Princess Palace: March 2026

via Wikimedia Commons

The violet-eyed Princess could not take her eyes off of the handsome young Grand Duke with the piercing light blue eyes. Victoria Melita had always been high-spirited and a bit of a tomboy, but she was on her best behavior on this trip to her mother's homeland for her aunt's funeral in St. Petersburg, Russia. Not quite 15 years old, she was trying to be on her best behavior, but something abour her cousin Kirill Vladimirovich made her heart flutter. He could hardly be more handsome and how dashing--he was, after all, preparing to enter the Imperial Navy the following year, after his 15th birthday.

In that, he was like her beloved father, Prince Alfred Duke of Edinburgh, second son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. A sailor prince whose naval career had caused his second daughter to be born on the Mediterranean island of Malta (and inspired her name, Victoria Melita), Alfred had since been landlocked as the heir to his father's patrimony in Saxe-Coburg, deep in the heart of Germany. Victoria Melita, affectionately called Ducky in the family, was a challenge to her mother, the imperious Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna, who had been delighted to remove her daughter's from the English influences of their father's homeland when they moved to Germany. Now, she was focused on finding sons-in-law that would put her daughter's in positions of power and keep them out of England.

However, a match with Kirill was impossible, no matter how dreamy he might be. He was too far from a throne. More importantly, the Russian Orthodox Church forbade marriage between first cousins. Any thought of Kirill had to be wiped from Ducky's mind. In this, Maria had an unlikely ally: her mother-in-law, Queen Victoria, who would adamantly (but sometimes unsuccessfully) oppose Russian marriages for any of her granddaughters.

And so, Ducky was dragged back to Germany while Kirill went off to the Navy while Mama and Grandmama searched for a more suitable suitor. In fact, Victoria has already started her planning just weeks earlier when Ducky visited her at a her Scottish home in Balmoral at just the same time as another grandchild, Prince Ernest Louis, heir to the Grand Duke of Hesse, also in Germany. He was the only surviving son of Victoria's second daughter Princess Alice. As it turns out, Ducky's English and German relatives had no qualms about marriage among first cousins. Victoria and Albert had been first cousins themselves. The fact that Victoria Melita and Ernest Louis were born on the 25th of November must be a sign of their compatibility. Never mind that neither was very keen on the other. Nevertheless, the two dutiful grandchildren were persuaded to stand together before an altar in 1894. She was 17. He was 25 and had by then succeeded his father as Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt and by Rhine.

Victoria Melita and Elisabeth

by C Ruf via Wikimedia Commons

The newlyweds were immediately fruitful with their daughter, Elisabeth, born just 11 months after the wedding. The couple also engaged in a boisterous social life throwing parties from which anyone over 30 was banned. They filled their circle with progressives and artists and insisted on informality. As a couple, however, they had no spark. Ducky found Ernie cold and undemonstrative. The only thing she enjoyed less about life in Hesse than her husband was probably being his consort. The lively teenager did not feel at all compelled to take up the duties of leading a nation, which often included spending time with people who were far less jolly than she. Ernie was impatient with her attitude. She responded with shouting, throwing both tantrums and tea trays. As with other unhappy royal brides, she escaped outside to ride her beloved horse and to travel internationally while Ernie preferred staying home with their daughter.

When Ducky's Uncle Tsar Alexander III died, the pair traveled together to Russia for the coronation of her cousin Tsar Nicholas II and Ernie's sister, the new Empress Alexandra. Ernie described the coronation as "the most splendid ceremony I have ever seen." Ducky, however, found something else even more splendid: Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, whose time in the Navy had no doubt added more charm and maturity. Ducky and Cousin Kirill rekindled their childhood flirtation before reality dragged them back into their separate lives.

Ducky escaped Hesse the next year for an extended visit to her older sister, Missy, better known then as Crown Princess Marie of Romania. When she returned north, she allegedly discovered Ernie bedding a male servant. The couple tried to keep up the pretence of their marriage, especially since Grandmama Victoria strictly forbade a divorce, but neither was happy. Ernie would later describe their life together as misery with both staying together mostly for their daughter's sake. Some joy returned when Ducky fell pregnant but a devastating stillbirth in May 1900 sent both careening once again into their separate, unhappy corners. Queen Victoria's death in January 1901 relieved a lot of the opposition to divorc and the two officially split later that year.

Ducky went to live with her mother, splitting their time between Coburg and the French Riviera. Five-year-old Elisabeth spent half the year with Ducky and half with Ernie, but she was often unhappy with her mother, who had never had as strong of a bond with her as Ernie had. In October 1903, Ernie took eight-year-old Elisabeth with him to visit his sister Empress Alexandra of Russia and her family at an imperial hunting lodge. While the grown-ups spent the days hunting, Elisabeth and her cousins, the young Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia played games and roamed through the forest. Perhaps after drinking from a contaminated water source in the forest, Elisabeth fell ill with typhoid fever. By the time a telegraph reached Ducky, the little girl was already dead. At the white funeral Ernie arranged for their daughter, Ducky removed her Hessian medallion and placed it on the tiny coffin, making her last break with the marriage that had made her so unhappy.

