I’m sorry for your mother. Do try to get her to keep calm. I’m very angry with these ladies [of the court] for they are to blame for making her so nervous. When you consider that none of these women is married, how can they want to involve themselves in such affairs?… You know, I understand your mother perfectly. She naturally wants the best for you, but she is an Empress and wants to have you just as she is, but she forgets that she is still an Empress.697
In a gesture aimed at furthering the emperor’s belief in the success of international relations through personal diplomacy, he invited to the wedding King George V and Queen Mary, Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra, and almost all of his extended family. Wilhelm’s choice to invite his imperial counterparts was a natural one because, despite years of building tension between Germany and Russia and Britain, Ernest Augustus was a first cousin to both the king and the tsar.698 George wrote to Nicholas in April 1913, “May and I have accepted William’s kind invitation to be present at his daughter’s wedding next month. I also understand he has invited you and I trust that you may be able to come as it would give me the greatest pleasure to meet you there. I hope nothing will prevent this. Our best love to Alix and the children. Georgie.” The response Nicholas sent back was simple and to the point: “I’ll go if you go.”699
George and Mary were the first guests to arrive in Berlin in May 1913. Their arrival was treated with the greatest ceremony, since they were the most highly regarded, highest-ranking visitors. After being met at the train station by Wilhelm and Dona, they passed under the Brandenburg Gate, driving down Under den Linden in an “awe-inspiring” ceremony. For the remainder of the day, the zeppelin Hansa circled above imperial Germany’s capital. The next day, Nicholas and Alexandra arrived, accompanied by a hundred plainclothes police officers. “The arrival of all the wedding guests turned Berlin into a magnificent showcase, a display of Royalty rarely seen before,” Sissy recalled in her memoirs. “Masses of people gathered in the streets of the capital to witness the parade of princes. They had come from everywhere to line the route the wedding guests would pass, and the sight of the tremendous throng in Under den Linden Opera Place, and in front of the castle was indescribable.”700
The constant flow of royals arriving at the train station in the subsequent days was reminiscent of Ernie and Ducky’s wedding twenty years before and brought together many of the same people. Alexandra was reunited with her sisters Irene and Victoria, whom she had not seen in more than four years. Many of the guests were housed at the Stadtschloss, where the strict etiquette reigned. Outside the rooms of every royal woman was a majordomo dressed in gold and scarlet, whose sole duty was to empty the washbasins. At a welcoming party that commenced the wedding celebrations, Dona, Wilhelm, George, Mary, Nicholas, and Alexandra were together again. Dressed in the uniforms of each other’s armed forces as a sign of affection, the members of this imperial triumvirate put on a united front. Wilhelm and George visited Potsdam to review the Prussian regiments. Mary and Dona accompanied their husbands in an open carriage together. It was ostensibly one of the only times that these two women were ever together while both of their husbands were reigning.
