. This continued well into the king’s reign as his marital dalliances did not abate with the passage of time.
Edward VII’s ability to transcend such rooted disapproval was largely due to his openness about his transgressions. Because he was “intensely human” and because “he never attempted to hide his weaknesses,”20 Edward succeeded in winning over most of his critics. He managed to tinge his extramarital exploits with a lustrous sheen to the point where, instead of being condemned, Edward’s infidelities became legendary. After he succeeded Victoria to the throne, society was more accepting of such conduct since the very arbiter of taste and behavior was none other than “Edward the Caresser” himself. And nowhere was this more evident than in the new feminine ideal that emerged with the new reign. For the arrival of the new king meant that the Victorian feminine ideal was usurped. In its place came a new, Edwardian woman: confident, audacious, and itching to practice a moral relativism denied her under the strictures of the Victorian era.
Thus, in tandem with the change in reigns, a shift of subtle but discernable proportions in the code of moral probity also emerged. Such high ideals as marital fidelity, so publicly prized in the Victorian era, were now shunted aside to make room for a greater acceptance of permissive behavior, epitomized by King Edward himself.
No longer was it enough for the Edwardian woman to accept benignly the marital infidelities of her husband while embarking on an affair at her own social peril. This was already evident toward the end of the Victorian era and gained momentum with the dawn of the Edwardian era and the emergence of a set of women known as “the Souls.” According to Barbara Tuchman, this restricted group of society people—“self-consciously clever and endlessly self-admiring”— had chosen, “in conscious reaction to the Victorian feminine ideal,” to allow themselves “a new freedom of private morality.” It became a kind of desiderata for people who subscribed to this “new freedom of private morality” to “depart from Victorian morality without deserting propriety”21 Marie of Romania exemplified this new Edwardian woman. The crown princess, with her male friends, had far more in common with these women who rebelled against the Victorian feminine ideal than with her strait-laced cousin. The Tsarina of Russia was more like the “Incorruptibles”—that “strict, reactionary” group of individuals who had found the loose-living Marlborough House set presided over by Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales so “vulgar.”22
As the Edwardian era unfolded, Tsarina Alexandra still clung tenaciously to her principled Victorian ideals. After nearly a dozen years in Russia, she refused to tolerate the shenanigans of the elite. Instead of allowing St. Petersburg society to guide her—the outsider—the tsarina remained intractable and refused to be dictated to. This stubborn streak was driven by personal characteristics that were downright disastrous. When combined with her transparent honesty, the tsarina’s notorious insecurity transformed Alexandria into a defensive wounded animal in retreat.
In comparison to Marie of Romania and their uncle, Edward VII, neither of whom was afraid to show their flawed but very human side, Tsarina Alexandra appeared thoroughly out of touch, out of date, and unsympathetic to all but a narrow circle of intimates. Tragically for Alix, this only led to her descending deeper and deeper into misunderstanding and vilification from which she was never to emerge.
But in analyzing the factors that contributed to the acceptance of Marie in Romania and the growing criticisms of Alexandra in Russia, there was one more reason why Missy’s trajectory veered toward success and promise of great potential whereas Alix’s was still aimlessly adrift. Marie succeeded where Alix had failed in the one area that counted the most: their role as mothers of a dynasty. Alexandra had yet to complete the all-important task of providing the coveted male heir. For Marie, the fact that she had given birth to a second son in 1903 meant that she had certainly done her duty where the dynasty was concerned. Such an achievement was something Alix could only dream of, and the presence of four lovely daughters could not make up for the lack of that precious son. Married for nearly ten years at the dawn of the Edwardian era, Alix was beginning to wonder if she was ever going to give birth to the much-longed-for tsarevitch.
