Contents

About the Book

A major new work of investigative history that will completely change the way in which we see the Romanov story. Finally, here is the truth about the secret plans to rescue Russia’s last imperial family.

On 17 July 1918, the whole of the Russian Imperial Family was murdered. There were no miraculous escapes. The former Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and their children – Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexey – were all tragically gunned down in a blaze of bullets.

On the 100-year-anniversary of these brutal murders, historian Helen Rappaport set out to uncover why the Romanovs’ European royal relatives and the Allied governments failed to save them. It was not, ever, a simple case of one British King’s loss of nerve. In this race against time, many other nations and individuals were facing political and personal challenges of the highest order.

In this incredible detective story, Rappaport draws on an unprecedented range of unseen sources, tracking down missing documents, destroyed papers and covert plots to liberate the family by land, sea and even sky. Through countless twists and turns, this revelatory work unpicks many false claims and conspiracies, revealing the fiercest loyalty, bitter rivalries and devastating betrayals as the Romanovs, imprisoned, awaited their fate.

A remarkable new work of history from Helen Rappaport, author of Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs.

About the Author

Helen Rappaport is a historian with a specialism in late Imperial Russia and the Victorians. She is the author of thirteen published books, including the Sunday Times bestseller Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses; Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs and Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, 1917. Helen is also historical consultant to the ITV drama series, Victoria and her books about the Victorians include Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death that Changed the Monarchy.

Also by Helen Rappaport

Caught in the Revolution

The Victoria Letters

Four Sisters

Magnificent Obsession

Beautiful for Ever

Conspirator

Ekaterinburg

No Place for Ladies

Queen Victoria

An Encyclopedia of Women Social Reformers

Joseph Stalin

With William Horwood

Dark Hearts of Chicago

With Roger Watson

Capturing the Light

List of Illustrations

By Way of a Beginning

AFTER PUBLISHING TWO books on Russia’s last Imperial Family, in 2008 and 2014, a book on Lenin in 2009 and one on the Russian Revolution in 2016, I really thought I had come to the end of my written love affair with the Romanovs and Russia. It seemed to me that I had exhausted all I had to say on the subject. From now on, as a writer, I was going to stay closer to home, and go back to my other love, the Victorians.

But something kept niggling away at me. The Romanovs would not let me go.

Romanovs. Russia. Revolution. Those three seductive words have drawn so many of us into the tragic story of Russia’s last Imperial Family over the century since their deaths. They suggest a grandeur that in many ways runs entirely counter to the real family – albeit a royal one – at the heart of it. What is it about Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra and their five children, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexey, that endlessly fascinates? Despite representing the apotheosis of 300 years of Romanov dynastic rule in Russia – as the possessors of fabulous wealth, vast lands and numerous grand palaces – it is not the epic scale of the Imperial Family’s story that attracts, but rather the intensely moving and human one of a quiet, loving and deeply unostentatious family who liked nothing better than being in each other’s company, but whose lives ended in hideous murder.

While it is their parents’ story that will set the scene in the opening chapters of this book, and we shall see how they were in many respects the masters of their own violent destiny, it is the children who inspire a continuing sense of regret and of longing for a different outcome.

As rulers of the most powerful empire in the world, Nicholas and Alexandra had been desperate for a son and heir. The birth of four daughters – Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia – in quick succession between 1895 and 1901 had brought considerable public anguish, but also much private joy. The arrival, finally, in 1904 of a son and heir to the Romanov throne, Alexey, turned the family’s life upside down. Its whole focus shifted onto the sickly Tsarevich and the unending battle to keep at bay the crippling attacks of haemophilia, passed on to him unknowingly by his mother, which could at any time have killed ‘The Hope of Russia’.

With so much attention directed onto Alexey, less and less note was taken of his four sisters, who increasingly slipped into the background, an anonymous collective of pretty girls who seemed charming, uncontroversial – and dull. But despite living perpetually in the shadow of filial duty to their brother and loyalty to their controlling, invalid mother, the Romanov sisters by no means lost their striking individuality. Olga, kind and sensitive, who loved poetry but who tended to introspection and mood swings, felt the weight of responsibility, as the eldest, to set an example. Tatiana, in contrast, never betrayed her feelings, was brisk and capable and extremely good at getting things done. She had the same cautious personality and reserve as her mother, to whom she was devoted. Maria was sweet, gentle and loving, a natural care-giver who loved children. But as the middle child she was vulnerable to being bullied by the others, particularly the fourth sister, Anastasia. Much has been written about the youngest Romanov sister – perhaps at the expense of the others – but she was an extraordinary individualist, a wild spirit, flamboyant and extrovert, good at entertaining people and keeping up morale. And finally there was Alexey, a bright, inquisitive child who suffered from being spoilt by an overprotective mother – which encouraged bouts of bad behaviour – but who demonstrated great intelligence and intuition as he grew older, and a compassion for those, like him, who experienced ill health.

