Sablin was, as ever, in disagreement. He found Bertie less polished than either the German Kaiser or the French president. In his view, the monarchs greeted each other stiffly: ‘Edward shook hands with the Emperor but they didn’t embrace, as had happened with Wilhelm… The Kaiser did his greetings in Russian very well. The French president spoke a greeting in French and the people could catch the end of the phrase and answer gracefully.’ Sablin admitted that the King showed a passing interest in the Russian ships: the cruiser Admiral Makarov and ice breaker Ermak. But, he added: ‘… he did not speak as authoritatively as the Kaiser.’
The King had always had his own reservations about the Kaiser. During sensitive discussions as to where his meeting with the Tsar should take place, Bertie had made it clear that he was determined to keep the Kaiser at bay. As Benckendorff reported: ‘The King said [the meeting] had to be sufficiently far from the German boarder to avoid the Kaiser descending on the two monarchs.’
Arthur Nicolson had, by this time, been Ambassador in St Petersburg for two years. He was nearly 60 and slightly stooped, noticeably smaller than his fellow diplomats and courtiers. His lack of height did not diminish his authority. He expressed himself loftily, making full use of a battery of waspish comments. His initial impression was that the imperial couple were on relatively good form, but he couldn’t resist adding unflattering references to the Tsarina: ‘The Emperor was gay and at his ease. Even the Empress, a shy and sulky woman, inclined to unbend. She walked across that carpeted deck with that stooping movement adopted by affectionate women who are much taller than their husbands; the whites of her eyes yellow with prolonged dyspepsia; she pointed at things and people with a lace sunshade.’
He proved almost uniquely unsusceptible to the charms of the beautiful imperial children: ‘The Tsarevich went off and played with Derevenko, the sailor friend who never left him,’ he reported flatly. ‘The Grand Duchesses, in English schoolgirl clothes, simpered like English schoolgirls.’
This Englishness of the young Grand Duchesses, who had never been to England, might have been down to the influence of their anglophile mother. The girls had also been receiving regular lessons from an English tutor, John Epps, for four years. Mr Epps struggled to keep charge, particularly when the girls argued over who was to be allowed to use his exotic pen. As he recalled fondly: ‘A great deal of tact was necessary to maintain order.’ During one session, he taught them how English words might be combined, as in spoon-ful. When he asked them if they now understood combinations, he was rather thrown by their cheeky response: ‘Oh yes, we wear them.’
The Tsar’s doughty mother, the 60-year-old Dowager Empress, arrived at Reval an hour after the Tsar, travelling by train with her daughter, the Tsar’s sister, Olga. Mossolov recalled how much the Dowager looked forward to seeing her sister, Queen Alexandra, and her niece, Princess Victoria. Sablin confirmed: ‘They were very amicable towards each other and the daughter [Princess] Victoria, was very much loved by both our empresses.’
Sablin watched the interaction between the Dowager and the Tsarina and the ‘English ladies’, and registered the Dowager’s attempts to keep a low profile: ‘[The Dowager] tried to stay on the sidelines because Alexandra Feoderovna [the Tsarina] was meant to be the hostess and the English ladies also treated her respectfully to reflect her position.’ There had always been an element of rivalry between the Dowager and the Tsarina. One of their first arguments had been over protocol, with the Dowager refusing to hand over some jewels. There followed a dispute over whose name should come immediately after the Tsar’s during prayers.
OTMA with their aunt Olga and grandmother
Sablin noted the contrasts in the women’s dress: ‘The English ladies were dressed very modestly, you could even say old-fashioned.’ The Dowager may have agreed that the women were dressed modestly, but she would not have considered their clothing old-fashioned. She was a fan of British fashion, refusing to go anywhere but London for her toque hats and wigs.
The Tsarina with female entourage on the Standart
The Grand Duchesses with Princess Victoria
Indeed the Dowager was, at this point, flush with a rekindled passion for Britain. She had enjoyed British holidays after her sister’s marriage to Bertie, but then had been forced, for political reasons, to stay away. In March 1907, she had enjoyed a three-week stay with her sister, writing rapturously to Nicky: ‘We went by car… I have no words to describe how magnificent it all is. Aunt Alix’s rooms are remarkably beautiful and cosy. I must say they are the same here, at Buckingham Palace. Everything is so tastefully and artistically arranged, it makes one’s mouth water to see all this magnificence.
