For the time being, George V’s honour had been saved, protected by the redaction of both Buchanan’s and Lloyd George’s memoirs. After the King’s death in 1936 the inevitable official biography would follow, and in 1948 the author and former diplomat Harold Nicolson was invited to take on the task. He was instructed from the outset that, at all costs, his job was to protect the King’s reputation and he should ‘omit things and incidents which were discreditable to the royal family’.41 Summers and Mangold later claimed that in his account Nicolson ‘slithered past the subject [of the Romanov asylum] as quickly as possible, quoting highly selectively’. Not true, countered former court correspondent Daniel Counihan, in a letter to The Listener on 7 October 1976: Nicolson had revealed the King’s opposition in four pages on the subject; his biography was the product of the severe constraints placed upon him, and ‘written at a time when some things simply could not be said’. King George’s opposition to the Romanovs coming to England had been that of a ‘great constitutional monarch conscientiously doing his job’.42
To his dying day in March 1931, Lord Stamfordham also fiercely protected George’s position, so much so that he took the most extraordinary of defensive measures not long beforehand. Drawing on his unique position of trust, he obtained access to the Foreign Office papers dealing with the Romanov asylum and, at the bottom of his original letter of 6 April 1917 in which he explained the King’s change of heart to Balfour, he added a handwritten note: ‘Most people appear to think the invitation was initiated by the King whereas it was His Govt who did so.’43 Ruthless to the last, Stamfordham, the devoted royal servant, was even prepared to doctor the record.
And so the endless game of buck-passing continued. Ultimately, it was historian Kenneth Rose who best summed up King George V’s position in his revealing 1983 biography. Unlike other historians, Rose was, apparently, given ‘a free hand as regards the royal archives’ and access to all of Harold Nicolson’s papers. Eventually the typescript had to be submitted to Queen Elizabeth II for her approval. Having read the contentious section in which Rose pulled no punches on George’s own failings in the Romanov asylum, the Queen wrote with a flourish at the bottom: ‘Let him publish.’44 Perhaps by 1983 she had come to the conclusion that the Windsors could no longer continue to dodge their responsibility in the affair. It was Kenneth Rose, in fact, who best summed up the extraordinarily difficult position in which the Queen’s grandfather had found himself:
The first principle of an hereditary monarchy is to survive; and never was King George V obliged to tread the path of self preservation more cautiously than in 1917.45
* * *
From the moment that news of the murder of Nicholas II was announced, impregnable official defences were thrown up around the reputation of King George and are still largely in place to this day. Over the years, both the National Archives and the Royal Archives have responded to numerous Freedom of Information requests from writers and journalists with repeated assertions that there is no relevant material hidden away that has not already been made public. The first challenges to official insistence that nothing had been removed from the record were concertedly made in the 1970s by Summers and Mangold during the research for their TV documentary and controversial bestseller, The File on the Tsar. They contended, through three editions of their book over the next thirty years, that some official British records had been carefully and selectively weeded of potentially embarrassing or compromising material relating to the Romanov asylum. While the unsealing of Cabinet papers in 1986 showed that David Lloyd George, and to a degree Sir George Buchanan as well, had taken the rap for the King’s share of responsibility, there is still the question of Secret Service files. These are of course an entirely different matter: any such MI1(c) files relating to SIS activities in Russia in 1917–18 might reveal behind-the-scenes attempts to help the Romanovs that have never been admitted to. But if they do exist, they will probably never be released.46 It is, of course, every historian’s ultimate nightmare – knowing that there may well be material that will shed valuable light on a complex story, but to which he or she will never be granted access. Sadly, the Romanov story is full of such frustrations.
* * *
Despite the nagging gaps in the record with regard to some aspects of this story, over the last century numerous books and articles, TV documentaries and, latterly, blogs and internet discussions have all repeatedly raked over the coals, many of them in a determined attempt to lay the blame at King George’s door in particular. But perhaps the time has come to accept that responsibility should be more widely, and equally, apportioned. The hindsight of 100 years allows us to assess the situation today from several very different perspectives: of political alliances, wartime expediency, personal antipathies, family loyalties, logistics, geography, and even the weather. All of these elements had a part to play in the failure of all and any rescue plans. But back in 1917–18 by far the most pressing aspect, for all the royal families and governments involved, was that of the internal political considerations then prevailing.
