Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  As grand duke, Ernie pursued a lifestyle of constant amusements. He designed the scenery for the Court Theater, which he personally funded. There was no end to his parties and practical jokes. Life at his court was a perpetual whirlwind, as if he were breathlessly running from something, in the frantic hope that the nonstop diversions would chase away the demons that haunted him. Ernie was indeed hiding something, but his secret was even deeper than his unfathomable grief for his late mother and baby brother.

  Queen Victoria couldn’t understand why Ernie remained a bachelor. Several young maidens of Hesse had lost their hearts to the handsome grand duke. Why had there been no movement with Ducky? The queen’s only concern about their prospective match was the specter of hemophilia that hovered over the family tree, so she consulted her personal physician, Dr. William Jenner. According to the queen, “. . . I spoke to him about the possibility of Ernie’s marrying one of the Edinburgh Cousins, and he said there was no danger and no objection as they are so strong and healthy. . . . He said if the relations were strong intermarriage with them only led to greater strength and health. . . .” The queen was under the wildly misguided notion that, as she insisted to Ernie, “the same blood only adds to the strength and if you try to avoid it you will marry some unhealthy little Princess who would just cause what you wish to avoid.”

  After these words of encouragement from her trusted medical expert, it was full speed ahead on the Ducky-Ernie marriage. The queen urged Ernie’s oldest sister, also named Victoria, to “hint” to her brother “to be very kind and posé [sedate] and not tease Ducky or make silly jokes, which might destroy our hopes and wishes.”

  But Ducky spiraled into a depression after her older sister’s January 1893 marriage to Ferdinand of Roumania. The girls were accustomed to being inseparable, and Ducky had a naturally jealous nature and envied anyone else claiming Missy’s attention. To ease her mind over the parting, the Duchess of Coburg brought Ducky to St. Petersburg for a holiday. The excursion worked wonders. Snapping out of her melancholia, Ducky became newly enraptured with her handsome and soulful sixteen-year-old cousin, Kirill. During long walks, the pair held hands and poured out their hearts. By the end of Ducky’s vacation, they were deeply in love. Her mother was none too thrilled; aware of the free-spirited, lusty nature of all the Russian grand dukes, the duchess was convinced they made unfaithful husbands.

  But back in Hesse, Ernie was getting cold feet about proposing to Ducky. His sister, Alicky, the future Empress Alexandra of Russia, threatened to leave court if he wed Ducky. Alicky hated the idea that Ernie’s wife would take social precedence over her. Nor did she welcome the prospect of Ducky’s pushy mother “playing the dictator around Darmstadt.” Being doubly related to Ducky, Ernie privately feared that the family trait of hemophilia might be passed to their children. But the grand duke had an even greater secret: He was finally beginning to acknowledge that he “preferred male company.” For all his cousin’s loveliness in others’ eyes, he was not sexually attracted to her.

  As for Ducky, her feelings for Ernie were fraternal. They were nothing compared to the passion she felt for Kirill. The latter, whose smoldering looks and temperament made her nervous, was the dangerous choice. Ernie was safe. Ernie didn’t make her uncomfortable by generating physical sensations that were too scary to confront.

  But Queen Victoria kept up the pressure, insisting that Ernie show cousin Ducky some interest. And finally, in early December 1893, a few days after Victoria Melita’s seventeenth birthday, Ernie paid a surprise visit to Coburg to discuss his intentions.

  It must have been a difficult decision. But royals were raised to accept and fulfill their dynastic duties, regardless of the promptings of their hearts or their sexual proclivities. “After the gravest heart-searchings,” Ernie returned to Coburg to celebrate the New Year. And on January 9, 1894, Affie sent his mother a telegram announcing, “Your and my great wish has been fulfilled this evening. Ducky has accepted Ernie of Hesse’s proposal. . . .”

  The match was universally praised in the print media as brilliant, and from a dynastic standpoint, Ducky’s parents would view it as the most illustrious of their daughters’ unions.

