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

by Julia P. Gelardi

  While the political noose around Tsarina Alexandra and her family tightened in the early months of 1917, signaling the imminent fall of the Romanov dynasty, her cousin, Queen Sophie of the Hellenes, watched helplessly as her country was battered by the merciless dictates of the Allied Powers in their campaign to bring Greece to its knees. One historian has said that the Allied blockade amounted to “a more subtle and elegant form of massacre. Instead of the victim’s throat being cut he is made to die of starvation.”

  By the spring of 1917, the Greek people “understood that all the French bullying had but one aim, to deliver over a defenceless Greece to ‘the traitor Venize-los.’ “17 The royal family was well aware that most of the unrelenting pressure on Greece emanated from the French. However, the fact that Great Britain supported the French in their perfidious actions proved difficult for this Anglophile family to swallow. Queen Sophie’s eldest daughter, Princess Helen, summed up the family’s feelings when she said that “it was as though some dear, trusted friend had cold-bloodedly pushed a dagger in one’s back.”18

  Back in Russia, Rasputin’s murder did not solve anything. The poisonous cloud of anarchy reappeared. Petrograd descended to being a city on edge, recapturing its reputation as the city of trouble. The people’s fury, held in check for so long, was set to erupt. A prominent Russian, Alexander Zvegintsev, once warned his British friend, the historian Sir Bernard Pares: “Do not wish for a Russian Revolution! It will be far more savage than the French.”19

  By the end of February, the tsarist empire was clearly crumbling, thanks to the revolutionary workers and their supporters, who “had in their hands some forty thousand rifles, thirty thousand revolvers, and four hundred machine guns…more than sixty-six thousand soldiers went over to the crowd.”20 In a last-ditch effort to save the monarchy, Rodzianko telegraphed Nicholas: “Garrison troops can no longer be relied upon. Reserve battalions of guards in revolt. They are killing their own officers. Sire, do not delay. If the movement reaches the army, it will mean the ruin of Russia. Inevitably, the dynasty will fall with it. Tomorrow may be too late.”21

  Petrograd and its environs were engulfed in a sea of revolutionary fever, red flags fluttering ominously over the city. Atrocities were committed against those who had shown loyalty to the tsar. Even innocent children were not immune.

  Queen Marie of Romania meanwhile was terrified for Romania and for Russia. “What would happen to us if things went wrong in Russia is not to be contemplated. It would mean utter and complete disaster, it would mean the end of everything!”22 More news of Alix’s predicament in Russia reached Queen Marie and she admitted to being “absolutely horrified” at what she heard. “Their [the Russians’] hatred of the Empress,” she noted in January 1917, “has reached a terrible pitch; they consider her a misfortune for the country and there is no one to-day who would not gladly get rid of her by any means. How dreadful! I cannot imagine anything more ghastly than to be hated by one’s own people, and after all it is not so very difficult to make yourself beloved if you are Queen, in Russia especially where the Tsar and Tsarina are almost sacred figures.”23 Marie was absolutely correct. It was precisely because so many people looked to her for help in Romania’s darkest hours that she felt so overwhelmed. Yet she never completely lost hope. “Everything seems too hard, too difficult, too completely dreadful, as though no human strength could stand such pressure and not give way to despair,” the queen wrote in her diary. “But I shall stand it, I have sworn to stand it to the bitter end, it may even be a glorious end; at the deepest depths of my soul, I still believe it will be a glorious end, though I must admit that nothing at the present time justifies this optimism.”24

  Despite her own crisis, Tsarina Alexandra had not forgotten Marie’s predicament at Jassy and sent her supplies for the soldiers and townspeople when possible. The two countries, after all, were formal allies. Even toward Alexandra’s dying days of power in February 1917, Marie was grateful to find that five wagons full of goods had arrived for distribution; and just days before the Russian monarchy’s downfall, Marie dutifully recorded: “Another beautiful present arrived for me from Empress Alexandra, a quantity of linen, medicines and provisions for the hospitals.”25

  Though the tsarina helped Romania when she could through the donations of medical provisions, the Russian troops so desperately needed by Romania in the war effort were another story. Romania’s army had proven no match for the German military machine that charged its way through the country. A lack of well-trained officers and a shortage of artillery marred Romania’s efforts. “Artillery and aircraft were in desperately short supply and medical facilities were abysmal. As a result, the suffering of Romanian peasant troops was truly awful,even by the especially dreadful standards of the First World War. The thousands upon thousands of Russian soldiers who were to have been Romania’s saviours turned out to be more trouble than they were worth. Feeding them was exceptionally difficult since there was so little food left in Romania.

