Back in Russia, the nation enjoyed one final golden opportunity to see their sovereigns – their little mother and father – at close hand during the Romanov Tercentenary celebrations of 1913. In St Petersburg and Moscow the whole family joined in great religious parades, where ordinary Russians turned out in their thousands to catch a glimpse of them, followed in May by a riverboat tour along the Volga to Kostroma, Yaroslavl, Suzdal and other ancient cities of old Muscovy. The ceremonials held in Moscow also enabled many of the Russian public to see the elusive young Tsarevich at last, though people expressed concern at seeing him having to be carried by a Cossack. Alexey was still recovering from a severe episode of bleeding that had nearly killed him the previous year and had left him with permanent damage to his leg. The truth about his haemophilia and the constant threat to his life was still being kept from the Russian public.
Shortly afterwards, Nicholas left for Germany, for the last great European royal wedding to be held before the outbreak of war – in Berlin. By this time, one of the monarchs in King Edward’s funeral procession has already lost his throne: King Manuel of Portugal had been deposed in a military coup just five months later.
Always keen to outdo his English cousins, Wilhelm had invited even more relatives than those who had gathered in London in 1910. Nicholas, however, travelled alone to the festivities under heavy guard in an armoured train, arriving at Berlin’s Anhalter station where the security was so extensive it looked like ‘a constabulary camp, police and detectives were everywhere’.36 At the Berlin Schloss he joined George V and his wife Mary at the marriage of the Kaiser’s only daughter, Viktoria Luise, to Duke Ernst Augustus of Brunswick, a grandson of the last King of Hanover, and Nicholas’s first cousin. The assembled military dress uniforms were magnificent, the parades and other imperial German ceremonial impressive, the jewels lavish and the food spectacular. Yet the atmosphere, although superficially cordial, was strained by intensifying Anglo-German-Russian rivalries and by continuing concern over Germany’s naval build-up.
During the visit Wilhelm seemed more paranoid and jealous than ever and had done his utmost to ensure that his two cousins did not have any private time together. Nevertheless George managed to have ‘a long and satisfactory talk with dear Nicky’ over tea at the Kaiserhof Hotel.37 He found Nicholas still the same amiable cousin of his childhood memories, and observers noted the affectionate, if not jovial, atmosphere between them. To seal their continuing closeness they had their photograph taken, wearing the uniforms of their honorary German regiments – Nicholas’s Westphalian Hussars and George’s Rhenish Cuirassiers – that they had worn for the wedding. They looked even more uncannily alike than ever. It was an iconic photograph, and one that would go down in history as the last ever taken together of Nicky and Georgy, the ‘Heavenly Twins’.
Sixteen months later the world was at war. Nicholas had agonised over his decision to mobilise in defence of the Serbs, as fellow Slavs, when Austria–Hungary had declared war on them. Although he did so in the face of dark warnings from Wilhelm about the consequences, the Tsar was confident of British and French support. With the English and Russian monarchs forging an even closer relationship as allies, George confided in Margot Asquith, wife of his Prime Minister, that his cousin the Tsar was ‘the best, straightest, most clear and decided man I know’. Their cousin Wilhelm – his dreams of a vast continental alliance of Germany, Russia and France in tatters – was now the enemy.38 Orthodox Russia was now a wartime ally of socialist, freethinking France, an unlikely union that Nicholas found uncomfortable, despite his admiration for President Poincaré. But far better to be allies than the alternative. His mother the Dowager, like many in the Romanov family, expressed her enormous sense of relief: ‘You cannot imagine, after having been obliged to hide my true feelings for forty years, what it feels like to be able to tell you at last how much I hate the Germans!’ she told a member of the State Duma.39 The wounds of the Schleswig-Holstein crisis and the ensuing Danish war with Prussia in 1864 still ran very deep. Nicholas vowed that he was ‘determined to stick to my French Ally to the bitter end’, he told Prince Nicholas of Greece. ‘We cannot afford to lose this war, as the triumph of Prussian militarism would mean the end of all liberty and civilization.’40
There would be no more visits, however brief, to relatives in war-torn Europe, as royal families were forced to align with either the Allies (the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia) or the Central Powers (the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria–Hungary and Italy). The finger of suspicion, however irrational, was now being pointed at anyone on the Allied side with familial links to Germany. Close royal relatives in Coburg and in Hesse would soon be cut off from their families in Russia and Britain. The Duchess of Coburg (Russian wife of Queen Victoria’s son Prince Alfred), who was very pro-German, was forced to send messages to her English and Russian relatives via neutral embassies in Scandinavia and the offices of the Crown Princess of Sweden, who ran a kind of royal postal service for her warring relatives.
