فصل 04

Chapter Four

THE HOPE OF RUSSIA

In the Russian imperial family there was a custom, whereby all brides on the night before their wedding would go to St Petersburg’s Kazan Cathedral to pray before the wonder-working icon of the Mother of God. According to Russian superstition, failure to perform this ritual would lead to infertility or the birth of only girls. When the tsaritsa had been told this before her wedding in 1894 – so the gossip in St Petersburg went – she had refused to go, saying that she had no intention of kowtowing to obsolete practices.1 For the highly superstitious Russian peasantry it seemed clear, by 1901, that ‘the Empress was not beloved in heaven or she would have borne a son’.2 God was angry.

Under such intense pressure, Alexandra was naturally susceptible to the insidious influence of men such as Nizier Anthelme Philippe.3 His background was shadowy and medically dubious. The son of peasant farmers from Savoy, he had been working in his uncle’s butcher’s shop in Lyons, when at the age of thirteen he began claiming extra-sensory powers. Aged twenty-three, and without completing any formal medical training, he set himself up in practice without a licence, offering treatment with mysterious ‘psychic fluids and astral forces’.4 In 1884 Philippe had presented a paper, ‘Principles of Hygiene Applicable in Pregnancy, Childbirth and Infancy’, in which he had claimed he could predict the sex of a child and, even more outlandishly, that he could use his magnetic powers to change its sex inside the womb.5 Philippe’s occult medicine was geared to hypnosis sessions with patients and business prospered, despite his being fined several times for practising illegally; by the late 1890s his consulting rooms in Paris were besieged by fashionable French society. The Russian aristocracy too was becoming interested in mysticism and the occult at this time; in the south of France the Montenegrin princess, Militza, had solicited Philippe’s help in treating her sick son Roman.6 So convinced were she and her husband Grand Duke Petr of Philippe’s supposed miraculous powers of healing, that they invited him to St Petersburg. On 26 March 1901 they introduced him to Nicholas and Alexandra. ‘This evening we met the amazing Frenchman Mr Philippe’, Nicholas recorded in his diary. ‘We talked with him for a long time.’7

Militza soon began badgering Nicholas to arrange for Philippe to be allowed to practise in Russia, despite objections from the medical establishment. A medical diploma was contrived for him, under duress, from the Petersburg Military Medical Academy and Philippe was given the rank of State Councillor and the uniform of an imperial military doctor, complete with gold epaulettes. Close relatives – including Xenia, Maria Feodorovna and Ella – were alarmed and warned Nicholas and Alexandra to stay well away from Philippe, but all attempts to discredit him in their eyes failed. Even a report on his dubious practices, sent to Nicholas by the Okhrana in Paris with the connivance of Maria Feodorovna, had no effect; Nicholas promptly dismissed the agent who had prepared it.8

Convinced that at last they had found a sympathetic ear, the couple hung on Maître Philippe’s words of pseudo-mystical wisdom at every opportunity. When he returned on a twelve-day visit in July they went to see him daily, making the short drive from the Lower Dacha to Znamenka, and often staying late into the night. ‘We were deeply moved listening to him’, wrote Nicholas; ‘what wonderful hours’ they spent with their friend.9 They even cut short a visit to the theatre on the 14th to go straight to Znamenka and sit talking to Philippe until 2.30 in the morning. The evening before Philippe left they all sat and prayed together and said goodbye with heavy hearts. During their brief visit to Compiègne Nicholas and Alexandra contrived to see Philippe again, and snatched another meeting with him when he returned to Znamenka in November.

Beyond this inner sanctum, Nicholas and Alexandra’s association with Philippe was a closely guarded secret, though rumour at the time was rife. It was alleged that Philippe ‘carried out experiments in hypnotism, prophecy, incarnation and necromancy’ in the imperial couple’s presence and that utilizing his own particular combination of ‘hermetic medicine, astronomy and psychurgy’ he had claimed to direct ‘the evolution of the embryonic phenomena’.10 Psychobabble or not, during his visit in July Philippe had won the confidence of the empress and penetrated her intensely private world; after his departure he continued to offer advice to the imperial couple on achieving the birth of an heir, as well as passing on overtly political prognostications, advising that Nicholas should never grant a constitution, ‘as that would be the ruin of Russia’.11

By the end of 1901, and within five months of giving birth to Anastasia, the tsaritsa had once more fallen pregnant. It seemed a total vindication of Philippe’s prayers and powers of autosuggestion. They kept the news of the pregnancy from their family as long as they could, but by the spring of 1902, it was clear that the tsaritsa was getting fatter and had stopped wearing a corset. Xenia, who by now was also pregnant – for a sixth time – did not find out for certain until April, when Alexandra wrote to her, admitting that ‘now it begins to be difficult to hide. Don’t write to Motherdear [the dowager empress], as I want to tell it to her when she returns next week. I feel so well, thank God; in August! – My broad waist all winter must have struck you.’12

