Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  After the royal families returned to their respective courts following the 1897 celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, there were also rumblings about the undeniable attraction they’d witnessed between Ducky and Kirill, now fueled by the rumors of Ernie’s homosexuality and his penchant for stable boys and kitchen hands. Hesse itself was small enough for word to spread quickly from the center of the court into the echelons of the military and out among the citizenry.

  Queen Victoria, who had expressed the desire that Ducky might “become of more and more use to Ernie” and might eventually bear him a son, finally saw the light after receiving an uncomfortably detailed description of the reasons for their connubial tension. With a heavy heart, Her Majesty remarked, “I arranged that marriage. I will never try and marry anyone again.” And she never did.

  But when Ducky and Ernie approached her for permission to divorce, Victoria strenuously objected. Marriage was a sacred and permanent bond that only death could sever. Moreover, the couple had the well-being of a child to consider. After Ernie contracted smallpox and hovered for a time between life and death, grateful to have survived, he enjoyed a temporary reconciliation with Ducky. But it didn’t take long for him to revert to his hole-in-the-corner affairs with the handsome young men at the palace, although he became more discreet about them, now that his wife—and so many others—knew his secret.

  Aware that divorce was no option, Ducky tried to remove thoughts of Kirill from her mind, and chose to rededicate herself to her marriage. Ernie was doing his best as well. They began to sleep together again—on occasion—and for some reason Ducky found the experience a bit more pleasant than she had when they’d been newlyweds. But there was now another reason she couldn’t consider jettisoning her marriage. The revelation of Missy’s sensational affair with a dashing Roumanian military officer, Zizi Cantacuzène, had sent shock waves through the family, as well as half the courts of Europe, before the damage control began. Never mind that their husbands had both been unfaithful: Two sisters could not be embroiled in marital scandals, or it might herald the collapse of the respective monarchies. So Ducky had to take one for the team.

  The results of her renewed relations with Ernie were unfortunate. She had a miscarriage in 1900, and later that year, she prematurely gave birth to a stillborn son. It was the final blow to the Hesse marriage. Ernie would never change. And Ducky had not overcome her revulsion to his homosexuality.

  In the autumn of 1900, Kirill, who had been serving with the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, visited Ducky at Wolfsgarten for three weeks. He would later describe the time in his memoirs as “decisive for the whole of my life.” The couple planned for the future, even if marriage seemed a pipe dream. From then on, their intention was “to meet as often as possible.” At the end of Kirill’s visit to Hesse, he and Ducky went off to Paris. Although they were accompanied by his sister, Helen (the future queen of Greece), their rendezvous created a scandal among polite society.

  The death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 eliminated the major obstacle to Ducky’s divorce. The clandestine planning began. Kirill visited her that summer at Wolfsgarten before embarking on a yearlong voyage. One morning in October, Ducky packed most of her clothes, telling Ernie she was going to Coburg to visit her parents; the servants wondered why she so tightly, and tearfully, hugged her daughter when she left the palace.

  Ducky informed her mother that she’d left Ernie and had no intentions of returning. After the duchess protested, and Ducky finally explained everything she’d endured for the past eight years, Marie promised her support. It was Ernie who resisted at first. He preferred to remain married, accepting Ducky and Kirill as discreet lovers while he continued to pursue his secret lifestyle. Divorce would air the filthiest linen and ruin the family’s respectability. Royal sovereigns did not divorce.

  Ducky acknowledged the gravity of their situation and the massive scandal a divorce would create in their social sphere. It was far worse than being secretly gay or clandestinely adulterous. But even though Ernie was capable of living a lie, she was not.

  Finally, he relented, admitting in a letter to his oldest sister that the past few years had been “a living hell. . . . Now that I am calmer I see the absolute impossibility of going on leading a life which was killing her and driving me nearly mad.” Ernie did not divulge the true reason for the split. Unbeknownst to him, his sister had already divined it.

