The King’s extemporising, on the other hand, he deemed disrespectful, insisting, as usual, that his negative view was generally shared. Sablin was sure that the King held notes which he, perversely, refused to use: ‘Edward VII spoke softly and lazily. It was felt he didn’t attach importance to the fact that he was forced to stick to the minister’s speech, which he held in his hand.’ Needless to say, Ponsonby disagreed with Sablin: ‘King made impressive speech… proposing the health of the Emperor.’
Among the party there was also Olga, Queen of Greece, whose son, Andrew, had married the Tsarina’s lively niece, Alice, five years previously. Their son Philip, born 13 years later, would be the future Duke of Edinburgh. The Queen of Greece came armed with celebratory photographs of herself to give to the crew, signed ‘Olga, Reval 1908’.
Olga, Queen of Greece, who came armed with this photograph of herself to give to the crew
The diners repaired to the deck, where they could enjoy the illumination of the ships. As The New York Times reported: ‘Warships were brilliantly illuminated and the yachts Polar Star and Alexandra displayed special electrical effects’. Sablin hoped they would appreciate the Standart’s intricate water feature: ‘After dinner, coffee and cigars on quarterdeck. Talking quietly, sitting among the greenery, flowers and gurgling of a small cascade – the pride of our mechanics.’
Sadly the sound of quiet talking and gurgling was soon drowned out by some serenaders. As Ponsonby recalled: ‘After dinner the two monarchs stood on deck while a steamer full of some choral society came and sang weird Russian songs.’
Ponsonby had earlier discussed this same choral society with the head of the British police, Quinn, and been told that the Russian police intended to have all the members strip-searched: ‘When Mr Quinn came and told me this, I felt there might be a row in England and questions might be asked in the house about it. The greater part of the singers were ladies and I wondered what would be said if, when the Russian Emperor came to England, and some choral society asked leave to serenade him, our police insisted on stripping them and searching them… Mr Quinn said Russian police had agreed to give up this stringent measure.’
Needless to say, Sablin found the serenading worse than weird: ‘Under Standart’s stern, yard ships sailing with the brightly dressed public and the local choral society – various Schwarzkopfs – played horrible music. The entire Reval roadstead was filled with lights coming from all the vessels with the music played in honour of the foreign guests.’ Sablin never revealed which aspect of the music he found ‘horrible’, but it can’t have been its foreignness: the Reval musical society programme boasts balalaika accompaniments and an opening song entitled: ‘Let the Tsar live forever’.
Nicolson was convinced that the King found the music tedious: ‘They were serenaded afterwards by certain carefully chosen inhabitants of Reval who appeared in a tug. King Edward, who only cared for Puccini, was bored. He fiddled in an abstract manner with the gold bracelet on his left wrist.’
The New York Times seems to have been alone in its appreciation. ‘Boatloads of German, Estonian and Russian residents steamed out in the roadstead and serenaded the royal visitors with national folk songs and village roundelays, the singing of the Estonians being particularly pleasing as the melody floated over the moonlit waters.’
The Tsarina’s attitude to the serenaders is not known, but it was at this point in the evening that she surrendered to a loud fit of tears. Hardinge heard the sound of weeping as he took a solitary walk around the deck. As the former Ambassador to Russia, from 1904 to 1906, he would have been relatively familiar with her moods; he was also 14 years her senior. Both elements would have played a part in his bold decision to approach her. As he recalled: ‘The Empress was in a state of nervous hysteria for, at a dance after dinner on board the Standart, when I happened to wander around the other side of the deck, I heard sobs and found the Empress sitting alone and weeping, and on my offer to obtain help she asked to be left alone.’
Towards the end of the evening, the ‘highly successful nephew’ appeared to suffer a setback, when he tried and failed to attract his uncle’s attention. Sablin was infuriated as he watched the King talking, instead, to a random member of the Standart crew: ‘Ministers and other officials gathered around the Tsar expecting to be summoned to the anticipated informal meeting of the monarchs… The King lit a large cigar, took a seat in one of the chairs near the royal cabins. Suddenly he stood up and slowly walked towards the watchman. Standing to the right of the ladder, Edward VII began animatedly talking to the astonished sailor about something, puffing a fragrant cigar from time to time. Everyone was watching the scene with amazement.
