When Lloyd George suggested the King put a house at the imperial family’s disposal, Stamfordham replied stiffly that the only available place was Balmoral: ‘which would not be a suitable residence at this time of year’.
On 30th March, Stamfordham wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour: ‘The King has been thinking much about the government’s proposal that the Emperor Nicholas and his family should come to England. As you are doubtless aware, the King has a strong personal friendship for the Emperor and therefore would be glad to do anything to help him in this crisis. But His Majesty cannot help doubting, not only on account of the dangers of the voyage, but on general grounds of expediency, whether it is advisable that the imperial family should take up their residence in this country.’
The Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, at this point opposed Stamfordham, writing: ‘His Majesty’s ministers quite realise the difficulties to which you refer in your letter, but they do not think, unless the position changes, that it is now possible to withdraw the invitation which has been sent, and they therefore trust that the King will consent to adhere to the original invitation, which was sent on the advice of His Majesty’s ministers.’
But Stamfordham was not backing down. On 6th April he wrote another letter to Balfour: ‘Every day the King is becoming more concerned about the question of the Emperor and Empress coming to this country. His Majesty receives letters from all classes in life, known or unknown to him, saying how much the matter is being discussed, not only in clubs, but by working men, and that Labour members in the House of Commons are expressing adverse opinions to the proposal.
‘As you know, from the first the King [Nicky’s cousin, Georgie] has thought the presence of the imperial family (especially of the Empress) in this country would raise all sorts of difficulties and I feel sure that you appreciate how awkward it will be for our royal family who are closely connected with the Emperor and the Empress….
‘The King desires me to ask you whether, after consulting the Prime Minister [Lloyd George], Sir George Buchanan [the Ambassador in Russia] should not be communicated with, with a view to approaching the Russian government to make some other plan for the future residence of Their Imperial Majesties?’
That same evening, Stamfordham wrote with even greater urgency: ‘He [the King] must beg you to represent to the Prime Minister that, from all he hears and reads in the press, the residence in this country of the ex Emperor and Empress would be strongly resented by the public and would undoubtedly compromise the position of the King and Queen. Buchanan ought to be instructed to tell Miliukov [Russian’s Foreign Minister] that the opposition to the Emperor and Empress coming here is so strong that we must be allowed to withdraw from the consent previously given to the Russian government’s proposal.’
Under this continuing barrage, Balfour began to falter, sending a minute to Lloyd George: ‘I think the King IS placed in an awkward position.
‘If the Tsar is to come here we are bound publicly to state that WE (the government) have invited him – and to add (for our own protection) that we did so on the initiative of the Russian government (who will not like it).
‘I still think that we may have to suggest Spain or the south of France as a more suitable residence than England for the Tsar.’
Four days later, Stamfordham ratcheted up his campaign with a visit to Lloyd George at Downing Street. Balfour finally agreed to send a telegram to Buchanan, informing him that their previous agreement, to admit the Tsar, was no longer binding.
The King was becoming increasingly paranoid, fearing for his popularity, even for his throne. The possibility that public opposition to the Tsar might result in some kind of uprising was not so remote. Republican rallies had been held at the Albert Hall and demonstrations had taken place in industrial centres, including Glasgow and Liverpool. There would be a major incident, months later, in February 1918, during which 3,000 soldiers marched on Whitehall.
Then there was the issue of finance. How much would it cost to keep the Romanovs in suitable grandeur? This is now regarded as one of the central stumbling blocks. In the end, some believe that all these discussions of a British welcome were purely academic. The historian Robert Service is adamant that radical left-wing members of the provisional government would never have allowed the Romanovs to leave Russia.
In the summer of 1917, when Buchanan told the provisional government leader, Alexander Kerensky, that the British government had withdrawn its offer, the imperial family were under house arrest at Tsarskoe Selo. Kerensky never forgot Buchanan’s discomfort: ‘With tears in his eyes, [he was] scarcely able to control his emotions.’ Within weeks, the imperial family had been taken from St Petersburg to their Siberian exile in Tobolsk.
