‘Similarly, to express friendship and in memory of our good relationship, the entourage presented the wardroom with souvenirs: Fabergé cigarette boxes with an image of the yachts, an album with silhouettes of everyone who was on board, which were cut out by the skilful adjutant.’
The Tsar had to be prevented from making more presentations on the British ship, the Minotaur, which had accompanied the Victoria and Albert. Admiral Fisher mentioned the visit in a letter to his friend, the Liberal politician Reginald McKenna: ‘He went all over her. He wanted to decorate the whole crew, but the King restrained him.’ The Tsar recorded baldly: ‘I sailed on their cruiser, the Minotaur, and looked it over from the outside. Then I transferred to the turbine yacht, the [Russian] Alexandra, on which all the relatives were.’
The second ‘Five o’clock’ took place on the Polar Star. As the Tsar wrote: ‘We departed to the Polar Star where Mama had tea set up.’ The imperial family then returned to the Standart and the Tsar did what he enjoyed best: ‘played with the children’. The Standart was well equipped with games: Alexis’s playroom boasted a blue and red kite, battledore and shuttlecock, deck billiards and nine bunches of straws for blowing bubbles.
Communal games included bingo sessions, arranged either by the officers or the Tsar’s sister Olga, perhaps anxious for distraction from her unhappy home life. There was an excuse for yet more gifts, as the Tsarina awarded prizes from her chaise longue. Sablin wrote: ‘It is impossible to forget the pleasure of the bingo evenings. Everyone was calling numbers and, when someone won, the Empress would give a prize, a little thing like a pen knife or a cutter or something small, painted by her… it felt very normal as if we were a family.’ Rounds of ‘cat and mouse’ were particularly enjoyed by the diminutive Tsar, who would target an agile, but obliging, engineer. The Tsarina herself occasionally joined in. Though not very limber, she probably did better than her friend, the portly Anya Vyrubova, who, according to Sablin, created much merriment as she ‘lumbered about’.
Everyone on board took part in the games, even the Standart’s priest, Father Feodor Ivanovich Znamensky. Sablin was a great supporter of the canny priest who, as he reported: ‘Had an excellent understanding of the environment in which he happened to be; he did not set any objectives and since the officers and the team always tried to sneak away from the services, he made them short and sweet.’
That evening, the parties dined on the British royal yacht. ‘At 8.30 the two of us went to the Victoria and Albert to a state dinner,’ noted the Tsar. Soon after the imperial couple’s arrival, the King faced a dilemma. Who would accompany him into the dining room: the Tsarina or the Dowager? English protocol dictated that the sovereign’s wife should precede the Dowager; but this might put the older lady’s nose out of joint. However, if the Tsarina were forced into second place, she might well seize a welcome opportunity to duck out altogether. The King handled the situation with his usual bluff aplomb. Taking the arms of both ladies, he declared: ‘Tonight I am going to enjoy the unique honour of taking two empresses into dinner.’
The lavish nine-course meal began with ‘Tortue claire, Consommé froid’ and ended with the slightly more prosaic ‘Glace aux Pêches’. Headed with a royal crest and a picture of ‘HMY Victoria and Albert’, the menu further featured: ‘Filets de Boeuf garnis à la Bouquetière’, ‘Dindonneaux et poulets à la broche’ and, not least, ‘Cailles froides à la Russe’.
Relishing his new position as a British admiral, the Tsar now returned the compliment, suggesting the King accept the title: Admiral of the Russian fleet. As Hardinge wrote: ‘At official banquet on board V and A, King proposed Tsar’s health as British Admiral of the Fleet and the British cruisers thundered an admiral’s salute. The Tsar was pleased at the honour and countered the compliment by asking him to be an admiral “of our young and growing fleet”.’
In fact, the young and growing Russian fleet comprised just one ship, the Almaz, now acting as a floating hotel for the Russian ministers. The rest of the fleet had been sunk at Tsushima, during the Russo-Japanese War. As Hardinge put it bluntly: ‘The Almaz only existing representative’. The Tsar, as usual, recognised no awkwardness: ‘I appointed Uncle Bertie an Admiral of our navy.’
Admiral Fisher was considered by some to be a troublesome presence at Reval. He was regarded with alarm by the Kaiser, who suspected him of poisoning the King’s mind against Germany. There were fears, elsewhere, that he was urging Stolypin on to war, keen to build up land forces facing Germany.