  Ordinarily sleepy Coburg bustled with activity as it prepared to welcome the great crowned heads of Europe and their extended families for Ernie and Ducky’s wedding. Their nuptials were considered the social event of the year. Even the septuagenarian Queen Victoria, who rarely ventured beyond Buckingham Palace (unless it was to escape to her beloved Balmoral or Osborne) never would have missed it! And the bride’s sister Marie, Crown Princess of Roumania, ever the fashionista despite being four months pregnant, was resplendent in a white satin gown embroidered in gold, even though she was “looking pale and thin,” according to their aunt Vicky, the kaiser’s mother.

  The morning of Thursday, April 19, 1894, was golden and blue. At eleven a.m., Ernie and Ducky were wed in a brief civil ceremony in Queen Victoria’s apartments at Alfred’s Edinburgh Palace. Then the family and their guests packed into the small chapel within the Schloss Ehrenburg, which had been festively decorated with flowers and fir garlands.

  Dressed identically to their mutual cousin, the uniform-obsessed Kaiser Wilhelm (who many believe was also a repressed homosexual), Ernie wore the full regalia of a Hessian general and a gleaming helmet with red and white plumes. In a simple white gown with a judicious absence of Victorian embellishments, and her late mother-in-law’s wedding veil secured with an emerald diadem and a sprig of orange blossoms, “Ducky looked very charming and ‘distinguée,’” Vicky wrote to her daughter Sophie, the Crown Princess of the Hellenes. Aunt Vicky became teary-eyed during the ceremony, as did the bride’s father, and their mother, Queen Victoria. Ducky’s mother remained unsentimentally dry-eyed.

  Only when the Duchess of Coburg kissed her daughter good-bye after the wedding breakfast did the bride notice the first tears she had ever seen in her mother’s eyes. The newlyweds climbed into their carriage bedecked with flowers and drove off in a hailstorm of rice. Still a teenager, Ducky was now Grand Duchess of Hesse.

  And now what? Queen Victoria had pushed her into Ernie’s arms. Neither of them knew what love was; neither had any experience of a sexual relationship. On their first night of marriage, Ernie admitted to his cousin-wife that he “was not attracted to her.” What was she to think after that? Ducky had to bear an heir for a husband who had trouble with the process because he found her physically repellent, and their first experiences between the sheets were so disastrous that she felt “completely shattered and disillusioned.” With no basis for comparison, all Ducky could do was doubt herself.

  So the grand duke and duchess opted to pretend that nothing was amiss. Instead they lived and laughed and partied and played as hard and fast as they could, behaving flamboyantly and spending money as if it were water. Queen Victoria despaired of her namesake’s rudeness in neglecting to respond to her letters and telegrams. Ducky had not even demonstrated the good grace to thank her wedding guests for their gifts.

  Still a few years shy of her twentieth birthday, Ducky was in rebellion. In her mind, the only way to assert her independence was through overindulgence. To the outside observer, the grand duchess’s life in her new home at Darmstadt was glamorous and colorful, a nonstop merry-go-round of amusements with a husband who shared every interest. But in the privacy of their marital bed, their proclivities could not have been more different. Nevertheless, within three months of their wedding vows, Ducky was pregnant.

  Ernie was delighted at the prospect of an heir. So were their subjects. The only one who couldn’t summon a smile was Ernie’s diffident sister, Alicky, who disliked her confident cousin, and resented losing her status as the first lady in Hesse and playing second fiddle to Ducky. Eager to wed Grand Duke Nicholas Romanov in a genuine love match, she couldn’t leave Hesse fast enough. But Alexandra would never lose her antipathy for her sister-in-law, and one day would ac
tively strive to destroy her happiness.

  In the throes of a difficult pregnancy, Ducky remained in Darmstadt while Ernie journeyed to Russia for Alicky’s November 26, 1894, wedding to the newly created Czar Nicholas II, which came on the heels of the funeral for Nicky’s father. The old czar, Alexander III, had died of nephritis on November 1.

