Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna was born in 1875, the eldest daughter of Tsar Alexander III and the sister of the last Tsar, Nicholas II. In 1894 she married Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, a cousin of her father, and the marriage produced seven children. She and her husband were at Ai-Todor in the Crimea when the Revolution came in 1917. After a period of detention and uncertainty, during which they feared execution, she was eventually evacuated from the Crimea in 1919 aboard a British warship at the intervention of her cousin, King George V.
She arrived in England with some jewels that she had managed to bring out of Russia. Her husband, with whom she later separated, went elsewhere in Europe. She settled in Britain, where she would remain for the rest of her long life.
Exile in Britain
Her cousin King George V arranged for her to be accommodated at Wilderness House, a grace-and-favour residence at Hampton Court Palace. She later moved to Frogmore Cottage at Windsor, another grace-and-favour property. The generosity of the British royal family in accommodating her was substantial, but her financial circumstances were genuinely constrained: the income she had possessed as a Russian Grand Duchess no longer existed, and the jewels she had brought with her represented one of her few material resources.
Over the following decades, she sold pieces from her collection through dealers and at auction when financial necessity required it. This is a pattern shared with many Romanov survivors: the jewels became a long-term financial reserve, liquidated gradually rather than all at once.
Xenia and Cartier
Xenia was a Cartier patron before the Revolution. She took her mother, the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, to Cartier's establishment on the rue de la Paix in Paris, and she bought pieces from the firm herself. Nadelhoffer records her as among the Russian imperial family's Cartier clients alongside the Grand Duchess Vladimir and Grand Duke Paul.
The Dispersal of Russian Imperial Jewellery
Grand Duchess Xenia is one of several Romanov figures through whom Russian imperial jewellery entered the Western market during the interwar and post-war periods. She is distinct from the Grand Duchess Vladimir, who died in 1920 and whose jewels were brought out of Russia by her son Grand Duke Boris and eventually passed through various hands. Xenia was herself present in Britain throughout the dispersal of her pieces, and she dealt directly with London dealers and auction houses.
Later Life
Grand Duchess Xenia lived to eighty-four, dying in 1960 at Wilderness House. She outlived her brother Nicholas II by forty-two years, an extraordinary endurance given the upheavals of her life. Her children and grandchildren dispersed across Europe, America, and further afield, maintaining the scattered Romanov diaspora that persisted through the mid-twentieth century.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 2 (“Louis, 1898–1919”), p. 87
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), pp. 101, 104 et al.
- John Van der Kiste and Coryne Hall, Once a Grand Duchess: Xenia, Sister of Nicholas II (Sutton Publishing, 2002), p. 67
- Christopher Dobson, Prince Felix Yusupov: The Man who Murdered Rasputin (Harrap, 1989), p. 130
- Wikipedia: Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna
