فصل 03

Chapter Three

MY GOD! WHAT A DISAPPOINTMENT!… A FOURTH GIRL!

On 10 June 1897 (NS) Queen Victoria sent a trenchant note to her daughter, Princess Beatrice: ‘Alicky has got a 2nd daughter which I fully expected.’1 While the queen may have been gifted with the art of prophecy, Nicholas accepted the arrival of a second daughter with quiet equanimity. It was, he wrote, ‘the second bright, happy day in our family life … God blessed us with a little daughter – Tatiana’. His sister Xenia visited soon after: ‘I went in to see Alix, who was nursing the baby girl. She looks wonderful. The little one is so dear, and she and her mother are like as two peas in a pod! She has a tiny mouth, so pretty.’2

But elsewhere in the Russian imperial family a sense of gloom prevailed; ‘everyone was very disappointed as they had been hoping for a son’, admitted Grand Duke Konstantin. From the Caucasus, where he was taking the cure for his tuberculosis, Nicholas’s brother Georgiy telegraphed to say that he was disappointed not to have a nephew to relieve him of his duties as tsarevich: ‘I was already preparing to go into retirement, but it was not to be.’3

‘The joys of the Czar have been increased, but scarcely with satisfaction’, observed one British paper in response to the news. ‘The Czarina has yesterday presented his Imperial Majesty with a second daughter, which, to a monarch praying for a son and heir, is not comforting. Little wonder if the Court party is shaking its head, and the hopes of the Grand Dukes are rising.’4 While Nicholas showed no public signs of disappointment, a few days later the Boston Daily Globe reported that the tsar was ‘taking it very hard that he had yet again been denied a male heir’, and stated – totally erroneously – that he was ‘sunk in melancholia’. Meanwhile, it was claimed that the ambitious Maria Pavlovna, wife of Grand Duke Vladimir – and herself the mother of three boys – ‘had consulted a gypsy fortune teller, who had predicted that one of her sons would sit on the throne of Russia’.5

It is little wonder that Nicholas and Alexandra detached themselves from such insidious gossip and kept well out of sight at Tsarskoe Selo. Alexandra was exhausted, though she recovered from this pregnancy rather quicker than the first. Now that she had two children to mother, the focal point of family life at the Alexander Palace increasingly became her Meltzer-designed mauve boudoir, the room where she spent most of her day. In it, as her family grew, Alexandra accumulated an eclectic mix of sentimental objects, and aside from occasional redecoration, nothing in the room would be altered in the twenty-one years that followed.

Two high windows looked east, out onto the Alexander Park and the lakes beyond. Within and close to the windows was a large wooden plant holder full of vases of freshly cut, heavily scented flowers – in particular the lilac Alexandra adored. In addition there were roses, orchids, freesias and lilies of the valley – many specially grown for Alexandra in the palace hothouses – and ferns, palms and aspidistras, and other flowers in abundance filling vases of Sèvres and other china placed around the room. Simple white-painted lemonwood furniture, cream wood panelling and opalescent grey and mauve silk wall coverings and draped curtains were all carefully chosen to match the lilac hues of Alexandra’s upholstered chaise-longue-cum-daybed with its lace cushions. This bed was concealed behind a wooden screen to keep away draughts. Further into the room were a white upright piano and a writing desk, and the tsaritsa’s personal library of favourite books. But always, too, a basket of toys and children’s games were at hand, for this is where the family would usually gravitate in the evenings.6

In August of 1897, on a reciprocal visit to Russia in furtherance of the Franco-Russian alliance, President Faure was eager to see ‘La Grande Duchesse Olga’ once more. He took great delight in dandling her on his knee – far longer, it was said, than ‘arranged for by the Protocol’ – and he held baby Tatiana in his arms as well.7 The president brought with him an expensive gift of a Morocco leather trunk emblazoned with Olga’s initials and coat of arms, containing three exquisite French dolls.8 One of them had a ‘complete trousseau: dresses, lingerie, hats, slippers, the entire equipment of a dressing-table, all reproduced with remarkable art and fidelity’.9 She was dressed in blue surah silk trimmed with the finest Valenciennes lace and when a spring was pressed on her chest her waxen lips would open and say ‘Bonjour ma chère, petite mama! As-tu bien dormi cette nuit?’10