‘I do wish you too could come over here for a little, to breathe another air. How good that would be! I myself feel as if I were a different person – and 20 years younger!’
Her daughter Olga, was not particularly anglophile, but she had a strong British influence in her life: her nanny, ‘Nana’, Elizabeth Francklin, the daughter of an innkeeper in Bedfordshire. Recommended by her aunt, Alexandra, she had tended Olga from birth.
The Dowager, during her days as tsarina, had, at one point, tried to dispatch Nana, believing that she and her charge were too attached. She had insisted that, as Olga was well into her teens, she must be attended by a lady-in-waiting. But Olga had proven obdurate, shouting at her mother: ‘Alicky had her Mrs Orchard brought to Russia. What shall I do without Nana? If you send her away I will run away myself. I will elope with a palace sweep. I will go and peel potatoes in someone’s kitchen or offer myself as a kennel maid to one of the society ladies in St Petersburg. And I am sure Nicky will be on my side.’
Olga won her battle and, in her late 20s, was still obeying Mrs Francklin’s rules on coughs and colds: ‘Nana says I mustn’t go out.’ The Dowager never quite recovered from her worsting, referring to the beleaguered nanny as ‘that odious woman’.
Nana introduced English teas to the imperial nursery: bread before cake was apparently the strictest rule. She ordered golden syrup from England and, at Christmas, insisted on making a plum pudding.
While enjoying the teas and puddings, Olga evidently found some of Nana’s English attitudes less appealing. At Peterhof, the pair would occasionally come upon soldiers bathing and washing their clothes in the rivers: ‘Caught by surprise, the men would scramble out of the water, not to get their clothes, but to grab their caps, which they would jam on their wet heads. Then, smartly standing at attention, they would salute and shout… Only Nana, with her proper British ways, thought the sight “revolting” and looked away,’ she recalled.
Nana and Orchie became the best of friends, discussing ‘their’ children over cups of tea. Perhaps it was as well that the outspoken Margaret Eager was not included in the nannies’ tea parties. She would undoubtedly have been bored by the conversation and irritated by the elderly Orchie, who she subsequently described in a cold note to a Russian friend: ‘Mrs Orchard is here – she forgets so much and her nose is so purple, I’m afraid it’s the heart that causes that.’
Grand Duchess Olga didn’t share Nana’s fondness for Orchie either: ‘She [Miss Orchard] was most dictatorial and in the end left the palace in a huff. There followed spells of complete chaos.’
At the time of the Reval meeting, Olga was a youthful 26, locked in a loveless marriage with the homosexual Grand Duke Peter of Oldenburg. It would have come as no surprise therefore that she was ready to make the most of a new friendship, during the trip, with the glamorous English Admiral, Sir John Fisher.
The Admiral, known as ‘Jackie’ Fisher, was much older than her, at 57, but still handsome and a keen dancer. She had met him, some months before, in Karlsbad, in Germany, succumbing to his charms as he passed on dancing tips. She confessed later: ‘I particularly enjoyed meeting Admiral Fisher again.’ The feelings were evidently mutual. A week before the Reval meeting, Fisher wrote excitedly to a Mrs Spender: ‘The King has sweetly asked me to go to Russia with him, which
is lovely, as the Queen has telegraphed for that Grand Duchess I am in love with to come and meet me.’
Lunch was served on the Dowager’s yacht, the Polar Star. As the Tsar reported briefly: ‘After mutual presentations of our suites and conversation, we broke up, changed into frock coats and met for lunch on the Polar Star.’ It is not clear whether Bertie, at this point, also took the opportunity to remove his constraining Russian uniform.
Prince Felix Yusupov, later famous for murdering Rasputin, gives a vivid description of the King’s discomfort at table that day. Yusupov was not actually at Reval, so he must have heard details through his friends at court. His description gives every indication that the King was, indeed, still stuffed into his Russian uniform. He claimed the King dined: ‘in a state of semi-suffocation and in a very bad temper’.
Ponsonby was not taken with the Polar Star. While Sablin had found the Victoria and Albert too fancy, Ponsonby decreed the Polar Star too military. The yacht, he wrote, was: ‘most beautifully fitted up but elaborate military arrangements on board’.
