فصل 02

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فصل 02

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Chapter Two

LA PETITE DUCHESSE

From her very first days in Russia, Princess Alix of Hesse was determined to counter anything she saw as a threat to the quiet family life that she had envisaged for herself and Nicky. Family had been her only security when death had taken those most dear from her; she was far from home, lonely and apprehensive, and dreaded being exposed as an object of curiosity. But in protecting her own deeply held insecurities by retreating, at every opportunity, from public view, she only succeeded in accentuating her already marked air of chilly reserve. Alexandra Feodorovna, as she was now styled, found herself at the receiving end of hostile looks from a Russian aristocracy that was already critical of her English upbringing and manners – and, to their horror, her poor French, which was still very much the language of their elite circles.1 Worse, this insignificant German princess had, in the eyes of the court, displaced the much loved and highly sociable former empress, Maria Feodorovna – a still vigorous widow in her forties – from her central position at court.

From the first, Alexandra found the strain of fulfilling her ceremonial duties almost intolerable, such as in January 1895, when she had to face a line of 550 court ladies for the New Year baise-main ceremony at which they all processed to kiss her imperial hand. Her visible discomfort and habit of recoiling in horror when anyone tried to get too close were quickly misinterpreted as manifestations of a difficult personality. Her new sister-in-law Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna later recalled: ‘Even in that first year – I remember so well – if Alicky smiled they called it mockery. If she looked grave they said she was angry.’2 And so, in response, Alexandra retreated behind the protective wall of domesticity, preoccupied with the one thing primarily expected of her – getting pregnant. Everyone was watching for the telltale signs. Grand Duke Konstantin Konstan-tinovich pointedly noted in his diary within weeks of the wedding that ‘the young Empress again felt faint in church. If this is for the reason the whole of Russia longs for, then praise be to God!’3 Sure enough, by the end of February Alexandra was confiding to Ernie (whose own wife was about to give birth to her first child in Darmstadt, and to whom Alexandra was sending the imperial accoucheur Madame Günst to attend her): ‘I think now I can have hopes – a certain thing has stopped – and I think … Oh I cannot believe it, it would be too good and too great a happiness.’ She swore Ernie to secrecy; her sister Ella had ‘fidgeted in December already about it’ and her other sister Irene too, but she would tell them in her own time.4 As for her old nurse, whom she had brought with her from Darmstadt, ‘Orchie watches me the whole time in a tiresome way’. Within a week of this letter, Alexandra was ‘feeling daily so terribly sick’ that she could not attend the funeral service for the young Grand Duke Alexey Mikhailovich who had died of tuberculosis, and thereafter she was frequently confined to bed with violent nausea.5 Orchie coaxed her to have the occasional mutton chop, which more often than not would send her fleeing from the dining table to vomit. Alexandra was fearful that she was being watched for signs of her legendary poor health, and again begged Ernie not to tell anyone about how severe her morning sickness was.6 From now until her due date tsarist officialdom protected Alexandra’s health and welfare behind a wall of censorship; there were no announcements or bulletins in the Russian press and the people at large knew nothing of her condition.

For the time being the couple was still living at the Anichkov Palace in St Petersburg. Alexandra spent her days here resolutely hidden away from view in a ‘big armchair in a corner, half-hidden by the screen’, reading the Darmstadter Zeitung, sewing and painting, while her adored husband dealt with his ‘aggravating people’. She resented Nicky’s absence on official business for even a couple of hours in the morning (echoes of her grandmother Victoria’s solipsism and inability to let her beloved Albert out of her sight). But she did have him to herself in the afternoons: ‘whilst he usually reads his heaps of papers from the ministers, I look through the begging letters, of which there are not [a] few & cut out the stamps’, the latter act a mark of her ingrained Hessian frugality.7 The business of state seemed an irritating diversion – ‘a horrid bore’.8 Evenings were spent listening to Nicky reading aloud, after which, while he decamped to his study for more paperwork, Alexandra would spin out the time playing the board game halma with her mother-in-law until Nicky returned for more bedtime reading. What few perfunctory duties Alexandra was obliged to fulfil – meeting foreign deputations or line-ups of ministers – were now made doubly unpleasant, for she was feeling dreadfully sick and suffering constant headaches.