The menu for the lavish nine-course dinner given in honour of the imperial couple by Bertie on the royal yacht
At table, however, Fisher was more interested in carrying on his flirtation with the Tsar’s sister, Olga. His success was such that the Grand Duchess was soon guffawing loudly. As she explained: ‘Admiral Fisher could tell the funniest stories and my laughter was known to carry far.’ The King was eventually obliged to rebuke Fisher: ‘Just remember you aren’t a midshipman any longer.’ Olga later gave a fond description of her riotous evening: ‘At a dinner on board the V and A, I laughed so loudly that Uncle Bertie raised his head and asked Admiral Fisher to remember he was not in the guardroom. I felt dreadful… I had to wait until dinner was over and I could tell Uncle Bertie that it had all been my fault.’ But the irrepressible Admiral had not finished. After dinner, he was intent on recapturing the romance of those dancing lessons in Karlsbad. The parties had barely settled themselves on deck, before Fisher approached Olga, bowing and offering her his arm. The couple then took their place in a grand circle, featuring the two monarchs and their ministers, and the orchestra struck up the waltz from the Merry Widow. As Olga was swung around by the handsome Admiral, she may have given a wistful thought to merry widows. There’s no account of what her husband, or indeed Fisher’s wife, thought of the revelry.
The King’s exact thoughts are, equally, unknown, but Fisher felt he could gauge his audience, enthusing to his friend Reginald McKenna: ‘I said to my sweet partner: “How about Siberia for me after this?” which sent her into hysterics… the Grand Duchess Olga felt herself like Herodias’ daughter [Salome] as they formed a ring all round us while we danced! And my head wasn’t wanted on a charger!’
When he had worn Olga out, Fisher proceeded to dance on his own. As the journalist W.T. Stead later wrote: ‘“Jacky” went on deck and by requests, which were commands, he brought down the house by dancing a hornpipe in approved nautical fashion.’ Fisher was always keen to show off his steps. Three years before, he had pushed his luck by asking Queen Alexandra for a dance. ‘Certainly not’, came the reply.
Nonetheless, Olga was convinced that all the male members of the Russian party were won over by Fisher’s antics. She wrote ‘Sir John’ a gushing letter: ‘All our gentlemen – ministers, admirals and generals – were delighted with you, as you brought such an amount of frolic and jollity into their midst. They couldn’t get over it and spoke about you and your dancing, anecdotes, etc, without end. I told them that, even if they tried their very hardest, they would never reach anywhere near your level. I shall never forget the last evening, when you entertained Victoria and me with your solo performance. I hadn’t laughed so much for ages.’
Queen Alexandra may have turned down her opportunity to dance with Fisher, but she recognised his charm, noting wryly: ‘He even succeeded in achieving the impossible by bringing a smile to the face of the Empress of Russia.’ Fisher himself was proud of that particular achievement: ‘They told me she [the Tsarina] had not laughed for two years.’ On 12th June he wrote to his friend McKenna boasting of his progress with the Russian party; he admitted that the Tsar remained a little wary: ‘The whole lot of them are now all dead-on for the Emperor coming to England but he said to one of them: “Don’t let us hurry too much, we might spoil it”.’
The Tsar gave the briefest description of the evening’s merriment. There was no reference to his wife’s rare smile: ‘We talked for a long time, listened to the choruses again, s
inging from the sailboats. Olga danced with Admiral Fisher.’
Mossolov expressed his admiration, once again, for the generally convivial atmosphere: ‘On board the Victoria and Albert things were done differently. After dinner the King and his august guests sat down in comfortable armchairs; coffee and liqueurs were served; an armchair was left vacant alongside each person of high rank and the officers with whom the King wanted to talk were invited to sit down in one of these chairs; after a fairly long conversation, the King would nod and his interlocutor would retire for somebody else to take his place.’
The evening concluded with fond farewells. ‘The Emperor and Empress said goodbye to the King and we all shook hands warmly with the Russian suite and the next morning we left for England,’ recalled Ponsonby. The Tsar took his leave, as he had done at Balmoral, without regrets: ‘We said goodbye to Uncle Bertie, Aunt Alix and Victoria around 12 midnight and returned to our ship in the quiet of a bright night.’
