As one author put it: ‘Albert wed memories of German castles to his own taste and his love for Scotland.’ There was tartan upholstery, curtains and carpets: the Prince had, at one point, even designed his own mauve and grey tartan. The profusion of thistles once inspired Lord Clarendon to declare: ‘The thistles are in such abundance that they would rejoice the heart of a donkey if they happened to LOOK LIKE his favourite repast, which they don’t.’
The imperial couple were shown into the drawing room for drinks. The drawing room itself was not universally popular. Lord Rosebery once brazenly said that he had believed the drawing room at Victoria’s Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight, to be the ugliest in the world, till he saw its equivalent at Balmoral.
Perhaps it was fortunate that the visitors had little time to consider the decor before the momentous entrance of baby Olga. Queen Victoria was immediately entranced: ‘The dear baby was then brought in, a most beautiful child and so big.’ The Queen mentioned her granddaughter’s generous proportions again to her daughter Vicky: ‘The baby is magnificent… bigger than she or Ella [Alix and her sister Ella] ever were and a lovely lively [great] grandchild’. Her physician, Sir James Reid, was pleased to report that, at ten and a half months old, the imperial baby weighed 301/2 pounds, minus the three and a half pounds of clothes she was wearing.
The Tsar noted proudly that Granny was ‘delighted to see Olga’. The Yorkshire Herald pulled no punches: ‘It is said that the moment she [Olga] saw her great grandmother she delighted that august lady by adopting her as her first and most willing slave.’
Though the Queen remained unexpansive, she did allow herself one of her brief, lyrical moments: ‘After which [drinks] N and A went to their rooms and I quickly dressed for dinner, to which we went down just before nine… it seems quite like a dream having dear Alicky and Nicky here.’ The couple’s rooms had been painstakingly redecorated in imperial black and yellow. If the Tsar noticed the colours, he never mentioned them. His account of the evening centred on his relief at removing the controversial Scots Greys uniform: ‘Dinner was at 9pm. I did not crawl out of my uniform before 11pm.’
Wednesday 23 September
Queen Victoria’s diary: ‘The morning was again hopelessly bad and the day continued wet till late in the afternoon.’
On that first day of the imperial couple’s visit, Queen Victoria became the longest-reigning monarch. She claimed to be anxious to play it down: ‘Today is the day on which I have reigned longer, by a day, than any reigning English sovereign and the people wished to make all sorts of demonstrations, which I asked them not to do, until I had completed the 60 years next June. But notwithstanding that this was made public in the papers people of all kinds and ranks from every part of the Kingdom sent congratulatory telegrams and they kept coming in all day.’
She was also, more controversially, marking the anniversary of the Fall of Sevastopol, in the Crimea, delighting in putting on a small exhibition of trophies won from the imperial Russian armies in 1855. According to A.N. Wilson, the imperial couple viewed the exhibits with ‘humourless solemnity’.
The Tsar was not in good spirits. He was oppressed, first, by the continuing rain and, secondly, by work pressures that prevented him from unpacking properly. He was known for being fastidious, able to find pencils in his study, in the pitch dark. ‘From morning on the weather remained atrocious,’ he grumbled, ‘the same as yesterday. I did not have time to unpack in my room, a messenger had brought my papers.’ Furthermore, he missed out on sharing one of his favourite dishes, porridge oats, with the Queen. As she recorded: ‘Only dear Alicky breakfasted with us and the sweet Baby was brought in.’
Little Olga had a rapturous reception. Lady Lytton was as smitten as the Queen, already insisting that Olga’s social skills outshone her parents’: ‘Oh you never saw such a darling as she is… a very broad face, very fat, in a lovely high St Joshua baby bonnet – but with bright intelligent eyes, a wee mouth and so happy and contented the whole day… quite an old person already – bursting with life and happiness and a perfect knowledge how to behave.’
The Tsar was usually an enthusiastic huntsman. The Ambassador, Nicholas O’Connor, had written to Bigge on 9th September: ‘I gather that the Emperor is looking forward to a really quiet time at Balmoral, to killing some grouse and stags, he is looking forward to some rest and repose after all he has been through.’ In fact, when he reached Balmoral, he was curiously reluctant, complaining to his mother: ‘From the very first day, my uncles took charge of me… they seem to think it necessary to take me out shooting all day with the gentlemen. The weather is awful, rain and wind every day.’