  On March 11, 1895, Ducky bore a daughter, the first royal birth in Hesse in nearly two decades. Everyone was delighted, from their subjects to Queen Victoria, who believed the successful birth had vindicated her pairing of these two cousins. But no one was more exhilarated or relieved than Ernie. The birth of baby Elizabeth, controversially named after his Hessian grandmother, rather than for his wife or maternal grandmama, proved what the grand duke feared he’d been unable to accomplish. Ernie had become a father. And he transferred every shred of his attention to his tiny daughter, denying Ducky the warmth and—dared she hope—love she expected as his wife. At first she tried to compete with her own infant for her husband’s affection, but soon realized it was fruitless. Ernie and Elizabeth formed a special bond from the day she was born. Elizabeth was all of six months old when her father began redecorating the nursery. Ernie held up various wallpaper samples in front of her like flash cards, choosing the mauve-colored swatch after Elizabeth’s eyes lit up when she saw it.

  In 1895, Ducky decided to take her daughter for a holiday in England—without Ernie. But when he bade them farewell in the palace courtyard, smothering Elizabeth with tearful, tender kisses, and giving Ducky only a perfunctory peck on the cheek, it was a crushing heartbreak from which she never recovered. During her sojourn, despite the gaiety of Ascot and a joyful reunion with her sister, Missy, she had plenty of time to reflect upon her marriage, concluding that it had been a horrible mistake.

  She realized that Ernie had been interested in her for only two purposes: as a breeder, and to fill the vacancy in Hesse made by his mother’s death in 1878—that of Landesmutter, or Mother of the Land. But the former rulers of the duchy had been unwilling to embrace progress, and Ducky, more cultured and sophisticated than her subjects, resented the fact that she was now expected to please them. Bored with the Hessians’ rigid social constraints, she pleased herself instead, by deliberately neglecting the duties expected of her as first lady of the realm. She “forgot to answer letters; she postponed paying visits to boring old relations; at official receptions she often caused great offense by talking to someone who amused her, and ignoring people whose high standing gave them importance.” Ducky also decreed that her court was a place for young people only; anyone over thirty was “old and out.” This behavior is straight out of the playbook Marie Antoinette employed as soon as she became queen of France, conduct unbecoming that began her tragic journey from heedless to headless. But with the lessons of history and the upbringing of an eagle-eyed mother, Ducky should have been mature enough to know better.

  Her dereliction of duty had the desired effect. She got her husband’s attention, and Ernie was outraged that she should insult their subjects. Ducky’s subsequent bursts of “ungovernable temper” led to numerous rows, replete with flying Pfaltzgraff, as she aimed for Ernie’s head with pieces of china, silver tea trays, and “any handy object.” Her cousin Kaiser Wilhelm nicknamed her the Little Spitfire. Others at his court in Berlin called her the Fighting Grand Duchess. These nicknames weren’t intended to be compliments.

  Parenthood had fulfilled neither Ducky nor Ernie. Darmstadt earned the reputation for being the most hedonistic court in Europe, as the Hessian spouses tried to drown their unhappiness in the pursuit of pleasure. Adultery was still frowned upon between aristocratic social equals, but the nobility freely went slumming with lovers from the lower orders. Nevertheless, there were exceptions to every rule. Most royal husbands had mistresses, who were occasionally from their own class, and some of their wives took lovers, as well. But the ruling classes endeavored to be discreet about their adulterous liaisons.

  According to Missy, Ducky would not have strayed from her marriage bed, no matter how unhappy she became, because she always “hated frauds and insincerity more than anything else.” Fidelity was important to her.

  Not so to Ernie, however. There had been whispers that he was satisfying his passions elsewhere—with a young woman from Darmstadt—and rumors circulated about his unconventional friendships with men from Hesse’s flourishing artistic community, of which he was a major patron.

  In May of 1896, Ducky and Ernie traveled to Moscow for the coronation of Nicholas and Alexandra. Ducky and her older sister, the two glamour girls of European royalty—Missy fair and blithe, and Ducky dark and melancholy—were the life of every event, to the dismay of their dowdy mother. As the czar’s aunt, she had fully expected to be the center of attention. More important, Ducky fell in love all over again with Russia’s golden and bejeweled Orientalism—and with her nineteen-year-old cousin, Kirill.

