quite aware that some comment and criticism might be levelled against the King if he was represented at the Requiem Service and thereafter ordered Court mourning for the late Czar.
But he was clear that taking into account the close relationship of the two Sovereigns and that the Emperor was always loyal to the Entente, and always most friendly to the King, no criticism need divert His Majesty from the natural course of treating the Emperor’s memory with the same respect as would be extended to other friendly Sovereigns.
The tragic circumstances of his death appear to render this course more consonant to natural good-feeling than it otherwise would have been.46
After another day’s hesitation, in order to be certain of at least the Tsar’s death, an announcement was published on 25 July in the Court Circular of The Times:
The King Commands that the Court shall wear mourning for four weeks, from July 24, for his late Imperial Majesty Nicholas II, first cousin to His Majesty. The Court to change to half-mourning on Wednesday, August 14, and on Wednesday, August 21, the Court to go out of mourning.47
On the 26th, from the Marselisborg Palace – the Danish royal family’s summer residence – King Christian issued similar orders; the following day the Spanish did likewise.
* * *
Whatever opinion their government had in the matter, King George and Queen Mary were most anxious to attend the memorial service for the Tsar, which was held the day after a similar one was conducted at the Russian Church on the rue Daru in Paris. (Other services would follow in Rome, Stockholm, Oslo and The Hague – though surrogates for the Queen of the Netherlands and the Queen Mother attended the latter.) The panikhida at the Russian Embassy Chapel on Welbeck Street, Marylebone – the only Russian Orthodox church then in London – was attended by King George, Queen Mary and the Queen Mother, along with many of London’s émigré Russian community. No representatives of the British Cabinet were present. ‘Why not?’ queried Stamfordham. ‘Surely not from fear of offending the Bolshevists!’ It turned out this was ‘out of consideration for the General Election: the announcement of which synchronized with that of the Memorial Service’.48
Dressed in the most sombre black, the congregation at the Russian Chapel heard the priest and choir sing the powerful prayers for the dead. ‘Their wonderful deep-toned voices broke the silence,’ recalled Baroness de Stoeckl, lady-in-waiting to Grand Duchess George; the responses sung a cappella by the choir were intensely moving:
The beauty of the liturgy was too much for the loyal Russians who had come to pay their last homage to their beloved Emperor and all that he represented. They broke into sobs. We tried to restrain our emotions but we, in turn, gave way.49
Meriel Buchanan was there with her father, Sir George, and recalled ‘the same blue drift of incense, the same wavering golden gleam of candles’ that she had seen at funeral services in Russia. The unrestrained emotional response that the Buchanans and Baroness de Stoeckl witnessed that day was not just a farewell to Nicholas; it reflected a profound sense of loss, of it being ‘the end of everything’. The old Russia, which so many of those gathered there had known and loved and been forced to flee, was gone. ‘With the Emperor so much went that was dear to us in life,’ recalled de Stoeckl, and it was a feeling that transmitted itself also to King George and Queen Mary. ‘When the choir sang a prayer to the Virgin in farewell to the soul which had fled, tears were running down the Queen’s face.’50
Never one to record his innermost feelings, even in the privacy of his diary – a characteristic he shared with his cousin Nicholas – George struggled to find something to say that evening. ‘It was a foul murder. I was devoted to Nicky, who was the kindest of men and a thorough gentleman,’ he wrote. Whatever his faults, his cousin had ‘loved his country and people’.51
What more could he say? George knew that he had failed Nicholas. But the consequences of that failure were only just beginning to unravel, as too was the final act in the grotesque game of cat-and-mouse being conducted by the Bolsheviks over the fate of Alexandra and the children.