It is hard to know what exactly put the Tsar off. Was it really the unpleasant conditions? Was it his resentment of time spent away from his beloved wife? Or was it simply that he dreaded the prospect of long hours with his overbearing uncles? Whatever the case, he was clearly relieved by the failure of that first outing: ‘In addition the uncles wanted to drag me off to hunt grouse. But this all fell apart due to the weather.’
Lunch was served at 1pm, as the Queen recorded baldly: ‘We lunched in the dining room.’ Neither the Tsar nor the Tsarina were bon viveurs. They would have been unfazed by Balmoral’s more spartan traditions, not least meals gobbled down in half an hour, occasionally in silence.
The food, equally, would have held little interest. Over time, the Tsarina may well have developed an appetite for the local produce so savoured by the Queen: salmon and trout from the river Dee and venison from the estate. Left to her own devices, however, she was happy to eat chicken cutlets twice daily for months on end. Her husband had his own simple preferences: beetroot or cabbage soup.
Granny’s strictures on smoking, however, would have been more controversial. The chain-smoking Tsar would have been horrified to find himself reduced to smoking in a specially designated room, accessible only through an open kitchen courtyard. This smokers’ room was sparsely furnished and kept intentionally cold; malingerers were cleared out at 12.00 midnight sharp, with the extinguishing of the lights. Two years before, while staying with the Queen at Windsor, the Tsar had complained of an evening during which: ‘We talked until 11pm which, due to standing and not having the possibility to smoke, drove me to complete exhaustion.’
By the end of lunch, the weather had cleared and plans for outings were resumed. As the Queen recorded blithely: ‘Nicky, the others and some of the gentlemen went out for a deer drive in the Abergeldie woods.’ This delayed shoot bore out the Tsar’s worst expectations: ‘Six for lunch at 1pm and then we went off to the nearby mountains to hunt deer. I did not see a thing.’ His report of Uncle Bertie’s better luck had a slightly sour ring; Bertie, he wrote, bagged ‘an unlucky deer’.
He made no reference to his first sight of Balmoral’s picturesque groves of fir and beech or the glades of harebells, daisies and heather. Nor was there any word of the statues and seats dedicated to faithful retainers and dogs.
The Queen and her granddaughter undertook a less challenging carriage outing. As the Queen put it: ‘Took a short drive with Alicky and it was quite fair.’ Whether it really was ‘quite fair’ is impossible to know. Drives usually went ahead in fog, rain and snow, with the Queen readily switching her satin slippers for sturdy boots. She had always been averse to changing routines. As her ascerbic lady-in-waiting, Marie Mallet, wrote: ‘There seems a curious charm to our beloved Sovereign in doing the same thing on the same day year after year.’ According to one description of Balmoral, the same chairs were kept in the same places and the same biscuits on the same plates. The only items to be replaced were the dogs, when they died.
The Queen continued merrily: ‘Had tea on coming home and it seemed quite like old times seeing her [Alix] sitting there.’ Her granddaughter may well have been trying to forget old times. Seven years previously, Alix had had an awkward stay at Balmoral with Bertie’s eldest son, Prince Albert. The Prince, known, confusingly, as Eddie, had been earmarked by the Quee
n as a match for Alix. If that match failed, she declared, she would try Eddie’s brother, Georgie. As she wrote to her daughter, Vicky: ‘My heart and mind are bent on securing dear Alicky for either Eddie or Georgie.’
The Queen had always taken a passionate interest in her granddaughter’s marital prospects, considering herself in loco parentis following the death of Alix’s mother, Alice. The Princess had been just six when her mother died. The Queen’s first priority had been to stop Alix marrying a Russian. As she instructed Vicky: ‘You must prevent FURTHER Russians or other people coming to snap her up.’ She informed Alix crisply that her late mother would not have countenanced a Russian match: ‘Dear Mama said she would never hear of it.’
The Queen had invited Alix and Eddie to stay at Balmoral together, and a courtship of sorts had followed. Indeed Eddie had appeared to be devastated when Alix turned him down. It is hard, however, to gauge the extent of his hurt, as the young Prince was known for being both feckless and homosexual. James Pope-Hennessy dismissed him as ‘heedless and aimless as a gleaming goldfish in a crystal ball’. He died suddenly, three years later, of complications following a bout of flu.
