Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires

by Justin C. Vovk

  Playdates were not the only time May saw her more famous cousins. The Duchess of Teck and the Princess of Wales were regularly seen out and about doing charity work with their daughters in tow. During one charity bazaar at Kew Gardens, May and her mother ran their own booth with Princess Alexandra and “the Wales girls”—Maud, Victoria (“Toria”), and Louise. When a wealthy lady bought a fan with Princess May’s portrait on it, she asked the young girl to autograph it. “With pleasure,” she replied excitedly, “but are you not mistaking me for one of my cousins of Wales?”39 These childhood memories that May created with her cousins marked the beginning of some ultimately historic relationships. She became lifelong friends with Princess Maud and got to know two young princes who would change the course of her life. These boys were Princess Alexandra’s sons Albert Victor (“Eddy”) and George (“Georgie”). The two brothers would have a profound impact on May Teck’s life, with one of them destined to be her fiancé and the other her husband.

  In the years following the death of Alix’s brother Frittie, her mother, Alice, did everything in her power to give her children as loving and secure a home as possible. The greatest support for Alix’s family during this time was the redoubtable Queen Victoria. She and Alice wrote to each other on a regular basis. The princess asked her mother for advice on everything from proper eating habits for her children to her choices of tutors and governesses.

  As Alix grew into a young girl, her cheeriness did not dwindle. She was allowed to prosper and thrive in the cultivated atmosphere that prevailed in Darmstadt. Princess Alice insisted on modeling life in Hesse after the British court. Alice emphasized to her mother her attempts to mimic life in England: “I try to copy as much as is in my power all those things for my children that they may have an idea when I speak to them of what a happy home ours was.”40 The New Palace was decorated with British trimmings. Meals were thoroughly English with common staples like rice puddings and baked apples. Alice boasted to Queen Victoria that “the decoration and domestic arrangements were so English that it was hard to realise one was in Germany.”41 Even the head of the children’s nursery, Mary Anne Orchard, came straight from England. A bare-bones, straight-laced woman who had no taste for extravagance, Mrs. Orchard made sure Alix and her siblings were brought up with simple tastes. “The children’s bedrooms were large and airy, but plainly furnished,” wrote Robert Massie in his definitive biography, Nicholas and Alexandra. “Mrs. Orchard believed in strict daily schedules with fixed hours for every activity.”42 Mrs. Orchard was not the only Englishwoman employed at the Hessian court. Princess Alice also brought a woman to Darmstadt named Miss Jackson, who served as Alix’s governess. It was under Jackson’s tutelage that the young princess first took an interest in politics, “which later was to prove fatal.”43 Alice’s efforts to model Darmstadt after the British court came at a high price. The expenses she incurred were well beyond the financial resources available to her and Louis. Eventually, her requests to Queen Victoria for money put a difficult strain on their relationship.

  In 1877, Alix’s family underwent two drastic changes. First, Louis’s father, the heir to the Hessian throne, died in March. “These have been most painful—most distressing days, so harrowing,” Alice wrote to her mother. “The recollections of 1861 [when Prince Albert died], of dear Frittie’s death, when my dear father-in-law was so tender and kind, were painfully vivid.”44 Three months later, Alix’s great-uncle died, making her father Grand Duke Louis IV. With the accession of Alix’s father, her mother was now the Grand Duchess of Hesse, but it was not a role Alice relished. She told her mother that, when it came to being the new first lady of the land, “I am so dreading every thing, and above all the responsibility of being the first in every thing.”45 Her new position was not without its benefits, though. As the heads of state, Louis and Alice received a moderate improvement in their finances, since they now had access to the small Hessian treasury. Louis’s accession to the grand ducal throne only widened the chasm separating him and Alice. In a telling letter, Alice explained to Louis how happy she would have been “if I had been able to share my intellectual interests, and intellectual aspirations with a husband whose strong, protective love would have guided me round the rocks strewn in my way by my own nature, outward circumstances, and the excesses of my own opinions.” She added that she had tried to talk to him about more serious matters, but “we have developed separately—away from each other; and that is why I feel that true companionship is an impossibility for us—because our thoughts will never meet.”46 The difficulties Alix’s parents faced, both in their marriage and as the first couple of Hesse, were soon overshadowed by the greatest tragedy their family would ever endure.