  The extended royal family weighed in as soon as they received the dreadful news. The Czarina Alexandra, who knew nothing of her brother’s lifestyle, saw him as the victimized saint and her sister-in-law as the villainess who had irrevocably disgraced the family. Her husband was infuriated, writing, “In a case like this even the loss of a dear person is better than the general disgrace of a divorce. How sad to think of the future of them both, their poor little daughter—and all his countrymen.”

  Princess Elizabeth of Hesse and by Rhine may have been the first royal child to become the subject of a joint custody agreement: six consecutive months a year with each parent, and the proviso that she permanently return to Darmstadt on her eighteenth birthday. Unfortunately, the child wouldn’t live that long; she would die of typhoid in 1903 at the age of eight, when the alleged Curse of Hesse struck again. Her daughter’s death heralded Ducky’s final, and permanent, break with the grand duchy.

  A divorcée in 1901 at the age of twenty-four, Ducky had prepared for the inevitable backlash. But she had not expected to become an outcast within the royal family, and the cold shoulder she received shocked and angered her. With Ernie’s homosexuality unknown to most of the family, it was Ducky who was blamed for the failure of their marriage.

  While Ernie was busily erasing all traces of Ducky’s presence from the grand ducal archives of Hesse, the condemned grand duchess fled into exile with her mother and youngest sister, briefly reuniting on the French Riviera with Kirill, who had obtained shore leave. Yet behind the scenes, prompted by Alexandra’s thirst for revenge, the imperial family closed ranks, determined to thwart their love affair and, in Kirill’s words, to “ruin any chance” of their meeting in the future.

  The cousins had one ally: Kirill’s father. Grand Duke Vladimir, who loved his son unconditionally, finally came around when he realized that Kirill was never going to abandon Ducky. But Vladimir’s support availed little when the czar was hell-bent on upholding the laws that had knit their society together. Kirill would never be permitted to wed his divorced cousin whose husband was still alive—particularly when that husband was the czarina’s beloved brother.

  In February 1904, after the Japanese attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, Kirill reported for active service as a naval officer to do his part in the Russo-Japanese War. On the night of April 13, during a violent blizzard, an explosion from a Japanese mine destroyed Kirill’s ship, killing 631 of the Petropavlosk’s 711 men. Badly burned and bruised, Kirill jumped from the wreckage into the sea; caught in a maelstrom, he injured his back as well. Kirill managed to cling to a piece of flotsam from the burning ship until he was rescued. His wounds would heal, but he would never recover from shell shock, or his newly developed fear of the water—a devastating blow for a naval officer.

  As lovers, Ducky and Kirill had weathered ostracism and war, scandal and repudiation. The acknowledgment of the fragility of life in the wake of Kirill’s accident reinforced their decision to wed, despite the insuperable obstacles. And in August 1904, after Empress Alexandra finally bore a son and heir, which removed Kirill from the direct line of imperial succession, he grew less afraid of agitating his cousin Nicholas.

  The lovers waited as patiently as they could for the Russo-Japanese War to end. Finally, in the autumn of 1905, the Treaty of Portsmouth put a cessation to all hostilities. Japan had come out on top in the first of a series of severe blows to the Russian Empire that would lead to the revolution, the rise of Bolshevism, and the overthrow of the monarchy in 1917.
The Romanovs’ tragedies would culminate in 1918, with the violent deaths of the immediate imperial family and many of their relatives.

  On the afternoon of October 8, 1905, in the midst of a blizzard, Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich decided to present the emperor with a fait accompli. The trembling Father Smirov, fearing both “the wrath of the Holy Synod and the Emperor,” conducted their wedding ceremony in the private chapel at the home of one of Ducky’s personal friends, at Tegernsee, outside Munich. None of the witnesses had been told why they’d been invited until the ceremony began. Ducky’s mother and youngest sister, Beatrice, were in attendance, as well as their host, his housekeeper, and three other servants. Caught in the blizzard, Kirill’s uncle, Grand Duke Alexis, arrived late.

  Kirill never regretted nor looked back on his risky decision to wed Ducky without the czar’s permission. Toward the end of his life, after much had passed between them, he would write, “There are few who in one person combine all that is best in soul, mind, and body. She had it all, and more. Few there are who are fortunate in having such a woman as the partner of their lives—I was one of these privileged.”