Philippe spent four days in St Petersburg in March of 1902, staying with Militza’s sister Stana – another devoted acolyte – and her husband the Duke of Leuchtenburg, where once again Nicholas and Alexandra visited. ‘We listened to him over supper and for the rest of that evening until one a.m. We could have gone on listening to him for ever’, Nicholas recalled.13 Philippe’s hold over Alexandra was such that he advised her not to allow any doctors to examine her, even as her due date approached. But by the summer she was showing worryingly little physical sign of what should have been an advanced state of pregnancy. Nevertheless, in August manifestos announcing the imminent birth were made ready. When Dr Ott took up residence at Peterhof for the delivery, he immediately realized something was wrong. It took considerable persuasion before Alexandra would agree to his examining her, upon which Ott immediately announced that she was not pregnant.

Alexandra’s ‘phantom pregnancy’ provoked considerable consternation in the imperial family: ‘From 8 August we have been waiting every day for confirmation of the Empress’s pregnancy,’ wrote Grand Duke Konstantin. ‘Now we have suddenly learned that she is not pregnant, indeed that there never was any pregnancy, and that the symptoms that led to suppose it were in fact only anaemia! What a disappointment for the Tsar and Tsarina! Poor things!’ A deeply distressed Alexandra wrote to Elizaveta Naryshkina, who had been anxiously awaiting news at her estate in the country: ‘Dear Friend, do not come. There will be no christening – there is no child – there is nothing! It is a catastrophe!’14

Such had been the level of rumour that an official, face-saving bulletin on the tsaritsa’s health was published by the court physicians Ott and Gustav Girsh on 21 August: ‘Several months ago there were changes in the state of health of Her Imperial Highness the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, indicating a pregnancy. At the present time, owing to a departure from the normal course of things, the pregnancy has resulted in a straightforward miscarriage, without any complications.’15

Alexandra’s true condition had, however, been an unusual one that was never made public. In a secret report submitted to Nicholas, Dr Girsh gave the precise details. Alexandra had last menstruated on 1 November 1901 and had genuinely believed she was pregnant, anticipating a birth at the beginning of the following August, even though, approaching her due date, she had not significantly increased in size. Then on 16 August she had had a bleed. Ott and Günst had been called in but Alexandra had refused to let them examine her; on the evening of the 19th she experienced what seemed like early labour pains and had another show of blood that continued till the following morning. But when she got up to wash, she suffered a discharge – of a spherical, fleshy mass the size of a walnut, which when examined under the microscope by Ott was confirmed as a dead fertilized egg in the fourth week of gestation. In his opinion the tsaritsa had been suffering from a condition known as ‘Mole Carnosum’ (hydatidiform mole) – and the loss of blood had flushed the egg out.16

The news that the tsaritsa had ‘miscarried’, far from winning sympathy for her among the Russian people, sadly had the reverse effect. It sparked a wave of merciless vilification and all kinds of outlandish rumour that she had given birth to some kind of deformed child – a monster, ‘a freak with horns’. Such was official paranoia about this that part of the libretto of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan, referring to how ‘the tsaritsa gave birth in the night not to a son, nor a daughter, nor a dog, nor a frog but – some kind of unknown wild creature’, was censored.17 As far as the suspicious Russian people were concerned, the hand of God lay heavy on their ill-fated sovereigns. The absence of a son was the tsar’s punishment, many said, for the Khodynka tragedy of 1896, when thousands had been trampled to death during a stampede at the coronation festivities in Moscow.18

In England, the Anglo-Russian responded, albeit with a jaundiced eye, to the growing criticism being heaped on the unfortunate tsaritsa for failing to produce an heir, by striking a blow for a female Russian monarch:

Once again the Tsaritsa has disregarded the Salic law and disappointed the sex-biased Russian populace, who even show dislike amounting to hatred toward the gifted mother … yet a little knowledge of natural law and of history would demonstrate that ‘a perfect woman nobly planned’ is ‘Nature’s Crown’, and a female sovereign has often been the salvation of a people, denoting their era of greatest material and social progress.19

