Jump to navigation Jump to search This article is about Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, wife of Nicholas II of Russia. A granddaughter of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, Alexandra was, like her grandmother, one of the most famous royal carriers of the haemophilia disease. Lutheran Church and given the names of russian mail order wife documentary mother and each of her mother’s four sisters, some of which were transliterated into German.

Alix’s older sister, had been sent to visit her paternal grandmother, and thus escaped the outbreak. Alix and her surviving siblings grew close to their British cousins, spending holidays with their grandmother Queen Victoria. Princess Alix of Hesse, lower right, with her grandmother Queen Victoria and her four older siblings in mourning after the deaths of her mother and sister. Despite being renowned as one of the most beautiful princesses in her youth, Alix was married relatively late for her rank in her era, having rejected a proposal from her first cousin, the Duke of Clarence and Avondale in 1890, despite strong familial pressure. Nicholas and Alix had first met in 1884 at the wedding of Nicholas’s Uncle Sergei to Alix’s sister Elizabeth in St. When Alix returned to Russia in 1889, they fell in love.

Nicholas wrote in his diary: “It is my dream to one day marry Alix H. Alexander and his wife, both vehemently anti-German, had no intention of permitting a match with Princess Alix and the Tsesarevich. As long as he was well, Alexander III ignored his son’s demands, only relenting when his health began to fail in 1894. At first, Alix was troubled by the requirement that she renounce her Lutheran faith and become Orthodox, but she was persuaded and eventually became a fervent convert. Tsar Nicholas II, in hussar uniform, and Princess Alix of Hesse in an official engagement photograph, 1894. The day after his arrival in Coburg, Nicholas proposed to Alix, and she rejected him on the grounds of her refusal to convert to Orthodoxy.

However, after pressure from the Kaiser, who had told her that it was her duty to marry Nicholas, and her sister Elisabeth, who tried to point out the similarities between Lutheranism and Russian Orthodoxy, she accepted Nicholas’s second proposal. Following the engagement, Alix returned to England with her grandmother. In June, Nicholas travelled to England to visit her, bringing with him his father’s personal priest, Father Yanishev, who was to give her religious instruction. Later that autumn, as Alexander III’s health began to further deteriorate, Nicholas obtained the permission of his dying father to summon Alix to the Romanovs’ Crimean palace of Livadia.