When Victoria of Hesse married Louis Battenberg in April 1884, Queen Victoria had more on her mind than the aberration of the bride’s father and the unforeseen romance between Beatrice and Liko. Though, of course, she had been informed in advance, the announcement of Ella’s engagement to a Russian Grand Duke sent a shiver of terror down a fond grandmother’s spine.
Since her formal entry into society three years previously, nineteen-year-old Ella might have had her pick of several European princes. Renowned as one of the most beautiful women in Europe, word of her charm, intelligence and gentleness brought proposals from many quarters. While Cousin Willy was still smarting at her rebuttal, Uncle Leo entreated her father not to throw her away on a dull Scandinavian prince who was earnestly seeking her hand. Ella herself had turned down the son of the Duke of Manchester and in 1883, Queen Victoria was mildly disappointed to hear that she had declined the proposal of her childhood friend, Fritz of Baden. The Queen’s disappointment turned to horror when she discovered that Ella had rejected him in favour of ‘a Russian!’
Apart from his great wealth, there was little to commend Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich to the Queen. Not only was he a Russian and a Romanov - the younger brother of Tsar Alexander III and Marie, Duchess of Edinburgh - but his highly-strung nature and unyielding reactionary views had created many enemies in his native St. Petersburg. His natural reticence had always given him a haughty air and the assassination of his father, Alexander II, had filled him with such a deep hatred of revolutionaries that he would mercilessly oppose any reform that might undermine the Romanov autocracy. Even in Russia, where the power of the Tsar was unlimited, Serge was commonly viewed as a sadistic despot.
Nor was the Grand Duke’s appearance particularly appealing to a Queen. His niece, Ella’s cousin, Missy of Roumania, thought him strikingly handsome, but noticed too the coldness in his steely-grey eyes. The French Ambassador, Maurice Paleologue observed that his face was disagreeable, ‘distinguished by greyish-white eyebrows and a hard look.’ Tall and extremely thin, he accentuated his gaunt figure by wearing whalebone corsets that showed through his clothes.
As if that were not to disenchant the Queen, she may well have heard the more insidious rumours, emanating from St. Petersburg.
“Try as I will,” wrote his cousin Sandro Mikhailovich, “I cannot find a single redeeming feature in his character…obstinate, arrogant, disagreeable, he flaunted his many peculiarities in the face of the entire nation, providing the enemies of the regime with inexhaustible material for calumnies and libels.”
Stories of his alleged ‘peculiarities’ were to haunt the Grand Duke all his life. As a young man, his devotion to the officers of his beloved Preobrazhensky Regiment led to speculation that he was homosexual and his apparent reluctance to marry, added further fuel to rumours.
What on earth, Queen Victoria wondered, could attract ‘dear lovely Ella’ to such an unpleasant man? It was true that Princess Alice had been fond of the shy little boy who, throughout Ella’s childhood, had often accompanied his consumptive mother on her recuperative visits to her native Hesse-Darmstadt. It was equally true that he was so different from bombastic Willy that Ella had responded with affection to his friendship; but now, surrounded by so many more sparkling suitors, the aloof Grand Duke seemed a most unlikely choice. He had made little impression upon her when he accompanied his mother on her final visit to Darmstadt in 1879, and Ella had even confessed to her sister that she found him ‘rather boring.’ Yet, when he returned to Hesse after his father’s assassination, her opinion changed dramatically.
Perhaps it was his heartfelt sorrow at the loss of his father that convinced her that his brittle exterior concealed a more sensitive nature. Having lost her own mother Ella empathised with his grief and, spending more time in his company, gradually came to realise that in spite of their disparate political and religious opinions, they shared the same aesthetic interest in music and art, inspired by a deeply spiritual temperament.
Gossip spread quickly through the family and by the time of Victoria’s engagement, word of Ella’s growing attachment to the Russian had reached a horrified Queen Victoria in Scotland. Summoning her granddaughter to Balmoral, the Queen earnestly attempted to dissuade her from the match. Princess Alice, she claimed, would never have wanted her daughter to marry a Russian. The vast Romanov wealth would ‘turn Ella’s head’; the country was very unstable and St. Petersburg society, immoral. The thought that ‘our sweet but undecided and inexperienced Ella, with her lovely face,’ may be led astray by the unscrupulous Russians was more than the Queen could bear. And if that were not disconcerting enough, Ella need only think of the cold Russian climate that would ruin her health, as it had that of several German princesses including Serge’s own mother.
