Maria Feodorovna (Dagmar of Denmark)

• 1. Introduction

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  Maria Feodorovna, born Princess Dagmar of Denmark, was buried twice, and the second burial came almost 78 years after she died. At the 2006 ceremony in Saint Petersburg, where she was laid beside her husband, the crowd around the coffin pressed in so tightly that a young Danish diplomat fell into the grave before the coffin was lowered. The mishap suited a woman whose life never followed the script written for it. She was a Danish princess who became Empress of Russia, then outlived the empire that had adopted her. She died in 1928.

  How did a girl who wandered Copenhagen markets and cafes become the most cheered member of the Romanov family? Why did a bride chosen for one brother end up marrying the other? What did she see coming that her own son, the last tsar, would not? And why did she refuse to the end of her life to believe the most notorious murder in Russian history had happened at all?

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• 2. A Simple Copenhagen Childhood

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  At 18 Amaliegade in Copenhagen, in an 18th-century town house called the Yellow Mansion, Dagmar was born on the 26th of November 1847. The house stood right beside the Amalienborg Palace complex, the Danish royal family's main residence. Yet her father, then Prince Christian, lived on an officer's salary. Her mother was Princess Louise of Hesse-Kassel, and Dagmar was their fourth child and second daughter.

  The household employed only six people. The children were allowed to walk the streets of Copenhagen, go to the market and sit in cafes. On the rare occasions they took part in ceremonies, they put on their fine clothes and then took them off again at once, so as not to get them dirty. Their parents wanted a plain civic upbringing built around the idea of royal duty.

  She was baptised a Lutheran, with Queen Caroline Amalie as godmother. Her names honoured a kinswoman, a Queen Dowager of Denmark, and the popular medieval queen Dagmar of Bohemia. Within the family she was called Minnie for her whole life. The name Maria Feodorovna came only later, when she converted to Orthodoxy before her 1866 marriage.

  Her closest companion was her eldest sister, Alexandra, with whom she shared a room in the Yellow Mansion. Tutors taught the two girls French, English and German, along with dancing, music, painting and drawing. Their mother taught housekeeping. Their father added gymnastics and sports, which was unusual for girls. Swimming lessons came from Nancy Edberg, a Swedish pioneer of swimming for women. Years later Dagmar welcomed Edberg to Russia on a royal scholarship to teach women to swim.

  In 1852 her father became heir-presumptive to the Danish throne, largely because his wife Louise was a niece of King Christian VIII. The following year he was named Prince of Denmark, and the family received Bernstorff Palace, north of Copenhagen, as a summer home. Louise loved it above all her residences. When King Frederick VII died in 1863, Dagmar's father became king, just as she turned 16.

  That same year Alexandra married Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, in March. Within months Dagmar's brother Vilhelm was elected King George I of Greece. Her father earned the nickname "Father-in-law of Europe" for his children's brilliant matches. By the end of 1863 suitors were calling for Dagmar herself, and the first one was not the man her mother had in mind.

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• 3. Two Brothers

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  Crown Prince Umberto of Italy proposed first, but Dagmar found him unattractive, and Louise would not push the match. Louise saw higher status in a Russian marriage. Alexander II was looking beyond the German states that had traditionally supplied tsars with wives. Dagmar was among his candidates for the heir, Nicholas Alexandrovich, and the emperor had made his first inquiries as early as 1860.

  In the summer of 1864 the heir, known to his family as Nixa, arrived at Fredensborg Palace. He had never met her, but he had collected her photographs for years. He wrote to his mother that he had come as if in a fever and found her even lovelier than her portraits. On the 28th of September 1864, in the gardens of Bernstorff Palace, he proposed and was accepted. The gifts from her future in-laws, including a six-strand pearl necklace, cost 1.5 million rubles in total.

  The engagement fell in the middle of the Second Schleswig War, when Denmark faced Prussia and Austria. During the peace talks in October 1864, Dagmar wrote to Alexander II. She begged him to "use your power to mitigate the terrible conditions which the Germans have brutally forced Papa to accept." Her plea failed. From that moment she was known for her anti-Prussian views.

  Nicholas travelled on to Florence, and the couple exchanged daily love letters for months. When his letters thinned, she teased him that he had fallen for "a dark-eyed Italian." In April 1865 he fell gravely ill with cerebrospinal meningitis. Alexander II telegraphed her: "Nicholas has received the Last Rites. Pray for us and come if you can." Nicholas died on the 22nd of April 1865, with his parents, his brothers and Dagmar at his side. His last wish was that she marry his younger brother. His parents had to struggle to pull her away from the body.

