Q&A with Helen Rappaport

 

 

 

Helen Rappaport is the author of the new book The Rebel Romanov: Julie of Saxe-Coburg, The Empress Russia Never Had. Her other books include The Romanov Sisters. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and she lives in West Dorset, UK. 

 

Q: Why did you decide to focus on Julie of Saxe-Coburg (1781-1860) in your new book?

 

A: The reason goes back to my major premise as a writer—I like forgotten stories, particularly about women in history.

 

When I found a fairly small reference to her, I’d never known about her, despite my being a Romanov historian. She could have been [a Russian] empress if she’d stuck it out. Why was she lost to history, or never found?

 

I was also interested in her other sisters and the marriage market. There were a lot of impoverished duchies who were desperate, and the only currency they had was daughters.

 

Q: How would you describe the treatment of these women?

 

A: Despite wealth, power, and status in their families, in a way they had less autonomy than women lower down the scale. The daughters were married off strategically to keep them afloat, the minute they hit 16. And Julie was still 14.

 

These women had little choice. They rarely married for love. Victoria and Albert, and Nicholas and Alexandra were the exception.

 

Q: What was Julie’s marriage to her husband, Konstantin, like?

 

A: She married a stranger. Julie and her two sisters went to Petersburg in 1795 at the request of Catherine the Great. She had imported a princess from Baden for [her grandson] Alexander, but she had to get [her grandson] Konstantin settled. He was a dreadful handful.

 

Julie was the sacrificial lamb. It was a very perfunctory courtship. She was told she was chosen, her mother and sisters left, and she was stranded. They married in an ornate ceremony.

From Day One, she learned her husband was an erratic, unpredictable brute. He would go from kind and gentle to brutal and frightening. He very quickly developed a reputation of being brutal with his troops. He loved soldiering, but he had a reputation for being sadistic.

 

Julie’s life with him was one of extremes—leaving her and coming back. He was either nice to her or extremely violent. Julie did nothing to alienate him. This marriage was awful for her, but she couldn’t get away. There would be letters from her father asking to send money. She was used as a money machine.

 

In 1799, she was unwell and desperate. She asked to go to a spa at Carlsbad to see her mother. She asked not to have to go back [to her husband. Her family] were horrified. They said you’ll bring dishonor, and we need the Russian money. She was forced to go back.

 

In 1801 her brother-in-law Alexander, who had been kind to her, came to the throne, and she begged him to leave Russia. She was a woman of status who was still married but not with her husband—it was an anomalous situation.

 

Given her loveliness and her beauty, she was not ostracized. She lived a rootless life; she was terrified of scandal. In 1814, she settled in Switzerland and regularized her life.

 

Q: So she was seen as a commodity by her family?

 

A: Sophie, the oldest girl, married for love. The second sister, Antoinette, married the brother of the Dowager Empress. The fourth sister married the Duke of Kent, and became the mother of Queen Victoria.

 

Q: How did you research the book?

 

A: I did a lot of very intensive searching to ferret out small clues. There were some letters, but they were very scattered. Some were in Saxe-Coburg. Julie destroyed a lot of her private papers. There were odd letters here and there, and sightings of her from contemporary newspapers. It was a very painstaking process.

 

Q: Were you surprised by anything you found?

 

A: Not particularly. She was very guarded in her letters. She’d be writing a letter in French and break into German—the Czarist spies couldn’t read German. I got very frustrated that so much of her private correspondence had not survived.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m working on the life of a man called Sydney Gibbes, the tutor to the Romanov children. Three members of the family [entourage] survived: the English tutor, the French tutor, and a lady in waiting. After the family was murdered, these three had difficulty escaping the Bolsheviks.

 

Sydney worked for the British High Commission, and then went to Manchuria until 1935 and became a Russian Orthodox priest. He was the keeper of the flame; he never got over the murder of the children. He was a very interesting man—he had a secret side. I’ve been given unique access to [relevant] papers in France.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Helen Rappaport.