The Tsar had appointed ‘the good Mordvinov’ as one of his own ADCs and that switch of loyalties was enough to ensure an uneasy audience. Michael, who felt betrayed by him, told him brusquely to go away and not come back. ‘We are no longer on good terms’, Michael wrote to Nicholas. He then set out his own settlement of the issue: that he and Natasha should return to Russia to live quietly outside the public gaze, that she should be given the title of Countess, and that — despite the threats passed on by messenger Mordvinov — he was to retain full control ‘of his personal fortune and property’.27
By the time Nicholas read that in his study at Tsarskoe Selo it was already too late to hope that the marriage could be kept secret. As he wrote to his mother on November 21: ‘By now everybody knows… In Moscow it is the same; probably the news came from her relations.’28
The gossip had also spread far beyond Russia: all Europe was agog, and in England Michael’s cousin King George V was as concerned as anyone else, writing to Nicholas that ‘I am so fond of him that I am in despair that he should have done this foolish thing & I know how miserable you must be about it. What a lot of worries & anxieties there are in this world.29
At Tsarskoe Selo it was now clear that there was no choice left but to impose the severest punishment on Michael and quickly before the start of the official tercentenary celebrations, scheduled to begin with a great choral Te Deum in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan on the Nevsky Prospekt on February 21. Michael was to be swept away, as a reminder that no one, however high, could defy the Emperor of All the Russias, and think that they could be excused.
On December 15, 1912, two months after Michael’s marriage, the Tsar issued at Tsarskoe Selo an imperial ukase or edict to the Ruling Senate. It read:
Deeming it expedient to establish a guardianship over the person, estate and affairs of the Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich, we have considered it advisable to take upon ourselves the chief control of the guardianship and to entrust to the Central Administration of the Imperial Duma the direct control of all estate, personal and real, and also funds possessed by the Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich. 30
Two weeks later, on December 30, he issued an imperial manifesto removing Michael from the Regency.
By our Manifesto given on the first day of August 1904, we, in the event of our decease before the attainment of his majority by our beloved son, his Imperial Highness and Heir, the Tsarevich and Grand Duke Alexis Nikolaevich, appointed our brother the Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich, to be Regent of the state until our son should come of age. Now, we have deemed it advisable to divest his Imperial Highness, the Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich of the obligations laid upon him by our Manifesto… 31
Both the ukase and the manifesto were published for the world to see in the Official Messenger No 2 of January 3, 1913. Two days earlier the same official gazette had announced that ‘Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich, Colonel and Commandant of the Chevalier Gardes Regiment of the Empress Marie Fedorovna… is relieved of his command.’32
These series of official statements caused a considerable stir, within the diplomatic world as well as in society at large. Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador, telegraphed the news at once to the British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, adding that ‘in the event of no one being specially appointed to act as Regent in place of the Grand Duke Michael the Regency would, as I am informed, devolve by law on the Empress’.33
In effect, if Nicholas died, it would be Alexandra who would rule Russia. That was a prospect which even in 1913 was unwelcome; Alexandra and her clique at Tsarskoe Selo were not yet hated as they would be, but there was little liking for her in society or in the political classes. When her mother-in-law had been empress, she had ‘considered her chief function was to charm those who came into contact with her; she had every quality needed for doing so and was venerated at court and by the great mass of the people’.34
In contrast, Alexandra had no interest in charming anyone: her ‘chief function’ was in badgering Nicholas to ‘be firm’ and to show them ‘who is master’. That would bring both of them down in the end, but it was not the end in 1913, though she hoped it would be the end of ‘that woman’ Natasha.
In St Petersburg, even hardened members of society were astonished at the severity of the punishment which, as one observer put it, was ‘as unfortunate as it was unwarrantable’.35 And because Alexandra was judged to be behind this humiliation, sympathy in some quarters swung to Michael rather than to Nicholas. Given the choice between condemning the well-liked Michael and condemning Alexandra, society was more than ready to forgive him if only to have more reason to denigrate her.
