Born to Rule: Five Reigning Consorts, Granddaughters of Queen Victoria

by Julia P. Gelardi

  Tsarina Alexandra, who was following events in Greece, was especially incensed that Russia was ignoring the Greeks’ predicament, even promoting Allied policy against them. She told Nicky what she thought of it all: “I must say our diplomates [sic] behave shamefully & if Tino is kicked out, it will be our fault—horrid & unjust…. Vile shame!”47 Three days later, the tsarina was again urging Nicholas II to try to do something about Greece: “we are driving them into a republic [by undermining their king], we, [their fellow] orthodox— its [sic] really shameful…we are behaving most unfairly & understand poor Tino going half wild.”48

  Finally, in December 1916, a combination of British and French troops landed in Athens. There, they met with resistance from royalist soldiers, sending tensions in the Greek capital sky-high. The Allies retaliated in the most forceful way possible by bombarding Athens in early December from their ships in Piraeus. Five- to twelve-inch shells pounded the ancient city in a merciless barrage. The Royal Palace itself took a beating. The king and queen were home, as were their two daughters, Helen and Katherine. The palace garden became a battle scene as trees and shrubs were destroyed by large shrapnel. Queen Sophie had sought out the women servants, wishing them to seek shelter from the bombardment. Some hesitated, but the queen insisted, saying, “I have already sent my daughter [three-and-a-half-year-old Princess Katherine] to the cellar. It is better to take no risks.”49 For several terrifying hours, Queen Sophie and her children along with the women of the palace hid in the cellar.

  Ten days after the bombardment, King Constantine fired off a lengthy telegram to King George V: “You know and have always given me to understand that you believed I have never harboured any plots against you and your Allies. I entreat you do not push us to despair…we have been cruelly treated owing to lying and calumnious insinuations of political enemies, acting only for their own interior anti-dynastic party interests.”50

  By this stage, Queen Sophie had already despaired of the royal family’s predicament and that of the Greek people. A series of telegrams sent to Berlin at the time, and published by the Greek government in 1919 as the Greek White Book, reveal her agitated state. Among them was one that Queen Sophie sent her brother, the Kaiser, describing her harrowing experience at the Royal Palace:

  By a miracle we are safe after a three-hours’ bombardment of the Palace by the French fleet, which fired without warning. The shells exploded very near us. We took refuge in the cellars. Serious engagements also took place next day in the streets; the revolutionaries fired from the houses. The army and the people fought in a magnificent manner…and behaved loyally.…What will the demands of the Entente be? The health of all is good; great nervous tension. We are prepared for everything.…Please inform us when the army in Macedonia will be sufficiently reinforced in order to undertake the definite offensive.51

  After the Allies imposed a punishing blockade on Greece, the situation became intolerable. In another telegram, the queen told her brother in Berlin that “the blockade continues. We have bread enough to last until the end of December.”52 And in yet another message said to have been sent by the queen, this time to Nicholas Theotokis, the Greek minister to Berlin, she is quoted as saying: “Owing to the continuation of the blockade we have bread for only a few days; other food-supplies too are diminishing. War against the Entente is therefore now out of the question…I consider the game as lost, if the attack does not take place immediately; it will be too late afterwards.”53

  A week later, Queen Sophie found herself and the country in such dire straits that she was forced to send the following message to the Kaiser: “you can realize my situation! How much I suffer! …May the infamous pigs receive the punishment which they deserve!”54 It was not so much for herself that Sophie worried but for the harsh circumstances under which the Greeks were barely surviving. In Athens, malnutrition was widespread and many children were dying of starvation. Heartbreaking scenes of people dropping dead in the streets of the capital became a common sight. The poor and the weakest of the population—the elderly and the children—were felled by epidemics of dysentery due to the poor grade of flour used for bread, the main staple of the Greek diet. The French proved merciless in implementing the blockade and even prevented the fishermen from catching anything, oftentimes sinking vessels that dared to venture out. When the fishermen protested, the commanders simply replied, “If you want to be left alone, you have only to drive out your King.”55

  The predicament of the Greek people and Queen Sophie deeply angered Mossy, who wrote to a friend, “You can imagine what I feel like about my sister, it makes ones [sic] hair stand on end. Have people gone quite mad? Oh dear, oh dear, when will they come to their senses again.