The intimate, highly protected domestic world created by their mama and papa, which these five children inhabited so contentedly till the outbreak of war in 1914, was very different from the public one occupied by Nicholas and Alexandra themselves. By 1917, the autocratic Tsar and Tsaritsa – once so beloved as the ‘little father’ and ‘little mother’ of the nation – were widely reviled in a rapidly changing revolutionary Russia. The country was worn down by the abuses of the old repressive tsarist regime and a growing voice of dissent demanded their overthrow and the establishment of a democratic constitutional government.

During the war years of 1914–18 the Romanov children had begun to see and experience at first hand the ugly truth of the widespread antipathy directed towards their parents. They had had to grow up fast – the eldest two sisters, Olga and Tatiana, training as nurses to work in the hospital set up by their mother at Tsarskoe Selo, and all of them, including Alexey, supporting Red Cross charities, hospital-visiting and other war work. But then war descended into revolution and chaos; in March 1917 the metaphorical cage that had protected the Romanov children till now became a very real and frightening one. The old tsarist government – the State Duma – fell, and Nicholas was prevailed upon to abdicate. Now prisoners of the new Russian Provisional Government, the Romanov family were held under house arrest, first at the Alexander Palace from March to July 1917, then transferred to Tobolsk from August to April 1918, and finally sent to the House of Special Purpose in Ekaterinburg.

It was here, in this centre of the Urals mining industry in Western Siberia, during the last ninety-eight days of their lives, that the Romanovs finally began to sense an ominous change in the atmosphere. Until then they had endured the monotony of their captivity with a combination of intense boredom and calm resignation. But, for the Bolshevik Revolution, the endgame was in sight; and that meant one thing: a brutal and vindictive act of retribution would be carried out against the entire Imperial Family. Nicholas and Alexandra must have sensed that sooner or later the revolution might take its revenge on them. But the children too?

The violent deaths of these seven royal victims, along with their doctor and three loyal servants, although horrific to us now, were soon forgotten at the time. They were rapidly swallowed up in a much more hideous catalogue of savage fighting and murder that saw eleven million Russians die during the years of upheaval and civil war of 1917–22.

Yet despite this, for some people the Romanov family will always represent, historically, the symbolic first victims of the new, Soviet regime and a system that would go on to kill even more millions in the decades of Stalinist repression that followed. There is also another element that keeps this story in the public consciousness: a persisting sense – often not fully understood – that regicide, the killing of a king or tsar, is the killing of God’s anointed; that regicide is an act that crosses a line, after which any evil is possible.

But, ultimately, it is the murder of innocent children that horrifies us the most.

I had felt a strong sense of attachment to the Romanov family right from the very start – when walking the streets of Ekaterinburg in the summer of 2007, after flying there to research my book Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs. In the humid July heat and late into the eerie White Nights that lit up the city, I walked its streets from north to south, east to west, reimagining the Romanovs’ last days at the Ipatiev House on Voznesensky Prospekt. I travelled out to the Koptyaki Forest nine miles away and stood with the pilgrims mourning the Romanovs in rapt silence at the place where the family’s bodies, and those of their loyal retainers, had been thrown in chaotic haste that first night. I found my way to the modest wooden cross with plastic flowers in a woodland glade not far away, where they all – bar Maria and Alexey – had been tossed into a shallow grave forty-eight hours later. I pondered why exactly this story had gained such a hold over my imagination. I could understand the powerful, all-pervading sense of grief about the Romanov murders that was still nursed by devout Orthodox Russians; and, like everyone else, I had been sucked into its elements of high drama and tragedy. But my fundamental attraction to it was as a historian and a writer. I wanted answers to questions that had long been troubling me, and which I felt no one till now had really tried to answer. I wanted to try and get at the truth of what really happened in 1917–18.

The canonisation of the murdered Romanov family in the 1980s, followed by the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church after the collapse of communism in 1991, has fostered a level of veneration that has today turned Ekaterinburg into a major pilgrimage centre. As a result, a great deal of evidence has come to light in the last twenty-five years in post-Soviet Russia about the circumstances of the family’s time in captivity, from their house arrest at the Alexander Palace to the final haunting, foreboding days in Ekaterinburg. Russian historians have, since the 1990s, published valuable evidence that had long been languishing in the Soviet archives, and have written extensively on the circumstances of the murders and the identity of their perpetrators. The continuing controversy over the DNA testing of the remains – first carried out in the 1990s and repeated more recently at the behest of the Russian Orthodox Church – has meant that the story regularly resurfaces in the press. Every time it does, the inevitable tedious conspiracy theories and claims of miraculous survival follow in its wake; even now, they still refuse to go away.

