Alexandra and the Queens Consorts of her Time - most were related

[maria_cristina]

These two women were grand daughters of Queen Victoria the First British Queen-Empress,they were first cousins and eventually Tsaritsa of all the Russias and Queen  of Spain.But the common thing about them that stands out like a sore thumb was their personal and painful tragedy of being mothers to heamophiliacs and unpopular Consorts to their adoptive countries.Did these two cousins ever reach out to each other prior to the great war and the Fall of the Russian Moanrchy?Did they ever write to one another and discuss their shared worries?Did they give advice to one another?What did Queen Ena say after her cousin and the Imperial family were excecuted?

[darius]

I know that Ena had a portrait of the Empress in her private apartments and that the night of her flight from Madrid memories of the Tsaritsa´s fate played greatly on her mind.

[bluetoria]

I suppose that because of their age difference, they would have had little do with each other - after all, Ena was only 7 when Alix married so I doubt they saw a great deal of one another. Another similarity though, is that they both converted in order to marry. Although Ena survived in exile, in many ways she had the harder lot, didn't she, because her unfaithful husband was so lacking in understanding & blamed her for bringing haemophilia into the family. At least Alix had Nicholas' undivided support & love.

[griffh]

David have you heard of Kitty Kelley's book, The Royals?  In Chapter two she tells of the efforts George V took to conceal the German origins of the British Crown.  I just remembered that you may not have seen it as it is banned in England, or at least it is not available in England according to the website.  But Kelley states that Queen Mary did have slight German accent as did another individual who was critiquing the Masterpiece Theater production of Prince John.

I will quote from Kelley's book as she shows how German war histeria was as extreme in England as it was in Russia.  She states:

". . . the House of Windsor was a fantasy…created in 1917 to conceal the German roots of the King and Queen, and the deception enabled the monarchy to be perceived as British by subjects who despised Germany.

Until then, many English kings never spoke the King's English. They spoke only German because for almost two hundred years, from 1714 until this century, a long line of Germans ruled the British empire. By 1915 England finally had a king, George V, who could speak English without a German accent. Although he was a German from the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha line that had ruled England for eighty years, he considered himself to be indisputably British. His subjects, who hated Germany, Germans, and all things Germanic, were not convinced.

For years, especially in the early 1900s, the English had become increasingly afraid of Prussian militarism. They felt threatened by the Kaiser's oppression. And they were "sore-headed and fed up," as George Bernard Shaw wrote, with Germany's rattling sabers. They viewed World War I as a war against Germany. Newspapers carried eyewitness accounts of revolting cruelty by the Germans, who bombed undefended towns and killed civilians. Those actions shocked the world in 1915. In England, editorials denounced "The March of the Hun" and "Treason to Civilization" as German U-boats sank British ships. The mounting death tolls on French battlefields caused hardships in England, which exacerbated Britain's hatred of foreigners.

King George V was disturbed as he watched his subjects stone butchers with German names and burn the homes of people who owned dachshunds. Pretzels were banned and symphony conductors shunned Mozart and Beethoven.

This antipathy was not unique to Great Britain. Blood hatred of everything German had infected all of Europe and spread to America, where Hollywood produced a string of hate films such as To Hell with the Kaiser, Wolves of Kultur, and The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin.

The King of England deplored the "hysterical clamor," calling it "petty and undignified," but few listened. The image of the hideous Hun as a fiendish torturer who raped, pillaged, and murdered innocents had gripped the public imagination.

The King became so concerned about the reaction of his volatile subjects that he was afraid to protect his relatives of German descent. Instead he stood by silently as his beloved cousin Prince Louis of Battenberg was vilified simply because of his German name. When war had threatened, Battenberg as the First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy mobilized the Admiralty with speed and efficiency, so that when war broke out, England was ready. But Battenberg, a naturalized British subject, became a target for abuse: his name was German, he was born in Germany, he spoke with a German accent, he employed German servants, and he owned property in Germany.

