The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) by Helen Rappaport Read Free Book Online

and
    Alexandra were married on 14 November in front of hundreds of
    invited guests at the chapel of the Winter Palace.
    Alix could not have looked more beautiful or serene that day –
    tall and statuesque in her white-and-silver brocade dress, the train
    heavily trimmed in ermine and the imperial mantle of cloth of gold
    across her shoulders, her lovely figure complemented by her limpid
    blue eyes and her wavy reddish gold hair enhanced by the diamond-
    encrusted wedding crown. British envoy Lord Carrington was deeply
    impressed: ‘She looked the perfection of what one would imagine
    an Empress of Russia on her way to the altar would be’, he informed
    * All events taking place in Russia prior to February 1918 are given according to the Old Style, Julian calendar then in use there. Where confusion might arise, New Style dates are added in brackets.
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    MOTHER LOVE
    Queen Victoria.43 Other witnesses noted the commanding stature
    of the princess alongside her shorter and rather delicate-looking
    consort; to all intents and purposes she appeared to be the one with
    the physical strength, a woman of considerable presence, ‘much
    above the traditional level of Duchy Princesses’.44
    There was, however, something about the royal bride’s solemn,
    guarded look and the thin tight mouth that told a different story,
    of a strong, determined personality fighting a natural, but violent,
    antipathy to being on public display after having enjoyed the
    domestic privacy of the Hessian court for so long. Alix endured the
    ordeal, but at the end of her wedding day, much like her grand-
    mother Victoria before her, she retreated to bed early with a head-
    ache. For others who had attended the proceedings that day, such
    as Princess Radziwill, it had been ‘one of the saddest sights I ever
    remember having seen’. So long as the authoritarian Alexander III
    had lived the Russian aristocracy had felt safe, but their sense of
    security had vanished with his untimely death, and had been replaced
    with ‘the feeling of approaching calamity’.45
    After a few nights spent in the relatively cramped surroundings
    of Nicholas’s bachelor apartments at the Anichkov Palace in St
    Petersburg (their own at the Winter Palace still being redecorated)
    the newly married couple travelled to the Alexander Palace at
    Tsarskoe Selo. They ensconced themselves in the dowager empress’s
    apartments in the east wing, where Nicky himself had been born
    in 1868, for four blissful days of absolute privacy, ‘hand in hand and heart to heart’, as Nicky told his brother-in-law Ernie.46 Alix had
    also written shortly before her wedding assuring Ernie that ‘I am
    so happy & never can thank God enough for having given me such
    a treasure as my Nicky’.47 The obscure and serious-minded Alix of
    Hesse, whom even her own grandmother had described as ‘ein
    kleines deutsches Prinzesschen with no knowledge of anything
    beyond small German courts’, had won for herself not only one of
    the greatest royal catches but the richest man in the world.48
    But in leaving Darmstadt prematurely the new tsaritsa had arrived
    in Russia ignorant of its customs and profound superstitions, with
    a limited knowledge of its language and having made the enormous
    leap of faith from the militant austerity of her devout Lutheranism
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    FOUR SISTERS
    to the mystical and opulent rituals of Russian Orthodoxy. The
    cultural divide was enormous. Princess Alix of Hesse encountered
    the same problems – on a much grander scale – that her mother
    before her had first met in Darmstadt, and – for that matter – her
    grandfather Prince Albert, who as a homesick Coburger had arrived
    in an alien English court fifty-four years before. Alix’s adoptive
    country was as wary of her as a German and an interloper – the
    fifth princess of German blood to become a Russian empress in
    barely a century – as England had