Queen Alexandra and the Tsarina
The countryside around Cowes was, indeed, teeming with Russian and British police. Patrolling cyclists raced through the leafy lanes, while Russian secret agents hung around in pairs, cursorily disguised in yachting caps. Emissaries from Scotland Yard and St Petersburg were stationed at Southampton, Portsmouth, Lymington and Bournemouth. Visitors arriving at the pier heads of Ryde, Seaview, Sandown, Shanklin, Ventnor, Alum and Totland Bays were scrutinised and some turned away. The island faced unprecedented numbers, some 12,000 visitors arriving over just a couple of days, at the Victoria Pier.
The County Press made the most of the excitement: ‘The Scotland Yard officers are, of course, fully acquainted with the movements in this country of the Russian and other foreign revolutionaries, and the few suspects of this connection who arrived at the yachting capital were promptly warned away.’ The Isle of Wight Times reported: ‘The local police frankly confess that they have never before had to deal with anything so comprehensive and complete as the scheme of protection for the Tsar, nor do they believe that an organisation to equal it has ever been formed in England.’
Pleasure launches circling both royal yachts were kept at bay by aggressive little Russian picket boats. Several were chased off and one of them was towed away by a torpedo boat. The journalist Henry Lucy felt that the security put a dampener on the occasion: ‘The reception of the Tsar… was hopelessly depressed by the circumstance that, to put the matter bluntly, he shrank from setting his foot ashore… though all the resources of Scotland Yard, reinforced by a contingent of Russian secret police, familiar with the individuality of anarchists, had been invoked to keep murderous hands off, it was felt undesirable for His Majesty to land.’
One of the British party, Lord Suffield, had been to Russia and met Tsar Alexander II, who had later been assassinated. Even he was horrified by the security: ‘Everybody seemed to be in fear for the poor hunted Tsar. I do not know how any man can submit to such thraldom; it is too big a price to pay for being a potentate!’
The first business conducted on board the Standart was, appropriately, a meeting of the heads of security. The Isle of Wight’s Chief Constable, Captain H.G. Adams Connor, was in consultation with the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Edward Henry. Throughout the visit, finer points regarding security could be discussed and amended, thanks to special telegraph and telephone cable laid down between the shore and the royal yachts. The Standart had her own telegraph office on board. The County Press recorded the Cowes post office as having: ‘an unprecendented amount of business. It had been obliged to take on extra staff, largely augmented from London and other large centres.’
After the security chiefs came the diplomats, headed by the Russian Ambassador, Count Benckendorff. Throughout July, he had been exchanging letters with Knollys, containing the inevitable lists of prospective royal guests and their attendants. Further lists gave details of the recipients of various awards.
Benckendorff, by then 60, was distinguished-looking, tall and thin, with a long, lugubrious face and monocle. His moustaches were shorter than Izvolsky’s but equally painstakingly curled. He had been curiously unenthusiastic about the visit. In a letter to Izvolsky, he wrote: ‘Le Roi est ENCHANTE de voir l’Empereur chez lui’. But he proceeded to complain about the expense of the accommodation, insisting that Cowes had: ‘un seul hotel à peu près propre’, namely the Gloster Hotel.
The Ambassador was later described by Donald M. Wallace, who had been at Balmoral and was now extra-groom-in-waiting to the King, as generally ‘uneasy and anxious’. Wallace added that the great Izvolsky, also, seemed to let his standards slip, appearing: ‘not at all in high spirits’.
After a relatively brisk 20-minute reunion, the royal parties were transferred from the Standart to the Victoria and Albert. The King’s Lord Chamberlain, the 6th Earl Spencer, recorded events at the Isle of White in his diary. Then 54, Spencer had drooping eyelids that lent him a rather supercilious expression. He was preoccupied with his dress and the day of the Tsar’s arrival began badly: ‘My new serge not a success with the King’.
But his subsequent presentation to the imperial couple went swimmingly; he proudly noted his progress with the reticent Tsarina: ‘Empress very civil to me… Remembered the Windsor visit; talked about her children’. The Windsor visit would have been a reference to Alix’s stay with her grandmother in 1894.