  For three weeks of banquets, balls, and parades, while the married Missy enjoyed a torrid flirtation with Kirill’s brother, Boris, Ducky and Kirill acknowledged that their own mutual passion was undeniable. And highly problematic. Although royals had always done so, Ducky was not the type to have an extramarital affair. In any case, what was winked at for men made women social pariahs. Divorce was unthinkable. And even if Ducky were to divorce Ernie, how would she and Kirill legitimize their relationship, when imperial Russian law and their Orthodox Church (which officially sanctioned three marriages for every person, no matter how many exes still survived) had nonetheless placed an interdiction on the union of first cousins?

  Ducky left Moscow convinced of the futility of her illicit love. Having witnessed the happiness of Nicholas and Alexandra’s marriage, she and Ernie promised each other to try harder. He vowed to be more considerate of her feelings, and they both endeavored to analyze what had gone wrong. Hindsight reveals what was abundantly clear even then: Ernie had always loved men, and Ducky had always loved Kirill.

  A month and a half Ducky’s senior, Kirill was the oldest of four children born to the gruff and outspoken Grand Duke Vladimir, the most erudite of her mother’s brothers. Kirill’s mother, Ducky’s stylish and witty aunt Miechen, was the daughter of the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, a duchy in northern Germany that bordered the Baltic coast. Thanks to a British nurse, Kirill had learned Ducky’s native language from the cradle. A boyhood English teacher instilled a lifelong passion for the works of Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott. Kirill was also an accomplished athlete and a talented pianist whose passion for music would never wane. In the autumn of 1891, he’d applied the same devotion to the study of math, science, mechanics, and navigation, in preparation for enrollment in the naval college and a career at sea. His maiden voyage a year later as a midshipman shaped his career. After finding conditions Spartan and the discipline brutal, Kirill was nonetheless determined to make friends; the experience provided him with the empathy necessary to be a commander.

  By 1897, while Ducky fretted over her miserable marriage to Ernie, Kirill’s charm, generosity, and grace on the dance floor became legendary from St. Petersburg to Paris. Described by his cousin the Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich as “kind-hearted” and “built like an Apollo,” Kirill was the most envied member of Russia’s imperial family, “the idol of all women and the friend of most of the men.”

  Ducky was, of course, one of those women. But her sister, Marie of Roumania most decidedly was not. Already predisposed to be hostile to men who were “too handsome,” Missy jealously referred to Kirill as the Marble Man: majestic, yes, but cold. She was also worried that Ducky’s love affair would not survive the long haul, because Kirill might someday regret his decision to defy the czar and blame Ducky for the personal sacrifices he had made for their relationship.

  In 1897, Ernie and Ducky enjoyed a holiday in Roumania with Missy and her husband, Crown Prince Ferdinand. Ducky extended her visit; when she returned to Hesse, she was startled by the ch
ange in Ernie’s demeanor. He seemed remote. Ducky suddenly felt like an unwelcome guest at their home, the Wolfsgarten Palace. Several servants now refused to meet her gaze; they whispered and laughed among themselves when she passed.

  Ducky was completely confounded by the shift, until one day she caught Ernie in bed with a boy from the palace kitchen. The shock left her physically ill for days. She refused to see anyone, especially Ernie. Ducky had no idea such behavior existed, and it disgusted her. She had no way of knowing that their cousin the kaiser may also have been secretly homosexual and that his Second Reich was rife with gay relationships, even though the punishment for such “criminal” behavior was several years’ hard labor in prison.

  In her own private hell, Ducky could not discuss “the love that dare not speak its name” with anyone, because the revelation would bring down the dynasty. She unhappily acknowledged the importance of being discreet; five years after her discovery of Ernie’s predilections, another German noblewoman would be thrown into a madhouse and locked inside a padded cell for outing her husband. His life ruined as well, he committed suicide.

  Ducky finally unburdened her soul about Ernie three decades later, after Missy’s daughter Ileana learned that her fiancé was gay. As she would then tell her niece Ileana, Ernie’s indiscretion was far from a solitary fling. “No boy was safe, from the stable hands to the kitchen help. He slept quite openly with them all.” People had suspected the truth for years.