Despite his total loyalty to the Crown, he was forced to resign his military position and relinquish his princely title. The final humiliation occurred when the King told him to change his name. Shattered, Prince Louis dutifully anglicized Battenberg (berg is "mountain" in German) to Mountbatten to make it acceptable to the English.

The King tried to mollify his cousin by making him a British noble. Louis accepted the title of Marquess of Milford Haven because he wanted his children to be noblemen, but he never recovered from the shame of renouncing his ancestry. Somehow, though, he kept his sense of humor. He wrote in his son's guest book: "June 9th arrived Prince Hyde; June 19th departed Lord Jekyll." His younger son and namesake, Louis, was shocked by the news of his father's resignation. "It was all so stupid," he recalled years later. "My father had been in the Royal Navy for forty-six years. He was completely identified with England, and we always regarded ourselves as an English family. Of course, we were well aware of our German connections; how could we not be? It certainly never occurred to any of us to be ashamed of them--rather the contrary. We are a very old family, and proud of it. . . . My father had worked his way to the top of the Royal Navy by sheer ability and industry. And now his career was finished--all because of the ridiculous suspicion that he might be in secret sympathy with the very people he had come to England to avoid!"

Next, the King moved to cleanse the rest of his German family. Like the monarchs of mythology who bring magic clouds with them wherever they go, King George V waved his royal wand. Overnight, one brother-in-law--the Duke of Teck--became the Marquess of Cambridge, and the other--Prince Alexander of Teck--became the Earl of Athlone. One stroke of the royal quill eradicated all traces of Mecklenberg-Strelitz, Hesse, and Wettins from the King's lineage: the ugly German ducklings were transformed into beautiful British swans. The royal family's Teutonic dukes, archdukes, and princelings instantly became English marquises.

But the King felt he still needed to make the monarchy appear less imperial to survive. He decreed that members of the royal family could marry into the nobility. So, for the first time in history, royalty could marry commoners, whether they were titled or not. This paved the way for his second son, Albert, known to the family as "Bertie," to propose to a sweet-faced Scottish girl, reared as an Earl's daughter, although her mother has been rumored to have been one of the Earl's Welsh servant girls (these rumors, never officially acknowledged, have yet to be borne out by any evidence). Ironically, Bertie's marriage in 1923 to the commoner, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, brought stability to the British throne and propped up the dynasty for several generations. During the First World War, concern was voiced over the bloody role of the King's German cousin Prince Albert of Schleswig-Holstein, who was in charge of British prisoners of war in a camp outside Berlin.

"He's not really fighting on the side of the Germans," said the King defensively. "He was only put in charge of a camp of English prisoners." "A nice distinction," Prime Minister Asquith later observed to a friend. His successor, Lloyd George, was even more blunt. When he received a royal summons to the Palace, he turned to his secretary and said: "I wonder what my little German friend has got to say to me." The Prime Minister's antipathy spread to his staff, who kept the King's private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, waiting on a wooden chair in the hall and refused to rise when he entered their office. The private secretary ignored the discourtesy. "We are all servants," he told shocked courtiers, "although some are more important than others."

As the devoted secretary to Queen Victoria, Lord Stamfordham was by far the most important of the King's men. He had served Victoria's heir, King Edward VII, who had put him in charge of his own son, George, at an early age. "He taught me how to be a king," said the master of his servant.

It was Lord Stamfordham who received the unenviable job of telling King George V about D. H. Lawrence, who had been hounded into hiding because he married a German woman. The once revered writer had married the sister of German military aviator Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the legendary Red Baron, credited with shooting down eighty Allied planes during World War I. After their wedding, Lawrence and his bride, Frieda, were forced by public hostility to seek refuge in the English countryside, where they hid in barns like animals.

This news was unsettling to the King, who also had a German wife. But the clever Queen--Mary of Teck--speaking English with a slight guttural accent, began referring to herself as "English from top to toe." The King immediately stopped addressing Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, the commander of the German forces sweeping across Europe, as "sweet cousin Willy." His German-hating subjects, who avoided references to sex, began referring to the male member as a "Willy."