‘The Tsar tried to approach His Majesty several times but the King pretended not to notice and became even more engaged in conversation. The ministers concluded that no conference would be held – neither today nor in the future – and the King decided without them what was required for the good of England. The King entertained the simple Russian sailor with his conversation for a quarter of an hour.’
When the party left the Standart, Bertie made a point of taking leave of his new acquaintance. ‘The King quickly turned away and went to say goodbye to the Empress, gave a friendly hug to the Emperor and went to the ladder. A few words, with a sweet smile, short bows to the retinue and the minister, then the King, when passing the watchman, said: “Goodbye, goodbye dear fellow”. Turning once again, Edward VII patted his astonished companion on the back and gave him a half smoked fragrant cigar and then skipped into his motorboat.’
Sablin added a bizarre detail: ‘As the motorboat pulled away, a hand came out of a lower porthole and handed the coxswain a ginger kitten. As he recounted: ‘“Uncle Eddie” pressed it to his chest.’
After the King left, the captain of the Standart, also, coincidentally, called Nikolai Sablin, immediately quizzed the privileged sailor: ‘The captain approached the watchman, “What was the King saying to you?”. “I do not know,” replied the King’s famous companion, in his own language, beaming broadly. “Good for you brother…” said the usually stern captain and awarded the lucky man a brand new rouble.’
The Tsar gave an unusually cheerful account of his day. He did not seem to have noticed any slights from his uncle and was probably unaware of his wife’s fit of tears: ‘The day remained marvellous, in a dead like stillness. The impression of the day was the very best.’ Ponsonby was captivated by the white night: ‘rather weird being broad daylight – sun does not set till 11.30 at night. There was a beautiful, red sky.’ Sablin added a final, vivid picture: ‘The white night lit up the roadstead, and the bulky figure of Edward VII paced rhythmically on the upper promenade deck of V and A.’
Wednesday 10th June
The Tsar’s diary: ‘A divine day again’.
At 11.30am the Tsar and Tsarina were obliged to receive delegations from Reval. The head of security, Spiridovich, noted the Tsarina’s malaise. Was it her legs again? Or her upset from the night before? Spiridovich wrote: ‘Accompanied by the Empress, the Emperor inspected the circle formed by the delegates, exchanging a few words with each of them. After him, the Empress had little to add, she spoke very little, every so often she would smile, but it seems a forced smile. She was visibly uncomfortable and ill at ease, those seeing her for the first time could have mistaken this for arrogance. “She was a sorry sight,” one of the delegates who adored the Emperor and his family told me later.’
To add to her discomfort, the Tsarina was the victim of a social gaffe. As Spiridovich added: ‘The peasant representatives included one of His Majesty’s former Uhlans. The Emperor, who had an astonishing memory, recognised him, and told the Empress, in English, to extend her hand to the Uhlan. The Empress did so, and the Uhlan just shook it, without kissing it. Everyone felt embarrassed but no one knew how to signal to the Uhlan to draw his attention to the lack of protocol he had just made.’
The British party returned to the Standart for what the Tsar referre
d to prosaically as ‘a big lunch’ at 1pm. ‘Dejeuner du 28 Mai 1908’ comprised: ‘Potage Crème Printanière, Petits Patés, Truite Taymine Italienne Sce Verte, Petits Poulets de Grains Clamart, Selle de Bebague Richelieu, Macedoine de Fruits au Champagne, Mousseline Victoria, Dessert’. It was during this meal that the King hit upon the happy notion of giving the Tsar another British title. Hardinge fondly recalled receiving a note from the King asking: ‘Whether I did not think he might appoint the Emperor to be a British admiral of the fleet. (This menu I treasure amongst my papers). I at once replied that I thought the idea an excellent one.’ Fisher gave a colourful description of Nicky’s reaction: ‘Tsar like a child in his delight at having been made admiral of the fleet’. The Tsar himself, as ever, gave little away in his own diary: ‘Uncle Bertie appointed me Admiral of the English navy.’
