The Three Emperors Read online

  Nicholas decided to visit Alix while she was on her three-month trip to England, arriving on board his father’s new white yacht, Polar Star, nearly a year after his previous visit, in mid-June 1894. The month he stayed there, he wrote, was “paradisiacal happiness.”75 He and Alix spent several days at Henley with Alix’s sister Victoria, who was married to Louis of Battenberg (brother of the ill-fated Sandro and a rising man in the Royal Navy), then went on to Windsor (where Nicholas managed to lock himself “in a certain place”76—i.e., a lavatory—and only got out half an hour later with Alix’s help) and Osborne. They went boating on the Thames, picnicking at Windsor, and at Osborne they put on new-fangled swimming costumes and “walked in bare feet like a child by water.” When he confessed his affair to Alix she wrote in his diary, “I love you even more since you told me that little story, your confidence in me touched me, oh, so deeply …” She had taken to leaving little notes and quotes in English in his diary. “Sweety dear, have confidence and faith in your girly dear, who loves you more deeply … than she can ever say.”77 When George and May’s first child, a boy called David, was born during the visit, Nicholas travelled with the family to Richmond to see him and stand godparent. He worked hard to win the queen’s approval. Nicky “is most affectionate78 and attentive to me,” she observed. “She is very79 fond of you,” Alix had reassured him. Underneath, he bridled at “good Granny’s” supervision, her reluctance to let them out without a chaperone and her attempts to shoehorn him into court occasions: “I have to appear in a tail coat with red collar and cuffs and breeches and pumps—how ghastly!”80

  Beyond the family, Nicholas cut a less impressive figure—he was such a “delicate-looking81 stripling” compared to his father, one courtier noticed; very young, “very bashful,” a German diplomat at the London embassy observed, lapsing into an “almost childish silliness, which, however, was rather likeable than otherwise.”82

  What must have struck Nicholas forcibly, as on his previous trip, was the way that the English family—or at least Edward—made themselves so much more available than his own Russian family. Towards the end of the visit, he went to spend a few days with George and his father at Sandringham. The deceptively modest but (on the way to being) modern stately home was very different from the immense, draughty malachite halls of St. Petersburg or Berlin’s vast, chilly schloss, a monument to leisurely wealth in which a royal family chose not to be on duty. Edward took Nicholas to a horse sale in nearby King’s Lynn, where they ate lunch in a huge tent along with all the other diners, separated only by the dais on which their table was perched, everyone “gaping more at us,83 than the horses.” In Russia a Romanov would never have eaten among, and in full view of, the lower orders, but Edward positively enjoyed being on show. Even more unusual were Edward’s house guests. “Most of them84 were horse-dealers, among others a Baron Hirsch. The Cousins rather enjoyed the situation and kept teasing me about it; but I tried to keep away as much as I could, and not to talk.”

  Baron Maurice de Hirsch was a Jew, probably the first Nicholas had ever met. Though in Europe Jews had had, more or less, the same rights as anyone else since the 1870s, in Russia anti-Semitism was still energetically inculcated by the Church, and they remained the poorest and most persecuted of minorities, victims of pogroms (the word comes from the Russian “to wreak havoc”), and a whole raft of persecutory and restrictive laws. Hirsch was a millionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist of German extraction who was known in Russia—though Nicky had clearly never heard of him—for his attempts to improve the lives of Russian Jews and for the millions he was spending on resettling Russian Jewish emigrants in America and Argentina.