  Ducky was just as confident in their decision to wed, but not in the outcome. Soon after her wedding to Kirill, she confided to a friend, “I hardly know to what sort of happiness it will lead.”

  While the newlyweds enjoyed an Alpine honeymoon, the entire Russian Empire was paralyzed by a general strike. Cossacks had rioted. The cousins could not have chosen a less auspicious time to announce their nuptials to the Imperial Majesties, let alone expect their heartfelt felicitations. Kirill traveled to the Vladimir Palace to share the news with his parents, expecting to do the same with Czar Nicholas the following day. Instead, that night the minister of the court, Count Frederiks, delivered an ominous message: Leave Russia within the next forty-eight hours. Not only was Kirill to be outlawed—banished from the entire Russian Empire—but he was to be stripped of his honors and decorations, as well as his titles and privileges, including his commission in the navy. His imperial allowance was to be discontinued, effective immediately.

  Kirill and his parents had not anticipated such a drastic reaction. The czar at least owed a debt of gratitude to his uncle Vladimir, Kirill’s father, who had been the head of the imperial army for the past twenty-five years. Having never liked the imperial couple, Vladimir and Marie blamed the czar’s decision primarily on Alexandra’s vindictiveness, believing that she had pressured her weak husband into meting out a punishment that far exceeded the crime, particularly given Kirill’s own service to the empire.

  But to Nicholas, it was precisely the fabric of the empire that was being ripped apart by Kirill’s marriage. The czar was morally and legally bound by his empire’s laws. Some of his relatives, including his younger brother Michael, had already transgressed them and disgraced the family with their scandalous liaisons. Faithful and honorable in his own marriage, Nicholas II was not about to grant special concessions to his cousin. Had Russia not lost the recent war to Japan, and were she not threatened by strikes, uprisings, and pogroms, beset from all sides by unhappy and disenfranchised students, workers, and peasants, Nicholas might have had a more open mind. Instead, he treated Kirill’s disobedience as a crime against the state.

  Kirill’s parents were livid: In their opinion, he deserved a slap on the wrist at the most. Instead, the czar was making an example of him. Grand Duke Vladimir marched into a meeting with Nicholas, and in a characteristic display of his legendary temper, he ripped the medals and decorations from his uniform and renounced them before the ungrateful emperor. On Vladimir’s departure, he slammed the gold-studded door so hard that he demolished it. A few days later, Nicholas conceded that he had been too hasty. He agreed to reinstate Kirill’s titles, but refused to rescind the rest of the punishment, including the grand duke’s exile.

  Two weeks after Kirill’s banishment, on October 30, 1905, Nicholas was compelled to sign an Imperial Manifesto that effectively transformed Russia from an autocracy into a semiconstitutional monarchy, establishing a parliament, the Duma. From now on, the czar would be unable to pass any laws without their consent. His thirteen-year march to a firing squad in Ekaterinburg had begun.

  Perhaps it was better that Kirill and Ducky were personae non grata in a disintegrating empire. Raised on French culture, the grand duke decided that they might be happy in Paris. Having been impoverished by his cousin, Kirill and Ducky were financially supported in the City of Lights by his parents and her mother. By the summer of 1906, when they emerged from obscurity to visit Missy in Bucharest, Ducky was two months pregnant. She gave birth to a girl on January 20, 1907, at the Edinburgh Palace in Coburg, naming the baby Marie, after her mother. Just a few weeks earlier, Ducky had been received into the Russian Orthodox Church.