Chapter 13
‘Those Poor Innocent Children’
The memorial service for the former Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, received scanty coverage in the British press in August 1918. ‘So many people do wear black these days,’ remarked the society magazine Tatler, ‘that the Court mourning for the Tsar really made not much difference to the look of things, even at the opera.’1 ‘Most of the newspapers in the countries of the Entente printed the shortest of obituaries and gave the impression that their writers refrained, for motives of delicacy, from expressing their real thoughts,’ recalled the former Russian ambassador to France, Alexander Iswolsky. ‘One could not help feeling that this reserve veiled an overwhelming condemnation of the character and acts of the late sovereign.’ The one ‘glaring exception to this “conspiracy of silence”,’ he noted, was the response of the Daily Telegraph, which published a series of articles by Dr Ernest Dillon, full of ‘violent accusations against Nicholas II’, which Iswolsky found to be ‘extreme, misleading and untruthful’.2
The Allies were now in the fourth year of a bitter war and in danger of losing it; in Russia a general lack of diplomatic interest about the fate of the Tsar was amplified by the very poor communications, preventing any foreign powers from obtaining reliable news and conveying their outrage to the Soviets. Those diplomats still resident in the country found themselves in an increasingly perilous situation, with many Allied officials in particular in fear for their lives. Violent political reprisals were now becoming widespread as the Bolshevik Red Terror took hold: what was one more death, of a now irrelevant former monarch, in the midst of a growing culture of violence that was taking hold in Russia? The response from ordinary Russians to Nicholas’s murder was even more subdued, if not indifferent, although a few services were held in those of Moscow’s churches still open to worship. In general, as US ambassador David R. Francis noted, ‘The killing of the Emperor, whom the people of Russia once looked upon with affection and reverence as the Little Father, aroused no resentment whatever. In fact, it was forgotten within a short time.’3
It was a report in the ‘German Wireless’ that first pointed the finger of blame – at Britain – for having failed the Tsar:
If England now fulfils the kindred duty of her Court by wearing mourning … she ought to have fulfilled her duty of granting at least personal protection to the fallen Czar, who was too weak to maintain his position and too weak to take a hand again in the fate of Russia … Even in the last few weeks she could have protected the Czar if she had so desired. The Czar has been sacrificed to British policy, just like everything else that comes in its way … Now that Nicholas can no longer do any harm, mourning is worn for him. The English Court makes use of his death, which was welcome to them and for which England herself is partly responsible, in order to make of it before the world a melodramatic spectacle.4
Over in Britain the levels of official hypocrisy reached new heights in a letter that Lord Stamfordham wrote to Lord Esher on 25 July, in which he bewailed the low-key British response to the Tsar’s death. ‘Was there ever a crueller murder and has this country ever before displayed such callous indifference to a tragedy of this magnitude?’ he asked. ‘Where is our national sympathy, gratitude, common decency gone to?’5
Callous indifference? Stamfordham seems to have had no sense of his own, when stoking the fires of the King’s reluctance to offer asylum, or when debating whether or not the monarch should even attend his own cousin’s funeral. ‘What were the sufferings of that poor unfortunate Emperor during the past year,’ Stamfordham asked, now neatly batting the ball back into the German court: ‘Why didn’t the German Emperor make the release of the Czar and family a condition of the Brest-Litovsk Peace?’6 In his response Lord Esher agreed that it was all Wilhelm’s fault for not doing so. It all boiled down to a matter of ‘Moral cowardice. Fear of insinuation, of criticism, of abuse.’7
Moral
cowardice was indeed a characteristic of all the failed negotiations for the Romanovs by all the parties involved, except perhaps King Alfonso. Yet, even as the various royals and their governments began pointing the finger of blame at each other, considerable confusion still prevailed about the fate of Alexandra and the children. This was made worse when rumours began circulating that they had been seen being transferred by train out of Ekaterinburg to Perm.8
It was this unsubstantiated sighting, told and retold and spun a dozen different ways by conspiracy theorists, that engendered the myths of miraculous escape that would follow over the next century. From Perm, so it was later claimed, the women were separated and sent to different locations in Europe under new identities. The stories rapidly developed a life of their own, feeding into the claims that began in 1920, with the emergence in Berlin of the false Anastasia – Anna Anderson, aka Franciszka Szankowska – not to mention a host of other bogus claimants who followed in her wake.
