As the years passed, this sense of entitlement and magical ability provided an uneasy counterbalance to his lack of confidence. While on individual issues he remained susceptible to one or another minister’s, or even his family’s, opinions, Nicholas was increasingly resentful of what he regarded as trespasses on his wider authority, or contradiction, especially from the imperial household, who could be dismissed for mentioning politics or the wider world—especially if they implied criticism of the system. Among Nicholas’s entourage, according to A. A. Mossolov, the emphasis was on scrupulous politeness and obedience, “the motto was ‘lie low’ and ‘do nothing on your own responsibility.’” Despite mountains of paperwork Nicholas refused to have even one secretary, or to let anyone else seal his letters or lick his stamps. “It would have been necessary to take a third party into his confidence, and the Tsar hated to confide his ideas to anybody.”37 He persisted in seeing Russia as a large private estate which he could run like a paternalistic landowner. Without a secretariat, mountains of trivia fell across his desk. The tsar was the only person in the empire who could grant a divorce or sanction a name change; ministers were obliged to consult him over the smallest changes of personnel. Concentrating on the trivial allowed him to think he was actually running the country.
As for the government, Nicholas seemed intrinsically to distrust and dislike his ministers, even though they were virtually his sole source of information about the world outside. This was partly to do with class and codes. In Russia the landed aristocracy—in contrast to Britain—looked down on the not so elevated “bureaucratic” nobility, who dirtied their hands in government. Nicholas, like George, had absorbed an aristocratic military code which perceived the world in black and white, and found the complexities, ambiguities and grey areas of politics distasteful. As the court saw it, the bureaucratic class—themselves nobles, of course, but of a lower sort—were self-interested careerists, who intrigued and deliberately misled the tsar for their own ends. “The bureaucracy is38 interested … in keeping the Tsar in ignorance of what is going on; it is in this way that it makes itself more and more indispensable,” wrote Nicholas’s deputy minister of the court. The tsar also showed a tendency to look to, and rely on, his largely useless, self-serving cousins and uncles in the Romanov clan, and to have his head turned by wild schemes brought to him by totally inexperienced aristocratic former guards officers, whose company and outlook he found more congenial. It was just such a plan that eventually drew Russia into its disastrous war with Japan.
And it was true that the Russian government was full of backstabbing, intrigue and muddle, a state of affairs which had arisen because, in the absence of anything providing policy coordination, each minister and department ended up fighting its corner against the rest. Nicholas was supposed to be the figure who controlled and coordinated policy, who took the overview. But like Wilhelm, he was entirely incapable of doing so and the country was so large, and the government so primitive and chaotic, that probably no one could have run Russia on their own. In the absence of established policy priorities, ministers and departments slugged it out for dominance. Ministers had one-to-one interviews with the tsar which weren’t minuted. Decisions made in one meeting were often swept away by the next. Contradictory orders were not resolved. Long, carefully researched reports went unread—for lack of time and the tsar’s patience. Like his cousins, Nicholas was irritated by too much complexity. Annotated reports disappeared. His habit of changing his mind complicated everything, and led ministers to ever more byzantine and manipulative efforts to keep him on track,39 which in turn alienated him still further. In the 1900s a couple of attempts were made to get all the ministers round one table for a weekly meeting with the emperor. Nicholas refused to see the point of it. He was, besides, extremely bad at running a meeting, and got bored and irritated quickly. Perhaps it was his loathing of any form of confrontation, perhaps it was his increasing dislike of being contradicted. Certainly he was reluctant to accept that discussion and debate could lead anywhere useful. “The very idea40 of discussion was wholly alien to the nature of Nicholas II,” wrote Mossolov, head of the tsar’s Chancellery—the office which organized government matters which needed the tsar’s personal attention, but which had become overwhelmed by paper and trivia. He seemed unable to see policy in any larger context. “He only grasps41 the significance of a fact in isolation without its relationship to other facts,” his old tutor Pobedonostsev wrote dismissively in 1900. “Events, currents … wide general ideas worked out by an exchange of views, arguments or discussion are lacking.”
