by Theo Aronson
She loved it all: the ordered opulence of King Edward VII's court, the quiet elegance of the great country houses, the sound of the birds in a wood carpeted with bluebells, the jam, the cream, the scones and the cake of an English tea. Once, when she was strolling with Queen Alexandra across the green lawns at Sandringham, she suddenly felt weak with nostalgia for everything she had given up by going to live in faraway Romania. 'An immense desire came over me to fall down on the ground and kiss this green, green grass, to roll on it, to feel it, to possess it, make it mine once more,' runs her impassioned admission.
The Queen looked at her and took her hand.
'You love it?' she asked quietly.
'Yes, I love it,' answered Marie, 'and it hurts to love quite so hard . . . .
2
Despite the fact that King Edward VII paid visits to almost every monarch in Europe during the course of his reign, it was his state visit to republican France in 1903 that was to prove the most significant.
During the closing years of the nineteenth century there had been a gradual shift in continental alliances; a shift quite independent of ruling family, or even monarchical, ties. The old Three Emperors' Alliance – an agreement between the autocratic rulers of Russia, Germany and Austria – had fallen away and Tsarist Russia was now allied to republican France. With Britain anxious to emerge from its long period of splendid isolation and with a proposed German alliance having come to nothing, British statesmen were obliged to look towards France for friendship.
The realization of such a friendship was going to be no easy task. The two countries had been at loggerheads for years. Various factors – colonial rivalries, French pro-Boer sympathies, the Anglophobe rantings of the French press – had poisoned Franco-British relations. Considerable diplomatic skill would be needed to overcome the hostility of French public opinion towards Britain. The politicians might be ready enough to come to an agreement, but would the public be as amenable? How was the right atmosphere for a rapprochement to be created?
To this problem King Edward VII applied himself with gusto. The proposed entente between Britain and France had his enthusiastic approval. He had always loved France; of all continental capitals, Paris was the one in which he felt most at ease. This did not mean that his admiration for France was unqualified. He would undoubtedly have preferred an Orleans or a Bonaparte to a president as Head of State and he could hardly approve of recent French behaviour towards his country. His well-known love of Paris did not blind him to what he considered certain shortcomings of the French nation, any more than his equally well-known dislike of his nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm II, blinded him to certain German virtues. Edward VII's approval of an entente with France was the result neither of his antipathy for Wilhelm II nor his taste for Parisian life; it was due to his lifelong sympathy with what he regarded as the most civilized nation on the Continent.
The delicate negotiations between the representatives of the two countries having got under way, the King decided to do something to help. What was needed was le grand geste, some spectacular proof of Britain's good intentions. He would visit Paris in state. His Ministers, apprehensive of the sort of reception he might be given by the Parisians, were not very enthusiastic; perhaps an incognito visit would be wiser? But Edward was having none of it. He would go to Paris as the King of England, in state, or not at all. He had already decided to embark on a grand tour of Europe in the spring of 1903; he would visit Paris for a few days on his way home. With this plan President Emile Loubet was in full accord and the King was formally invited to visit the French capital from 1 to 3 May 1903.
Travelling without a Cabinet Minister in attendance (there was not one with whose company the King could bear to put up for several weeks) Edward set off in the Victoria and Albert on 2 April 1903, for Lisbon. Here the stout English King, in an embarrassingly short jacket of a colonel of a Portuguese cavalry regiment, was met by the even stouter Portuguese King, Carlos I, and lavishly entertained. For several days the British party moved in an almost eighteenth-century atmosphere: a world of rococo carriages, gilded barges, 'magnificently ugly' salons, theatrical bullfights (they were gratified to discover that the bulls were never killed and the horses never hurt) and stiff ceremonial. After the customary exchange of decorations, with which the King, as always, had some fault to find, he remarked that Portuguese noblemen looked like nothing so much as 'waiters at second-rate restaurants'.
From Lisbon he sailed, via Gibraltar and Malta, to Naples. On 27 April he was welcomed to Rome by the diminutive King Victor Emmanuel III and two days later paid a visit to the Pope. This visit was made in the face of considerable opposition on the part of the British Government, but, as always, the King carried it off with great aplomb.