Acceptance of Nicholas’s death, however, was fairly immediate and widespread, although his mother Dagmar refused to believe that her darling Niki was dead till the day she herself died. In the weeks that followed, it was a different matter for the rest of the family. Without tangible proof, without a grave or sight of Alexandra’s and the children’s bodies, many in their wider European family refused to give up hope that they were still alive. Worse, they were not yet aware that Ella and her fellow captives at Alapaevsk had also been murdered. Indeed, for a while the Germans seem to have been under the impression that Ella was still in Moscow.9 Even as the acting German consul there, Herbert Hauschild, was making vigorous appeals on behalf of the ‘German Princesses’, he sensed that the Soviets were lying to him.
There is no doubt that the most shameful episode in this tragic story is the extent to which King Alfonso of Spain was led by the nose by Lenin’s government. At the beginning of August his last desperate attempts to help the family were revealed, when Spanish newspapers began reporting that their Foreign Ministry had initiated discussions to ‘bring the widow and daughters of the former tsar to Spain’.10
Throughout this period of grief and uncertainty, King Alfonso, who had been closely monitoring the Romanov situation since the abdication the previous March, was in close contact with Victoria Milford Haven. The Tsaritsa Alexandra was his wife Ena’s and Victoria Milford Haven’s first cousin, and they all shared great concern over her well-being and that of the Romanov children. It would appear that on 31 July, the Spanish Foreign Ministry sent instructions to Fernando Gómez Contreras – its business attaché in Petrograd and the sole remaining diplomatic representative in Russia – that at the first opportunity he was to intimate to the Soviets that King Alfonso, out of deep humanitarian considerations, wanted to offer refuge to the ‘empress widow and her son’, while wishing in no way to interfere in the internal affairs of Russia.11 A further telegram clarified that the offer was extended to the Dowager and all of the children. On 3 August The Times broke the Spanish rumours of the proposed ‘removal to Spain of the widow and daughters of the ex-tsar’, thanks to King Alfonso’s ‘solicitude’. Three days later it was reporting a rumour in ‘political circles in Moscow’ that although the ‘ex-tsarina is safe’, the government intended to ‘bring her before a Revolutionary Court owing to her relations with Rasputin’.12
On 3 August, Alfonso telegraphed Victoria Milford Haven, confirming he had initiated negotiations
to save empress and young girls, as it seems the tsarevich is dead. The proposal is to move them to a neutral country or have them remain here on my word of honour until the end of the war. I hope that the rest of the sovereigns will help me. I shall inform you of all the news I receive. Affectionately, Alfonso.13
He also wrote to the Grand Duchess George in London, who had recently begged him to act for her own husband. Now imprisoned in Petrograd’s Shpalernaya Prison by the Soviets, Grand Duke George was receiving very little food, had fallen ill and was in need of medical assistance.14 Alfonso was, he told her, in the process of making representations on behalf of all their Romanov relatives, but ‘it would be of the utmost importance that the King of England telegraphed me in this regard in order to reinforce my petition, which is not easy at all’.15 It was imperative that he had the British king’s support, and Alfonso simultaneously sent word to George, asking, ‘May I count on your approval?’16 Queen Mary – who had also telegraphed King Alfonso about the plight of Grand Duke George – was loath to trouble her husband while he was away visiting the British army in France, but with Alfonso clearly unwilling to act on his own initiative, she discussed the matter with Foreign Office officials.17 Tiptoeing around the correct protocols, Mary wished ‘to be most careful not to compromise herself or our King’. A draft response was discussed with Balfour and then rejected, in favour of the blandest of replies: ‘George away’, and the additional justification that her brief telegram to Alfonso confirming this had been sent ‘with knowledge of Foreign Office’.18
Bearing in mind the excruciating degree of royal obsession with the correct procedures demonstrated in this entirely modest exchange, is it likely that the British monarchy could ever have cut through the crippling levels of bureaucratic red tape at any point in this story, to take command of the situation and rescue their Romanov cousins?