  The beleaguered Greek people besieged charitable institutions for help, foremost of which was the Patriotic League of Greek Women, which “under the competent management of the Queen, was able to distribute 10,000 meals a day, as well as clothes, blankets, medicine, milk for infants, etc.”57 Yet no matter how hard such institutions tried to combat illness and famine, it was not enough to prevent many unnecessary and dreadful deaths.

  In just three weeks, the Allied blockade of Greece had succeeded in inflicting cruel blows on the Greek people. One of the most eloquent defenses on behalf of Queen Sophie came from Prince Nicholas of Greece, who in 1928 vigorously championed the queen by explaining that the documents published by the Greek government of 1919 in the White Book were “only partially authentic” and “others were either faked or…falsified for obvious reasons.” The government in power at the time was certainly not partial to King Constantine, by then in exile in Switzerland. Prince Nicholas wrote that the essential thing to remember with the messages published in the White Book was that any “compromising messages” were “not the cause… but the ‘the consequence’ of a situation made unbearable by a sequence of measures that were as humiliating as they were inflexible.” As for the “several telegrams addressed by the Queen to the Kaiser,” which “enquired when his armies would be ready for a decisive offensive in Macedonia,” these questions were asked because “the timely interference of the Germans could alone deliver Greece from a frightful situation rendered all the more hopeless by the penury of provisions and munitions and by the pressure of the general blockade.” In other words, the so-called “damning” evidence used against the queen was not that she was vehemently pro-German, but that she wanted to know when Greece might be delivered from a brutal blockade imposed by Allies.

  As Prince Nicholas rightly pointed out: “The important fact must not be overlooked that the ‘sensational and compromising’ telegrams are those dated from December 1916 to beginning of February 1917; that is, during the period that the Entente Powers’ coercive measures and the suffering and mortification of the King and Queen as well as the people’s had reached their limit.” In conclusion, Prince Nicholas wrote: “If your house is broken into and plundered and finally set on fire by persons whom you considered to be your best friends, have the latter any right to call you a ‘traitor’ because, in despair, you opened your window and screamed for help?”58

  Three hellish months after the blockade started, the Greeks still showed little sign of succumbing to Allied pressure. Incensed, a Greek crowd attacked the French Legation, crying: “Long live the King, and down with the Allies.” Later, as the blockade’s vise tightened, starving Greeks cried out in their misery, “Long live the King!” and “We are pleased to starve for him!” “There were even cases of mothers snatching the bread from their children’s hands, telling them they dare not eat while the King was hungry too.”59 A woman outside a soup kitchen in Piraeus summed it up when she retorted, “Give in? We will eat our children first!” Among the most poignant protestations were inscriptions found over the graves of dead babies: “Here lies my child, starved to death by Venizelos.”60 This accusation had some truth to it. For at the end of December 1916, Venizelos, through the French Legation at Athens, sent off instructions to the French Foreign Office
“to let no corn into Greece except by driblets, and to let no money in at all.” In the same message, Venizelos also offered “to raise a terrible revolution in Athens and to shatter the King.”

  Contemporaries allied to the Entente who were familiar with their governments’ actions in Greece acknowledged that the tragedy was indeed appalling. One British diplomat wrote that “altogether the proceedings of the Allies in Greece were of an equivocal and inglorious character and were due almost entirely to French initiative.” Even Compton Mackenzie, the British adventurer and author, who was not in King Constantine’s good books because of his activities with the British Secret Service in Greece, which helped undermine the king’s position, had defended Queen Sophie unequivocally: “I will take this opportunity of affirming that I believed none of the fantastic tales about her stratagems and that whenever and wherever I could I suppressed their circulation.” 3

  Since Venizelos was openly pro-Entente, many Greeks were bitterly against the politician, whom they viewed with growing suspicion. On Christmas Day, 1916, in a dramatic manifestation of just how much the Greeks despised Venizelos, an anathema against him was carried out, in front of a crowd of thousands.

