Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires

by Justin C. Vovk

  From the day the soldiers arrived, the atmosphere at the Alexander Palace was thick with tension. The occupying soldiers began hurling insults on the former empress. The grand duchesses were still bedridden, and Alexandra had all but locked herself away in her Mauve Boudoir. Her only companion continued to be Lili, who promised the girls she would not leave their mother’s sight. The days waiting for Nicholas were whittled away in quiet prayer and reading, but the nights were insufferably long. Alexandra barely slept. Outside the palace, the sounds of gunfire rang out as drunken soldiers caroused throughout the village grounds. Every so often, Alexandra would pull the drapes aside and look out anxiously, hoping to catch a glimpse of Nicholas returning. From the next room where she slept, Lili could hear her pacing back and forth, the only sound a faint cough brought on by stress and fatigue. The ex-tsarina counted the minutes until her husband returned. It was the last time the couple would ever be separated. They would remain together until the bitter end.

  When Nicholas finally reached Tsarskoe Selo, he dejectedly made his way past dozens of angry soldiers who hurled insult after insult upon “Citizen Nicholas Romanov.” In front of his family’s captors, he refused to show any emotion, but when he and Alexandra entered her Mauve Boudoir alone, he fell to the ground, his face bathed in bitter tears. Alexandra took her husband into her arms. Overcome herself, she found it hard to find the words to comfort him. According to Lili Dehn, Alexandra assured Nicholas that “the husband and father [were] of more value in her eyes than the Emperor whose throne she shared.”950

  The next few months proved taxing on the former imperial family. They remained under house arrest at the Alexander Palace while the Russian Provisional Government decided what should be done with them. Determined to live normal lives, Nicholas, Alexandra, and their family continued their daily routines when possible. Very much the outdoorsman, Nicholas insisted on physical activity by maintaining the palace grounds himself. Guards were surprised to find the former tsar and autocrat of All the Russias chopping wood and shoveling snow. The guards watching could not help but sneer at Nicholas, “Well, well, Nicolouchka (Little Nicholas), so you are breaking the ice now, are you? Perhaps you’ve drunk enough of our blood? … And in summer, when there’s no more ice—what’ll you do then, Goloubchik nach (our darling)? Perhaps you’ll throw a little sand on the walks with a little shovel?”951 Along with his daughters, Nicky—who was now known simply as Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov—planted a vast vegetable garden of beans, turnips, lettuce, squash, and some five hundred heads of cabbage.

  Alexandra was unable to move around as freely as her husband. Her fragile health completely collapsed. Her dark hair became filled with gray. Her face, once praised as the most beautiful in all of Europe, had aged well beyond its forty-five years. Her heart trouble and the pain in her back, legs, and head meant she could barely walk. The woman who had once ruled a sixth of the world’s landmass was now confined to a wheelchair most of the time. But Nicholas and their daughters happily pushed her around the village grounds. On some afternoons, when the weather was pleasant enough, Alexandra sat outdoors with one of her daughters or her lady-in-waiting, Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden. It was on one such afternoon that a particularly vulgar guard sat next to Alexandra, accusing her of hating Russia. Her calm, rational answers to the soldier’s accusations began disarming him. The conversation eventually turned to matters of politics, religion, and family. The guard was especially surprised to learn that, despite being born German, the former empress was a Russian “with all her heart.” When the officer on duty arrived, the guard stood to his feet. Taking her hand, he said, “Do you know, Alexandra Feodorovna, I had quite a different idea of you? I was mistaken about you.”952

  The captivity at Tsarskoe Selo lasted six long months. During that time, the Romanovs were forced to endure repeated interrogations from Alexander Kerensky, the justice minister of the Russian Provisional Government. One of his first acts at the palace was to have Lili Dehn, the last of Alexandra’s friends, sent back to Petrograd. “I am the Procurator-General, Kerensky,” he told Nicholas and Alexandra upon meeting them in the palace’s schoolroom. “The queen of England asks for news of the ex-tsarina.”953 It was the first time Alexandra had been addressed that way, prompting her face to turn red. She told Kerensky that, as usual, her heart was troubling her. He then spent hours questioning her about her political agenda. After a grueling interview, Kerensky admitted to Nicholas, “your wife does not lie.”954 He was also forced to admit, “I had imagined her differently. She is very sympathetic. She is an admirable mother. What courage, what dignity, what intelligence and how beautiful she is!”955