Thursday 11th June
The Tsar’s diary: ‘The day was excellent.’
The parties went their separate ways. The Victoria and Albert weighed anchor in the early hours of the morning, arriving at Port Victoria three days later. The Tsar remained in good form, probably further buoyed up by the departure of the British ships: ‘At 3am the English ships weighed anchor and sailed out to sea. The roadstead was markedly empty.’
Passing mentions were made of work: ‘Received Izvolsky’s report’/‘Received Stolypin after lunch’. Otherwise, the Tsar welcomed a return to the Standart idyll: ‘Prayers were said on the occasion of Tatiana’s birthday.’ (The little Grand Duchess Tatiana had just turned 11). A farewell dinner followed with his mother, the Dowager; sister, Grand Duchess Olga; and brother-in-law, Grand Duke Peter: ‘At 11pm we said goodbye to her [his mother], Olga and Petya.’ The comforting bedtime routine was outlined by Sablin: ‘Towards 12.30 on Standart, the sailor in charge of cabins would inform the watch: “His Majesty has deigned to go to bed”.’
By the following day, the Tsar was basking in balaika music from the Standart’s own orchestra: an improvement, doubtless on the efforts of the Reval Musical Society: ‘Weather was ideal but cool. We also weighed anchor at 10.30 and sailed out to sea. We cross over to Pikopas under the best conditions – 135 miles in eight and a half hours time. The sea was delightful… The balalaikas played during dinner.’
Sablin described the arrangements following the meeting: ‘After departure of the British, Standart returned to Kronstandt from Reval. And Their Majesties left for Peterhof, promising that in the autumn we would be sailing as always but not for long because, on doctors’ advice, the Empress wanted to undergo treatment in Nauheim, Germany, where the entire family was going in autumn.’
It is perhaps a measure of the Tsarina’s general low spirits, that Spiridovich deemed 1908 one of her better years. He remembered her as being unusually happy during a subsequent sail through the fjords: ‘There had been a particularly agreeable atmosphere that year in the fjords. The Empress’s constant good mood, her appearance of good health, everyone’s desire to please her, had created an exceedingly pleasant ambience, happy with the happiness of youth… When Alix happy, everybody happy.’
Admiral Fisher’s verdict on the two-day meeting was ecstatic. As he wrote to McKenna: ‘The visit has been a phenomenal triumph… the King has surpassed himself all round. Every blessed Russian of note he got quietly into his spider web and captured!’ Hardinge was almost as enthusiastic: ‘All my time at Reval spent talking to Stolypin and Izvolsky on foreign affairs… good progress made. Short conversations with the Tsar in best possible spirits.’ He was apparently determined to overlook the Tsarina’s tearful episode: ‘There was no disguising the fact that the Emperor and Empress were extraordinarily happy in the company of their uncle and aunt.’
In her biography of Admiral Fisher, Fisher’s Face, Jan Morris outlines the reasons behind the meeting: ‘The purpose of the Reval meeting was to make sure that in another European war they would be allies rather than enemies and to reassure the nervous Tsar that he would not be alone if Germany attacked his territories.’ Jane Ridley, Edward VII’s biographer, describes its successful outcome: ‘Reval achieved its aim of strengthening ties between Russia and Britain.’ For his part, Spiridovich quoted a report in The Times: ‘Together with France, this [Anglo-Russian] entente will, from now on, work on consolidating general peace. The friendship between these three countries can only serve to strengthen each country.’
Russian newspapers referred to a ‘feast of peace’. Hugh O’Beirne wrote buoyantly to the Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, from St Petersburg, on 18th June: ‘I have been assured, from many widely different quarters, of the excellent effect produced on Russian opinion by the Reval meeting… The King’s toast to “the welfare above all” of this “great empire” produced, I know, the happiest impression, not only among politicians but also in court circles, where narrower views are apt to prevail.’ Prince Orloff, the Tsar’s principle aide-de-camp, told Fisher that the King: ‘changed the atmosphere of Russian feelings towards England from suspicion to cordial trust’.
The writer Donald M. Wallace, who had been at Balmoral during the Romanovs’ visit, might have welcomed Prince Orloff’s comments about ‘cordial trust’ but he later revealed that he had no time for the man himself: ‘[Orloff], the fattest member of a corpulent family, is stolid and indolent.’