President Faure was not the only person to be smitten with the two little sisters: everyone found them the most sweet and winning children. ‘Our little daughters are growing, and turning into delightful happy little girls’, Nicholas told his mother that November. ‘Olga talks the same in Russian and in English and adores her little sister. Tatiana seems to us, understandably, a very beautiful child, her eyes have become dark and large. She is always happy and only cries once a day without fail, after her bath when they feed her.’11 Many were already beginning to note Olga’s precocious and friendly manner, among them Princess Mariya Baryatinskaya who was invited to Tsarskoe Selo to meet the tsaritsa by her niece and namesake, who was a lady-in-waiting:

She had her little Olga by her side, who, when she saw me, said, ‘What are you?’ in English, and I said, ‘I am Princess Baryatinsky!’ ‘Oh but you can’t be,’ she replied, ‘we’ve got one already!’ The little lady regarded me with an air of great astonishment, then, pressing close to her mother’s side, she adjusted her shoes, which I could see were new ones. ‘New shoes,’ she said. ‘You like them?’ – this in English.12

Everyone remarked on Alexandra’s relaxed manner in the privacy of their home with her children, but by November she was feeling very sick again, could not eat and was losing weight. Maria Feodorovna was swift to offer her own homespun medical advice:

She ought to try eating raw ham in bed in the morning before breakfast. It really does help against nausea … She must eat something so as not to lose strength, and eat in small quantities but often, say every other hour, until her appetite comes back. It is your duty, my dear Nicky, to watch over her and to look after her in every possible way, to see she keeps her feet warm and above all that she doesn’t go out in the garden in shoes. That is very bad for her.13

If another baby was on the way, nothing was said and the pregnancy did not progress. Alexandra’s English cousin Thora (daughter of her aunt Princess Helena) was making a four-month visit to Russia at the time and made no mention of it.14 Thora described Olga’s second birthday that November in a letter to Queen Victoria: ‘there was a short service in the morning … Alix took little Olga with us as it only last[ed] ten minutes or a quarter of an hour & she behaved beautifully & enjoyed the singing & tried to join in which nearly made us laugh.’15 Later that day they went to open an orphanage for 180 6–15-year-old girls and boys established to commemorate Olga’s birth, its upkeep personally funded by Alexandra.16 Life at Tsarskoe Selo was, as Thora told Grandmama, modest and familial:

We lead a very quiet life here and one can scarcely realize that they are an Emperor & Empress as there is, here in the country, an entire absence of state. None of the gentlemen live in the house & the one lady on duty takes her meals in her own room, so one never sees any of the suite unless people come or there is some function.17

The self-imposed isolation of her granddaughter clearly concerned Queen Victoria (who had been through her own troubled period of retreat from public view in the 1860s). Victoria demanded further elaboration from Thora, who responded: ‘As to what you say about Alix & Nicky seeing so few people … I think she quite knows how important it is she should get to know more of the society but the truth is she & Nicky are so absolutely happy together that they do not like to have to give up their evenings to receiving people.’18

No one caught a glimpse of Alexandra that winter – even in St Petersburg, and nothing was imparted to newspaper readers eager to know something of the domestic life of their monarchs. ‘It was almost a minor state secret to know if they took sugar with their tea, or had mustard with their beef’, observed Anglo-Russian writer Edith Almedingen.19 In any event, Alexandra seemed to be perpetually ill or pregnant – or both. In February 1898 she went down with a severe bout of measles – caught on a visit to one of the charity schools she supported – and suffered severe bronchial complications.20 The St Petersburg season was over by the time she recovered and many of her royal relatives were beginning to worry. When the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg visited Russia in August that year she opted to stay in St Petersburg rather than endure the domestic boredom of the Alexander Palace. ‘It seems that Nicky and Alix shut themselves up more than ever and never see a soul’, she told her daughter, adding that ‘Alix is not a bit popular’.21 Alexandra for her part cared little. On 21 September, when Nicholas unexpectedly had to go to Copenhagen with his mother for the Queen of Denmark’s funeral, she was distraught: ‘I cannot bear to think what will become of me without you – you who are my one and all, who make up all my life’, the words eerily like those of her grandmother whenever she was separated from Prince Albert. All Alexandra wanted was that she and Nicky should ‘live a quiet life of love’; besides, she thought she might be pregnant again. ‘If I only knew whether something is beginning with me or not’, she wrote to Nicky as he left. ‘God grant it may be so, I long for it and so does my Huzy too, I think.’22