July 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the Romanov murders. Now is undoubtedly the opportune and most fitting time to at last put the metaphorical lid on the coffin and bring closure to this story. For me as a historian, there remain several burning, unanswered questions that nobody has yet tackled – except piecemeal, here and there, and often based on conjecture rather than original, evidence-based research. And they are these:

Why was nobody able to save the Romanovs?

Why did the Imperial Family’s many royal cousins in Europe collectively fail them? Why did all the Allied governments with which Russia had so doggedly been fighting a war for three and a half years let them down? Why did the Russian Provisional Government prove impotent in effecting a prompt and safe evacuation out of Russia, after Nicholas abdicated? Why did Germany not take advantage of its upper hand at the Brest-Litovsk peace talks with the Bolsheviks in 1918 and insist that the Romanovs be released? And why was everyone so easily taken in by the duplicitous game played by Lenin’s Soviet government about the true circumstances of the Imperial Family’s brutal murder?

Having spoken about the Romanovs on the literary-festival circuit for many years, I always get two predictable questions from audiences at the end of every talk. One is: ‘Did Anastasia get away?’; and the other: ‘Why did King George V betray his Romanov cousins and not grant them asylum in England?’

Ah, so it was all King George’s fault? The British king had failed to come galloping to the rescue of his Romanov cousins. If only it were that simple. The story that I unravel here is much more complicated: it is a tale of intriguing personal family relationships; internal and international political rivalries and prejudices; the vagaries of geography and the weather, and the logistical difficulties created by them; and – at its most basic level – a story of plain bad timing.

To make sense of it all, I wanted to begin by getting to grips with the attitudes and relationships of the royal cousins who found themselves at war – or clinging perilously to a neutral stance – in August 1914. This meant that I needed to go back to the close, incestuous world of European royalty of the 1890s.

Chapter 1

Happy Families

IN APRIL 1894 the last of a succession of royal dynastic marriages engineered by Queen Victoria as ‘Grandmama of Europe’ took place in Coburg, the capital of the German Duchy of Hesse and by Rhine. The bride and groom were two of her grandchildren: Ernst, the reigning Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine, and Princess Victoria Melita, a daughter of Victoria’s son Prince Alfred. It was a union that epitomised the close intermarriage of first and second cousins that had been a regular feature of Queen Victoria’s family since the 1850s. By the time she died in 1901, her royal descendants in Europe had been drawn into a network of complex and often antagonistic dynastic ties and loyalties that would continue to be made right up to the eve of war in 1914.

This latest family marriage at Coburg, between first cousins Ernst (better known as Ernie) and Victoria Melita, was, however, almost upstaged by the behind-the-scenes drama surrounding the ten-year-long on–off romance between Nicholas Alexandrovich, heir to the Russian throne, and Ernie’s sister, Princess Alix (as she was then known). Everyone thought Alix a great beauty and a desirable match, as a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Nicholas had carried the torch for her for several years, but she had stubbornly resisted his entreaties to marry her. The seemingly insurmountable stumbling block was that, despite being deeply in love with Nicholas, the pious Alix steadfastly refused to give up her Lutheran faith and convert to Russian Orthodoxy. But at the Coburg wedding, and somewhat unexpectedly, the match was given the impetus it required by the intervention of one of the couple’s least-likely relatives – the difficult and often antagonistic Wilhelm, Kaiser of Germany. Here, as German emperor on a par with his grandmother Victoria, who was Empress of India, Wilhelm revelled in presiding over this ‘august reunion of the oldest dynasties in Europe’.¹ He had worked hard to persuade Alix to agree to convert, in order to cement further royal dynastic expansion in Europe, and on 21 April she had finally relented. Nicholas recorded in his diary that this was the ‘most wonderful, unforgettable day of my life – the day of my betrothal to my dear beloved Alix’.² For ever after, Wilhelm would congratulate himself that he had acted as the deus ex machina behind the engagement of his Russian and German cousins. They owed their good fortune to him, and this unshakeable belief in his own magisterial powers would remain an integral part of the ‘mythomania’ of Wilhelm’s eccentric world.³

Queen Victoria, however, had very serious apprehensions about what the future might hold for her beloved granddaughter Alix if she married into Russian royalty. ‘My blood runs cold when I think of her so young most likely placed on that very unsafe throne,’ she wrote to Alix’s sister Victoria, for ‘her dear life and above all her husband’s’ would be ‘constantly threatened’.⁴ As in many things, history would prove Queen Victoria right.

