George hated the telegram, unable to see that it had been written as much for domestic consumption as for the new Russian government (which, as it happened, contained a significant number of new members who were far more enthusiastic about British political traditions than anyone in the tsarist regime). Stamfordham was instructed to complain that it was “a little strong,”103 especially coming from a monarchical government. Lloyd George reminded the king’s secretary that the British constitution itself had been founded on a revolution—the bloodless revolution of 1688.
George decided to send his own message of support to Nicholas: “Events of last104 week have deeply distressed me. My thoughts are constantly with you and I shall always remain your true and devoted friend, as you know I have been in the past.” The provisional government’s foreign minister, Pavel Miliukov, a former Duma member who revered Sir Edward Grey and admired Britain’s liberal traditions, told Buchanan that it couldn’t be delivered. The new soviet was showing worrying signs of wanting to execute the tsar. Petrograd’s political climate was so uncertain that George’s telegram would make things worse. Miliukov’s solution was to get the emperor out of Russia105 as soon as possible. When, on 21 March, Buchanan delivered a warning that “any violence done106 to the Emperor or his family would have a most deplorable effect and would deeply shock public opinion in this country,” Miliukov asked him if Britain would offer the Romanovs asylum. In reporting the foreign minister’s request, Buchanan added his own opinion that it ought to be heeded.
That same day the ex–imperial family was placed under house arrest. Soldiers had arrived at Tsarskoe Selo a week before, surrounded the palace, and cut off the water supply. Alix heard nothing about Nicholas for three days. Alexis had contracted measles and was in terrible pain. The tsarina almost fainted when she heard about the abdication, then reacted with all-too-characteristic fatalism: “It’s for the best.107 It’s the will of God. God will make sure that Russia is saved. It’s the only thing that matters.” The provisional government told their captives that arrest was only a precaution to keep them safe. The plan, they were told, was to get them to the Finnish border and coast, only a few hours away, and to put them on108 a British cruiser to England. Nicholas, who was permitted to take his leave of Stavka before returning to Tsarskoe Selo, told the British military attaché there that he hoped to retire to the Crimea but “if not, he109 would sooner go to England than anywhere else.”
Lloyd George didn’t love the idea of giving sanctuary to the discredited autocrat of all the Russias, but in consultation with Edward’s old adviser Sir Charles Hardinge and Stamfordham, he agreed “that the proposal … could not be refused.” Stamfordham added that Buchanan should “throw out a hint” that the Russian government should provide money for the ex-tsar to live on. When Lloyd George suggested (no doubt deliberately provocatively) that the king might hand over “one of his houses,” Stamfordham said very sharply that the king “had got no houses except Balmoral,”110 which was entirely unsuitable.
Nicholas arrived back at Tsarskoe Selo that day, running the gauntlet through rooms of curious soldiers who now had no reason to stand to attention or salute. When he reached the family’s private apartments, he broke down and sobbed.111 He looked, another courtier wrote, “like an old112 man.” When he tried to go for a walk, six soldiers surrounded him and prodded him with their rifles. “You can’t go113 there, Gospodin Polkovnik,”* they said. “Stand back when you are commanded, Gospodin Polkovnik.” Nicholas stood, small, quiet and expressionless. Later that evening, three armoured cars of over-excited soldiers from Petrograd arrived and announced they were taking the ex-tsar to the St. Peter and Paul fortress—another sign of how tenuous the provisional government’s hold on the army was. They were eventually persuaded to leave after they were allowed to see him. Sometime after midnight, another group of soldiers broke in to Rasputin’s tomb in the imperial park, exhumed the body and burned it.
Miliukov assured Buchanan that the Russian government would fund the tsar’s asylum, but asked him not to reveal that the request for sanctuary had come from them, for fear of inflaming public opinion and the Petrograd soviet. It was clear that smuggling the imperial family into Finland wasn’t going to be straightforward. A week passed. England and George were clearly on the family’s mind. Nicholas wrote114 in his diary that he was planning to start packing the things he would take to England, Alix began to talk constantly about her memories of Osborne, and the children asked their tutors what life would be like there.