Alexandra spent Nicholas’s absence at Livadia in the Crimea, where he rejoined her on 9 October, but it was the end of the month before his mother heard the news: ‘I am now in a position to tell you, dear Mama, that with God’s help – we expect a new happy event next May.’ But, he added:

She begs you not to talk about it yet, although I think this is an unnecessary precaution, because such news always spreads very quickly. Surely everyone here is guessing it already, for we have both stopped lunching and dining in the common dining room and Alix does not go driving any more, twice she fainted during Mass – everybody notices all this, of course.23

Privately, Alexandra was apprehensive not just about the sex of her unborn child, but the physical suffering to come: ‘I never like making plans’, she told Grandmama in England. ‘God knows how it will all end.’24 Fits of giddiness and severe nausea forced her to spend much of her third pregnancy lying down, or sitting on the balcony of the palace at Livadia. Her husband’s devotion to her was exemplary; he pushed his wife around in her bath chair and read to her daily and at length: first War and Peace and then a history of Alexander I. They remained in Livadia until 16 December. Till now managing only with a temporary nanny, Alexandra had set about finding a permanent one. Her cousin Thora’s lady-in-waiting Emily Loch had good contacts in England and knew whom to ask, and in December wrote to Alexandra recommending a Miss Margaretta Eagar. The thirty-six-year-old Irish Protestant came with good domestic skills as cook, housekeeper and needlewoman, as well as considerable experience in looking after children. She had trained as a medical nurse in Belfast and had worked as matron of a girls’ orphanage in Ireland, and was the older sister of one of Emily Loch’s friends. Emily sent a personal report on Miss Eagar to Alexandra, emphasizing that she was straightforward and unsophisticated, with no interest in court intrigues. When approached about the position, Margaretta had hesitated at first, fearful of the responsibility of looking after a newborn baby in addition to two small children. But as one of ten herself – seven of them girls – she had had plenty of experience looking after younger female siblings and took some additional training with babies before travelling to Russia.25 Her life there would, however, be extremely sheltered. She would have no opportunity of sharing her experiences with other British nannies and governesses, of whom there were many in St Petersburg. Any excursions with the children, and even on her own, would be strictly monitored by the tsar’s security police, allowing her little or no opportunity to see anything of ‘the land of the Czar’ beyond the confines of the imperial residences.26

On 2 February 1899, Margaretta Eagar arrived at the Winter Palace by train from Berlin. After resting, she was taken by Alexandra to see her new charges. It was the feast of the Purification of the Virgin and Olga and Tatiana were exquisitely dressed ‘in transparent white muslin dresses trimmed with Brussels lace, and worn over pale-blue satin slips. Pale-blue sashes and shoulder ribbons completed their costumes.’ ‘Innumerable Russian nurses and chambermaids’ would of course assist Margaretta in her duties, including trained children’s nurse Mariya Vishnyakova who had been hired in May 1897. Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna* recalled how the nursery staff at Tsarskoe Selo wore uniforms, ‘all in white, with small nurse-caps of white tulle. With this exception: two of their Russian nurses were peasants and wore the magnificent native peasant costumes.’27 Maria and her brother Dmitri (the children of Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich), who were a few years older than Olga and Tatiana, were among the first playmates the girls had within the Romanov family. Maria remembered how pleasant the ambience of the girls’ apartments was: ‘The rooms, light and spacious, were hung with flowered cretonne and furnished throughout with polished lemonwood’, which she found ‘luxurious, yet peaceful and comfortable’. After playing upstairs, the children would have an early supper in the nursery and then be taken down to see Nicholas and Alexandra, where they would be greeted and kissed ‘and the Empress would take from the nurse’s arms her youngest daughter, keeping the baby beside her on the chaise-longue’. The older children would sit and look at photograph albums ‘of which there was at least one on every table’. Everything was extremely relaxed; Nicholas sitting opening and reading his sealed dispatches, as Alexandra passed round the glasses of tea.28

Although Alexandra’s attitude to family life was unusually informal for an empress, she was certainly glad of Miss Eagar’s presence; for by March 1899 her pregnancy was proving extremely uncomfortable. The baby was lying in an awkward position that aggravated her sciatica; yet again she was spending most of her pregnancy in a bath chair.29 On 9 May the family left Tsarskoe Selo for Peterhof to await the arrival of the new member of the family, which was mercifully quick and straightforward. At 12.10 p.m. on 14 June 1899 another robust girl was born, weighing 10 lb (4.5 kg). They called her Maria, in honour of her grandmother, and Alexandra was soon happily breastfeeding her.