Nevertheless, the tsaritsa had every reason to be confident that she would produce the expected son before the year was out. The statistics certainly favoured it, there having been plenty of boys born to the previous three Romanov tsars. Male children were crucial in a country where the succession laws, changed in 1797 by Tsar Paul I, were based on male primogeniture.9 The Russian throne could pass to a woman only if all legal male lines of descent were extinct. But in Russia at the time, beyond Nicholas’s two younger brothers Georgiy and Mikhail – who would be next in line – there were several more grand dukes with sons aplenty.

While eagerly awaiting the birth of her child, Alexandra set about creating something no Russian empress before her had ever attempted: an intimate family home for herself, Nicky and the children to come. They both loved the Alexander Palace out at Tsarksoe Selo, preferring its location well away from inquisitive St Petersburg society. ‘The quiet here is so delightful,’ she told Ernie, ‘one feels quite another creature, than when in town.’10 She and Nicholas chose not to take over Alexander III’s family apartments in the east wing, but instead the somewhat neglected and sparsely furnished west wing closer to the palace gates. The interior was to be neither imperial in style nor in any way grandiose but renovated to Alexandra’s own simple provincial tastes, the perfect environment in which she anticipated living the life of a devoted hausfrau and mother. Simple modern furniture like that familiar from her childhood in Darmstadt was ordered from Maples, the London-based furniture manufacturer and retailer, which sent out orders from its Tottenham Court Road store. The ambience of this intentionally family-oriented home, in which Nicholas and Alexandra would spend the majority of their time – aside from the obligatory winter season in St Petersburg from Christmas to Lent – was to be cosily Victorian, as Grandmama would have liked it. St Petersburg society was of course duly horrified at the new tsaritsa’s bourgeoise tastes, for she had commissioned the Russian interior designer, Roman Meltzer, to refurbish the rooms in the Jugendstil or art nouveau style then popular in Germany, rather than in ways that would match the palace’s Russian location and its classical exterior.

The heat was intolerable that summer of 1895 and as her pregnancy progressed and with it her discomfort, Alexandra was glad to escape to the sea breezes of the Lower Dacha at Peterhof, located in the Alexandria Park, one of six English-style landscaped parks on the Peterhof estate. The Lower Dacha inhabited a world entirely its own, located well out of sight of the golden cupolas of Peter the Great’s grand palace and its cascading fountains and ornamental gardens, a charming, unobtrusive building of red and cream brickwork laid in alternating, horizontal stripes. Between 1883 and 1885 Alexander III had had it enlarged from a two-storey turreted structure into a four-storey Italianate pavilion with balconies and glazed verandas. But it was still rather high and narrow with smallish rooms and low ceilings, giving it more the feel of a seaside villa than an imperial residence. The location, however, was idyllic – tucked away at the far north-east corner of the park behind a grove of shady pine and deciduous trees and in sight of the boulder-strewn shoreline of the Gulf of Finland. The park itself, where the wild flowers grew in profusion and which was full of rabbits and hares, was surrounded by railings 7 feet (2 m) high, with a soldier with fixed bayonet posted every 100 yards (90 m) and Cossacks of the Tsar’s Escort – Nicholas’s personal bodyguard, who went with him everywhere – patrolling on horseback inside the grounds.11 The Lower Dacha itself was encircled by a lawn and a flower garden of lilies, hollyhocks, poppies and sweet peas. It reminded Alexandra of the lovely gardens at Wolfsgarten, Ernie’s hunting lodge in the heart of the Hessian forest, and she felt safe and at home here. Anticipating the need for more rooms, Nicholas ordered an additional wing to be constructed. The interior would remain much as the couple’s new apartments at Tsarskoe Selo, only more modest in scale, with plain and mainly white furniture and the familiar chintz draperies, and everywhere, as always, Alexandra’s trademark: ‘tables, brackets, and furniture … laden with jars, vases, and bowls filled with fresh-cut, sweet-smelling flowers’.12

She spent the months of June to September in absolute seclusion at Peterhof. Her pregnancy was exhausting and the baby was very active. As she told Ernie in July, ‘My tiny one hops like mad sometimes, and makes me feel quite giddy, and gives me stiches [sic] (downstairs) when I walk.’*13 She spent much of her time resting on a couch in sight of the sea, or taking gentle daily walks and drives with Nicky, in between drawing, painting and making quilts and baby clothes. ‘What a joy it must be to have a sweet little wee child of one’s own’, she wrote in July to Ernie, who now had a baby daughter, Elisabeth. ‘I am longing for the moment when God will give us ours – it will be such a happiness for my darling Nicky too … he has so many sorrows and worries that the appearance of a tiny Baby of his very own will cheer him up.… So young, and in such a responsible position and so many things to fight against.’14