In London, George started to harbour serious doubts about the wisdom of bringing his cousin to England. On 30 March Stamfordham wrote to the former prime minister, Arthur Balfour, whom Lloyd George had brought in as foreign secretary:
The King has115 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 residence in this country.
Balfour sent an uncompromising reply. Miliukov had just sent another telegram asking that the tsar leave Russia at once, and while “His Majesty’s Ministers116 quite realize the difficulties to which you refer in your letter … 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.”
On 3 April two of Alix’s ladies-in-waiting, Lili Dehn and the much-hated Vyrubova, were arrested and taken to Petrograd for questioning, and the couple were ordered to live apart while the question of Alix’s treason was investigated.
On 6 April Stamfordham wrote to Balfour insisting the invitation be withdrawn. “Every day,”117 he wrote,
the King is becoming more concerned about the question of the Emperor and Empress coming to this country. His Majesty receives letters from people in all classes of 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 … I feel sure that you appreciate how awkward it will be for our Royal Family who are closely connected with both the Emperor and Empress … The King desires me to ask you whether after consulting the Prime Minister, Sir George Buchanan should not be communicated with, with a view to approaching the Russian Government to make some other place for the future residence of their Imperial Majesties?
Several hours later he sent another letter:
He must beg118 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 from whom it is already generally supposed the invitation has emanated … Buchanan ought to be instructed to tell Miliukoff 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.
On 10 April Stamfordham bearded Lloyd George in Downing Street, “to impress upon him the King’s strong opinion that the Emperor and Empress of Russia should not come to this country, and that … It would,” he added, “be most unfair upon the King … if TIM’s [Their Imperial Majesties] came here when popular feeling against their doing so is so pronounced.” Then he went to complain to Balfour, saying that he had seen a telegram from Buchanan, who “evidently took it for granted that the Emperor and Empress were coming to England and it was only a question of delay.”119 The king felt that Buchanan should already have been told to withdraw the invitation.
Stamfordham’s harangues touched a nerve in the governm
ent. Lloyd George knew harbouring the Romanovs was not going to be popular in Britain, and he didn’t want to do anything to alienate the increasingly unstable Russian government—he dreaded the thought that it might suddenly bow out of the war leaving the Western Front to take the full German assault. Balfour reflected that the king had been “placed in an120 awkward position.” No one would believe that the invitation hadn’t come from the court. Perhaps the Romanovs should go to the South of France instead? The Foreign Office issued a statement: “His Majesty’s121 Government does not insist on its former offer of hospitality to the Imperial family.” Balfour cabled Buchanan and told him to say nothing further about the invitation. The ambassador obediently agreed, Miliukov hadn’t referred to it for a few days, the subject had clearly become a hot potato within the Russian government, and obviously if there was “any danger122 of an anti-monarchist movement,” England was not the right place for the tsar. He suggested that the foreign minister might sound out the French. But at home, his daughter later wrote, it was clear that he was deeply upset.123
At Tsarskoe Selo “The days passed124 and our departure was always being postponed.” Talk of England gradually ceased.
