<
A
granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and great-aunt of the present Duke
of Edinburgh, no one who saw Princess Elizabeth (Ella) of
Hesse-Darmstadt gracing the opulent Romanov Court could have
imagined that she would die horrifically of infected wounds and
starvation in a mineshaft in Siberia, or that she would one day be
recognised as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church.
The second daughter of Queen Victoria’s daughter Alice and her
husband Louis, heir to the little German Grand Duchy of Hesse, Ella
was born into a happy household in 1864. Although by royal
standards her parents were not wealthy, they sought to create an
idyllic childhood for their seven children, whom they educated
themselves, ensuring that their curriculum included the practical
skills of gardening, cookery, woodwork, book-keeping and household
management. Alice, a great philanthropist, was equally keen to
instil in her children the belief that with privilege comes
responsibility, and they frequently witnessed her willingness to
carry out the most menial tasks in the hospitals and homes of the
poor.
Life was not all service and study, though. Each year, the family
spent several months with Queen Victoria in England, where Ella
delighted in the ‘pretty English houses with their pretty little
gardens’ and she and her siblings ran wildly through the corridors
of Windsor Castle in noisy games of hide and seek, or enjoyed the
sea air at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.
This childhood idyll was tragically cut short in 1878 when a
diphtheria epidemic broke out in Darmstadt, and one after another,
Ella’s father and each of her siblings contracted the illness.
While Ella was sent away for her own protection, her mother nursed
the rest of the family, adhering to the doctor’s instructions to
neither kiss nor hold the children to avoid contracting the highly
contagious disease.
Despite Alice’s tender ministrations, diphtheria proved fatal for
her youngest child, five-year-old May, and to avoid causing
distress to the other children who were still in the grip of the
disease, Alice did not tell them that their sister had died. When,
eventually, her son, Ernie, began to recover, Alice revealed the
truth, and the little boy was so overcome with grief that Alice
held him in her arms and kissed him. It was, as Disraeli told the
British parliament, ‘the kiss of death’. Alice, too, contracted the
illness and died on 14th December – the seventeenth anniversary of
the death of her father, Prince Albert. Her final words were a
whispered, “Dear Papa!”
Devastated by Alice’s death, Queen Victoria promised she would try
to be a mother to ‘dear Alice’s orphaned children’, and, true to
her word, she followed their progress with maternal concern,
frequently inviting them to spend time with her in England. Ella,
she noticed, was blossoming into a strikingly beautiful young woman
and when her cousin, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, fell in love
with her, The Queen was delighted. Ella’s intelligence and
gentleness would, she hoped, help calm the impetuous young man, and
she had no doubt that Ella would one day make a wonderful German
Empress.
To Ella, though, the idea was abhorrent and, while even years
later, her fond grandmother sighed at the thought of ‘what might
have been’ she accepted Ella’s decision, convinced that she would
soon find an equally suitable ‘parti’. A few years later, The
Queen’s resignation turned to horror when she discovered that Ella
had decided to marry ‘a Russian!’
Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich, a younger brother of Tsar Alexander
II, was, at first sight, hardly the ideal husband for a
half-English princess, raised in a liberal atmosphere. Tall,
extremely thin and highly-strung, he was notoriously short-tempered
with strong reactionary views and firm belief in the autocracy of
the Tsar. Nonetheless, Ella appeared to see beyond his harsh
exterior and, as she told The Queen, she hoped she might ‘do him
some good’. When the wedding took place in the Winter Palace in
June 1884, a distressed Queen Victoria huffed in horror, “I hate
weddings!”
In the early months of her marriage, Ella revelled in the glamour
of the ballrooms of St. Petersburg where her beauty attracted the
attention of every man in the room, but within months of the
wedding, unfounded rumours of Serge’s cruelty towards her spread
through the courts of Europe, fuelled no doubt by her spurned
suitor, Kaiser Wilhelm II. The fact the couple remained childless
added to the belief that something was amiss in the marriage and,
when Ella attended Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee celebrations in
1887, her fond grandmother pressed her to reveal the most intimate
details of her life but was disappointed by Ella’s protestations:
“All I can repeat is that I am perfectly happy.”
For a while, in fact, Ella was happy. She loved her husband and he,
in his way, loved her, but for a woman raised in an atmosphere of
service to others, Ella soon found that her talents were stifled in
an endless round of receptions and society entertainment. Serge
refused to permit her to venture out among the poor of Russia,
viewing such a move as dangerous and demeaning to the Imperial
Family, and Ella was obliged to console herself by founding various
charities, and encouraging a match between her younger sister,
Alix, and Serge’s nephew, the Tsarevich Nicholas, who had met and
fallen in love with one another at Ella’s wedding.