The truth was that Alix was already bound up with Nicky. Their mutual fascination had sparked when Alix was just 12, becoming serious when she was 17. The couple had faced opposition from both sides, with Nicky’s father, Alexander III, denouncing Alix as: ‘too German altogether’. Members of the English community in St Petersburg seemed to share his distaste. One of the Princess of Wales’ ladies-in-waiting, Charlotte Knollys, wrote a scathing letter from St Petersburg, in which she dismissed Alix as ‘a little scrubby Hessian Princess.’
Tsar Alexander’s objections were, however, no more effective than the Queen’s. The couple’s engagement took place on 20th April 1894, or 8th April, according to the Russian calendar. Nicky’s diary entry was fond but matter-of-fact: ‘A marvellous unforgettable day in my life – the day of my engagement with dear, beloved Alix.’ His new fiancée’s entry was characteristically gushing: ‘Ap [sic] 20th Easternight! Shall we ever forget it, oh, my kind sweet mannykins – toi, toi, toi, toi.’
The Tsarina at Balmoral
The thwarted Queen admitted that she was ‘thunderstruck’: ‘I knew that Nicky much wished it, I thought that Alicky was not sure of her mind.’ She made no secret of the efforts she had made to prevent the marriage, lamenting to her daughter, Vicky: ‘I had laboured so hard to PREVENT it and I felt there was NO LONGER any danger and all in one night EVERYTHING was changed.’
Fortunately, with all her objections to Russians generally, the Queen always retained a soft spot for Nicky. As she put it to Vicky: ‘The more I think of sweet Alicky’s marriage the more unhappy I am. NOT as to the personality, for I like him very much.’
The pair had enjoyed their first substantial meeting at Windsor at the time of Georgie’s wedding in 1893. The Queen had stationed herself at the top of a staircase, before processing slowly down the steps. Sensitive about his height, to the point of walking on tiptoe, Nicky may well have disliked having to crane his neck. But he maintained his sangfroid, boldly comparing her, later, to: ‘a round ball with wobbly legs’. She, in turn, pronounced him: ‘very simple and unaffected’.
She was immediately impressed by his language skills: ‘Nicky… always speaks English and almost without a fault.’ When he returned to England after his engagement to Alix she set about cultivating his tutor, Charles Heath, inviting him to Osborne and pumping him for reports: ‘After luncheon I again saw good old Mr Heath and had some interesting conversation with him. He spoke in the highest terms of Nicky, who he said was excellent and true.’ Mr Heath’s good opinion of Nicky was not reciprocated. The young Tsarevich had been highly amused by the Romanov family parrot’s impersonation of him. As his sister, Olga, recorded: ‘Every time the poor master entered… the bird would fly into a rage and then imitate Mr Heath with the most exaggerated British accent. Mr Heath finally became so exasperated that he refused to enter Georgie’s room until Popka had been removed.’
Nicky’s decision to talk to the Queen soon after the announcement of his engagement proved particularly popular. ‘Afterwards Nicky came and had some talk with me in my room. He is so sensible and nice, and expressed the hope to come quietly to see Alicky at the end of June.’ He gleefully described how she had summoned her Indian servant, ‘the Munshi’, to share the news. ‘She [the Queen] called for the Munshi, her teacher of the Indian language, and he congratulated me on the occasion of my engagement.’
There were 22 for dinner including Colonel Arthur Davidson, groom-in-waiting in ordinary to the Queen, and Carington, still smarting from his brushes with the Russian naval attaché. The Queen embarked on what Nicky might have regarded as ominous talks with the Russian Ambassador, Baron George de Staal: As she reported: ‘After dinner spoke to M de Staal about public affairs… said it would be a very good thing if I spoke to Nicky on all the important points’.
Thursday 24th September
The Tsar’s diary: ‘At last the weather improved and all the mountains were wiped clean of the storm clouds which had hung over them… I had a walk with Alix.’