  During the war, the queen was aided in her rounds by one or more of her children, whose formative years were now seared by the firsthand experience of war. All of Marie’s children, without exception, were privy to ghastly scenes of suffering: Elisabetta, Nicky, Mignon, Ileana, and Carol. Marie had always looked for signs of growing maturity in Crown Prince Carol. He did not disappoint, exhibiting perseverance, hard work, organization, and a sense of the confidence his father always appeared to lack. Perhaps the experience of war had helped to change Carol for the better.

  Writing in 1917, when the war’s outcome and Romania’s fate were still unknown, Marie refused to be cowed, stating confidently: “I want to declare that in spite of the calamity that has come over her, Roumania does not regret having thrown in her lot with those fighting for a holy cause!…Roumania is proud of her Allies, confident in their noble sense of justice.” The queen also added that “when the great hour of Victory strikes, those for whom she [Romania] bled so sorely will not forget that she also has won her right to live!”27 In this, Queen Marie emulated her grandmother, Queen Victoria, who, in the darkest hour of the Boer War and at the end of her life, railed at Arthur Balfour, saying emphatically that no one was depressed and defeat was not in the cards. If the old queen’s rallying cry at Windsor was, as one biographer puts it, “the climax of her vocation to ‘be of use,’ “28 then Marie of Romania’s own battle cry was an exact parallel. It was classic Queen Victoria at her finest.

  While Alexandra exhibited a calm exterior to those living at the Alexander Palace and the soldiers guarding Tsarskoe Selo, her soul burned like a raging volcano. She was worried about Russia, Nicholas, and the Revolution at her gates, and scared for her desperately sick children, Olga, Tatiana and Alexei, now ill with the measles. In one of her last letters to Nicholas as tsarina, Alix, in a tone of mingled anguish, defiance, and sympathy, wrote:

  My own beloved, precious Angel, light of my life,

  My heart breaks, thinking of you all alone going through all this anguish, anxiety, & we know nothing of you & you neither of us…you who are alone, no army behind you, caught like a mouse in a trap, what can you do? Thats [sic] the lowest, meanest thing unknown in history, to stop ones sovereign…. Two currents—Duma & revolutionists—two snakes who I hope will eat off each others [sic] heads.…Heart aches very much, but I don’t heed it.…Only suffer too hideously for you.…God bless & protect you—send His angels to guard & guide you…this is the climax of the bad. The horror before our Allies!! & the enemies joy!!—Can advise nothing, be only yr. Precious self. If you have to give into things, God will help you to get out of them. Ah my suffering Saint. I am one with you, inseparably one

  Old Wify29

  In early March 1917, at Pskov, where Tsar Nicholas II was sidelined on board a train, the Duma confronted him with two alternatives: Either march on toward Petrograd with loyalist troops and risk civil war or abdicate. Without hesitation the tsar agreed to abdicate, wishing to spare the Russian people further bloo
dshed.

  Thus, with the simple stroke of a pen, Nicholas II put an end to the three-hundred-year Romanov dynasty. With his reign ended, so too ended his wife’s position as empress. Alexandra was Tsarina of Russia for twenty-two and a half grueling years. The tsar also decided that his only son would not survive the rigors of being emperor and so was moved to exclude him from the succession. Better to have Alexei with him, Alix, and the girls than to break the close family unit. Besides, if the tsarevitch was separated from his mother at this critical juncture, Nicky knew Alix would be devastated. Nicholas II therefore signed the act of abdication in favor of his younger brother, Grand Duke Michael, rather than Alexei, the son for whom Alexandra had prayed so fervently.