  That younger brother, Alexander, was in love with Maria Meshcherskaya, a lady-in-waiting to his mother. He had even tried to renounce his place as heir so he could marry her. Dagmar was still mourning. Neither was keen on the idea. In June 1866 Alexander came to Copenhagen with his brothers Vladimir and Alexei. While they looked over photographs of Nicholas, he asked whether she could love him after loving Nixa. She said she could love no one but him, because Nixa had been so close to him. On the 17th of June he proposed during a beach picnic at Hellebæk, near Elsinore.

  On the 22nd of September 1866 she sailed from Copenhagen aboard the royal yacht Slesvig. Hans Christian Andersen, who had once told stories to the royal children, stood in the quay crowd. That night he wrote in his diary, "What a poor child!" He feared she was heading for a country where the people and religion were different and where she would have none of her old acquaintances.

  In Saint Petersburg on the 24th of September the weather was more than 20 degrees Celsius, almost summery, and the poet Fyodor Tyutchev marked it in a welcome poem. On the 29th she made her formal entry in a blue and gold Russian national costume and appeared on a balcony of the Winter Palace. After her conversion she became Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna. Her parents could not attend the wedding because of money problems, so her brother, Crown Prince Frederick, went in their place. The couple then settled in the Anichkov Palace, where they would live for the next 15 years.

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• 4. A Family of Crowned Heads

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  On the 18th of May 1868, at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, Maria gave birth to Nicholas, the future Nicholas II. Her husband wrote in his diary that he had been "weeping like a child" before the birth, and that his heart then turned light. The whole imperial family crowded into the room. She later told her mother that the Emperor held one of her hands, her husband the other, and the Empress kept kissing her.

  A second son, Alexander, born in 1869, died of meningitis in infancy. She wrote that the doctors said he had not suffered but that the parents had suffered terribly to see and hear him. Four more children reached adulthood: George in 1871, Xenia in 1875, Michael in 1878 and Olga in 1882. Maria doted on her sons and was possessive of them. Her relationship with her daughters was more distant. George was her favourite, and she could never bring herself to punish his pranks. Olga recalled that "mother had a great weakness for him."

  Her talent for arranging marriages showed itself early. When her brother George I of Greece visited Saint Petersburg in 1867, she contrived to leave him alone with Olga Constantinovna of Russia. She then won over Olga's parents, including a father who thought the girl too young. Her own father wrote to praise her, asking, "Where in the world have you, little rogue, ever learned to intrigue so well?"

  In 1873 she travelled to the United Kingdom with her husband and their two eldest sons. Maria and her sister Alexandra delighted London society by dressing alike at social gatherings. Almost every summer afterward the Russian family went to Denmark, where her parents hosted reunions at Bernstorff and Fredensborg. Her brother George and his wife Olga came up from Athens, and the Princess of Wales often arrived without her husband. After the heavy security in Russia, the tsar and tsarina relished the freedom there.

  Europe found these gatherings suspicious. Otto von Bismarck nicknamed Fredensborg "Europe's Whispering Gallery" and accused Queen Louise of plotting against him with her children. Prince Gorchakov had already predicted that Germany would not forget that a Danish princess stood "on the steps of the throne" in both Russia and England.

  Maria and Alexandra were called the "international anti-German pair." Alexandra told her sister in 1900 that Kaiser Wilhelm II was "inwardly our enemy." In 1905 the Kaiser wrote to Nicholas II, accusing the tsar's mother of stirring up anti-German feeling at court. His letter named the diplomat Alexander von Benckendorff, who he said had met her secretly in Copenhagen at the request of Edward VII.

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• 5. The Beloved Empress

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  In February 1880 a plot against Alexander II failed to reach the imperial family only because they arrived late for dinner. By then Maria's relations with her father-in-law had soured. She refused to accept his second wife, Catherine Dolgorukov, and would not let her children visit the woman or her legitimized children. She admitted to Sophia Tolstaya that there had been "grave scenes" between her and the Sovereign. At a Winter Palace reception in February 1881 she refused to kiss Catherine and offered only her hand. The furious emperor told her, "Sasha is a good son, but you, you have no heart."

  On the morning of the 13th of March 1881, the revolutionary group Narodnaya Volya killed Alexander II with bombs as he returned from a military parade. The second bomb tore his legs apart, and he died of blood loss a few hours later. Maria described in her diary what she saw when the dying emperor was carried into the palace. Her fear then turned to her husband. "Our happiest and serenest times are now over," she wrote.

  The new couple were crowned at the Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin on the 27th of May 1883, before more than 8000 guests. A major conspiracy discovered just before the ceremony cast a pall over it. Soon afterward General Cherevin, head of the security police, urged them to move to Gatchina Palace, 50 kilometres outside Saint Petersburg. Catherine the Great had built it, and it had 900 rooms. The family lived there for 13 years and visited the capital only under heavy guard.