At the end of August the apartments at Tsarskoe Selo were ready for use. Despite its modest size, the palace and its 14 miles (22.5 km) of parkland would need a 1,000-strong staff of servants and court officials to run it and a much larger military garrison to guard it.15 Alexandra loved her new rooms and was busy organizing her layette, although suffering a lot of discomfort. ‘I do hope I shall not have to wait much longer – the weight and movements get so strong’, she told Ernie.16 At the end of September she experienced a bout of acute pain in her abdomen. Madame Günst was sent for and immediately called in Dr Dmitri Ott – director of the St Petersburg Institute of Midwifery and the most influential gynaecologist in Russia at the time – and with whom Günst had recently attended the birth of Nicholas’s sister Xenia’s first child.17 Meanwhile Alexandra was thinking about a nurse for the baby. Like Xenia, she wanted her to be English: ‘If I can only find a good one – they mostly dread going so far away, and have extraordinary ideas about the wild Russians and I don’t know what other nonsense – the nursery maid will of course be a Russian.’18

Nicholas and Alexandra were both convinced their baby would arrive around the middle of October but it still had not been born when Ella arrived from Moscow at the end of the month. She found Alix looking ‘remarkably well thank God so much plumper in the face such a healthy complexion better than I had seen for years’, she reported to Queen Victoria. She was concerned that the baby was ‘probably immense’, but Alix was transformed – ‘full of fun quite like as a child & that dreadfully sad look which Papa’s death had printed on her disappears in her constant smiles’.19

Nicholas was keeping careful watch over his wife: ‘the “babe” has sunk lower and makes her very uncomfortable, the poor dear!’ he told his mother.20 So preoccupied was he with its imminent arrival, that he hoped his ministers would not ‘swamp’ him with work when the time came. Anticipating a son, he and Alexandra had already decided on the name Paul. Maria Feodorovna, however, was not at all keen on it, because of its associations with Paul I, who had been murdered, but she was anxious to be there when labour began. ‘It is understood, isn’t it, that you will let me know as soon as the first symptoms appear? I shall fly to you, my dear children, and shall not be a nuisance, except perhaps by acting as policeman, to keep everybody else well away.’21

The baby’s size and position were causing Alexandra such terrible pain in her back and legs that she was now forced to lie in bed or on the sofa for much of the time. ‘Baby won’t come – it is at the door but has not yet wished to appear & I do so terribly long for it’, she told Ernie.22 Dr Ott was now staying overnight and Madame Günst had been there for the past two weeks. With no news emanating from official sources about the progress of the Empress of Russia’s pregnancy, rumour abroad was rife, just as it had been in the run-up to her marriage. The gossip prompted a firm rebuttal in the British press, based on ‘well-informed quarters in Darmstadt and Berlin’:

With reference to certain disquieting rumours which have been circulated respecting the health of the Empress of Russia, and the statement that some other physicians will be called in, a St Petersburg correspondent says that Her Imperial Majesty, according to the declaration of her medical adviser, is going on as well as possible, and that she neither needs nor desires any extraneous assistance.23

At around 1 o’clock in the morning of 3 November, Alexandra finally went into labour. Ella was joined by Maria Feodorovna, and together, as Ella reported to Queen Victoria, they ‘gently rubbed her back & legs which relieved her’.24 Alexandra was grateful for their presence and that of her husband too, for her labour lasted twenty hours, during which Nicholas was frequently in tears and his mother often on her knees in prayer.25 Finally, at 9 p.m. ‘we heard a child’s squeal, and all heaved a sigh of relief’, as Nicholas recalled.26

It was not, however, the longed-for boy, but a girl, and Ella’s apprehensions had been correct: ‘The Baby was colossal but she was so brave & patient & Minny [Maria Feodorovna] a great comfort encouraging her.’27 The baby girl weighed 10 pounds (4.5 kg); it had required the combined skill of Ott and Günst to deliver her, an episiotomy and forceps having been necessary, with the help of chloroform.28 It was, Nicholas wrote in his diary, ‘A day I will remember for ever’, but he had ‘suffered a very great deal’ at the sight of his wife in the agonies of labour. His baby daughter, whom he and Alexandra named Olga, seemed so robust that he remarked that she didn’t look like a newborn at all.29

