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

by Justin C. Vovk

  The Tecks, traveling incognito as the Count and Countess von Hohenstein, decided upon Florence as their home-in-exile. Compared to the rest of Europe at the time, Italy’s cost of living was relatively low, but Florence was also remote enough to keep Mary Adelaide’s luxuriant spending at a minimum—or so it was hoped. The Tecks left Britain on the evening of Saturday, September 15, 1883. They faced “a vastly different life from the life they had led for the past twenty years … they had dispensed hospitality to almost every royal and distinguished visitor who had visited London during that time.”102 Not surprisingly, though “somewhat to the embarrassment of her family,” the Duchess of Teck did not make straight for Florence. Ever conscious that “she was the daughter of the Viceroy of Hanover, niece of the [formers kings] of Great Britain and” had once been “fifth in line to the throne,” she promptly shed her innocuous pseudonym and insisted on paying semiofficial visits to numerous royals en route to Italy.103 They spent their first few weeks at a villa on the shores of Lake Constance in Switzerland that belonged to Francis’s Württemberger relatives. In mid-October, the Tecks could no longer delay their journey into Italy. Although the family had traveled to Switzerland together, May’s brothers Frank and Dolly returned to England to finish their educations at the Wellington School in Somerset—this did not last long, since Frank was soon expelled for throwing the headmaster over a bush.

  Once the Tecks and their suite entered Italy, they still showed no signs of altering their ways. Shortly after crossing the border, May’s parents were invited to dinner with the king and queen of Italy. When they finally reached Florence, the Tecks settled into some rooms at the Hotel Paoli, but even this became a difficult situation. Incensed that other guests were allowed to stay on the same floor as the cousin of the queen of England, Francis insisted the other rooms be kept empty. Naturally, the duke and duchess were charged for this, leading Francis to experience “one of the uncontrolled fits of temper which were becoming more and more frequent in his life.” May was just as unhappy about being in Florence as her parents. David Duff, one of her biographers, commented on the way it impacted her.

  This exile had a deep effect on May, altering not only her adolescent years but lasting through the rest of her life. It was the humiliation which hurt … she had reached an age when she could think for herself and she realized that she was under a handicap in life. Her contemporaries were completing their education and beginning to think of parties and “coming out” and boyfriends, while May found herself backward in learning, totally unfitted for the ballroom and obviously without the financial background necessary for launching her into the social round.… Her brothers being younger than herself, she was held back in sophistication, causing her to be treated as younger than she really was.104

  These thoughts were foremost in May’s mind as she settled into her new Florentine life. She made it her goal to enhance her education, which was helped with the departure of the stern, authoritarian governess Fraulein Gutman, who had been selected to oversee the princess’s education in Italy. Gutman was ardently anti-Italian and discouraged May from embracing the culture or the lifestyle of the country. May and Alge—who pushed Gutman into a fountain in his sister’s defense—loathed the woman, and Mary Adelaide found her insufferable. So when she was sent packing in late 1883, there were no tears shed.

  May’s new governess, Signora Zucchelli, could not have been more different from her predecessor. Vivacious and cultivated, she stimulated in May a renewed interest in her own education. This was partly accomplished by selecting young ladies of the same age to come and share May’s lessons with her. It was the first time she had ever interacted with girls her own age in that type of environment. Much to May’s satisfaction, her daily lessons began to include music and drawing, as well as tutoring in languages—she quickly mastered German and became proficient in French. Her studies were not limited to indoor lessons. Perhaps her favorite part of this whirlwind of new experiences was the expeditions to museums, the opera, and academic and historic locales. Visits to places like the Basilica of San Lorenzo, the Via Camillo Cavour, and the Pitti Palace cemented a permanent love in May Teck for traveling and sightseeing, especially to places of historic significance. Her time in Italy proved to be one of the most fruitful, productive periods in her life. When she left Britain, she was shy, awkward, and introverted, but after only a short time in Florence, she had turned into a lively, vivacious young woman. For May, “Florence was overwhelming” at first, but by 1884, she “proceeded deliberately to make it her own.”105

  By the time she reached adolescence, Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt had grown into a ravishingly beautiful young woman with gray-blue eyes, flowing chestnut hair, and a flawless complexion. Her beauty became well known in royal circles. Queen Victoria told her daughter Vicky that Alix was “the handsomest child I ever saw.”106

  The year that Alix turned twelve, 1884, three family weddings took place. The first two occurred in April, when Alix’s eldest sister, Victoria, married Prince Louis of Battenberg. Most of Europe’s “royal mob,” including Queen Victoria, had congregated in Darmstadt for the ceremony on April 30, which was held in the Marble Chamber in the New Palace. What no one knew at the time was that the bride’s father, the Grand Duke of Hesse, was planning his own secret marriage to Alexandrina von Kolemine, the Polish ex-wife of the Russian chargé d’affaires in Darmstadt. The same day that Louis and Victoria were married, the grand duke slipped away to a smaller, quieter room “and there married his divorcée in a clandestine little ceremony that was a threadbare simulation of the main event a few hours earlier.” One royal biographer has concluded, “Though there was no question of Madame Kolemine becoming the new grand duchess of Hesse, Louis must have known that his actions were, by the overarching rules of nineteenth-century European royal conduct, scandalous. He also must have been truly besotted to think that making Kolemine even his morganatic wife was going to be easy.”107 When word leaked out three days later that the grand duke had married his mistress under everyone’s noses, there was outrage. Most of the guests immediately fled Darmstadt and declared Louis persona non grata at their courts. Queen Victoria was stupefied that the father of her grandchildren would marry morganatically, and using her own personal authority, she forced him to have it annulled less than a year later. Alexandrina was paid off by the grand duke, given a title, and married a Russian diplomat.

  Two months later, Alix took a journey that would change her life forever. In June 1884, she and her family traveled to Saint Petersburg for the wedding of her sister Ella to Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich of Russia, one of the brothers of Tsar Alexander III. Ella was also a beautiful woman but was not as dour or cold as Alix was reputed to be. As a young woman, Ella had caught the eye of her first cousin Prince Willy of Prussia. At the time, Willy was studying at Bonn University and visited Ella in Darmstadt on the weekends. Flattered though she was, Ella politely refused Willy’s romantic overtures. It was a rejection from which he never recovered. For the rest of his life, he would keep her photograph on his desk. In the end, it was Grand Duke Serge who won her heart. The pair had little in common at first, but after Serge lost both his parents in a single year—his mother to a terminal illness and his father to an assassin’s bomb—the nurturing Ella saw a more sensitive side of him. When he proposed to her in 1883, she accepted.

  The experience of traveling to Saint Petersburg for Ella’s wedding opened Alix’s eyes to royal opulence like she had never known before. Despite her visits to Queen Victoria in Britain, the Russian imperial court was unparalleled in magnificence and scale anywhere in Europe. The Romanovs reportedly employed more than fifteen thousand servants across their many palaces. This drew a stark contrast with the humble surroundings in Alix’s native Hesse. Alix’s family’s very arrival at the train station in Saint Petersburg was carried out with radiance. Alix watched in awe as her sister was chauffeured through the city in a gold carriage drawn by horses dressed in imperial livery. Que
en Victoria wrote to one of her granddaughters that she hoped “Darling Ella won’t be spoilt by all this admiration & adulation & all this flitter of jewelry & grandeur etc.”108