  In 1887 students planned to kill Alexander III on the anniversary of his father's death, hiding dynamite in hollowed-out books. The secret police uncovered the plot. Five students were hanged, among them Aleksandr Ulyanov, the older brother of Vladimir Lenin. The worst danger to the family, however, came by rail. In the fall of 1888 the imperial train left the tracks and slid down an embankment while the family was at lunch, and the roof of the dining car nearly caved in.

  Through it all she remained adored. Charles Frederick Worth, the Parisian couturier, said no other woman inspired him as she did, and that he would dress her free of charge for life. A visitor named John Logan called her "the best dressed woman in Europe." The American writer Thomas Knox met her once and wrote that he liked her though he was neither emperor nor Russian.

  She had spoken no Russian when she married. Within a few years she was so fluent that her husband wrote to her in the language. She told an American minister that Russian rivaled Italian in music. Her husband called her "the Guardian Angel of Russia." As Empress she took over patronage of the Marie Institutions, which included 450 charitable establishments, and in 1882 she founded Marie schools to give girls an elementary education. She also served as patroness of the Russian Red Cross Society.

  She was just as notable in the ballroom, hosting the imperial balls at Gatchina. A rivalry with Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, the wife of her brother-in-law Vladimir, mirrored the one between their husbands. In private Maria called her "Empress Vladimir." At parties her husband liked to join the musicians, but he would send them off one by one. When that happened, Maria knew the evening was over.

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• 6. The Dowager and the Daughter-in-Law

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  On the 1st of November 1894, Alexander III died at Livadia at only 49. When Alexandra had visited Gatchina in July, she was shocked by how weak her brother-in-law looked. Maria wrote in her diary that she was heartbroken, but that the peace on his face after death gave her strength. Two days later the Prince and Princess of Wales arrived. Alexandra prayed with her sister and slept at her bedside.

  Nicholas had long wanted to marry Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine, a favourite grandchild of Queen Victoria. His parents had not approved. They thought her shy and somewhat peculiar, and they feared she lacked the character to be an empress. Nicholas wrote, "I wish to move in one direction, and it is clear that Mama wishes me to move in another." Only as his father's health failed did they give permission. Maria's birthday fell a week after the funeral, and as mourning could be eased that day, Nicholas married Alix then. She took the name Alexandra Feodorovna.

  At her son's coronation in May 1896 the three of them arrived in separate carriages. Maria was met with applause the writer Kate Kool called "almost deafening," and the American journalist Richard Harding Davis was surprised that she was cheered more loudly than the emperor or the empress. For some time Nicholas told his ministers he would seek his mother's advice before deciding, and sometimes the ministers suggested it themselves. On her advice he first kept his father's ministers.

  She thought her son weak and believed it better that she influence him than someone worse. After her husband's death she became convinced that Russia needed reforms to avoid revolution. Her daughter Olga said her personality was magnetic, and that she would work her secretaries to shreds. In 1904 she backed the liberal Pyotr Sviatopolk-Mirsky as interior minister. She reportedly told him to accept the post, adding, "If you do, I will give you a kiss." After the first years of the reign, the tsar's wife replaced her as his confidant.

  The two women never found common ground. Court custom put an empress dowager above an empress consort. Maria resented that Alexandra bore four daughters before an heir came, almost ten years after the wedding, and that she failed to win the public. Olga said they "were utterly different in character, habits and outlook." Maria was sociable and a good dancer. Alexandra was shy and shut herself away from the Russian people.

  Maria also disliked Grigori Rasputin, whom she considered a dangerous charlatan. She asked Nicholas and Alexandra to send him away. Nicholas stayed silent and Alexandra refused. She said of her daughter-in-law, "She does not perceive that she is ruining the dynasty and herself." In February 1914 the tsar dismissed the minister Vladimir Kokovtsov on Alexandra's advice. Maria told Kokovtsov she saw the country "nearing some kind of catastrophe."

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• 7. Ultimatum and Exile

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  In May 1914 Maria went to London to visit her sister, and in July the First World War broke out. German authorities in Berlin stopped her train from reaching the Russian border. She had to return by way of neutral Denmark and Finland. In Finland, where she had long opposed the Russification of the grand duchy, a welcoming orchestra played the March of the Pori Regiment and the anthem "Maamme." Governor-General Franz Albert Seyn had banned both. Earlier, during the first wave of Russification, she had asked her son to recall the unpopular governor-general Nikolai Bobrikov.

  Back in Russia she lived at Yelagin Palace, closer to the capital, which had been renamed Petrograd. She served as president of the Russian Red Cross. As she had done during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, she also paid for a sanitary train.

