Georgie had written an especially affectionate letter after hearing of Nicky’s engagement. He had been among those who voiced misgivings about the match, but his centred solely on the cousins’ shared lack of height. He had raised the ticklish subject with Alix, who then complained to her fiancé: ‘Foolish Georgie says I am to insist upon you wearing high heels and that I am to have quite low ones. May won’t change hers, but he wears much higher ones. At first they had been uncomfortable, now he did not mind it any more.’
Bertie’s wife, the future Queen Alexandra, arrived at Balmoral that second afternoon, with her daughter, Princess Victoria. The pair had suffered an arduous journey, as the Tsar reported with concern: ‘At 4pm Aunt Alix arrived with Victoria; they had had an absolutely terrible crossing on the Osborne.’ The Queen made her own sympathetic reference to their: ‘frightful passage from Copenhagen’.
After commiserating with Aunt Alexandra and Victoria, the party visited the Castle of Braemar, before stopping at one of the Queen’s so-called hideaway cottages, the ‘Dantzig’, for tea.
While insisting that the Romanovs’ Balmoral visit was of a purely personal and domestic nature, The Times admitted that: ‘Coming at a critical juncture in European politics, the visit of the Tsar has been invested with singular importance.’ Certainly, Granny, perhaps prompted by her talk with the Ambassador the previous evening, made the most of her time with the young Tsar. It was during the return carriage ride from the ‘Dantzig’ that she broached her most pressing topic: ‘I said a few words to him about Turkey and Armenia, saying his own Ambassador at Constantinople… hoped some agreement would be come to whilst Nicky was here, as affairs were very critical and some catastrophe was dreaded… I remarked that if England and Russia went together there must be peace and something must be done to bring this about.’ The Tsar, she reported, remained characteristically agreeable and non-committal: ‘Nicky said he quite saw this and would see what he could do’. She later added: ‘Nicky nodded but said it would be difficult.’
Intent on avoiding what he gloomily labelled ‘political conversations’, the Tsar made no reference in his diary to Granny’s unwelcome overtures or his response: ‘At 5.30 we went off to have tea in one of the forest cottages. Dinner at 9pm.’
Friday 25th September
The Queen’s diary: ‘A dull morning, raining again… it was very cold.’ For all her insistence that she was not celebrating her long reign, she was happy to boast: ‘The congratulatory telegrams are still coming in.’
Having missed the preceding day, the hunters were keen to resume shooting. As the Queen wrote breezily: ‘Nicky and the others came in to wish us good morning before going to a deer drive.’
If the Tsar was finding the company of his uncles generally oppressive, he particularly dreaded Bertie’s repeated attempts to discuss an Anglo-Russian or Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Romanov alliance. He preferred the company of his less enterprising cousin: ‘I’m glad Georgie comes out to shoot too – we can at least talk over the good times we’ve just had in Denmark.’
The Tsar’s second hunt went no better than the first. This despite his thoughtful hosts ensuring that he was in the best spot. As he wrote in his diary: ‘Again it rained for half the day, but nevertheless we went off hunting to the place where we had tea yesterday… and on top of it no luck at all – I haven’t killed a stag yet.’ He managed somehow to blame the deer: ‘For me the hunt was unsuccessful. I did shoot, but the deer were passing through far off.’
A record still exists of that particular deer drive:
Emperor of Russia – 0
Duke of Connaught – 4 stags
Duke of York – 5 stags
Prince of Wales – 0 (no shot)
The Tsarina later lamented to her former governess, Madgie: ‘My husband has not shot one stag, only a brace of grouse.’ The grouse would not, in fact, be bagged for a further three days.
The Tsar’s spirits seemed to lift a little with lunch al fresco: ‘Open air lunch, the weather had become better.’ Back at the house, the Queen and Alix’s more civilised lunch was followed by an informal concert: ‘After luncheon’, the Queen reported, ‘Tostie, his wife and Wolff came up to my room and played and sang for Alicky, who was there.’ Paolo Tosti was an Italian composer who had acted as a singing master for the royal family. Alix would have been relieved to be listening rather than performing. Though a keen pianist, she hated playing in public, insisting that it had been one of the worst ordeals of her life. As a child, she had been forced to perform by the Queen; she complained that her ‘clammy hands felt literally stuck to the keys’.