Nicholas registered no obvious air of dismay, his religious fatalism no doubt playing a part in his phlegmatic response. Nevertheless, it was noticed that soon after the baby was born ‘he set off on a long solitary walk’. He returned, ‘as outwardly unruffled as ever’, and noted in his diary that this had been another ‘happy day’. ‘The Lord sent us a third daughter.’ God’s will be done; he was reconciled.30 Grand Duke Konstantin, however, once again expressed what Nicholas was probably feeling deep inside: ‘And so there’s no Heir. The whole of Russia will be disappointed by this news.’31

‘I am so thankful that dear Alicky has recovered so well’, wrote Queen Victoria on receiving the telegram, but she could not conceal the serious dynastic issue it raised: ‘I regret the 3rd girl for the country. I know that an Heir would be more welcome than a daughter.’32 ‘Poor Alix … had another daughter, and it seems she was so ill the whole time with it poor thing’, wrote Crown Princess Marie of Romania to her mother the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg. ‘Now I suppose she will have to begin over again and then once more she will shut herself up and it discontents everyone.’33

When the European press got news of the arrival of yet another daughter they had a field day. The talk in St Petersburg, alleged Lloyds Weekly Newspaper, is

that the birth of a third daughter to the Czar is regarded as an event of great political importance. Absurd as it may sound, there is a strong party there which waited only for this event to resume their mischievous intrigues against the Czarina, in whom they hate the Princess of Anglo-German blood. The influence of the Empress-Dowager, whose relations with her daughter-in-law are, as is known, anything but cordial, is expected to increase.34

Another paper came up with a more chilling claim: ‘it is reported that the Dowager-Empress, who is evidently superstitious, on her arrival at Peterhof, met the Czar with the accusatory words: “Six daughters have been foretold unto me: to-day the half of the prophecy has been fulfilled.”’35 At home in Russia the birth of a third daughter certainly fuelled the widespread superstitious belief that Alexandra’s arrival in Russia – in the dying days of Alexander III – had been a bad omen for the marriage: ‘The birth of three daughters in succession with the empire still lacking an heir was seen as proof that their forebodings had been well founded.’36 A manifestation of how close rampant superstition lay beneath the surface of official Orthodoxy was brought home to Margaretta Eagar at Maria’s christening a fortnight later. After the baby was dipped in the font three times, ‘the hair was cut in four places, in the form of a cross. What was cut off was rolled in wax and thrown into the font.’ Eagar was told that ‘according to Russian superstition the good or evil future of the child’s life depends on whether the hair sinks or swims’. She was happy to note: ‘Little Marie’s hair behaved in an orthodox fashion and all sank at once, so there is no need for alarm concerning her future.’37

Nicholas put a brave face on it and sent his wife a note: ‘I dare complain the least, having such happiness on earth, having a treasure like you my beloved Alix, and already the three little cherubs. From the depth of my heart do I thank God for all His blessings, in giving me you. He gave me paradise and has made my life an easy and happy one.’38 Such depth of feeling did not square with the confident claim of the Paris correspondent of The Times that the tsar was ‘weary of rule’. Apparently so dejected was Nicholas at the birth of another daughter that he had declared himself ‘disappointed and tired of the throne’ and was about to abdicate. ‘The absence of an heir excites his superstitious feelings,’ it went on to explain, ‘and he connects himself with a Russian legend according to which an heirless czar is to be succeeded by a Czar Michael, predestined to occupy Constantinople.’39

As things turned out Margaretta Eagar coped happily with the arrival of the new baby. She found her charges most endearing, particularly the precociously bright and quizzical Olga. The two older girls were fine-looking children and Tatiana had a particular delicate beauty. But it was the new baby who stole Margaretta’s heart: Maria ‘was born good, I often think, with the very smallest trace of original sin possible’.40 And who could resist her? She was ‘a real beauty, very big with enormous blue eyes’, according to the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg; a gentleman at court went one better, remarking that little Maria ‘had the face of one of Botticelli’s angels’.41