  After his only son was diagnosed as a hemophiliac, Czar Nicholas began to have second thoughts about his mistreatment of cousin Kirill. The czarevich’s precarious health meant that Nicholas would have to seriously consider the probability of relatives further down the line of succession inheriting his throne. Next in line after his son, Alexei, was Grand Duke Michael, who had all but eliminated himself by living in sin with his mistress. After Michael came Kirill, a promising candidate but for his marriage to Ducky. However, at least theirs had been a union of royal equals. And, having become a victim of circumstance, Nicholas reversed his opinion on Kirill’s marriage, viewing it now as a mere breach of imperial etiquette, rather than high treason. When Kirill’s father became gravely ill in January 1909, Nicholas felt ashamed that Vladimir might die while his oldest son remained dispossessed. And so, over the objections of the czarina, during the first week in February 1909, Nicholas conveyed the information to Kirill, through the grand duke’s mother, that he and Ducky were welcome within the imperial family, with the brief message: “Ta femme est grande duchesse”—“Your wife is a grand duchess.” Grand Duke Vladimir died a few days later.

  Ducky was now formally the imperial Grand Duchess Viktoria Feordorovna. Because of Nicholas’s tremendous respect for their grandmother, Ducky’s namesake, Queen Victoria, she was granted the rare honor of retaining her own name, rather than adopting a Russian one, according to their custom and tradition. Yet Ducky was still not permitted to set foot in Russia. She remained in exile for another year while Kirill resumed his naval duties, and she was still in Paris in April 1909, when she bore him a second daughter, Kira.

  Finally, in the spring of 1910, the family was allowed to move to Russia. Ducky enthusiastically reembraced the land she had adored as a girl. For the pampered and privileged royals, the next few years leading up to the start of the Great War were a glittering whirligig of balls, concerts, and dances. Women in furs shopped for Fabergé and thrilled to the high-flying Nijinsky at the Imperial Ballet. Ducky’s taste in fashion and interior design was admired and copied, and everyone clamored for an invitation to her always lively entertainments.

  But behind the abundant vodka, sturgeon, and caviar, Grigori Rasputin, a scruffy peasant and self-proclaimed starets (or faith-healing holy man), had insinuated himself into the royal family’s inner sanctum by convincing the czarina that he had the power to heal her son. Through Alexandra, Rasputin’s influence eventually permeated the corridors of government.

  The assassination in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, precipitated a domino effect of war declarations that quickly escalated into the First World War. Yet, owing in part to Queen Victoria’s global matchmaking, the crowned heads—whether they were hostile or allies—were interrelated. Nearly a demimillennial leap in time from the Cousins’ War that pitted Lancaster against York, international geography suddenly made foes out of formerly amicable family members in what was initially called “the War of Cousins,” because the king of England, German kaiser, and Russian czar were all first cousins.

 
Overlapping relationships from intermarriages over the years also tested the bonds of familial loyalty over allegiance to one’s sovereign. Ducky was first cousin to each of the leading players. She was now married to a Russian whose position was obvious. But her mother was the daughter of a czar, had married an Englishman, yet had lived in Germany for most of her life, and was staunchly on the other side, supporting the kaiser.

  Ducky made herself useful during the Great War. The imperial family financed and supported the Red Cross, and she was one of the first to mobilize an auxiliary ambulance corps, personally visiting the front lines near Warsaw with supplies from the Red Cross, while Kirill worked with the naval department in Poland braving crude wartime conditions.

  Nineteen seventeen was a difficult year for Ducky and Kirill. They were in St. Petersburg when the city capitulated to the revolutionaries; mob violence increased by the day. Now forty-one, with a history of miscarriages and difficult pregnancies, Ducky was carrying Kirill’s third child, hoping this time for a son. Her husband was still in command of his naval guards; their unswerving loyalty kept him alive through a number of terrifying touch-and-go ordeals. From Kirill’s perspective, the mob was not particularly antagonistic or disloyal toward the czar, but they were hungry, and they did want an end to the war and a fair distribution of land and wealth. He believed that they didn’t even understand the revolutionary rhetoric they were parroting; it had been fed to them by the demagogues who were the agents of the Revolution.

  Three hundred years of Romanov rule came to an end on March 15. Czar Nicholas was forced to abdicate his throne, relinquishing the rights of the young czarevich as well. By the order of succession, the imperial crown then passed to Nicholas’s ne’er-do-well younger brother Michael, who, terrified of assassination, abdicated the same day. Kirill considered March 15, 1917, “the saddest moment” of his life, although the triple renunciation had made him the heir to the Russian throne.