There were those in the royal household who deemed the imperial couple aloof, though Alix, understandably more at ease in her grandmother’s house, made several conquests. One of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting singled her out as: ‘unmistakably lovely… one is always in rapture with her’.
Lady Lytton was won over as Alix confided her worries about nannies: ‘The Empress talked to me a long time after dinner and was so nice. Like anyone else she has had nurse troubles and the first she had was rude and domineering, never even bowing to the Emperor. The one she has now is a housekeeper in a Russian family and she cannot keep her, but she is nice.’
Alix’s first ‘English nurse’ had, in fact, been specially selected for her by the Queen. Mrs Inman had first appeared at the palace the previous December, when little Olga was nearly five weeks old. Nicky took an instant dislike to her, which may well have had something to do with her refusal to bow to him. In any case, he complained to his brother Georgie: ‘She has something hard and unpleasant in her face and looks like a stubborn woman.’ He and Alix were agreed, he added, they: ‘did not like the look of Mrs Inman’.
The Tsar subsequently included some neutral references to her in his diary, writing on 20th December: ‘After tea we attended the little daughter’s bath – the nanny, Mrs Inman, gave her a bath.’ But he was soon back on the attack, telling his brother that Alix was worried ‘the new English nanny would in some way affect the way of things in our daily family life’. The daily family life was, indeed, affected when Mrs Inman made the unpopular decision to move baby Olga into the nursery upstairs.
The Tsarina mentioned her growing dislike of Mrs Inman to her own brother, Ernie. She found Mrs Inman’s fondness for impersonations particularly distasteful: ‘I am NOT AT ALL enchanted with the nurse…. she is good and kind with Baby, but as a woman most antipathetic and that disturbs me sorely. Her manners are neither very nice and she will mimic people in speaking about them, an odious habit wh[ich] would be awful for a child to learn – most headstrong (but I am too, thank goodness) I foresee no end of troubles and only wish I had another.’
The Queen’s endorsement protected Mrs Inman for four months, but the imperial couple’s brothers would both, doubtless, have been relieved to hear that, on 29th April, she had been given her marching orders. The Tsar wrote with uncharacteristic candour: ‘Today the unbearable nanny left us – the English woman; we are glad that we are finally separated from her!’
Her successor, the ‘nice’ housekeeper from a Russian family, was one of two English sisters, the Misses Coster, who both worked for members of the Romanov dynasty. The first worked for the Tsar’s sister, Xenia, eventually tending all seven children. The second arrived at the palace three days after the departure of Mrs Inman. The Tsar did not find this Miss Coster hard-faced, but he was struck by another peculiarity in her appearance. On 2nd May 1896 he wrote: ‘After tea I walked upstairs to watch little daughter’s bath. Since yesterday a new nanny has been tending to her – a nurse from Kseniya Institute, with a very long nose, who has been taken on, until she proves otherwise.’ ‘Mrs Coster’ was written into the diary margin by Alix. Unmarried nannies would often be known, decorously, as Mrs.
The Tsar’s sister, Olga, recalled another disastrous nanny: ‘My niece Olga’s nurse was a terror – fond of tippling. In the end she was found in bed with a Cossack and dismissed on the spot.’
Perhaps any nanny at the Russian court would have a hard time matching Alix’s own English nurse, Orchie. Mary Ann Orchard, in fact a Dubliner – and another of Queen Victoria’s protégées – had tended Alix from the time of her birth, looking after her as she faced the deaths of her mother and two siblings. Over the years, Orchie would vie for Alix’s affection with Madgie (Margaret Jackson), the more sophisticated, London-born governess who would later be credited with teaching Alix to think independently. Sadly, for all Madgie’s acclaimed fondness for abstract thought, the Tsarina would become known for her failure to grasp the wider picture, and her refusal to have it explained to her by anybody else.
Orchie, by then aged 64, followed Alix to Russia in 1894, helping her to dress on her wedding day. Another of the Tsarina’s sisters, Irene, wrote to the Queen describing a visit to the palace shortly after Orchie’s arrival: ‘Orchie was bustling about with the rest of all her things… it looked so homelike.’ After Olga’s birth, Orchie took overall charge of the nursery. Alix’s sister Victoria assured the Queen that Orchie was an immediate hit with Olga: ‘The baby is magnificent – a bright intelligent little soul – she is especially fond of Orchie, smiling broadly whenever she catches sight of her.’
