The Lives And Deaths Of The Princesses Of Hesse by Frances Welch: The tragic lives of
The Lives And Deaths Of The Princesses Of Hesse Frances Welch Short Books £25, 288pp
As well as being Britain’s monarch, Empress of India and the ruler of a vast empire over which ‘the sun never set’, Queen Victoria was also a meddlesome matriarch who spent a great deal of time trying to arrange suitable matches for her numerous grandchildren.
This was especially true when it came to Victoria, Ella, Irene and Alix, daughters of the Queen’s third child, Alice, and her husband Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse. The Queen kept a beady eye on what they were doing and received dutiful letters from the princesses, thanking ‘dearest Grandmama’ for saddles, hats, brooches and shortbread.
Queen Victoria with her ‘darling’ granddaughters
Although she doted on the girls, Victoria could be harsh and bossy. She was annoyed when Alice breastfed her children, something the Queen regarded as ‘animalistic’; in retaliation, Victoria pointedly named one of her cows ‘Princess Alice’. Irene was dismissed as ‘plain’, Ella ‘obstinate and peevish’, while the garrulous Victoria was ‘a gasbag’.
In 1878 Alice died from diphtheria and the four girls were sent to stay with their grandmother. Instructing them to ‘think of me as your mama’, Victoria decided she would take over their upbringing.
But when it came to finding suitable husbands among the crowned heads of Europe, the world’s most powerful woman had little success in bending her granddaughters to her will. Skilfuly told by Frances Welch, this is the tragic tale of four sisters whose gilded lives were shattered by their choice of husbands and world events.
In 1883 the eldest of the sisters, Victoria, became engaged to Prince Louis Battenberg, an officer in the Royal Navy. The Queen, although miffed at not having been consulted, gave her approval. Besotted, Louis declared, ‘I am nearly off my chump altogether with feeling so jolly.’
At around the same time Ella, the most beautiful of the Hesse princesses, fell in love with Grand Duke Serge, brother of the Russian emperor Alexander III. Queen Victoria, who thought all Russians were savages, was distraught.
Even worse was to come. At Ella’s wedding, 12-year-old Alix struck up a friendship with Serge’s nephew, the teenage Nicholas, heir to the Russian throne. Five years later, in 1894, she accepted his proposal. And Irene’s choice of husband wasn’t much better: the Queen thought Prince Henry of Prussia was feckless, although not as bad as his brother, the future Kaiser Wilhelm.
Princess ‘Ella’ of Hesse in her nuns habit
Victoria fumed: ‘I feel very deeply that my opinion and my advice are never listened to.’ Yet her attachment to her ‘darling children’ remained strong.
Victoria didn’t live to see her gloomy prophecies about Ella and Alix’s lives in Russia come true. In 1905 Ella’s husband was killed in a terrorist bomb so violent that ‘his heart was found on a nearby roof’.
Showing extraordinary fortitude, Ella forgave his killer. She founded a convent and became a nun. She and Alix, by now the Tsarina, fell out over the ‘mad monk’ Rasputin. Ella thought he was a charlatan, while Alix – who had become increasingly unpopular with her subjects – was convinced he could cure her haemophiliac son.
By early 1917, Russia was in such turmoil that Nicholas and Alix talked of leaving for England. But when all five of the royal children came down with measles, Alix was so distracted that she failed to grasp how precarious their position was, and the travel plan never came to fruition.
In March, the Tsar was forced to abdicate and he and his family were put under house arrest. Alix’s sister Victoria frantically lobbied for Britain to pressurise the Bolshevik government to allow Alix and the children to come to England. The Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, refused: he didn’t trust the Bolsheviks to do a deal, he told her.
The former Tsar and Tsarina and their children ended up in a house in Ekaterinburg, in the Urals. Ella had been forced out of her convent and was also under arrest nearby. For Easter 1918, Ella managed to send Alix and her family a parcel of eggs, coffee and chocolate, perhaps hopeful of a reconciliation with her sister. Alix never wrote to thank her.
In July 1918, Nicholas, Alix, their five children and four servants were led down to the cellar of their house and told to line up so they could be photographed. Eleven gunmen, most of them drunk, then opened fire. It was a scene of total confusion: the Tsarina and her daughters had jewels sown into their corsets and bullets ricocheted wildly off the precious stones. Reports said that most of the men had aimed at Alix first.
Disposing of the bodies took two days. First they were lowered into a mine, which wasn’t deep enough. Then the killers tried to destroy the bodies with grenades and acid. Finally, most of the bodies were dumped under some railway sleepers, where they remained for 50 years.
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A day after the murders, Ella was also killed. Her great-nephew Prince Philip bluntly described it: ‘Ella was taken and thrown down a mineshaft in Siberia and they lobbed some hand grenades after her.’ In 1993, Philip’s DNA was used to identify the bodies of Tsarina Alix and her children.
It would be months before Victoria and Irene found out about their sisters’ gruesome deaths. On hearing about Alix, Victoria wrote to the King: ‘My poor Alicky… one must be grateful her suffering is over.’ Even as the surviving princesses of Hesse mourned Alix and Ella, the First World War had caused a breach between them, because their sons had fought on different sides.
When Germany became a republic, Irene and Prince Henry were stripped of their titles and they rarely visited Britain again. Victoria, who was godmother to Prince (now King) Charles, died in 1950; Irene died in Germany three years later. Queen Elizabeth didn’t send a representative to her funeral.
Welch does a wonderful job of marshalling the different strands of this story, drawing on the sisters’ chatty, gossipy correspondence, some of which has never been published. It grips you until the very last page.