Word was by now leaking into the foreign press that Philippe’s influence over the imperial couple went well beyond ‘psychical methods of healing’ in the conception of a son and that Nicholas had even subjected himself to ‘hypnotic experiments’, during which Philippe ‘calls forth the spirit of Alexander III, foretells the future, and inspires the Czar with one or another decision concerning not only his domestic, but also State affairs’.20 Philippe’s reputation took a dip and accusatory voices that he was a charlatan bent on meddling in affairs of state mounted, making his position at the Russian court untenable. Nicholas and Alexandra were loath to part with him but at the end of 1902 Philippe returned to France with gifts from his grateful imperial patrons including a Serpollet motor car.21 In return Philippe presented Alexandra with an icon with a small bell, which, he told her, would ring to alert her should anyone meaning her harm enter the room. She also kept a frame with dried flowers that he gave her, which he claimed had been touched by the hand of the saviour. And then he departed, leaving one final, tantalizing prediction: ‘Someday you will have another friend like me who will speak to you of God.’22

In the persisting climate of recrimination at the absence of an heir to the throne, rumours began circulating after the ‘miscarriage’ of 1902 that Nicholas would be prevailed upon to divorce Alexandra – much as Napoleon Bonaparte had divorced Empress Josephine in 1810, after fourteen years of marriage, for failing to provide him with a son. There was even talk that the tsar would abdicate if his next child was another daughter. Within Russia, the tsaritsa’s position was growing ‘extremely precarious’. Rumour abounded that she had become the victim of ‘profound and growing melancholy since her hope of becoming a mother again was dashed’, so much so that her desire to produce an heir had become ‘almost a mania with her’.23 Meanwhile sympathy abroad grew for the four imperial daughters so systematically marginalized in the Russian public’s imagination, such as in this quip published in the Pittsburgh press in November 1901:

Mrs Gaswell: The Czar of Russia has now four little daughters.Mr Gaswell: Oh, the dear little Czardines.24

The year 1903 was an important one for the Romanov family, beginning with the celebrations for the bicentenary of the foundation of St Petersburg. In a rare court appearance – as it turned out, their last for several years to come – Nicholas and Alexandra took centre stage at what would be the last great costume ball held before the revolution. Alexandra looked magnificent, if rather uncomfortable, ornately dressed as the Tsaritsa Maria Miloslavskaya in a heavy gold brocade costume and unwieldy crown, with her husband at her side and rather eclipsed by her, dressed as their favourite tsar, Alexey I. Alexandra seemed a beautiful vision, a ‘Byzantine Madonna come down from among the jewelled ikons of a cathedral’.25 But it was an image of autocratic remoteness that, seen at the centre of this splendid gathering of St Petersburg’s wealthy aristocratic elite, served only to accentuate both her and Nicholas’s total isolation from the ordinary Russian people. Later that summer, however, the Russian people would be rewarded with a very rare glimpse of the royal couple, in their continuing quest for a son.

Before Philippe had left for France he had recommended that the imperial couple pray for the intercession of St Seraphim of Sarov, and they would have a son. There was, however, a problem: there was no official saint of that name in the Russian Orthodox calendar. After a frantic search, it was eventually ascertained that a monk at the Diveevo Monastery at Sarov in the Tambov region, 250 miles (403 km) east of Moscow, had been revered locally for performing miracles. But none of these had been officially verified and Seraphim had been dead for seventy years. Nor had his body, when his coffin was opened for inspection, passed the acid test of sanctity by appearing miraculously uncorrupted. It was in an advanced state of decay. As emperor, Nicholas nevertheless had the power to order that this unknown miracle-worker be canonized, whatever the state of his corpse. The Metropolitan of Moscow found himself obliged to find a way of upholding Seraphim’s sanctity, as being ‘fully established by the many miracles performed in connexion with his remains, including the soil in which he lies buried, the stone on which he prayed, and the water from the well which he bored – by all of which many believers have been restored to health’.26 As Elizaveta Naryshkina noted, the contrivance of Seraphim’s sainthood was seen as a direct result of Alexandra’s involvement with her new ‘friend’: ‘It would be difficult to know where Philippe ends and Seraphim begins.’27 In February 1903 the Metropolitan finally sanctioned the canonization.