The prolonged conversation about nannies at Balmoral would have confirmed the ascerbic lady-in-waiting Marie Mallet’s worst misgivings about the Tsarina. She later described Alix as: ‘The angelic but somewhat cowlike Princess who he [the Tsar] adores but who cares for little beyond her husband and her children’. Mallet went on to dismiss Alix, more savagely, as: ‘a rabid, pathetic hausfrau’ who ‘cannot rouse herself to reform either society or politics’. Her pronouncements on Nicky carried echoes of Uncle Bertie’s: she denounced him as a ‘weakling’.
The Tsar’s fourth night seems to have been mercifully uneventful: ‘We had tea at the end of the hunt in Donald Stewart’s house – an old hunter, who goes around with me during round-ups. Granny, Alix and others arrived there. Dinner at 9pm. In the evening I had writing to do.’
Saturday 26th September
Queen Victoria’s diary: ‘A fair day… much milder than yesterday.’
The Tsar commented on the welcome break in the downpours. Sadly, it did nothing to improve a second all-day hunt: ‘It was a day without rain. At 11am the tireless hunters went off to the mountains for a beating-out, but no one saw any deer and for the whole day only one shot was heard. Lunch in the woods.’
While the Tsar dined under the trees, the Queen and Alix enjoyed a thoroughly domestic lunch, with an assortment of great-grandchildren. As the Queen wrote: ‘Only ourselves and the little children to luncheon. Georgie’s dear little boys came in, as well as little Olga.’
It is hard to know how close Alix became to Georgie’s wife, May, but as young mothers of babies the same age, they shared a vital connection. May’s eldest child, David, the future Edward VIII, was just over two years old. Nicky and Alix had visited him, when he was newly-born, in June 1894, and were made godparents. May’s second son, Bertie, the future George VI, and the baby, Olga, had barely a month between them. The young mothers were additionally both pregnant again. May was expecting her third child, Victoria, while Alix was already pregnant with her second daughter, Tatiana, who was born the following June.
The toddler, David, and little Olga certainly bonded: a ‘belle alliance’ was declared as David purportedly picked Olga up, after a fall, and gave her a kiss.
The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, arrived that morning. He was keen to establish his own belle alliance with the Tsar, hopeful that the recent death of the tricky Foreign Minister, Lobanov-Rostovsky, might mitigate in his favour. The Tsar, anxious to maintain a holiday spirit, may well have heard news of the arrival with a sinking heart.
The Queen had always been more than happy to receive prime ministers with their dispatch boxes at Balmoral. The system did, however, have its detractors. Disraeli complained bitterly about the Queen: ‘carrying on the government of the country 600 miles from the metropolis’.
Salisbury’s complaints were less about the distance than the accommodation. No amount of talks with the Tsar could quite compensate the 66-year-old Prime Minister for a freezing bedroom. His aide sent a note insisting the room be heated at 60 degrees, the highest temperature the Queen would allow. The request was marked ‘private’ and slipped in at the end of a letter: ‘I am sure you will forgive my mentioning it, but it is most necessary that Lord Salisbury’s room should be very warm: a minimum temperature of 60 degrees… I am ashamed to bother you with so trifling a matter but it is not as trifling as it may seem.’
Balmoral was notorious among members of the court for its lack of creature comforts. As one household member wrote: ‘I never remember one congenial day in the Highlands.’ Lord Clarendon, who had objected to the thistle motifs, claimed he suffered from frostbite during dinner. He described two sticks in the fireplace hissing at the servant trying to light them. The glacial temperatures sometimes proved too much even for the bullish Marie Mallet: ‘The wind was so cold my face turned first blue then crimson and by dinner time I looked as if I had been drinking hard for a week – and this was in June.’ Lady Lytton was less bothered by the temperature than the lack of space in her bedroom: ‘One could hardly move when the two boxes were brought in.’
After an interlude with her great-grandchildren, the Queen was more than ready for a return to business. She set about engineering talks between the Prime Minister and the Tsar. If she was aware of Nicky’s distaste for ‘political conversations’, she was not going to let this stand in her way. As she reported: ‘Afterwards I saw Lord Salisbury, who had arrived early this morning. I told him how well disposed Nicky was and how anxious to speak to him.’