Luncheon was served, surprisingly late, at 2pm. The King escorted his niece, the Tsarina, to the table, while the Tsar accompanied his aunt, Queen Alexandra. No formal toasts were proposed, but the King raised his glass to the health of the imperial couple.
After lunch, the Tsar was besieged by British dignitaries, among them the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, the First Lord of the Admiralty and Fisher’s correspondent, Reginald McKenna, and finally Edward Grey, who he had once insisted he was keen to meet. Benckendorff watched with misgivings, aware that the Tsar failed to impress the British statesmen, coming across as an ‘entirely unaffected but well-informed country gentleman’. The future Edward VIII, then a boy of 15, agreed. He later wrote: ‘I do not recall him [the Tsar] as a man of marked personality.’
Benckendorff had become convinced that the Tsar was outclassed by the King. Confiding his grim thoughts to a relation, he was perhaps over-generous in his list of the King’s qualities: ‘His skill, his tact, his aptitude to avoid quite effortlessly saying a foolish thing… and then to compare, that’s what hurts.’
During his six years as Ambassador, Benckendorff had frequently found himself discomforted by his countrymen. He became wary of Russian theatrical events, anxious that performers might overdo their patriotism. In a letter to his wife, he described his rising tension during a concert at the London Colisseum: ‘A balalaika plays “Rule Britannia” – the audience ecstatic. “God save the King”… I was wondering what the devil is going to happen next. I am sitting very much in the public view. I am getting worried. The orchestra strike up “God save the Tsar”…’ His worries, on this occasion, were unfounded: the audience applauded politely.
At 3.20pm, the Victoria and Albert weighed anchor, in preparation for a review of the British fleet, accompanied by the Standart, the Polar Star, two Russian cruisers and two Russian destroyers. Twenty-eight admirals presided over a fleet comprising 24 battleships, 16 armoured cruisers, 48 destroyers and well over 50 other vessels of war, all arranged in three long lines.
The King and the Tsar stood side by side on the saloon deck of the Victoria and Albert, acknowledging cheers from British and Russian sailors. One photograph of the event, taken on the Lord Nelson, shows the somewhat choreographed nature of the cheering: the sailors, standing erect on the top deck next to the railings, evenly spaced, each with right hand raised waving a cap.
The Russian head of security, Spiridovich, was overwhelmed by the sight: ‘Three rows of massive warships and several rows of smaller ships stretched in parallel lines in Spithead harbour and disappeared out towards Cowes… one enormously impressive force, defying reality, a complete vision of grandeur.’ There was no let-up from the squally conditions, but, as Spiridovich wrote, the ships were restrained by their moorings ‘like immense spindles placed between the steel giants by an almighty hand’. Even Sablin was entranced: ‘The scene was majestic and awesome. What power, what brilliance!’
The fleet was almost too glorious. As Spiridovich added: ‘It was not without an element of jealousy that we admired the splendid scene. If only we had something like this!’ Donald M. Wallace recalled Admiral Konstantine Nilov’s discomfort. The Admiral, he wrote, was: ‘depressed that the British navy was better than the Russians’… The magnificent British fleet at Cowes made him think of the condition of the Russian navy, which he described to me as “deplorable”… A navy recruit may never have seen the sea in his life…. [there was a] general indifference to the Russian navy and higher posts [were] not always filled satisfactorily.’
Admiral Fishe
r was unable to resist ramming the point home: ‘I told the Emperor it was a fine avenue! – 18 miles of ships – the most powerful in the world and none of them more than ten years old!’
The Tsar and Edward VII on board the Victoria and Albert, acknowledging cheers from British and Russian sailors
In fact, the day before, during the welcome to the King, the Royal Navy had suffered a serious accident when a cannon backfired on HMS Temeraire. An able seaman died after part of his left arm was shot away; while two ordinary seaman suffered injuries to the face and hands. All three had been taken to the Royal Naval Hospital at Haslar. The County Press reported: ‘The King, to whom news of the accident was communicated, expressed great concern, made sympathetic inquiries and asked to be kept informed of the progress of the sufferers.’