Leaving their daughters behind in the care of Margaretta Eagar, Nicholas and Alexandra travelled in intense heat to Sarov for the formal ceremony, in the company of Nicholas’s sister Olga, Maria Feodorovna, Ella and Sergey, and Militza and Stana. Nicholas was well aware that the canonization ceremony would serve an important purpose, as an act of collective religious faith underpinning his autocratic rule, for the imperial guests were joined by something approaching 300,000 devout pilgrims, who descended on Sarov, raising a huge cloud of dust in the process. Hordes of the blind, the sick and the crippled, all seeking a miracle, tried to mob their little father and kiss his hand. In an atmosphere saturated with mystical religious fervour and the incessant ringing of bells, the family attended three days of protracted church services, often of over three hours’ duration, in the boiling heat.28 Despite the pain in her legs, Alexandra endured the devotions on her feet, with deep piety and without complaint. The intense faith manifested at Sarov by the many pilgrims fuelled her own unshakeable belief in the sacred, inviolable communion between tsar and people. Nicholas helped carry the coffin containing Seraphim’s sacred relics on a litter during the ceremonies, culminating in its interment on 19 August in a specially created shrine built in St Seraphim’s honour. That evening, as an important, symbolic act of religious faith, Alexandra and Nicholas went in private down to the nearby Sarova River, where Seraphim himself had once bathed and – as Philippe had instructed them – submerged themselves in its sacred waters in the hope that they might be blessed with a son.

In the autumn of 1903 the Romanov family made a visit to Darmstadt for the wedding of Princess Alice of Battenberg and Prince Andrew of Greece.* Ernie and Ducky – a mismatched couple from the first – had by now sadly separated and divorced, but Ernie was devoted to their eight-year-old daughter Elisabeth, who spent six months of the year with him. After the wedding, the two families travelled to Wolfsgarten for a private holiday, where Olga and Tatiana played happily with their cousin, riding bicycles and ponies and going out mushroom-picking. Elisabeth was a strange, ethereal child with eyes full of pathos and a halo of dark curly hair that contradicted her warm and lively personality. She was greatly taken with her ‘tiny cousin’ Anastasia, took to mothering her and wanted to take her back home with her to Darmstadt.29

When the imperial family left Hesse, Ernie and Elisabeth travelled on with them to the tsar’s hunting lodge on the imperial estate at Skierniewice near the Bia?owiea Forest in today’s Poland, where Nicholas went for regular hunting trips. But on the morning of 15 November, and without warning, Elisabeth suddenly fell sick. It seemed at first to be a bad sore throat, but her temperature continued to rise and, lying dangerously ill, she begged Margaretta Eagar to send for her mother. The illness, however, overwhelmed her and there was nothing the doctors could do. Within forty-eight hours Elisabeth was dead, carried off by a particularly virulent form of typhoid that had caused heart failure.30 The sisters were greatly distressed by their cousin’s sudden death and immediately afterwards Margaretta took all four of them back to Tsarskoe Selo, so that their rooms at Skierniewice could be fumigated. Olga was bewildered: ‘What a pity that the dear God has taken away from me such a good friend!’ she told Margaretta plaintively. Later, at Christmas, she remembered Elisabeth again, wondering to Margaretta whether God had purposely ‘sent for her to keep with him’ in Heaven.31

Almost immediately after Ernie took Elisabeth’s sad little coffin back to Darmstadt, Alexandra fell ill with a severe ear infection and instead of travelling on to Elisabeth’s funeral, remained confined to bed at Skierniewice for six long weeks. The pain was so bad that an ear specialist was called in from Warsaw. Desperate to be with her children for Christmas and arrange the tree and presents for them and the staff, Alexandra travelled back to Russia before she was fully recovered.32 No sooner had she arrived at Tsarskoe Selo than she went down with influenza and on Christmas Eve, as Margaretta Eagar recalled, she was ‘very ill and could not see the children’.33 Instead Nicholas supervised the tree and the distribution of presents. This was no mean task, for the family had eight large trees brought in at Christmas – for themselves, the staff and even the Tsar’s Escort. Alexandra liked to decorate them all herself, in addition to laying out the huge array of presents for the household on long tables covered with crisp white tablecloths – very much in the German style adopted by her grandmother at Windsor. The girls as usual took pride in making their own little gifts, but Christmas that year was a sad and subdued one, haunted by the death of their cousin and with their mother confined to bed. ‘Wanting her, we wanted more than half of our usual gaiety’, Margaretta remembered.

The tsaritsa remained bedridden until mid-January and the family did not transfer to St Petersburg for the winter season until the following month.34 It was a difficult time to be laid so low by illness for Alexandra was pregnant again – her child probably conceived at Skierniewice – and her illness only exacerbated her anxieties. Xenia was sympathetic when she was finally told the news by Maria Feodorovna on 13 March: ‘It’s become noticeable now, but she, poor thing, had been concealing it as no doubt she was afraid that people would find out about it too soon.’35

Alexandra was saved from further criticism when the St Petersburg season was cut short with the outbreak in January 1904 of the Russo-Japanese War, triggered by Nicholas’s expansionist policies in southern Manchuria, a territory long contested by the Japanese. Many at court believed it to be a direct result of the insidious influence of Philippe, who had assured the couple that a short, sharp war would be a triumphant demonstration of Russian imperial might that would underline the inviolability of their autocracy. But it was an ill-judged conflict for which Russia was not prepared, her troops even less so, and the initial burst of patriotic fervour rapidly faded.