In the meantime, Kirill's interest in Ducky was growing, to his family's horror. Not only were they scandalized by her divorce, they were still deadset against marriage among cousins. His desperate mother even encouraged him to assuage his longing by taking Ducky as a mistress, but not as a wife. While serving in the Russo-Japanese war, Kirill's ship hit a mine. He suffered debilitating burns and injuries and was sent home. His near death experience led him to make a momentous decision. Both he and Ducky had tried living by others' rules, now they would live by their own.

Kirill and Victoria

by Eduoard Uhlenhuh via Wikimedia Commons

In October 1905, Victoria Melita married Kirill in a simple Orthodox ceremony in her mother's home in Coburg. The marriage was almost more shocking than her divorce had been. Not only had she not sought permission from her uncle King Edward VII of the United Kingdom, as required for a royal princess, but Kirill had not obtained permission from his cousin the Tsar. As the fourth in line for the Russian throne, this decision was monumental. Nicholas II stripped him of his titles and military rank and forbade the newlywed to return to Russia. They lived between Coburg, where their daugther Maria was born in 1907, and Paris, where daughter Kira was born in 1909.

By this time, the Tsar relented in his anger and restored Kirill's titles and rank. Ducky was created Grand Duchess Victoria Feodorovna and launched herself as a social hostess between their homes in St. Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo. She continued her love of riding and indulged in painting, gardening and home decoration while Kirill took up auto racing. She still enjoyed traveling abroad, especially during the bleak Russian winters opting to spend time with her mother in France or her sister Marie in Romania, far to the south.

The family was summering on their yacht in the Baltic in 1914, stopping off in Riga for one of Kirill's auto races, when the First World War broke out. While Kirill served in Poland on the staff of the commander of the Russian Army, Victoria took on work as a nurse, as so many royal women did. Perhaps drawing on her husband's love of automobiles, she even created a motorized ambuland unit. She sometimes traveled to Romania to assist her sister with war victims. In Russia, however, familial tensions were rising due to the influence of Gregory Rasputin over Nicholas and Alexandra, who believed he could relieve the hemophiliac suffering of their son Tsarevich Alexei. After Imperial relatives murdered Rasputin, the couple joined in requests for leniency for the perpetrators, but Nicholas was unyielding.

The pair remained publicly loyal to the Tsar but they were privately very worried about the future of the monarchy and the dynasty. When the February Revolution of 1917 led to the Tsar's abdication, Kirill and Victoria Melita were secretly siding with the mob that surrounded their palace in St. Petersburg. Kirill and his naval unit swore allegiance to the new Provisional Government. He hoped to preserve the monarchy but many relatives viewed this act as treason. Kirill was forced to resign while Ducky wrote to her sister Marie that they were losing everything.

Now in the early stages of her final pregnancy, 40-year-old Ducky knew they had to escape Russia. The Provisional Government agreed to let them go to Finland, which was a quasi-independent Russian territory at the time. In August 1917, their son Vladimir Kirillovich was born in Finland, but they were rapidly running out of sustenance. By the following summer, when their Russian relatives were being massacred back home, they had been reduced to begging for baby food from family outside of the former empire. Ducky had pleaded with her cousin, now King George V, to send more help for the Romanovs and the Provisional Government, but he had refused. That was a blow that would not heal.

In 1919, after the war, the desperate family went first to her mother in Germany and then on to Switzerland. Later, she inherited her mother's homes in France and Coburg, where Ducky showed an interest in the emerging Nazi party due to its strong stance against the Bolsheviks.

After nursing Kirill through a breakdown in 1923, the couple focused on their dynastic aspirations. While many refused to believe rumors about the murders of the Tsar and his immediate family, Kirill felt it was important to accept them. Once Nicholas' only brother was declared legally dead, he decided to act. Much to the dismay of many Romanovs, he made himself the head of the family and "Guardian of the Throne" and raised his children from Princesses and Prince to Grand Duchesses and Grand Duke. When Germany began strenghthening its relationship with Soviet Russia, the family moved permanently to France.

There, they lived among many British ex-pats and maintained their imperial pretenses. They enjoyed throwing parties and socializing, but their romance came to a shuddering halt when Ducky discovered that his sojourns to Paris were for adultery. She did not seek a divorce as she had with her first husband, but she was devastated. When she suffered a stroke at the age of 59, it was her sister Marie she was glad to see, not her husband. She died surrounded by family and was buried at Coburg. After the fall of the USSR, she and Kirill, who died just two years after her, were among the many Romanovs to be re-interred in St. Petersburg, due in large part to the efforts of their granddaughter, Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, who today styles herself as Head of the Imperial House of Romanov.

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