Alexandra (17 page)

As soon as she announced the start of ‘Help Through Handwork’, many women, among them quite a number of aristocratic women, came forward to join the sewing guild. There were also
women from the merchant class, living in the village of Tsarskoe Selo or nearby, who wanted to join, and soon the meetings were organized and the sewing began. Alix presided, offered guidance and
correction to the sewers, and began making plans for the expansion of the guild and for the distribution of the first group of garments.

She hoped to go further in her charitable efforts, to establish a school for nurses and housemaids, like the one founded by her Aunt Helena in England. She wrote to Helena’s school asking
for help in
initiating her project, and anticipated beginning it soon, within months if possible.

But Alix had no sooner launched her efforts than obstacles arose. In Russia, she discovered, there was virtually no private charity; all charitable enterprises were controlled by the government,
and most government charities were headed, at least nominally, by the Dowager Empress. Wherever Alix turned, it seemed, Minnie stood, arms folded, barring the way.

What was worse, she quickly discovered that the highborn women who joined her guild had done so in the expectation that in return they would receive her special patronage; they expected
advancement to positions at court, or promotions or positions for their husbands or sons – some immediate, concrete quid pro quo. When they discovered that the empress had no expectation of
rewarding them for joining her charitable enterprise, they withdrew – with many a bitter comment about ‘imperial ingratitude’.
²
Some wives of merchants and tradesmen remained, proud to belong to an undertaking headed by the empress. But they too, Alix realized, were far from disinterested. They were seeking the social
cachet of association with the court, and this mattered far more to them than any benefit their sewing might bring to the poor.

The failure of her scheme was disillusioning to Alix, and the scoffing of the women she had tried to recruit wounded her. In the aftermath of the Khodynka disaster, the brief lull in criticism
had ended. The gossiping against the empress now grew more scurrilous. It was being said that she had been pregnant by a lover, and had deliberately aborted the foetus to hide her transgression
– a malevolent distortion of the reality of her miscarriage.
³
The members of her household were pestered for details of her private life in
the hope that scandalous stories could be built upon them. It must have seemed to Alix as though a web of malice was being woven around her; everywhere she turned, she found petty meanness and
spite. If she wore white on a festival day – as she had been told was the correct thing to do – all the other women wore dark gowns, so that she stood out awkwardly. If she gave one of
her rare receptions, and
struck off the invitation list married women she suspected of ‘loose manners’, all the invited women pointedly refused to attend.

‘The whole of Petersburg rose up in arms against its empress,’ Martha Mouchanow recalled.
⁴
Hardly anyone would speak to her.
Behind her back, court and society alike criticized her for being dull, for dressing badly, for having declared, with unpardonable hauteur, ‘that she was going to reform the morals of her
empire’.
⁵
Her tastes, her sensibilities were not theirs. She bored them – and she made it plain that they bored her.

Thwarted and angered, and wounded to be, as she thought herself, so misunderstood, Alix prepared for a far wider social challenge. In August of 1896, she and Nicky left for a European tour.

Despite all her reading and study about Russia, it is doubtful whether Alix had even a rudimentary understanding of her adopted country’s actual position among the European states, or of
Russia’s vulnerability as a great power. No one in the Foreign Ministry attempted to instruct her – indeed the only message she received from the foreign minister before leaving for the
West was that she must take along certain magnificent necklaces from among the Crown Jewels and wear them to impress the rulers and dignitaries at the foreign courts.

Russia was in fact in a precarious condition as the nineteenth century drew to its close for, although it had traditionally been among the leading states of Europe, it no longer possessed either
the wealth or the military strength to compete with the phenomenally expanding German Empire. Russia was advancing economically, its industrialization spreading but, compared to the Western
European states, it was still a backward country with a medieval agricultural system where illiterate peasants lived in poverty and ignorance.

And it was still overwhelmingly autocratic, ruled by the will of one man, the tsar. What movements there had been to promote constitutional government had been short-lived, and brutally
suppressed. Observers in Europe watched with interest to see whether the new tsar Nicholas would finally bring his backward realm out of what they saw as its benighted, barbaric condition and
into the light of modernity – or whether, as it seemed, he was intent on preventing change, which meant continued stagnation in the government and continued unrest
among his subjects.

