A Dark Fairy Tale of a Young Princess and Her Horrible Husband

New York Times

24-04-2025

For too long, Queen Victoria's ghost has been allowed to claim the nickname 'Grandmama of Europe,' owing to the countless descendants who became queens, princes, dukes and czarinas. But according to Helen Rappaport, in her serious but sprightly 'The Rebel Romanov, ' that honorific should really go to Victoria's own grandmama, Auguste of Saxe-Coburg.
Auguste, a duchess from a cash-strapped German principality, is the reason both Victoria and her husband, Albert, who was also her first cousin, exist and therefore, Elizabeth and Philip (both Victoria's great-great-grandchildren). At one point, this ducal Mrs. Bennet even tried to fob a daughter off on Napoleon.
But it's another of Auguste's daughters, Juliane, who is the subject of Rappaport's latest book. Initially, Julie, as she was known, promised to be Auguste's greatest matchmaking triumph.
At 14, Julie married Grand Duke Konstantin of Russia at the bidding of his grandmother, Catherine the Great. This was in the late 18th century, but even then, courtiers remarked with distaste at what the author calls 'trafficking in princesses' north to Russia.
Actual wine flowed from fountains during the couple's 1796 wedding festivities, and if all went according to plan, Konstantin and Julie would rule over Constantinople — once Catherine took it. But Julie's new husband was, to mix regimes, a rotten Fabergé egg. Even Empress Catherine described Konstantin as 'a Fury' and 'a little Vulcan.'
Parsing the euphemistic language of the day, Rappaport presents a truly frightening portrait of a marriage. When the military-obsessed Konstantin wasn't drilling his human toy soldiers, throwing kittens in ovens or shooting rats out of cannons, he was terrorizing Julie.
Rappaport quotes one account in which Konstantin, knowing his wife's fear of mice, released a box of them into a room and locked Julie inside, laughing 'most heartily at his spouse's hoppings and jumpings, and screams and entreaties,' while letting his officers peep through the keyhole.
He 'dropped' Julie into a huge blue Chinese vase and fired his pistol at it 'to his wife's utter terror.' References are made to Konstantin's violent outbursts, philandering, cruelty — and the venereal diseases he likely spread to his already sickly young wife.
So it comes as a relief when, five years after their marriage, Julie leaves Russia for her native Germany. But it's also the point at which her story loses steam. From a narrative standpoint, it's hard to compete with the glittering grotesquerie of the imperial Russian court. Take, for example, Catherine the Great's lying in state. Her body had been ineptly embalmed and 'soon appeared quite disfigured: Her hands, eyes and the lower parts of her face were black, blue and yellow' and 'all the riches that covered her corpse served only to augment the horror it inspired.'
Back home in Germany, the financially stressed Saxe-Coburgs worried about the cost of boarding their errant daughter and her eight-carriage-long entourage. In a letter to her financial adviser, Auguste described Julie as 'the catastrophe from the north.'
Rappaport spends mercifully little time explaining the ever-shifting alliances and reconfigurations of various German principalities. The same cannot be said for the ink she devotes to tracking Julie's geographic progressions from spa to spa over decades.
Julie lived a long life as a princess in self-imposed exile, bearing several children, likely by men she employed as managers-cum-father figures, although details are murky. She loved music, amassing a sophisticated and varied collection of scores, and developed the romantic gardens at her estate in Switzerland.
While a pall of scandal and sadness hung about Julie and her household, the Saxe-Coburgs remained a tight-knit bunch. Queen Victoria harbored a fascination with her intriguing aunt and, while the two met only a couple of times, Victoria adorned her residences with pictures of Julie and her siblings. She commissioned a portrait of Julie at age 68, which she described as 'an indescribably like and beautiful picture of Aunt Julia.'
That portrait hangs today at Highgrove, King Charles's country house, and is said to be 'a particular favorite' of his. Another, of Julie as a teenager, hangs in William and Kate's Kensington Palace apartments. Aunt Julie is all around.
And yet her voice is barely audible. We learn of Julie's physical whereabouts as a perma-health-spa guest, but Rappaport fails to breach her inner world. Few letters of Julie's survive (she was a dedicated letter-burner, as were her relatives), and those that do 'are largely unrevealing,' Rappaport writes, 'full of stream-of-consciousness chatter that switches constantly from French to German and back again, about family weddings, birthdays and deaths.' Julie supposedly kept a diary in Russia, but it has never been found.
This is a story of one kind of suffering: that of a noble girl sacrificed on the altar of family ambition, and the malaise that sets in when one has titles, ranks, plenty — if never quite enough — money, but no clear role. She floats like a specter through her own biography, unreal and unknowable.