The excellent idea proved controversial. On June 10th, the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, wrote Knollys a stiff letter, headed ‘secret’. He had heard of the appointment in a cypher telegraph from Hardinge: ‘As you well know this Russian visit has, from the first, been a delicate affair. We have done our best to remove apprehension and doubts, but where such grave issues are involved, I should not be doing my duty if I did not suggest, and even urge, the desirability of preliminary notice.’
Upon his return, the King was informed by Asquith directly that the appointment, ‘off his own bat’, had been unconstitutional. Bertie breezily instructed Knollys to write a letter of apology, explaining that he was ‘totally unaware of the constitutional point’. He added that he: ‘regretted that he had, without knowing it, acted irregularly’. Beckendorff gave his own account of the repercussions: ‘The radicals and the British court blamed Grey, for he had sent the King on the visit without a responsible minister at his side.’ The forthright Admiral Fisher, of course, had his own view: ‘It’s a jolly good thing we have a King who knows how to act, as cabinet ministers seem to me always like frightened rabbits.’
Nicolson left some scant details: ‘Large lunch on Standart; Izvolsky and Hardinge discussed the Straits.’ Hardinge would insist that he was: ‘always prepared to discuss the Straits in an amicable spirit’. He clearly did keep the discussions amicable, even though he and Izvolsky were in basic disagreement. In an echo of the Tsar’s talks with Salisbury at Balmoral, Izvolsky held the view that the Turkish Straits should be open only to Russians, while Hardinge wanted them open to all. Hardinge’s description of the great Izvolsky indicates that he succeeded in gaining the upper hand: ‘He [Izvolsky] struck me as very able, adroit but extremely timid… any suggestion which I made to him was at once set aside as requiring careful study.’
Hardinge broached easier topics with the Tsar: ‘He was enthusiastic over the Anglo-Russia agreement [and he] foretold close cooperation in the future between the two countries.’ Hardinge brought up the positive Russian press coverage preceding the visit: ‘On my saying I was surprised at the support of the “bitterest foe of England” (Novoe Vremya), His Majesty admitted that he was also astonished at the rapidity with which the feeling had spread and that he had never been so surprised as when he had read recently in a chauvinistic “rag” called the Sviet a warm article in praise of England and urging closer relations between the two countries.’ In fact, the Sviet had also been quoted by Hugh O’Beirne as referring to the ‘traditional enmity of England’. In the growing spirit of accord, the Tsar told Hardinge that he looked forward, at some stage, to meeting Edward Grey.
Hardinge commented, once again, on the Tsar’s well-being: ‘[He] looked extraordinarily well and in the best possible spirits.’ If he was struck by the contrast in mood between the Tsar and his tearful wife of the night before, he made no reference to it.
Meanwhile, Ponsonby made great strides with Stolypin, who he described as: ‘a grave, splendid-looking man with a long grey beard’. Stolypin told Ponsonby of his refusal to be intimidated by the nihilists who had attacked him just two years before: the resulting explosion had cost his daughter her leg. Ponsonby was full of admiration: ‘He said that if he lived in fear of his life, his life wouldn’t be worth living. He asked me a good deal about English politics, seemed to be very well versed in everything going on in England.’ Stolypin himself was very taken with the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, ‘la charmante Lady Antrim’, later sending her photographs of Reval. He spoke of ‘les belles journées… dont je garde un souvenir inoubliable’.
It was probably during this lunch that the beleaguered Tsarina suffered a further blow, as the King told her that the little Grand Duchesses had poor English accents. The criticism would have been especially offensive coming from Bertie, whose own speech was distinctly Germanic. The Tsar’s nephew, Prince Dmitri, never forgot the King’s regular exclamation: ‘Ach!’
Bertie’s comments, overheard by Arthur Nicolson, went down badly. It is impossible to know the reasons for the Tsarina’s extreme response. Was she in pain again? Was it her generally low mood? Did she worry that his criticism was justified? In any case, her decision was immediate and uncompromising: the English tutor, Mr Epps, must go.