A few days later on May 24, 1913, Sissy’s wedding was carried out in two stages at the Berlin Stadtschloss. That morning, King George issued a proclamation in honor of the bride and groom: “We are especially pleased that we are the guests of the Sovereign of this great and friendly nation in order to celebrate the union of two young lives, which we earnestly pray may be fraught with all possible blessing.”701 The civil ceremony was held in the Electress’s Hall, while the religious ceremony was carried out in the chapel. Augusta Victoria looked every inch an empress that day, dressed in a light-green, robe-style dress adorned with long strings of pearls and a diamond-encrusted crown. Queen Mary, who reportedly “was so overcome by the ceremony that she broke into a flood of tears,”702 also attracted a great deal of attention. She wore a gown of Indian cloth of gold. Atop her head sat the same coronation tiara she had worn to the durbar. Her jewelry included six diamond brooches, two diamond necklaces, diamond earrings, and nine necklaces made up of strings of diamonds once owned by Queen Victoria, along with the Lesser Star of Africa—a 317-carat diamond—as a pendant. In Neustrelitz, the capital of Mecklenburg situated northwest of Berlin, Aunt Augusta kept abreast of Mary’s German visit. She wrote to her niece, “a Lady (in Attendance there) told me, she never saw anything like your magnificent Dresses and Diamonds, and your regal appearance, the Wedding Toilette surpassing all!”703
The official wedding feast was attended by twelve hundred guests. Four emperors and empresses, four kings and queens, and dozens of princes sat crowded around massive tables filling the entire Grand Hall of the Stadtschloss. For dinner, Dona sat next to George and across from Nicholas and Alexandra. The highlight of the wedding reception was the Fackeltanz, the traditional Prussian torchlight ritual in which the bride danced with all the men bearing the style of Royal Highness or higher. It was this same dance, in this same room, that Dona herself performed decades earlier at her own wedding. Sissy, dancing with her father first, began by making a deep curtsy to the emperor. Then, one after the other, she danced with Nicholas, George, and all the other visiting kings and princes of sufficient rank. Once the bride had danced with the three emperors, the other senior women joined in. Dona looked joyous and regal as she danced with George, but Queen Mary stole the show. As she danced round and round with Wilhelm, the countless diamonds adorning the gold fabric of her dress flickered in the candlelight. It was such a beautiful, incomparable sight that newspapers in Canada and the United States reported every detail. At the end of the night, the newlyweds boarded a train for their honeymoon. The parting was especially hard on Dona, who broke down sobbing. “I shall say nothing about myself, except that it seemed that my heart was breaking,” she wrote in her daughter’s commemorative diary. “I could only pray, particularly as I knelt at my child’s bed during the night, God protect my child, my youngest. Make her happy, O Lord.”704
The celebrations in Berlin and Potsdam were some of the rare events that saw Alexandra and Augusta Victoria together after their dismal state visit almost twenty years earlier, but neither of them sought to make amends with the other. Both women preferred Queen Mary’s company to each other’s, which is a great irony considering how similar both women were. The empresses of Russia and Germany were deeply religious, distrustful of outsiders, fiercely loyal to their husbands and immediate family, and plagued by similar chronic health problems. They each claimed to suffer from weak hearts, which were exacerbated by anxiety or nervousness. Though Alexandra constantly referred to her heart problems, there is little evidence she suffered any physical cardiac disease. In the end, it proved to be their similarities that drove these two women apart.
During the exhausting round of parties, parades, and military reviews that etiquette demanded be put on for the visiting royals, Dona’s health appeared in fine form, but Alexandra was struggling through one of her bad periods of health. Her suffering was obvious to many people, who described her being “bent with sciatica and totally absorbed in grief that her only son had haemophilia.”705 Despite her afflictions, Alexandra’s spirits were lifted by the visit. Here in Berlin, she was among her friends and family, her equals. She may have disliked Wilhelm and Dona, but they were still kindred spirits, reigning monarchs who understood her plight as a wife, mother, and consort better than anyone in Saint Petersburg. No one there realized it then, but that was the last time that George and Mary, Wilhelm and Augusta Victoria, and Nicholas and Alexandra would ever see each other. It was also their last chance to try and make some type of détente between the three empires, but their efforts came to naught. George and Nicholas left closer than ever, surer of their need to stand united against expanding German influence. But Wilhelm became paranoid that George and Nicholas were not only uniting against Germany but were directly plotting against Prussia and the Hohenzollerns. George recalled that e
very time he and Nicholas tried to have a private conversation, Wilhelm was constantly “lurking around” with his ear “glued to the keyhole.”706