Here Russia’s newly forged link with France, formalized by the signing of an agreement in 1892, was crucial. For there was increasing tension between Russia and Germany, with the German
government imposing high tariffs on Russian goods and threatening to expand militarily into Russian territory; only the protection of an alliance with France – and the friendship of Britain
– could hold the might of Germany at bay. Meanwhile the Russian treasury was being shored up by loans from French banks, French entrepreneurs were doing more business than ever before in
Petersburg, and French investors were funding the growth of Russian industry, growth vital to the country’s viability as a great power with aims of its own in Asia and the Balkans.

It was essential, if the path the Russian government had decided to pursue was to succeed, that the sovereigns aid in cementing the bond with France, while helping to prevent further
deterioration of relations with Germany through preserving the tie of cousinage with the German emperor. Beyond this, the effect of press reports and public opinion on the relations between states
was significant; if Nicky and Alix managed to make themselves liked and admired on their tour, if they projected magnanimity, confidence and majesty, and an aura of wealth and glamour, if they said
the right thing at the right time, then the public would be favourably disposed towards Russia and would influence their governments accordingly.

Alix went to great trouble over her clothes for the trip, sending detailed instructions to Worth in Paris, who supplied her gowns. Worth sent a team of seamstresses to Petersburg for the final
fittings. It was an era of excess in dress, when upper-class women wore wide hats piled a foot high with swathes of gauze and luxuriant clusters of artificial flowers and curling ostrich feathers,
parasols with many flounces, long draping feather boas and gowns and mantles in delicate, perishable white crepe and pink satin and pale mauve velvet. There were layers upon layers of ornament,
rows of lace, frills, ribbon bows
and beadwork. Collars and mantles were embroidered in silver and gold thread, ball gowns were trimmed with sequins and thickly encrusted
with pearls. Flowers and fur were heaped generously upon garments already overdecorated with adornments of other kinds, and long ropes of pearls were worn looped many times around the neck or
dangling from neck to ankle.

Alix, who had a weakness for beautiful clothes, and wore them to striking effect, being tall and having a stately posture, indulged her pleasure in finery when ordering her travelling wardrobe.
The trunks arrived from Worth, and were loaded onto the imperial train, along with dozens of cases and boxes filled with linens, lace and bed sheets, jewels and lingerie, and Alix’s large
heavy gold toilette service, which filled several large trunks in itself. There was an entire travelling nursery for baby Olga, along with her nursery staff – minus the sour English nurse,
who had recently been sent away – and hundreds of servants and officials, among them doctors, cooks, laundresses, waiting maids and valets.

It quickly became apparent, once Nicky and Alix arrived in Breslau for the start of their tour, that Alix was not prepared to play her part in promoting Russian diplomatic interests. Partly out
of nervousness, partly because she was still aggrieved over the failure of her handcrafts project and the ugly rumours in Petersburg that she had a lover, she was defensive and oversensitive; her
focus was not on acting with discretion and tact but on herself and the respect due her as the newly crowned empress of Russia. She became touchy, moody, demanding; she was peremptory with her
servants, insisting that they go to much extra trouble to change the costly Argenton and Brussels lace trimmings on her dressing table everyday, just as they did at home, and that it match exactly
the lace on her bed sheets and nightgowns. She argued with Martha Mouchanow, and told her curtly to be quiet and do as she was told. Worst of all, she clashed with her cousin Willy.

Alix had never liked her imperial German cousin, and had always responded to his overbearing, domineering personality with mockery and disdain. She could not bring herself to establish a more
mature
relationship with him, as their formal positions now demanded. When Willy provided Alix with an antique silver toilette service that had once belonged to Queen
Louise of Prussia, instead of accepting it graciously she took offence, feeling slighted instead of honoured. Only her gold service would do for an empress; she put the silver one aside.

Willy, highly insulted, responded with a cutting remark to the effect that in lending Alix the silver service he was ‘paying her a great compliment’.

