Queen Victoria's Matchmaking

by Deborah Cadbury

  Ella witnessed the hostility provoked by her sister’s actions at first hand. In the summer of 1915 a vengeful crowd gathered outside the Martha and Mary Convent in Moscow. They demanded to see Ella, ‘the German traitor’, insisting that she, like her sister, must be a German spy. It was claimed she was conspiring with the tsarina to hide German agents, perhaps even her brother, Ernie, in the convent. Someone began throwing stones. Ella saw the swirling mass of people hungry for vengeance, their minds filled with the need to kill with no thought of justice. She walked out to meet the crowd, a solitary figure, appealing for calm. Her brother was not in the convent, she told them. They could search it for themselves. The mood remained ugly and it was only as soldiers arrived that the mob disbanded.

  With her sister directing the government, in under a year and a half Russia’s misfortunes at war accelerated as no fewer than four prime ministers and three ministers of war came and went with dizzying speed, not to mention top ministerial changes to other crucial departments such as agriculture. By the time the rout in Romania in 1916 was adding to Russia’s military problems, men of no ability were in charge of crucial matters: how to supply enough grain to feed the army and how to transport supplies to the front. Russia itself was crumbling under the tsarina’s interference. The marital alliance that had started in Coburg twenty-two years earlier with such extravagant hopes for peace not only now threatened the survival of the dynasty but had potential implications for all of civilised Europe.

  The tsar himself was uncharacteristically irritable, his face assuming a gaunt, hollowed-out expression. When he tried to oppose one of his wife’s judgements, she came to the army headquarters and pressured him in person. The tsar had all but surrendered his control of Russia’s mighty autocracy to an illiterate peasant. Senior members of the Romanov family, including his own mother, pleaded with him to stop his wife’s interference. The Dowager Empress believed Alexandra had lost her sanity.15 The merry-go-round of inadequate ministers was destroying the tsar’s authority. If Nicholas did not take control there would be no kingdom to manage. The tsar did not listen. He appeared pushed beyond endurance, utterly unable to resist his wife’s endless entreaties. There was a defeated air about him as though his interior life was now dead.

  The Romanovs also warned Alix, but their concerns were meaningless to her. The only voice she could hear was Rasputin’s. Nothing could shake her faith in him. He alone understood the mysteries of God’s plan. Her delusional world had its own internal logic, resistant to all outside threats. Anything said against him was ‘slander’. Saints, she believed, ‘have always been slandered’.16 The criticism was just part of God’s test. When shown photographs of Rasputin at the centre of an orgy, she insisted he had been impersonated. Those who spoke badly of him were coldly dismissed.

  It fell to Ella to make one last personal appeal. She set out from Moscow bearing the hopes of the Romanov family. By this point the sisters ‘did not get on at all well’, according to her friend, Prince Yusupov, due to ‘the tsarina’s blind confidence in Rasputin’. Alix and Rasputin were aware of Ella’s views. Ella was a friend of Yusupov’s mother. ‘Both of them plot against me and spread slander about me too,’ Rasputin once claimed. ‘The tsarina has often told me they are my worst enemies.’17

  In December 1916 the two sisters who had once turned the heads of Europe’s most eligible princes were briefly reunited. Ella was shown into the tsarina’s rooms in the Alexander Palace. She had prayed to God to ‘give her the powers of persuasion which had hitherto failed her’. Now she tried to find the words to explain the disastrous course her younger sister was taking. But once it became clear that Ella wished to talk about Rasputin, the sisterly warmth that she had hoped for evaporated.

  The tsarina had long dismissed Ella’s views by believing that she was part of a ‘very bigoted’ Moscow clique. The passion and sincerity of her pleading eluded her. Alix expressed her disappointment that her sister could believe in falsehoods. ‘Rasputin was a man of great prayer,’ she insisted.18 She had no wish to touch on the matter any further.

  Ella found it hard to accept her younger sister had become so unwilling to hear any view that conflicted with her own, so dangerously bound up was she with an imaginary saint. She tried again, but Alix had heard enough. Her trust in her sister had broken down.