By now the Tsar’s trust in the British was waning fast. Aside from the withdrawal of their invitation, there was an outlandish belief, at court, that Buchanan had conspired against the Tsar with several hostile Romanov cousins.
The imperial children’s English tutor, Sydney Gibbes, had followed the family to Tobolsk in October. ‘He [the Tsar] absolutely pounced on me at first, for it was from English sources that he had received the severest blows,’ wrote Gibbes. ‘Attacks from revolutionary leaders in Russia he knew he must take and suffer, but those from England – to which he had been so loyal – had to be the unkindest cut of all.’
On the day when the Bolsheviks finally seized power, Nicky noted in his diary that he sawed wood and underwent a consultation with his dentist. With all his dread of dental work, Nicky seems to have had his dentist with him in Tobolsk. He read details of the events in St Petersburg some weeks later. Gibbes described his shocked reaction: ‘I had never seen the Emperor so shaken. For the moment he was completely incapable of saying or doing anything, nobody dared to say a word.’
Two months later, in December 1917, Gibbes took the unusual step of writing a letter to the Tsarina’s former governess, Madgie, in London. In the letter, he gave a description of the location of the house in Tobolsk, including a sketch of the layout of the interior. At one point, he referred to David, the future Duke of Windsor, who had played with the baby Olga at Balmoral and who, aged 15, had shown the imperial family around Osborne College: ‘I hear that David is back from France, how are his father and mother? And the cousins, are they also at the front?’
This letter was addressed to Miss Margaret Jackson at a Home for Governesses in Regents Park. It was clearly written with the intention of aiding some rescue attempt by the British. As Gibbes later said: ‘The Empress was sure that Miss Jackson would carry the letter to the Queen.’
Eighteen months later, Gibbes, then in Vladivostock, wrote to an unnamed British official wanting to know what had happened to the letter. There was evidence of its having reached St Petersburg, but nothing further.
To assist the Romanovs’ efforts to adapt themselves to their life in captivity, Mr Gibbes came up with the idea of staging obscure one-act plays in Russian, French and English. During a performance of the English playwright Harry Grattan’s Packing Up, the youngest Grand Duchess, Anastasia, created some welcome hilarity when she mischievously lifted her skirt to reveal her father’s Jaeger underwear.
In February 1918, the Bolsheviks phased out the Russian Julian calendar, forcing citizens to adopt the Western Gregorian calendar. The Tsar felt he had simply lost 13 days; he railed in his diary: ‘18 January or Feb 1 (new time). There’ll be no end to misunderstandings and confusion.’ There was little mention of cousin Georgie during this period, though his name was raised when the Bolshevik guards discussed the removal of ‘citizen Nicholas Romanov’s’ epaulettes. Fearing that the Tsar would resist, one of the more lenient guards warned there would be consequences if King George V heard that there had been some sort of struggle. But the Tsar dealt with the issue peaceably, agreeing to wear a short black coat when walking outside. Henceforth, he would wear his military tunic only when he was inside.
Towards the end of April 1918, the Tsar and Tsarina
were told they must leave Tobolsk. The British government had not issued another formal invitation, nor had they instigated any serious rescue attempt. But it seems that, at this point, the imperial couple were still living in hope that they would end up living in Britain. That, at least, was what they told their faithful Dr. Botkin, who had accompanied the family to Tobolsk. The doctor passed the reassuring news on to his teenage children: the Tsar, he said, would attend a show trial in Moscow, after which the imperial family would be exiled to Britain.
The Tsarina’s sister, Victoria, harboured hopes of getting the female members of the imperial family to England at the very least. In May 1918 she wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, begging him to allow the Tsarina and her four nieces to live with her on the Isle of Wight. Writing from Kent House, she pointed out that, though Alexis might be a ‘political asset’, the women could be ‘of no value or importance as hostages to the Russian government.’ Balfour replied that the Foreign Office couldn’t trust the Bolshevik government to do any kind of deal, adding that any such plan could be construed as a Tsarist conspiracy. But he gave a forlorn promise to look for other opportunities.