Still, the hatred of Germans became so intense in England that the King's mother begged him to remove the Kaiser's honorary flags from the chapel. "Although as a rule I never interfere, I think the time has come when I must speak out," wrote Queen Alexandra. "It is but right and proper for you to have down those hateful German banners in our sacred Church, St. George's, at Windsor."

The Queen Mother sent her letter to "my darling little Georgie" after the Daily Mail had excoriated him for allowing the eight flags of "enemy Emperors, Kings and Princes" a place of honor at Windsor. "As long as the offending banners remain, their owners will be prayed for," thundered the newspaper. "What are the King's advisors doing?"

The King ignored the criticism until it came from his "darling Mother dear." Then he yielded and had the banners removed. "Otherwise," he told a friend, "the people would have stormed the chapel."

I will post the second half of Kelley's chapter as it deals in part with George V's attitude toward Alexandra and also later with his son John and his dread of his heir, Edward the VIII or the Duke of Winsor.  

[griffh]

Here is some more of Chapter two of "The Royals."

"The King then threw himself and his family into the war effort. He dispatched his sons to the western front, sending the Prince of Wales (Edward, but known to the family as David) to France, while Prince Albert (Bertie) served on the battleship HMS Collingwood. The King banned alcohol and began strict rationing at the Palace to set a national example.

In March 1917 his cousin the Emperor Nicholas II of Russia ("dear Nicky") was forced to abdicate, in part because he, too, had a German wife whom the King blamed "for the present state of chaos that exists in Russia."

The King's equerry was more brutal on the subject: "The Empress is not only a Boche by birth, but in sentiment. She did all she could to bring about an understanding with Germany. She is regarded as a criminal or a criminal lunatic and the ex-Emperor as a criminal for his weakness and submission to her promptings."

That was all the King needed to hear. Concerned about the survival of his throne, he withdrew the warm friendship he had once extended to his "beloved cousin." When the Czar appealed for asylum for himself and his family, the King refused, prohibiting them entry into England. The King felt he needed to separate himself from Russian imperialism, especially when wrapped with a German ribbon. So he wrote his cousin that he did not think it "advisable that the Imperial Family should take up their residence in this country." He suggested instead Spain or the South of France. At that point the revolutionaries in Russia realized that the King would not use military force to save his relatives. Thus abandoned, the Czar and his family were seized and sent to Siberia.

The King was more determined than ever to hang on to his threatened monarchy. He resented references to his German ancestry and raged over the caricatures of Max Beerbohm, who drew him as a comical and lugubrious figure. He lost his temper when a Labor Member of Parliament called him "a German pork butcher," and he erupted again when H. G. Wells branded him a foreigner. In a letter to the Times, the British journalist and novelist called for an end to "the ancient trappings of the throne and sceptre." He damned the royal house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha by calling it "an alien and uninspiring Court."

"I may be uninspiring," boomed the King, "but I'll be damned if I'm an alien." He resolved then and there to rid himself and his royal house of what he saw as its dreadful German taint. With the greatest sleight of hand since the sorcery of Prospero, he asserted his divine right and rechristened himself with the most euphonious, melodious British name conceivable. His courtiers had spent weeks searching for just such a name that would reestablish the monarchy as thoroughly English.

Finally, Lord Stamfordham found it and secured his place in history by proposing the name of Windsor. That one word summoned up what the King was looking for--a glorious image that resonated with history, stretching back to William the Conqueror. For Windsor Castle, the most thoroughly British symbol extant, had been the site of English monarchs for eight hundred years. Although no king had ever lived there, several had died in Windsor Castle, and nine were buried in its royal crypt. The name was enough to redeem a tarnished crown. The proclamation of the House of Windsor was announced on July 17, 1917, and appeared the next day on the front pages of England's newspapers. The British press dutifully reported that the King had renounced his German name and all German titles for himself and all other descendants of Queen Victoria and that henceforth he and his issue were to be referred to as the House of Windsor. In the United States, news of the British royal family's reinventing itself was reported on page nine of The New York Times. In an editorial, the Times noted "the unnaming and renaming" was approved in a meeting of the largest Privy Council ever assembled and suggested that the name of Windsor, an Anglo-Saxon fortress where the legendary King Arthur sat among the Knights of the Table Round, might have been selected for its "sense of continuity, of ancientness." America's newspaper of record praised England's King for choosing "a venerable name for his house."

