For Florence, Grace and JJ.
“Man’s sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest are the signs of a strange disorder.”
Pascal, Pensées
“Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.”
Elizabeth Bowen, The House In Paris, 1938
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Balmoral
Reval
The Isle of Wight
Bibliography
Royal Archive Sources
Acknowledgements
Index
Copyright
BALMORAL
On Friday, 11th September 1896, the young Tsarina of Russia wrote a buoyant telegram to her 77-year-old grandmother, Queen Victoria. The pair were to be reunited, at Balmoral, after being parted for more than two years: ‘Fondest thanks dear letter Nicky agrees to all sends much love fine weather Alix.’
The 24-year-old Tsarina was due to travel from Denmark in just over a week. The imperial couple had not visited Britain since their marriage in 1894 and the recent coronation of Alix’s husband, Nicky. The Queen would be seeing the imperial couple’s ten-month baby daughter, Olga, for the first time.
The close attachment between Alix and her grandmother had been forged over idyllic summers at various royal residences. Alix, or ‘Alicky’, as her grandmother called her, had developed a particular fondness for Balmoral. At the Russian court, the Tsarina had maintained her happy memories with a life-size portrait of Victoria, chintzes from the Maples catalogue and British foodstuffs. As the Tsar’s younger sister Olga reported: ‘Nicky once complained Alix kept him awake by crunching her favourite English biscuits.’
A week later, the Queen received another telegram, altering the date of her granddaughter’s arrival: ‘Nicky and Alicky much distressed that on account of new ship will not be able to start till Sunday arriving 22nd hope you won’t mind Old Alix.’ The ‘new ship’ was the 4,500-ton imperial yacht, swiftly referred to by her husband as the ‘marvellous Standart’.
But the punctilious Queen did mind, complaining of ‘great inconvenience’. The equerry-in-waiting, the Hon William Carington, was obliged to reassure her: ‘All arrangements exactly the same but Tuesday not Monday’. The Aberdeenshire Constabulary, however, remained in a muddle. The Chief Constable’s office issued an elaborately inscribed report marred by ugly crossings out, with Tuesday and 22nd mysteriously erased and Monday and 21st scrawled on top.
There may have been further complications caused by the fact that the Tsar, and presumably his suite, stuck resolutely to the Julian calendar, which was then 12 days behind the Gregorian calendar used by the British. As far as the Tsar was concerned, the arrival date had changed from the 9th to the 10th of September.
Alix’s breezy ‘Nicky agrees to all’ in the first telegram appeared increasingly wide of the mark, as the Tsar’s naval attaché now began a huffy exchange of telegrams with the beleaguered equerry. While taking the alteration of the date in his stride, Carington had not been so happy to receive last-minute quibbles about landing docks. He immediately telegraphed the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Arthur Bigge: ‘Russian embassy says Tsar wants to land North Queen’s ferry and not Leith.’ He complained that the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) himself had been obliged to weigh in, sending his own sharp telegram to the attaché: ‘deprecating changing Leith for North Queen’s ferry’.
At one point Carington seemed to soften in his attitude to the bumptious Russian attaché, with a light-hearted instruction to Bigge to overlook the dock debacle. Worried that his adversary might ‘get into a row’, he wrote: ‘He was very excited at first but is now settling down and making himself very useful.’ He added wryly: ‘If anything goes wrong I conclude he will be sent to Siberia.’
But, three days later, the pair were again at loggerheads, with an outburst from Carington: ‘The Russian naval attaché has just proposed that the plan of the steamers for disembarkation should be set aside in favour of the yacht coming into Leith Harbour,’ he fumed. ‘As this is the third change of great magnitude he has proposed, I was constrained to tell him that, unless I receive the Emperor’s commands in writing to that effect, I could not undertake at this late hour so important an alteration.’
Carington’s exasperation increased as the Russians’ demands for changes were matched by a refusal to provide any detailed information. He complained to Bigge that he was no further with his inquiries about luggage: ‘We have received no answer to that question or, between you and me, to any other addressed to that quarter.’