The meeting did not go down well in Germany. It would not have escaped the Kaiser’s notice that there were no German journalists among the group of 40 special correspondents at Reval. He now complained of being ‘encircled’ by hostile neighbours: ‘The King aims at war. I am to begin it so that he doesn’t get the odium.’
Nicolson reiterated Grey’s original claim, in Westminster, that the meeting was never intended to have a political element. ‘The German press has often attributed great political importance to that visit, and has wished to have it believed that secret arrangements were reached which had for their object the “encircling” and isolation of Germany. There is no truth in this. The two sovereigns did not discuss politics at all and their meeting, with their respective families, was a strictly family reunion. Sir Charles Hardinge and M. Izvolsky had some conversations regarding Macedonia and other matters, but they were merely an interchange of views and nothing definite was concluded.’ For all his talks with Stolypin, Izvolsky and the Tsar, Hardinge echoed Nicolson’s view: ‘The visit had largely a family character.’
Nonetheless it was partly as a result of the Reval meeting that, four months later, the Russo-English Chamber of Commerce was formed at St Petersburg, joined by leading members of the Duma and the Council of the British Empire, in the hope that the declining trade between the two countries would prosper.
While trade relations began to flourish, London enjoyed a respite from some of its Russian revolutionaries. Lenin had gone to settle in Switzerland, where he was joined, just before Christmas, by Prince Kropotkin, who was following doctor’s instructions to take a break from the damp air of Bromley.
That autumn, the Romanov children’s new English tutor, Sydney Gibbes, made his first appearance at the Russian court. Priding himself on his discretion, Mr Gibbes revealed little of his first days with the two elder Grand Duchesses, Olga and Tatiana: though he did pay tribute to their decorum in not commenting when he forgot to put his tie on. Like Sablin, he took a particular shine to the third daughter, Maria: ‘I took as my first lesson the two elder girls. They took their lessons together. Olga and Tatiana… Then I had the third daughter by herself… [Maria] was the most charming of all, the sweetest character and the greatest of them in artistic talent.’ Mr Gibbes was unfazed by the Tsarina’s frequent presence during his lessons. Indeed he gave a rapturous description of her: ‘Not haughty in the ordinary sense, she never forgot her position, she looked queenly, but I was always at ease with her… she had a fresh complexion and beautiful hair and eyes. She gave you her hand with dignity mingled with
shyness, which gave her a truly gracious air.’ Apparently her large feet, which he also noted, did not detract from her dignity.
He was aware that his glowing view of the Tsarina was not widely shared in Russia; he laid the reason for her unpopularity squarely at Queen Victoria’s door: ‘I think that the cause of this must be attributed to the Empress’s lack of a theatrical sense. The theatrical instinct is so deeply engrained in the Russian nature that one often feels that Russians act their lives rather than live them. This was completely foreign to the Empress’s school of thought… which she had mostly acquired under the tutelage of her revered grandmother, Queen Victoria.’
Some months after enjoying the fjords, the Tsarina suffered another downturn, refusing to join her husband at their customary reception for the diplomatic corps at new year. This time the trouble was her nerves. Despite her frequent protest ‘The peasants love us,’ Alix had developed a fear of large gatherings. As Nicky told his cousin, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich: ‘The Empress is very unwilling to receive, and is fearful of people, especially in crowds.’
Alexis was absent from the new year liturgy, at Tsarskoe Selo, following a fall. Grand Duke Konstantin recalled being told that the boy had ‘inflammation of the knee joint’.
Of course, as long as the Tsarevich suffered from such inflammations, Rasputin would remain a welcome visitor in the royal household. In March 1909 the Tsarina wrote effusively to her daughters: ‘I’m glad you had him [Rasputin] so long to yourselves, 1,000 kisses, Mama.’ She instructed her eldest daughter, Olga: ‘Remember above all to always be a good example to the little ones, then Our Friend [Rasputin] will be contented with you.’ On the 26th April, the Tsar wrote in his diary: ‘From 6 to 7.30 we saw Grigory [Rasputin] together with Olga. After dinner I had a go at billiards with Dmitri and in the evening sat for a while again with Grigory in the nursery.’
The Imperial Tea Party Page 12