  Whilst nowhere was as anti-Semitic as Russia, Edward’s friendship with Hirsch was a mark of his worldliness and openness. He had made a point of admitting to his social circle a number of rich Jews and self-made millionaires, including the Rothschild brothers—Alfred, Nathan and Leopold—whom he had met at university, along with the Glasgow tenement boy turned tea millionaire Thomas Lipton and the furniture manufacturer Sir Blundell Maple. By contrast, the Romanovs spoke of “trade,” i.e., the new Russian industrial rich, with only slightly less disgust than they did of rich Jews, and many of the British upper classes exercised a “salon” anti-Semitism, welcoming in new money but sneering at it behind their backs. Edward’s friendliness was certainly due in part to his rich Jewish friends’ willingness to pay off his debts—it seems Hirsch had. But he was also fascinated by the energy and power of people who made and manipulated money, and he understood the importance of the new rich far better than the rest of his contemporaries among European royalty and the haute aristocracy. The Rothschilds, for example, were not just rich—their bank was the biggest financial institution in the world, and, as the British empire’s bankers, they had lent Disraeli the capital to buy shares in the Suez Canal and Cecil Rhodes the money to launch De Beers. Edward took a simple view of class and caste: there was royalty, and there was everyone else. This could manifest itself both as a pleasing lack of snobbery and colour-blindness, and as blunt racism. “Because a man85 has a black face and a different religion from our own there is no reason why he should be treated as a brute,” he commented on the way the colonial authorities treated Indians. “Either the brute86 is a King, or else he is an ordinary black nigger, and if he is not a King why is he here?” he reasoned when he placed the King of Hawaii ahead of the German crown prince at the 1887 Golden Jubilee.

  In late August Wilhelm told the queen that the tsar was said to be mortally ill.87

  Alexander was dying of kidney failure. He had been moved to the imperial family’s estates at Livadia by the Black Sea, in the hope that the Crimea’s famous “velvet” climate would revive him. The best German doctors had been summoned, but nothing could be done. By mid-October, when Alix arrived at Nicholas’s request, Alexander was almost blind and so weak he could hardly rise to kiss her, though he insisted on doing so in full dress uniform. Minny sent a telegram pleading for Edward and Alexandra to come. Perhaps mindful of the comfort she had given Alexandra after Eddy’s death, the Prince and Princess of Wales, plus an equerry, a lady-in-waiting and the prince’s friend Lord Carrington, the Lord Chamberlain, immediately set off across Europe. Alexander died painfully two days before they arrived on 2 November. He was forty-nine. “Lord, Lord,88 what a day,” Nicholas wrote in his diary. “God has called to him our adored, our dear, our tender Papa. My head spins, I can’t believe it … it was the death of a saint!” The afternoon of his father’s death, he took the oath of allegiance in the gardens of the palace, surrounded by dozens of courtiers, family and servants all dressed in gold. The next day everything was draped in black.

  Edward and Alexandra arrived to find the family in a kind of seizure. Minny had locked herself in her rooms. Nicky seemed cowed by his tall, confident uncles, grand dukes Vladimir and Sergei, and “harassed”89 by his ministers. The prospect of becoming tsar horrified him. In private with his family he tearfully confessed his terror. “What am I to do?”90 he asked Sandro. “What is going to happen to me, to you, to Xenia, to Alix, to mother, to all of Russia. I am not prepared to be Czar. I never wanted to become Czar. I know nothing of the business of ruling.” Olga remembered, “He was in despair. He kept saying that he did not know what would become of us all. That he was wholly unfit to reign. Even at that time I felt instinctively that sensitivity and kindness on their own were not enough for a sovereign.” It was Bertie, according to Olga, who “quietly began calming down the tumult that met them on their arrival … The last days at Livadia would have been beyond anyone’s endurance were it not for the presence of the Prince of Wales.”91 Alexandra took care of her sister; for the next month she accompanied her everywhere, even sleeping in her room. Bertie took over the funeral arrangements, tirelessly questioning their organizer, the minister of the imperial court (perhaps slightly to the minister’s exasperation), and set himself to befriend and encourage Nicky. “I cannot tell you92 what awful
and trying days we are living through,” Nicky wrote to “Granny.” “… Dear aunt Alix and uncle Bertie being here—help also dearest Mama in her pain.” “I wonder what93 his tiresome old mother would have said had she seen everybody accept uncle Bertie’s authority in Russia of all places,” Olga observed.