Two days before their arrival, on 20th September, the Tsarina wrote her third and most cheery telegram to the Queen: ‘Just leaving beautiful Sunday weather so happy meeting soon many kisses.’ Her repeated references to fine weather would later strike a particularly jarring note. At the beginning of September, Sir Francis Knollys, private secretary to the Prince of Wales, had sent an optimistic message to Bigge regarding the likely temperature in Scotland: ‘Take care to acquaint the Emperor that it will be warm.’
In fact, the imperial couple would be greeted at Leith by conditions described by The Scotsman newspaper as ‘dreich and misty with driving rain’. And, as it turned out, the weather barely improved throughout the imperial couple’s 11 days at Balmoral. The Queen’s harrowing descriptions included: ‘threatening’, ‘frosty’ and, on one especially bad day, ‘terrible pouring wet morning, with much darkness’.
While the royal parties fretted about rain, the authorities grappled with unprecedented security arrangements. The British and Russian royal families had close blood ties – Nicky and Alicky were both first cousins of ‘Georgie’, the future George V – and for much of the sentimental British public, a Romanov visit would have been cause for celebration. However, among radical left-wing factions, Nicky was merely the latest in a long line of autocrats, with a poor record on civil liberties and censorship.
In an era of letters and telegrams, keeping ahead of potential troublemakers was an enormous challenge. Courtiers liaised with the Metropolitan Police and the Aberdeenshire constabulary; the constabulary, in turn, were in daily contact with continental police. Hundreds of plain-clothes policemen would work alongside 24 constables and four sergeants from the Metropolitan Police. The movements of the Tsar’s secret police, the okhrana, however, remained a mystery; clues seldom went beyond rumours of bodyguards secreting themselves behind bushes, armed with spyglasses. One metropolitan police report later revealed slightly more detail: ‘3 Russian detective officers present now residing with… head gardener to Her Majesty the Queen’. But on 8th September, Carington was still writing coy notes to Bigge: ‘From a remark I heard dropped at the Russian embassy I fancy the two persons who are to live in the artists rooms at Balmoral are Russian Police.’
Railway workers would patrol the track covering the Romanovs’ proposed train route from Leith to Ballater (the closest station to Balmoral). Bridges and viaducts would be supervised by local police, while a pilot engine ran ahead of the trains. One newspaper reassured readers that there was a ‘staff of telegraph linesmen and operators with appliances for effecting telegraphic communication’. The Aberdeenshire constabulary promised that its constables would be vigilant: ‘They will see that a sharp look-out is kept for suspicious strangers.’
The Times insisted finally: ‘Every precaution has been and will be taken which human foresight can compass to ensure a safe and speedy arrival… on no previous occasion have such elaborate preparations been made for the reception of royalty as at present, while the precautions taken to secure the safety of the imperial visitors were extremely thorough and minute.’
Sir Edward Bradfor
d, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, agreed, assuring Bigge: ‘The Emperor is safer here than anywhere else in the world and you can assure the Queen and all concerned. It is a great happiness to be able to feel this and to have no hesitation in saying it.’
Days before the Romanovs’ arrival, however, tensions rose as Scotland Yard released confusing information about a plan to attack the imperial family. Reports appeared of the so-called ‘dynamite conspiracy’, featuring plans by Irish-American activists and Russian nihilists to bomb one of the trains. The ringleader, it was reported, held a forged letter for the Tsar saying he was an envoy of the Queen. It emerged that a cache of dynamite had, indeed, been found in an anarchists’ basement in Antwerp and three arrests had been made. But there had never been any plan to assassinate the Tsar.
While Carington was sorting out the dock debacle, Bigge was receiving reassuring notes from the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. The assistant commissioner, Robert Anderson, was adamant that the recent plot: ‘did not aim at any personal injury either to the Queen or the Tsar; moreover the gang is now broken up and the practical danger which was serious and urgent is happily at an end’. In several follow-up letters, Anderson carried on protesting that he himself had never spoken to the press. He wrote with such vehemence that he feared, finally, that he was coming across as ‘egotistical’.