In Germany, the news was reported with less reverence. The Kaiser laughed at his quixotic cousin and said that he was looking forward to attending a performance of that well-known play The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. But the Kaiser appreciated the political necessity of accommodation. As he pointed out, "Monarchy is like virginity--once lost, you can't get it back." Still, he exacted revenge nineteen years later when the King died by sending the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to his cousin's funeral in Windsor Castle. The Duke wore his Nazi uniform.

George V never expressed any qualms about his actions. He pragmatically buried his German roots to save his throne and then systematically ostracized his foreign relatives. He did this without compunction, even after receiving news from Russia that the Czar and Czarina and their four daughters and young son, who were moved from Siberia and Ekaterinburg, had been massacred by the Bolsheviks.

"It was a foul murder," he wrote piously in the diary he kept for posterity. "I was devoted to Nicky, who was the kindest of men and a thorough gentleman." By keeping his distance, the King of England had held his crown in place. He then proceeded to rule the House of Windsor for the next two decades with probity. There was no scandal attached to his reign, and like his grandmother Queen Victoria, he excelled at the virtues the English prize most: duty and punctuality. His subjects saw him as a simple, decent man whose plain tastes reflected their own."


Well this is rather strong stuff but it does show how seriously German War Hysteria was taken in England and how drastic and cruel measures saved the throne.  

It also shows how German War Hysteria was focused on the Empress in Russia and how nothing less than the equally drastic measures such as the arrest of Rasputin and the incarceration in during the height of the Hysteria in late 1915-1916 of the Empress in a convent for the duration of the war could have staved off the Hysteria.  

[griffh]

I just wanted to say that obviously the Empress would have never been encarcarated or Rasputin arrested.  In fact his assassination was nothing more than the Romanoff family's public admission that the Empress was a traitor and it fed the War Hysteria that I believe led to the Revolution.  If George V had not acted in 1915 he would not have survived the terrible reverses and defeats of 1916 that were paving the way to socialist revolutions everywhere.  

There is nothing more revealing than the tone of British poetry from 1914 to 1918 as it goes from a heroic Christian Idealism in 1914, to a total disolutionment in 1916, and finally to cruel and hardened atheistic cynicisim by 1919 that would mark the entire twentieth century.

I think it is so tragic that Nicky did not know how to protect his wife who he so loved, any more that Alix seemed to know how to support her husband who she so loved.

To me the real tragedy was that they could not seem to inspire loyalty, which has been described as the most beautiful attribute of Soul.  They did not seem to be able to inspire loyalty from their relatives, the government, the allies, or even the church but only from their children and a hand full of retainers.  To me it was a lack of loyalty that abandoned them to their fate.  

Here is the last bit of Chapter two of "The Royals."

"The King had started his adult life as the Duke of York and spent seventeen years shooting grouse on the moors of Sandringham. He became the heir apparent when his older brother, the Duke of Clarence, died. Even then the King kept the clocks at Sandringham set forward an hour to provide more time for shooting. A proper country squire, he enjoyed tramping across his twenty-thousand-acre estate in Norfolk. He adored his wife, indulged his daughter, and terrorized his five sons. "I was frightened of my father, and I am damn well going to see to it that my children are frightened of me," he said.

Poorly educated, he rarely read, shunned the theater, and did not listen to classical music. He ignored the arts, letters, and sciences. For recreation he licked postage stamps and placed them with childlike percision in blue leather stamp books. By the end of his life he had compiled an enormous collection of stamps from places he never wanted to visit. Known as "the Sailor King," he did not travel for education or pleasure. "Abroad is awful," he said. "I know because I've been there." Except for touring military installations, he took few trips. He made an exception in 1911 to go to India for his coronation and in 1913 to visit relatives in Germany.

