The Imperial Tea Party
Page 19
Vladimir Burtsev also ended up opposing Lenin, protesting that the Bolsheviks were acting for the Germans and that they were agents of the Kaiser. On the day of the October Revolution, Trotsky had Burtsev arrested; he came to be seen by some as the first political prisoner of the USSR. He was freed, months later, subsequently living in exile in Finland, Sweden and finally France. He died in Paris, impoverished, in 1942, aged 79.
Of the grand spectators at Cowes, in 1909, the names of at least two would be forever linked to the Romanovs. The New York Times’s biggest spender, Nonie May Leeds, would have glimpsed the youngest Romanov daughter, Anastasia, on the Standart. What Nonie could not have known was that, after her death, in 1923, her young son, Billy, would play host to the false Anastasia at the Leeds’ sumptuous house on Long Island. Billy’s wife believed the mentally unstable Anna Anderson to be the real Anastasia, and the claimant would live with the Leedses for several months before Billy decided he’d had enough and threw her out, along with her two parakeets. The Anastasia debacle was said to have cost Billy Leeds his marriage.
One of Nonie May Leeds’s guests on her floating palace Margareta, Lady Muriel Paget, set up a hospital in St Petersburg six years after the Isle of Wight meeting. The Anglo-Russian hospital was based in the palace of Grand Duke Dmitri Romanov. And when, in 1916, Grand Duke Dmitri conspired with Prince Felix Yusupov to murder Rasputin, the hospital provided a refuge for Yusupov, who checked himself in, claiming to have choked on a fish bone.
The Cowes pharmacist, Frank Beken, whose shop proved such a hit with the two young Grand Duchesses, became established as a marine photographer. Three years after the Romanovs’ visit, he captured a picture of the Titanic setting off on her first and last voyage. Frank Beken died in 1970. His grandson, Ken Beken, now runs the Beken and Son marine photography business. He has a picture of the Titanic on the wall, alongside his grandfather’s hard-won photograph of the Standart.
The Standart herself was stripped down after the revolution, before being pressed into military service. She was renamed plain 18 Marta (18th of March), then just Marti and served as a minelayer during the Second World War before being damaged in an air attack at Kronstadt. She was renamed Oka in 1957, then scrapped at her old haunt, Tallinn (Reval), in 1963. King George V’s yacht, Britannia, was sunk in the Solent upon his death, in 1936. The Victoria and Albert was scrapped in 1955.
And what of the lavish gifts? In February 2017, one of the Tsarina’s presents for her twin godchildren in Harrogate was put up for sale at Bulstrodes, the auctioneers, in Dorset. The boxed set of Fabergé cutlery was expected to fetch £10,000. It fetched £20,000.
The nephrite vase set with cabochon moonstones and chalcedony, presented to Bertie by Nicky at Reval, is now in the Royal Collection. The Wilkinson sword given, in turn, to Nicky by Bertie, is in the museum at Tsarskoe Selo. With the sword is a Scots Greys Uniform, presented, in April 2017, by a group of retired officers of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards. The presentation of the uniform, conducted by a Brigadier Melville Jameson, marked the first official visit by the former Scots Greys for 122 years.
A chain presented by Queen Victoria to Nicky is now on show at one of the Kremlin Museums in Moscow. The chain should have been returned to the British royal family, but Queen Elizabeth II allowed it to stay in Russia. According to the museum director, Yelena Gargarina, ‘[Queen Elizabeth] wrote a wonderful letter saying that she wanted as many people in Russia as possible to see this chain and to recall the tragic story that occurred to a member of her family 100 years ago.’ Several members of the Romanov family have been to see the chain, some intimating that they might make some kind of claim for it. Yelena Gargarina, the daughter of the spaceman Yuri Gargarin, dismisses them outright, insisting that they are no different from the 2.2 million other visitors to the museum and that they are ‘just tourists’.
The Tsar’s sister, Grand Duchess Xenia, was one of the few Romanovs to settle in Britain. More or less penniless and destitute, Xenia readily accepted cousin Georgie’s offer of a house on the Frogmore estate, at Windsor, where Nicky and Alix had stayed during their engagement. In 1925, the Grand Duchess moved into Frogmore Cottage, along with a sizeable family contingent.
These Romanovs had very little to do with their royal neighbours. Xenia’s grandson, Prince Andrew Romanoff, remembered just one tea at the castle with the Queen, or ‘Auntie Mary’ as he was instructed to call her. The King never registered the young Prince. He once spotted the boy bowing and doffing his cap as he swept past the family’s garden gate in a royal car. He later rang to ask who ‘the little gentleman’ was.
On one occasion Xenia’s grandchildren created a furore when they tucked into three enormous Easter eggs intended for the little Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret: the packages had been wrongly delivered. Another time, Prince Andrew was cycling through the Windsor Castle Grounds when he met the young Princess Elizabeth. He greeted the future Queen, three years his junior, with an elaborate: ‘How do you do?’ That evening Xenia received a phone call saying her grandchildren were not to walk in the private gardens while the British royal family was staying at the castle.
Georgie’s general avoidance of the poor relations did not extend to the Grand Duchess herself. She was regularly entertained at Buckingham Palace, with her son, Prince Dmitri, accompanying her to dinners.
The King took pains to avoid all blame for the deaths of the imperial family. Dmitri later wrote: ‘I twice heard King George refer to Lloyd George as “that murderer” in the presence of my mother.’
