If Izvolsky was generally down in the mouth, he would have been cheered by references, in both speeches, to a recent visit to Britain by delegates from the Russian parliament. The Duma delegates had been received, according to Benckendorff, ‘warmly but tactfully’. Another reason to be cheerful was the prospect of a weekend at a grand country estate with the aristocratic Savile family. Izvolsky had a special relationship with Lady Savile, to whom he had written on 22nd July: ‘It is awfully kind of you to ask me to Rufford Abbey and I am afraid I cannot resist the temptation to see you in your beautiful home…. a letter will find me… on 2nd August at Cowes, on board the Russian imperial yacht Polar Star…
The Polar Star on which Izvolsky sailed as part of the imperial entourage
‘I cannot tell you how I look forward to my visit at Rufford Abbey and to a nice long talk with you. I saw so little of you during my last stay in England and this is such a pleasant way of meeting you. Please convey my best thanks to Lord Savile and believe me yours ever, sincerely, Izvolsky.’
Donald M. Wallace attributed Izvolsky’s low mood on the Isle of Wight to a lack of such glittering female company: ‘Izvolsky enjoys the admiration of charming fashionable ladies and he did not receive at Cowes quite as much of that stimulant as he would have liked… one or two fair beings found him positively unsympathetic and ugly and perhaps did not entirely succeed in concealing this feeling… he was certainly morose.’
Spirodivich, who sailed with Izvolsky on the Polar Star was struck by the minister’s tension, describing him as: ‘haughty and inscrutable. It was as if he were trying hard to contain himself and would soon spill all the secrets he had.’
Izvolsky’s letter to Lady Savile
After dinner, members of the Russian embassy and Russian naval captains were invited to circulate. Lord Suffield was more enthusiastic about the dinner than he had been about the review. ‘We had a great dinner party… and the King took me by the arm, as he always did, and presented me once more to the Emperor of all the Russias, telling him how often I had been in his country, and so on. The Tsar was very gracious and kind.’ Izvolsky cast aside his moroseness for a while, enjoying his reunion with the King. The pair discussed Sherwood Forest and the daring deeds of Robin Hood.
By the time Lord Suffield and several notables returned to their pier, the harbour master had locked up and gone to bed. Suffield, then 79 years old, had to be hoisted over the gates by the Commodore and the Duke of Leeds. But he was made of strong stuff; one of his ancestors had shot a bear in Russia and had it stuffed. It stood for years – most likely at the family’s Gunton estate in Norfolk – with its paws outstretched, proffering food trays.
After dark, the royal yachts, the fleet and 150 other vessels, were lit up. Spiridovich was enraptured: ‘As if turned on by a magic switch, the entire English fleet was illuminated with electric lights along the main lines of vessels. The silver outlines of the sea giants stood out against the liquid darkness of the night. As we looked further out in the distance, the illuminated spectres appeared smaller and smaller, and the last of them, those furthest away, only displayed thin threads of silver. This colossal, immobile stationary fleet looked like something out of a fairytale.’ One British observer wrote: ‘The riding lights and lanterns gleamed and shone like glow-worms against the onyx water.’
Grandees gazed in awe at the spectacle from their own splendid yachts. Nonie May Leeds, the widow of an American tinplate millionaire, was later hailed by The New York Times as Cowes’ biggest spender of 1909. She was shelling out £500 a day (over £40,000 in today’s money) for her ‘floating palace’, Margarita. Among her guests was Lady Muriel Paget, who would later move to St Petersburg to set up the Anglo-Russian hospital. Sablin enjoyed a rare moment of unbridled excitement, gazing at the ships through a telescope: ‘And the boats! Steam vessels, sailing boats, big ocean liners from America’.
The famously acquisitive Princess of Wales, May, enjoyed rich pickings that day. She enthused in her diary that the Tsarina had given her a trinket, the anchor of St Catherine, ‘which for years I had wanted to have!!!’ Georgie’s entry was characteristically sparse: ‘Beautiful night but rather cold. Bed at 11.30’. Earl Spencer closed his diary with: ‘My cabin at 11.45… the air is refreshing though today has been rather trying for one’s feet.’
Tuesday 3rd August
The Princess of Wales, May, wrote in her diary: ‘Went to… Osborne Bay to meet the charming little Russian children. Picked up shells with them on the beach.’