  As the two women faced each other in the Alexander Palace, they stood apart, separated irretrievably: Alix now, in all but name, the unreachable ruler of that ungovernable mass of land, tsarina of all the Russias; Ella in her grey nun’s robes, retired from the world but with a much keener understanding of it.

  A servant was summoned. The meeting was over. Sisterly ties, once so intimate, appeared to no longer exist. Ella went straight to her friend, Felix Yusupov, and members of the Romanov family. ‘We all waited eagerly for her arrival,’ recorded Yusupov, ‘anxious to hear the result of the interview.’ Ella came into the room ‘trembling and in tears: “She drove me away like a dog!” she cried. “Poor Nicky, poor Russia!”’19

  Ella herself endorsed what happened next – knowing full well the traumatic impact it would have on her sister.20

  The steps taken by members of the Russian nobility in December 1916 to break the destructive hold of Rasputin have taken on the character of myth or legend. The chief architect of the plan was Ella’s devoted friend, Prince Yusupov, whose own famous account casts his exploits as a heroic clash between good and evil, apparently touched by the supernatural as though he were struggling with the devil himself. But his actions would cost the Romanovs their last vestiges of moral authority.

  On 29 December, Prince Yusupov invited Rasputin to his palace on the pretext that he could meet his beautiful wife, Irena, a niece of the tsar. Rasputin enjoyed being feted by the prince, little knowing that the cakes and wine he was served were laced with cyanide. Yusupov had reached a point where he and his friends saw murder as the only way to shore up Russia’s ailing autocracy.

  According to Yusupov’s account, Rasputin consumed enough cyanide to fell a man, but still he did not die. Dressed in silks and velvet, at ease in the richly appointed room, he called for more of the poisoned cakes and wine. Time passed with Rasputin in exuberant mood, impatient to meet the beautiful Irene. Finally, in desperation, Yusupov pulled a gun and aimed for his heart at close range. Rasputin fell on a white bearskin, apparently dead. Yusupov’s friends left to make arrangements for disposing of the body, leaving the prince on guard. Curious, he leaned over the dead man and watched, unbelieving, and in a state of shock, as first one eye opened, then the other, ‘the green eyes of a viper’. With an expression of malevolent hatred, Rasputin rose to attack his murderer, clutching at Yusupov’s jacket, grappling him down. Yusupov broke free and fetched his friends, but they returned to an empty room. The ‘dead’ man was making his way across the snow-covered yard towards the gate. It took several more bullets to stop Rasputin, now heavily bleeding and lying in the snow.21

  The claims made by Yusupov highlight the feeling widespread at the time, that Russia had somehow fallen under a supernatural influence. Analysis of the body, which was found below the ice of the Little Neva, has shed a rather more prosaic light on Yusupov’s colourful account. The actual point of death was in the courtyard: a final shot in the forehead executed with the skill of a professional killer. This lends weight to the unproven claim that British agents may also have been involved in the murder, anxious to remove the one man who was having such a destructive impact on Russia’s war effort – a view naturally denied by the British ambassador, George Buchanan, when questioned by the tsar.22

  Whatever the case, the plot backfired. Once her initial trauma had subsided, Alix rallied as though fortified from beyond the grave by Rasputin’s spirit. ‘Our dear Friend . . . is yet nearer to us,’ she told Nicholas.23 The chaos in government resumed once again with the tsarina selecting and dispatching ministers. It was the tsar who, far from being released from the irrational hold of his wife, seemed destroyed fr
om within, consumed by the fearful implications of the murder. He became silent, his face expressionless. From the sanctuary of his study, he shrank from further conflict, a ghost in the vast glittering palace.