The review of the fleet was barely under way before the Russians underwent a humiliating setback when their cruiser, Rurik, nearly collided with another ship. The Rurik was already sullied by her links to one of the previous year’s assassination plots. The shady Azev had been involved in the plan, scheduled to take place months after the Reval visit.
Presently, the Standart herself ran into difficulties, proving less nifty than the Victoria and Albert, which was very fast and, being smaller than the Standart, more manoeuverable – ‘Chagin [the Admiral] had to reverse one of the engines, trying to stay in line with the English,’ wrote Sablin.
Lord Suffield, on board the Victoria and Albert, had already been put out by the excessive security. He now saw mishaps galore: ‘I felt quite bewildered as we passed up and down the lines of battleships in the midst of unprecedented turmoil; the pomp and circumstance of everything really seemed tiresome and the firing of salutes merely a great waste of valuable powder!’
The journalist Henry Lucy, however, was cheered by the display: ‘The effect came as near as landsmen are likely to witness to the scene of actual battle. At first the smoke from the guns curling slowly round the ships was pierced by the sunlight streaming through. As the firing went on the cloud thickened, till, before the yacht carrying Caesar and his fortunes had sped a mile, she and he were lost in the smoke that bridged the broad avenue.’ Caesar, coincidentally, was the name of Edward VII’s dog, then on board the Victoria and Albert. The terrier was not a favourite of his wife. ‘Horrid little dog’, she would complain, days after her husband’s death.
The windswept spectators must have been relieved when the review of the fleet was finally over. ‘Favoured guests were taken ashore to Cowes, where they arrived in a bedraggled and otherwise pitiful condition,’ wrote Henry Lucy.
During the late afternoon, several Russian courtiers grew intent on going ashore. ‘None of us knew why we had been in such a hurry to disembark,’ recalled Spiridovich. ‘After all, we really didn’t have any immediate tasks on landing.’ But their eagerness did not stop them agonising about their appearance. They wanted to look like English gentlemen but so far their efforts had been rather hit-and-miss. Spiridovich recalled: ‘Some of these military men tried to adapt to civilian clothing, to which they were not accustomed, and appear like real gentlemen. Unfortunately, they were not very successful at this and every so often one could see looks of amusement from our hosts.
‘One of our party spent his time rolling up and down his trousers in an effort to follow the latest fashion trends. Finally, seeing that he was only crumpling his clothing, he gave up any further attempt and resigned himself to wearing trousers without any creases. But how shameful! What will the English say? Oh that damn tailor.’
Spirodovich’s party faced further difficulties when their motorboat collided with a mysterious underwater obstacle. The accident happened after a high-handed Russian prince ordered the boat’s helmsman to ignore guiding markers in the sea. According to Spirodovich, the helmsman tried to argue, but had been shouted down by the Prince. ‘We veered out in a straight line for a few seconds, then heard a dreadful crash, and our boat stopped… We went backwards and forwards a few times before we were finally able to extricate ourselves.’
Arriving at Cowes a few minutes later, the Russian courtiers found themselves being stared at by a large crowd. Had they failed to look sufficiently like English gentlemen? It was impossible to tell. Spiriodivich was, however, gratified by the crowd’s fascination: ‘They looked at us curiously, admiring the smart young sailors from the guard crew, who indeed looked magnificent in their imperial navy uniforms.’ Spiridovich himself was, at this point, a youthful and dapper 36.
The party paraded up and down the High Street. One crew member practised English phrases he had learnt at the Berlitz School in St Petersburg. He was mortified when an Englishwoman simply gawped at him, baffled, before replying in stilted French: ‘Sorry, but I don’t speak Russian.’