Would Nicholas’s presence in Britain have put George’s throne in danger? It seems, in hindsight, highly unlikely. It was true that Britain had not been immune to the strikes and riots that had broken out across Europe since the Russian Revolution. Small issues caused sudden strikes. In 1918 12,000 aircraft factory workers in Coventry walked out because of false rumours that they were to be conscripted. Moreover, England, like the rest of Europe, had seen a surge in left-wing rhetoric calling for change, revolution and even a republic. A week after the Foreign Office took back its invitation to the tsar, H. G. Wells wrote to The Times declaring that Britain should rid itself of “the ancient trappings125 of throne and sceptre,” and proposed the formation of republican societies across the country. (Wells had famously described George’s circle as an “alien and uninspiring court,” to which George made his only ever recorded witty riposte: “I may be uninspiring, but I be damned if I’m an alien.”126) There was, however, no answering surge of revolutionary republicanism—nothing, for example, on the scale of the hundreds of republican clubs that sprang up in the 1870s. Of all the civilian populations of Europe engaged in the war, the British suffered the least in terms of want and number of deaths—German civilian deaths were far greater than British ones*—and were furthest away from the fighting. Lloyd George dealt with the unrest he did encounter more successfully than any other leading statesman in Europe. Though his ministry was dominated by Conservatives, his own enormous popularity and his record of social amelioration gave him credibility with the strikers, and his political instincts led him to meet them halfway, while other European governments responded with heavy-handed repression. All the while he told the country it was fighting to defend Liberty—as manifested by the British system—and to destroy the German military caste and its oppression of the German people.
If Lloyd George and his fellow politicians had really thought that bringing the ex-tsar to England posed a threat to the Crown and the constitutional structure of England—something none of them wanted—they would never have agreed to taking him in the first place. It was another great irony entirely lost on King George that Lloyd George, the man whose politics were anathema to him, was the man who kept his throne secure. He would also be the man who would cover up George’s involvement in the rejection of the Romanovs, omitting his role entirely from his War Memoirs and taking the weight of what opprobrium there was—though he also falsely127 claimed that Britain never withdrew the invitation, and stated more truthfully that it wasn’t clear the provisional government would have been able to extricate the tsar out of Russia. Buchanan would also bear the weight of blame for the British failure to do so: he would spend the rest of his life unhappily trying to exonerate himself—he too assumed the source of the decision to revoke the invitation was Lloyd George.
The truth was George had become immensely sensitive to criticism of himself or the monarchy—in that respect he was now far more attuned and attentive to public opinion than either of his cousins. Any whisper of it “rankled unduly”128 and made him deeply depressed. Just how hair-triggerishly anxious George was would be well illustrated a few months later, in July 1917, when he became so upset about insinuations that the royal family might not be entirely loyal because of their German names and antecedents that he changed the family name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the entirely made-up Windsor. George wasn’t wrong to imagine that giving sanctuary to his cousin would have been a very unpopular move in a country whose government was now justifying the war as a fight for freedom against autocracy. But it is extremely unlikely that it would have cost him his throne. He panicked and placed his worries ahead of the family relationship which he had always said counted for so much, and the cousin he had professed to care so deeply for. It was a final blow to the cult of family which his queen empress grandmother had so heartily embraced. It was also a decision that revealed a monarchy aware of the need to sell itself to its subjects if it was to survive.
Over the next fourteen months the tide of scepticism about George would turn: the grim-faced visits to the front, to hospitals and to factories and the stories of royal belt-tightening that gradually leaked out began to be seen as a testament to his commitment to duty, to hard work and to sharing the burden of the long years of struggle. George’s frayed but stoic ordinariness seemed like a counter or even a rebuke to the overblown Wagnerian swagger, the mystical claims to perfection, of the European absolutist monarchies the country felt it was fighting against. By the end of the war The Times would write of “the wonderful popularity129 with Londoners—as we are convinced, with the whole country—of THEIR MAJESTIES the KING and QUEEN … this signal outburst of loyal feeling is born of the conviction that the CROWN, well-worn, is the symbol and safeguard of unity, not only here in England, but in the free dominions overseas, and in India.”
In July 1917, the month George changed his name, there was a surge of angry unrest in Petrograd—“the July days.” Alexander Kerensky, recently made head of the provisional government, decided he must try again to get the imperial family out of the country. He went to Buchanan, who replied—according to Kerensky with tears in his eyes—that the British government had withdrawn its offer of asylum. A month later, in August, the family were sent to Tobolsk, a small backwater in western Siberia.