  A deadly strain of diphtheria invaded Darmstadt in November 1878, cutting straight to the heart of the grand ducal family. The entire family, save for Alice and Ella, fell ill. Queen Victoria sent her chief physician, Sir William Jenner, as did her daughter Vicky in Berlin. Alice nursed her family with the utmost care. It was the second time in her life she played the role of nurse. The first time, she lovingly took care of her father during his fatal battle with typhoid fever in 1861. Now, as she tended to her children, she wrote to Queen Victoria that the pain of “knowing all these precious lives [are] hanging on a thread, is an agony barely to be conceived.”47 On November 16, Alix’s sister May died from the illness. The poor toddler literally choked to death from the effects of the infection. Devastated, the grand duchess, who was exhausted and worn down from caring for her family, went to break the news to her son Ernie. Against her doctors’ orders, she tearfully embraced him, but this act of a grieving mother would cost Alice her life. She fell ill with diphtheria on December 7. On Friday, December 13, Grand Duke Louis was told his wife would not recover. The next morning, just before 8:30 a.m., Alice died. The date was December 14, “the horrible day” when her father died seventeen years earlier at Windsor Castle. The last two words Alice murmured were: “Dear Papa.”48

  The Duchess of Teck, whose own children had once been ill with diphtheria, was grieved by the loss of Princess Alice. She wrote the following to the Countess of Hopetown:

  Now again the shadow of a great sorrow has fallen upon us, in which the whole country warmly and touchly [sic] sympathises. Those poor bereaved ones, in that once so happy home, are never out of my thoughts, and my very heart bleeds for them. God help them! for He alone can! The poor Queen is so sadly shaken, though more composed than I expected, and very resigned.… I have just been summoned to Windsor to-morrow, to be present at the religious service which the Queen is going to have in the private Chapel of the Castle at the same hour (2.30) as that at which the last sad ceremony at Darmstadt is to take place.49

  With her mother gone, Alix’s world imploded. The very heart and soul of her family was gone. Queen Victoria’s heart broke for her Hessian grandchildren. She poured out her grief in a letter to them: “Poor dear children for I write this for you all—You have all had the most terrible blow which can befall Children—you have lost your precious, dear, devoted Mother who loved you—and devoted her life to you & your dear Papa!”50

  The deaths of her mother and sister were among the most important events that shaped Alix’s life. Before this, she was warm and loving, though possessing a stubborn streak. After these tragedies, she began to shut down, cutting herself off emotionally from other people. Even those objects that all children would cling to for comfort—toys, playthings, and clothes—were taken away from her during this horrible time. To prevent the spread of the diphtheria, they were burned. “In one fell swoop,” wrote one historian, “everything that had been familiar and comforting to the six-year-old Alix was suddenly and permanently wrenched from her. Alicky withdrew into herself—setting a pattern that would mark her propensity to withdraw and brood.”51 This behavior was not purely spontaneous. When Alice was a young girl, she demonstrated a melancholy, oversensitive personality that, while giving her greater compassion for people than most of what Quee
n Victoria’s other children possessed, birthed somewhat darker moods that she ostensibly passed on to Alix.

  A month after the grand duchess’s death, Alix and her family visited the queen in January 1879, once the doctors decided it was safe for them to travel. “Next week the dear Queen expects the poor Grand Duke and his motherless children over,” the Duchess of Teck wrote, “and I shall be most thankful for them all when the dreaded painful first meeting is over.”52 A few days later, Alix’s aunt Beatrice, Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, sent the Duchess of Teck a note when the Hesse family arrived: “I cannot tell you how sad the meeting yesterday with Louis and the Children was. For the first time to miss darling Alice, and to see him alone [sic]. It all brought our terrible loss so vividly before us.”53 During the visit, Grand Duke Louis came to Kensington Palace to see Mary Adelaide. The duchess was deeply moved by his demeanor, which she described as “utterly broken hearted.”54