  As for Alexandra, the waiting seemed unbearable. Finally, on 3 March 1917, the Grand Duke Paul dropped the bombshell. In an emotional audience, Alexandra heard the dreadful news. After the interview with the grand duke ended, Alix was met by Lili Dehn, who found the tsarina stupefied. Clutching Lili’s hands in hers, Alexandra exclaimed: “Abdiqué!” In this moment of great tragedy, raw with emotion, she thought solely of the immense sadness of her husband. Barely audible, the words tumbled out: “le pauvre…tout seul là bas…oh, mon Dieu, par quoi il a passé! Et je ne puis pas être près de lui pour le consoler.”30

  After endless months of plying her husband in her letters with demands that he resolutely hold to the path of autocracy, when it came to reacting to the news that Nicholas had abdicated, Alexandra gave her beloved husband her complete support and understanding. Instead of bemoaning his abdication, Alix thought only of what he must have been going through:

  I fully understand yr. action [in abdicating], my own heroe [sic]! I know that [you] could not sign [anything] against what you swore at yr. coronation. We know each other through & through—need no words—as I live, we shall see you back on yr. throne, brought back by your people, to the glory of your reign. You have saved yr. son’s reign & the country & yr. saintly purity.…I hold you tight, tight in my arms & will never let them touch your shining soul. I kiss, kiss, kiss & bless you & will always understand you.

  Wify.31

  The former tsarina was under no illusions as to what the abdication meant. When she went to see a distraught Anna Viroubova the next morning, she said, “You know, Annia, all is finished for our Russia. But we must not blame the people or the soldiers for what has happened.”32

  Queen Marie of Romania, upon hearing of the abdication, confided to her diary:

  What an hour for that woman…she who would listen to no one except Rasputin, and separated herself little by little from all the members of the family, then from the whole of society, never showing herself any more, shutting herself up either in Tsarskoe or in the Crimea….

  What may her feelings be to-day? How does she bear it, separated, as she is from her husband, he not able to get to her and all her children down with measles. A ghastly situation. I sit and ponder over it and to me it seems tragic and fearful beyond words.

  …What influence will it have on the War, on our fate? Tragic questions to which I find no answer.33

  In the days between the tsar’s abdication and his anticipated arrival back at the Alexander Palace, Lili Dehn and the ex-tsarina began systematically to destroy numerous letters and diaries to prevent the revolutionaries from seizing them and possibly fabricating all kinds of anti-Romanov propaganda. Alexandra rifled through her correspondence and went on to destroy more after her husband’s arrival. The most difficult to part with were the letters from Queen Victoria and Nicholas to Alexandra. When it came time to destroy Nicholas’s love letters to her since the days before their marriage, Alix could not stop weeping. Rising from her chair, she took them one by one, placed them in the fire, and watched as her husband’s words of love and devotion were consumed by the glowing flames.

  Within days of Nicholas II’s abdication, the tsarina and her children were placed under house arrest. The tsar’s household staff was given an ultimatum:Either they left the Alexander Palace at once or they could choose house arrest with the tsarina and her family. In what turned out to be “a veritable orgy of cowardice and stupidity, and a sickening display of shabby, contemptible disloyalty,” many chose to abandon the tsarina. “People who but a few days previously had paraded their monarchistic convictions were now assuring everybody of their loyalty to the revolution and heaping abuses upon the Emperor and the Empress, referring to His Majesty as ‘Colonel Romanov,’ or simply ‘Nicholas.’ “34 Gleb Botkin’s father, the imperial family’s physician, could not bring himself to be disloyal. He bravely chose to share the family’s uncertain fate, and in so doing, would meet his end with them in a dark cellar in Siberia. Others who chose to stay and share in the uncertainty of captivity included several attendants and retainers and close friends. When Pierre Gilliard told Alexei what had happened and Alix broke the news to her daughters, the children’s modesty and deep sense of filial devotion shone forth. Alexei never once expressed regret or even questioned the loss of his position as heir or as tsar. The girls, though seriously ill at the time (Anastasia and Marie had also fallen sick), were only concerned for their father and mother.

  One evening, before Nicholas’s arrival, Alexandra spent a tense, lonely night in her bedroom; Lili Dehn, keeping her promise to the sick grand duchesses that she would stay with their mother, had made up a bed in the room next to the Mauve Boudoir. All was still and calm—until gunshots crackled and the soldiers in their coarse drunkenness broke the peace with vulgar songs and laughter. Alexandra could hardly sleep that night, nor could Lili, who could hear the former tsarina roaming about her bedroom, coughing. Of all the items in Alexandra’s favorite room that night, none was more characteristic than the bunches of lilacs in front of the tall windows. Since fresh supplies from the South of France no longer arrived to grace the Mauve Boudoir, only the old ones were left. “Just before dawn, the dying lilac seemed to expire in a last breath of perfume.”35 Those dead blooms presaged life ahead for Alexandra Feodorovna.

