A SUMPTUOUS SCENE AS THE ROMANOVS SAY ‘I DO’

The life of Alexandra, the last Empress of Russia, was beset by tragedy – from the loss of her mother, Princess Alice, to diphtheria when she was only six, and the birth of a haemophiliac son Alexei, to her eventual murder alongside her husband Nicholas II and five children in July 1918 in the Russian Revolution.

The betrothed Nicholas and Alexandra spent the summer of 1894 with Alexandra’s grandmother Queen Victoria in England. ‘You don’t know, dearest Grandmama,’ Nicholas wrote to the Queen before he arrived, ‘how happy I am to come and spend time with you and my beloved little bride.’

But a tragedy affected their wedding plans. His father Alexander III developed terminal kidney disease and died on 1 November 1894, aged only 49. ‘What a horrible tragedy,’ wrote the Queen, reflecting that Alicky, as she called her granddaughter, would become wife and empress at the same moment. ‘And what a position for these dear young people. God help them!’

Nicholas and Alexandra married in St Petersburg a week after Alexander’s funeral, the bride swapping her black mourning gown for a rich silver brocade dress covered in a trailing mantle of cloth of gold, lined with ermine.

Back at Windsor Castle, Victoria hosted a large dinner party to celebrate her granddaughter’s wedding. She stood to attention for the playing of the Russian national anthem and was heard to exclaim, ‘Oh! How I do wish I had been there!’

She commissioned one of her favourite artists, Laurits Tuxen, to attend the wedding and paint the moment the Metropolitan Archbishop of St Petersburg made the sign of the cross before the young couple. The finished work was hung at Osborne House, her Isle of Wight home, before being moved to Buckingham Palace following her death in 1901.