  Sir Francis Elliot reported the event to his superiors in London: “This afternoon a ceremony of Anathema against Venizelos was performed by the Metropolitan of Athens accompanied by the Holy Synod at the Champs de Mars where a grave had been previously dug and filled and piled up with stones thrown by the populace to the cry of Anathema to the traitor. Shops were all shut in principal streets and great concourse attended ceremony” A witness reported watching one old woman take her rock, brought from her farm in Attica, and cry out loudly as she cast the stone and cursed Venizelos: “We made him Premier; but he was not content. He would make himself king. Anathema!”65

  Of the numerous warnings and pleas directed at the tsar and tsarina over their disastrous association with Rasputin, none was more heart-wrenching than the one made by Alexandra’s older sister, the widowed Ella, who visited Tsarskoe Selo in December 1916, Ella did not mince words, telling Alix, “Rasputin is exasperating society. He is compromising the imperial family and will lead the dynasty to ruin.” But the tsarina would have none it, replying, “Rasputin is a great man of prayer. All these rumors are slanders.” The meeting between the two sisters ended in bitterness. That frosty encounter was the last time the two would meet.

  When the much-respected Ella had failed to change Alexandra’s mind, there was little hope that anyone else could succeed. After the meeting with her sister, Ella saw Prince Felix Youssopov and related what had happened. This served to strengthen Felix’s resolve that something drastic had to be done. A conspiracy to assassinate Rasputin emerged, involving Prince Felix Youssopov, Grand Duke Dmitri, and a member of the Duma, Vladimir Purishkevitch. Felix and Dmitri had close ties to the tsar and tsarina. Felix was married to the tsar’s niece, Irina, while Dmitri was a cousin of Nicholas II and a nephew of Queen Sophie of Greece.

  Rasputin was lured to Youssopov Palace in Petrograd, where he was plied with poisoned wine and poisoned cake. Incredibly, Rasputin kept on drinking and eating as if nothing was wrong. Finally, Felix shot him with a revolver, and when he saw the victim’s immobile body, the staretz was taken for dead. But sometime during the early hours of the next day an inexplicable, bizarre event occurred. Youssopov went to the palace basement where Rasputin’s lifeless body lay. “According to Felix, he felt for a pulse; there was none. Then, in a burst of rage, he seized the corpse by the shoulders and shook it violently. He threw the body back against the floor, then again knelt down beside it. Suddenly, the left eye twitched and then opened.” Rasputin, the miracle man, had done it again. This time, instead of snatching the Tsarevitch Alexei from death, it was the staretz himself who seemed to be rising from the dead.

  The attacker now found himself attacked. Rasputin, his eyes pierced with fury, decided to lunge after Felix. “With a wild roar, Rasputin stumbled to his feet. Flailing his arms about in the air, he managed to grab Felix and rip one of the epaulets from his tunic. His eyes bulged in their sockets, and a thin stream of blood trickled from his lips. Calling, ‘Felix! Felix!’ he again reached for his assassin.” Purishkevitch finally came to the rescue, but not before Rasputin cried out to Youssopov: “Felix! Felix! I will tell the Tsarina everything! They were his last words. Purishkevitch shot Rasputin in the back and the head. Their deed done, the murderers threw his body into the Neva River. Poisoned, stabbed, and shot three times, the seemingly indestructible Rasputin finally met his end in the freezing waters of the Neva.

  A week after Rasputin’s body was found in a tributary of the Neva, Marie of Romania wrote that “something uncanny and dreadful is going on there [in Russia].” Marie added, “how deplorable when a woman has a bad influence over a man! Poor Alix!”69 But just as Alexandra’s world was soon to explode in a wave of a violence, Marie’s life was about to undergo tremendous upheaval. The foundations of the dynasty would be shaken to the core, and the cause would prove to be none other than Marie’s eldest son, Carol.