By 1904, Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg had blossomed. One London newspaper was in raptures, describing Ena as “tall and slender without being too thin…[with] golden hair…large luminous blue eyes, a straight nose, well outlined lips, a rosy complection; in sum, a grand beauty”23
The princess had already garnered the attention of one of Europe’s most eligible bachelors. During a visit to England, Grand Duke Boris met the teenaged, blue-eyed princess and took a fancy to her. When they met again in the South of France early in 1905, the grand duke courted the seventeen-year-old princess. However, nothing came of Boris’s attentions. Soon after her debut, Ena was so busy enjoying herself in a round of parties that she all but forgot her Russian suitor.
It was just as well, for this was the very same Boris who had, a decade before, unashamedly pursued Marie of Romania while she was in Moscow for the coronation of Nicholas II and Alexandra. Ena’s admirer was thus none other than the infamous Boris whom Missy so brazenly used to taunt King Carol of Romania, with the startling news that Boris was the father of her third child. Ena’s decision not to marry Boris was a wise one; the grand duke has been rightly described as “a world class womanizer…the terror of jealous husbands as well as of watchful mothers.”24
Despite having morganatic blood in her veins on her father’s side, the fact that Ena had been a favored granddaughter of Queen Victoria and was born and raised in the English court made her an eligible princess in the highly contested matrimonial stakes. And Ena’s obvious physical attractions garnered her a fair share of admirers. As Princess Ena launched into society, settling into a round of official engagements and entertainments, London was gearing up for the visit of Spain’s King Alfonso XIII. The niece of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, like her other female English cousins living in and around London, would be expected to take part in the festivities surrounding the king’s visit. But their presence was to be as more than mere adornments in the sparkling court of Edward VII. For these eligible princesses of the realm were to be discreetly paraded before Alfonso in an exercise intended to secure a potential English queen for Spain.
Nine
THE FACADE CRUMBLES
AFTER SUCCESSFULLY PUSHING FOR THE CANONIZATION OF SERAPHIM, the tsarina found to her satisfaction that she was again enceinte. The arrival of a male heir would help lift the empire’s spirits, with Russia enmeshed in a devastating war in the Pacific against Japan. Russia found to its consternation that the Japanese Empire was proving to be more than an equal foe.
Tsarina Alexandra wasted little time in throwing herself wholeheartedly into the war effort, organizing workshops in the Winter Palace where ladies of different classes met to prepare supplies and sew clothes for Russia’s soldiers. The tsarina often joined the ladies in their tasks, being careful not to monopolize any one group. All in all, she managed to secure the aid of some five thousand women in the war effort.
The tsarina encouraged her daughters to do their part for the empire’s troops by having them knit scarves and caps. One of the more effective ideas the tsarina came up with was to send parcels to the troops for Easter. Inside were such much-needed items as soap, bandages, a shirt, a handkerchief, sugar, notepaper and a stamped envelope. These thoughtful gifts elicited much gratitude from the troops. Later in the war, Alexandra also created her own hospital in the g
rounds of Tsarskoe Selo, where she paid visits every day to the wounded. And in a gesture toward those soldiers who were wounded, the tsarina created an invalids’ home for a number of them.
Alexandra’s dedication to her country’s soldiers was in abundant evidence during this crisis, and though she was pregnant again, she did not slow down until just two months short of her confinement. By then, wracked by tremendous pain when standing or walking, the tsarina had no other recourse but to spend the remaining weeks prostrate in bed or on a sofa.
It became apparent that Russia was faring badly in the war. Hampered by geography, Russia could not replenish its supplies and aid its troops fast enough. Neither were the Russian military leaders up to par. At the Battle of Mukden alone, which took place in February–March 1905, 330,000 Russian soldiers fought and nearly 90,000 fell in battle. To place this in perspective, one historian has noted that “Mukden was, in terms of the numbers involved, the biggest battle until then recorded.…Over six hundred thousand men, more than were ever engaged in any nineteenth-century battle, fought desperately for over two weeks instead of for a day”1
Like most Russians, the tsarina was anxious about the war, but through sheer willpower, she managed to keep herself from succumbing to anxiety, exhaustion, and illness. On a hot summer’s day in August 1904, the miracle Alexandra had been fervently praying for finally took place: A beautiful baby, weighing in at eleven pounds, was born to Nicholas and Alexandra at Peterhof.