  It was Edward’s fourth visit to Russia. Since his marriage he had put himself out to be on good terms with his Russian in-laws, and in the last few years he had bestirred himself to meet them in Denmark—even if only briefly—almost every year. Though suspicious of Russia, he liked the idea of being an agent for the improvement of relations between the two countries, and no doubt Alexandra’s enthusiasm played its part. He had first gone to St. Petersburg in 1866, when Minny had asked him to swell her family’s numbers at her wedding. Almost bankrupted by a 60,000-crown dowry, the Danish family could afford to send only the crown prince, Freddi. The queen disapproved of his inveterate gadding about and thought he ought to stay at home more. But the British government had encouraged the trip, seeing it as an opportunity to clear some of the bad blood left since the Crimean War. Edward had leapt at the opportunity: “It would interest me94 beyond anything to see Russia … I should be only too happy to be the means in any way of promoting the entente cordiale between Russia and our own country … I am a very good traveller so that I should not at all mind the length of the journey.” He had made a good impression and returned in 1881 for Alexander II’s funeral and later for Alexander III’s coronation—but repeated imperial clashes had meant that diplomatic relations had never warmed up in the eighteen years since that first visit. A British official at the embassy in St. Petersburg had reported in June 1894—as Nicholas floated down the Thames—that “Popular opinion in95 Russia is strongly adverse to England.”

  The British were just as unfriendly. In May the British foreign secretary, Lord Rosebery, had issued warnings that the Royal Navy would counter with force any attempt by the Russian Black Sea fleet to venture into the Mediterranean, and the year’s runaway bestseller was The Great War in England by the popular spy-writer William Tufnell Le Queux, a fantasy about a Russian invasion (“Throughout the land the grey-coated horde of the White Tsar spread like locusts”) which bespoke an almost hysterical fear and dislike of the enemy. Within the government, however, there was beginning to be a feeling that the traditional enmity with Russia was expensive and impractical. British naval strategists had started to admit that the Royal Navy would not necessarily be able to hold back the Black Sea fleet if it chose to enter the Mediterranean. British ministers had begun to agree that the chances of Russia invading India were extremely remote—though the Indian government disagreed with them. And now that Britain occupied Egypt and controlled the Suez Canal, the overland route to India didn’t matter so much. Edward—briefed by Lord Rosebery, who had recently taken over the prime ministership from the retiring Gladstone—planned to make a lastingly strong impression on the new tsar, in the hope that it might mark the beginning of a thaw.

  When the tsar’s body made its seventeen-day journey to Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg, Edward and his entourage followed. They sent their observations back to Queen Victoria, who demanded descriptions. (“That old, tiresome96 woman at Windsor Castle telegraphs … for more letters,” grumbled the prince’s equerry, Sir Arthur Ellis.) They were overwhelmed by Russia. Everything seemed extreme: the tens of thousands of soldiers who lined the railway tracks from the Crimea to Moscow and St. Petersburg, the crowds of sobbing peasants, the vast, suffocatingly overheated palaces and the gorgeous, interminable, agonizingly slow ritual. On each of the seventeen days, the tsar’s family, its attendants and Edward—determined to show his support—and his entourage attended two services in dress uniform, kneeling for hours, then kissing the icon now held rigidly between the corpse’s fingers. It was exceptionally uncomfortable, boring and soon revolting, as “dear Papa”97 was “unfortunately starting to decompose very quickly.” Embalming didn’t solve the problem, and by the time Alexander was buried, his face had begun to rot. Ritual decreed it could not be covered, and the English visitors came to dread the “barbarous and98 unseemly custom.”

  The funeral was on a vast scale and relentless. Sixty-one European royals arrived in St. Petersburg for it, making it the largest royal event the Russians had ever hosted. George—summoned by his father because the “opportunity to see99 the great capital of Russia is not one to be missed”—was a pallbearer.* It took four hours for the funeral cortège to reach Kazan Cathedral, “most fatiguing for101 those who walked in the procession.” George watched ice form on the Neva. Inside the church, “the crowd was so102 great that the master of the ceremonies could hardly get a passage for the Empress to enter, and 3 ladies fainted.” In the Russian Orthodox Church there were no pews so everyone stood. Throughout it all, Bertie was next to Nicky, and along with the Romanovs he kissed the lips of the dead monarch though “the smell was103 awful.”