By daybreak the following morning, the fleet had completely disappeared. An awe-struck Spiridovich wrote: ‘Noiselessly, without anyone noticing, this vast fleet had spirited itself out of port during the night. You had to be a true sailor to appreciate the virtuosity of such a manoeuvre.’
The weather had improved. The County Press reported: ‘Tuesday turned out to be a very much better day. There was a nice northerly sailing breeze and the day was much warmer and brighter than the bank holiday had been.’ Spiridovich concurred: ‘The weather was glorious, clear and hot, with a light breeze blowing.’
The Tsar met officers of the Royal Scots Greys before breakfast, thoughtfully insisting they remove their thick bearskin hats. As Sablin recounted: ‘After a few minutes the sovereign asked all the officers to remove them, which was a small deviation from the strict British regulations: the officers of the regiment wear them on their heads for hours, but never complain!’
Later, as Sablin watched the King eating breakfast with the Tsar, he felt, once again, that ‘Uncle Eddie’ was being patronising towards his nephew. He preferred Georgie’s manner towards the Tsar, noting that the young men’s physical resemblance was matched by similarities in character: ‘Edward VII was in good spirits and made charming jokes. But yet again a sense of superiority and some condescension towards our good-natured and shy Emperor was evident. But the Prince of Wales, the future King, was very heartfelt towards the sovereign, having, apparently, the same nature as his cousin.’
Sablin could not have known how the cousins’ friendship was destined to be tested in the years to come.
The Tsar received several delegations, after which the imperial couple watched the royal yacht squadron races with the King and Queen. At some point, Nicky and Georgie sailed together on the racing cutter, Britannia. Among their competitors was the Shamrock, owned by the ‘tea king’ (as Sablin called him) Sir Thomas Lipton. Sablin recalled: ‘For such races, the Prince of Wales dressed as a simple sailor, with his cap without a visor, bearing a ribbon with Britannia on it. The Emperor was wearing a marine guard’s service jacket.’
The wind now began to pick up. Even Georgie was struck: ‘There was a fair breeze… and it is not very warm.’ Sablin gave a graphic report: ‘Heave, heave was coming from every yacht. Britannia was heeling a lot, with the floor deck under the water, and everyone was on it, leaning with their feet firmly against the bulwarks. But Britannia did not take the first prize.’
Sablin added: ‘The Emperor was not very fond of sailing; nevertheless, he returned feeling very lively and saying that he was very impressed. It was [only] the second time in my ten years of service on the Standart when the Emperor was on a boat under sail.’
So buoyed up was the Tsar by his sailing that he didn’t appear to notice a further blow to the morale of the Russian navy. ‘Unfortunately not a single Russian yacht was taking part, even though we had excellent international racers and yachts,’ complained Sablin.
At 12pm the Tsar and Tsarina boarded Britannia for what Spencer, unusually chirpily, referred to as a ‘delightful cruise towards Stokes Bay’. The Tsar was almost as enthusiastic: ‘It was pleasant to sit down and breathe in the fresh air.’ Spencer complained that the sun was ‘fearfully hot’, but he managed more conversation with the Tsarina: ‘Great deal of talk to the Empress’.
The Tsarina was not a great one for enjoying herself: four days of relentless entertainment would have been especially taxing. But during this particular cr
uise she was photographed smiling with uncharacteristic abandon, leaning boldly towards her cousin, Princess Victoria. The pair, who had met at Balmoral as well as at Reval, are chatting on deck: Victoria looks as if she is telling a story, while the Tsarina laughs.
Bertie with Queen Alexandra on deck
On a second occasion, she floored King Edward’s mistress, Alice Keppel, with a further burst of exuberance. By 1909, Mrs Keppel had become Bertie’s frequent companion and confidante. After he died, Mrs Keppel told Lord Rosebery that: ‘the King showed her every letter he received within minutes of receiving it’. She had chestnut hair and a large bust; Lady Lytton dismissed her as ‘a rather coarse type of woman’.
Mrs Keppel noticed the Tsarina’s ‘frigid calm’ on deck. She followed the Tsarina downstairs to a suite of rooms after receiving an unexpected invitation. Upon reaching the suite, she found that her hostess completely changed character: ‘There was a sudden lightening of the atmosphere and the Tsarina became almost skittish – “Tell me, my dear, where do YOU get your knitting wool?”’
