The dreadful fate of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters

‘Cela me revolte,’ wrote Queen Victoria in her diary in 1894 when her adored granddaughter Alexandra of Hesse announced her engagement to the Tsarevich Nicholas, ‘to feel that she has been taken possession of and carried away by those Russians.’

The sisters all look alike in the photos: uncomfortable dress, priceless jewellery, grimace, hair in bun

The queen was proprietorial about the four surviving daughters of her late daughter Alice, who had died of diphtheria, aged 35, when little Alix was only six. To lose one of those granddaughters to the Russians had been bad enough. Alix’s elder sister, the headstrong Elizabeth, known as Ella, had refused Victoria’s suggestion that she marry the eligible Fritz von Baden and had insisted on the corset-wearing, Dante-reading Russian Grand Duke Serge instead. And now Alix, also going against her grandmother’s advice, had accepted the proposal of the future Tsar – for which Ella was partly to blame. She’d enticed her younger sister to Russia, wanting to have her living near her.

In hindsight, we know Queen Victoria was right to be deeply worried. Both Alix and Ella would die appalling deaths at the hands of revolutionaries. Alix, her husband and their five children were shot in 1917 in a murder orgy that lasted for 20 minutes; and the following year, Ella (who was by then a widow and a nun) was thrown down a mineshaft into which grenades were then lobbed.

Frances Welch has a gift for bringing royal figures (who all look rather alike in the photos – uncomfortable dress, priceless jewellery, grimace, hair in bun) to life, making us care about them and showing us how their stories interweave. For anyone who seeks Queen Mary’s famed encyclopaedic knowledge of ‘How They [European royal family members] Were Related’ in the early 20th century, this is both a deeply affecting story of four sisters and an informative bit of history.