  Twenty-two

  DEATH AT EKATERINBURG

  IN THE DARK DAYS AND MONTHS FOLLOWING THE ABDICATION OF Nicholas II, Alexandra and her family faced a life of captivity at the Alexander Palace. To her credit, Alix remained strong throughout the ordeal. To those who knew her well, there was little doubt as to where Alexandra derived her strength and serenity. “Her faith,” noted a friend, “came to her rescue.”1

  When Nicholas returned to Tsarskoe Selo within days of his abdication, an expression of “utter dejection” was etched on the ex-tsar’s face, for he was a man whose “spirit seemed completely broken.” Only when they were alone in Alix’s Mauve Boudoir did Nicky completely lose his self-control, weeping bitter tears. For a moment, Alix was overcome, unable to think how she could comfort her desolate husband. In the end, she rose to the occasion, and though “it was excessively difficult for her to console him,” she let her heart speak. In so doing, she assured her beloved Nicky that it was “the husband and father [who were] of more value in her eyes than the Emperor whose throne she had shared.”2

  The tsar’s spectacular downfall sent shockwaves throughout Europe. That the once powerful Romanov dynasty should be toppled by the people meant that other thrones were in danger of succumbing to the same fate. Where the King and Queen of the Hellenes were concerned, the tsar’s abdication meant more than a tragic turn of events; for the disappearance of Nicholas II from the political scene meant that the Greek king’s strongest protector was no more. With the eruption of the Russian Revolution early in 1917, the fates of King Constantine I and Queen Sophie looked increasingly bleak because the overthrow of the imperial family in Russia emboldened the Greek royal family’s enemies—the Venizelists and their Allied partners—to seek the same outcome for Constantine and Sophie.

  Sophie’s sister, Mossy, was constantly worried and saddened by her sister’s predicament. The two sisters had always been close, often meeting in Mossy’s home, Friedrichshof, in Germany,
which she inherited from their mother. Eastbourne, in England, had also been a favorite rendezvous point for the two sisters. The outbreak of the war, however, put a stop to these vacations together. Writing to a mutual friend of theirs, Mossy lamented the fact that “I get nothing from there [Greece]. Too cruel & so senseless. You can imagine what it means to us both. Soon we shall have been separated 3 years.”3

  In Greece, the king’s enemies accused him of acting unconstitutionally, but even Sir Francis Elliot admitted early in April 1917 that “as to the ‘unconstitutional behaviour of King Constantine’ it is only fair to consider that under present circumstances it is not open to him to behave otherwise.”4 Ten days later, Elliot reported of a desperate Constantine: “He repeated that there is no enmity against us in Greece, that her interests are bound up with ours and that all he wants is to be left alone and to maintain his neutrality. But the French were openly speaking of occupying the country and dethroning him…he wanted to know what he could do to satisfy the Entente and he trusted H.M. Government to obtain this information.”5 Constantine I was certainly not exaggerating. In May, Elliot admitted in another confidential despatch to London that “while French Minister is instructed to observe an attitude of reserve French members of military mission openly advocate occupation of Greece and dethronement of king.”

  By June 1917, the perfidy of the French had reached new lows when a French senator, Charles Jonnart, arrived in Athens and bullied King Constantine and the Greek prime minister, Alexandros Zaïmis, threatening to destroy Athens if the king did not abdicate in favor of his second son, Alexander (the heir, George, was deemed too “pro-German” because of his military training in Germany). Like Tsar Nicholas just months before, King Constantine did not want civil war to erupt on his account and so opted to leave Greece. “I have no choice,” he told a shocked Queen Sophie and Princess Helen; “there must be no more blood spilt because of me.”7 Upon meeting with the Crown Council, Constantine announced that he and Prince George would give way, but would not sign an act of abdication, thus leaving the throne to Tino and Sophie’s second son, twenty-four-year-old Alexander.