Frances Welch is good at conveying the mundanity of court life, although that’s probably not her intention. The author of five previous books about the Romanovs, she shifts her focus here to the four princesses of Hesse — Victoria (1863-1950), Elisabeth, also known as Ella (1864-1918), Irène (1866-1953) and Alexandra or Alix (1872-1918) — who were granddaughters of Queen Victoria. The book is drawn from their letters and diaries, correspondence mostly concerned with the ephemera of everyday life. There’s a bout of chickenpox, some bedbugs, some lost hair ribbons, a sore wisdom tooth. War and revolution take a backseat to gossip and grumbling.
Princess Alice, their mother, the third child of Queen Victoria, died of diphtheria in 1878, when she was just 35. Their father, Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, who died in 1892, seemed always busy elsewhere. Parenting duties were left mainly to the girls’ nannies, although Queen Victoria interfered when so inclined. “Think of me as your mama,” she told the girls. Since she was not dependable, astute or particularly kind, her mothering was aloof and erratic.
“It’s not very ladylike to kill animals and go out shooting,” she advised. “Only fast ladies do such things.” On another occasion she told the girls: ‘Never make friendships: girls’ friendships and intimacies are very bad and often lead to great mischief.” When the sisters Victoria and Ella approached puberty, the Queen warned them that there would be a time in every month when they should avoid riding horses. She considered breastfeeding “animalistic”. My low opinion of the Queen did not change as a result of reading this book.
Victoria assumed the right to decide upon suitable husbands for her granddaughters. She was vehemently opposed to suitors from Russia — “that horrid corrupt country” — and was also suspicious of most Germans, especially her grandson Willie (the future Kaiser Wilhelm), whom she loathed. She supposedly disliked the idea of matches between first cousins, but nevertheless promoted a union between Alix and her rather fey (and probably gay) grandson Prince Albert.
Much to the Queen’s dismay, the princesses ignored her advice. First to marry was Victoria, who wedded Prince Louis of Battenberg in April 1884. He was a swashbuckling officer in the Royal Navy with a large dragon tattoo who was rumored to have fathered a child with Lillie Langtry, the actress and poster girl for Pears Soap. Louis was nevertheless smitten with Victoria — “I am nearly off my chump altogether with feeling so jolly.” Although her father objected to Battenberg’s low rank and limited wealth, Victoria got her way.
Next came Ella. Considered one of the most beautiful women in Europe, she did not lack for suitors, although her air of saintliness was off-putting. Defying her grandmother’s strictures, she settled on a Russian, the Grand Duke Sergei (Serge), uncle of the Tsarevich Nicholas. It was a strange match, given that the otherworldly Ella “sublimated her sexuality to religion” and Serge was enthusiastically homosexual. The grand duke preferred spending time with his junior officers rather than with poor Ella. According to Welch, “He was also said to be a heavy drinker, devising a game in which officers dived naked into the snow, drank champagne from a bowl, then howled like wolves.” Ella, who seemed to crave suffering, insisted that her marriage was happy.
In defiance of her grandmother’s strictures, Irène married her first cousin Prince Henry of Prussia, younger brother of Wilhelm, in May 1888. “He is so awfully good and dear to me,” she confessed, “and my great love for him increases daily.” She gave birth to three children, two of whom inherited the family scourge of haemophilia. The marriage meant that her life was shaped to a large extent by her bullying brother-in-law, who poisoned relations with the English side of her family.
Finally, there was Alix. The most headstrong of the four princesses, she married the Tsarevich Nicholas in November 1894. It was by all accounts a genuine love match, but Alix often boasted that she wore the trousers in the family. Her story is well-known: revolutionary turbulence, her son Alexei’s haemophilia, that bizarre relationship with Rasputin. Her German background meant that she was a target for suspicion among the Russian people from the beginning and their hatred intensified as Rasputin’s power grew. Early in the marriage, Queen Victoria advised her to do more to court the affections of the peasantry. “You are mistaken my dear grandmama,” she replied. “Here we do not need to earn the love of the people. The Russian people revere their tsars as divine beings.”
This was not a good time to be married to Russian royalty. Sergei was assassinated when a bomb was thrown into his carriage in February 1905. Ella, having witnessed the explosion, frantically gathered his body parts: “Hurry, hurry, Serge hates blood and mess.” She then shaved her head, joined a convent and found the spiritual fulfillment she had craved.
Meanwhile, Alix fiddled while Russia burned, always insisting that the peasants adored her. That assumption was dramatically disproved when Bolsheviks executed her and her family on July 17, 1918. Ella’s selfless charity over the previous 13 years did not prevent her from being executed the next day. “Lord forgive them for they know not what they do,” she prayed. That seems another misguided assumption.
Victoria and Irène survived the First World War, but suffered because of it. Battenberg rose to the position of sea lord in 1911, but was forced to retire shortly after the outbreak of war, a victim of the anti-German mood. Changing his name to Mountbatten did not appease his detractors. He and Victoria moved to the Isle of Wight where she fretted about her sisters in Russia but was powerless to help them. Meanwhile, Irène found herself in the awkward position of being the enemy of her sisters, or at least of their countries. She had a good war until 1918 when sudden defeat led to the dissolution of the German monarchy.
This book mirrors the lives of the sisters — it’s set against the backdrop of war and revolution, but is often strangely detached from those big events. Welch lets the sisters tell their own story; nearly every paragraph contains a quote from their correspondence. This provides welcome immediacy, but also means there are considerable gaps in the narrative when the sisters choose to ignore events around them, which they often did. Welch is also reluctant to criticize her subjects; the rather deranged Alix, in particular, gets off all too lightly. Her analysis is frequently bland: “Had Alix not been tsarina, early 20th-century Russian history might have been very different.” This book, though, will delight those who enjoy reading about the lives of royals but don’t want all that majesty polluted with too much politics.
Victoria died in 1950, Irène three years later. They lived out their lives in quiet insignificance, a far cry from the splendor they had once enjoyed and always expected. While Welch brings the four princesses vividly to life through the minutiae of their everyday existence, none of them seems very appealing as a person. They are often dull, frequently petty, occasionally deranged and, to be honest, rather foolish.
Gerard DeGroot is a professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews and the author of several books, including The Bomb: A Life and The Seventies Unplugged