The lunch menu was headed, confusingly, ‘Dejeuner du 27 Mai 1908’. Despite all the spirit of accord, the Russian hosts were only noting their own date. The menus were in occasionally idiosyncratic French. The food sounded exotic: ‘Potages: Princesse, Consommé à la Toulouse, Petits patés. Homard au Champagne, froid. Roulettes de Gélinotte Truffées en Vol-au-vent, Canards Nantais aux Petits Pois. Pêches à la Vanille at Purée de Fraises Glacée. Fromages. Dessert’. Ponsonby, however, mentioned only caviar sandwiches and an unappetising drink: ‘kirsch which tasted of boot varnish’.
Following his disappointing lunch, Ponsonby returned to the Victoria and Albert to meet the head of the British police, Patrick Quinn. He suggested, perhaps unwisely, that Quinn contact the slippery Azev. The police, he wrote: ‘recommended [that an] officer [be] posted on every gangway on the yacht to see who came on board – uniform no criterion. Every individual should be scrutinised and passed.’ He was irritated to discover that he would not be allowed to go ashore: ‘tiresome, as I should very much like to have seen the town of Reval which looked most picturesque.’
Sablin insisted that tea, or the ‘Five o’clock’, as he called it, was served on the Standart at, naturally, 5pm. The Tsar’s ‘Five o’clock’ traditionally comprised one glass of tea with milk and one without. It is hard to know why Sablin, who had never been to England, felt he was such an authority on British customs. But he stood firm on tea-time: ‘It was quite informal, because it is the most favourite and traditional English pastime, one cannot imagine English life without the “Five o’clocks”.’
The Tsar revealed that tea was, in fact, served on the ‘English yacht’. It is possible that Sablin had a memory lapse; on the other hand, he might simply have been unable to resist a discourse on ‘Five o’clocks’ and an accompanying dig at English pastimes.
Whatever the case, the Tsar was upset that he had to go to the Victoria and Albert alone, as his wife was suffering, once again, from sciatica: ‘Alix unfortunately was not able to come due to the pains in her legs.’ Despite Nicolson’s earlier claim that the Tsarina was ‘inclined to unbend’, there were several reports that she was ‘fatigued by her journey’ to Reval. Sablin had seen the Empress that morning, for the first time in several months, and was not impressed: ‘We already noticed that the Empress didn’t feel that great.’
The Tsarina’s recurring ailments put the whole of her family under a strain. But she stuck to her curiously positive view, writing of the benefits of sick mothers to her daughter, Maria: ‘I know it’s dull having an invalid mother, but it teaches you all to be loving and gentle.’ Her devoted daughters were not satisfied. They all worried about her heart, which she would grimly register, on a scale of one to three. And they missed her company. As Olga complained in a note: ‘So sorry that never see you alone, Mama dear… what is to be done if there is not time, and neither can I hear the dear words which sweet Mama could tell me.’ Tatiana also wrote, displaying some patchy English: ‘I hope you wont be today very tied and that you can get up to dinner…. I am always so awfuy sorry when you are tied and when you can’t get up [sic].’
The Tsarina’s malaise was exacerbated by the all too justifiable anxiety she felt for her son. Minor cuts or bruises could have dangerous consequences for the haemophiliac Alexis.
The British royals returned to the Standart for dinner, as the Tsar recorded baldly: ‘At 8.30 there was a dinner on our ship with toasts.’
Sablin began his evening in unusually good heart: ‘At exactly 8pm the magnificent English motorboat again delivered the royal relatives to the Standart.’ He was captivated by the foreman of the English boat: ‘an old man, covered with medals with a huge belly and the typical face of an English sea dog. He always stood at the steering wheel of the King’s motorboat and, apparently, Edward VII was very fond of him. It was felt there was a special relationship between them as between old serving servants and a good gentleman.’
He was won over by the British party, even succumbing to the King: ‘Contrary to normal British stiffness, the dinner was very lively. The King for that matter was charmingly sweet.’ It was probably at this juncture that Sablin began making the odd skittish reference to ‘Uncle Eddie’.