In earlier years, Wilhelm had himself held aspirations to marry one of the four beautiful Hesse sisters: Alix, Ella, Victoria and Irene. He had visited them frequently from his home in Berlin when they were growing up in Hesse and had always looked on Alix’s older sister Ella as his ‘special pet’.⁵ By the time he was nineteen, Wilhelm hoped to make her his wife. She was a first cousin, a match that, despite the genetic risks of consanguinity, Queen Victoria might nevertheless have encouraged. But Wilhelm’s mother, Crown Princess Victoria, had other thoughts. She favoured a Princess of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, who was less closely related.

Wilhelm never liked being thwarted, especially by his mother, and persisted in visiting the Hesse sisters at Darmstadt. But just as Ella began to relent, the notoriously unpredictable Kaiser-in-waiting switched his affections to his mother’s preferred candidate, Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein, with what his own father described as ‘outrageous rapidity’.⁶ Yet Wilhelm never forgot his early love for Ella and developed an obsessive hatred for the man she went on to marry in 1884 – Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich. Ella might have married a Russian, but in Wilhelm’s eyes she was, and would remain, a German.

Privately it was clear that Crown Princess Victoria had feared that haemophilia – the ‘Hesse disease’ – might be passed by Ella into the German royal family. For Ella’s mother, Princess Alice, the Grand Duchess of Hesse and the Crown Princess’s sister, had been a carrier of the potentially fatal gene, passed on to her unknowingly by their mother, Queen Victoria. The closeness of the blood ties that bound the European royal families was thus, by the end of the century, increasingly being called into question. Still, at the wedding at Coburg in 1894 everyone tried to shut out these fears. It was such a happy time: ‘No one seemed to remember all those horrid things which were said about cousins marrying,’ Alix had reassured a friend about her engagement to Nicholas, ‘look, half our cousins have married each other’. And besides, ‘who else is there to marry?’⁷

The marriage in November 1894 of Nicholas and Alix (who now took the Russian names of Alexandra Feodorovna) forged new Russian–German–British family alliances. These would ensure that the Russian Imperial Family made regular family visits, with their five children – Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexey – to their relatives in Europe over the coming fifteen years. The favourite venue was Alexandra’s home state of Hesse and by Rhine – usually the Neues Palais in the city of Darmstadt, where she had been born a princess of the ruling house in 1872. So regular were Romanov family visits that in the late 1890s Nicholas paid for a Russian Orthodox chapel to be specially built for Alexandra’s use there, for she had become as devout in her Russian Orthodoxy as she had been in her Lutheranism. But the place in Hesse that the Romanov family loved most was Ernie’s summer retreat, the hunting lodge known as Schloss Wolfsgarten, to which his and Alexandra’s father, Grand Duke Louis, frequently retreated after the untimely death of their mother, Princess Alice, in 1878. Situated not far from the capital, the house was brick-built and modest, but it was set in beautiful, dense beech woods, with a sweet-smelling rose garden, ornamental fountain and orchards. Here the Romanovs enjoyed reunions with Alexandra’s sisters Irene, married to Prince Henry of Prussia, and Victoria, married to Prince Louis of Battenberg and now resident in England. Ella joined them from Russia when she was able. These relaxed family holidays often went on for several weeks, with many happy hours of riding, games of tennis and picnics, much music and singing. They were in marked contrast to the tense atmosphere that prevailed when Wilhelm was present at family gatherings.

Like most of their European royal cousins, the Hesse and Romanov families always found Wilhelm abrasive and systematically cold-shouldered him; many held him in utter contempt. He had – as Count Mosolov, head of the Russian Imperial Court Chancellery, noted – ‘a special gift of upsetting everybody who came near him’. Nicholas could not bear Wilhelm’s overbearing manner and held him always at arm’s length, as his father Alexander III had done before him. Alexandra too had always had ‘an innate aversion’ to her cousin and often contrived a ‘bad head’ when a lunch or dinner with Wilhelm loomed. She was scathing in her view of her cousin: ‘He’s an actor, an outstanding comic turn, a false person,’ she told a member of her entourage.⁸

Wilhelm’s English cousin, George – who had become Prince of Wales after the old queen’s death in 1901 – and his wife, the half-German Mary, got on with the Kaiser rather better. Although privately Mary thought Wilhelm’s erratic behaviour at times ‘made royalty ridiculous’, she and her husband showed a greater natural tolerance of his eccentricities. This was partly out of loyalty to the strong ties with Prussia that had been promoted by George’s grandfather, Prince Albert, during his lifetime, when his and Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter Vicky had married Wilhelm’s father, the future Prussian emperor.⁹ For a time an inherent sense of a ‘deep dynastic commitment’ to all things German, based on a century or more of Hanoverians on the throne of Britain prior to Victoria, had existed between the two royal houses.¹⁰ This was confirmed by a relative, Princess Marie of Battenberg (a daughter of Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine), who remarked that she had ‘never felt more German’ than with Queen Victoria. During the Queen’s lifetime, ‘it was taken as a matter of course that German was widely and fluently spoken in the family’.¹¹ But after Victoria’s death it was a struggle for Wilhelm to gain the approval of his uncle Bertie, now King Edward VII; Wilhelm’s hectoring and bellicose manner did nothing to promote the alliance with Britain that his mother and father had long cherished. His aggressive colonial expansionism further antagonised the British and, by the end of the century, a chill political and diplomatic air between the two countries prevailed. During the reign of King Edward VII ‘there was always a feeling of thunder in the air’ whenever he was obliged to meet with his nephew the Kaiser.¹²