Neither the Russian Imperial Family nor Queen Victoria favoured
such a match. To the Russians, Alix was too reserved and serious
for a future Tsarina; and for Queen Victoria, the prospect of her
favourite granddaughter living in a country where assassinations
were commonplace was too terrifying to contemplate. Moreover, Alix
herself had reservations for, much as she loved Nicholas, a Tsarina
had to be of the Russian Orthodox faith, and she was unwilling to
abandon her Lutheran religion. Even when, in 1891, Ella converted
to Orthodoxy, Alix’s scruples prevented her from accepting
Nicholas’ proposal. For ten years, Ella urged Nicholas to remain
hopeful, while Queen Victoria became increasingly irked by Ella’s
‘interference’, until, at last, at a family wedding in Coburg in
1894, Alix gave way and agreed to marry Nicholas. In the ‘orgy of
rejoicing’ that followed, even Queen Victoria was so touched by the
romance, that she gave the young couple her blessing.
Queen Victoria’s fears for Alix’s future were well-founded. Barely
had the engagement been announced when Nicholas’ father, Tsar
Alexander III, died unexpectedly, leaving twenty-six-year-old
Nicholas to shoulder the responsibility for his
hundred-and-eight-million subjects. Alix, eager to support him,
agreed to have the wedding brought forward, and in November 1894,
amid whispers that ‘she has come to us behind a coffin’, Tsar
Nicholas II and ‘Alexandra’ (as she was now named) were married in
an atmosphere of mourning.
Despite Ella’s high hopes, Alix did not endear herself to the
Russian Court, where her attempts to engage the aristocracy in
charitable works were met with disdain. More importantly, in the
first ten years of her marriage, she gave birth to four daughters
but, in a country where women were debarred from inheriting the
throne, she had yet to produce an heir. It was not until 1904 that
she finally gave birth to a son – the Tsarevich Alexei – but,
within a matter of weeks, it was discovered that he had inherited
the ‘terrible illness of the English family’ – haemophilia.
In 1905, following a disastrous war with Japan, unrest spread
through Russia, and one particular target of the revolutionaries
was Ella’s husband, Serge, now Governor General of Moscow. One
afternoon in February, while Ella was working on a Red Cross
project in the Kremlin, she heard an explosion from the street
outside, and realised at once that her husband had been
assassinated. Rushing to the scene, she discovered a shattered
carriage, two dead horses and Serge’s mutilated corpse. Gathering
his remains in her own hands, she ordered the body to be taken to a
neighbouring monastery and, three days later, visited his killer in
prison. Presenting the man with an icon and a Bible, she told him
she had forgiven him but needed to know what had impelled him to
commit such violence.
From that moment on, Ella’s life changed dramatically. She sold or
gave away all her property, even her wedding ring, to purchase a
piece of land in the poorest part of Moscow, where she built a
hospital, orphanage, church and convent of which she became Abbess.
Every part of the building was designed by the finest architects
and artists to create a palace for the poor, for, as she said, “How
can those who work all day in terrible conditions ever find beauty
in their souls.”
Throughout the night, she wandered the streets, rescuing abandoned
children and child prostitutes, providing them with a home, and,
having undertaken a course in nurse training, she tended the most
abject patients herself. Her schemes extended to providing work and
hostels for young people across Russia, and establishing the
earliest forms of district nursing in the country. So great was her
impact that the Muscovites revered her as a saint, and even when
Russia was in the grip of revolution, she was initially permitted
to continue her work, until the Bolsheviks seized power in October
1917 and Lenin declared that no Romanov should be left alive in
Russia.
Despite pleas from her family in England, and offers of help from
her cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm in Germany, Ella refused to abandon her
orphans and her convent. In the summer of 1918, she was taken with
several companions to Siberia where, in the early hours of the
morning on 18th July – a day after the murder of her sister, Alix,
and the entire Imperial Family – she was taken by cart to a disused
mine, and having been struck by rifle-butts was forced into the
waterlogged shaft, and left to die of starvation.
Miraculously, it was reported that when her body was eventually
recovered from the mine, it was found to be incorrupt, and when, in
1921, her elder sister, Victoria (grandmother of the Duke of
Edinburgh) arranged for her to be reburied in Jerusalem, a monk
accompanying the coffin claimed that a scent of roses emanated from
it. Since then, several miracles have been reported at her tomb on
the Mount of Olives.
The convent, which Ella founded, has now re-opened, and in 1981 she
was declared a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church outside
Russia.
Perhaps, if you should pass by Westminster Abbey, you might raise
your head and notice ‘the most beautiful princess in Europe’, who
sought to bring beauty to the lives of the poor – Queen Victoria’s
granddaughter, Saint Elizabeth Feodorovna of Russia.
(Christina Croft is the author of
Most Beautiful
Princess – A Novel based on the Life of Grand Duchess Elizabeth
of Russia; and Queen Victoria’s
Granddaughters 1860-1918)]]>
What an amazing woman!
Why “Feodorovna?”