Nicholas’s most able minister, Sergei Witte, particularly offended him. Witte was the man who had supervised and shepherded Russia’s industrialization—to such an extent that the Russian economy was now growing almost as fast as the German one. Iron, steel and coal42 production tripled between 1890 and 1900, though the human costs of this had been devastating in some places. The famine of the early 1890s had been exacerbated, if not caused, by Witte’s insistence on exporting wheat in exchange for foreign capital. Witte was as tall—six foot six, it was said—as Nicholas was small, as aggressively uninterested in the niceties of etiquette and courtesy as Nicholas was preoccupied with them. He emanated a kind of brute force, was openly ambitious and ruthless in pursuit of his ends and was convinced of the correctness of his policies. He believed that to better Russia’s position in the world its government had to improve the economy, through industrial development, railways and new markets. There was nothing suave or courtly about him; he was cynical, manipulative and often rude. He once shouted so angrily at another minister in front of the emperor that Nicholas left the room. Nicholas hated this. He recognized that Witte was able but he didn’t trust him, and consciously or not, he felt threatened by Witte’s confidence and ability. He preferred the acknowledgedly mediocre and supine Goremykin, who behaved “like a butler,43 taking instruction to the other servants.” Nicholas and Alexandra nursed a fantasy that beyond the ministries there were good, honest advisers with whose counsel he would be able to solve everything. “He has nobody44 on whom he can thoroughly rely and who can be a real help to him,” Alix wrote at the height of the revolutionary crisis of 1905. “… He tries so hard, works with such great perseverance, but the lack of what I call ‘real’ men is great … The bad are always close at hand, the others through false humility keep in the background.”
Not that the tsar expressed his feelings openly. Just as in his foreign dealings, he was always calm, never lost his temper and frequently seemed entirely amenable to whatever was being said to him. He would smile, nod, and do something else entirely, erecting his own wall around his emotions and reactions. In his memoirs Witte described being sacked by Nicholas: “We talked for45 two solid hours. He shook my hand. He embraced me. He wished me all the luck in the world. I returned home beside myself with happiness and found a written order for my dismissal lying on my desk.” Such sackings were not isolated incidents. Nicholas told Wilhelm he never appointed anyone without having a replacement should he decide to sack them.
At the same time, Nicholas was entirely implicated in the regime’s most ill-advised excesses. He knew there was a growing agricultural crisis and was aware of Russia’s increasingly parlous financial situation. He knew of the brutal measures that his government took in the name of national security, he encouraged extravagant spending on the Russian fleet, and the huge sums spent on taking parts of China. He supported the aggressively ham-fisted Russification of the peaceful and independent duchy of Finland, which began in 1898 with the appointment of brutal General Bobrikov as governor-general. By 1904 Finland was on the edge of revolt, and Bobrikov had been assassinated. In 1902 Nicholas’s mother, in an unprecedentedly critical letter, wrote to him: “It is a complete46 puzzle to me how you, my dear, good Nicky, whose sense of fairness has always been so strong, now choose to be guided and deceived by a liar like Bobrikoff! … The people were perfectly happy and contented, now everything is broken up, e
verything changed, disorder and hatred sown … All that has been and is being done in Finland is based on lies and deceit and leads straight to revolution.” Nicky disagreed. Tough choices were necessary, he said. His father had Russified the Baltic states: “a strong and steady hand brought complete appeasement, and now all those troubles are quite forgotten.” (In fact, émigré German Balts had become some of the most vociferous anti-Russian propagandists in Germany, at the forefront of anti-Slavic Pan-Germanism.) The tsar added that he had just suffered “a very heavy personal grief”:47 his favourite dog had died and he had cried all day. Perhaps the juxtaposition is unfair—but it was Nicholas who made it.