During the war, the little grand duchesses were inevitably susceptible to the racist and xenophobic talk prevalent at court; Margaretta Eagar recalled that it was ‘very sad to witness the wrathful, vindictive spirit that the war raised in my little charges’. Maria and Anastasia were perplexed by images of the ‘queer little children’ of the Crown Prince of Japan that they saw in magazines. ‘Horrid little people,’ exclaimed Maria, ‘they came and destroyed our poor little ships and drowned our sailors.’ Mama had told them ‘the Japs were all only little people’. ‘I hope the Russian soldiers will kill all of the Japanese’, exclaimed Olga one day, upon which Margaretta explained that the Japanese women and children were not to blame. The bright and opinionated Olga seemed satisfied after several of her questions had been answered: ‘I did not know that the Japs were people like ourselves. I thought they were only like monkeys.’36

The war, meanwhile, had galvanized Alexandra’s talent for philanthropic work and despite her pregnancy, she had engaged in war relief, sending portable field chapels to the troops and organizing supplies and hospital trains. For the first time in years she was once again conspicuous in St Petersburg, overseeing groups of women gathered to make clothing and sort linen and bandages for the hospital trains in the ballrooms of the Winter Palace. Just as Queen Victoria and her daughters had sat knitting and sewing during the Crimean War of 1854–6, so Alexandra and her four daughters crocheted caps and knitted scarves for the troops; and young though she was, Anastasia proved herself extraordinarily adept at frame knitting.37 The girls also helped Margaretta Eagar fold and stamp piles of letter-forms for wounded troops to write home to their families on.

As the months passed and the birth of the tsaritsa’s fifth baby approached, the foreign press inevitably was awash with speculation. ‘That great events may hinge on small ones is, unfortunately, a truism’, observed an editorial in the Bystander:

A few days will decide whether the Czarina is to be the most popular woman in Russia, or regarded by the great bulk of the people as a castaway – under the special wrath of God. It is said that she prays night and day that the coming child may prove a son in order that she may win the hearts of her husband’s people by giving an heir to the sovereignty of All the Russias. Just at this minute the Czarina – waiting for the mysterious decision of God and Nature – is one of the most pitiful figures in Europe, all the more so that her position allows her no shelter from the sympathy or curiosity of the world.38

‘Royal and imperial families make themselves very unhappy over matters American families never think of’, observed another editorial commenting on the simple, unspoilt lives of the consistently overlooked imperial daughters. ‘There are four of these little girls. They are bright, intelligent children, but nobody in Russia wants them, unless it be their parents.’ In the midst of so much speculation, there was no doubt how much Nicholas and Alexandra loved their daughters – their ‘little four leaved clover’ as Alexandra described them. ‘Our girlies are our joy and happiness, each so different in face and Character.’ She and Nicholas firmly believed that ‘Children are the apostles of God, which day after day He sends us, to speak of love, peace and hope’.39 But, as Edith Almedingen observed: ‘However beloved by their parents, the four little girls were just four prefaces to an exciting book which would not begin until their brother was born.’40

The onset of Alexandra’s fifth labour came very quickly indeed, at Peterhof on 30 July 1904. Ella and Sergey had been visiting from Moscow when, over lunch, Alexandra suddenly experienced strong labour pains and quickly retreated upstairs. Barely half an hour later, at 1.15 p.m., she gave birth to a large boy weighing 11½ lb (5.2 kg). She felt extremely well and looked radiant and soon after was happily breastfeeding.41

At long last the cannon of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg were able to boom out the 301-gun salute across the River Neva announcing the birth of a naslednik – an heir – the first to be born to a reigning monarch (rather than a tsarevich) since the seventeenth century. People stopped in their tracks to count the number of salutes, which came every six seconds. ‘The aspect of the streets’ suddenly changed, as the St Petersburg correspondent of the Daily Express reported on the paper’s front page: ‘National flags seemed to spring from every quarter, and in five minutes after the 102nd gun had boomed out its glad tidings the whole city was ablaze with flags. Work automatically stopped for the day and the people gave themselves over to public rejoicing.’ That evening the streets were bright with electric illuminations of the imperial twin-headed eagle and Romanov crowns; orchestras played in the parks, constantly repeating the National Anthem. Later, in many of the capital’s best restaurants the champagne flowed freely ‘at the expense of the proprietors’.42