On their way back from the cruise, the imperial couple paid a brief visit to the exiled French Empress Eugenie, who was installed on her own steam yacht, Thistle. The Empress had lived in exile in Farnborough, in Hampshire, since the overthrow of her husband, Napoleon III, in 1870. The Tsar had, dined with her and Queen Victoria at Windsor, in 1894. According to Sablin, meetings with the Empress had to be carefully choreographed, to avoid upsetting the French government. He wrote: ‘The Tsarina told us later that the French Empress was very cheerful and charmingly sweet, but it was said she didn’t return our visit because of a diplomatic difficulty and old age. And, in fact, after Cherbourg, they couldn’t display their excellent relations – that would have displeased the republicans.’
Empress Eugenie may have decided, tactfully, not to return her visits; her advanced age, 83, might have been an additional obstacle. But the social whirl aboard Thistle continued unabated. The Empress’s distinguished visitors included the Prince of Wales, Georgie and Earl Spencer, who enjoyed his encounter: ‘Remembered me. Talked English – very old but with a charming manner’. Lord Suffield, another visitor, was equally taken with her unfailing good cheer: ‘[She was] telling me, as a great joke, of a cropper she had come on deck the day before, as if she had been 18 instead of about 80.’ He himself was, or course, nearly 80.
Nearly 2,000 miles away from the stultifying court in St Petersburg, the Romanov children were intent on enjoying themselves. The weather had grown sunny and the sea less menacing. They had all shaken off their seasickness and, having barely left the Standart for several weeks, the time had come to visit the pretty, leafy Osborne Bay, where their mother had played during her summer holidays.
During that last visit to Osborne, in 1894, Alix had written to Nicky (‘bad Boysie’) about visiting the bay and taking swimming lessons that had left her ‘muchly frightened’: ‘How lovely the sea looked this evening when we sat out on the beach, all so peaceful and quiet, a real Sunday evening.’ The letter concluded with one of her eerily prescient questions: ‘Only this still, I love you, many more than words can express and daily my affection grows stronger and deeper – sweet, what will be the end?’
The children arrived at the public pontoon at East Cowes, creating a minor security alert as they refused a motor car, insisting, instead, on two open horse carriages. They clearly had no worries about security for their short ride and were simply intent on enjoying a better view. Upon reaching the beach, they spent a merry hour collecting shells with their cousins, May, the Princess of Wales and Princess Mary, aged 12. May would have been happy to forego the Britannia cruise – she was not a keen sailor – and she loved the company: ‘The children were delicious,’ she wrote to her Aunt Augusta. In her diary she alluded to: ‘the charming little Russian children, four girls and the boy’.
But the trip to the beach was not enough for the two eldest Grand Duchesses, Olga, now 13, and the newly-restored Tatiana. At two o’clock sharp, the girls were back at Trinity Wharf, all set for a shopping trip. They were not allowed to shop in St Petersburg, so it was with particular glee that they paid their halfpenny fare for the floating bridge to West Cowes. This was an exciting taste of what the sheltered girls liked to call ‘outside life’.
Their progress down the High Street was monitored by the Isle of Wight’s stalwart Chief Constable, Captain H.G. Adams Connor, and his Deputy Chief Constable, Mr Gallaway. According to the County Press, the policemen ‘kept the visitors under observation but did not make their official character known’. The girls wore discreet outfits, matching grey suits and straw hats, but were unable to tone down their high spirits. The reporter from the County Press was rather baffled by their enthusiasm: ‘Their royal highnesses walked slowly through the main streets of Cowes, inspecting very commonplace shop windows with much eagerness and excitement.’
They were soon installed in the Beken Pharmacy. Ken Beken, whose grandfather Frank owned the shop, remembers being told about the young Grand Duchesses’ visit. ‘My grandfather said the royal party bought up most of his stock of hairbrushes and perfume. The girls said they were in short supply in Russia. They said it was nice to be in Cowes, where they were not being mobbed, but were treated with politeness and courtesy.’ They bought postcards depicting members of various royal families, including their own adored parents.