Chastened by the lecture and unwilling to distress her grandmother, Ella assured the Queen that she had no intention of marrying Serge and that she would ‘hate to live in Russia.’ She returned to Darmstadt in the early autumn determined to put him from her mind and when Serge proposed, she refused him. Though the Russians, including Serge’s sister, the Duchess of Edinburgh, considered the refusal an insult, the relieved Queen was filled with admiration:
“I never gave Ella credit for so much independence of character.”
She had yet to discover quite how independent her gentle granddaughter could be.
Serge’s proposal had come at a time of great upheaval in Darmstadt. The New Palace was buzzing in preparation for Victoria’s wedding and her father was on the point of marrying Madame de Kolomine. Within a month of Ella’s departure from Scotland the Queen was alarmed to hear that Serge had received a further invitation to Hesse and could only pray that, in his presence, Ella would ‘remain firm.’
Her hopes and warnings were in vain. Whether it was the sense of romance in the air, or she had truly fallen in love, when Serge proposed for a second time Ella accepted him. It was left to Victoria to break the news to the Queen, before Ella dared pick up her pen to write to ‘dearest grandmama’ with some trepidation:
“…I am afraid this letter will not give you as much pleasure as I should wish but as it concerns my happiness and you have always been so kind to me, I wish you to know what I think about Serge…though he may have opinions you do not like, do you not think, dear Grandmama, that I might do him good?
…I shall try to keep to the right path and will always keep those I love in my mind and follow their good example...I think I know what I’m doing and if I am unhappy, which I am sure I never will be, it will all be my doing, as you know. Please forgive me if you are vexed with what I shall do, and although I will have to begin a new life, I will always cling to those who have been dearer to me than I can say.”
Queen Victoria could only shake her head in despair:
“Dear Ella, she really is so changeable and unaccountable, she told me how she hated all Russians, she refused Serge three weeks ago and now she takes him and forgets all.”
Six weeks after Victoria’s wedding, the royalties migrated to St. Petersburg where, on 15th June 1884, Ella and Serge were married according to both the Lutheran and Orthodox rites in the chapel of the Winter Palace. Cousin Willy, having made tactful excuses for his absence, missed the beautiful spectacle of his first love, draped in Russian Court dress and the jewels of Catherine the Great, walking down the aisle ‘on the arm of haughty Sergei.’ Even so, the Prussians managed to use the celebrations to humiliate the Battenbergs. Still angered by Moretta’s attachment to Sandro, Bismarck whispered a word in the right Russian ears to ensure that during the wedding banquet Louis was placed as far away as possible from the top table where his wife, Victoria, was seated near the bride.
After the wedding, the celebrations continued for a further ten days before Ella, now Grand Duchess Elizaveta Feodorovna Romanova, bade goodbye to her family. She and Serge travelled east for a honeymoon on his country estate, Ilinskoe, not far from Moscow, where her generosity and eagerness to learn everything about her new homeland, quickly endeared her to the villagers. In the autumn, the couple returned to the magnificent Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace in St. Petersburg for ‘the season,’ where Ella threw herself into the social life of the capital and soon made her mark in the ballrooms and receptions of the aristocracy.
“Ravishing beauty, rare intelligence, delightful sense of humour, infinite patience, hospitality of thought, generous heart, all gifts were hers,” wrote Serge’s cousin, Sandro Mikhailovich. “Everybody fell in love with ‘Aunt Ella’ the very first moment she arrived in St. Petersburg.”
The winter days were filled with skating parties, theatre visits and balls where, dripping in the jewels that Serge lavished upon her, she often disappeared partway through the evening only to re-emerge in an entirely new gown and another set of priceless gems. Devoted to her husband, popular at Court and loved by the people, life appeared idyllic for the naïve Grand Duchess but, within months of her wedding, rumours began to surface, that would plague her for the next twenty years.
Marriage had done nothing to improve Serge’s reputation. On the contrary, Ella’s calm passivity contrasted so sharply with his shortness of temper and dictatorial manner that her very presence at his side seemed to highlight the many flaws in his character. Observers, disgusted by the way he criticised and humiliated her in public, were convinced he must be still more cruel when they were alone. It was said that he was so jealous that he spied on all her movements, refused to allow her to go out without his permission and that he even read all her letters.
While Ella could not deny that Serge made every decision affecting their lives - even to choosing her partners at balls - the rumours of his unkindness were greatly exaggerated and caused her far more pain than his supposedly cruel treatment of her. But, however vehemently she protested that she ‘adored’ her husband and was ‘perfectly happy’ in Russia, increasingly outlandish stories spread not only through Russia but via the large family network to all the Courts of Europe.