…
Like Nicholas, George was only too happy to keep himself as much as possible away from public scrutiny and to withdraw into a quiet, rural domestic life. After he and May married in 1894, they moved into York Cottage, a “glum little villa”48 on the Sandringham estate, a few hundred yards from his father and mother’s grand home. He loved it because Sandringham was the place he felt most comfortable in all the world, because there were 30,000 acres to shoot on, and because it was too small to have to entertain in—it was his own barrier to the outside world. It was, by everyone’s estimation—apart from George’s—gloomy, dark and cramped: “a poky and inconvenient49 place, architecturally repulsive and always full of the smell of cooking,” his cousin Princess Alice wrote. “George adored it, but then he had the only comfortable room in the house, which was called the ‘library,’ though it contained very few books … the drawing-room was small enough when only two adults occupied it—but after tea, when five children were crammed into it as well, it became a veritable bedlam.” It was covered in rough cast and set with fake Tudor beams and sat in the eternal shadow of high trees, looking onto a dark pond on which “a leaden pelican gazed in dejection upon the water lilies and bamboo.” Inside, the red cloth from which the French army made its trousers “saddened,”50 one observer reported, the walls. During the daytime York Cottage accommodated ladies-in-waiting, the equerries and private secretaries, assorted nurses, nurse maids, housemaids, ten footmen, three wine butlers, a valet and a chef—a small suite by royal standards, though the house was bursting. George remained there, despite all attempts to dislodge him, until 1910—and even after, as king, he refused to move into the big house at Sandringham until his mother died.
There he lived the life of a Norfolk country gentleman, an extremely rich one, with an income that after 1901 was worth £100,000 a year (£40,000 from Parliament, £60,000 from the duchy of Cornwall). His tastes were simple but expensive. His suits were from Savile Row and his guns were from Purdey, the cartridges engraved with little red crowns. Having all but left the navy, he had virtually no obligations apart from the very occasional public engagement. (His engagements51 for 1895 were receiving the Freedom of the City of London and making a speech in thanks; sailing to Germany for the opening of the Kiel Canal, where he had dinner with Wilhelm on the Hohenzollern; watching Lord Rosebery’s horse win the Derby; going to Goodwood for more horse-racing and Cowes for the yachting; shooting on the grouse moors of various friends; visiting Balmoral, then returning to Sandringham.) His father’s staff ran the estate. “For seventeen years,”52 his biographer Harold Nicolson wrote exasperatedly, “he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps.”
Shooting and stamp collecting were George’s passions. The stamps had begun with a present of his uncle Affie’s collection, bought for him by his father in the early 1890s. Attracted by the pastime’s solitary, methodical orderliness, he would spend several afternoons a week arranging and rearranging his stamps, poring over catalogues, occasionally bidding vast sums for rare issues. By the end of his life he had amassed the largest collection in the world—325 albums full. After 1910, when he became king, he collected only stamps with his own face on them. As for shooting, it was the one thing George did exceptionally well. By the late 1890s he was generally acknowledged to be one of the two or three best shots in the country. Shooting was one of the great signifiers of leisurely aristocratic life. The aristocratic shooting party—complete with thousands of available animals hiding in the brush, plus beaters, someone to carry the guns and lunch—could be staged only on vast, uncultivated estates. Like so many of the leisure habits of British aristocratic life, it had become madly popular abroad among the European super-rich. Nicholas and Wilhelm were both obsessive about hunting and shooting. As tsarevitch, Nicholas had spent five or six hours a day shooting in mid-winter: “667 dead53 creatures for 1596 shots fired,” he recorded for one day in 1893. Wilhelm, who shot leaning on the shoulders of a nearby servant, kept a list of everything he’d ever killed: by 1897 it totalled 33,967 animals, beginning with “two aurochs, 7 elks” and ending with “694 herons and cormorants and 581 unspecified beasts.”54 George could bring down 1,000 pheasants in one day. At Sandringham the quantities of game shot were positively obscene. By the time George was king, the politician Lord Crewe couldn’t help but remark, “it is a misfortune55 for a public personage to have any taste so simply developed as the craze for shooting is in our beloved monarch … His perspective of what is proper seems almost destroyed.”