In the final analysis, King George V was faced with reaching a highly reluctant decision about his Romanov cousins. Russophobia was nothing new in the UK; indeed, anti-Russian hatred had been whipped up in the reign of George’s grandmother, Queen Victoria, from the Crimean War of 1854–6 to Russian encroachments in Afghanistan in the 1880s. In 1908, George’s father Edward VII had been widely condemned for meeting the ‘blood-stained’ Nicholas at Reval, and Labour Party members had signed a petition against the visit. By 1917, the Labour Party and its leadership, not to mention much of the British press, were so vehemently opposed to any possibility of the former Tsar and his family settling in the UK that, like it or not, King George had no alternative but to consider the potentially dire political consequences for his monarchy. It mattered not that Nicholas would have wished to live in quiet domestic obscurity in the countryside; his need for a refuge came at totally the wrong time politically, when many left-wing groups in Britain were hoping that the British throne might go the same way as the Russian one. The King clearly panicked at the exaggerated prospect presented to him by Lord Stamfordham of worker-led strikes and mass protests across the country.
George’s scrupulous attention to the position of the constitutional monarch – or, more accurately, parliamentary monarch – meant that he was obliged to respect the Coronation Oath that he had sworn in 1910 to put the national interests first at all times. His government had been voted into power by the will of the people, and the will of the British people in 1917–18 was seemingly that the Romanovs were not welcome. And while it might be easy retrospectively to say that the threat to his throne was exaggerated and that a republican-style uprising on the streets of London was in fact highly unlikely, one has to view the King’s reaction in the context of 1917 and not that of 100 years later.
In all his decision-making, King George V’s forceful and uncompromising wife Queen Mary supported him quietly but firmly behind the scenes. She, if anything, was even more determined to preserve the continuity and stability of the British throne, in much the same way that Tsaritsa Alexandra had vigorously defended it in Russia. Would Nicholas ever have capitulated and signed the abdication if Alexandra had been in the room at the time? No. Never.
Many years after the events of 1917–18 the former King Edward VIII, now Duke of Windsor, recalled taking breakfast with his parents in the spring of 1917 when an equerry suddenly entered the room – something that was never normally done. ‘I mean this was breakfast, for heaven’s sake! We looked, I hope, suitably horrified at this breach.’ His father was furious, the Duke recalled:
But the man went straight up to him with this note, which the king read and gave to my mother, and she read it and gave it back and said, ‘No’. The king gave it to the equerry and said ‘No.’ Later that day I asked my mother what that was all about and she said the government was willing to send a ship to rescue the czar and his family but she did not think it wou
ld be good for us to have them in England.47
In recounting this story in his book, The Last Kaiser, author Tyler Whittle added – from ‘private information’ given to him – that Queen Mary, whom George V considered his most trusted adviser, conceived it her ‘prime duty to protect the English throne’ and that ‘it could not be put at risk even for dear cousins’.48 It was for this reason that in July 1917 King George had distanced himself and his family from their German roots by adopting the family name of Windsor; the wider British royal family had also dropped all their German honours and titles.49
The suggestion has also been made that much deeper personal feelings coloured Queen Mary’s attitude to the Romanov asylum: that her adamant opposition was influenced by her own intense dislike for the Tsaritsa. This, so the story goes, was born of Mary’s own sense of inferiority to the ‘real royalty’ of the tsars, an elevated position to which her modestly born German cousin Alexandra had risen and in which she revelled. In private conversations with the American author Gore Vidal, the late Princess Margaret suggested that Queen Mary had a ‘pathological jealousy’ of the status of most of her grandchildren: they were Royal Highnesses, whereas she, as the daughter of the Duke of Teck from the obscure Kingdom of Württemberg (and who had contracted a morganatic marriage to boot), was a mere Serene Highness. There is nothing to substantiate Princess Margaret’s view, beyond the fact perhaps that Mary’s spendthrift parents had lived in straitened circumstances and her relatives had rubbed into her during her childhood a sense of being the poor relation.50 Alexandra was a crashing snob with an unshakeable sense of her superiority and it is little wonder if Mary felt humiliated by her; particularly when, in 1891, Mary became the lower-ranking second-choice fiancée for Bertie’s son Eddy, Duke of Clarence, after Alexandra had rejected him.51
Such private feelings may have been in the back of Queen Mary’s mind, but neither she nor the King, nor even his insidious adviser Lord Stamfordham, could ever have had an inkling of the terrible murders to come. This in itself is demonstrative of their own and the British government’s lack of understanding, at this stage, of the brutal new communist regime that they were dealing with. Nevertheless, Stamfordham’s decisive Machiavellian influence over the King was first noted in 1934 by Stephen Gaselee, the official in control of the vetting of diplomatic memoirs: ‘the truth of the matter is that Lord Stamfordham suddenly “got cold feet”, and induced a couple of rather timid telegrams to be sent from here’.52 Such was the power of the King’s private secretary at that time.