The scene in the Hall of Tapestries at the Vatican was brilliant: cardinals in scarlet robes, chamberlains in sixteenth-century costume, the Swiss Guard in gleaming armour and the Noble Guard in red and gold. The King, having decided that it would 'never do' for the members of his suite to kiss the Pope's ring, had told them that they must simply bow to the Pontiff. Thus, when, on the approach of the aged Leo XIII, the rest of the company fell to their knees, the British party remained firmly on its feet. The adroit Pope, appreciating their predicament, eased the situation by saying, 'I am so pleased to see you here today that I must shake you by the hand.'
On 30 April, amidst scenes of great enthusiasm, the King boarded a special train for Paris. He was joined, at Dijon, by his apprehensive Ambassador, Sir Edmund Monson, and was met, at the Gare du Bois de Boulogne, by the no less apprehensive President Loubet.
For King Edward VII, this visit to Paris was a great personal triumph. During the course of it he was able, by virtue of his tact, his charm and his geniality, to convert the scarcely veiled hostility of the crowds into vociferous enthusiasm. On his first drive along the Champs Elysées to the British Embassy, he was assailed with shouts of 'Vivent les Boers!', 'Vive Fashoda!' and even, strangely enough, 'Vive Jeanne d'Arc!'; when he left, three days later, it was with thunderous cries of 'Vive Edouard!' ringing in his gratified ears.
He never put a foot wrong. He melted the iciness of the audience at the Théâtre Français by saying, during the first interval, to the beautiful Jeanne Granier, 'Mademoiselle, I remember applauding you in London where you represented all the grace and spirit of France.' He charmed his hosts at the Hôtel de Ville by assuring them, in the sort of extempore speech he did so well, that it was always with the greatest pleasure that he returned to their charming city, in which he always felt so much at home. At a race-meeting at Longchamps, he delighted the beau monde by arranging to excuse himself, with impeccable politeness, from the worthy but dull presidential party ('Get me out of this at once!' he hissed to Frederick Ponsonby) in order to spend some time in the Jockey Club stand. And at a glittering banquet at the Elysée he so 'captivated' the guests by the ease, audibility and warmth of his address (so different from the mumblings of the nervous President) that he was given a long and enthusiastic ovation.
When he left Paris on 3 May, his cortege could hardly make its way through the press of wildly cheering people. The visit, wrote the astonished British Ambassador to the British Foreign Secretary, had been 'a success more complete than the most sanguine optimist could have foreseen'.
The subsequent entente cordiale between Britain and France, made more tangible by the signing of an Anglo-French agreement in April 1904, was not, of course, solely due to the success of King Edward VII's visit to Paris. Indeed, certain British Ministers considered that it was very little due to him; with or without his active encouragement, the two countries would probably have come to some arrangement. But there is no doubt that the King's state visit created the right climate for such an agreement. 'It was all very well,' argued Frederick Ponsonby, 'for Lord Lansdowne [the Foreign Secretary] to claim afterwards the credit for the entente cordiale, but neither he nor the Government could ever have got the French people round from hostility to enthusiastic frie
ndship the way King Edward did.'
In this affair, the King acted as a catalyst. By his dignity, his assurance, his friendliness and his very apparent love of the French people, King Edward VII stilled their suspicions and won their hearts. With that achieved, the politicians could more easily carry public opinion with them. As Paul Cambon, the French Ambassador in London, afterwards remarked, 'any clerk at the Foreign Office could draw up a treaty, but there was no one else who could have succeeded in producing the right atmosphere for a rapprochement with France.'
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Tsarevich
1
The death of Queen Victoria came as a severe blow to her granddaughter Alicky, the Empress of Russia. Alicky's first thought on hearing the news had been to travel to England for the funeral but, as she was pregnant, she was dissuaded from doing so. 'How I envy you being able to see beloved Grandmama being taken to her rest,' she wrote to one of her sisters. 'I cannot really believe she has gone, that we shall never see her any more . . . Since one can remember, she was in our life, and a dearer, kinder being never was . . . England without the Queen seems impossible.'