For Queen Mary, her reunion with Dona and Alexandra went off very well. Since the Tecks were descended from the royal family of Württemberg, Dona was more gracious to the queen than toward many others. “We left Berlin at 5.35 for London,” Queen Mary wrote in her diary on May 27, “William & [Augusta] Victoria accompanied us to the station—Took leave of them all with regret after charming visit.”707 A few days later, she described the visit in a letter to Aunt Augusta: “I cannot tell you how very much we enjoyed our visit to Berlin or how touched we were at the kindness shown us by William & [Augusta] Victoria & indeed by everybody. It was a most interesting time & so beautifully arranged in every way, nothing could have gone off better.”708
The wedding celebrations of 1913 were some of the last happy moments in the life of Empress Augusta Victoria and arguably also for the German people for the foreseeable future. According to one of Wilhelm II’s biographers, the wedding “was a public sensation; recorded using an early version of colour film and viewed by millions across the empire, this was perhaps the last occasion before the outbreak of the war on which an event in the life of the monarch could provide the occasion for mass emotional identification.”709 After the wedding, Wilhelm granted a further concession to the Hanovers in November 1913 by making Ernest Augustus the reigning duke of Brunswick, whose throne had been vacant for decades. Upon being invested with the dukedom, Ernest Augustus and Sissy relocated to the city of Brunswick in Lower Saxony, where they fashioned a charming and vivacious court. Less than a year later, Dona was blessed with another grandchild. In May 1914, Dona, Wilhelm, and their suites moved to Brunswick for the christening of Sissy’s first child, a son. Keeping with the traditions of the Hanoverian royal family, the eldest son was named Ernest Augustus. His godparents included the emperor and empress, Emperor Franz Joseph, Nicholas II, George V, the king of Bavaria, and many others. The ceremony “was solemnised in great state, in the presence of the Emperor and Empress, the Crown Prince and Princess … and representatives of the crowned heads of Europe.”710
By the time he was nine, Alexei Nicholaievich had grown into a mischievous, outgoing child. He was very much aware that he was different from other children. The simplest of activities that his friends enjoyed—running, jumping, and playing—were potentially lethal for him. Alexandra watched her son like a hawk, sometimes to the point of obsessively smothering him. One contemporary observed that, given the difficulties faced by her only son, she “must have envied Charles and Zita their healthy baby son.”711 The tsarina’s trusted friend and lady-in-waiting Anna Viroubova once saw her break down into hysterics when Alexei’s leg became caught in a chair. When she saw him screaming “like a wounded animal,” she ran over to him, shouting at Anna, “Leave him, stop, his leg’s caught in the chair!” Later, Anna noticed how badly “bruised and swollen” the boy’s leg was.712
Alexei was a child of contradictions. His illness gave him great sensitivity, which made him more acutely aware of the sufferings of others than the rest of his family. On other occasions, he was indulged by his parents, making him willful and selfish. He was Alexandra’s only child who refused to speak English at home, the language the imperial family spoke in private. His tutors remarked that the tsarevitch had little interest in his lessons, except when they concerned matters of the military or trains. It helped his demeanor that he had been in relatively good health recently. A dangerous hernia operation he underwent in 1912 went well. It also helped the general atmosphere in the family that the tsarina made the decision to inform her in-laws of the true nature of his condition. This relieved some of the burden Alexandra had been carrying for so long. There was a glimmer of hope in her life again. Some of the imperial doctors even began speculating that the tsarevitch might be one of those lucky few hemophiliacs who survived into adulthood like Alexandra’s uncle the Duke of Albany.
More than any of her other children, Alexandra felt a special connection with Alexei because, in her eyes, he was “the direct result of prayer, the Divine condescension of God, the crowning joy of her marriage.” Alexei represented the best qualities of Nicholas and Alexandra hybridized into one. He had the gentleness and kindness of his father coupled with the devotion and loyalty of his mother. Julia (“Lili”) Dehn, another of the tsarina’s friends, recalled a touching scene one evening after Alexei had finished his bedtime prayers. Before Alexandra had left the room, he turned out the light over his bed. “Why have you done this, Baby?” the confused Alexandra asked. “Oh,” he replied, “it’s only light for me, Mama, when you are here. It’s always quite dark when you have gone.”713
The attention Alexandra gave to her only son in no way diminished her love for her daughters. The four grand duchesses, who were collectively known as OTMA for the first letters of each of their names, brought great joy to their mother’s life. Largely brought up by Alexandra herself, the girls were dignified, gracious, and deeply religious. The girls’ insularity preserved their virtues and morality, but it also left them with something of a maturity handicap. Even into their teen years, the grand duchesses often thought and acted like little girls.
Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, a family friend, was a firm supporter of the empress’s style of parenting. She wrote, “It is not possible to imagine more charming, pure and high-minded girls. The Empress really brought up her daughters herself, and her work was well done.”714 This did not mean that there was never discord in the family. Alexandra’s moral probity meant she left her daughters little breathing room for their own individual and often highly divergent personalities. “The children with all their love have quite other ideas and rarely understand my way of looking at things,” Alexandra wrote. “The smallest, even—they are always right and when I say how I was brought up and how one must be, they can’t understand, find it dull. Only when I speak quietly with Tatiana she grasps it….And when I am severe—sulks me.”715
Growing up, the girls naturally divided themselves into two groups: Olga and Tatiana (“the big pair”), and Marie and Anastasia (“the little pair”), though all four of them were tenderly close. Olga and Tatiana, by virtue of being the eldest, took more after their father. Like Nicholas II, they possessed dark features and deep eyes that revealed passionate souls. Olga could be stubborn and experienced intense emotional highs and lows: “In temperament and appearance she most resembled her father, whom she adored.”716 Olga was also the daughter with whom Alexandra was most often in conflict. “Olga is most unamiable about every proposition,” the empress wrote, “though she may end by doing what I wish.”717
In contrast, Tatiana was the closest of the four girls with their mother. Like Alexandra, Tatiana was stately, elegant, refined, and inherited much of the empress’s regal nature. More than any of her sisters, Tatiana also possessed a total acceptance of their family’s royal position and the privileges that came with it. Her self-assurance and commanding nature made her the natural leader among the four sisters—even though Olga was the eldest. The other three girls nicknamed Tatiana the Governess. Nonetheless, she was still a modest, down-to-earth girl who embarrassed easily. She once kicked a lady-in-waiting for addressing her publicly as “Your Imperial Highness.”718
The younger grand duchesses, Marie and Anastasia, were similar but different. Without a doubt, Marie was the biggest flirt in the family and attracted the attention of many suitors. The youngest grand duchess, Anastasia, was the exact opposite of her sisters, especially Olga and Tatiana. If the elder two were passionate and pensive, and Marie was flirtatious, Anastasia was a tomboy. She made her unique mark by being the joker of the family. “Forever in the shadow of her more glamorous sisters,” wrote one historian, “Anastasia came into her own through her gift of mimicry. Never shy, always game for a good joke, Tsarina Alexandra’s youngest daughter was the very antithesis of her reserved mother.”719 Anastasia’s antics endeared
her to many of her relatives. Her Aunt Olga nicknamed her schwipsig, a German expression meaning “merry little one.”720 Perhaps more than her other daughters, Alexandra kept Anastasia under a close eye. As a young girl, she nearly drowned in the Gulf of Finland in a freak accident when she was swept underwater by a massive rogue wave, driving the air out of her lungs. As a consequence, the empress took special care of Anastasia, much in the same way she did for Alexei. For Alexandra, her two youngest children were her babies.
The Russian aristocrats saw Alexandra’s Victorian, bourgeois values as abnormal. She did not believe that her daughters should grow up used to royal extravagance. The grand duchesses were unaccustomed to formality in their homes. Servants and courtiers were instructed to refer to them by their names rather than their titles, a practice that would have been unthinkable in Potsdam or Vienna. To combat indulgence, the girls slept on folding military beds—a tradition dating back almost a century—in rooms decorated with simple stuffed furniture, chintz, icons, and favorite watercolors and photographs. Alexandra wanted her daughters to learn how to endure the elements. Their rooms were heavily ventilated, even in the winter, causing them to grow largely insensitive to the cold. In the mornings, they took cold baths. Each evening concluded with a warm bath, in a solid silver tub, at which point they were allowed one of their few luxuries: scented bath mixes imported from Paris. Between the four sisters, rose, jasmine, lilac, and violet could be smelled in the hallways of the palaces on any given day.
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