The Bolsheviks’ decision to move the imperial family from Tobolsk was beset by difficulties as it became clear that the Tsarevich Alexis was too ill to travel. It was eventually decided that the Tsar and Tsarina would form an advance party, taking only the 18-year-old Grand Duchess Maria and Dr. Botkin with them. The doctor assured his children they would soon be reunited in England. He told his son he must spend a year there, before entering the Academy of Theology. The young Botkins eagerly assembled their father’s belongings in a trunk. His son Gleb, then aged 18, was struck by the strangeness of packing tennis flannels and white tennis shoes amidst the snowy wastes of Siberia.
As it turned out, the party was transferred to Ekaterinburg, in the Urals. The rest of the imperial family joined the Tsar, Tsarina and Maria in May. Two months later, on the night of 16th-17th July, all seven members of the imperial family were murdered in a cellar along with Dr. Botkin. The murder took a full 20 minutes to complete as bullets ricocheted off the jewels they had sewn into their clothes for safekeeping.
Days after the killings, the English tutor, Mr Gibbes, managed to get into the house. He pocketed various keepsakes, including several of the Tsarevich’s bloody bandages. He later combined these macabre keepsakes with a pair of the Tsar’s felt boots that he had brought from Tobolsk. A tattered notebook was found in a filthy washroom, behind some pipes. It bore the inscription: ‘For my own beloved Nicky to put to good use when he is far away from his Spitzbube. From his love Alix, Osborne, July 1894.’
When news began to circulate in Britain that the Tsar had been murdered, Georgie must have been horrified. A memorial was organised at the Russian Church in London for ‘dear Nicky’. But Stamfordham tried to prevent the King from attending, insisting that the news of the Tsar’s death had yet to be official confirmed: ‘Public opinion is in a hypersensitive condition and might misconstrue anything done by the King into sympathy with the counter-revolution in Russia. Meanwhile, it seems to me we could decline to join in the G. Duchess George’s service on the grounds that the government have no official news of the Emperor’s death.’ Georgie may not have fully expressed his sorrow, still less any contrition, but he did defy Stamfordham with his decision to attend the memorial. On 25th July he wrote in his diary: ‘May and I attended a service at the Russian Church in Welbeck Street in memory of dear Nicky, who I fear was shot last month by the Bolshevists. We can get no details. It was a foul murder. I was devoted to Nicky, who was the kindest of men and a thorough gentleman: loved his country and people.’
A month later he wrote of the fate of the rest of the imperial family: ‘I hear from Russia that there is every probability that Alicky and four daughters and little boy were murdered at the same time as Nicky. It’s too horrible and shows what fiends these Bolshevists are. For poor Alicky, perhaps it was best so. But those poor innocent children!’
The King now made desperate attempts to rescue his aunt, the Tsar’s mother, who was by then in the Crimea. She was finally persuaded to leave, in April 1919, on a British battleship, HMS Marlborough, with 16 other Romanovs, including her daughter, the Tsar’s sister, Grand Duchess Xenia, and five of Xenia’s sons. The party was accompanied by six dogs and a canary.
Most of the 17 Romanovs were taken to Malta. After several days, they boarded a second British ship, the Lord Nelson, for England. It was the crew of the Lord Nelson who had been photographed cheering the King and the Tsar at Cowes ten years before.
King George’s reunion with his surviving cousins took place at London’s Victoria station. One of the Russian servants fell to her knees in front of the King, having mistaken him for the cousin he so resembled. A friend of the Tsar’s nephew, Vassily, said the family never forgot that moment: ‘It was embarrassing for the Dowager Empress and Xenia. Vassily found it excruciating.’
IN 1998, JUST OVER A HUNDRED YEARS after the imperial visit to Balmoral, the Royal Scots Greys, now known as the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, escorted five members of the imperial family to their final resting place. The bodies of the Tsar, Tsarina, Olga, Tatiana and Anastasia, exhumed in the Urals, at the start of the decade, were borne into the Peter Paul Fortress, in St Petersburg, to the accompaniment of pipes and drums.