Although apparently such different types, the Queen and her granddaughter had had certain similarities of temperament. 'The Empress Alexandra,' wrote one of her intimates, 'had the Queen's warm heart, her capacity for great enthusiasms, both for ideas and for people, the same intense sense of duty, the same fidelity in friendship.' Alicky had inherited, too, her grandmother's shyness and her preference for a quiet, well-ordered domestic life.
And Queen Victoria's death had robbed her granddaughter, not only of the woman who had been, as she once said, 'as a mother to me', but of an extremely beneficial influence. Since Alicky's marriage, the two of them had been in regular correspondence. The flow of advice from the practical, sensible and experienced Queen had been of inestimable value to the withdrawn, intense and highly emotional Empress. Queen Victoria's down-to-earth qualities had been the very ones which her granddaughter lacked; with her gone, there was no one of superior, or even equal rank, to whom Alicky felt that she could look for encouragement.
She was certainly in need of it. Although, by the time of Queen Victoria's death, Alicky had been Tsaritsa for over half a dozen years, she did not yet know how to act the Empress. She remained painfully ill at ease in company; she loathed public appearances. Yet in no court in Europe were sovereigns on such merciless display. The Winter Palace in St Petersburg, with its magnificent enfilade of state rooms, gleaming with marble, porphyry and malachite and glittering with gold, glass and crystal, made an unrivalled setting for the most formal and exacting ceremonial in the world. Everyone moved in strict order of precedence; everything was acted out according to long-established custom. Nicholas and Alexandra were the central figures in a set piece of almost barbaric splendour. From the moment that the great double doors opened and the entire, brilliantly dressed company bowed or curtsied in their honour, the imperial couple were on show. Every move, every gesture, every word was noted and criticized.
For Alicky, it was all a form of torture. In her lavishly embroidered dresses of gold or silver brocade, her waist-long ropes of pearls and a diamond tiara flashing on her red-gold hair, she was breathtaking in her beauty, but her manner lacked all grace and charm. With set mouth, hooded eyes and erect carriage, she moved through all the kaleidoscopic brilliance of the St Petersburg winter season like an automaton. She never relaxed; she never enjoyed herself. She was incapable of saying a gracious word or of making a spontaneous gesture. It was all too obvious that she could hardly wait for the moment when she could take her leave.
And it was not only her shyness that made her appear so unsympathetic in public. Added to it was her hearty disapproval of the majority of the people with whom she was obliged to mix. To this serious-minded young woman, raised under the eye of Grandmama Queen, the decadence of St Petersburg society was abhorrent.
The aristocracy was just as quick to disapprove of her. They found her cold, prudish and provincial. To them, with their French gloss over their Russian barbarism, she was too 'English': with relish they repeated the witticism that whereas Queen Victoria's subjects were gloomy on only one day a week, she kept gloomy on seven. Her piety they found equally disconcerting. The Orthodox religion was something which court and society took for granted. In fashionable St Petersburg, religious observance had become little more than another social diversion; the Easter midnight service was more remarkable for the chic than the fervour of the congregation. Yet here was the Empress taking it all so desperately seriously: studying theology, collecting icons, making pilgrimages and hunting for relics. Already there were stories about the visits of bizarre miracle-workers to the palace – bands of blind nuns, deaf and dumb holy men, dabblers in the occult.
To the Tsaritsa, this aristocratic disapproval meant very little. She felt that she could ignore their opinion. They were not, by her reckoning, real Russians at all. In the Empress's mind, says one of her biographers, Holy Russia meant 'Church, dynasty, nation – in that order.' And by nation Alicky did not mean these amoral aristocrats, any more than she meant any of those other 'undesirables': the striking workers, the fiery students, the pen-pushing clerks or the frock-coated Ministers. To the Empress, the Russian nation meant the peasants – the humble, simple, devout, unspoilt, unquestioning millions who worked the land. It was to this Russia that she must dedicate herself.