  Grand Duke Louis found himself at a loss caring for his five young children alone. One of his family’s few refuges was Wolfsgarten, a hunting lodge between Darmstadt and Frankfurt. The grand duke purchased the building after Alice’s death. In time it became the family’s preferred residence over the New Palace. In Alice’s absence, Queen Victoria stepped into the role of loving matriarch. She embraced the grand duke as her own son and frequently invited him and his children to stay with her in Britain for prolonged periods. She also decreed that Alice’s sister Helena would visit Darmstadt every year to provide the family with a maternal presence. The children, in turn, would spend part of every holiday they took in England with Princess Helena and her family. In time, Balmoral Castle in the fog-laden Scottish Highlands and Osborne House, the queen’s vacation home on the Isle of Wight, became as comforting and familiar to Alix as the New Palace in Darmstadt. Alix later said her visits to Balmoral and Osborne were “the best part of the year.”55 The years that Alix spent at her grandmother’s side shaped the very foundation of the woman, and eventually the empress, she became.

  She visited Windsor Castle in March 1879 for the wedding of her uncle, the Duke of Connaught, to Princess Louise of Prussia. Unlike Buckingham Palace, which was a relatively new building, Windsor Castle had been an iconic home of the English monarchy since the eleventh century. A fortresslike abode with high stone walls, it remains the longest-used royal residence in Europe. Princess Alix’s visit here revealed to her for the first time the true opulence of her maternal ancestry. Before this, she had only known the isolated but comfortable world at Darmstadt, where she and her sisters sewed their own socks and waited on themselves. In Britain, as a granddaughter of the queen, Alix was fondled over and treated to incomparable luxury. Despite the glamour of London, she preferred peace and quiet. While she was in Britain, she enjoyed playing quietly with her siblings or having personal time with her grandmother, who was affectionately known as “Gangan.”

  Princess Alix became a true by-product of the Victorian court who espoused the highest morals of the era. She was conservative in her personal and political views—withdrawn, almost cold, when out in public. But in private, she burned with well-guarded emotion. She also echoed her grandmother’s extremely shy personality by hating one of the most integral duties of royalty: being on display. Once, when Alix was asked by the queen to play the piano for a room full of dinner guests, she was overcome with anxiety. Her “clammy hands felt literally glued to the keys,” she told a friend later in life.56 She described it as “one of the worst ordeals of her life.”57 Even in the relative quiet of the Hessian court, Alix’s shyness showed itself. Her “shyness became so crippling that visitors to Darmstadt sometimes took the little princess’s tied tongue for arrogance.”58 Princess Marie of Edinburgh, her cousin, wrote that Alix’s “attitude to the world was perpetually distrustful…strangely empty of tenderness and, in a way, hostile…She held both great and small at a distance, as though they intended to steal something which was hers.”59

  Alix’s aunt Vicky, Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, was less sympathetic toward the princess than her grandmother. Vicky felt the death of Alix’s mother left her spoiled and overindulged, leading to her being obdurate, melodramatic, and self-centered. Vicky’s opinion of Alix was somewhat ironic, given her failure raising her three eldest children, but not everything she said was inaccurate. What Vicky perceived as self-centeredness was actually Alix’s intense insecurity. She was terrified to open up and care for others out of fear she would lose them. In the end, the only person who seemed to fill that void in her life was Queen Victoria. It is not surprising Alix came to idolize her grandmother. She began using English as her first language in an effort to distance herself from the painful memories of Darmstadt. The queen, in turn, became Alix’s English refuge. She described the queen as “a combination of a very grand person and Santa Claus.”60 Queen Victoria undoubtedly became the woman she loved most in the world, and the queen was just as devoted to Alix. She was very affectionate toward her Hessian grandchildren, even more so than toward many of her English grandchildren—the Prince and Princess of Wales’ children never enjoyed the same level of intimacy with the queen that Alix and her siblings did. Not until the arrival of other grandchildren years later did the queen come to be affectionately known as “Gangan” by a wider group of her descendants. As the years passed, the queen’s love for her Hessian grandchildren grew deeper. She hoped they would come to see her as a second mother. She emphasized this point when she wrote to Alix’s sister, Princess Victoria, hoping she would look upon the queen as “a loving Mother (for I feel I am that to you beloved Children far more than a Grandmother).”61