Queen Victoria was enormously relieved to hear the news: ‘At Carlisle got a telegram from Nicky saying: “Darling Alix has just given birth to a lovely enormous little daughter, Olga. My joy is beyond words. Mother & child doing well.” Am so thankful.’30 She was even more relieved to hear from Ella that ‘The joy of having their baby has never one moment let them regret little Olga being a girl’.31 Indeed Nicholas was quick to emphasize his and Alexandra’s joy, in a story later widely circulated in the press. Upon being congratulated by the court chamberlain he is said to have remarked, ‘I am glad that our child is a girl. Had it been a boy he would have belonged to the people, being a girl she belongs to us.’32 They were, quite simply, besotted. ‘They are so proud of themselves & each other & the baby that they think nothing could be more perfect’, wrote the wife of a British diplomat.33 ‘For us there is no question of sex,’ Alexandra asserted, ‘our child is simply a gift from God.’34 She and Nicholas were quick to reward the skills of Dr Ott and Madame Günst in the safe delivery of their daughter: Ott was appointed leib-akusher* to the imperial court and presented with a jewelled snuffbox of gold and diamonds and an honorarium of 10,000 roubles (as he would be for delivering all the Romanov children); Evgeniya Günst received around 3,000 roubles each time.35

There was, inevitably, a sense of disappointment in the wider Romanov family, expressed by Grand Duchess Xenia, who thought Olga’s birth ‘a great joy, although it’s a pity it’s not a son!’36 Such disquiet was not of course expressed in any of the heavily censored Russian press. The whole of St Petersburg had been eagerly anticipating the event, to be announced by the boom of cannons across the Neva. When the moment came, ‘people opened their windows, others rushed out into the street to hear and count the volleys’. But alas the number of rounds fired was only 101; for a first son and heir it would have been 301.37 The news reached many of the theatres in St Petersburg just as people were leaving at the end of the evening performance. It ‘duly called forth patriotic demonstrations from the audiences, in response to whose wish the Russian national anthem had to be played several times’.38 In Paris’s Little Russia, a Te Deum was sung at the St Alexander Nevsky Orthodox Church on rue Daru in celebration of the tsaritsa’s safe delivery. But the British press was quick to note an element of dismay in Russian political and diplomatic circles: ‘A son would have been more welcome than a daughter, but a daughter is better than nothing’, observed the Pall Mall Gazette.39 At a time when Russia and England were still to some extent political rivals, the Daily Chronicle wondered whether baby Olga ‘might be made a peg to hang an Anglo-Russian understanding on’ at some future date. The seed was sown for a rapprochement between the Russian and British royal families, and what better way than through a future dynastic marriage?

On 5 November 1895 an Imperial Manifesto was issued in St Petersburg greeting Grand Duchess Olga’s birth: ‘Inasmuch as we regard this accession to the Imperial House as a token of the blessings vouchsafed to our House and Empire, we notify the joyful event to all our faithful subjects, and join with them in offering fervent prayers to the Almighty that the newly born Princess may grow up in happiness and strength.’40 In a magnanimous gesture to celebrate his daughter’s birth, Nicholas announced an amnesty for political and religious prisoners, who were given a free pardon, as well as ordering remittances in sentence for common criminals.

But not everyone shared the optimistic view of little Olga’s future; early in the new year of 1896 a curious story appeared in the French press. Prince Charles of Denmark (soon to be married to Princess Maud of Wales, daughter of Alexandra’s cousin Bertie) had, it appeared, been ‘exercising his ingenuity in drawing the horoscope of the Czar’s infant daughter’. In it the prince predicted critical periods in Olga’s health at ‘her third, fourth, sixth, seventh, and eighth years’. In so doing, he felt unable to ‘guarantee that she will even reach the last-named age, but if she does she will assuredly reach twenty’. This, the prince concluded, would grant ‘twelve years of peace to be thankful for’. For ‘it is certain … that she will never live to be thirty’.41


The moment her new great-granddaughter was born, Queen Victoria, as godmother, took it upon herself to ensure that the baby had a good English nanny and promptly set about recruiting one. But she was horrified when Alexandra announced her intention to breastfeed, just as her mother Alice had done. The British press quickly got wind of what, for the times, was sensational news. It was unheard-of for sovereigns – particularly imperial Russian ones – to breastfeed their children. The news had ‘astonished all the Russians’ although a wet-nurse was also to be appointed as essential back-up. ‘A large number of peasant women … were gathered from various parts’ for the selection process. ‘None of them was to be the mother of fewer than two or more than four children, and those of dark complexion were to be preferred.’42 Alexandra’s first attempts at breastfeeding did not, however, go to plan, for baby Olga rejected her, and, as Nicholas recalled, it ‘ended up with Alix very successfully feeding the son of the wet-nurse, while the latter gave milk to Olga! Very funny!’ ‘For my part I consider it the most natural thing a mother can do and I think the example an excellent one!’ he told Queen Victoria soon after.43