"My father, George V, took quiet pride in never having set foot in the United States," said his eldest son.

"Too far to go," said the King.

What he was, his children would become. In later years his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, who became the Duke of Windsor, was so humiliated by his father's ignorance that he reneged on an agreement to write a book of royal family reminiscences. He confided the reason to his publisher: "I'd hate for the world to know how illiterate we all were." The Prince of Wales embarrassed himself at a dinner party by not knowing the name of the Bronte sisters, who in their short lifetimes wrote Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, both considered classics of the English novel. The Prince of Wales, who rarely read, did not know who they were or how to pronounce their name. "Who are the Bronts?" he asked.

Unenlightened about mental illness, the Prince of Wales considered the condition of his youngest brother, Prince John, a source of shame. The last of the monarch's six children, John was mentally retarded and an epileptic. He was secretly removed from the family at an early age and lived on a farm on the Sandringham estate, where he died in 1919 at the age of thirteen.

As uneducated as the King was, George V won wide respect from his subjects for his conscientious performance of royal duties and for his numerous military uniforms and the obvious pleasure he took in wearing them in royal parades. His subjects looked up to him as the father of their country and the personification of their values. England had gained enough land by conquest during the First World War to give her dominion over a quarter of the globe and a fourth of the world's inhabitants, thus making George V the last great Emperor King. During his reign, the sun truly never set on the British empire. By the time King George V died in 1936, his beleaguered country was on the brink of another world war with Germany, which would end Britain's imperial power. And the House of Windsor, which he had built on the quicksand of illusion, started sinking under the weight of scandal.

For the last two years of his life, the King agonized over his heir. He dreaded leaving the monarchy in the hands of his feckless son, who at the age of forty-one was still unmarried. Following a fourteen-year affair with another man's wife, the Prince of Wales was now besotted with a married American woman, once divorced, named Wallis Warfield Simpson. Already Mrs. Simpson envisioned herself as the next Queen of England. The concept of a divorced person in royal circles was considered such sacrilege in those days that the King refused to receive his son's "unholy lover." He forbade his son to bring a woman defiled by divorce into his royal presence. When the King realized he was dying, he made his wife swear that she would never receive the despised Mrs. Simpson. The Queen, who regarded the King as more than her husband--"He's my almighty Lord and sovereign"--obeyed his command for the rest of her days.

At the end of his life, King George V cursed the laws of primogeniture that barred his solidly married second son from succeeding him. Although Bertie's stutter and stammer irritated him beyond bearing, he would have done anything to save the Crown from the Prince of Wales and his wenching ways.

"After I am dead," he said, "the boy will ruin himself in twelve months." In that the King proved prescient.

He wanted the throne to pass to his second son and then to his beloved granddaughter Elizabeth, who called him "Grandpapa England" because he referred to the National Anthem ("God Save the King") as his song. She sat on his lap, tousled his hair, pulled his beard, and plucked food from his plate for her Welsh corgi dogs. She also made him get down on his hands and knees to play "horsey" with her. The old King doted on his first granddaughter and held her in his arms on the balcony of Buckingham Palace so she could hear the crowd roar. "They're cheering for you, you know," he told her. Later he confided to an equerry: "I pray to God that my eldest son Edward will never marry and have children, and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne."

Critically ill for days, George V died on Monday, January 20, 1936, at 11:55 P.M. His end was hastened by Lord Dawson, who gave him a lethal injection of cocaine and morphine. The courtier wanted the King to die before midnight so that his death could be announced in the morning Times rather than in the less prestigious afternoon newspapers. The King, who had renamed the royal family, now lost his life to meet a newspaper deadline. Such was the legacy of the House of Windsor, which would eventually rise and fall as a puppet show for the media."

[cantacuzene]

Hey, I'm Cantacuzene from Spain. I don't know if you have heard this story: For her aniversary , King Alfonso XIII asked Ena what she wanted as gift. So many jewels she had already receive! She answered the thing
she most desired was just a collar-dog like this of Alexandra her cousin from Russia. Do you realize? That of the super-pic where she is more a goddess than a tsarevna. Did she got it? What do you think? Dream a little. We will be in touch , dear. kiss

[isabel]

Alix and Ena were first cousins, but they were not very close because the difference of their age (15 years), and because Russia and Spain are too far.