The Tsar was delighted by the weather, relieved to have a reprieve from his uncles and thrilled to spend time with his wife. As the imperial couple walked, they savoured their freedom from the rigorous security arrangements foisted on them in St Petersburg. They may well have thought back to the early months of their engagement, mostly spent in Britain.
The pair had been separated for six weeks when Nicky was obliged to return to Russia. During his absence, Alix had succumbed to a bout of sciatica and been advised to go for a cure in Harrogate. Her intention had been to remain incognito, staying in an obscure boarding house, under the name of Baroness Starckenburg. However, her real identity soon became known. Her insistence that her landlady’s newborn twins be named Nicholas and Alix may not have helped. She elected herself the twins’ godmother, subsequently sending Nicholas Allen a confirmation present of cufflinks by Fabergé.
Periods between cures were taken up with her tutor, Catherine Schneider, and a crate of Russian manuals. She gamely described her sessions with Miss Schneider as ‘amusing but certainly not easy’. She found the presence of her second companion, her nine-year-old niece, Alice, a welcome relief. She also enjoyed a visit from Alice’s mother, her much-loved sister, Victoria. Worries about sciatica were cast aside as Alix, her sister and niece raced around town on tricycle bath chairs.
After weeks of cures and Russian lessons, Alix would have been looking forward to a reunion with her fiancé. The couple were finally reunited in what the Tsar referred to as Victoria’s ‘little house’, the actually very substantial Elm Grove, in Walton-on-Thames. Victoria had by then been married to Prince Louis of Battenberg for ten years and the couple had three children. Their fourth child, Louis, the future Lord Mountbatten, was not yet born.
Nicky’s diary account was predictably sparse and included a familiar allusion to dispiriting weather: ‘I arrived at “Walton” in 25 minutes and at 3.45 met dear Alix. Again I experienced the happiness which I had when I left Coburg! It is a rare, warm and friendly life for four people in Victoria’s and Ludwig’s little house. We spent the rest of the day together at home, since it was pouring.’
The betrothed couple shared some of their first blissful moments together at ‘Walton’. During bursts of sunshine, they lazed under a chestnut tree, near the river bank, or took boating trips. Nicky, a poor sailor, relished the gentle demands of the Thames, enthusing about their first excursion ‘up to the town of Camden’ on an ‘electric dinghy’: ‘The outing turned out superb, the riverbanks are beautiful… I was in ecstasy over everything that had been built along the riverbanks.’ Their second jaunt was on a rowing boat or, as Nicky called it: ‘a comfortable gig’. As they stopped for tea on a riverbank, Nicky proudly noted his future wife’s unexpected catering skills: ‘[We] started to boil up some tea. Alix did all of this, since she has a
n excellent new “tea basket” from Granny.’
There were tensions, though. The couple found themselves contending with the high spirits of young Alice and her sister Louise (the future Queen of Sweden), about which Nicky registered his irritation: ‘The girls romped around terribly in the carriage.’ He and Alice never altogether hit it off. She would later quote his tremulous words during a drive through Windsor Park. According to Alice, he said: ‘I really dread becoming Tsar because I shall never hear the truth again.’ Even as a child she viewed his thoughts as ‘defeatist’. Her memory of her Aunt Alix contrasts starkly with subsequent descriptions of the Tsarina: ‘We all loved her, she was so delighted and happy.’
The Tsar summed up the couple’s precious stroll at Balmoral in a brief sentence: ‘We stopped by the only shop here and bought a few incidentals.’ The owners of the only shop, grandly entitled ‘The Merchants’, were two elderly sisters, and the ‘incidentals’ might have been anything from tartans or notebooks to pastries. The sisters had once taught Alix how to make traditional Scottish scones and she had taken the recipe with her to St Petersburg. Her skill with scones could have been usefully combined with her mastery of Granny’s ‘tea basket’.
Upon their return, Nicky and Alix enjoyed what the Queen referred to as ‘a large luncheon’, attended by cousin Georgie and his wife, May. Georgie, at this point, echoed his grandmother’s view of the new Tsar as unchanged: ‘Had a good talk with dear Nicky. He is just the same dear boy as he always was.’ Despite the age difference – Georgie was three years older than Nicky – the cousins had always been close. Their friendship had been forged in Denmark, during happy holidays orchestrated by their Danish mothers.
The Imperial Tea Party Page 3