Frank Beken was a keen photographer, and the young Grand Duchesses admired his photographs of sailing boats. What they presumably didn’t know was that, during the review the night before, Beken had taken two photographs of the Standart. ‘He said he was only just able to slip in between the circling picket boats, take a photograph and beat a hasty retreat, with one of them chasing him,’ says his grandson.
At a second shop, the girls bought souvenirs of cufflinks and flags. They would present these, along with cigarettes, to favoured Standart officers, including Nikolai Sablin.
Further down the High Street, however, the girls fell victim to one of the ‘mobbings’ they so dreaded. They recognised fellow countrymen in a carriage drawn up outside the post office and cried out in Russian. One of the carriage party then produced a camera and the girls suddenly found themselves surrounded by a crowd. The County Press played it down: ‘It is important to note that the temper of this large and miscellaneous assemblage was distinctly friendly and cordial, and the only rudeness exhibited was excessive admiration.
‘The children themselves had not apparently been in the least frightened by the excited and rather closely pressing holiday crowd and they behaved with complete self-possession, smiling when one or two enthusiasts raised a cheer for them.’
But as excitement grew, several ladies pursued the girls into Benzies, the jewellers, and Captain Adams Connor was obliged to stand in the doorway to prevent what the County Press now admitted was ‘troublesome homage’. It was Scotland Yard’s Superintendent Quinn, the saviour of the choristers’ blushes at Reval, who came to the rescue. He and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Edward Henry, ordered police to line the street and clear a path for the royal party. If the girls earlier gave the impression they were enjoying themselves, their companions were less convincing. As the County Press reported: ‘Some at least of their attendants were a little perturbed by the whole incident.’
A photograph exists of the girls and their trusty doctor, Eugene Botkin, in the High Street. All three look furtive and nervous. Olga is frowning and looking down at the ground, while trying to cram her left hand into her pocket, Tatiana looks nervously to her right, and fingers her top button. Botkin seems to be looking anxiously at Olga.
Dr. Botkin had only worked at court for a year, but he judged himself a cut above the other imperial doctor, Vladimir Derevenko, whom he denounced as ‘of peasant stock’. At Cowes, he immediately made his mark, insisting Alexis be kept away from his 14-year-old cousin Prince Albert, ‘Bertie’ (later King George VI), who was laid low with whooping cough. The doctor was worried
that fits of coughing could trigger a haemorrhage in the little boy. How candid he was allowed to be about Alexis’s illness is not known, but the result was that young Bertie, who should have played host to the children, was instead dispatched to Balmoral.
Dr. Botkin with the two Grand Duchesse
The courtly Botkin took the Tsarina’s mysterious maladies seriously. Spiridovich was more sceptical; in his memoir he included a Russian professor’s diagnosis of the Tsarina’s ills: ‘It was this illness, hysteron-neurasthenia, which had caused the Empress’s exaggerated likes and dislikes, her bizarre way of thinking and acting, her religious exultation, her belief in the supernatural in general, and her faith in Rasputin in particular… The Empress’s treatment was… entrusted to E.S. Botkin, who obeyed his patient in every way; he prescribed the treatment not as was necessary, but as the Empress demanded it.’
Botkin was equally smitten with the Tsar. When Donald M. Wallace suggested to Botkin that the Tsar was ‘fatalistic’, Wallace recorded the doctor’s retort: ‘If fatalism meant a quiet trust in providence, he agreed.’
It was suggested to the Grand Duchesses that they move from the seething streets of West Cowes to Queen Victoria’s Church, St Mildred’s, at Whippingham. The Chief Constable ordered a landau for them and a wagonette for the team of police officers. But the girls, evidently fully recovered from their ‘mobbing’, refused to travel in the landau. In a repeat of the morning’s dispute, they insisted on riding in the wagonette, so that they could see better.
On their way, they met Canon Clement Smith, who had been an honarary chaplain to Queen Victoria since 1893, remaining with her until her death. The Canon showed them around the church and the girls gazed at memorials put up by the royal family in memory of Queen Victoria. Their attention was caught by the Queen’s surprisingly modest-looking blue chair. The Canon showed them the Battenberg Chapel, containing the tomb of the girls’ uncle, Prince Henry of Battenberg, who had died of malaria, in 1896, shortly before the imperial family’s visit to Balmoral.
The Imperial Tea Party Page 15