As supply officer for the Standart, Sabin was obliged to explore the shops at Cowes. He never made any bones about preferring France – ‘beautiful country, with hearty hospitality’ – to England. But his discovery of the English bank holiday was the last straw: ‘All commercial establishments in the country are closed and you cannot change any letter of credit or buy a pound of bread.’ In France, it had been very different: ‘In spite of being Sunday, the banks were open to us. We not only exchanged letters of credit but were also welcomed with fine wine in the company of charming employees, representing the beautiful half of the human race [women].’
Sablin was disappointed by the consul in Cowes. ‘He turned out to be an elderly Englishman who could not come out to meet me…. People were saying he was so old that he could not get out of bed or someone even said he had died long ago and the consular affairs were managed by his wife and son. The consul’s age was evident from the letters in which he wrote market prices and various certificates.’
Interestingly the police were still unsure of the Tsar and Tsarina’s itinerary. It was emerging that earlier press reports, denying that the Tsar would land, were not set in stone. Spiridovich recalled meeting police representatives and speaking to them about what further security would be necessary if ‘Their Majesties’ ever came ashore.
The Prince of Wales, Georgie, took the early evening easily: ‘6pm, read and rested, as I was pretty tired after standing about all day.’
That first night, both royal families dined on board the Victoria and Albert. Forty-four guests sat at one long table, decorated with red roses and gold centre pieces. The King sat in the middle, with the Tsarina on his right. The Tsar was immediately opposite, with Queen Alexandra on his right. Dignitaries included the Crown Prince and crown Princess of Sweden, Herbert Asquith, Edward Grey and, naturally, Admiral Fisher, who kept a low profile, perhaps feeling the absence of his Grand Duchess Olga. Georgie recorded the few he saw as guests of note: ‘Nicky and Alicky and Russian suite’.
Sablin proved predictably out of sorts, describing the atmosphere at dinner as: ‘characterised by stiffness and tension’. There was no mention here of the King’s subtle humour or charming sweetness. Was the loyal Sablin oversensitive to the pressures on the imperial couple? The Tsar would have had mixed feelings about all the social challenges, while the Tsarina was, once again, unwell. This time, it was not her legs letting her down, but her head. She was suffering, as her husband had, from neuralgia. Donald M. Wallace recalled being told by one of her ladies-in-waiting that the Tsarina had been afflicted with: ‘facial neuralgia which prevented her from sleeping well at night’. Wallace shared Sablin’s view of the atmosphere, registering the unease of his neighbour, Benckendorff: ‘He always sat silent, glancing up and down the table, as if looking for somebody he could not find.’
Thankfully, Sablin rallied sufficiently to appreciate the food, or, as he put it, ‘the remarkable sophistication and refinement of the cuisine’. The exotic menu included: ‘Cailles Froides à la Muscovite’, ‘Timbales de Poires à la Siberienne’ and ‘Glace à la Czarine’. The musical entertainment featured a band from Portsmouth playing a piece from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, a xylophone solo called ‘Le Jo
ngleur’ and Squire’s ‘The Merry Nigger’.
The King’s speech was, once again, off the cuff: ‘I am proud to welcome you both to British waters… Your Majesty, as well as my dear niece, are no strangers to England, especially to the Isle of Wight and I trust your memory will carry you back to years ago, when the hospitality of my beloved mother was extended to you both… I trust that Your Majesty will never look upon these ships as symbols of war, but, on the contrary, as a protection to our coasts and commerce and, above all for upholding the interests of peace.’
The Tsar’s more elaborate speech was, needless to say, carefully prepared: ‘I take great pleasure in expressing my heartiest thanks for the kind words with which Your Majesty has been pleased to welcome the Empress and myself in British water. The magnificent review which I witnessed today bears full testimony to England’s greatness…. Fifteen years have passed since last I came to Cowes. I shall ever bear in mind the happy days spent with your beloved and venerated mother, Queen Victoria, and the affection she bestowed upon me, as upon the Empress, her granddaughter.’
Georgie wrote agreeably in his diary: ‘Papa proposed Nicky’s health which he answered. Very nice speeches.’ Earl Spencer was equally impressed by the King: ‘Excellent speech. Rather moved….’, but dismissive of the Tsar: ‘The Emperor read his reply.’
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