‘We were nearly deafened by the church bells ringing all day’, remembered Baroness Sophia Buxhoeveden, a visitor to court.43 Nicholas and Alexandra’s prayers had been answered; it was ‘an unforgettable, great day for us’, the tsar recorded in his diary. ‘I am sure it was Seraphim who brought it about’, remarked his sister Olga.44 The happy parents blessed the day they had met Maître Philippe: ‘Please, somehow or other, pass on our gratitude and joy … to Him’, Nicholas wrote to Militza.45

The general feeling elsewhere was that ‘the birth of an heir after all these anxious years of disappointed hopes changes the destinies of Russia’; for Nicholas it was certainly a dramatically charged moment that brought renewed optimism in time of war. ‘I am more happy at the birth of a son and heir than at a victory of my troops, for now I face the future calmly and without alarm; knowing by this sign that the war will be brought to a happy conclusion.’46 With this in mind, and as a morale-booster, Nicholas named the entire Russian army fighting in Manchuria as Alexey’s godfathers. An imperial manifesto followed, granting numerous political concessions, abolishing corporal punishment for the peasantry and armed forces and remitting fines for a wide range of offences. A political amnesty was issued to prisoners (excepting those convicted of murder) and a fund set up for military and naval scholarships.47

With his large blue eyes and head of golden curls the little tsarevich was the most beautiful of babies. They named him Alexey after the second Romanov tsar, Alexey I (who ruled 1645–76), and father of Peter the Great, the name coming from the Greek meaning ‘helper’ or ‘defender’. Russia had had enough Alexanders and Nicholases, said the tsar. Unlike his charismatic son, who had looked to the West for inspiration, Alexey I had been a pious tsar in the tradition of old Muscovite Russia – the kind of traditional monarch that Nicholas and Alexandra wished their son to be. An official announcement was soon published revoking the nomination of Grand Duke Mikhail as successor: ‘From now on, in accordance with the Fundamental Laws of the Empire, the Imperial title of Heir Tsarevich, and all the rights pertaining to it, belong to Our Son Alexei.’48 In celebration Nicholas took his three eldest daughters to a Te Deum at the chapel of the Lower Dacha, as hundreds of telegrams and letters of congratulation flooded into Peterhof. Dr Ott and Madame Günst were once more handsomely rewarded for their services; the doctor this time receiving a blue-enamel box by Fabergé set with rose-cut diamonds in addition to his handsome fee.49

Like his sisters Alexey had a Russian wet-nurse and it was Mariya Geringer’s special duty to ensure that she was given plenty of good food. On one occasion she asked the nurse how her appetite was. ‘What sort of appetite can I have,’ she complained, ‘when there is nothing salted or pickled?’ The wet-nurse may have grumbled about the plain food on offer but ‘this did not prevent her from doubling her weight, as she would eat everything on the table and leave not a scrap’. After Alexey was weaned, the nurse received a pension and numerous gifts; her child back in the village received presents too and at Christmas and Easter and her name day a grateful Alexandra would continue to remember her boy’s wet-nurse with money and other gifts.50

On the occasion of Alexey’s christening twelve days later, an enlarged cortège of carriages wound its way a fifth time to the imperial chapel at Peterhof. Mistress of the robes Mariya Golitsyna was once more entrusted with carrying the Romanov baby to the font on a golden cushion, but by now elderly, she feared she might drop the precious boy. As a precaution an improvised gold sling attached the cushion to her shoulder and she wore non-slip rubber-soled shoes. The baby’s older sisters, nine-year-old Olga and seven-year-old Tatiana, were there in the procession – Olga as one of his godmothers – and clearly enjoying their first taste of formal public ceremonial. They looked especially beautiful, dressed in child-size versions of full Russian court dresses of blue satin with silver-thread embroidery and buttons and silver shoes. They also wore miniature versions of the order of St Catherine and blue velvet kokoshniki decorated with pearls and silver bows. The two proud sisters rose to the importance of the occasion: ‘Olga blushed with pride when, holding a corner of Alexey’s cushion, she walked with Maria Feodorovna to the font’ and she and Tatiana ‘allowed themselves to relax into a smile only when they passed a group of still smaller children, their two tiny sisters, and several little cousins, standing near a doorway and gazing open-mouthed as the procession passed’.51

Although still very young, Olga created a deep impression on one of her Romanov cousins that day. Sixteen-year-old Prince Ioann Konstantinovich – or Ioannchik as everyone called him – was besotted with her, as he told his mother:

I was so enraptured by her I can’t even describe it. It was like a wildfire fanned by the wind. Her hair was waving, her eyes were sparkling, well, I can’t even begin to describe it!! The problem is that I am too young for such thoughts and, moreover, that she is the Tsar’s daughter and, God forbid, they might think that I am doing it for some ulterior motive.