  The imperial family worried that Rasputin's hold on Empress Alexandra endangered the throne. Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna and Grand Duchess Victoria Feodorovna asked Alexandra to banish him, without success. Several Grand Dukes approached the tsar and also failed. In 1916-17 Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna reportedly planned a coup with four guard regiments. They would force the tsar to abdicate and install his young son, with her own son Kirill as regent.

  Documents suggest Maria Feodorovna was involved in a plan to depose her son to save the monarchy. She was to give Nicholas an ultimatum to banish Rasputin or she would leave the capital, and that departure would be the signal. How the replacement would work is unconfirmed. One version has Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich ruling in her name. Another has him and Maria sharing a regency for her grandson Alexei.

  She hesitated at first. Maria Pavlovna told the French ambassador that Maria Feodorovna was too outspoken and imperious, and that in these confrontations mother and son parted in a rage. Eventually she was persuaded, after Alexandra asked for the dismissal of the minister Alexei Polivanov. Alexandra reportedly learned of the plan and persuaded the tsar to order his mother out of the capital. Maria went to the Mariinskyi Palace in Kiev and never returned to Petrograd. Alexandra remarked that it was much better for Mother-dear to stay in Kiev, where "she can live as she wishes and hears less gossip."

  In Kiev Maria worked with the Red Cross and hospitals. In September, the 50th anniversary of her arrival in Russia was celebrated with festivities, and Nicholas visited her without his wife. Alexandra wrote that he should tell his mother sharply how pained he was that she listened to slander. Maria then urged her son to remove both Rasputin and Alexandra from political influence. Soon afterward Nicholas and Alexandra cut off all contact with the tsar's family.

  When Rasputin was murdered, relatives asked her to come back and take Alexandra's place as the tsar's political adviser. She refused. Her opinion of her daughter-in-law remained blunt: "Alexandra Feodorovna must be banished." She added, "Let her enter a convent or just disappear."

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• 8. A Mother Who Would Not Believe

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  On the 15th of March 1917, Nicholas II abdicated. Maria travelled from Kiev to meet him in Mogilev, and on returning to Kiev she saw that the city had changed and that her presence was no longer wanted. Her family persuaded her to go with a group of refugee Romanovs by train to the Crimea. They arrived at the end of March.

  In the Crimea she was told that her sons, her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren had been murdered. She publicly dismissed it as a rumour. In her diary she told herself that they had all escaped Russia and that the Bolsheviks were hiding the truth. One surviving letter to Nicholas says that her thoughts and prayers never left him and that she sometimes felt she could not bear it. Her daughter Olga later wrote that she believed her mother had steeled herself to accept the truth some years before her death.

  Because she believed in their survival, she rejected the woman known as Anna Anderson, really Franziska Schanzkowska, who claimed to be her granddaughter Anastasia. She opposed Olga's 1925 visit to the claimant. Olga went anyway, concluded the woman was an impostor, and called the later accusation that her mother had ordered her to reject the claim a "huge lie."

  She refused to leave Russia at first. Only in early April 1919, at the urging of Queen Dowager Alexandra, did she sail from the Crimea. King George V sent the battleship HMS Marlborough to fetch his aunt. The party of 17 Romanovs included her daughter Xenia and five of Xenia's sons, along with six dogs and a canary. After Malta, they went on to England aboard HMS Lord Nelson.

  In England she stayed with Alexandra. Although her sister treated her kindly, she felt she had become "number two" beside a popular queen dowager. In November 1919 she returned to Denmark. She lived briefly in a wing of Amalienborg with her nephew, King Christian X, then in 1923 made her permanent home at Hvidøre, the villa she and Alexandra had bought in 1906.

  Russian émigrés in Copenhagen kept treating her as their empress. In 1921 the All-Russian Monarchical Assembly offered her the locum tenens of the throne. She declined with the words "Nobody saw Nicky killed." She financially supported Nikolai Sokolov, who investigated the deaths of the tsar's family, but never met him. When Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich proclaimed himself "Tsar of all the Russias" in August 1924, she answered by telegram that she was convinced her two beloved sons were alive.

  Alexandra died in November 1925. That was the last loss she could bear. She died at Hvidøre of heart failure, having outlived four of her six children, and was interred at Roskilde Cathedral, the traditional burial site of Danish monarchs.

  In 2005 Queen Margrethe II of Denmark and President Vladimir Putin agreed that her remains should go to Saint Petersburg, as she had wished. Ceremonies ran from the 23rd to the 28th of September 2006. On the 26th of September a statue of her was unveiled near her favourite Cottage Palace in Peterhof. Helsinki still has a street, the Dagmarinkatu in Töölö, named for her, and in the 1997 animated film Anastasia, Angela Lansbury gave her voice to the Dowager Empress.

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