  Ardently Russophobic, Queen Victoria felt nothing but contempt for the Romanovs and their empire. Queen Victoria’s feelings reflected the opinions of many of her countrymen. Russia was viewed as a direct threat to British imperial interests. The queen summed up her feelings to Benjamin Disraeli by declaring, “Oh, if the Queen were a man, she would to go & give those horrid Russians, whose word one cannot trust, such a beating.”109 Like many of her contemporaries, the queen ascribed moral traits to situations that otherwise had none. In the case of the Russians, she believed their moral bankruptcy was contributed to by the fact that they did not keep their homes properly ventilated; Victoria insisted on keeping all of her homes bone-chillingly cold, which she believed crucial to good health. Her antipathy for Russia was not only political. It was a deeply personal sentiment. Her son Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, married the formidable Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna, the daughter of Tsar Alexander II. She was reputed to be the wealthiest woman in the world at the time. Many hoped that the marriage would bring about a thaw in Russo-British relations, but Marie created constant headaches at the English court. To begin with, Queen Victoria insisted on seeing Marie before the wedding, but her father refused to bring her over for inspection, which Victoria took as a personal insult. Once Marie settled into Clarence House in England after her wedding, it was obvious that she was demanding and obdurate. She insisted on being given precedence over other higher-ranking women in the family, including the Princess of Wales. Her behavior only confirmed Queen Victoria’s low opinion of the Romanovs, which only got worse when Marie and Alfred’s marriage fell apart. When Ella announced she was marrying Serge, the queen was revolted. In August 1883, her daughter-in-law Marie wrote regarding Ella and Serge’s marriage: “I knew that from the very first she [Queen Victoria] sett [sic] her heart against it saying that she had only heard his [Serge’s] praise, but he had the greatest of all misfortunes, he was Russian and she had enough of one Russian in the family (meaning me of course).”110

  The wedding ceremony was held on June 15 in the gold and marble chapel of the famously opulent Winter Palace. Alix looked like a vision of beauty in her white muslin dress, with roses decorating her long hair that sat draped over her shoulders. As she stood off to one side during the ceremony, a handsome young prince of sixteen found he could not keep his eyes off the angelic princess from Hesse. The young man was Grand Duke Serge’s nephew, the timid but thoughtful Tsarevitch Nicholas Alexandrovich (“Nicky”), heir to the Russian throne. The young royals met for the first time after the ceremony at the Alexandria cottage, a small villa on the grounds of the Peterhof Palace in the Gulf of Finland. Like the pair themselves, their first meeting was simple and devoid of pretension.

  “I’m Nicky,” the tsarevitch said when he walked over to Alix.

  “I’m Sunny,” replied the shy princess.

  “Yes,” Nicky said with a little smile, “I know.”111

  At the parties that followed the wedding, Alix and Nicky became enamored with one another. Born on May 16, 1868, Nicholas was the son of Tsar Alexander III and his Danish-born wife, Marie Feodorovna—who was known as Minnie in the family to distinguish her from the hundreds of other Maries that populated both the Romanov clan and royal Europe. Like Willy of Prussia, Nicky was directly related to many of Europe’s royal houses. His mother’s family was especially well connected. Minnie’s siblings included Queen Victoria’s daughter-in-law the Princess of Wales, the king of Greece, the crown prince of Denmark, and the crown princess of Hanover. Nicky could also boast of being a first cousin on his mother’s side to the future kings of Denmark, Greece, Norway, and Great Britain. On his father’s side, he was a cousin to Princess Marie of Edinburgh, the future queen of Romania; this was the same Marie who had stood alongside Alix at their aunt Beatrice’s wedding in 1885. These complex intermarriages meant that Nicky and Alix, besides sharing numerous cousins in common, were also second cousins themselves.

  Brought up by his doting mother and exacting father, Nicholas Alexandrovich had a reputation for being mild mannered from the time he was very young. Both parents insisted on isolating Nicky and his siblings—George, Xenia, Michael, and Olga—from the outside world as much as possible. This prevented Nicky from ever developing a strong resolve in the face of real-world problems. He was known for kindness, gentility, and his sympathetic eyes, but he also lacked the formidable Romanov demeanor that his father and uncles possessed. Until the day he died, Nicholas was hampered by a crippling indecisiveness in the face of opposition.