At the same time, few could think of anything which would be to the credit of Natasha. Society had cut her dead when she had arrived in the capital eleven months earlier. The runaway marriage seemed its own proof that they had been right to do so. He had been foolish; among those who followed the lead of the the smartest salons, she was unspeakable.
TWO weeks after his runaway marriage, Michael had written to his brother to tell him what he had done and concluded by saying that ‘I know that punishment awaits me for this act and I am ready to bear it.’36 He expected to be banished, relieved of his command of the Chevalier Gardes, and to have his assets frozen, perhaps for a year or so until the storm had abated. He was by no means the first Grand Duke to have married in breach of the imperial statutes — uncle Paul and cousin Kirill were just two examples of that — and there was always a price to pay, but no other Grand Duke had found himself subject to the kind of public humiliation inflicted on Michael. High society would always know when a Grand Duke had been banished and the reasons for it, but officially these were matters kept within the imperial family, and not something which the ordinary Russian should know about. Romanov prestige was not to be damaged by its private scandals becoming street gossip.
Yet that was precisely what had happened in Michael’s case, and in particular with open publication of the fact that his assets had been placed under guardianship, a step normally reserved for situations where someone was adjudged to be no longer mentally capable of managing their assets themselves. Michael, the order implied, had lost his mind — the fevered view at Tsarskoe Selo in blaming Natasha for it all, but not a view which ought to have been promoted across the whole of Europe.
Understandably, Michael was appalled by that more than by anything else. Indeed, after reading newspaper reports of Nicholas’s actions against him he was so incensed that he could not bring himself to write to his brother even in protest.
When he did so a month later, he explained that ‘it took me some time to get over the guardianship decision, which you had announced for all the world to know. I will never believe that it was your own idea and it is painful to know that you listened to those people who wished to discredit me in public opinion.’ Knowing what was being said, he added: ‘It has already done a lot of harm’.37 The people he had in mind, in particular, were Alexandra and Mordvinov — and what added to his sense of outrage was that it was Mordvinov who had now been appointed to oversee his guardianship, thereby adding insult to injury.
That order, and Mordvinov’s role of servant turned master, continued to enrage him. There would be repeated protests that he did not want ‘this man anywhere near me or my affairs’38 and that he was not competent to exercise powers which he ought never to have been given in the first place. As Michael said in one of his letters to his brother:
The combination of trusteeship over my estate with the guardianship over my person, without doing anything to protect my fortune, has put me in the position of an imbecile or madman and made my situation totally unbearable. As things are, even a short visit to Russia is impossible for me, for I shall be seen as a man who has been subjected to a humiliating punishment. 39
Michael’s assets were very considerable. The inheritance and savings accumulated by his original trustees until he was twenty-five had provided him with a capital of severa
l million roubles; from the imperial purse he also drew, as did all Grand Dukes, an annual allowance of 280,000 gold roubles, a huge sum in those days. In addition he had substantial earnings, rising to a further one million roubles a year, from farms and factories owned by him across Russia, including, in the Ukraine, the country’s largest sugar refinery. As one measure of the value of all that, a six-seater Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost he had bought in August 1911 had cost him £1,367 or the equivalent of just over 12,000 roubles — petty cash when set against his overall annual income (equivalent to some $20m in today’s monies).
But he was worth a great deal more than that. His other assets included a palace on the English Embankment facing the Neva in St Petersburg — though he never chose to live there — a vast country estate, which he ran at a substantial profit, at Brasovo, near Orel, as well as another in Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. To this could be added his ‘invisible’ assets — his homes in both the Gatchina and Anichkov palaces, as well as the elegant imperial yacht Zarnista, with a crew of 120 men, ten officers and a priest, and his own blue-and-gold imperial railway carriage, lavishly furnished, which would be hooked onto any express train whenever he wanted to travel by rail — all now lost to him as they would have been anyway by his leaving Russia as he did.