When the tsarina awoke from the effects of the chloroform, she saw from her husband’s radiant face that their most cherished wish had come true. “Oh, it cannot be true; it cannot be true,” exclaimed the incredulous mother. “Is it really a boy?” she asked.2 The ecstatic parents named their precious son Alexei, in honor of Nicholas II’s favorite tsar, Alexei I, the father of Peter the Great.
Nicholas and Alexandra’s happiness proved short-lived, for anxiety over their son’s health soon tinged the parents’ waking hours. Within weeks of the baby’s birth, Nicholas confided to his diary a disquieting episode: “Alix and I are very disturbed at the constant bleeding in little Alexei. It continued at intervals from his navel until evening.”3 From that moment on, neither parent would know a moment’s peace. Their precious bundle of joy, the boy destined to be Emperor of Russia, was already showing signs of that most dreaded disease— hemophilia.
When Port Arthur fell to the Japanese at the end of 1904, the loss came as a bitter blow for the Russians. More than ever, the need to secure victory became an absolute imperative for the country’s leaders. Much hope, therefore, lay in the performance of their Baltic Fleet, which had been sent on a nine-month, 30,000-kilometer voyage to Japan in order to inflict great damage on the Japanese. What the Russians got instead was total defeat. Soon after its arrival in Japanese waters at the end of May 1905, the fleet was unexpectedly annihilated by the enemy at what became known as the Battle of Tsushima. In a destructive and decisive battle lasting an incredibly brief forty-five minutes, the empire of Japan defeated the empire of Russia. The barrage of Japanese firepower resulted in the mind-boggling loss for Russia of six destroyers, twelve cruisers, eight battleships, and thousands of men. It was an ignominious end for Russia’s Baltic Fleet.
According to the Grand Duchess Olga, Tsarina Alexandra’s sister-in-law, who was with Nicholas II and Alix at the moment they received news of the disaster at Tsushima, the tsar “turned ashen pale…and clutched at a chair for support,” while “Alicky broke down and sobbed.”4
Vanquished, Russia had no alternative but to make peace with Japan. The Treaty of Portsmouth was signed, ending the Russo-Japanese War, which had brought nothing but humiliation for the empire of Nicholas II. Of the 2 million men who fought in that conflict, the country lost 125,000, and all, it seemed, had died in vain.
The stunning outcome of the Battle of Tsushima had a detrimental impact on the prestige of the tsar and the government. It is not an exaggeration to state that this crushing defeat led in some direct measure to the revolutionary fever that engulfed Russia in 1905. The overwhelming defeat in war plus the Bloody Sunday riots combined to make 1904–05 one of the most harrowing years for the tsar and tsarina. Events of such magnitude peeled away the facade of near impregnability associated with the Romanov dynasty. Though the imperial family had been dogged by assassinations and instability, by the end of 1905 an ever greater sense of vulnerability emanated from Tsarskoe Selo. From then on, every misstep taken by the tsar, and especially the tsarina, was not only to have the effect of stripping away further the illusion of stability and affection; the blunders were to provide the imperial couple’s enemies with the ammunition to destroy them.
Ever since Bloody Sunday, growing mass unrest and a string of endless actions directed against the government had made for greater instability. Strikes, revolts, and demonstrations in many parts of the country were commonplace, so much so that “between Bloody Sunday and the late fall, Nicholas and his military advisers assigned 15,297 companies of infantry and 3,665 squadrons of cavalry, with 224 cannon and 124 machine guns, to suppress strikes and peasant riots.”5
In Odessa, two thousand deaths resulted after eight hundred men mutinied on the battleship Potemkin. By the first week of October 1905, a massive railway strike involving three quarters of a million railroad employees snowballed, causing others to join in, so that millions of workers brought the empire to a virtual standstill. Mob violence erupted and ominous swathes of revolutionary red were unfurled in cities and towns as workers sang the Marseillaise and loudly proclaimed: “Long Live the Revolution!” and “Down with Autocracy!
