Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [9]
To this familial exaltation was added the dark memory of the ages. In the blood of Alix H. flowed the blood of Queen Mary Stuart.
Alix’s mother died at age thirty-five, leaving a large family, of whom Alix was the youngest. Her oldest sister, Victoria, married Prince Louis of Battenberg, who would become commander-in-chief of the British Navy; her second sister, Ella, would marry Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. Finally Irène, the third sister, became the wife of Prince Henry, her first cousin and the brother of German Emperor Wilhelm II. Thus, by forging familial bonds, these Hesse princesses would unite the Russian, English, and German royal houses.
After her mother’s death, Alix’s grandmother took the child under her wing. Her grandmother, the English Queen Victoria, observed the constitution scrupulously. Power belonged to Parliament, sage counsel to the queen.
Alix H. was one of the liberal queen’s favorite granddaughters.
A pale blond little beauty. For her radiant nature her mother called her “Sunny.” For her mischief and recalcitrance, the German court had called her spitzbube (“scamp,” “troublemaker”). Was the orphan, taken away from her sisters, brother, and father, really so very lighthearted and gay? Or is that how her grandmother Victoria chose to see her? And did Alix, with the cunning of a child, make a point of playing up to her grandmother’s expectations?
She was a troublemaker, however.
Queen Victoria did not favor the German princes, especially Emperor Wilhelm. And Alix, who spoke and thought in English, must have smiled at the old queen’s caustic jokes. But she must have missed them as well—her father, her brother Ernie, and the blooming Hesse landscape. And her family. That large family that fell apart when she was six years old.
When she married she would attempt to re-create the same kind of large family.
The lonely girl made the circuit of the royal courts of her numerous relatives.
In 1884 twelve-year-old Alix was brought to Russia.
Her sister Ella was marrying Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. Her cousin, the future German Emperor Wilhelm II (“Uncle Willy”) followed beautiful blond Alix’s debut at the Russian court closely. The wedding of Sergei Alexandrovich—the brother of the Russian tsar to a German princess—could have a reprise. The heir to the Russian throne was already sixteen, and the Hesse line occupied a special place in the history of the Romanov family. Emperor Paul’s first wife, who died in childbirth, had come from that line. And Empress Maria Alexandrovna, Nicholas’s grandmother, was also a princess of Hesse-Darmstadt.
This was how they came to meet for the first time: Alix and Nicky. It was an idyll: he fell in love with her at first sight. And there was a day when they found themselves in Peterhof, at Alexandria, the small imperial dacha.
Much later, a year after their marriage, Nicholas and Alix would come back to Alexandria, and Nicholas would write in his diary, “Rained the entire day, after coffee we went upstairs … we saw the window we had both cut our names into in 1884.” (She liked to draw on glass with the precious stone on her ring. One can see her signature on the grand windows of the Winter Palace.)
Subsequently they would come to love old Alexandria, which preserved a precious memory.
A window and a couple. They were looking out at that day in 1884. Standing at a window at the inception of their destiny.
It was after this that Nicholas spoke with his sister Xenia, the only one with whom the not very sociable English-Hessian princess had become friendly.