There were once four sisters - Victoria, Ella, Irene and Alix - who lived in an obscure grand duchy in south-western Germany, a place of winding cobbled streets and dark forests made legendary in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm… despite their lack of large dowries or vast territories, each sister in turn married well. But it was to the youngest and most beautiful of the four that fate dealt the biggest hand.1
Until I had the recent pleasure of cracking the spine on Clare McHugh’s new novel, The Romanov Brides, when I heard the name Romanov I thought a) sisters and b) Anastasia. I also thought ignoble death in a basement…. end of the Russian monarchy… something to do with Rasputin probably. That kind of thing. Who I didn’t think of was Anastasia’s mother, Alix, who had several sisters and was one of Queen Victoria’s twenty-two granddaughters.
It’s pretty easy to get lost in the weeds with the interconnectedness of turn of the twentieth century European monarchy. Royal marriage, as it had been for centuries, was an important tool in diplomacy and politics. The Hesse sisters, Victoria, Elisabeth (Ella), Irene and Alexandra (Alix), were related to pretty much anyone and everyone and, happily, McHugh handles this all with aplomb. Here’s an example of Alix ruminating on current affairs:
Uncle Fritz was crowned German kaiser in March and died of a cancer in his throat in June. Cousin Willy is the kaiser now, and full of glee, he travels around, showing himself off, pleased as punch to have ascended aged twenty-nine. Papa says it’s sick-making.
This close third-person approach makes The Romanov Brides a highly accessible read and I was completely drawn into Alix and her sisters’ early lives. But while the looming specter of future disaster fades at points, it’s never fully forgotten. As the story unfolds, it’s Queen Victoria more than anyone, who has her fears for the future, and given the opportunity to chat with Clare McHugh about the book for the Historical Novel Society (read that full interview here), I was keen to get her take on the famous Queen’s role in this story:
In my novel, Queen Victoria plays the role of the oracle. And a funny sort of oracle she was! Often highly emotional, always opinionated and bossy, the queen nonetheless spoke the truth. The young Hesse princesses, while loving her deeply, failed to appreciate how the queen’s wisdom about the world—and about human relationships—was far keener than their own.
In fact one of my favorite lines in the book is when one character tells another:
Remember, a young woman doesn’t want to be advised in love by her old granny—even if that granny is the Queen of England.
As the girls grow and marry, it’s the youngest, Alix, who despite being in love with Nicky (later to be Nicholas II, the Russian Emperor) is a stubborn hold-out, unwilling to enter into a marriage that will require her to renounce her Lutheran beliefs and practices, something she swears to her beloved father she will never do. Her sister Ella, however, has other ideas.
Ella, six years older than Alix, married into the Romanov family in 1884. Her wedding brought about the first meeting between Alix and Nicky, then aged twelve and sixteen respectively . Ella’s husband, Sergei was Nicky’s uncle and, no surprise, also a relative of the sisters, as Sergei’s mother was their father’s aunt. Although Alix and Nicky didn’t become engaged for another decade, the story of their courtship is charmingly told in the novel, and most certainly helped along by Ella. Here are some choice sisterly quotes from The Romanov Brides:
If Nicky is to be granted his dearest wish, and Alix united with an ideal husband, Ella must play her part. Hasn’t she always, especially since Mama died, tried to care tenderly for her younger sister? Shouldn’t she welcome the opportunity God gives her now to benefit Alix? Especially as that impulse coincides with what she secretly yearns for, for herself?
Ella feels a surge of elation. This pairing is meant to be, she knows it—the interlocking of two souls that will be a rich blessing for each of them, and a gift for Russia. “How overjoyed I would be to see you married living together in perfect happiness!”
Imagine if Alix could be persuaded that by marrying Nicky she’d be acting virtuously? I’m quite sure she wants to accept him—she just doesn’t know how. She needs to cancel out what in her mind is a great evil—breaking her vow to Papa.
In the grand scheme of historical sisters and how they influence each other’s successes and failures, Ella of Hesse’s role in promoting the marriage of the future (and final) emperor and empress of Russia is one, with the benefit of hindsight, she must only have come to regret. Dramatic irony runs strong in The Romanov Brides, but in the book we leave the sisters long before any of the bad stuff happens.
I don't seem quite able to do the same, so here’s a few words on the sisters future lives…
Victoria (1863-1950) was the mother of Louis Mountbatten, who was killed by the IRA in 1979, an event I’m old enough to remember happening. She was also the maternal grandmother of the Duke of Edinburgh, and therefore the great-grandmother of the current king, Charles III.
Ella (1864-1918) suffered through the assassination of her husband Sergei in 1905, when a bomb was thrown into his carriage on his way into the Kremlin. In 1918, Ella was arrested on the orders of Lenin and in July she and other prisoners were murdered by being thrown into a disused mine pit.
Irene (1866-1953) married Henry of Prussia, the younger brother of ‘cousin Willy’ the Kaiser mentioned by Alix at the top of this piece. She passed on the hemophilia gene to her oldest and youngest son, although her middle son was unaffected, and survived her.
Alix (1872-1918) had four daughters and one son, who suffered from hemophilia. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Alix and her family were arrested. On July 17, 1918 the whole family was executed by firing squad in the basement of Ipatiev House, Yekaterinburg, Russia.
As I close this out with a photograph from happier days, I’ve found myself a little hung up on Ella and Alix’s deaths which took place on consecutive days. The imperial family were shot in that basement on July 17th, and one day later Ella was killed in Sinyachikha. Could Ella have known what had happened to her beloved younger sister the previous day? In his book, The Life and Death of Ella Grand Duchess of Russia, Christopher Warwick says not, writing that they '“of course had no knowledge of what had taken place in that distant cellar in Ekaterinburg”2. I really hope he is right.
Four Sisters, the Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses, Helen Rapport, 2014.
The Life and Death of Ella Grand Duchess of Russia, Christopher Warwick, 2014/