Ena married Alfonso King of Spain in 1906, they had six children: Alfonso (1907), Jaime (1908), Beatriz (1909), Cristina (1911), Juan (1913) and Gonzalo (1914). The eldest boy, Alfonso, and the younger, Gonzalo, were heamophiliacs, the second one, Jaime was deaft because an illness in childhood, the only healthy boy, was Juan (father of our actual King, Juan Carlos). Alfonso and Gonzalo died in youth. In reference of the girls, Beatriz and Cistina they had difficulties to marry Royal Relatives, because they were supossed to transmit the heamophilia to her descendents.

The life of Ena was not easy, she didn´t had de support and consolation of her husband as Alix had in Nicky. Alfonso never forgived that Ena was the guilty of their family tragedy. After the Spanish war, they lived separated. Ena died in 1969.

I don´t think that Alix and Ena shared their tragedy. But i have read that the King Alfonso was agree to welcome the IF in Spain during the russian revolution, i think that he was agree not as a King, or because they were his wife family, but because he was a father affected by the same Family Tragedy.

[Prince_Lieven]

They both had very hard lives, but at least Alix had the comfort of a loving husband, whereas Ena was deprived even of this . . .

[Caleb]

As far as the relationship between the Tsarina Alexandra & Queen Mary, I heard on the commentaries for "The Lost Prince" that both King George & Queen Mary found Tsarina Alexandra "deeply irritating" (can anybody confirm this?) It is dramatized in the "Lost Prince" when the Tsarina is acting very snobbish & insisting on not ruining her white shoes by walking on the grass at Osborne. But they portray George & Mary as having a soft spot for the Tsar & Mary actually playing with Nicholas & Alexandra's children, something that Mary probably woudn't have done with her own children. I must say in the scene with Nicholas, Alexandra & the children on the farm, her snobbishness makes the scene quite amusing. They also portray King George as being haunted by the Russians upon hearing of the brutal execution of Nicholas, Alexandra & the children.

[Caleb]

Don't get me wrong though, I was shocked to see how Tsarina Alexandra was portrayed as a "domineering snob" But I also noticed that they portray Nicholas as (forgive me for saying this) as almost in a sense, stupid.

[bluetoria]

I thought the portrayal of all the royalties was very poor. The Kaiser appeared like a comic book character; the Tsarina as ridiculous; Nicholas as foolish; George as neurotic etc etc. (I think this programme is discussed, though, on a separate thread...)

[griffh]

Bluetoria as usual I totally agree with you.  I think that the Brits have a considerable amount of guilt that colors their attitude toward the Romanoff’s and even the Kaiser.  I just finished reading the first sympathetic biography of the Kaiser.  Clearly he was a troubled man, but he was certainly not the man portrayed in the series.  

Alexandra was certainly not an elitist or someone who put having fun before etiquette or a concern for her own possessions.  She always was more relaxed and at ease in England among her own kin than she was in the formal atmosphere of the ceremonious Russian Court.  My friend, Princess Holstein, who was studying painting in NYC said that she was once publicly rebuked by Queen Elizabeth II at a garden party for. what the Queen considered, the betrayal of Nicholas II for  the revolution and the eventual withdrawal from WWI.  That is guilt speaking it defense.  

[ChristineM]

Griffh, your quote by your friend which refers to her conversation with QEII has left me quite stunned.

I have taken the liberty of quoting it on the Windsor thread.

tsaria

[HerrKaiser]

Most intriguing. Griffh, I am not sure I fully understand the meaning of QEII's comment to your friend. Is QE saying Nickolas betrayed England for withdrawing from WWI and causing the Revolution, or is she saying England betrayed Nickolas?

Also, what is the new bio of Wilhelm that is somewhat compassionate towards him? There is an international symposium on his era that is being sponsored by Germany, Israel, and Finland. Thanks!