bedroom, seated in an armchair, Alexander III awaited the young couple. He was dressed in full-dress uniform. He had insisted, despite all objection, that this was the only way for the Tsar of Russia to greet a future Russian empress. Kneeling before the pale, enfeebled giant, Alix received his blessing, and she and Nicholas were formally betrothed.
For the ten days that followed, the life of the household revolved about the sickbed of the dying Tsar. Nicholas and Alix went quietly about the house, caught up in an unsettling swirl of happiness and despair. They walked through the vineyards and by the sea, although they never dared to go too far from the house. She sat at his side while he began reading over the reports submitted by his father’s ministers. It was a difficult role. Plunged into the bosom of a grief-stricken family, she felt herself an outsider. Her one contact and confidant was Nicholas. Marie was too busy caring for her husband to worry about the niceties of welcoming her future daughter-in-law. It was natural, of course, in a household where the patient was husband, father and ruler of a great empire, that attention should be concentrated on him and his wife. Doctors, government ministers and court officials treated Marie not only with the normal deference due an empress, but with the extra consideration accorded a human being facing a great personal ordeal. Doctors hurried from the bedside to the Empress, scarcely noticing the shy young man and woman standing outside the door or waiting at the foot of the stairs. In time Alix became offended by this treatment. Her lover, whom she honored, was Heir to the Throne. If this huge Tsar whom she scarcely knew should die, her fiancee would be the Tsar. Yet he was treated like a nobody.
She put many of these feelings into a famous passage in his diary: “Sweet child, pray to God. He will comfort you. Don’t feel too low. Your Sunny is praying for you and the beloved patient.… Be firm and make the doctors come to you every day and tell you how they find him … so that you are always the first to know. Don’t let others be put first and you left out. You are Father’s dear son and must be told all and asked about everything. Show your own mind and don’t let others forget who you are. Forgive me, lovy.”
For ten days after Alix’s appearance at Livadia, the agony in the sickroom continued. Then, on the afternoon of November 1, 1894, Alexander III suddenly died. Marie fainted into Alix’s arms. “God, God, what a day,” wrote Nicholas. “The Lord has called to him our adored, our dear, our tenderly loved Papa. My head turns, it isn’t possible to believe it. All day we rested upstairs near him. His respiration became difficult, suddenly it became necessary to give him oxygen. About 2:30 he received extreme unction; soon light trembling began and the end followed quickly. Father John remained with him an hour at the bedside, holding his head. It was the death of a saint, Lord assist us in these difficult days. Poor dear Mama.”
No one better understood the significance of the death of the Tsar than the twenty-six-year-old youth who had inherited his throne. “I saw tears in his blue eyes,” recalled Grand Duke Alexander, Nicholas’s brother-in-law. “He took me by the arm and led me downstairs to his room. We embraced and cried together. He could not collect his thoughts. He knew that he was Emperor now, and the weight of this terrifying fact crushed him.
“ ‘Sandro, what am I going to do?’ he exclaimed, pathetically. What is going to happen to me, to you, to Xenia, to Alix, to mother, to all of Russia? I am not prepared to be a Tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling. I have no idea of even how to talk to the ministers.’ ”
In the late afternoon, while the guns of the warships in Yalta harbor still thundered a last salute to the dead monarch, an altar was erected on the lawn in front of the palace. Courtiers, officials, servants and family formed a semicircle, and a priest in golden vestments solemnly administered the oath of allegiance to His Imperial Majesty, Tsar Nicholas II.
When morning came the following day, the palace was draped in black and a storm raged on the Black Sea. As the embalmers arrived to deal with the body, the priests effected the religious conversion of the Protestant German Princess who suddenly stood so close to the Russian throne. Before noon that very day, the new Tsar, his betrothed and his widowed mother went to the palace chapel for a special service.
“Even in our great grief, God gives us a sweet and luminous joy,” wrote Nicholas. “At ten o’clock in the presence only of the family, my dear Alix has been consecrated to Orthodoxy.” After the service, Alix, Marie and Nicholas took Holy Communion together and, said Nicholas, “Alix read beautifully and in a clear voice, the responses and the prayers.” When they returned to the palace, the new Tsar Nicholas issued his first Imperial Decree. It proclaimed the new faith, new title and new name of the former Princess Alix of Hesse. Queen Victoria’s Lutheran granddaughter had become “the truly believing Grand Duchess Alexandra Fedorovna.”