The three major Scandinavian powers – Norway, Sweden and Denmark – had been reluctant to take part in the conflict, all of them having their own historical loyalties. King Gustav V of Sweden was inherently sympathetic to the German side, Sweden having fought a succession of wars with Russia since the late fifteenth century. Gustav’s wife Victoria was a daughter of the Grand Duke of the German duchy of Baden, and Sweden had long feared incursions from Russia, which still controlled neighbouring Finland. In 1915 Gustav wrote in secret to Nicholas telling him how, in an attempt to broker a separate deal between Russia and Germany, he would offer to mediate, but Nicholas would not countenance one. ‘Never has Russia been so united and so determined as now,’ he told Gustav; they would carry on with the war ‘until it reaches a permanent end’.41 But remaining neutral throughout a protracted war would leave Sweden increasingly isolated by harsh rationing and famine, to such an extent that King Gustav became fearful for his own throne.
Like Sweden, Denmark and Norway opted for neutrality, despite family ties with the major antagonists. George V and Nicholas II were closely related to the kings of Denmark and Norway: King Christian X was a nephew to Dagmar, the Dowager Empress and the Queen Mother; and King Haakon was also their nephew. Geographically, however, Denmark had always been considered ‘part of Germany’, wrote ambassador Maurice Egan; its capital Copenhagen was:
so near what was that center of world politics – the German court – its royal family … so closely allied with all the reigning and non-reigning royal families of Europe, and its diplomatic life so tense and comprehensive – that it ha[d] been well named the whispering gallery of Europe.42
Having such a close relationship with the Allies, through his two widowed aunts Alexandra and Dagmar, King Christian of Denmark offered to mediate in the war via messages that he sent through a wealthy Danish businessman and shipowner, Hans Niels Andersen, a personal friend of both the Danish and British royal families. In 1915 Christian had suggested hosting a peace conference in Copenhagen; as a neutral country, Denmark would be well placed economically to capitalise on the rebuilding of Germany and Russia after the war. Only that year the Danes had established a Russian trading company and had appointed their own commercial attaché, Harald Schou-Kjeldsen, to the Danish embassy in Petrograd. The export opportunities to Russia were huge, and the Danish-born Dowager was a key patron of Danish enterprise at the time.43 Policy was what drove wartime loyalties, not blood ties; policy based on the needs for territory, markets and raw materials.
Andersen, like Kjeldsen, supported Danish trading interest during the war and travelled regularly between London, St Petersburg and Berlin. He seemed the perfect go-between; and already in 1915, with Berlin’s encouragement, he had travelled to Petrograd to try and persuade the Tsar to negotiate a separate peace with Germany. This had greatly annoyed the British government, which wanted nothing less than a general peace between all parties, and only after Germany had been brought to its knees. But
it was perhaps King Haakon of Norway, the furthest removed from Russia geographically and the most pragmatic and democratic monarch of the three, who seemed best placed to offer Nicholas serious advice at a time when Russia was not just worn down by a disastrous campaign on the Eastern Front, but also by the threat of civil disturbance at home. Haakon was in fact a Danish prince, Carl, who had been invited to take the newly vacant throne of Norway when the act of Union linking it with Sweden had been dissolved in 1905. His wife Maud was the young English princess who had teased Nicholas about his affection for Alexandra back in the 1880s.
Before agreeing to take the throne, Haakon had insisted on a national referendum being held, so that his accession was endorsed by the nation as a whole. It was, in his opinion, only by the will of the Norwegian people that he and his fellow monarchs ruled, and in a frank conversation with Nicholas some time before the war, Haakon had advised him on the best way to avoid revolution in Russia:
Give the Poles autonomy. Let the little Russians [Ukrainians], Georgians and Armenians enjoy home rule and nationality undisturbed. Restore peace to the Caucasus by recognizing their rights and cease trying to Russianize Finland.