Sir Matthew Ridley, of the home department, wrote to Bigge, echoing Anderson: ‘I have been watching the operation of these ruffians… I do not believe that this plot had anything to do with the Tsar’s visit.’
It was widely mooted that, on this occasion, the British press had allowed itself to be carried away. A Boston newspaper ran the headline: ‘All England terrified. The London press suddenly becomes sensational… if printers’ ink could produce a panic, London would be in a state of nervous prostration.’
But The Scotsman newspaper gave a sober description of the resulting unease: ‘The rumours and suspicions of a plot against their [the Romanovs’] lives… were enough to create a certain feeling of anxiety in the minds of the public of the country. That harm should have befallen them anywhere would have been a mournful calamity; that it should have reached them in Scotland would have been an unspeakable grief to the nation.’
Queen Victoria’s mounting excitement at the prospect of her reunion with Alix and her introduction to baby Olga may well have been tempered by worries about the family’s safety. She had never been under any illusions about the dangers her favourite granddaughter would face when she married the young Russian Tsarevich. Civil unrest was endemic in Russia: Nicky’s grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, had been assassinated just 15 years previously.
Nicky’s coronation, four months before, had been dogged by chaos and tragedy. During a presentation of commemorative gifts at the Khodynka Fields, in Moscow, there had been a crowd surge during which nearly 1,500 people were crushed to death. That night, Nicky had made one of his first deeply unpopular decisions as tsar: to attend a party at the French embassy. He had been reluctant to go, but had been swayed by his domineering uncles. He was to develop a reputation for being easily led; a weakness which would colour his 21-year-reign.
At the time of the couple’s engagement, the Queen had written a prescient letter to her eldest daughter, Vicky: ‘The state of Russia is so bad, so rotten, that at any moment something dreadful might happen… the wife of the heir to the throne is in a difficult and precarious position.’ She wrote to Alix’s sister, Victoria, of her own anguish: ‘the awful insecurity to which that sweet child will be exposed. I will try and bear it… my blood runs cold when I think of her so young… her dear life and above all her husband’s constantly threatened and unable to see her but rarely…. Oh, how I wish it was not to be that I should lose my sweet Alicky.’
Her granddaughter had tried to dispel some of her worries, cheerily pointing out that Russia was just three days away. ‘Please do not think that my marrying will make a difference in my love to you, CERTAINLY IT WILL NOT, and when I am far away, I shall long to think that there is one, the dearest and kindest woman alive, who loves me a little bit.’
How much was the anxious Queen consoled by the idea that her granddaughter’s marriage might help British and Russian relations? She certainly recorded an encouraging comment from the Prime Minister at the time, Lord Rosebery: ‘He spoke first of Alicky’s engagement, which he felt sure must tend to peace.’
Two years on, in 1896, she seemed almost too keen to take advantage of the Russian connection. With all her excitement and worry about the visit, it soon became clear that one of her main concerns was securing the young Tsar’s support for British causes abroad. Her efforts would not be appreciated by the peaceable Nicky, who was horrified to find himself endlessly embroiled in weighty discussions at Balmoral, not least two gruelling sessions with the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. As a doting husband of just 22 months, he wrote wistfully to his mother: ‘I see even less of Alix here than at home, where deputations and audiences with ministers interfere enough.’
There was certainly room for improvement in the relations between the two countries. The British government was aware that grievances dating back to the Crimean War of the 1850s were festering, alongside the ongoing concerns about Russia’s repressive regimes. The Metropolitan Police’s Robert Anderson was relieved that the young Romanovs’ visit was to take place at Balmoral: ‘I confess a good deal has come to my knowledge which makes me glad that the Tsar is there [at Balmoral] not in London. I should be very anxious indeed if he were here.’