In contrast, the Danish royals, according to Queen Victoria, had always been the ‘one remarkable’ exception to the disharmony among so many of her other European relatives.¹³ They enjoyed warm relations with their British and Russian relatives, thanks to the marriage into those royal houses of the Danish sisters Alexandra and Dagmar, in 1863 and 1866 respectively. As young parents, Nicholas and Alexandra made a few informal summer trips to ‘amama’ and ‘apapa’ (as they referred to the Danish king Christian IX and his wife Queen Louise) at Fredensborg. It was here that the cousins – Dagmar’s son, Nicholas the Tsarevich, and Alexandra’s son, George, Prince of Wales – had first developed a firm friendship. Indeed, it was as far back as 1883, on a family holiday at Fredensborg that George’s sister Maud had first taken note of the fifteen-year-old ‘darling little Nicky’. Like everyone else, she had noted how enamoured he was of Alix of Hesse and teased Nicholas about the fact that the object of his admiration was taller than him. Nonetheless, when Nicky and Maud were seen together at Prince George’s wedding to Princess Mary of Teck in London in 1893, his father (then still Prince of Wales) had asked his mother-in-law Queen Louise whether there might perhaps be hope of a match between Nicky and Maud. The queen had thought this a bad idea; Maud was ‘very sweet but far too headstrong’.¹⁴

Dynastic alliances were thus as much in the mind of the future King Edward VII as they were in that of the Kaiser, although Wilhelm’s matchmaking ambitions had been part of a grandiose plan for the creation of a powerful new Zollverein – a continental alliance of Germany, Russia and France. Steering Alix of Hesse in the direction of Nicholas of Russia had been one way of shoring this up. Perhaps, in the wilder reaches of his vivid imagination, Wilhelm nursed visions of being another Frederick the Great, the Prussian monarch who had been instrumental in brokering the marriage of his German relative Sophie van Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg, and with it her rise on the Russian throne as Catherine the Great. The new Tsaritsa Alexandra would, however, never demonstrate any of Catherine’s breadth of vision and energy as Empress. If anything, she inherited the prosaic, domestic Victorian values of her mother Alice – of example, duty, morality and a sense of service. But in one thing at least Alexandra would later demonstrate an instinct that she shared with her cousin Wilhelm: an entrenched belief in absolutist autocratic power.

Wilhelm’s mother, the Dowager Empress Victoria, had certainly hoped that her niece Alexandra’s succession to the Russian throne in November 1894, on the sudden death of Alexander III, might foster improved relations between Russia and Germany. In the years up to 1908 Nicholas and Wilhelm made frequent visits to each other for army manoeuvres, reviews of the fleet or simply to enjoy the shooting at their respective hunting lodges in Prussia and the Russian imperial game reserves in Poland. They had even gone yachting together – the Romanovs on the imperial yacht, the Shtandart, the Kaiser on the Hohenzollern – at Kiel and around the Finnish skerries. But far too often the prickly, meddlesome Kaiser had succeeded in upsetting those around him.¹⁵ Despite this, in his letters to Nicky, Willy repeatedly assured him of his love and devotion; after all they shared the same fundamental belief in their divine right as sovereigns. ‘We, Christian Kings and Emperors have one holy duty imposed on us by Heaven,’ he told Nicky. ‘That is to uphold the principle “von Gottes gnaden” [by the grace of God].’¹⁶

The Tsarevich Alexey’s christening in 1904 would be the culmination of a period of rapprochement with Wilhelm, when he was asked to be godfather, in what may well have been an act more of diplomatic flattery than of familial affection. Wilhelm had been impatiently anticipating the birth of a ‘nice little boy’ since Nicholas and Alexandra’s marriage in 1894, but had had to wait almost ten years – interspersed with the arrival of four baby girls – before the longed-for Tsarevich was born.¹⁷ He was delighted to be honoured in this way, and hoped that little Alexey would ‘grow to be a brave soldier and a wise and powerful statesman’ and a ‘ray of sunshine to you both during your life’.¹⁸