Alexandra, as one might expect, bloomed as a nursing mother; her whole world, and Nicholas’s, revolved around their adored newborn daughter. The tsar delighted in recording every detail of her life in his diary: the first time she slept through the night, how he helped feed and bathe her, the emergence of her baby teeth, the clothes she wore, the first photographs he took of her. Neither he nor Alexandra of course noted that little Olga was in fact not the prettiest of babies – her large moon-shaped head with its awkward quiff of blonde hair that replaced the long dark hair she was born with, was too large for her body, and made her seem almost ugly to some members of the imperial family. But she was, from the outset a good, chubby and happy baby and her doting parents rarely let her out of their sight.

On the morning of 14 November 1895 – her parents’ wedding anniversary and the Dowager Empress’s forty-eighth birthday – Olga Nikolaevna Romanova was christened (with just the one given name, according to Russian Orthodox practice). It was a particularly joyful occasion for the imperial court as it marked the end of official mourning for Tsar Alexander III. The baby was dressed in Nicholas’s own christening robes and conveyed in a gold state coach drawn by six white horses, accompanied by Cossacks of the Tsar’s Escort, to the Church of the Resurrection, the imperial chapel at Tsarskoe Selo. From here, Princess Mariya Golitsyna, the mistress of the robes, carried Olga to the font on a golden cushion. In line with Russian Orthodox practice, Nicholas and Alexandra did not attend the actual ceremony, at which members of the Orthodox synod, illustrious royal relatives, diplomats and foreign VIPs, all in full court dress, were gathered. The baby had seven sponsors including Queen Victoria and the dowager empress. But most of these could not attend in person, so Maria Feodorovna presided, resplendent in Russian national dress and jewelled kokoshnik, surrounded by most of the Russian grand dukes and duchesses. During the service, the baby ‘was dipped three times into the water in the orthodox way and then was straight laid into a pink satin quilted bag, dried and undressed, & returned to the gamp [nurse], who was very important in corded silk’.44 Olga was then anointed with holy oil on her face, eyes, ears, hands and feet and carried round the church three times by Maria Feodorovna, with one of the godfathers on either side of her. When the ceremony was over, Nicholas invested his daughter with the Order of St Catherine.

Olga’s difficult birth had, inevitably, left Alexandra considerably weakened and she was not allowed out of bed until 18 November. Thereafter, she went for quiet drives in the park with Nicky but despite the presence of her brother and his wife Ducky (Victoria Melita’s pet name in the family), she took little advantage of their company, even though they were only there for a week. Ducky complained in letters to relatives of her boredom, of how Alix was rather distant and that she talked endlessly of Nicky and ‘praise[d] him so much all the time’, that she came to the conclusion that her sister-in-law preferred being on her own with him.45 She certainly jealously guarded her time with Nicky; the rest of it was spent mothering Olga. Orchie was still in evidence, as a superannuated family retainer, given the token role of supervising the running of the nursery, but she was not entrusted with the baby’s care, even when Madame Günst – who stayed on as maternity nurse for three months – was laid up for a couple of days.46 The presence of Günst caused considerable disgruntlement. ‘Orchie slept in the blue room and scarcely spoke to me, so offended we did not have Baby with her’, Alexandra told Ernie.47

Professional English nannies were sticklers for routine and did not like being usurped in their roles, and the arrival on 18 December of Queen Victoria’s hand-picked recruit, the redoubtable Mrs Inman, was not a happy one. Nicholas remarked that his wife was worried that ‘the new English nanny would in some way affect the way of things in our daily family life’. And sure enough she did, for the protocols of royal nannying demanded that ‘our little daughter will have to be moved upstairs, which is a real bore and a shame’.48 The day after Mrs Inman arrived baby Olga was duly removed from Nicholas and Alexandra’s ground-floor bedroom to the nursery and Nicholas was already writing to his brother Georgiy, complaining that he and Alexandra ‘[did] not particularly like the look of Mrs Inman’. ‘She has something hard and unpleasant in her face,’ he told him, ‘and looks like a stubborn woman.’ Both he and Alexandra thought she was ‘going to be a lot of trouble’, for she had immediately started laying down the law: ‘she has already decided that our daughter does not have enough rooms, and that, in her opinion, Alix pops up into the nursery too often.’49