By 1900 the three little Romanov sisters were attracting considerable attention abroad, with much discussion of which was the prettiest, cleverest, or most endearing. ‘The flower of the flock, as far as looks are concerned … is Grand Duchess Tatiana’, was the opinion of the British magazine, Woman at Home. ‘She is a real beauty, with dark pathetic eyes, and wistful little mouth. But the Grand Duchess Olga, the eldest, is such a hearty, merry child, everybody loves her.’ The author of the article wondered, as others had done since the Balmoral visit, ‘whether she is destined to be our future Queen Consort!’42

Although Alexandra had plenty of staff at her disposal, she continued to spend so much time in the nursery that ‘they began to say at court that the empress was not a tsaritsa but only a mother’. Even when dealing with day-to-day official business in the mauve boudoir, she would often be dandling one child on her knee or rocking another in her cradle, ‘while with the other hand she signed official papers’. She and Nicholas were hardly seen, even by members of their own entourage. When her ladies did have a moment’s conversation with the empress alone, she only ever had two topics of conversation – Nicky and her children. As Princess Baryatinskaya recalled, it was only when talking of how ‘deeply interesting’ she found it to ‘watch the gradual development of a child step by step’ that Alexandra’s mournful shyness was ‘for once subsumed in a moment’s true pleasure’.43

Maria Feodorovna strongly disapproved of so much mothering by her daughter-in-law. An empress should be visible, performing her ceremonial duties, but Alexandra stubbornly refused to put herself or her children on show, although she genuinely wished to play an active role in philanthropic work, as her mother Alice had done. Her social projects included establishing workhouses for the poor, crèches for working mothers, a school for training nurses at Tsarskoe Selo and another for housemaids. Having a particular concern about the high infant mortality rate and the welfare of women during pregnancy, she also set about organizing midwives for rural areas.44 The illustrated magazines, however, were left to create their own fantasy figure of the ‘womanly woman, who lives in a secluded mansion and nurses her own children’. The tsaritsa was to be commended, readers of the Young Woman were told, for she was ‘something more than a figurehead. Even if she had done nothing else, she has nursed her own baby, and an Empress nursing a baby is a sight worth living to see.’45

The first intimations of a possible crisis in the Russian succession came in August 1899 when Nicholas’s brother the tsarevich, Grand Duke Georgiy, died suddenly at Abbas Tuman in the Caucasus. A manifesto was issued soon after, declaring that the next in line to the throne was now Nicholas’s youngest brother Grand Duke Mikhail, but he was only named as heir and not given the formal title of tsarevich, in anticipation that Nicholas would soon have a son. Gossip in Russia had it that this was a superstitious act on the part of the couple, out of a fear that to make Michael tsarevich would in some way jinx them and ‘prevent the appearance in the world of [their own] boy’.46

It is certainly clear that after Grand Duke Georgiy’s death, the level of concern escalated, for the first time arousing real fears that the tsaritsa might never have a boy. After Maria was born letters of advice began arriving – from England, France, Belgium, and as far afield as the USA, Latin America and Japan – offering the secret of begetting a son. Many correspondents solicited thousands of dollars from the imperial couple in return for divulging their miracle panaceas. Most of the theories on offer were in fact variants of those much talked about since publication in 1896 of The Determination of Sex by the Austrian embryologist, Dr Leopold Schenk. Himself the father of eight sons, of whom six had survived, Schenk considered this proof that his method worked. In October 1898 when Alexandra had been trying to fall pregnant for a third time she had apparently instructed one of her doctors in Yalta ‘to study Dr Schenk’s theory thoroughly and to communicate with him’; she had subsequently ‘lived exactly according to Dr Schenk’s precepts’, supervised at St Petersburg and Perhof by that Yalta doctor. The story first broke in an article on Dr Schenk in the American press in December 1898, which reported that he was ‘at present, with an assistant, working in the court of Russia, where the Czar of all the Russias longs for an heir’. The article claimed that it was ‘an open secret in Russia that the Czarina … has placed herself under Dr Schenk’s treatment and is willing to await the result’.47

At a time when the genetics of conception were still not understood, Schenk’s theories had been pooh-poohed by many of his medical contemporaries but he stuck to his guns, arguing that the sex of the child depended upon which ovary had ovulated: an unripe ovum, released soon after menstruation, would produce female children and a ripe one males. Schenk also believed that nutrition played a key role in the development of sexual characteristics, and his advice focused on the nutrition of the mother up to and during pregnancy. A woman wanting a son, he argued, should eat more meat in order to raise the level of blood corpuscles (perhaps Maria Feodorovna had also read Dr Schenk’s book?), there being more in the male than the female. Other unsolicited advice was offered from within Russia, based on more superstitious practice.* ‘Ask your wife, the empress, to lie on the left hand side of the bed’ wrote one correspondent, instructing that he, Nicholas, lie on the right – a euphemistic allusion to the popular belief that ‘if the husband mounts his wife from the left a girl will be born, if from the right a boy’ (the ‘missionary position’ in Russian being na kone ‘on a horse’).†48