As for the various other characters involved in the Romanovs’ sad story, Madgie, Miss Margaret Jackson, died at her Home for Governesses in Regents Park, in January 1918, just a month after Mr Gibbes posted his letter from Tobolsk. She was 82 and had been in a steep decline mentally and physically, so would have been unable to help in any kind of rescue effort.
Margaretta Eager died in 1936, aged 72, at the Grange Nursing Home, in Keynsham, Bristol. Her Holland Park boarding house had not proven a success, but she left a full £218. She was very insistent that her niece should not benefit from her death: ‘I leave NOTHING to my niece Frances Macleod because I spent nearly £400 on her education, travelling expenses and clothes.’
The English tutor, Mr Epps, had returned to England, following his dismissal, in 1908. In February 1918, he delivered a talk about his experiences in Russia to the Church of England Men’s Society, in Yorkshire. Belying his reputation as a gossip, Epps made no mention of the imperial family, focusing instead on the chaos of revolution. The ‘miseries of life without discipline were sufficiently illustrated’, reported the Harrogate Advertiser drily. Epps died, aged 87, in 1935. His nephew subsequently sent 31 treasured papers to Maggs, the antiquarian book dealers for pricing. The papers, including colourful drawings by the little Grand Duchesses, were then forgotten, languishing in a drawer for nearly 70 years before being restored to the Epps family in Australia.
Following the murders of the imperial family, the tutor, Mr Gibbes, travelled from Siberia to Manchuria, where he was ordained a Russian priest, changing his name to Father Nicholas, after the Tsar. He returned to England in 1937 and subsequently established a Russian orthodox church in Oxford. At every service, he commemorated the Tsar, Tsarina, Tsarevich and four Grand Duchesses. In his chapel he stored a chandelier that had hung in one of the imperial family’s rooms in Ekaterinburg and the Tsar’s felt boots from Tobolsk. He died in 1963, in St Pancras’ hospital, London.
Of those Russians involved in the Anglo-Russian ‘entente’, several survived the revolution. The moody Standart officer, Nikolai Sablin, was arrested twice before escaping to Romania, where he joined groups struggling against communism. He ended his days in a Romanian prison, dying of heart failure in 1962. General Alexander Spiridovich, the Tsar’s head of security, was arrested and imprisoned, but then unexpectedly released. He and his family settled in Paris, where he worked as a historian. He died in 1952.
Sablin’s namesake, the Standart’s Captain Nikolai Sablin, became the Tsar’s aide-de-camp but refused to accompany the family to Siberia. The Tsarina was said to have been particularly upset by this and other demonstrations of
disloyalty from Standart officers. The Captain did, however, fight for the White Army, before leaving Russia in 1920. He died in Paris in 1937.
The anglophile Russian Ambassador, Count Benckendorff, died, in January 1917, two months before the first revolution. The Foreign Minister, Alexander Izvolsky, died in Biarritz, in 1919.
The slippery double agent, Evno Azev, took refuge in a Balkan monastery, having been condemned to death by Prince Kropotkin, Burtsev and the other revolutionaries. He later fled to Germany, where he died, aged 49, in 1918.
The principal British dignitaries who had attended the meetings were not directly affected by the revolution. The Ambassador in Russia, Arthur Nicolson, was succeeded by George Buchanan in 1910 and died in 1928. The 6th Earl Charles Spencer, who made such an effort at the Isle of Wight, died in 1922, aged 64, after contracting a chill at a public event in Northamptonshire.
The Russian radicals, Prince Kropotkin and Vladimir Burtsev, both lived to see the revolution. The Prince set off from Bromley to St Petersburg, just days after the Tsar’s abdication, proclaiming: ‘What they reproached us with as a fantastic utopia has been accomplished without a single casualty.’ He arrived at the station in the early hours of the morning, to be greeted by a crowd of 60,000.
Kropotkin successfully gave advice to Kerensky throughout the summer of 1917, but then fell out with Lenin, comparing his policies to those of the ‘darkest middle ages’. He died, aged 78, in 1921. His funeral marked the last meeting of the Russian anarchists: their persecution, by Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka, began days later.
The Imperial Tea Party Page 18
