summer from the cold British winters to warmer climes. In November 1911, accompanied by her husband, Macduff, and their two daughters, Alexandra and Maud, she boarded the P&O liner, the Delhi bound for Egypt by way of the Bay of Biscay. In spite of her delicate constitution, the rough seas and strong winds did not bother her unduly and, on the night of 12th December, she retired to her cabin untroubled by the rising storm. While the royal party slept, gales forced the ship off course towards Morocco where it ran aground, throwing several crew members overboard and destroying many of the lifeboats.
Awoken by the chaos, Louise and Macduff made their way to the deck where officers urged the princess and her family to hurry into the remaining lifeboats. With remarkable calm, Louise displayed her true nobility and insisted on remaining on board until all the other passengers were safe.
When word of the danger reached the British fleet, boats were immediately dispatched to assist in the rescue and eventually, Louise, Macduff and their daughters, dressed only in their nightclothes covered by coats and life jackets, were able to climb into a boat. Their ordeal was only just beginning. Waves lashed at the vessel, filling it with water and ultimately throwing the family overboard.
“We floated in our belts,” Louise wrote to her brother, “- waves like iron walls tore over us, knocked us under, Admiral Cradock gripped my shoulder & saved me! - Thank God my Macduff & children both on beach but had been under too, it was an awful moment, our clothes so heavy & we were breathless & shivery, we ran to get warm as best we could.”
Drenched and exhausted, the family and sailors found themselves in a forlorn spot and trudged shivering for miles through the darkness of the continuing storm. Eventually they reached Tangier where they finally found warmth and rest.
Although it took several weeks for Louise to regain her strength, she had come through the disaster unscathed and her courage earned the admiration of her rescuers. A month later, the family embarked on a recuperative cruise along the Nile, where it was soon apparent to Louise that the shipwreck had affected her husband more deeply than she had first realised. He contracted a series of chills, which developed into pleurisy and pneumonia and died on the 19th January 1912.
In England, the Royal Family awaited the return of his coffin and, for a second time in three months, the reputedly weak Louise impressed everyone by her composure and strength of character.
“What a saintly heroine our poor darling Louise has become!” wrote a proud Queen Alexandra, “a changed being who can bear every cross now!”
Resigning herself to ‘the will of God’ Louise calmly accepted her widowhood and assumed full responsibility for her daughters and the running of Macduff’s estates. Her eldest daughter, Alexandra, inherited her father’s title and became the first Duchess of Fife in her own right. Two years later she married her mother’s first cousin, Arthur, the brother of Daisy and Patsy Connaught.
Louise was not the only one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters to be regarded as a ‘saintly heroine’ that year. Just as Macduff’s death brought out Louise’s finest qualities, the shock of Serge’s assassination had led to a far more dramatic transformation in the life of her Hessian cousin, Ella. Though heartbroken at her husband’s horrific murder, the forty-year-old Grand Duchess refused to give way to despair. For twenty years, she had been seen as little more than a beautiful appendage to the Grand Duke - a bejewelled ornament who, for all her numerous charitable causes, remained entirely under Serge’s overbearing command.
Beneath her passive exterior, however, Ella had lost none of the intelligence or strength of character she had inherited from her mother. Her decision to convert to Orthodoxy had not been taken lightly and with each passing year she had absorbed herself more deeply in her faith. She may have endured Serge’s accusations of ‘immoderate devotion’ in silence but throughout her difficult marriage she had ‘kept her ears open’ to what was going on around her and had nurtured a secret dream.
Now, relieved of her duties as wife of the Governor General, she withdrew from the ballrooms to adopt a more ascetic existence. Dispensing with the trappings of royalty, she stripped her Kremlin apartments of their expensive furnishings and, adopting a vegetarian diet, divided her time between prayer and charitable works, venturing ever deeper into the heart of Moscow’s slums. The ignorance, poverty and debauchery she encountered revived the longing she had had since childhood ‘to help those who suffer.’
“How,” she asked, “can you expect workmen who toil all day in hot hideous factories or on remote farms with nothing in their lives but work and worry, to have beauty in their souls?”
It was no longer sufficient for her to patronise charities at a distance; like her mother before her, Ella felt drawn to take a more direct approach. After many months of careful planning and consultations with Church elders, she gradually disposed of her possessions and purchased a piece of land in the poorest part of Moscow. There, she built a convent, orphanage, church and hospital where the poor could be treated free of charge. She undertook a course of nurse training and, after two years of wrangling, the Orthodox Church agreed to grant ‘The House of Martha and Mary’ official recognition as a convent. Ella, having taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, was appointed its abbess.
In her desire to create a beautiful haven for the poor, Ella had the white buildings of her foundation surrounded with flowers and trees. She employed the finest artists in Russia to decorate the walls of her church with frescos and paintings and funded a permanent chaplain for her sisters:
“It is a very gentle and delicate experience to stand on the stone flags of the wide church,” wrote a visiting Englishman. “[The sisters’] religion is a religion of good deeds. They visit, clothe, comfort, heal the poor, and all but work miracles, flowers springing in their footsteps where they go.”
Far from the gaudy world of the ballrooms, Ella dedicated herself wholeheartedly to her foundation. Sleeping for only a few hours on a plain wooden bed, she spent the nights trailing through the back streets of Moscow in search of child prostitutes and abandoned children. She personally attended the most abject patients in her hospital, often receiving those whom other hospitals were unable or unwilling to treat. Her young friend, Prince Felix Youssoupov recalled one such case:
“A woman who had overturned a lighted oil stove was brought in; her clothes had caught fire and her body was a mass of burns. Gangrene had set in and the doctors despaired of saving her. With a gentle but obstinate courage, the Grand Duchess nursed her back to life. It took two hours each day to dress her wounds and the stench was such that several of the nurses fainted. The patient recovered within a few weeks and this was considered a miracle at the time.”
As the foundation flourished, she extended the work to establish hostels for students and young workers, and a scheme for employing messenger boys, providing them with accommodation and fair wages. Requests poured in by the thousand and Ella, employing all the administrative talents she had learned in childhood, attempted to deal with them all:
“[Ella] never used the words, ‘I can not’ and there was never anything gloomy in the life of the Martha and Mary Home,” wrote her sister Victoria’s lady-in-waiting, Nona Kerr, “Anyone who had been there took away with him a precious feeling.”
Ella’s saintly reputation soon spread through the country and wherever she went, crowds gathered to kiss the hem of her garments as she passed, but if the poor were convinced that a saint lived among them, the aristocracy were aghast. Many of her former friends considered her lifestyle demeaning to the Imperial Family and rumours spread through the family that she had suffered a nervous breakdown and intended to shut herself off from the world. Only with the staunch support of her sister, Victoria Battenberg, did she manage to convince her relatives in Darmstadt and England that this was no sudden ‘adventure’ but a dream she had nurtured since childhood which ‘grew in me more and more.’ It was a dream which would ultimately lead to death and canonisation.
No comments:
Post a Comment