“These tiresome reports about Ella being divorced etc. are all over the place; and in everyone’s mouth.” Vicky wrote to her mother only six months after the wedding, “I think it would be very good to have them contradicted.”
Queen Victoria was deeply troubled. She had dreaded this marriage from the start and now the rumours that she heard convinced her that her fears were well-founded. Ella’s letters repeatedly assured her that all was well but protestations of happiness served only to increase the Queen’s doubts.
“Ella’s constantly speaking of her happiness I don’t quite like. When people are very happy they don’t require to tell others of it.”
What was more, as the Queen could not fail to observe, there was evidence enough that something was awry in the marriage: many months had passed since the wedding yet Ella showed no sign of conceiving a child. In a family where children were as numerous ‘as the rabbits in Windsor Park’ her childlessness proved to Serge’s detractors that he was homosexual and had no interest in his wife. Increasingly salacious stories proliferated. Some claimed, without justification, that Ella refused to yield to Serge’s ‘unnatural’ perversions while others, more charitably but no less humiliatingly, believed that the shock of his father’s death had left him impotent.
It is possible that Ella was simply unable to have children. Since her adolescence, her grandmother had often commented on her frailty and, with her usual euphemistic references to her ‘health,’ implied that as a young girl Ella suffered from gynaecological problems. Advising Victoria not to ride too quickly or too often she added:
“For Ella it would be bad for her health as well, but then she cannot…ride just now.”
Conversely, though Ella frequently went to great lengths to defend her husband, she never made any attempt to explain away her childlessness. It was not simply a matter of coyness - after all, her Aunt Louise, Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter, also remained childless but had openly sought a cure in various European spas. Other members of the family were equally candid in the correspondence with the Queen, who for all her professed distaste for the subject, was remarkably inquisitive about the married lives of her daughters and granddaughters. Ella’s refusal to discuss the matter seems simply to confirm what the gossips had surmised: due to some failing on Serge’s part, the marriage remained unconsummated.
As the rumours continued unabated, the Queen seized every opportunity to cast a concerned eye over her precious granddaughter. When they met for a christening in Darmstadt in 1885, she was able to observe:
“They seems quite happy and comfortable together but Ella is looking pale and thin – which however they say is caused by the heat.”
Two years later Ella arrived in London for the Golden Jubilee celebrations, totally unprepared for the grilling she was about to receive. It was humiliating enough to hear the rumours and ‘disgusting lies’ that circulated through St. Petersburg, but mortifying to discover that the most intimate details of her marriage were being discussed as far away as Windsor. Deeply embarrassed by the Queen’s probing questions she could only reply with increasing desperation:
“All I can repeat is that I am perfectly happy.”
Ella’s heartfelt protestations were sincere. She loved Serge enough to endure a celibate marriage, but with each passing year the pain of her childlessness became harder to bear. Ella loved children and longed for a child of her own. During a visit to Ilinskoe in 1886, her Aunt Marie of Edinburgh noticed how readily she spoiled her eight-year-old cousin, Sandra, and she could not have been more thrilled to hear of the birth of her first niece, Alice. In Russia, too, she delighted in the company of her friends’ children, whom she frequently entertained by hiding gifts and sweets for them to seek out in the rooms of her palaces. Among the many charitable organisations that she patronised, the dearest to her heart was the ‘Elizabethan Society,’ which she had established to take care of orphans and neglected children. In the early years of her marriage, she entertained the forlorn hope that eventually something would change and she might have a child of her own, but with each passing season her optimism gradually faded.
For an intelligent, well-educated woman dogged by scandalous rumours, the trivial hours in the ballroom soon lost their appeal. She been raised to a life of service and duty, yet now she was little more than a beautiful ornament to a husband who showed her no physical affection and denied her any say in the decisions affecting her life. Had she sought them, the beautiful and charming Grand Duchess would have had no shortage of lovers in the infamously decadent Russian Court, but, believing that vows made before God were binding for life, Ella could not contemplate infidelity. Instead, like her mother before her, she devoted herself to her charities and, with ever greater fervency, to her religion•.
Although stories of Serge’s ‘perversions’ and sadism continued until his death and beyond Ella never spoke so much as one word of criticism against him. If the rumours of his homosexuality were true, she accepted the situation without complaint or self-pity and remained convinced that in his own peculiar way, he loved her. In that, at least, she found the comfort that was denied to one of her cousins, for out of all Queen Victoria’s granddaughters none suffered greater humiliation at the hands of a homosexual husband than the desperately unlucky Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein.
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