And dedicate herself she did. For if Alexandra had no taste for the public part of her duties, she was beginning to develop an interest in what she, quite rightly, considered to be the more important aspects of the monarchy. In this, she was very much a Coburg; very much Queen Victoria's granddaughter.
Utterly at odds with normal Coburg thinking, however, was her outright rejection of all idea of political reform. Of the enlightenment of her grandfather, Prince Albert, or the passionate liberalism of her aunt, the Empress Frederick, she had inherited nothing. From the beginning Alicky had accepted the principle of autocracy root and branch. One of Nicholas II's first public pronouncements, to the effect that he would 'maintain the principle of autocracy just as firmly and unflinchingly' as had his father, would have had her full approval. Her political creed was simple. The Russian people, who were 'deeply and truly devoted to their sovereign' were none the less 'utterly unbalanced and childlike' and had to be ruled firmly and autocratically. Therefore anyone wanting to destroy this autocracy was automatically an enemy of Russia. And not only an enemy of Russia but an enemy of God. The autocratic Tsar was God's anointed; thus the revolutionaries, or even the reformers, were God's enemies.
None of this is to say that the Empress Alexandra was the hard-hearted, power-hungry virago of her critics' imaginings. She sincerely wanted what was best for Russia. That she was too inexperienced, too straightforward, too simple-minded to appreciate what this best should be would be her undoing. There was nothing wrong with her intentions; it was the way in which she thought they should be made manifest that was to prove so disastrous. She saw the vast Russian Empire, says E. M. Almedingen, 'in terms of a magnified private household'; a household in which her husband was the master and she his right hand.
Nothing could have better epitomized Alexandra's naïve view of Holy Russia than Tsarskoe Selo – the Tsar's village – in which the imperial family lived. Lying some fifteen miles south of St Petersburg, Tsarskoe Selo was an elaborate, self-contained little world, effectively and quite literally sealed off from the harsh realities of life in the capital. Behind the tall, ceaselessly patrolled iron railings of its enormous park, the imperial family could live their make-believe life, unhampered by the presence of either the worthless nobility, the disgruntled proletariat or the sinister revolutionaries. At Tsarskoe Selo one really could believe that God was safely in his heaven, the Tsar safely on his throne and a nation of loyal peasants safely hoeing their fields.
Amidst the ornate splendours of Tsarskoe Selo the imperial family lived a relatively simple life. As
was gradually becoming customary all over Europe, life within the private apartments of the Alexander Palace was run on English lines. With their loose covers of brightly coloured cretonne, their white-painted panelling, their lemon wood furniture and their great bowls of freshly picked flowers, the imperial apartments were not unlike those of an English Edwardian country house.
Slightly more exotic was Alexandra's famous mauve boudoir, in which everything – curtains, carpets, furniture, cushions, flowers and the wealth of objets – was in shades ranging from the palest lilac to deep violet. The room had, though, (in addition to a reassuringly English cosiness) two undeniably English features: a large photograph of Queen Victoria and a disagreeable Scotch terrier named Eira.
But the room's most striking, if less tangible, reminder of Grandmama Queen was its temperature. It was always cold. 'Like her grandmother, Queen Victoria,' says one of the Empress's ladies, 'she could not stand a temperature that was even moderately warm.'
In this boudoir, in which she could feel safe from the sneers of sophisticated St Petersburg society, Alicky spent a great deal of her time. Wearing unfashionable, but becomingly fluid, dresses in pastel colours, she would lie stretched out on her mauve chaise-longue, writing, reading, doing handwork or drinking tea with her husband. Thus relaxed, Alexandra revealed herself as a charming, compassionate, utterly unaffected woman, deeply interested in everyday things: books, flowers, her children's lessons, her husband's recreations, her household's problems.
The pity of it all was that only those in the immediate imperial circle could appreciate the Empress's good qualities. Even members of the Tsar's family were kept at arm's length. As for the millions upon millions who made up the Russian nation, they knew nothing of their Tsaritsa, except what they were told: that she was arrogant, unfeeling and unpopular.