A year later, at the time of Russia’s war with Japan, and in light of the 1902 alliance between Britain and Japan, Wilhelm worked hard on Nicholas’s political loyalties. His long-term ambition had always been to keep his Russian cousin preoccupied with war in the East and Central Asia, leaving the way clear for his own ambitious German dominion-building in Europe.¹⁹ He had spent years lecturing Nicholas by letter on his political and military options. Now, in July 1905, he took advantage of the Tsar’s low morale at a time when he was worn down by a disastrous war, badgering him into a secret meeting at Björkö in Finland. Here Wilhelm talked the impressionable Nicholas into signing ‘a little agreement’ of their own, a defensive treaty under which Russia and Germany would come to each other’s aid in the event of attack, an act clearly designed to undermine Russia’s 1894 alliance with France. Thankfully Nicholas’s advisers refused to endorse his signature and the treaty was aborted.

Thereafter, and in the long, slow burn towards the outbreak of war in 1914, it became increasingly evident that Nicholas and Alexandra’s relationship with their German relative was ‘tinged with a measure of latent and almost instinctive animosity’ – a fact that would have a crucial bearing on events later in this story.²⁰ As for Nicholas, it was one thing for the two rulers to refer to each other by their pet domestic names, Willy and Nicky, but quite another for him ‘to bow the Slavic head to German benevolent assimilation’. As the US ambassador to Denmark, Maurice Egan, observed, ‘The Czar might call the Emperor by any endearing epithet, but that did not imply political friendship.’ Neither Nicholas nor Alexandra was impressed by Wilhelm’s brand of bombastic militarism, or by his manic sense of Hohenzollern grandeur.²¹ Egan’s conclusion was that ‘Germany and Russia will fly at each other’s throats as soon as the financiers approve of it.’²²

In contrast, and much to Wilhelm’s disgust, there had been a marked and growing closeness in recent years between the Russian and British royal families. People had always remarked on Nicholas’s good manners and impeccable English, the result of having grown up with an English tutor, Charles Heath, who had educated him in the traditional public-school values of fair play and gentlemanly behaviour.²³ Ever since Nicholas first visited Queen Victoria at Windsor in 1894 he had referred to her with great affection as ‘granny’, writing to his cousin George when the Queen died in 1901, ‘I am quite sure that with your help … the friendly relations between our two countries shall become still closer than in the past … May the new century bring England and Russia together for their mutual interests and for the general peace of the world.’ From now on, the Prince of Wales (and future king George V) made repeated assurances in letters that he was ‘Ever, dearest Nicky, your loving and truly devoted cousin and friend’.²⁴ They had much in common, notably an unostentatious domestic life and a love of the quiet of the countryside.

In tandem with warmer relations with Russia, a British entente with France was initiated in 1903 after King Edward made a triumphant state visit there. The entente cordiale had followed in 1904, and in 1907 a new Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia. It was seen as a long-overdue and necessary defensive counterweight to the Triple Alliance that Wilhelm’s grandfather had forged with Italy and Austria–Hungary in 1882. In Queen Victoria’s time Russia had been a traditional enemy, and a country of whose expansionist ambitions in Central Asia she had had a pathological mistrust. By 1908, however, with cousin Willy embarking on an intensive shipbuilding programme and rapid expansion of his German battle fleet, there was clearly a pressing need for political rapprochement between Britain and Russia to counter this. Nevertheless, many in the British government and press perceived Nicholas as a despot and openly criticised the tsarist regime and its draconian prison and exile system.

It was the pragmatic Edward VII who saw the logic of this new alliance and what he came to call ‘the Trade Union of Kings’. Nicholas, forever a straw in the wind susceptible to the influence of his more politically accomplished and domineering royal cousins, drifted increasingly into the British sphere of influence. For the time being, Edward’s form of personal royal diplomacy remained effective. In June 1908 he finally made an official visit to Russia – albeit at sea, for security reasons – meeting Nicholas at the Estonian port of Reval (now Tallinn) in the Baltic, at this time still part of the Russian Empire. Superficially intended as a family affair, the visit added a ‘personal touch of royal friendliness … to clear away any lingering mistrust’ and further cement Anglo-Russian relations. It also gave Edward the opportunity to offer Nicholas the weight of his own considerable political experience.²⁵

Despite rumblings from Labour MP Ramsay MacDonald that the King should not be ‘hobnobbing with a bloodstained creature’ Edward made the grand gesture at Reval of creating Nicholas an admiral of the British fleet, and Nicholas returned the compliment by making Edward an admiral of the Imperial Navy.²⁶ By the end of the two-day PR exercise, designed, so The Times noted, ‘to establish the world’s peace’, the atmosphere between the ‘sovereigns of the two greatest empires under the sun’ was one of ‘cordial trust’, a fact that infuriated the Kaiser when the news reached him.²⁷ Privately Edward had grave reservations about Nicholas’s competence as a monarch, thinking him ‘deplorably unsophisticated, immature, and reactionary’, but Edward was a skilful and tactful diplomatist who made his point by example and not by lecturing (unlike his nephew, the Kaiser), and the following year he invited the Romanovs to Britain.