  Twenty-one

  THE ABYSS

  “THEY HAVE GOT HIM AT LAST, general.”1 WITH THOSE WORDS, Major General Hanbury-Williams learned that Russia’s most hated man had been eliminated. The deed done, Tsarina Alexandra’s final nightmare was set to begin. Only a month before, Alix, whose life was leaden with anxieties, had exhibited signs of renewal. General Hanbury-Williams found her to be “in really good spirits…and seemed hopeful about the war. “2 This hopeful mood, however, was shattered by Rasputin’s murder.

  Rasputin himself had been convinced that his days were numbered and gave out a dire warning:

  If I am killed by common assassins, and especially by my brothers the Russian peasants, you, Tsar of Russia, have nothing to fear…if it was your relations who have wrought my death then…none of your children or relations, will remain alive for more than two years…I shall be killed. I am no longer among the living…Gregory3

  When news of Rasputin’s death came through, according to Pierre Gilliard, it was “like a thunderbolt.”4 Anna Viroubova recalled that Petrograd “burst into a wild orgy of rejoicing”5; and according to Sandro, amidst “universal rejoicing,” Felix and Dmitri became “national heroes.” Lady Sybil Grey, who was living in St. Petersburg, saw how Youssopov had been elevated as a hero by the masses for murdering Rasputin. When rumors circulated that Dmitri and Felix were to be executed, it caused “great agitation among the factory workers.” The telephones in the hospital Lady Sybil ran kept “ringing all day to say that they [the workers] had decided to form a body-guard to protect Yousopoff.”7

  Others, such as Dr. Eugene Botkin, viewed the murder with little enthusiasm. “Rasputin dead will be worse than Rasputin alive,” he muttered. “Moreover, what Youssoupoff actually has done is to fire the first shot of the revolution. He has showed others the way—when a demand is not granted, take the law into your hands and shoot.”8

  At Tsarskoe Selo, Alexandra was in a state of shock. Gilliard recalled her “agonised features,” her “inconsolable” grief.9 She had lost the only person she deemed indispensable to the survival of her son. Dmitri’s sister, Marie, who felt hostile toward the tsarina at the time, nevertheless admitted how “my heart perceived her torture.” For Marie envisioned Alexandra hovering anxiously over Alexei, hearing the words Rasputin had endlessly repeated, “So long as I live, the Tsarevitch will live.”10

  The tsarina was also horrified that members of the Romanov dynasty could be behind such a heinous act. Dr. Botkin recounted to his son, Gleb, how the tsarina broke down and said, “I cannot get over it. Dimitriy, whom I have loved as my own son, conspiring against my life! And Youssoupoff—a nobody who owes all he has solely to the mercy of the Emperor! It is terrible.”11 The tsar was equally aghast.

  When Prince Felix’s father-in-law faced the tsar, begging him to treat Dmitri and Felix as “misguided patriots,” Nicholas II retorted, “Nice speech, Sandro. Are yo
u aware, however, that nobody has the right to kill, be it a grand duke or a peasant?”12

  As punishment, the tsar ordered Dmitri and Felix exiled, the former to the Persian front, the latter to his estate in central Russia. Sixteen members of the Romanov family (including Queen Olga of Greece) wrote to the tsar pleading for him to spare Dmitri severe punishment. Nicholas II scribbled on the margin his answer: “No one has the right to kill, and I am astonished that the family should address itself to me with such requests. Signed: Nicholas.”13

  When Dimitri’s father begged the tsar to free his son, Nicholas replied, “The Empress cannot allow him to be released.”14 The tsar’s rejection of clemency for Dmitri marked a turning point in relations between Nicholas and Alexandra and the rest of the imperial dynasty, for it signaled an open breach between the tsar, tsarina, and the Romanovs. If the gates of Tsarskoe Selo had been left slightly ajar until now to the Romanov clan, Nicholas, with the full approval of his wife, had just slammed them shut. Bereft of much family support and with the masses agitating, Nicholas and Alexandra clung to each other more than ever.

  Rasputin was buried at Tsarskoe Selo, along with an icon that had been signed by the tsarina and her daughters and a letter from Alexandra. With his death, anxieties over the future of Russia and the imperial family did not diminish: It was after all a natural extension of what Rasputin had once prophesied to the tsar and tsarina: “If I die or you desert me, you will lose your son and your crown within six months.”15