For the time being, the only sight the Russian people might be likely to get of their tsar and tsaritsa would not be at court in St Petersburg but wheeling their baby in the grounds of the Alexander Park. The world beyond knew even less of them. The British press had hoped that the tsaritsa’s informal approach to mothering might have a positive effect politically: ‘The right feeling shown in the young wife’s decision is likelier to rally the mothers of Russia to her Majesty’s side than many more imposing actions on the part of the Czar’s Consort. And with their support the Empress may go far.’50 It was an ambitious hope, but one that would fall on fallow ground; for the fact that the empress had not produced a firstborn son was already a source of disfavour among many Russians.

In the new year of 1896 and much to her dismay, Alexandra was obliged to abandon the intimacy of the Alexander Palace and transfer to her newly renovated apartments at the Winter Palace for the St Petersburg season. Although Ella had taken a hand in their design, the unworldly and inexperienced Alexandra did not take to the grand, ceremonial ambience of the palace. Nor was she warming to Mrs Inman. ‘I am not at all enchanted with the nurse’, she told Ernie:

she is good & kind with Baby, but as a woman most antipathetic, & that disturbs me sorely. Her manners are neither very nice, & she will mimic people in speaking about them, an odious habit, wh.[ich] would be awful for a Child to learn – most headstrong, (but I am too, thank goodness). I foresee no end of troubles, & only wish I had an other [sic].51

By the end of April Alexandra was forced to give up breastfeeding Olga in preparation for travelling to Moscow for the arduous coronation ceremony: ‘that is so sad as I enjoyed it so much’, she confided to Ernie.52 By this time the domineering Mrs Inman had been sent packing. Nicholas had found her ‘insufferable’ and on 29 April noted with glee that ‘we were delighted finally to be rid of her’. Motherhood clearly became Alexandra, as her sister Victoria of Battenberg noted when she arrived for the coronation in May 1896. Alix, she told Queen Victoria,

is looking so well & happy, quite a different person & has developed into a big, handsome woman rosy cheeked & broad shouldered making Ella look small near her – she feels her leg a little from time to time & gets a headache off & on – but there is nothing left of the sad & drooping look she used to have.53

As for baby Olga, Victoria thought her ‘magnificent & a bright intelligent little soul. She is especially fond of Orchie smiling broadly whenever she catches sight of her.’54 Although Orchie was still in evidence, in fading hopes of a role, a new English nurse was taken on temporarily while a replacement for Mrs Inman was sought.55 Miss Coster was the sister of Grand Duchess Xenia’s nanny and arrived on 2 May. She had an extraordinarily long nose, and Nicholas didn’t much like the look of her.56 In any event, nanny or no nanny, Alexandra was still doing things determinedly her own way, now insisting that baby Olga ‘has a salt bath every morning according to my wish, as I want her to be as strong as possible having to carry such a plump little body’.57 After the exertions of Moscow another important trip was approaching: a visit to Grandmama at Balmoral, where baby Olga could at last be formally inspected.


On the surface the visit to Scotland would be an entirely private family visit,* but the logistics were a security nightmare for the British police, totally inexperienced in dealing with high-risk Russian tsars legendary as the target of assassins. The Russian royals arrived just as hysterical stories appeared in the British press of a ‘dynamite conspiracy’ led by Irish-American activists working with Russian nihilists, to kill the queen and the tsar too.58 Thankfully the ‘plotters’ were arrested in Glasgow and Rotterdam prior to the visit, and press suggestions of an attack on the tsar were later proved erroneous, but the scare underlined fears for the safety of the imperial couple – two of the most closely guarded monarchs in the world. In the run-up to the visit, the queen’s private secretary Sir Arthur Bigge had consulted closely with Lieutenant-General Charles Fraser, superintendent of the Metropolitan Police, who submitted a special report outlining the provision of detectives in addition to Nicholas’s own three Okhrana men. Ten police constables were to be on patrol in and around Balmoral Castle throughout the visit; railway employees would patrol the entire route of the tsar’s train and all bridges and viaducts be supervised by local police. Assistant Commissioner Robert Anderson admitted to Bigge that he was glad that the tsar was ‘at Balmoral and not in London. I should be very anxious indeed if he were here.’59