The former tsar had proved consistently patient, gracious and polite to his captors. Amazingly, he did not seem bitter, accepting his “restraints with extraordinary130 serenity and moral grandeur. No word of reproach ever passed his lips.” Kerensky, charged with the investigation and safety of the former tsar and his family, found him “an extremely reserved,131 reticent man, with much distrust and infinite contempt for others,” and was struck by “his utter indifference to the world around him, as though he loved and valued no one, and was not surprised by anything that happened.” The household found Kerensky unbearably high-handed, but Nicholas decided to132 trust him. Passive fatalistic acceptance was very much in keeping with the strain of mystic Russian Orthodoxy which had inspired Alix and him, but one might have concluded that the ex-tsar was almost relieved that the terrible weight of responsibility had been taken from his shoulders. Kerensky certainly thought so. Apart from certain constraints on his movement—he wasn’t allowed to go for long walks—the fabric of life wasn’t so remarkably different. The provisional government had taken on the upkeep of the emperor’s household (a sum so vast it was decided it should be kept secret), but now there were no decisions, no meetings, no need to take umbrage at others’ infringements of his prerogatives. He spent time with his family, played with the children, read aloud, smoked and slept well. When spring came, he gardened and played tennis. Alexandra, however, remained unresigned. Volubly bitter, she spent most days in bed or on her chaise longue.
July 1917 was the month Wilhelm found himsel
f eclipsed by the imperial General Staff. After three years at war, the divisions in German society were creating their own chaos; the country was riven with strikes and protests against falling wages and food shortages. In the Reichstag the Left was demanding an end to the war, on the streets protesters clamoured for political reform, while the Right and the army were insisting Germany fight on and annex Poland and the Baltic states.
As the war had progressed, the German High Command had gradually taken control of the state. In August 1916, with the war at stalemate, shortages at home, and the government and the country increasingly divided, Wilhelm had been pressured against his wishes to sack Falkenhayn (who had become chief of staff after Moltke’s health had failed in September 1914) and install the two heroes of Germany’s Eastern Front, generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff, instead. It was a move that compounded Wilhelm’s irrelevance and signalled the start of his total eclipse. The most successful generals in the war had their own agenda. They were incipient Napoleons, convinced that the war must be won on the Eastern Front against Russia, impatient that the civilian government wasn’t sufficiently acquiescent to their needs, and not afraid to interfere in politics. Wilhelm admired them and resented them equally: they were enormously popular and he feared their influence.
By early 1917 Ludendorff and Hindenburg had their sights on removing Bethmann-Hollweg, whom they saw as too unbiddable and alarmingly sympathetic to demands for political reform. The Left, which now dominated the Reichstag, wanted peace without annexations or indemnities. A month after Nicholas’s abdication, in April 1917, Bethmann-Hollweg, believing it was the only solution, persuaded a deeply reluctant Wilhelm to commit to political reform of the deeply inequitable franchise in Prussia after the war. In July Ludendorff and Hindenburg made their move, threatening to resign unless the chancellor was sacked. In a panic Wilhelm refused, but Bethmann-Hollweg had also lost all support in the Reichstag, and resigned himself. The new chancellor, selected with almost comical arbitrariness, was an administrator called Michaelis whom Wilhelm had met once and described as “an insignificant little133 man.” “Now I may as134 well abdicate,” Wilhelm told his former chancellor. He spent his time going for walks, playing card games, arguing with Dona. In September 1917 Hindenburg took Wilhelm’s title of Supreme Warlord, and the army’s press agency sent out his portrait throughout the country. In the nation’s mind, Hindenburg gradually replaced Wilhelm as the strongman, the absolute leader, the surrogate kaiser—for whom the country apparently longed. In January 1918, when Wilhelm tried to challenge the generals’ plans to annex Poland, they punished him by forcing the dismissal of his most trusted officials, the chiefs of his civil and military cabinets, Valentine and Lyncker, and installing their own candidate, Friedrich von Berg zu Markienen, who never let Wilhelm out of his sight. Germany had become essentially a military dictatorship; Wilhelm was the flimsy fig leaf.
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