She gave an account, in her diary, of the Prime Minister’s views on Turkey, the topic on which she had already lectured Nicky: ‘What Lord Salisbury is anxious to avoid is anything which could appear as an attack on the Mahomedans, or encouragement of a propaganda against Muslims, which would be most dangerous on account of the enormous number of our Mahomedan subjects. He fears that the only thing which could do any good would be the removal of the Sultan.’
Sunday 27th September
Queen Victoria’s diary: ‘Pouring wet morning… fine but cold and inclined to be frosty’.
The Tsar grimly recorded an end to the dry spell: ‘We woke up to awful weather – a rainstorm. At 12 o’clock we went to church; for the first time I attended a Scottish service.’
Just 15 months before, the Queen had been present at the opening and dedication of the new Craithie Kirk. The cost of the building had been met by donations and the proceeds of a curious two-day bazaar at Balmoral. The Queen had attended the bazaar twice, doubtless gratified to see several princesses tending stalls. The eight-year-old Ena of Battenberg was particularly captivating as an ‘old woman’ selling dolls from a giant shoe. Photographic studies were taken for five shillings a time and goods on sale ranged from a plough for £50 to a penny ‘leather scrubber’. The takings were a majestic £2,400.
For all the grand sums raised, Craithie Kirk remained a modestly sized, plain church, and Lady Lytton was struck by the sight of the royal parties in such humble surroundings: ‘Very interesting seeing the two pews full of the royalties and the Emperor and Empress standing by the Queen even in the Scotch [church] where all is simple and reverend’. Their attendance impressed even Marie Mallet: ‘She [the Queen] admired the Greek church most outside her own as being far more tolerant. For instance the Tsar and Tsarina went to Scotch service here, a thing no Roman Catholic monarch would ever do.’
Beyond saying that the Scotch service was his first, the Tsar made no comment. If he was underwhelmed by the sermon, he would have been in good company. As Lady Lytton reported: ‘The prayer for their majesties was good, but the sermon so dull I could not say what it was.’ They would both, however, have been in disagreement with the Queen, who expressed herself thoroughly satisfied: ‘The service was performed by Dr. Co
lin Campbell of Dundee, who preached very well.’
Religion had always been a vital part of Alix’s life. Her reluctance to give up her childhood Lutheranism and convert to orthodoxy had remained, for some time, an obstacle to her marrying Nicky. The Queen had raised the subject with the young Tsarevich soon after the couple’s engagement: ‘Nicky said: “She is much too good for me.” I told him he must make the religious difficulties as easy as he could for her, which he promised to do.’
The Queen had been unexpectedly taken with the Russian priest charged with Alix’s instruction. Her disapproval of Nicky’s father, Alexander III, did not, apparently, extend to his choice of chaplain. As she wrote in her diary after the couple became engaged: ‘Frogmore as usual for breakfast… went to the cottage where I saw the Russian priest Yanicheff, whom Nicky presented and who is reading with Alicky and preparing her for her entry into the Russian church. He is a very fine looking man with long grey hair and beard… He is the chaplain to the Emperor [Alexander III] and the imperial family and seems to be a very enlightened and wide-minded man.’
A few months after the wide-minded Yanicheff met Queen Victoria, he was at Tsar Alexander’s death-bed.
The gentle Sunday schedule at Balmoral continued with lunch, followed by tea at a neighbouring castle. As the Tsar wrote: ‘Lunch with the family. It cleared up and became cold. I went for a walk to Abergeldie Castle, where we all had tea.’ Religious services and walks were the stuff of Nicky’s life. Upon his return, however, he would have been less happy to find himself buttonholed by the Prime Minister for a ‘political conversation’ lasting a full hour and a half: ‘I had a talk with Salisbury,’ he reported bleakly.
The talk centred, once again, on Turkey. Salisbury suggested that Russia and Britain should act together as a stabilising force. His appeal to the autocratic Tsar on moral and humanitarian grounds was later deemed ironic by leftist factions. Nicky, oblivious to such nuances, seemed pleased with the proposal. He was not averse, he declared, to putting pressure on the Sultan.
The Imperial Tea Party Page 4