‘That alone,’ the King had told his Russian cousin, and ‘there would be no desire for revolution.’44
* * *
This rare interview with Haakon, published by an American reporter, Mary Boyle O’Reilly, was lost for a century. Forgotten in a long-defunct newspaper – the Fort Wayne Sentinel – it is now, like so much valuable context on the period, retrievable, thanks to the digitisation of old newspapers. It encapsulates the sanest, most pragmatic advice ever offered to Nicholas II by a fellow monarch, who understood only too clearly what they all needed to do to survive: compromise, reform, democratise, enfranchise. If only Nicholas had listened …
* * *
But Nicholas never acted upon Haakon’s or any other sensible advice offered to him by his relatives in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1917. Instead, he stubbornly turned his face away from what was logical and expedient, into the headwind of the vagaries of superstition and fate.
By the beginning of 1917, the royals of Europe were in a race to try and save Nicholas and Alexandra from their own folly. Having so far failed, how disposed would any of them be towards coming to their aid, when the inevitable, predicted crisis came?
Chapter 2
‘Some Catastrophe Lurking in the Dark’
It all began with a suitcase.
Into every historian’s life some lucky breaks must fall, and one such presented itself just as I embarked on the research for the story of the failed Romanov asylum. A dedicated Romanov buff and friend, who knew I was on the lookout for new material, contacted me. She had recently been acting as co-executor of the literary estate of a fellow enthusiast who had spent a lifetime exhaustively transcribing royal correspondence (written in English) held in the Romanian Royal Archives. The collection was extensive, was in some disarray, had had to be moved at speed and nothing was catalogued … ‘Do you want to take a look at the files?’ she asked, before they all got sent off to a royal archive in Spain that had agreed to take them.1
In such situations no sane historian ever says no. It is a measure of my friend’s devotion to history, scholarship and camaraderie that she pulled out all the files and folders she thought would be of interest to me, put them in a very large suitcase and trundled it across London, then all the way on the train down to my house in the West Country.
A quick flip through a random file and I was taken aback by the damning comments about the Tsaritsa Alexandra: ‘My innermost conviction is that she is suffering from a mild, but morally serious kind of insanity,’ wrote Alexandra’s aunt, the Duchess of Coburg, to her daughter, Crown Princess Marie of Romania, in February 1913; a year later she was even more scathing: ‘Alix to my mind is absolutely mad, everything she does is dictated to her by this false prophet [Rasputin].’2 The level of vitriol levelled at the ailing Tsaritsa by her royal relatives seemed excessive. Did they all really hate Alexandra so much, I asked myself? Was this why so many of them had had such ambivalent feelings when Nicholas and Alexandra’s whole world came crashing down in 1917?
I was soon to discover that the hatred for Alexandra was far more widespread, and would colour attitudes to the Romanov asylum in the most profound and disturbing ways.