* * *
There remains one final dimension to this story that till now has not been fully explored – and that is the position of the Kaiser. The subject was first publicly broached when a row broke out in 1935 between former French ambassador Maurice Paléologue and Dr Kurt Jagow, co-director and archivist at the Brandenburg Royal Prussian Archives. It was sparked by publication in Paris that year of Paléologue’s Guillaume II et Nicolas II, in which he vilified Wilhelm for betraying his cousin and the Imperial Family, claiming that he could – and indeed should – have made their release a prerequisite of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, and citing at length the accusatory open letter of General Leontiev.*
Jagow rose to the Kaiser’s defence in a long article entitled ‘Die Schuld am Zarenmord’ (The Blame for the Tsar’s Murder) published in Berlin.53 It seemed to him that Paléologue was intent on blaming Germany not only for the Romanovs’ deaths, but also for the entire war. As for Wilhelm’s responsibility as a cousin of the Tsar, Jagow contended that monarchs have never been particularly famous for their solidarity, and Nicholas and Wilhelm had not had a particularly deep friendship; by 1917, as even Paléologue himself admitted, ‘the mutual trust of the two sovereigns [was] dead’.54 Nicholas and Alexandra, argued Jagow, ‘did not see the Germans as having a moral obligation to help them; on the contrary, they were actively opposed to such help and refused it point-blank, even when their situation was most desperate’.55 He then turned his attention to the failures of Britain and France and of Milyukov’s government. The Tsar’s allies knew from the beginning that his life was in great danger and in 1917 they had the power to save him; yet ambassador Paléologue’s sympathy for the imprisoned Tsar and his family had never extended further than ‘sentimental entries in his diary and their literary use later’ in his memoirs.56 Jagow pointed out that right at the beginning of this crisis, through the offices of Scavenius at the Danish embassy in Petrograd,* the Germans had promised to allow a ship to evacuate the Imperial Family under a white flag and without threat from their torpedo boats; that in the spring of 1917, Germany ‘would not have stood in the way of the Entente to get them out’.57 He then went on to quote in detail from the various diplomatic exchanges with the Soviet government in efforts to protect the ‘German princesses’; how the Germans had liaised with King Christian of Denmark, and later with their Spanish counterparts, to secure the release of the Tsaritsa and her children, who they thought were still alive.58 But the German government had been ‘fobbed off with [Soviet] lies until the end, without being able to do anything’. Jagow had no doubt about who carried the burden of blame in all this: it was ‘the Bolshevik government of 1918’.59
Jagow’s defence of the Kaiser in response to Paléologue’s accusations was welcome, but revealed nothing of the Kaiser’s own personal feelings. Even in his memoirs, published in English in 1922, Wilhelm had hardly a word to say about Nicholas, beyond noting that ‘he ha[d] been murdered’.60 There is no sense of any regret, let alone outrage, and little or no empathy for his late cousin either, so it is no surprise that many have assumed that Wilhelm had made no real efforts to save the Romanov family.