  Over the winter of 1916 Nicholas was in a state of helplessness, as though he had suffered a devastating nervous breakdown. Everything about him was world-weary, exhausted. One loyal advisor considered him ‘unrecognisable’, his face haggard, his large eyes ‘quite faded’ as though his spirit had vanished.24 He behaved like a man doomed, trapped between the demands of his ministers to introduce reforms and stop his wife running the country, and her desire to enforce Russia’s autocracy. Resigned to her control, he approved the construction of a secret passageway so she could overhear his conversations and advise him. He did not respond to the repeated warnings. The tsar’s brother-in-law, Sandro, found a way to have one last meeting with the tsarina in February in which he dared to say the unsayable. The tsarina had ‘no right’, in her blind stubbornness, to drag everyone ‘down a precipice’. Alix spoke ‘excitedly, hurriedly’, but, Sandro felt, she had reached ‘a state of complete and incurable delusion’. Nothing would shake her certainty that she knew best, guided as she was by the spirit of God through ‘Our Friend’.25

  By early 1917 the scandal of government corruption and the dysfunctional relationship at the helm sparked rebellion. There were momentous events on the streets of Petrograd in late February as the years of hardship and repression came to a head. The tsar was warned of the bread riots; he was warned that 60,000 men and women were on strike; he was warned on 7 March that the revolt was out of control. That evening he told his ministers he would introduce reforms. A few hours later he changed his mind. With characteristic indecisiveness, he avoided a decision and slipped away to the front. Unknowingly, he had squandered his last chance. On 11 March some of the troops sent to bring order refused to fire on the rioters. The mutiny lit the fuse of the second Russian revolution. The following day members of the imperial cabinet were arrested. Power lay with the duma and a new assembly, the Soviet, representing workers and soldiers. The tsar attempted to return – but it was too late. The railways were falling into the hands of armed revolutionaries. By 15 March, diverted to a railway siding at Pskov, 200 miles south-west of Petrograd, Nicholas was forced to abdicate.

  Meanwhile, unaware of developments as she waited for her husband at Tsarskoe Selo, the empress tried to maintain her dignity, her memory taking her back momentarily to the security of childhood experiences. ‘You Russian ladies don’t know how to be useful,’ she said as her retinue was moved into the royal family’s wing. ‘When I was a girl, my grandmother, Queen Victoria, showed me how to make a bed. I’ll teach you . . .’26 With Petrograd in revolt just a few miles away, it was a relief to see her loyal guards at the palace gates.

  But on the morning of 15 March she woke early, perhaps disturbed by the unnatural silence outside. Looking out of the window at first light she was filled with a sense of shock. The scene outside was whitewashed with snow. There were no footprints. The grounds were empty; the soldiers gone. She and her children were utterly alone and unprotected. In the magnificent complex of palaces and pleasure gardens there was no one to help them in a world suddenly full of fear.

  The following day servants brought posters from the city announcing the abdication of the tsar. Alix had lost her throne, the first of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren to do so.

  For all her horrific forecasts for the Russian monarchy, even Queen Victoria had not anticipated a crisis in which the best hope of survival for her beloved granddaughter Alix would lie with her cousins: Kaiser Wilhelm and King George. Still less, that they would ruthlessly abandon her in order not to jeopardise their own fate. Queen Victoria herself had provided sanctuary for fallen sovereigns, notably Louis-Philippe, King of the French, after the 1848 French revolution and his successor, Emperor Napoleon III, who went into exile in Britain in 1871. But an inglorious point was reached in the descent of the royal dynasty where betrayal became intensely personal.

  George V was well informed of the catastrophe unfolding in Russia, fearing that Alicky was the ‘cause of it all’. His immediate instinct was to protect his cousins. He telegrammed Nicholas promising ‘I shall always remain your true and devoted friend’, words of comfort that never reached the tsar.27 The British prime minister, David Lloyd George, agreed to a request from Russia’s Provisional Government for asylum for the imperial family in Britain. But within days George V became worried and level-headed calculation set in.

  King George and Queen Mary had worked hard to live up to the high expectations invested in them by Queen Victoria. He had inspected troops and pinned on medals, she had visited hospitals and toured wards, invariably assured and in charge of her feelings. She was deeply moved but ‘trained herself to talk calmly to frightfully mutilated and disfigured men . . . Her habit of self-discipline gave her complete physical control,’ observed her lady-in-waiting, Lady Airlie.28 Her rather more excitable husband, George V, relied increasingly on his wife and their dignified and dutiful efforts went a long way to converting the British monarchy into a symbol of the people during the war. Should he now ally himself with his autocratic cousin?