Nonetheless, Michael had no immediate cause for financial worry. In preparation for his runaway marriage, and the certainty of enforced exile thereafter, in the summer of 1912 he had transferred a large amount of cash to the Crédit Lyonnais on the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris — the Russian rouble was then an international currency, freely traded — ostensibly for the purpose of buying a large estate in France,40 so there was no need to be unduly concerned about cash in the short-term; nor was it in the power of the Tsar to stop payment of the imperial allowance to any Grand Duke — a figure of just over 23,000 roubles a month, the equivalent of £2,500, or almost $12,000 in the values of the day.
At the same time, his costs were considerable. He was paid as a Grand Duke, and not surprisingly he spent as a Grand Duke. He had not booked rooms at the Hotel du Parc, he had booked a whole floor to house not only himself and Natasha in a grand suite, but the children, nanny and governess, maids, chauffeurs, and a new secretary, Nikolai Johnson who, despite his surname, was a Russian. Johnson, a shortish, round-faced young man who spoke three languages — though his English was heavily-accented41 — was a more than competent pianist, his mother who also joined the household having been a court music teacher; Johnson’s keyboard talent was one reason why he and Michael got on so well, playing duets together — indeed, it was why he had been hired in the first place. In the end, it would be a post which would cost Johnson his life.
3. A BRIEF PEACE
A YEAR after his runaway marriage, Michael moved Natasha and his extensive retinue to England, preferring to make his home there rather than in Paris, or anywhere else in Europe. After all, he knew the country well and spoke English as well as any Englishman. His first cousin George was its king; his beloved aunt, the Dowager Queen Alexandra — sister of his mother the Dowager Empress Marie — had her own court at Marlborough House, a stroll from Buckingham Palace. Michael had known Queen Victoria and had spent a holiday at her Scottish home, Balmoral. She had thought his father Alexander III ‘a boor’ — in turn, he had described her as ‘a nasty interfering old woman’.1 But she had liked Michael, writing afterwards that he ‘is remarkably nice & pleasing & pleasing looking.’2 Michael had represented Russia at her funeral in 1901, as he had done at the coronation of her successor, her eldest son King Edward VII, after which ‘Uncle Bertie’ had made Michael a Knight of the Garter, a member of Britain’s most illustrious order, with his own standard to hang in the chapel at Windsor Castle.
Natasha’s introduction to England came in July 1913 when she and Michael arrived at the Ritz Hotel on London’s Piccadilly. It was not a happy experience, for they had gone there in the hope of some sort of reconciliation with Michael’s mother, who was staying with her sister at Marlborough House. The meeting had been arranged by Michael’s sister Xenia — ‘she so wants to see him!’ Her husband Sandro had sent Michael a telegram ‘saying that he must come.’3
Michael went to the first meeting on his own, leaving a very nervous Natasha to pace up and down their suite at the Ritz, dreading what might happen. His mother had been ‘very agitated at the prospect of seeing him’ and had been ‘completely unable to sleep — she was so excited and upset’, Xenia wrote in her diary. At last he arrived and ‘they disappeared into the next room for a minute, but returned looking quite calm! Thank God it went all right. I was so anxious for Mama…’4
That evening Michael returned to Marlborough House, this time with Natasha, and he and his mother ‘had a good quiet talk, thank God, and he was happy to be able to speak.’5 Then it was Natasha’s turn to face the Dowager Empress and the tongue-lashing that inevitably awaited her. There was no hope of ‘a good quiet talk’ now and all Natasha could do was to keep her head up and allow the anger to wash over her. As Xenia recorded it later, the Dowager Empress ‘saw his wife and told her a few home truths in front of Misha…in general it was terribly penible (unpleasant) on all sides.’6
Afterwards the Dowager Empress wrote to Nicholas to give him her account of her meeting. I was happy to see that he has remained the same; just as nice and good and even kinder than ever. We talked everything over quite frankly and all was said so nicely and quietly without a bitter word, that for the first time after all these dreadful worries my heart felt relieved and so, I think, did his…7
She made no mention at all of Natasha. The next time they would meet it would again be at Marlborough House, but by then the world would have changed for ever and both would have more to worry about than either could have imagined in that summer of 1913.