There was, however, one person to whom the Kaiser did speak at length and in confidence about the subject: his old friend Brigadier General Wallscourt H.-H. Waters. The two men had become acquainted during 1900–3, when Waters had served as British military attaché in Berlin. After Wilhelm’s wife died in 1921, Waters had visited the Kaiser often at his manor house in Doorn in the Netherlands, where Wilhelm had taken refuge in 1920. Between 1928 and 1935 the two men had had many long conversations about the war, which Waters later recounted in his 1935 memoir Potsdam and Doorn. He had proved a willing listener to Wilhelm’s endless and frequent tirades about the ‘ocean of abuse, vilification, infamy, slanders and lies’ that he fulminated had been directed at him from London during and since that time.61
At Doorn in 1935, Wilhelm had insisted on reading Waters the long Jagow article in full. ‘It appeared to me,’ Waters wrote, ‘that the conversation on the subject between the Kaiser and myself should be recorded as spoken at the time.’ And so Waters diligently took notes of the whole ‘mendacious accusation’ made by Paléologue, along with Jagow’s ‘withering refutation’.62 Crucially he also stated in his memoirs that he had drawn on the Kaiser’s own notes on the matter, for his book.63
* * *
But where were those observations now? In File on the Tsar, Summers and Mangold claimed that Waters’s ‘full unedited notes’ on these conversations with the Kaiser had been lodged with the Royal Archives after Waters’s death in 1945. But on enquiry in 1975, the two authors were informed that there were ‘insuperable administrative difficulties’ in making the papers available to them.64 More than forty years later, when I too contacted the RA about these papers, I was informed that the archives held no such papers, but only a group of letters to Waters from the Kaiser and his wife that it had purchased from Waters’s cousin. There were no notes on conversations with the Kaiser about the Romanovs. So what had happened to the supposed notes deposited with the archives in 1945, I wondered? Were the Kaiser’s comments to Waters deliberately weeded and destroyed at some point, by the RA, to protect King George? Summers and Mangold seemed to think so, and that there was a conspiracy at work, because in Potsdam and Doorn Waters had ‘published only his notes on the German emperor’s attitude immediately after the tsar’s abdication in 1917’; and that ‘the key period in 19
18 is omitted altogether’.65 But is this really the case?
I sought clarification by ordering a copy of Waters’s will. In fact it only makes one brief reference to personal papers – specifically his correspondence – instructing his ‘residuary legatee’, Colonel Lyster Taylor, to dispose of various items as he saw fit. These included ‘letters of appreciation from distinguished persons and letters from the Emperor William’. This is the material that Colonel Taylor subsequently sold to the Royal Archives. There were no notes; and no conspiracy by the Royal Archives to hide any such material from the public.66
The Kaiser did, however, preserve his own notes. They finally surfaced during research for this book – having been lost to history since the 1930s.
In 2016, a brief internet announcement in German was spotted by a friend of mine, regarding an obscure, small-scale exhibition coming up at the Burg Hohenzollern Archive, entitled ‘300 Jahre Romanow & Hohenzollern’. Even obtaining a copy of the rudimentary catalogue proved difficult, but when it finally arrived, there – buried under item 64 – was this listing:
‘Questions and Reflections concerning Rescue of the Tsar’. Records of William II of April, 1931, concerning his trying to save the Tsar and his family in the summer of 1918* Lead on paper.67
A concerted effort to track down the relevant archivist and then obtain permission from HIRH the Prinz von Preussen to see these papers took some time, but finally produced a result. Digital scans pinged into my inbox from Burg Hohenzollern of twelve pages of documents covered with the Kaiser’s characteristic, tense pencil scribbles. The first document in the sequence, the ‘Questions and Reflections’, is written in English in pencil – perhaps for the benefit of Waters. It is not dated but it is, in part, an exact mirror of what Waters recounts on pages 259–61 of Potsdam and Doorn. However, with regard to the claim by Summers and Mangold that the notes on the ‘key period in 1918’ had been removed from the RA, it seems unlikely there ever were any.68 The original documents at Burg Hohenzollern are fundamentally a discussion of the early plans in 1917 for a German evacuation of the Romanovs from Russia. There is little or no mention by the Kaiser of events in 1918.
The Race to Save the Romanovs Page 31