Whatever the efficacy of the remedies offered them, in October 1900, while they were staying in Livadia, Nicholas was pleased to inform his mother that Alexandra was once again pregnant. As with her previous pregnancies, she was receiving no one, he said, ‘and is in the open air all day’.49 The happy couple’s quiet retreat was, however, suddenly disrupted at the end of that month when Nicholas fell seriously ill with what was at first put down to a severe case of influenza and then diagnosed as ‘an abdominal typhus peculiar to the Crimea’, although the foreign press widely referred to it as typhoid fever.50 Its onset provoked widespread concern for Nicholas, at a time when Russia was viewed as an important international power during the hostilities of the Boer War in Africa and the Boxer Rebellion in China.

Many papers referred to the tsar’s supposed delicate health and that he appeared to have suffered from attacks of vertigo and severe headaches in the previous three years.51 The reality was that despite being a heavy smoker, Nicholas in general enjoyed very good health and was extremely physically active. The attack of typhoid while serious was not ultimately life-threatening, but in all he was confined to bed for five weeks, suffering at times from agonizing pain in his back and legs and becoming very thin and weak. Despite her pregnancy, Alexandra had from the first taken exclusive control of his nursing and proved an exceptionally capable sickbed nurse. Aside from the loyal help of Mariya Baryatinskaya, she allowed virtually nobody near her precious husband and demonstrated ‘a very strong will’. She also ‘made the most of the fact that she found herself alone with the Czar in such an emergency’, vetting any urgent documents regarding affairs of state and ‘with exquisite tact … know[ing] how to keep from the Czar all that might have caused him excitement or worry’.52

Nicholas was flattered by his wife’s excessive care: ‘My darling Alix nursed and looked after me like the best of sisters of mercy. I can’t describe what she was for me during my illness. May God bless her.’53 The girls meanwhile were sent away from the palace, for fear of infection, and lodged at the house of one of the imperial entourage who had daughters of his own. Alexandra insisted on having them brought to the palace every day, ‘to a place where she could see them through a window, and looked at them for some time to convince herself that they were in perfect health’. Beyond the sickroom, however, the spectre of a Russian throne without a male heir once more rose, provoking considerable concern about what would happen should Nicholas die.

Back in 1797, Emperor Paul I had regularized the transfer of power in Russia by abandoning the old law of primogeniture and setting down clear rules on a male-only line of succession. This had been done in an attempt to avoid palace coups of the kind that had brought the mother he hated, Catherine the Great, to power.54 Until now, with previous tsars having plenty of sons, there had been no reason to seek changes to the Fundamental Laws on the succession. Even though Olga was not yet five years old, neither Nicholas nor Alexandra wished his brother, twenty-one-year-old Grand Duke Mikhail, to accede to the throne in preference to their own daughter or the child Alexandra was carrying. She certainly was distraught at the prospect; her baby might well be a boy, and she insisted that she be nominated regent in anticipation of that and until her son came of age. Although desperately ill, Nicholas was consulted and sided with his wife. His minister of finance, Count Witte, held a meeting with other ministers in Yalta; they all agreed that there was no precedent in Russian law that allowed a pregnant tsaritsa to rule in hopes of eventually producing a son, and it was decided that if the tsar died, they would swear an oath of allegiance to Mikhail as tsar.55 Should Alexandra’s baby turn out to be a boy, Witte was confident that Mikhail would renounce the throne in his nephew’s favour.

In the aftermath of his illness, Nicholas remained mindful of protecting his eldest daughter’s dynastic interests, and instructed government ministers to draft a decree to the effect that Olga would succeed to the throne if he should die without a son and heir.56 The impact on Alexandra of this debate over the succession was profound; psychologically, it marked the onset of a creeping paranoia that the throne might be wrested from her yet-to-be-born son by plotters in court circles and it further alienated her from the rest of the Romanov family, whom she mistrusted. In one thing she was fiercely resolute: she would defend the Russian throne for her future son, at absolutely any cost.