The dinner menu was headed, as on the Polar Star, solely with the Russian date: ‘Diner du 27 Mai 1908’; on some, 9th June was written in pencil alongside. The menu was, once again, impressive: ‘Potages: Pierre le Grand Marie Louise, Petites Patés, Sterlet de la Doina au Champagne, Selle de Chevreuil Grand Veneur, Parfait de Foie gras au Porto, Punch au Thé Vert, Roti-Poulardes du Mans et Becasses, Salade, Asperges d’Argenteuil Sauce Mousseline, Pêches à la Coque, Glaces à la Parisienne, Desserts.’
Sablin was especially taken with the King’s ‘subtle humour’: ‘When wild goat with sweet blackcurrant jelly was served with the amazing Cumberland sauce, the famous gastronomist [the King] said: “You could eat your own mother with this sauce.” Pierre Kyba, the Maitre d’, was very pleased.’ Nicolson, however, perhaps predictably, disliked all the dishes. He would presumably have found the Cumberland sauce even less enticing served with (or over) Queen Victoria. As he reported bleakly: ‘Banquet that evening on the Standart. The food was bad.’
The programme of music to be played, presumably by the Standart orchestra, was listed mostly, stylishly, in French and featured the peasants’ chorus from Borodin’s Prince Igor: ‘1. Wagner: ouverture de l’op La Vaisseau Fantome. 2. Borodine: La Choeur de Paysans de l’op Prince Igor. 3. Glazounov: divertissements du ballet Raymonde. 4. Grieg: Anitras Dans and Dovregubbens Hall from Peer Gynt. 5. Liszt: 2-me Rhapsodie hongroise. 6. Gounod: Entr’acte at Danse de Bacchantes de l’op Philemon et Baucis.’
Speeches followed, with the Tsar reading from a painstakingly prepared script and the King delivering his off the cuff. Copies of the Tsar’s speech were distributed to journalists but there was no equivalent record, obviously, for the King. When Admiral Fisher asked Bertie why he had no aide-memoir, the King replied that he had once memorised a speech for the French president, to be delivered in the garden of Buckingham Palace. When he rose to speak, he found, to his horror, that he had forgotten every word. He recalled that he: ‘… had to keep on beginning again at the beginning… Never again’.
The Tsar’s speech was predictable: ‘It is with feelings of the deepest satisfaction and pleasure that I welcome Your Majesty and Her Majesty the Queen to Russian waters. I trust that this meeting, while strengthening the many and strong ties which unite our houses, will have the happy results of drawing our countries closer together, and of promoting and maintaining the peace of the world.
‘In the course of the past year several questions of equal moment both to Russia and to England have been satisfactorily settled by our governments. I am certain that Your Majesty appreciates as highly as I do the value of the agreements, for, notwithstanding their limited scope, they cannot but help to spread among our two countries feelings of
mutual goodwill and confidence. I drink to the health of Your Majesty and of the Queen and to the prosperity of the royal family and of the British nation.’
The King’s speech, noted down by Ponsonby, was warmer in tone: ‘I thank Your Majesty most heartily on behalf of the Queen and myself for the cordial manner in which you have welcomed us in the waters of the Baltic and for the affectionate words in which you have proposed our healths. I have the happiest recollections of the welcome which I received on the occasions of my previous visit to Russia at the hands of your illustrious grandfather, your beloved father, and yourself, and it is a source of the sincerest gratification to me to have this opportunity of meeting your majesties again.
‘I most heartily endorse every word that fell from Your Majesty’s lips with regard to the [Anglo-Russian] convention recently concluded between our two governments. I believe it will serve to knit more closely the bonds that unite the people of our two countries, and I am certain that it will conduce to the satisfactory settlement in an amicable manner of some momentous questions in the future. I am convinced that it will not only tend to draw our two countries more closely together but will help very greatly towards the maintenance of the general peace of the world.
‘I hope this meeting may be followed before long by another opportunity of meeting your majesties. I drink to the health of your majesties; to that of the Empress Marie Feodorovna, and the members of the imperial family and, above, all to the welfare and prosperity of your great empire.’
It was at this point that Sablin’s view of ‘Uncle Eddie’ took the inevitable downturn. He cannot have understood much of either of the speeches, which were both delivered in English. He was adamant, nonetheless, that the King was outshone by the Tsar: ‘The Emperor’s answer was very short and from his expression could be seen that he thought about the seriousness and importance of the events that were planned for the future, but he spoke openheartedly.’
The Imperial Tea Party Page 10