Victoria Milford Haven was by now so distraught that she had even considered appealing – woman to woman – to Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya.19 On 10 August she wrote to King George about Alfonso’s need for concerted family backing. She was sure he was ‘willing and ready’ to help; but for ‘poor Alix and her girls … any steps to get them out of the country should be taken quickly’, otherwise the ‘revolutionary fanatics’ guarding them might ‘do what they like with their prisoners’. But she had no doubt that Ella would refuse to leave her religious work in Russia, to which she had dedicated her life.20
Victoria was right on both counts, but sadly, of course, it was too late.
Still ignorant of the truth, Alfonso had now turned his attention to Kaiser Wilhelm, asking him to join in the efforts to save Nicholas’s ‘unhappy family’ and ensure their safe evacuation to a neutral country for the duration of the war.21 The Germans at this stage seemed as certain as the Spanish that Alexandra and the children were all still alive, and Lenin’s government did nothing to disabuse either of them of the fact; indeed, they deliberately played along with them, and all the other Western governments. But there was considerable disquiet in German aristocratic circles that Germany was obliged to conduct pseudo-friendly negotiations with Lenin’s government. Princess Lowenstein was horrified with the German conservative press for playing down the Tsar’s murder, considering that ‘our intimate new friends the Bolsheviks have killed him. How disgusting I find the friendship with these pigs! One day this will exact vengeance.’22
For now, the royals and governments of Europe seemed more than happy to allow Alfonso to take the initiative, as they received the telegrams from him that winged their way from Madrid to Berlin, Vienna, Oslo, Paris, Rome, The Hague, London and Copenhagen. With their support, his ‘hand would be strengthened’, Alfonso told them, ‘in an act which can have no political but only humanitarian significance’. In response, words of encouragement arrived from Queen Wilhelmina (who instructed her ambassador in Petrograd to assist in any Spanish negotiations with the Soviets), King Haakon and the Kaiser.23 With the King still out of the country, London cabled that ‘the Government of His British Majesty deeply appreciates the sentiments of His Majesty the King of Spain and sincerely hopes that he shall achieve the intended purpose’.24 By now, even the Bourbon Prince Jaime – Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne – was also onside and telegraphed: ‘hoping quick result salvation unfortunate Russian Imperial Family’.25 Privately, however, the Spanish were investing little hope in support from the British with regard to a refuge for the former Tsaritsa. The Spanish ambassador in London, Alfonso Merry Del Val, considered that the British court was really only interested
in the welfare of the Dowager, and that any efforts to secure the release of Alexandra might be more favourably looked upon if they also included the Queen Mother’s sister, Dagmar, in the negotiations. There was still considerable hostility in England towards Alexandra, he noted, in a letter to the Spanish president:
She is considered to be an agent – conscious or unconscious – of Germany, and the principal cause, although certainly involuntarily, of the revolution … I must add that the resentment, whether justified or not, but nevertheless very powerful, against the empress Alix, is so extreme that it will ultimately prohibit all possibility of her coming to live in the United Kingdom.26
* * *
Even in death, Alexandra was still the bête noire in this whole sorry story.
It was not until mid-August that the British king himself reentered the frame. Returning on the 14th from his visit to the front, George V sent a belated but positive response to Alfonso via Sir Arthur Hardinge, his ambassador to Spain:
Would greatly appreciate that you exert all your influence in the most effective way, in order to release the Russian Imperial Family from the deplorable situation they are living in at the present time.27
British military intelligence was also enlisting Major General Poole, head of the British forces at Archangel: ‘If you have a chance of helping and saving them,’ he was instructed, ‘Mr Balfour desires that you should do so.’28
So British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour had finally changed his tune, as had many others in this story who had remained determinedly detached till now. But it had taken confirmation of Nicholas’s murder to galvanise them all into this last-ditch action.
The Race to Save the Romanovs Page 28