On 22 September (NS) Nicholas and Alexandra arrived at the port of Leith on their yacht the Shtandart in the midst of a chilly Scottish downpour. ‘The sight of the Imperial baby moved every female heart in the crowd, and there was an animated display of pocket handkerchiefs’, reported the Leeds Mercury.60 Bonfires burning from hill to hill greeted every stage of the journey by train from Leith to Ballater, where a guard of honour made up of Highland pipers and men of the Royal Scots Greys (of whom Nicholas had been made an honorary colonel on his marriage to Alexandra) met the couple. But the bunting decorating the station was sadly bedraggled by the heavy rain by the time they arrived. The rain, although ‘repellent’ as Nicholas recorded in his diary, did not, however, dampen the spirits of the crowds who gathered to watch the five carriages of the Russian entourage – one exclusively for the use of Grand Duchess Olga and her two attendants – pass by.61 As they approached Balmoral the bells of nearby Crathie Church rang out and bagpipes played, as a line of estate workers and kilted Highlanders stood holding burning torches along the roadside in the rain. And there on the doorstep was Grandmama waiting to greet them, surrounded by many of her extended family.

Everyone at Balmoral was charmed by the chubby and happy ten-month-old Olga, including her admiring great-grandmother. ‘The baby is magnificent’, she told her eldest daughter Vicky in Berlin; all in all she was ‘a lovely, lively grandchild’.62 ‘Oh, you never saw such a darling as she is,’ wrote the queen’s lady-in-waiting Lady Lytton, ‘a very broad face, very fat, in a lovely high Sir Joshua baby bonnet – but with bright intelligent eyes, a wee mouth and so happy – contented the whole day.’ Lady Lytton thought Olga ‘quite an old person already – bursting with life and happiness and a perfect knowledge how to behave’.63 The British press remarked on Alexandra’s ‘pride and joy at having a little daughter to bring with her’ as being ‘almost pathetic to witness’.64 ‘The tiny Grand Duchess takes very kindly to her new surroundings,’ reported the Yorkshire Herald, ‘and it is said that the moment she saw her great-grandmother she delighted that august lady by adopting her as her first and most willing slave.’65 Queen Victoria was so smitten that she even went to see Olga taking her bath, as did other members of the royal household, all of whom admired a happy and informal Russian empress enjoying the pleasure of her child – so totally in contrast to her normal stiff and haughty manner.

Nicholas meanwhile was having rather a miserable time of it, suffering from neuralgia and a swollen face – caused by the decayed stump of a tooth (he was fearful of the dentist). He complained during the visit that he saw even less of Alix than at home, because his uncle Bertie insisted on dragging him out grouse-shooting and deer-stalking all day in the cold, wind and rain. ‘I am totally exhausted from clambering up hills and standing for ages … inside mounds of earth’, he wrote in his diary.66

During their stay baby Olga had been trying to take her first steps and her two-year-old cousin David – son of the Duke of York and the future Edward VIII – had taken a shine to her, going to see her daily and offering an encouraging hand, so that by the time the family left, Olga was able to toddle across the drawing room holding his hand. Queen Victoria noted the children together with marked interest. It was a pretty pairing; ‘La Belle Alliance’, she is said to have approvingly remarked to Nicholas. The imagination of the British press quickly ran riot, with claims even of an informal betrothal.67

On one of the finer days of their visit the first and only cinematograph film of Nicholas and Alexandra with Queen Victoria was made in the courtyard at Balmoral, filmed by William Downey, the royal photographer. Before leaving, the couple planted a tree to commemorate their visit. Alexandra had enjoyed being back in Scotland and was sad to go: ‘It has been such a very short stay and I leave dear kind Grandmama with a heavy heart’, she told her old governess Madge Jackson. ‘Who knows when we may meet again and where?’68