  The fate of the former imperial family was brought up around the time of Kerensky’s visit. One of the first foreign requests for the Romanovs’ freedom came from Wilhelm and Dona. Though Russia and Germany were technically enemies, Wilhelm offered his cousin and her family exile in Berlin. Wilhelm later said, “I ordered my Chancellor to try and get in touch with the Kerensky government by neutral channels, informing him that if a hair of the Russian Imperial family’s head should be injured, I would hold him personally responsible if I should have the possibility of doing so.”956 But Alexandra could never forgive Wilhelm his failings, and she could never give up her antipathy for all things German. When she was told of the possibility of escaping to Germany, she was indignant, saying, “after what they have done to the Tsar, I would rather die in Russia than be saved by the Germans.”957 When the plan failed, Wilhelm admitted, “The blood of the unhappy Tsar is not at my door; not on my hands.”958

  Another possibility that presented itself was sending the family to England. After all, King George V and Nicholas were first cousins through their mothers. George and Alexandra were first cousins, since both were grandchildren of Queen Victoria. King George and Queen Mary were “deeply distressed” by the Romanovs’ situation, and working through their prime minister, David Lloyd George, they made overtures to invite the imperial family to spend the rest of their days in Britain.959 But this plan was doomed from the start. Public opposition began to take hold in England. The government was deeply concerned over who would be paying the family’s bills. Although previous Romanovs had been known for their exorbitant spending, there was a misconception that Alexandra and her family were the same way. In reality, they were among the most frugal, down-to-earth royals Europe had known in recent years. The British government ultimately insisted that if the Romanovs wanted to come to England, it was up to Alexander Kerensky, the newly appointed prime minister of the Russian Provisional Government, to cover their expenses.

  From there, the plan began to dissolve on both ends. The Russian Provisional Government was unwilling to pay anything on the Romanovs’ behalf. And in Britain, public opinion had long steered against the Romanov dynasty’s autocracy in favor of England’s more liberal, parliamentary monarchy. King George received letters from different classes of British society imploring him not to give the tsar and his family refuge. “Every day, the King is becoming more concerned about the question of the Emperor and Empress coming to this country,” wrote Baron Stamfordham, George’s private secretary. “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 by working men, and that Labour Members in the House of Commons are expressing adverse opinions to the proposal.”960 Even the Times was hostile toward the idea, especially when it came to the ex-tsarina. “How can we tolerate this friend of Germany in our midst?” one reporter wrote.961 At Buckingham Palace, the fate of Nicholas and Alexandra gnawed at Queen Mary, who was “harbouring guilt along with her anxiety. If any tragic fate befell them, she knew she would always feel a measure of the responsibility.”962

  The fact that Alexandra had been practically raised by Queen Victoria seems to have all but been forgotten. Lord Francis Bertie, the British ambassador to France, was particularly scathing in his opinion of the former tsarina. Reflectin
g the drastic misconception the public had about her, he wrote in 1917, “The Empress is not only a Boche [German] by birth but in sentiment. She did all she could to bring about an understanding with Germany. She is regarded as a criminal or a criminal lunatic and the ex-Emperor as a criminal from his weakness and submission to her promptings.”963 Alexandra was not oblivious to the accusations being made against her in the foreign press. She poured out her frustration in a letter to a patient she had met at Tsarskoe Selo, when some of the other buildings had been converted into field hospitals earlier in the war: “When they write filth about Me—let them, they started tormenting me long ago, I don’t care now, but that they slander Him [Nicholas], throw dirt on the Sovereign Anointed by God, that is beyond the bearable.”964

