𝗚rowing up, Alexandra’s family hid a dark secret. The men of their royal line tended to suffer from the often-fatal disease hemophilia, an illness that prevents blood from clotting. When Alexandra was barely a year old, her hemophiliac brother Frederich died after a nasty fall. Meanwhile, the women of the line were often carriers of the gene, including Alexandra herself.
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𝓓eath visited the royal House of Hesse in 1878. A violent outbreak of diphtheria entered the palace, and many of the children fell ill, along with their father Louis. Alexandra was among them. Her mother Princess Alice refused to leave their sides and nursed most of them back to health, but her loyalty came at a great cost.
In December of that year, Alice took ill and died along with Alexandra’s most beloved sister, Marie. The young Alexandra was reportedly so bereft at the loss that her whole personality turned from cheerful to solemn.
Later in her life, the nervous and fear-wracked Empress was addicted to Veronal, a kind of sedative. As she once confessed to a friend, “I’m literally saturated with it.”
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𝓣he romantic love story of Alexandra and her husband Tsar Nicholas II is one for the ages. They first met at her sister’s wedding in 1884, when Alexandra was only 12 years old. Over the years, they grew closer and closer, and soon they were both very much in love. Nicholas even spoke of her with aching adoration in his diary.
He wrote: “It is my dream to one day marry Alix H. I have loved her for a long time…For a long time, I have resisted my feeling that my dearest dream will come true.”
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𝓝icholas and Alexandra may have loved each other fiercely, but they were in for utter heartbreak at first. Nicholas’ parents Alexander and Maria were staunchly anti-German and refused him flat out when he asked to marry her. As for Alexandra’s side of the family, Queen Victoria wasn’t too pleased with Russia, and she personally detested Nicholas’ father.