Ioannchik would continue to nurse a deep attachment to Olga and the hope of marrying her (which had first entered his head, he said, in 1900) for several years to come.52

Baroness Buxhoeveden was impressed with the two older girls that day; they remained as ‘solemn as judges’, throughout the four-hour ceremony, during which several noticed that, as he was being anointed with holy oil, the little baby ‘raised his hand and extended his fingers as though pronouncing a blessing’. Such inadvertent religious symbolism did not pass unnoticed by the Orthodox faithful: ‘Everyone said that it was a very good omen, and that he would prove to be a father to his people.’53 The birth of this one precious little boy provided a field day for soothsayers and omen seekers, although some were deeply malevolent. For even now, the worst kind of superstitious nonsense was being put about that the little tsarevich was in a fact a changeling – substituted by Nicholas and Alexandra for an unwanted fifth daughter who had been spirited away.54

A rather more balanced line was taken outside Russia, where Alexey’s was the most talked-about royal birth in a century. Many were relieved for Alexandra’s sake as much as for the tsar’s; ‘the Empress will acquire a prestige that will exalt her influence above that of the Dowager Empress. She is the mother of a man-child!’ wrote one tongue-in-cheek American commentator, pointing up the increasingly difficult position Alexandra had been in – as a granddaughter of Queen Victoria living in a ‘semi-savage’, Asiatic country where rampant superstition prevented any compassion being shown for her misfortune in repeatedly producing girls.55 A former American ambassador to Russia was not alone in repeating the view that such was the bad feeling towards Alexandra up till that point that ‘if the last had been a girl … there would possibly have been demand for the Tsar to take another wife in order to obtain an heir’.56

Some observers abroad objected to the sexual discrimination being exercised against the four Romanov daughters, denigrating the fact that they had merited only 101-gun salutes each, as opposed to 301 for a boy. The US journal Broad Views thought the tsar’s four young daughters more than capable of ‘guarantee[ing] the security of the succession’:

If the present Czar had reverted to the idea of Peter the Great, and had declared the Grand Duchess Olga heiress to the throne irrespective even of any future little brothers … the Russian people might have reflected that in a few years more, for Olga has now attained the advanced age of nine, the Czar would be supported by an heiress old enough to wield the scepter, if he himself should lose his life to the Nihilists. As it is, the birth of the infant who has already, regardless of humour, been made a Colonel of Hussars, will merely guarantee the evils of a long regency in that far from impossible event.57

Within the larger Romanov family not everyone was delighted by the new arrival. The American military attaché Thomas Bentley Mott remembered dining with Grand Duke Vladimir – Nicholas’s eldest uncle – who would be next in line to the throne after the childless Mikhail, and after him, his sons Kirill, Boris and Andrey. On 30 July Mott had joined the grand duke for lunch after attending army manoeuvres. Upon arriving, Vladimir was handed a telegram and immediately disappeared. His guest was left waiting for an hour before the grand duke returned:

We sat down in silence; and as our host did not speak, the rest of us could not do so. The changing of the plates and the constant presenting of a fresh cigarette to the Grand Duke by the tall Cossack who stood at other times immovable behind his chair, alone relieved the stillness.58

After lunch the grand duke once more absented himself. It was only later that Mott learned that the telegram that had cast such a gloom over their lunch had contained the news of the birth of Alexey.

Had he known then what Nicholas and Alexandra already knew, the grand duke might well have been less gloomy. It has generally been accepted that it was not until 8 September, nearly six weeks after Alexey was born, that the baby first experienced ominous bleeding from the navel. But bleeding had in fact occurred almost as soon as the umbilical cord was cut, and it had taken two days for the doctors to bring it under control. On 1 August, Nicholas wrote at length to Militza, on behalf of Alexandra, telling her that:

Thank God the day has passed calmly. After the dressing was applied from 12 o’clock until 9.30 that evening there wasn’t a drop of blood. The doctors hope it will stay that way. Korovin is staying overnight. Feodorov is going into town and coming back tomorrow … The little treasure is amazingly placid, and when they change the dressing he either sleeps or lies there and smiles. His parents are now feeling a little easier in their minds. Feodorov says that the approximate amount of blood loss in 48 hours was from 1/8th to 1/9th of the total quantity of blood.59