  Bowing to pressure both from the people and his government, the king had no choice but to withdraw his offer of asylum to his cousins and their family. One night, while the king and queen were having tea with the Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace, a telegram arrived. It asked that, in light of the current pressure against harboring the Romanovs, “would there be any objection from the Palace if a destroyer was not sent to Russia and asylum not offered.” Upon reading it, the queen declared simply, “No.” The king agreed. “To say no was not a callous act,” wrote one historian. “The Queen, conceiving it her prime duty to protect the English throne, was aware that it could not be put at risk even for dear cousins.”965 Shortly thereafter, the Foreign Office issued a statement: “His Majesty’s Government does not insist on its former offer of hospitality to the Imperial Family.”966 But the king’s decision did not abate the criticism that both he and the queen were facing at this time. The German Imperial Air Service had just bombed London. Leading the attack had been the new heavy bomber, the Gotha G.IV. In the aftermath of the attack, the British monarchy was faced with a public relations nightmare. The official name of the royal family was Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. This commonality between their monarchs and the Germans proved too much for some people in British society. Ugly rumors began to permeate Britain that George and Mary were pro-German; the fall of the once-mighty Romanovs only fueled republican sentiments elsewhere. A week after Nicholas abdicated, crowds gathered at the Royal Albert Hall to celebrate the end of the tsarist regime. In a letter to the Times, the celebrated author H. G. Wells asserted that “the time has come to rid ourselves of the ancient trappings of throne and sceptre.”967 The very notion of hereditary monarchy was under assault.

  The king and queen’s critics believed that evidence of their German sympathies was obvious and came by way of the fact that a number of their relatives were German royals. Then there was George himself, whose grandfather Prince Albert was from the German dukedom of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. As such, all the members of the British royal family had inherited Prince Albert’s German titles. As for Queen Mary, who had been born and raised in England, her brothers Dolly and Alge were the duke and prince of Teck, respectively, making them part of the Württemberger monarchy.

  According to the rumors, the king and queen were supposed to be in league with their extended family, namely the other children and grandchildren of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. As far back as 1871, the British court had been sneered as little more than an arcane “pack of Germans.”968 Though harsh, this was not inaccurate. Six of Queen Victoria’s nine children married Germans, giving rise to two generations of British royals who were princes and princesses of Hesse-Darmstadt, Battenberg, Teck, or Schleswig-Holstein. This did not include Queen Victoria’s grandchildren (by birth or by marriage) from Prussia, Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Saxe-Meiningen, Hesse-Cassel, Schaumburg-Lippe, and Anhalt. Officials at Buckingham Palace were heard remarking that the king and royal family were more German than Wilhelm. By 1917, the British court was made up of so many foreign royals that H. G. Wells once called it “alien and uninspiring,” to which King George famously replied, “I may be uninspiring, but I’ll be damned if I’m an alien.”969 These protestations on the king’s part seemed to go unnoticed by the British public. During a dinner party at Buckingham Palace in May 1917, Lady Maud Warrender mentioned to the queen that London was rife with rumors that the king and queen must be pro-German since their family names were German. George was sitting nearby and overheard the remark. Growing pale, he abruptly left the table, looking shaken and disturbed. There was little recourse but to take drastic action.

  On June 19, 1917, a special session of the Privy Council was called by the king at Buckingham Palace. At the meeting, the king announced that he was ready to support British nationalist opinions and cut the monarchy’s ties with its German past. Under the advice of his Privy Counsellors, George issued an order-in-council formally changing the name of the British royal family. A list of historic English surnames were reviewed by the king, queen, Prince Louis of Battenberg, George’s uncle the Duke of Connaught, and Lord Stamfordham. The names Lancaster, York, Plantagenet, Tudor-Stewart, England, D’Este, and Fitzroy were all considered and unanimously voted down. Only after Lord Stamfordham suggested a name that once belonged to Edward III did the king and queen agree. No longer known as the German-sounding House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the royal family would be henceforth known as the House of Windsor. One of Queen Mary’s biographers observed that for her, “there was a sense of great pride at her new name and in the fact that she was to be the matriarch of a new dynasty—the Royal House of Windsor.”970

