Royally betrayed!
George V swore loyalty to his cousin, the Tsar. But, eight years after this photo, he abandoned him and his family to be murdered by the Bolsheviks
LIKE the best plays, this deeply affecting book about the meetings of the Russian and British royal families in the years before the Russian Revolution comes in three acts. Act I: Balmoral, 1896. Pouring with rain. Tsar Nicholas II and his young wife the Empress Alexandra come to stay with Alexandra’s grandmother Queen Victoria, bringing their fat baby the Grand Duchess Olga. Kilted torch-waving Highlanders line the route, welcoming the Russian party to Deeside.
Nicholas is homesick in the freezing castle. Described by one observer as ‘a timid little autocrat’, he hates having to have tricky political conversations with the visiting British prime minister. He has no luck stalking and doesn’t bag a single deer.
Act II: On board the British and Russian royal yachts at Reval (now Tallinn in Estonia), 1908. Since ‘Bloody Sunday’ in St Petersburg in 1905, when the Imperial Guard killed 200 peaceful demonstrators, who were petitioning for a fairer Russia, and injured 800 more, the Tsar’s popularity has plummeted.
Jovial King Edward VII, now with a 48-inch waist and known as ‘Tum-Tum’, meets increasingly morose Nicholas, with their wives and children, for two days of offshore banquets and friendly speeches, giving assurance of mutual support in the event of war.
ACT III: On board the royal yachts at Cowes, Isle of Wight, 1909. By this time the Tsar, who has imprisoned 400 editors of Russian newspapers, is so politically toxic among Left-wingers in Britain that the security is tight and he’s not allowed onshore, for fear of sparking riots.
Nicholas and his wife bring all five of their excited children with them: the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, and four-year-old Tsarevich Alexis. The main thing the children long to do is to go to a shop — something they’re never allowed to do in their own country.
On the surface, these three meetings are a catalogue of stifling Victorian and Edwardian niceties.
So many curled moustaches, so much dressing by the monarchs in the uniform of the other country as a symbol of mutual respect, so much accompanying of the ladies into the dining room, so many eightcourse lunches with menus in grandiose French, followed by tea at five o’clock, followed by nine-course dinners, so many stiffly gracious speeches, so much exchanging of inscribed vases and Fabergé cigarette boxes. Every tiny action was couched in protocol.
You can hardly blame the Tsarina for finding endless excuses to miss meals, pleading various minor ailments ranging from headaches to sciatica.
The nearest the Russian children came to a moment of freedom was when they were allowed into Cowes for a morning of shopping in the souvenir shops. They were even given a few minutes on the beach — not to get their feet wet, but to collect shells.
Those royal and imperial family members were sadly not up to much when it came to diary-writing. Their entries make ditchwater seem scintillating by comparison. ‘Sat down 38. Bed at 12.’ ‘Weather is awful.’ ‘Nice little evening.’ Frances Welch must have wished with her whole curious, investigative heart that the royal diary-writers had given more details.
She relies on less discreet attendants to tell the truth: one of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-
waiting described Alexandra as ‘a rabid, pathetic hausfrau’ who ‘cannot rouse herself to reform either society or politics’.
Another attendant noted that the Empress only ate a few vegetables, while greedy Edward VII exclaimed rapturously over his Cumberland sauce: ‘You could eat your mother with this sauce!’
What gives every sentence, and every glimpse, its fascination and poignancy is our knowledge that those five Imperial children and their parents would be massacred by the Bolsheviks in a brutal bloodbath, eight years after the last of those three meetings.
This knowledge makes all the generous royal assurances, the polite speeches, the endearing nicknames by which they called each other (‘Nicky’, ‘Alicky’, ‘Bertie’, ‘Georgie’) turn to ashes in one’s mouth.
In a devastating coda to the three ‘acts’, Welch tells the story of the British Royal Family’s eventual betrayal of their Russian cousins.
THE Prince of Wales, soon to be George V, was among the party at Cowes in 1909. He and his cousin the Tsar, as well as being the spitting image of each other with identical moustaches and beards, got on well. The photograph of the two of them with their young sons ‘David’ (the future Edward VIII) and little Alexis in a sailor-suit, is heartbreaking when you know what would happen.
In his farewell message, the Tsar said: ‘The affectionate welcome accorded by the Royal Family . . . the attitude of the British statesmen, people and press are all happy auguries for the future.’
When revolution struck in 1917, ‘Nicky’ changed overnight from Tsar Nicholas II to ‘Comrade Nicholas Romanov’ and the family were removed from their palace and exiled first to Siberia and then to the Urals. George V, who had become King after his father’s death in 1910, wrote to his cousin straight away. ‘My thoughts are constantly with you. And I shall always remain your true and devoted friend,’ he said.
The British did — at first — offer the deposed Tsar and his family asylum in Britain.
But the King came under the influence of the ‘jittery’ private secretary Lord Stamfordham, who was worried that giving the Romanovs asylum would stoke the growing republican movement in Britain.
Gradually and tactfully, in the politest possible language, the offer was withdrawn. Could not the Russian Government ‘make some other plans for the future residence of their Imperial Majesties?’
The British ambassador Sir George Buchanan was commanded to deliver the news to the Romanovs that the offer had been withdrawn, and he was ‘scarcely able to contain his emotions’. Reading that brought me up short. There is blood on British hands for this act of betrayal. Couldn’t we at least have given the children asylum?
Welch gives the stark and horrific facts: on the night of July 16-17, all seven members of the imperial family were shot dead in a cellar.
‘The murder took a full 20 minutes, as bullets ricocheted off the jewels they had sewn into their clothes for safekeeping.’ On hearing of the killings, George wrote in his diary: ‘Those poor innocent children!’
The only thing to assuage the British conscience is the belief, among today’s historians, that the radical Left-wingers of the provisional Russian government would never have allowed the Romanovs to leave Russia, even if our asylum offer had not been withdrawn.
Seventeen Romanovs did manage to get out of Russia after the Revolution.
The Royal Family gave the Tsar’s sister Xenia and her family a house on the Frogmore estate at Windsor — but they were treated very much as poor relations.