* * *
In 1896, when Nicholas and Alexandra visited Queen Victoria for the last time, at Balmoral, family perceptions of the sunny young Alexandra had dramatically changed. Now, as Empress of Russia, full of a sense of undisguised superiority over her lesser European relatives, she seemed so much grander and obsessed with her own precedence. Unlike other royal relatives, including her mother-in-law Dagmar who believed that the aristocracy had to work for their position, Alexandra considered it vulgar to make overt efforts to win the support or affection of her people. At the Imperial Russian Court, feelings were much the same. The Russian aristocracy had taken an almost instant dislike to Alexandra from the day she married Nicholas in November 1894. She had none of the grace, social skills or sartorial panache of her ‘brilliant mother-in-law, Dagmar of Denmark, [who] was still beautiful and picturesque’, as ambassador Maurice Egan observed. More importantly, the Dowager was truly ‘imperial’ in manner and understood the importance of court pomp and tradition, while her daughter-in-law refused to kowtow to any of it.3 Alexandra had a pathological aversion to the very rituals of court life that Dagmar enjoyed. They intruded on her family life with Nicholas and were too protracted. The imperial entourage, to her mind, was unnecessarily large. From the outset, official public life in Russia tormented her and she contrived to find every possible way of avoiding it.4
In Alexandra’s frequent absences from the St Petersburg social scene, the domineering presence – after the gregarious and stylish Dowager – had been Nicholas’s aunt, Maria Pavlovna the Elder, better known as Grand Duchess Vladimir. It was her social pronouncements that set the trend for whoever was in or out. From the very first, the new serious and sober-minded Tsaritsa was most decidedly out; her reticent appearances at the Russian court were sneered at. She was no equal of the sophisticated and ostentatious beau monde who met at functions at the Vladimir Palace in St Petersburg. Alexandra’s perceived social inadequacies, which none of her Romanov relatives ever tried to understand or make concessions for, gave increasing power to her most vocal critics within the family. Having also played a key role in persuading Alexandra to marry Nicholas, Grand Duchess Vladimir had expected a position as close adviser to her, when she became Tsaritsa. But this was not to be; and the Grand Duchess never forgave Alexandra when it became apparent that her advice and company were not welcomed. For ever after she ‘gave full vent to her spleen in acid comment on everything that her niece did or did not do,’ recalled Count Mosolov. ‘The Court – her Court – followed the example set to it. It was from the immediate entourage of Marie Pavlovna that the most wounding stories about the Tsaritsa emanated.’5
Over the years, these wounding stories gathered strength and venom, particularly once Alexandra had embraced the spiritual guidance of the guru and healer Rasputin in 1907. There had always been a sense, among some of the female members of the family, that the highly strung and mistrustful Alexandra was emotionally damaged and difficult, and her behaviour seemed to prove that this was the case. These fires of family animosity were stoked by Alexandra’s own cousin and former sister-in-law, Victoria Melita, now remarried as Grand Duchess Kirill; and the pot was vigorously stirred – when she visited St Petersburg – by Grand Duchess Kirill’s mother, Marie, Duchess of Coburg. Their gossipy letters to each other testify to the levels of backbiting against Alexandra in St Petersburg society.
* * *
A growing and voluble resentment against the Tsaritsa gathered pace during the war years. In September 1915, after the Russian army suffered a series of crippling reverses on the Eastern Front, Nicholas II decided to sack his Commander in Chief, his u
ncle Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolaevich, and take over command of the Russian army himself. He did so in the sincere belief that this would reassure his allies of his absolute determination to fight to the bitter end, and to counter persistent rumours that Russia was seeking an early exit from the war. Although his presence at the front did something to revive the flagging morale of the army, Nicholas’s absence from Petrograd opened the floodgates to what by then had become a stream of rumour, gossip and accusation targeted at his wife. Alexandra stepped into the political vacuum and rapidly began overreaching herself by directly influencing the sacking and appointment of key ministers, replacing with sycophants those who were sympathetic to reform. Even worse, in the eyes of the Romanov family elders, they became convinced that she was soliciting the advice of Rasputin at every turn.
Alexandra repeatedly protested her great love for Russia, and there was no doubting her unquestionable devotion to the Russian Orthodox Church. Yet nothing could dispel the widely held conviction, not just in Russia but also abroad, that the Hesse-born Tsaritsa was a covert German sympathiser. People were convinced that she was machinating against the Allied war effort and passing military information on to the German High Command. In France they openly referred to her as ‘La bochesse’; in Russia she was ‘the German woman’.6* Many believed that Alexandra, Rasputin and her camarilla of reactionary ministers were traitors, and were secretly conniving for a separate peace with Germany.7 Rumours were even circulating that the Empress had a ‘special radio-telegraph machine’ hidden at the Alexander Palace, on which she transmitted intelligence on the Russian war effort to Berlin.8 Such blatant character assassination prompted the French ambassador, Maurice Paléologue, to come to Alexandra’s defence. The Empress was ‘German neither in mind nor spirit and has never been so,’ he insisted. She was English through her mother and her grandmother, Queen Victoria, and in ‘the uncompromising and militant austerity of her conscience’. British statesman Lord Hardinge concurred: had Nicholas been an Englishman, he ‘would have been the most perfect type of English gentleman’ and there was no doubt that Alexandra ‘though shy and reserved, was devoted to England and thoroughly English in all her tastes’.9
The Race to Save the Romanovs Page 4