Epps has since been accused of giving the two elder Grand Duchesses a ‘strange Scottish twang’. But his relation, Janet Epps, doubts Epps ever set foot in Scotland. He was raised in Kent and attended a private boys’ grammar school, before doing a course at a teacher training institute in London. Janet Epps is inclined to lay the blame elsewhere: ‘They probably got their accent from the Irish nanny.’ This could have been Miss Eager, from Limerick, or Orchie, from Dublin. Orchie had been at the court, intermittently, since little Olga’s birth, in 1895, and stayed, for a short time, after Miss Eager’s departure in 1904.
Epps’s replacement, the Yorkshireman Sydney Gibbes, mentioned nothing of his predecessor’s accent, but he was more than willing to give details of speech defects: ‘Epps was a nice man but he was totally uneducated. He couldn’t pronounce “g” at the end of a word and he couldn’t pronounce “h” at the beginning without an enormous effort, which was prominent in all his conversation.’ Gibbes further accused Epps of being given to gossip: ‘He used to tell tales and I remember his coming once to see us and telling tales about the Grand Duchess Anastasia… She was a bright lively girl and everybody’s favourite. It was a very unprofessional thing for him to speak of the palace to people outside.’
Before moving to the palace, Epps had taught at the Lyceum high school for Young Nobles in St Petersburg. The Grand Duchesses may well have proved more challenging than the young nobles. When not arguing about his exotic pen, the girls would stand on the window sills then jump off, obliging Epps, then pushing 60, to catch them. ‘But they were bonnie children and possessed “avoir du pois” [weight] so it was a tiring game,’ he recalled.
With all his difficulties, Mr Epps had become a favourite at court. The Tsarina would have been reluctant to fire him, but she may have felt compelled to be seen to do something. Miss Eager had already been sent away and Orchie had died. Mr Epps seemed to accept his dismissal with good grace. As Janet Epps says: ‘He quite understood that he had to be the scapegoat in this situation.’
Days before the meeting, the Tsarina had celebrated her 36th birthday, with the Tsar writing hopefully in his diary: ‘Dear Alix’s birthday. Lord grant her health, strength and fortitude.’ Epps received a hand-scrawled telegram thanking him for his birthday greeting: ‘Many thanks for congratulations, Alexandra.’ He would leave, weeks later, with a large ruby ring for his troubles.
At some point during the meeting at Reval, there was the inevitable exchange of lavish gifts. The King presented his nephew with a sword made by Wilkinson, engraved with the words: ‘For his Imperial Majesty Emperor of All Russia from His Loving Uncle Edward, Reval 1908’. Nicky, in turn, gave his uncle a nephrite vase set with cabochon moonstones and chalcedony, which had been bought on 23rd May at a cost of 2,500 roubles. Other Russian gifts included cigarette boxes and cigar boxes, bronze busts for Count Benckendorff and Charles Hardinge, and enamelled s
poons for Mrs Knollys.
Spirodovich was thrilled to receive a medal, though he failed to understand most of the accompanying speech. He reported that he was taken to one of the British ships by the head of the secret service. He was then introduced to: ‘an elderly Englishman who appeared honourable and important… The honourable Englishman read something small out to me in his language, of which I did not understand a single word, and after that he ceremoniously presented me with the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Victoria with a certificate, letter and statutes. Once this was done, he congratulated me, this time in French, for having deserved this royal order, I thanked him, was then led back to the ladder, and returned home… I was very proud of the decoration and the circumstances in which I had received it.’
The receipt of his own medal did little to stem Sablin’s niggles: ‘The British are very sparing with their honours. Apart from the Captain, the only other officers who received them were the senior officer and chief of guard.’ He tut-tutted over muddles with the ranking: ‘I received Victorian Order Class 4, and the senior officer, more senior than me, the Victorian Order Class 5. Chagin [the naval Admiral] understood to correct this misunderstanding, which I readily agreed to.’
Sablin pointed out that, while the British were so sparing, the imperial couple were always finding new reasons to present gifts. The Tsarina was as generous as her husband: ‘Starting that year – 1908 – before the end of the season, Their Majesties would have dinner with us in our wardroom and to show gratitude for the voyages, they would give us something – a loving cup or wine glasses or flower vases, etc.
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