  The king went even further than just changing the family name. He issued letters patent that revoked the titles of his and Mary’s German relatives living in Britain, replacing them with English ones. Officially, the king only “requested” that his relations voluntarily surrender their titles, although the “request was in effect a command.”971 The king “deemed it desirable in the conditions brought about by the present war that those Princes of his family who are his subjects and bear German names and titles should relinquish these titles and henceforth adopt British surnames.”972 Prince Louis of Battenberg wrote to his daughter Louise in June, “It has been suggested that we should turn our name into English, viz: Battenhill or Mountbatten. We incline to the latter as a better sound … of course we are at his [the king’s] mercy. We are only allowed to use our German title as the Sovereign has always recognized it, but he can refuse this recognition [at] any moment.”973 The Tecks and the Battenbergs became the Cambridges and the Mountbattens. In his official statement, King George V announced the following:

  Now, therefore, We, out of Our Royal Will and Authority, do hereby declare and announce that as from the date of this Our Royal Proclamation Our House and Family shall be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor, and that all descendants in that male line of Our said Grandmother Queen Victoria who are subjects of these Realms … shall bear the said Name of Windsor:

  And do hereby further declare and announce that We for Ourselves and for and on behalf of Our descendants of Our said Grandmother Queen Victoria who are subjects of these Realms relinquish and enjoin the discontinuance of the use of the Degrees, Styles, Dignities, Titles, and Honours of Dukes and Duchesses of Saxony and Princes and Princesses of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and all other German Degrees, Styles, Dignities, Titles, Honours and Appellations to Us or to them heretofore belonging or appertaining.974

  Between September and November 1917, two generations of English-born royals found themselves stripped of their rank and titles. Even Queen Victoria’s daughters Helena and Beatrice reverted to their premarital English titles. The rest were forced to adopt English peerages that placed them on par with the country’s aristocracy. Louis of Battenberg’s wife and Tsarina Alexandra’s sister Victoria was now the Marchioness of Milford Haven. She wrote to her lady-in-waiting that she regretted the loss of her royal rank: “I am unduly influenced by the recollection of brewers, lawyers, bankers [and other] Peers.”975

  Following this declaration came the equally bold Enemy Princes Bill—also known as the Titles Deprivation Act—passed by Parliament later that year. The contro
versial document stripped all German royals of any British titles or privileges. Eight Knights of the Garter, England’s highest honor, had already been stripped of their order in 1915 and declared “enemy knights.”976 Among the disavowed members of the order were Wilhelm II, his son Willy, and his brother Prince Henry; King Wilhelm II of Württemberg (“Uncle Willie”); Grand Duke Ernie of Hesse; Charles Eduard, Duke of Coburg; and Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick. Uncle Willie aside, all of these men were George’s cousins.

  The foreign press was soon united in covering Britain’s severing of all ties with its German heritage. One tabloid cartoon showed King George, covered in coronation robes and wearing the imperial crown, furiously sweeping away a dust ball that spelled out the words “Made in Germany.” The reaction on continental Europe was just as biting. Wilhelm II was outraged by his cousin’s actions. He immediately stripped King George of all the German military honors that had been bestowed upon him. He also destroyed many of the pictures and mementos that the two cousins had acquired over the years. Later, speaking to one of his staff, Wilhelm caustically remarked that he planned to see a performance of Shakespeare’s play, The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

  At the same time that King George was reforming the British monarchy, his wife was living through an exceptionally difficult time. For a number of years, their youngest son, John, was plagued by violent seizures accompanied by extended periods of anxiety and disorientation. Even as an infant, his nurses observed that he had trouble sitting upright. He was eventually diagnosed with epilepsy in an advanced stage. Research conducted in the past several years has indicated that Prince John also suffered from a debilitating form of autism. So severe was his condition that he was the only member of the royal family to not attend the king and queen’s coronation in 1911. The feelings Mary associated with John’s illness remain unclear. She made no mention of him in her letters or diary entries. Even her letters to Aunt Augusta, her closest relative, lack any reference to John, his illness, or their impact on the family. According to her biographer David Duff, there was a marked difference in the way Queen Mary treated John compared to her other children. “His mother loved him,” he wrote, “spent much time with him and treasured his quaint little sayings, but he was an everlasting worry to her.”977