  The newspapers were full of the dramatic scenes in Russia, images of the tsar beneath headlines announcing ‘the Russian Revolution’. George’s close kinship to Nicholas was underlined by their striking similarity. It could almost have been a photograph of George looking out from the newspapers, next to column inches on the riots and chaos in Russia. The tsar and his family were under arrest by Russia’s Provisional Government ‘for their own protection’, reported the Daily Mirror. Mass rallies in Britain were held in support of Russia’s long-suffering people, not their fallen tsar.29 The birth of a ‘Russian Republic’ after centuries of autocracy ran alongside articles on the strength of republican sentiment in Britain. The tsarina was widely seen as a German spy. All this weighed heavily. George’s dear cousin Nicky, formerly absolute Ruler of all the Russias, for many clothed still with that once awesome mantle of wealth and power, might attract unimaginable trouble in a democratic country. Would it be wise to offer asylum? Could it even jeopardise his own throne? Guided by his faithful private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, the king had a change of heart.

  ‘His Majesty cannot help doubting . . . on general grounds of expediency, whether it is advisable that the Imperial Family should take up residence in this country,’ Stamfordham wrote on 30 March 1917 to the foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour.30 However, Balfour did not withdraw the British government’s offer of sanctuary, so Stamfordham wrote to him again on 6 April. ‘I feel sure that you appreciate how awkward it will be for our Royal Family,’ he wrote, urging that alternative arrangements were found.31 Concerned that this letter was still ambiguous, he sent a stronger message that day which left no room for doubt. ‘We must be allowed to withdraw from the consent previously given to the Russian government.’32 But this, too, failed to produce any change of policy, so Stamfordham went in person on 10 April to lobby the prime minister. He explained it was ‘the king’s strong opinion’ that his cousins ‘should not come to this country’.33 At last this produced the desired result. The British offer was discreetly dropped.

  George V could be in little doubt about the precariousness of his cousins’ position from the moment the imperial flag was lowered over the Winter Palace and the Red Flag was hoisted in its place.34 By mid-April the British press revealed that the tsar was confined to three rooms at Tsarskoe Selo and the ‘tsar and tsarina are forbidden to talk to each other’ while Alix was under investigation for treason. Six weeks later Russia’s Congress of Delegates discussed ‘the captivity of Nicholas Romanov’ and the transfer of the ex-tsar to the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul.35 The Soviet argued he should be imprisoned for his crimes, pending trial, possibly execution. ‘Ex-Tsar to be Tried’, pronounced the headlines.36 But George V did not change his decision; he merely obscured it, leaving Lloyd George to take the br
unt of responsibility for the British government’s decision.37

  It was left to Kaiser Wilhelm to approve a critical resolution that would wield the killer blow. Grandpapa Albert’s original vision had aimed to reduce the risk of revolution by gradual reform of Europe’s constitutional monarchies. Now the Kaiser’s government did the exact opposite and played an active role in ‘revolutionising’ Russia – a move that would backfire spectacularly and echo resoundingly across the decades to come.38

  When America was drawn into the war on 6 April 1917, German generals faced a race against time. They needed to settle the war with Russia in the east before American soldiers could arrive in large numbers to break the deadlock in the west. The Kaiser’s ministers alighted on a possible solution: they could destabilise the new Russian republic with help from Vladimir Lenin and his unruly gang of Bolsheviks. Russia’s Provisional Government was committed to the war effort, but Lenin promised to end the war with Germany whatever the cost.

  From his exile in Switzerland, Lenin lobbied the German government to permit him to travel through Germany to Russia. He won support at the highest level of the German government.39 As Churchill later famously observed, Germany’s war leaders ‘turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons’. They transported Lenin and his thirty-two supporters through Germany with diplomatic immunity in a ‘sealed’ train ‘like a plague bacillus’.40 When Lenin arrived in Petrograd on 16 April he spoke to his supporters of an end to Europe’s despised imperialism, an end to the ‘imperialist war’ and the beginning of the international peoples’ revolution. He was bankrolled by the Germans, who also provided funds for the Communist magazine, Pravda, which soon changed its editorial stance, promising an end to the war.