What Michael and Natasha did imagine was that they could remake their lives in England and live there happily ever after. Notwithstanding her bruising encounter with the Dowager Empress, Natasha was excited at the prospect of actually having a home not a hotel suite as had been the case for the past year. Looking around, they found a house some 20 miles north of London, near Stevenage in Hertfordshire. It was a magnificent stately home with an oak banqueting hall, four-poster bedrooms, state drawing room, picture gallery — and a small army of servants, including footmen who at dinner wore knee-breeches and powdered hair.8 Called Knebworth House, and owned by the Earl of Lytton, it was available for a year from that September 1913 at an annual rent of £3,000 or a tenth of Michael’s annual income from the imperial purse. On the lease, Michael was described as ‘at present residing at Palace Anichkov in St Petersburg’.9 The drafting lawyers in Belgravia knew, as did everyone else, that His Imperial Highness the Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich, ‘hereinafter the tenant of the other part’ ought properly to be described as ‘of no fixed abode’; however that would have appeared unseemly. A palace sounded better than a hotel room.
He paid the first six-month rental in advance. However, he found it a struggle in March 1914 to pay the next six months. After almost two years his cash was running out. Suddenly, having to find £1,500 from his monthly income of £2,500 was both a problem and a cause for bitter complaint. In his absence his personal estate had generated some two million roubles of profit — and not a penny of that had come his way. Mordvinov was deaf to pleas. He and his department were ‘unfair and discourteous’ he complained to Nicholas. ‘Life in England is very expensive… this month I have had to pay a six-month rent for the estate in which I am living, which is why I have been left without any money.’10 The only concession was to agree that his monthly income could increase to 30,000 roubles, or £3,300.
Yet in all other respects he was more content than he had been for the past five years. At least in England he and his wife Natasha were left in peace and that had never been the case in their lives together in Russia. Looking ahead, they planned to move that September of 1914 to another but much larger estate, Paddockhurst in
Sussex, owned by Lord Cowdray, with a two-year lease at a slightly higher rent of £3,460 a year.11
There would be time enough to decide by 1916 what next to do. After all, who could know what might happen in the interval?
Who indeed.
THE announcement in the Court Circular published in The Times a few months earlier, that Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich was taking possession of Knebworth House, would normally have been enough for crested invitations to fall thick and fast on their doormat. Society, however, had turned a polite back on Michael and Natasha, taking its lead from Michael’s cousin King George V and his aunt the Dowager Queen Alexandra that while Michael remained family, ‘that woman’ was not welcome in any respectable household.
One other influential and determined enemy in the British camp was Countess Torby, married to a namesake Grand Duke, Michael Mikhailovich, the 52-year-old brother-in-law of Michael’s elder sister Xenia, and known in the family as Miche-Miche. On the face of it, Michael might have expected Miche-Miche and his wife to have been the first to come to his support, since they too had been banished from Russia for a very similar offence — a runaway marriage which had caused almost as much uproar as had Michael’s.
In 1891, Miche-Miche had secretly married the well-born but not royal Sophie von Merenberg — a grand-daughter of the celebrated Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin. The news came as such a shock that when Miche-Miche’s mother Grand Duchess Olga received his telegram while standing on a station platform she collapsed with a heart attack and died.12
Alexander III banished the couple from Russia, and like Michael and Natasha 22 years later, they moved to England. Sophie was re-invented as Countess Torby, and they settled down happily in British society, eventually taking a long lease on Kenwood, a magnificent house overlooking London’s Hampstead Heath. The British took a much more relaxed view about ‘morganatic marriage’ — between a royal and a non-royal — which was why London was seen as a sanctuary for those who had blotted their copybook in the other stricter European courts. Knowing that in St. Petersburg they would never be accepted as they were in London, Miche-Miche and his wife had no interest in returning to Russia and never would.
The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II Page 4