  Dona Holstein’s parents struggled to carve out a life for their family at Dolzig Palace in the years following the end of the Second Schleswig and the Austro-Prussian wars. Duke Frederick VIII was overcome with depression but—like the Duke of Teck—was tenderly attached to his children and sought comfort and consolation with his son and daughters. The Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein was unable to cope with her family’s misfortunes as easily as her husband—a quality that would later be recognized in Dona. The birth of her daughter Louise Sophie in 1866 only worsened her somber ennui. Ada became moody, erratic, and gloomy. What we now know as postpartum depression is a possible explanation of what was causing havoc on the duchess’s personality, creating a chasm between Ada and her children that would only widen with time. Contemporary accounts show that Dona and her sisters were much closer with their father than they ever were with their mother.

  At this point in her life, Dona’s day-to-day activities were still overseen by the ducal chaplain and her English governess. The governess’s efforts allowed Dona to become fluent in English by the time she was ten. Whether playing in the nursery or sitting through Bible lessons with the chaplain, discipline reigned supreme in the Holstein household. Like most princesses of that period, especially the German ones, Dona and her sisters were trained to be reserved, submissive, and obedient. The rare times that Dona misbehaved, the governess would use Otto von Bismarck’s name to scare her into obedience. All she had to do was “say ‘Bismarck kommt!’ when her charge was not amenable to nursery authority. The little Princess was at once ready to do anything she was told, for fear the enemy of her house might appear.”62

  A few months before Dona’s eleventh birthday in 1869, her paternal grandfather, Duke Christian August II, died. The Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg’s last years had been disheartening ones. Increasingly infirmed, he and his wife rarely left their isolated estate, Primkenau Castle, where they had moved to following the end of the Second Schleswig War. The misfortunes that had fallen upon the House of Augustenburg became even more unbearable for Christian August when his wife died in March 1867. In a twist that truly evokes notions of a fateful romance, Christian August and his wife died on exactly the same day, March 11, two years apart. The duke’s death in 1869 meant Dona’s father now inherited his father’s entire estate. This included a small fortune and Christian A
ugust’s impressive Silesian castle, Primkenau, located near a town of the same name. Following his father’s funeral, Fritz sold Dolzig Palace to produce enough money to facilitate the move to the grander Primkenau. Located in the present-day, southwestern Polish town of Przemków, Primkenau was an iconic fairy-tale castle that sat deep in a verdant forest, nestled on the shores of a tiny lake. Visitors always described it as a “fair castle, looking, turret for turret and battlement for battlement, as if torn bodily from the pages of some quaint, beautifully illuminated volume of legends.”63

  During Dona’s first summer at Primkenau in July 1870, the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Fritz was invited by his old friend Crown Prince Frederick Wilhelm of Prussia to serve in the military forces of the North German Confederation The offer was tantamount to semi-redemption for the duke, who was eager to fight for Prussia and Germany against France. The duke returned home from war in 1871 after the unification ceremony at Versailles and the eventual French surrender. By the time Fritz returned, Dona was nearly thirteen years old. She was slender, though perhaps a bit short for her age, with thick, golden-blonde hair, a smooth, porcelain complexion, but with tiny, round ears and a short, stout chin. Despite having a slim figure, observers always remarked on her round, pudgy cheeks and jaw, a trait all of her sisters inherited. She was never considered a classically beautiful child, but her regal bearing and queenly manner were unmistakable. Of all the children of the Duke and Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein, it was Dona who was described as possessing the most graceful, dignified carriage. The staff at Dolzig, and later Primkenau, observed that the princess was always aware of any situation she was in and the necessary behavior that was expected. A later contemporary of Dona’s noted that “she was always dignified; she never forgot herself.”64