August 1909 witnessed the last lovely imperial summer that the Romanovs would enjoy with their English relatives before war changed things irrevocably. Nicholas, Alexandra and all five children had sailed to the Isle of Wight to spend time with ‘dear uncle Bertie’ and his family. But such was the security nightmare of entertaining the Tsar of Russia that the four-day visit had to be conducted almost entirely at sea. Meetings, meals and receptions between the two families were held away from public view, on the two royal yachts, the Shtandart and the Victoria and Albert, anchored in the Solent outside Cowes harbour. The Romanovs were accorded a perfunctory tour of Osborne House, and afternoon tea with the Prince of Wales and his family at nearby Barton Manor, but at least the Romanov children had enjoyed a day ashore. They had taken great pleasure in visiting the royal family’s private beach near Osborne House, where they dug sandcastles and collected seashells like any other children. On a shopping trip to west Cowes, with a bevy of detectives keeping a discreet distance, it was, however, the two eldest Romanov sisters, Olga and Tatiana, who had attracted the most attention and admiration. They seemed so natural, so modest and charming, and had shown such delight at their simple purchases of postcards and gifts for their parents and entourage.fn1

King Edward had been eager to organise this visit as an important gesture of support for the Anglo-Russian entente, at a time of increasing political tension. It was, he argued, ‘politically of the highest importance’.²⁸ But in 1909 growing hostility from Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Party was reflected in a widening public hostility towards Russia’s ‘Nicholas the Bloody’, which reached its zenith when the imperial yacht arrived at Cowes. This change had been coming ever since the brutal repressions of peaceful protesters in St Petersburg (from 1914 Petrograd) in January 1905 by Cossacks and other troops from the Imperial Guard, which was loyal to the government. Edward was accused of fraternising with a ‘common murderer’ and the Labour Party issued a formal protest. Nevertheless the atmosphere was in marked contrast to the stiff and uncomfortable visits made to the Kaiser by Nicholas at Swinemünde in 1907, and by Edward to Berlin six months before the Cowes visit, neither of which had done anything to mitigate deteriorating relations with Germany. Cowes, 1909, despite the anti-tsarist protests and worrying signs that Edward VII was now seriously ailing, reinforced the burgeoning new Anglo-Russian alliance. The Tsar’s attendance at a naval review at Cherbourg en route to the Isle of Wight also further endorsed the Russian union with France in a power bloc against a now highly militant Germany.

Despite the wish to promote closer family relationships in the run-up to what seemed an inevitable European war, after 1909 Nicholas and Alexandra were increasingly forced to stay at home. The threat of revolutionary violence against them in Russia, as well as Alexandra’s rapidly declining health, frequently made trips across the country, and beyond, untenable. With this heightened danger pressing inwards, the Imperial Family retreated within the protected walls of their palace at Tsarskoe Selo, fifteen miles south of St Petersburg. Journeys by rail were particularly open to attack, and the Romanovs now only travelled to visit relatives by sea. Even on a low-key visit to the Swedish king and queen in Stockholm in 1909 there had been rumours of an attempted attack on Nicholas, and for their protection the family had remained on board their yacht, with the Swedes coming to them. Such highly constrained visits allowed very little significant time in which the imperial children might enjoy the company of their young cousins, aside from precious trips to Wolfsgarten in Hesse.²⁹

On 6 May 1910, Edward VII, the monarch at the heart of the old European royal order, died, his overweight body finally giving up on him after years of heavy smoking, drinking and eating. Edward might have begun his reign with the reputation of a self-indulgent playboy, but he ended it as a model constitutional monarch and one who had been universally loved and admired at home and abroad. Sadly, his good example had not rubbed off on his most stubbornly autocratic nephews – Wilhelm and Nicholas.