While their parents had both been hidden from view for weeks, the three Romanov sisters had been seen a great deal in and around Yalta that autumn. ‘Nothing can be prettier’, wrote a local correspondent, ‘than the three little girls in the carriage, chattering and asking questions, and bowing when passers-by take their hats off to them’, adding somewhat mischievously that ‘the smallest Princess is living proof of the inefficiency of Professor Schenk’s theories’.57 For some time the girls continued to be the only public face of the Russian imperial family and according to press reports were extraordinarily unspoilt, thanks to the tsaritsa’s principle that her children should be ‘brought up without any extreme or special consideration on account of their high position and imperial birth’. They were always modestly dressed in ‘cheap, white dresses, short English stockings and plain, light shoes’; the temperature in their rooms was ‘always kept moderate’ and they went out into the fresh air even in the coldest of weather. ‘All useless, heavy etiquette and luxury are forbidden.’ The tsar and tsaritsa often went to see their children in the nursery; but even stranger and contrary to normal royal protocol, the correspondent reported with incredulity that ‘the august parents play with their daughters as mortal parents usually do’.58

The two older girls were already developing very clear and different personalities. Olga was ‘very kind hearted and of noble character’. She spoke Russian and English fluently, was talented at music and already a good pianist. Although she and Tatiana had a little English donkey, the tsar had recently indulged Olga’s request to ride side saddle ‘as grown up people do’, after she had admired the Cossack members of the Tsar’s Escort. ‘Charming Tatiana’, meanwhile, was ‘of a gay and lively temperament, and always quick and playful in her movements’. Both were very attached to their baby sister.59 No doubt they were, but Nicholas had already noted that Maria, who was now toddling, ‘falls often, because her elder sisters push her about and when one does not watch them they are altogether inclined to treat her very roughly’. He was pleased to report to his mother that Miss Eagar was doing an excellent job: ‘In the nursery all runs smoothly between nurse and the other girls, – it is real paradise in comparison with the dismal past.’60

With Nicholas’s doctors insisting he take a long convalescence in the Crimea, it was 9 January 1901 before the family left a beauti-ful, balmy Yalta in the Shtandart. At Sevastopol where they disembarked for the imperial train to St Petersburg, Nicholas and Alexandra received the news that Queen Victoria, whose health had been failing for some time, had died at Osborne on 22 January (NS). When they arrived back to a grey and gloomy St Petersburg, the Russian court season was immediately cancelled and the entire imperial household went into mourning. As Alexandra was now four months pregnant, the doctors would not allow her to travel to England for the funeral. Instead she attended a memorial service for her grandmother at the English Church in the capital, supported by Nicholas, where, much to everyone’s surprise, she openly wept. It was the first and only time many saw the tsaritsa give public display to her feelings.61

The loss of her beloved grandmama was profound but fortunately Alexandra remained well during this fourth pregnancy. Grand Duke Konstantin thought she was looking ‘very beautiful’ when he saw her in February and what is more she was feeling ‘wonderful, unlike the other occasions’. For this reason, the grand duke noted in his diary, ‘everyone is anxiously hoping that this time it will be a son’. But such preoccupations were forgotten in May when five-year-old Olga contracted typhoid at Peterhof.62 ‘She is separated from her sibling upstairs in the only empty room … but under the roof it is pretty hot’, Alexandra told a friend. ‘I spend most of the day with her; the stairs are tiring in my present condition.’ Olga was ill for five weeks and became very pale and thin; her long blonde hair had to be cut short because the illness had started to make it fall out. ‘She loves to have me with her, and for as long as I am on my feet, it is a delight to sit with her’, Alexandra added, for ‘to see a sick child really hurts and my heart weeps – God watch over her’.63 So changed was Olga by the illness that when Tatiana was taken in to see her sister she did not recognize her and wept.