The bleeding was frightening. Little Alexey had seemed so robust – he had ‘the air of a warrior knight’ as Grand Duchess Xenia remarked when she had first seen him.60 Militza had no doubt from the start. With their exclusive access to Nicholas and Alexandra at the time, she and Grand Duke Petr had driven over to the Lower Dacha the day Alexey was born to congratulate his parents, as their son Roman later recalled:

When they returned in the evening to Znamenka, my father remembered that when he had bidden farewell, the Tsar had told him that even though Alexey was a big and healthy child, the doctors were somewhat troubled about the frequent splatters of blood in his swaddling clothes. When my mother heard this, she was shocked and insisted on the doctors being told about the cases of haemophilia that were occasionally passed down in the female line from the English Queen Victoria, who was the Tsaritsa’s maternal grandmother. My father tried to calm her and assured her that the Tsar had been in the best of spirits when he had left. All the same, my father did indeed phone the palace to ask the Tsar what the doctors had to say about the blood splatters. When the Tsar answered that they hoped that the bleeding would soon stop, my mother took the receiver and asked if the doctors could explain the cause of the bleeding. When the Tsar could not give her a clear answer, she asked him with the calmest of voices she could manage: ‘I beg you, ask them if there is any sign of haemophilia’, and she added that should that be the case, then the doctors of today would be able to take certain measures. The Tsar fell silent on the phone for a long time and then started to question my mother and ended by quietly repeating the word that had staggered him: haemophilia.61

Mariya Geringer later recalled how Alexandra had sent for her soon after Alexey was born. The bleeding, she told Mariya, had been triggered by the midwife Günst swaddling the baby too tightly. This was traditional Russian practice but the pressure of the tight binding over Alexey’s navel had provoked a haemorrhage and had caused him to scream out in a ‘frenzy’ of pain. Weeping bitter tears, Alexandra had taken Mariya’s hand: ‘If only you knew how fervently I have prayed for God to protect my son from our inherited curse’, she had told her, already only too aware that the blight of haemophilia had indeed descended on them.62 Nicholas’s first cousin, Maria Pavlovna, had no doubt that he and Alexandra had known almost immediately that Alexey ‘carried in him the seeds of an incurable illness’. They hid their feelings from even their closest relatives, but from that moment, she recalled, ‘the Empress’s character underwent a change, and her health, physical as well as moral, altered’.63

For the remainder of that first month the couple were in a state of denial, hoping against hope, once the bleeding had stopped, that all would be well. And then almost six weeks later it had started again, confirming their very worst fears.64 Dr Feodorov, whom Nicholas and Alexandra liked and trusted, had been on hand at all times and had drawn on the best possible medical advice in St Petersburg. But it was already clear that the medical men could do little. Nicholas and Alexandra’s son’s fate rested on a miracle: only God could protect him. But nobody in Russia must know the truth. The life-threatening condition of the little tsarevich – ‘the hope of Russia’ – would remain a closely guarded secret, even from their nearest relatives.65 Nothing must undermine the security of the throne that Nicholas and Alexandra were absolutely determined to pass on, intact, to their son.

Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress of Russia, was only thirty-two but was already a physical wreck after ten physically and mentally draining years of pregnancy and childbirth. Her always precarious mental state was severely undermined by the discovery of Alexey’s condition and she tormented herself that she of all people had unwittingly transmitted haemophilia to her much-loved and longed-for son.* Her already melancholic air henceforth became an inexplicably tragic one to those not privy to the truth. The whole focus of the family now dramatically shifted, to protecting Alexey against accident and injury – to literally keeping him alive within their own closely controlled domestic world. Nicholas and Alexandra therefore abandoned their newly refurbished apartments in the Winter Palace and ceased staying in town for the court season. Tsarskoe Selo and Peterhof would from now on be their refuge.

Alexey’s four still very young but highly sensitive sisters – Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia – would bond ever more closely in response to the family’s retreat and in support of their physically vulnerable mother. In the late summer of 1904, the world of the four Romanov grand duchesses began to shrink, at the very point when they were eager to rush out and explore it. What no one then, of course, knew was that as female children of the tsaritsa, one or all of the sisters might be carriers of that terrible defective gene – a hidden time bomb that had already begun to reverberate across the royal families of Europe. Alexandra’s elder sister Irene – who like her was a carrier and who had married her first cousin, Prince Henry of Prussia – had already given birth to two haemophiliac sons. The youngest, four-year-old Heinrich, had died – ‘of the terrible illness of the English family’, as Xenia described it – just five months before Alexey was born. In Russia they called it the bolezn gessenskikh – ‘the Hesse disease’; others called it ‘the Curse of the Coburgs’.66 But one thing was certain; in the early 1900s, the life expectancy of a haemophiliac child was only about thirteen years.67