Alix, incensed, retorted that ‘it seemed to her that her cousin William still thought her the little Hessian princess of as little importance as she had been before her
marriage’.
⁶

Egos were bruised, feathers ruffled. Willy’s grandmother, the Dowager Empress Augusta, turned her back on Alix and pronounced her ‘frivolous’, and no doubt she wrote a letter
to her great friend Queen Victoria criticizing the Russian Empress for light-mindedness and vanity. Soon the entire German court had made up its mind to dislike Alix, and when she appeared at a
state dinner wearing a fortune in sapphires and pearls, and in a gown strewn with gold threads, it was whispered that she cared for nothing but impressing others with her wealth.
⁷

When Alix and Nicky sailed aboard the new yacht
Standart
from Copenhagen to Scotland, her mood did not soften, even though she must have been aware, in the presence of her aged
grandmother Victoria, that this would probably be the last time she would see her. For ten days rain poured down and a cold wind wrapped itself around the draughty castle of Balmoral, confining the
family to the chilly interior with its eccentric decoration of animal heads, mounted antlers and tartan-covered furniture. Alix, Victoria declared, was changed; she had become distant and all but
unapproachable. When the queen attempted to talk to her about her tactless behaviour in Germany, and her conflicts with her Russian court and relations, Alix became noticeably cool. In Scotland, as
in Germany, press and public reacted badly to the Russian Empress’s costly gowns and were affronted that she did not choose British tweeds.
⁸

Even in Paris, where enthusiastic crowds shouted wildly ‘Vive l’impératrice!’ and where Alix was judged to be very pretty and most welcome, she
responded with frostiness to the embrace of the French. The beauty of the city, specially adorned in honour of the imperial visitors, with even the bare chestnut trees covered with artificial
flowers, left Alix unmoved, while the constant cheering and praise with which she was surrounded only brought out her flinty side; she ‘felt embarrassed’, Martha Mouchanow wrote,
‘at what she considered to be exaggerated expressions of admiration’.
⁹

In Paris, as in Breslau, Alix seemed almost perversely bent on destroying rather than cementing good relations. In a clumsily mistaken effort to align herself with the Republican government, she
pointedly ignored some aristocratic women who had been invited to lunch at the Russian embassy. The snub was effective and devastating; the French public and press withdrew their approbation and
decided that Alix was not after all very chic, that her personality was not likable, and that perhaps she did not deserve the privilege, which had been allowed her, of sleeping in Marie
Antoinette’s former apartments at Versailles. After all, Marie Antoinette had not been a good Republican either.
¹⁰

It was noted that the empress was quite lethargic: she was in fact pregnant, having conceived another child in the early days of her tour. By the time she reached Paris she was yielding to the
torpor of her condition. Once she returned to Russia she took to her bed, and stayed there, without interruption, for nearly two months, until the danger of another miscarriage was past.

Along with the entire court, she was hoping for a boy, and confided her hopes to her sister Irene when she came to visit. Irene, the calmest and most undemanding of Alix’s three sisters
– she and her husband Prince Henry of Prussia were known among their relatives as ‘the Very Amiables’ – may have come to Russia partly to soothe her younger sister and calm
her anxieties. For apart from worrying that she might miscarry again, and that the child might be another girl, Alix was troubled by renewed threats of danger to the imperial family from
revolutionaries.
¹¹

Although no actual attempts had been made on the life of the tsar during the first two years of his reign, the constant menace of assassination was never far from his
thoughts, with detectives in attendance at the palace around the clock and armed guards surrounding Nicky everywhere he went. While Nicky and Alix were in England, Scotland Yard sent information
that a plot had been uncovered to dynamite the train they would ride to Ballater, near Balmoral. The conspiracy was international, with Belgian, French and Irish terrorists as well as Russians
involved; bombs were being made in a secret laboratory near Antwerp. The imperials were put aboard their train, but many extra precautions were taken to ensure its safe arrival. The line was
cleared by a second engine, travelling on ahead, and on the train itself were special British constables and railway agents, checking every passenger and searching every compartment.