George didn’t want to engage with the wider world. He couldn’t, as his uncle the Duke of Cambridge remarked, “bear London56 and going out, and hates Society.” Despite his devotion to his father, he was not part of fashionable society. As one observer noted delicately, George’s set were chosen “not for their57 social brilliance, for the wit or sparkle or novelty which their hospitality offered, but for more solid qualities based on old traditions.” He belonged to what the radical Liberal Arthur Ponsonby—royal secretary Fritz Ponsonby’s rebellious and radical brother and author of The Decline of the Aristocracy—described as the “reactionary,” “dull” part of the upper class, which deplored the modern world while enjoying its conveniences, yearned for the past, and expected “unlimited deference”58 from its social inferiors. He hated going abroad, even though, through his grandmother’s efforts, he was now related by blood or marriage to all twenty of the reigning monarchs in western Europe. Travel made him homesick and seasick and exposed his inability to speak any foreign language. He dreaded making speeches in public, and in general being pushed beyond his comfort zone. He didn’t even know about the Sandringham estate on which he lived. When he inherited it in 1910, he had no idea that his labourers were among the worst paid in Norfolk.
His marriage had been hailed as a great success. May produced an heir within a year—David, the future Edward VIII. The couple quickly became a beacon of respectable and contented domesticity. “Every time I59 see them I love and like them more and respect them greatly,” Queen Victoria wrote in 1897. “Thank God! Georgie has got such an excellent, useful, and good wife.” May was regarded at court as having bolstered George’s shyness, lending the partnership a ramrod-backed, rather severely splendid public poise. She showed a particular propensity for draping herself in diamonds and expensive jewellery. Although no extrovert, she enjoyed the public obligations of royalty.
George loved May, as much as he was able. “You know by this60 time,” he wrote to her several months after their wedding,
that I never do anything by halves, when I asked you to marry me I was very fond of you, but not very much in love with you, but I saw in you the person I was capable of loving most deeply, if you only returned that love … I have tried to understand you and to know you, and with the happy result that I know now that I do love you darling girl with all my heart, and am simply devoted to you … I adore you sweet May. My love grows stronger for you every day, mixed with admiration and I thank God every day that he has given me such a darling devoted wife as you are. God bless you my sweet Angel May, who I know will always stick to me as I need our love and help more than ever now.
On paper, George brimmed with the tenderest feelings towards his wife, and told her he couldn’t do without her. In St. Petersburg, for Nicholas’s wedding in 1894, he wrote her twe
nty letters in two weeks. Face-to-face, however, he continued to be quite unable to express his feelings. “I know that you understood what I felt & what agony it was having to take leave,” he wrote after he left for Russia in 1894; and after their tour of the Commonwealth in 1901, “Somehow I can’t tell you, so I take the first opportunity of writing to say how deeply I am indebted to you darling for the splendid way in which you supported and helped me on our long Tour. It was you who made it a success.”61
The relationship was complicated. George remained very close to his sisters and mother, who lived only minutes away. They were extremely possessive of him and often insensitive and hostile to her. George’s closest sister, Toria, who had remained unmarried because Alexandra wanted a companion, and who regarded May as an interloper, made little effort to hide her antipathy. “Do try to62 talk to May at dinner,” she told a guest shortly after the marriage, “though one knows she is deadly dull.” Alexandra never openly clashed with her daughter-in-law, and treated her with her characteristic breezy friendliness. But there was no mistaking “her jealousy63 of her daughter-in-law,” according to May’s oldest friend, Mabell, Countess of Airlie. Alexandra made a point of demonstrating her power over her son, turning up at the house whenever she felt like it; moving the furniture around when her daughter-in-law was away, “which certainly gives64 ever so much more room, and I think looks much prettier,” George wrote tactlessly to May. “Of course, if you don’t like it … we can move it all back again in a minute.” Alexandra was quick to point out anything that May did which might be construed as the tiniest neglect of her husband: “So my poor65 Georgie has lost his May who has fled to London to look at her glass.” As for her father-in-law, May found Edward’s chaffing discomfiting and disapproved of his lifestyle. Her family, who were enthusiastically pro-German, also disliked what they saw as his “dreadful Russian66 proclivities.” But George still lived in his father’s shadow, consulting the king about everything, even what colour livery his footmen should wear.
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