In St. Petersburg that October, striking workers cut off all electricity. The capital’s university teemed with revolutionaries consisting of the soon to be familiar Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The stage was set for civil war as the tsar ordered troops to crush the agitators.
Faced with anarchy, there were only two options left to Tsar Nicholas II and the government: Either answer the insurrections with violence or institute some kind of major reform such as the granting of a constitution. In the end, the chairman of the Committee of Ministers, Sergei Witte, one of the ablest members of the Russian government, convinced his master that the latter was the way to go, though Nicholas himself was more inclined toward some form of military dictatorship.
Throughout this time, Alexandra was never far from her husband’s side. When Count Witte went to Peterhof for a meeting with the tsar during these torturous days of decision making, he was astonished to find that not a single Romanov grand duke had joined the tsar for the meeting. Instead, an incredulous Witte found only Tsarina Alexandra with her husband. During the course of his audience with the tsar, in which discussions over changes to autocracy were explained, Witte noticed how uncomfortable and angry Alexandra seemed to be. “The Empress,” Count Witte recalled, “sat stiff as a ramrod, her face lobster-red, and did not utter a single word.”7 Tsarina Alexandra was finally making her mark with Nicholas II. Having been married to him for over a decade and having provided the son they so fervently prayed for, Alexandra had at last superseded the Dowager Empress Marie in gaining the tsar’s confidence when it came to giving him political advice.
Some who knew the tsarina were full of misgivings about her increased influence over the tsar. Count Witte himself concluded that “it is fatal for the Russian Empire that a person such as this should be adviser to its Autocratic Master, able to affect the fate of tens of millions of human beings.”8 Kaiser Wilhelm II was no less damning of Alexandra’s meddling. In March 1905, Wilhelm maintained that Tsar Nicholas was “in great danger” if he did not soon end his wife’s increasing influence. Writing in reply to a report which told the Kaiser that Alexandra now wielded influence with Nicholas, Wilhelm exploded: “The little Hessian Princess, who never heard anything about politics, is giving political advice!?” And in English, he added, “fools rush in where angels fear to tread!”9
When the time came to make his final decision, Nicholas II p
revaricated. The tsar’s cousin, the tall and imposing Grand Duke Nicholas (“Nikolasha”), was so furious about plans to proceed with a military dictatorship that he stormed into Peterhof and exclaimed: “I’m going now to the Czar and I will beg him to sign the manifesto and the Witte program. Either he signs or in his presence I will put a bullet through my head with this revolver.”10
On 17 October 1905, Tsar Nicholas II put an end to three hundred years of Romanov autocracy. After making the sign of the Cross, the tsar affixed his signature to a manifesto granting Russia a constitution, thus paving the way for the creation of a parliamentary body known as the Duma. In so doing, with the stroke of a pen, the tsar had succumbed to the latest assault against autocracy.
The tsarina never forgave Nikolasha for his histrionics or his bullying tactics. From then on, Alexandra was to regard the grand duke with disdain and suspicion. Nor did Count Sergei Witte come out of the episode in anything but a negative light for Alexandra. Witte himself recorded, “I heard that the Empress herself took the liberty of saying that I had forced the manifesto on her husband.”11
Other Romanovs also despised the manifesto. “That was the end,” concluded Sandro, Alix’s brother-in-law. To him, the October Manifesto meant “the end of the dynasty and the end of the empire. A brave jump from the precipice would have spared us the agony of the remaining twelve years.”12
Born to Rule: Five Reigning Consorts, Granddaughters of Queen Victoria Page 17