  Those qualities that others criticized in the tsarevitch were what endeared him to Alix. She was drawn to his quiet personality. There was little doubt that she was smitten with him. Even members of Alix’s extended family could see a budding romance between the two young royals. Princess Maud of Wales, who was a first cousin both to Alix and Nicky, wrote to the tsarevitch during Alix’s visit, “Do you like little Alix?.… She is my best friend, we always go for walks together when we meet. They say I am very much like her, but I do not think I am like her at all.”112 Before Alix left Russia, the pair carved their initials into a windowpane. Nicky wrote in his journal, “Alix and I wrote our names on the rear window” of a nearby house. He added at the end, “We love each other.” On June 21, Alix and her family left Saint Petersburg. As a parting gift, the tsarevitch gave Alix a diamond brooch. She handed it back to him though, because as a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, she knew that any exchange of gifts would be scrutinized for any political undertones. Nicky wrote dejectedly in his diary, “I am very sad the Darmstadts are going tomorrow and even more so that dearest Alix is leaving me.”113 Later that day, he pasted a photograph of Alix into his diary. No one could ever have realized that this adolescent romance would become one of the greatest love stories of the twentieth century.

  Ninety-Nine Days

  (1884–88)

  The exhilarating, stimulating lifestyle May Teck was experiencing after only six months in Florence received a sudden, frightening interruption on March 5, 1884, when her father suffered a massive stroke. Those close to the family were shocked by Mary Adelaide’s efforts to downplay the gravitas of the situation—the duke’s left arm and leg were paralyzed, and his mouth was noticeably crooked. With the Duchess of Teck unwilling to accept the reality of the situation—or more accurately, her unwillingness to allow it to interfere with her highly prized social life—the arduous responsibility of caring for Francis fell on her daughter. May, who was only a teenager, was left profoundly altered from caring for her demanding father around the clock. The tempestuous duke took his dark moods out on his daughter. But instead of lashing back at her father, May “determined to keep her emotions strictly under control and not to allow her father’s quirks to upset her.”114 This decision to keep up a strong front regardless of her internal emotions would become one of the most defining characteristics of May’s personality. From 1884 onward, she rarely lost her temper and never did so in public. It set a pattern for the rest of her life; she reserved her emotions more the worse a situation became.

  In April, the Tecks moved out of their hotel and into their own private residence, the Villa I Cedri. A fifteenth-century house three miles outside of Florence, May’s family was offered use of the house, rent-free, by its owner, Bianca Light, whose brother was the president of the English Club in Florence. It was a picturesque Tuscan villa with a flat, tiled roof and yellow-tinged walls. Surrounding it was an elaborate English country garden filled with ilexes, cedars, and magnolias. From the balcony, May could see beyond I Cedri’s walls across the vineyard-covered Tuscan landscape. Moving into her own private residence suited the Duchess of Teck quite well, who used it as an excuse to continue her exorbitant spending by hosting her now-customary parties. Telegrams apprising the British royal family of the duchess’s behavior flew between F
lorence and London regularly. Most of the ones arriving from Britain were from either the queen or the Duchess of Cambridge, imploring Mary Adelaide to learn some self-restraint. But after years of such unrepentant profligacy, the Duchess of Cambridge began to see her daughter as a financial delinquent of sorts.

  After nearly two years in Florence, in April 1885, messengers arrived at I Cedri informing the Tecks that permission had been granted for their return to Britain. The decision had been in the works for some time. Mary Adelaide’s brother, the Duke of Cambridge, made the point to the queen that there seemed little point to keeping the Tecks abroad any longer, since his sister seemed uninterested in mending her ways. It was also hurting the prospects for her children. May, he argued, was not receiving the education necessary for an English princess, while Alge was barely being educated at all. On the evening of May 24, 1885, the Tecks left Florence by train, arriving in Paris the next day for a brief layover. This afforded May the chance to visit the Louvre, stimulating her newfound historic and academic curiosity. “I admired the Rubenses and some of the Murillos immensely,” she wrote about her day in Paris. “The rooms are beautiful … We lunched with Lord Lyons (the British Ambassador), who was kindness itself … We left Paris at eight, and our crossing [the English Channel] was so-so, rather a swell.”115 At dawn on the morning of May 26, the Tecks disembarked at Victoria Station in central London’s Belgravia district. It was Princess May’s eighteenth birthday. She was thrilled to be home, writing to a friend that same day, “we reached London about seven, to find the dear boys waiting for us at the station.” The “dear boys” May spoke of were her brothers Dolly and Frank. “They are so grown,” she wrote, “Frank much taller than Mama.… I am so glad to be in London again.”116