The death of the powerful Tsar Alexander III at the age of forty-nine was a shock to all Russia. No arrangements had been made for a funeral, and the body of the dead Tsar was forced to wait for a week at Livadia while telegrams flew between the Crimea and St. Petersburg. The wedding, originally planned for the following spring, was moved forward at Nicholas’s insistence. Staggering under the weight of his new office, he had no intention of allowing the one person who gave him confidence to leave his side.
“Mama, many others, and I think it would be better to celebrate the marriage here in peace, while Papa still is under this roof,” he noted in his diary, “but all the uncles are against it, saying that I should marry in Petersburg after the funeral.”
Nicholas’s uncles, the four brothers of the dead Tsar, were independent, strong-minded men who carried great weight in the family. Their view, that the wedding of their young nephew was too important a national event to be performed privately at Livadia, prevailed. Meanwhile, the Orthodox ceremonies of death went on continuously. The family kissed the lips of the dead Tsar as he lay in his coffin, and went to the chapel twice a day to pray for his soul. “My dear Papa was transferred from the chapel to the large church,” Nicholas wrote. “The coffin was carried by the Cossacks.… When we got back to the empty house, we absolutely broke down. God has afflicted us with heavy trials.”
At the end of a week, the coffin, draped in purple and accompanied by the mourning family, left Livadia for Sevastopol, where a funeral train awaited. As the train rolled north from the Crimea across the Ukraine, clusters of peasants gathered along the track to watch the dead Tsar pass. In the cities of Kharkov, Kursk, Orel and Tula, the train halted and services were held in the presence of local nobility and officials. In Moscow, the coffin was transferred to a hearse and carried to the Kremlin for an overnight rest. Low clouds whipped across a gray November sky, and splinters of sleet bit into the faces of the Muscovites who lined the streets to watch the cortege. Ten times before reaching the Kremlin the procession stopped and separate litanies were sung from the steps of ten different churches.
In St. Petersburg, red-and-gold court carriages heavily draped in black waited at the station to pick up the family and move off through streets filled with the slush of an early thaw. For four excruciating hours the cortege advanced slowly across St. Petersburg to the Cathedral of the Fortress of Peter and Paul, where the Romanov tsars were buried. Throughout the city, the only sounds were the beat of muffled drums, the clatter of hoofs, the rumble of iron carriage wheels and the slow tolling of church bells. In the procession, the new Grand Duchess Alexandra Fedorovna rode alone, thickly veiled, behind the rest of the family. As she passed, the silent crowd strained to see their young Empress-to-be. Shaking their heads, old women crossed themselves and murmured darkly, “She has come to us behind a coffin.”
The Kings of Greece, Denmark and Serbia arrived to join the royal mourners. Edward, Prince of Wales, and his son George, Duke of York, represented Queen Victoria; Prince Henry of Prussia represented his brother, the Kaiser. In all, sixty-one royal personages, each with an entourage, gathered that week in the marble palaces of St. Petersburg. In addition, the ministers of the Imperial government, the commanders of the Russian army and navy, the provincial governors and 460 delegates from across Russia came to pay their respects. “I have received so many delegations, I had to walk in the garden. My head is spinning,” wrote Nicholas. At a banquet arranged in honor of the foreign guests, “I almost broke into sobs sitting down at the table because it was so difficult to see all this ceremony when my soul was so heavy.”
For seventeen days, the body of Alexander III lay exposed in its coffin. Thousands of people shuffled past the open bier while a priest stood by chanting prayers and a hidden choir sang mournful hymns. Twice a day all the royal mourners rode through the dank and misty streets for services. During this period, the future King George V wrote to his wife, Mary:
“Every day, after lunch, we had another service at the church. After the service, we all went up to [the] coffin which was open and kissed the Holy Picture which he holds in his hand. It gave me a shock when I saw his dear face so close to mine when I stooped down. He looks so beautiful and peaceful, but of course he has changed very much. It is a fortnight today.”
Amid the priests and their litanies, the rooms and streets decorated in black, the sad faces, the tears and the