London had long been a magnet for Russian revolutionaries, not least because of its reputation for being lax on surveillance. Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, the founder of the anarchist newspaper Freedom, had arrived in Hull, in June 1876, after escaping from the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg. He described himself as overwhelmed with relief when he saw the Union Jack, ‘under which so many Russian, Italian French and Hungarian refugees have found asylum’. The Prince eventually settled in Bromley.
Kropotkin would be joining his fellow Russian radical, Mikhail Bakunin, founder of the International Anarchist Movement, who had settled in Paddington Green. Bakunin, in turn, was already fraternising with the founder of communism, Karl Marx, of Kentish Town.
Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Secret Agent, was set in London just ten years before the Balmoral visit, in 1886. The hero’s foreign embassy contact makes direct reference to Britain’s lax security. Conrad’s group of anarchists produces a pamphlet called ‘The Future of the Proletariat’. The fictional Michaelis, a prominent member of the group, is an amalgam of two real anarchists: he expounds the views of Kropotkin while sharing Bakunin’s physical attributes. Michaelis and Bakunin were both, for instance, excessively large. Conrad writes that Michaelis: ‘had come out of a highly hygienic prison round like a tub… as though for 15 years the servants of an outraged society had made a point of stuffing him with fattening foods in a damp and lightless cellar’.
Two years after the Balmoral visit, in 1898, a further Russian anarchist, Vladimir Burtsev, would be arrested in the British Museum Reading Room after advocating the killing of the Tsar in his magazine Norodnaya Volya (The People’s Will). Like Kropotkin, Burtsev had been imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, before escaping during his subsequent exile. The prosecution had demanded Burtsev receive ten years’ hard labour; he was given 18 months in jail. The police filled the public gallery to prevent Burtsev’s anarchist supporters from attending the trial. Among those who succeeded in getting a seat, however, was the distinctive looking, extravagantly bearded Kropotkin.
The man put in charge of security for the Romanovs’ visit was the first head of Scotland Yard’s special branch, Chief Inspector William Melville. Melville had already made a name for himself, raiding anarchists’ clubs and underground printing presses. A notice from the Metropolitan Police read: ‘Melville and another officer will accompany Tsar from Leith to Ballater. Another London detective will be at Ball
ater. Three officers will remain during visit.’ Melville, who later worked with the Russian secret service, would clearly not be wasting his time in Scotland, despite his sniffy complaints about: ‘playing host to the Russian Security services’.
The extravagantly bearded Kropotkin
While the main focus was on security, the courtiers faced further challenges, not least finding accommodation for the large Russian contingent. Servants would have to be billeted out at local farmhouses and inns; there would be problems with communication as guests and hosts struggled with the twin hazards of the Russian language and Scottish accents. A village of stone huts, resembling grain storehouses, had to be specially constructed to help with an overspill. The scrum was such that four laundry maids were, at one point, obliged to share a single bed. Bigge referred drily to: ‘The Russian occupation of Balmoral’.
Tuesday 22 September
Queen Victoria’s diary: ‘A pouring wet day, the worst we have had yet.’
On the day of the arrival, Queen Victoria was avidly tracking her granddaughter’s movements: ‘Heard on getting up that the imperial yacht was in sight of Leith’.
The shy young imperial couple had already endured weeks of ceremony and protocol, with visits to Austria, the Ukraine, Germany and Denmark. Social pressures had been exacerbated by time change issues as the couple stayed in Vienna with Emperor Franz Joseph, who rose at 4am, dined at 5pm and retired at 7pm. The mood would not have been improved by the rumour that two men had died on a mountainside, while picking bunches of edelweiss for a state banquet at the Hofburg Palace.
The couple’s visit to Germany had been only a partial success. The Times reported that the Germans claimed the Tsarina as their own. In fact, Alix’s inability to disassociate herself from her native Hesse would prove a mixed blessing. The devotion she developed for her adopted country was never fully recognised and, years later, when Russia was at war with Germany, the Tsarina was continually labelled ‘Nemetz’ (German).
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