In 1933 Georgie seems to have had no compunction about buying the Tsarina’s Fabergé mosaic egg at half cost, for £250, from Cameo Corner in London. It had been given by the Tsar to his wife in 1914 and contained portraits of all five children. The legendarily acquisitive May was the lucky recipient.
It took decades for the full story to emerge about the role played by the palace in refusing sanctuary to the Romanovs. Two key memoirs were written before the King’s death, in January 1936: in both he escaped any blame. The Ambassador, George Buchanan, insisted, in 1923, that the invitation had never been withdrawn; his daughter’s claim, nine years later, that he had falsified his account to protect the King, as well as his Foreign Office pension, made little impact.
In 1934, Lloyd George diplomatically rewrote the relevant chapter of his War Memoirs. The later, published version made no mention of the King, or Stamfordham: ‘An agitation had also started in this country, which indicated that there was a strong feeling in extensive working class circles, hostile to the Tsar coming to Britain,’ he wrote. ‘However, the invitation was not withdrawn. The ultimate issue in the matter was decided by the action of the Russian government, which continued to place obstacles in the way of the Tsar’s departure.’
Thirty years on, in his global bestseller, Nicholas and Alexandra (1968), Robert K. Massie summarised the King’s directive in a way that suggested a measure of cool pragmatism: ‘Because of the outburst of public opinion, the Russian government should perhaps be informed that Britain was obliged to withdraw its offer.’ Massie admitted, however, that after the murders: ‘memories tend to blur’.
Three years later, in 1971, Earl Mountbatten, the son of the Tsarina’s sister Victoria, continued to blame Lloyd George, rather than the King, breezily telling an interviewer: ‘Oh yes, in the early days he discussed it with my mother, he was very anxious to offer them asylum over here, but the government, the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, was understandably opposed on political grounds at the time of the war and I think it would have been very difficult therefore to go against him.’
The matter was finally laid to rest in 1983, with the publication of Kenneth Rose’s biography of George V. Here, the woeful correspondence between Stamfordham and Balfour was quoted in full. There is no ambiguity in Rose’s chilling conclusion: ‘The King’s volte-face was complete. With the concurrence of his ministers, he had ensured that, whatever else might happen to his Russian cousins, they should
not set foot in England. The original offer of asylum, to which both sovereign and Prime Minister had subscribed, was a dead letter.’
When Rose asked the Queen for permission to print the papers, she had gamely responded: ‘Let him publish.’ The Queen Mother had not been so equable, dropping Rose from her lunch party list. Her private secretary told Rose: ‘Your chances of an MVO [Member of the Victorian Order] have just floated out to 50 to 1.’
The controversial Tsarina may have played a large part in the King’s decision. The British royal family were worried about her German roots and what they saw as her mental instability. The historian Hugo Vickers refers mutedly to the ‘strain in nerves of the Hesse-Darmstadt family line, inherited in full by the Tsarina’. The unimaginative King may well have been haunted by the social implications of having his cousins in Britain, worried that his life would be subsumed in awkward social situations, a never-ending imperial tea party.
There is a memorial to the imperial family on the Isle of Wight, in Queen Victoria’s church, St Mildred’s of Whippingham. It is curiously hard to find. The plaque is modestly sized and almost hidden, on an inside wall of the Battenberg chapel, which is itself usually locked. Those who succeed in finding the memorial, may read the names and birth dates of the members of the imperial family who ‘perished in the Russian Revolution on the 17th July 1918’, among them Olga and Tatiana, who, as two carefree young girls, paid a visit to the church on that hot summer afternoon of 3rd August 1909.
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ROYAL ARCHIVE SOURCES
Quotations used with the permission of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
Balmoral
Alix: ‘Fondest thanks dear let
ter Nicky agrees to all’ RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/63
Alix: ‘Nicky and Alicky much distressed’ RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/87
Victoria complaining of ‘great inconvenience’ RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/77
Carington: ‘arrangements exactly the same’ RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/78
Chief Constable’s Office: ‘Tuesday and 22nd erased and, mysteriously ‘RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/83
Carington: ‘Russian Embassy says Tsar wants to land’ RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/67
Carington: (Prince of Wales) ‘deprecating changing Leith for North Queen’s Ferry’ RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/68
Carington: ‘I conclude he will be sent to Siberia’ RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/74
Carington: ‘I was constrained to tell him’ (the Naval Attache) RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/82
Carington: (Luggage) ‘We have received no answer’ RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/74
Alix: ‘so happy meeting soon’ RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/87
Sir Francis Knollys: ‘take care to acquaint the Emperor that it will be warm’ RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/50
Metropolitan Police Report: ‘3 Russian Detective officers now residing with… Head Gardener’ RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/88
Carington: ‘two persons who are to live in the artists rooms at Balmoral are Russian police’ RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/54
Sir Edward Bradford: ‘The Emperor is safer here’ RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/86
Robert Anderson: ‘the practical danger which was serious and urgent is now happily at an end’ RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/69
Sir Matthew Ridley: ‘I do not believe that this plot had anything to do with the Tsar’s visit’ RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/76
Robert Anderson: ‘makes me glad that the Tsar is there’ RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/92
Maldolm Delavigne: ‘Three officers will remain during visit’ RA VIC/MAIN/H/47/79
Carington: ‘all well weather still rainy’ RA VIC/MAIN/H/47
Victoria: ‘I think you could not do otherwise now’ RA VFIC/MAIN/H/47/59