On 3 October (NS) the imperial family took the train south to Portsmouth where they boarded the Polyarnaya zvezda for a five-day state visit to France. From Cherbourg to Paris, they were greeted by huge crowds lining the streets, and arrived in the capital to a grand reception at the Elysée Palace hosted by President Faure. The French were fascinated that such distinguished monarchs should have their baby on tour with them rather than leave her behind in the nursery. Olga was so adaptable and had such a placid temperament that she travelled well, sitting on her nurse’s lap in an open landau. Her smiling presence, with her nurse helping her wave her hand to the crowd and blow them kisses, endeared her to everyone. ‘Our daughter made a great impression everywhere’, Nicholas told his mother. The first thing President Faure asked Alexandra each day was the health of la petite duchesse. Everywhere they went little Olga was greeted by shouts of ‘Vive la bébé’; some even called her La tsarinette.69 A polka was specially composed ‘Pour la Grande Duchesse Olga’ and all kinds of souvenirs and commemorative china were on sale, featuring her picture as well as that of her parents. By the end of Nicholas and Alexandra’s foreign tour, the little Russian grand duchess was one of the most discussed royal children in the world. She was certainly the richest, with it being alleged that £1 million (something like £59 million today) had been invested in her name in British, French and other securities when she was born.70 Nicholas had certainly settled money on his daughter, as he would for all his children, but it would be far less than the outlandish amounts suggested and was, effectively, money left them in Alexander III’s will.71 Nevertheless rumours of Croesus-like riches being heaped on the child led to fanciful ideas put about in the American press that little Olga was rocked in a mother-of-pearl cradle, her nappies fixed with gold safety pins set with pearls.72

After a private nineteen-day visit to Ernie and his family in Darmstadt in October, Nicholas and Alexandra returned to Russia overland on the imperial train and promptly retreated to their quiet life at Tsarskoe Selo, where they celebrated Olga’s first birthday in November. Alexandra was by now pregnant again and her second pregnancy proved a difficult one. By December she was suffering severe pain in her side and back and there were fears of a miscarriage.73 Ott and Günst were summoned and confined Alexandra to bed; there was a total clampdown on news and it was early the following year, 1897, before even members of the imperial family were told.

After a long and wearying seven weeks of bed rest, Alexandra was finally allowed outside in a wheelchair. She was not sorry to have to miss the winter season in Petersburg, but in PR terms this was a disaster. Her absence from view and the rumours of her continuing poor health had done their work in further eroding what little goodwill she enjoyed in Russia. Superstition and rumour began to gain a foothold and persisted ever after, focusing on the tsaritsa’s desperate hopes for a boy. One story in circulation was that ‘four blind nuns from Kiev’ had been brought to Tsarskoe Selo at the suggestion of the Montenegrin princess, Militza (wife of Grand Duke Petr Nikolaevich), who herself was a fan of faith healing and the occult. These women, it was said, had brought with them ‘four specially blessed candles and four flasks of water from a well in Bethlehem’. Having lit the candles at each corner of Alexandra’s bed and sprinkled her with the Bethlehem water, they assured her she would have a boy.74 Another tale suggested that a deformed and half-blind cripple called Mitya Kolyaba, who had supposed powers of prophecy that only became apparent during violent epileptic fits, was also brought in to work a miracle on the empress. On being taken to see her he had said nothing, but had later prophesied the birth of a male child and was sent gifts by the grateful imperial couple.75 But nothing could allay either Alexandra’s rising anxiety or the pressure she was under, made worse when her sister Irene, Princess Henry of Prussia, gave birth to a second boy in November and her sister-in-law Xenia produced her second baby – a son – in January.

Although she was up and about again, Alexandra could not face a return to public duties, even in a wheelchair – her sciatica being aggravated by the discomforts of the pregnancy. ‘I am beginning to look a pretty sight already, & I dread appearing half high for the Emperor of Austria after Easter,’ she told Ernie, ‘I can only walk half an hour, more tires me too much, & stand I can’t at all.’76 She endured the pain with characteristic fortitude, for ‘what happiness can be greater than living for a little being one is going to give one’s treasured husband’. As for Olga, ‘Baby is growing & tries to chatter, the beautiful air gives her nice pink cheeks. She is such a bright little Sunbeam, always merry & smiling.’77

At the end of May Nicholas and Alexandra decamped to Peterhof to await the arrival of their second child, which came on 29 May 1897, with Ott and Günst once more in attendance. The labour was less protracted this time, and the baby was smaller too, at 8¾ lb (3.9 kg) although forceps were once more needed.78 But it was another girl. They called her Tatiana. She was exceptionally pretty, with dark curly hair and large eyes, and she was the image of her mother.

It is said that when Alexandra came round from the chloroform administered during delivery, and saw the looks on the ‘anxious and troubled faces’ around her, she ‘burst into loud hysterics’. ‘My God, it is again a daughter,’ she was heard to cry. ‘What will the nation say, what will the nation say?’79

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