When Madame Günst arrived at Peterhof in preparation for the fourth baby, she became concerned that the tsaritsa’s exertions looking after Olga might trigger a premature birth and she called in the doctors.64 But all was well. At 3 a.m. on 5 June, Alexandra went into labour at the Lower Dacha. It was very quick this time; three hours later, and without complications, she gave birth to a large, 11½ lb (5.2 kg) baby girl. Nicholas had little time to register any disappointment. It all happened so quickly, before the household were up and about, giving himself and Alexandra ‘a feeling of peace and seclusion’.65 They gave their new daughter the name Anastasia, from the Greek anastasis, meaning ‘resurrection’; in Russian Orthodox usage the name was linked to the fourth-century martyr St Anastasia, who had succoured Christians imprisoned for their faith and was known as the ‘breaker of chains’. In honour of this Nicholas ordered an amnesty for students imprisoned in St Petersburg and Moscow for rioting the previous winter.66 Anastasia was not a traditional Russian imperial name but in naming her thus the tsar and tsaritsa were perhaps expressing a profoundly held belief that God would answer their prayers and that the Russian monarchy might yet be resurrected – by the birth of a son.

The Russian people and the imperial family were, however, extremely despondent; as US diplomat’s wife Rebecca Insley Casper observed, the arrival of Anastasia had ‘created such indescribable agitation in a nation clamouring for a boy’.67 ‘My God! What a disappointment!… a fourth girl!’ exclaimed Grand Duchess Xenia. ‘Forgive us Lord, if we all felt disappointment instead of joy; we were so hoping for a boy, and it’s a fourth daughter’, echoed Grand Duke Konstantin.68 ‘Illuminations, but Disappointment’ ran the headlines of the Daily Mail in London on 19 June (NS). ‘There is much rejoicing, although there is a popular undercurrent of disappointment, for a son had been most keenly hoped for.’ The newspaper could not but offer commiserations: ‘the legitimate hopes of the Czar and Czarina have so far been cruelly frustrated, whatever may be their private parental feelings towards their four little daughters … [who] had been born into an expectant world with distressing regularity’.69 In Russia the response was once again heavy with superstitious resentment, as the French diplomat Maurice Paléologue reported: ‘We said so, didn’t we! The German, the nemka, has the evil eye. Thanks to her nefarious influence our Emperor is doomed to catastrophe.’70

In the face of so much negativity, and determined to show how proud he was of his fourth daughter, Nicholas ordered the fullest possible pageantry at her christening in August, which followed the same format as those for her sisters, and after which ‘the cannon boomed all the way from Peterhof back to the capital’. Later Nicholas entertained his illustrious guests to lunch, during which they ‘went up to the supposedly happy father to present their felicitations’. Rebecca Insley Casper reported that for once the tsar seemed unable to conceal his dismay, for, when he turned to one of the ambassadors, he was heard to say with a sad smile – ‘We must try again!’71

Three months later, Nicholas and Alexandra visited the new French president, Emile Loubet, at Compiègne, leaving the girls at Kiel in the care of Alexandra’s sister Irene. The security surrounding them was intense: the town swarmed with French police who were even sent to ‘beat the forest and search every copse and thicket’ for undesirables. The chateau where Nicholas and Alexandra stayed was searched ‘from garret to basement’ and plain clothes detectives mingled with the staff.72

The imperial couple seemed clearly devoted, but there was an air of unmistakable melancholy about Alexandra. At a public reception Margaret Cassini, daughter of the Russian ambassador to Washington, thought her withdrawn air very marked. She looked luminous, as usual, dressed in white and wearing exquisite jewels ‘mostly pearls and diamonds, from ears to waist’. But, as Cassini could not help noticing, ‘she wears them without joy’. The French found the sombre Russian empress hard to fathom: ‘Oh, la la! Elle a une figure d’enterrement,’* they complained. Her sadness, thought Cassini, was a reflection of her being ‘a mother only of girls’. ‘Have you children?’ Alexandra would ask of ladies presented to her at court, only for sadness to descend whenever the lady in question replied as she curtsied, ‘A son, Your Majesty.’73

‘Nicholas would part with half his Empire in exchange for one Imperial boy’, remarked the travel writer Burton Holmes that year, wondering ‘Will one of the dear little duchesses some day ascend the throne of Catherine the Great?’74

But privately the imperial couple had not given up hope. Barely a month after Anastasia’s birth a new person was in evidence within their inner circle at Peterhof and was being referred to by them as ‘our friend’. A certain ‘Maître Philippe’ – a fashionable French faith-healer-cum-mystic – had arrived in Russia at the invitation of Grand Duke Petr and his wife Militza, and was staying with them at their home, Znamenka, not far from the Lower Dacha.75 It was there that Nicholas and Alexandra – who had met Philippe briefly in March – soon became locked into long evenings of earnest conversation with this mysterious French visitor. In their desperation for a son they were now turning to faith healing and the occult.