A great, solemn and dignified state funeral was arranged, but first the King’s coffin lay in state in Westminster Hall for three days, in order to allow almost 250,000 members of the public – in a queue that was seven miles long on its final day – to file past and pay their respects. A cavalcade of royals in full rig – gold braid, feathers and cockades ablaze in the hot sunshine – processed on horseback behind the gun carriage carrying the King’s coffin through the streets of London, to say farewell to this monarch, ‘the most kingly of them all’.³⁰

King Edward’s funeral, larger even than that for his mother in 1901, undoubtedly marked the apotheosis of European monarchy. Among the dignitaries gathered from all over the world to pay their respects were nine reigning monarchs: eight kings and one emperor, aged from twenty-one to sixty-six years old. They sat together at Windsor Castle for a now-famous portrait: the new British king, George V; Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany; Frederick VIII of Denmark; George I of Greece; Haakon VII of Norway; Alfonso XIII of Spain; Manuel II of Portugal; Ferdinand I of Bulgaria; and Albert I, King of the Belgians – all related to the dead monarch either by blood or marriage. As too were most of the forty-five princes and seven queens in their entourages.³¹

Yet one monarch was conspicuous by his absence. Where was Nicholas? It was no surprise to anyone that he was unable to attend, being represented instead by his younger brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, and his mother the Dowager, who was the dead king’s sister-in-law. No official explanation was offered, but it is likely that the security nightmare of the Tsar of Russia marching in the funeral procession, where any political assassin could take a shot at him, was one that neither Nicholas’s advisers nor British Special Branch had wished to take on. Cousin Wilhelm, however, was not slow to take advantage of Nicholas’s absence and clasped George’s hand in a moment’s commiseration as they stood together by the King’s coffin in Westminster Hall. The genuine sympathy that Wilhelm displayed that day prompted an invitation to return to England to attend the unveiling of a new statue of Queen Victoria – the grandmother he had revered as ‘the creator of the greatness of modern Britain’ – the following February.³²

Even as people talked of an inevitable war between Britain and Germany, the Kaiser remained hopeful that he and his English cousin could still be best friends. But behind his back, George was already aligning himself firmly with his Russian cousin, exchanging letters of solidarity with Nicholas in which he reassured him that he hoped ‘we shall always continue our old friendship to one another’ and insisting that ‘I have always been very fond of you’.³³ ‘If only England, Russia and France stick together,’ wrote George not long after his father’s funeral, ‘then peace in Europe is assured.’ His correspondence with Nicholas over the following years became regular, frank and friendly. He was sure the Tsar shared his sentiments, for they were both by now convinced of the need to strengthen the entente in the face of increased German aggression. ‘I know you don’t mind me writing quite frankly what I think, as we have always been such good friends, I like to tell you everything,’ George assured Nicholas a year later.³⁴

As things turned out, 1910 also marked the last time Nicholas and Alexandra were able to make the journey to their German relatives in Hesse. A prolonged stay at Friedberg Castle provided a rare opportunity for all five Hesse siblings – Alexandra, Ella, Irene, Victoria and their brother Ernie – to be reunited. Friedberg, located between Darmstadt and Frankfurt, was perhaps the most unroyal venue of all the royal homes Nicholas and Alexandra visited. Here the Romanovs enjoyed a reduced entourage, no parades or ceremonies, relaxed etiquette and, for Nicholas, an escape into civilian clothes. He was able to go out, incognito, with his brother-in-law Ernie, and could sit and drink a glass of beer in a café and browse in the local shops.³⁵ But Alexandra was by now in serious physical decline, suffering from chronic sciatica, heart trouble, headaches and facial neuralgia, made worse by the constant mental strain of having a haemophiliac son. She had already undergone treatment at a spa in Bad Nauheim prior to their visit, and kept mainly to her rooms, spending much of her time in a wheelchair. Her five children, who had long since learned to be self-sufficient during their mother’s frequent bouts of illness, enjoyed being left to their own devices and made the most of the time with their cousins.

Back in Russia, the nation enjoyed one final golden opportunity to see their sovereigns – their little mother and father – at close hand during the Romanov Tercentenary celebrations of 1913. In St Petersburg and Moscow the whole family joined in great religious parades, where ordinary Russians turned out in their thousands to catch a glimpse of them, followed in May by a riverboat tour along the Volga to Kostroma, Yaroslavl, Suzdal and other ancient cities of old Muscovy. The ceremonials held in Moscow also enabled many of the Russian public to see the elusive young Tsarevich at last, though people expressed concern at seeing him having to be carried by a Cossack. Alexey was still recovering from a severe episode of bleeding that had nearly killed him the previous year and had left him with permanent damage to his leg. The truth about his haemophilia and the constant threat to his life was still being kept from the Russian public.

Shortly afterwards, Nicholas left for Germany, for the last great European royal wedding to be held before the outbreak of war – in Berlin. By this time, one of the monarchs in King Edward’s funeral procession has already lost his throne: King Manuel of Portugal had been deposed in a military coup just five months later.

Always keen to outdo his English cousins, Wilhelm had invited even more relatives than those who had gathered in London in 1910. Nicholas, however, travelled alone to the festivities under heavy guard in an armoured train, arriving at Berlin’s Anhalter station where the security was so extensive it looked like ‘a constabulary camp, police and detectives were everywhere’.³⁶