  A week after the funeral Nicholas married his fiancée. In Windsor, the queen wrote ominously, “Tomorrow morning104 poor dear Alicky’s105 fate will be sealed. No two people were ever more devoted as she and he are and that is one consolation I have, for otherwise the dangers and responsibilities fill me with anxiety.” Nicky spent the night before the wedding quietly with George, Greek Georgie and a Danish cousin, Waldemar. George told his grandmother,

  Dear Alicky looked quite lovely at the Wedding … she went through it all with so much modesty but was so graceful and dignified at the same time, she certainly made a most excellent impression … I do think Nicky is a very lucky man to have got such a lovely and charming wife … I must say I never [saw] two people more in love with each other or happier than they are. When they drove from the Winter Palace after the wedding they got a tremendous reception and ovation from the large crowds in the streets, the cheering was most hearty and reminded me of England.

  But no one else was quite so sanguine, not even the bride and groom. Nicholas looked “dreadfully pale106 and worn,” and confessed that it felt like “somebody else’s107 wedding and not mine.” Alix was pinned to the floor by the weight of the traditional silver brocade and cloth of gold, diamond-encrusted, ermine-lined, Romanov wedding dress that encased her, and it required eight pages simply to lift the train. She later said gloomily, “Our marriage108 seemed to me a mere continuation of the masses for the dead with this difference, that now I wore a white dress instead of a black one.” In her wedding photos, she looked thin-lipped and frowning. Her unease and discomfort when confronted by the vast company was palpable. “Even at this supreme109 moment no joy seemed to uplift her, not even pride,” wrote her cousin Marie of Romania, who didn’t like her. “Aloof, enigmatic, she was all dignity but she had about her no warmth.” Arthur Ellis, Edward’s equerry, noted, “Everything had the appearance110 of a forced air of mock festivity. All mourning put aside and an effort to appear cheerful—which was manifestly put on … a shadow of sadness seem [sic] to hang over the whole ceremony.” In the streets of St. Petersburg, 40,000 soldiers all took their hats off simultaneously. As they drove111 off in their carriage to Nicholas’s old childhood quarters in Anichkov Palace, Olga thought, “They looked so lonely, like two birds in a golden cage.”

  “This is the first112 time I have been to Russia, I certainly have got a most excellent impression of the people and the country,” George told the queen. “… Nicky has been kindness itself to me, he is the same dear boy he has always been to me, and talks to me quite openly on every subject … and he does everything so quietly and nicely and naturally; everyone is struck by it and he is very popular already.” Actually George was not comfortable in St. Petersburg. He felt hemmed in and would go walking off into the city, which “greatly embarrassed113 the police who had charge of his safety,” and astonished the court. The Prince of Wales’s equerry observed, “The Duke of York114 is rather bored here and pining to get back to shoot.” In the two weeks he was away, he wrote twenty letters to May, all of them asking what wa
s happening at home.

  Despite the gloom, the wedding marked a revival of excitement in the rest of the British contingent. The new reign looked promising, and the Russian press was suddenly full of praise for the Prince of Wales. “It is 115impossible not to be struck with the gratitude evinced by all to the expression of English sympathy,” Arthur Ellis wrote. “We were not popular and suddenly we are almost beloved. This is mainly owing to two things—the manner in which the P. and Princess of Wales have thrown themselves into earnest sympathy with their relatives and the accepted fact that the new and beautiful Empress is almost an Englishwoman (we don’t say this to the Hessians).” They began to wonder over-excitedly whether the nice young tsar might turn out to be much more liberal than his father. A story did the rounds that after the wedding service Nicholas had gone into the street and told his troops to fall back so he could walk among the crowd without the usual wall of security. The London Daily Telegraph described it as “a liberality116 unheard of in Russia.” It seemed impossible not to make comparisons with “another young Emperor117 to his mother—under late similar circumstances—greatly to the Czar’s advantage.” Even Edward himself felt “The character and personality118 of the new Tsar give assurance of the benefits which would come of an alliance between England and Russia.”

  Edward returned to England to a sea of praise. The prime minister told him, “Our relations with119 Russia are, I honestly believe, more cordial than at any period since the German war.” The British press—more accustomed to reviling the prince’s indiscretions—crooned over his “unsurpassed tact,120 dignity and good feeling. He has practically been the special ambassador of this country entrusted with a mission which only one standing very near to the throne could carry out,” The Times enthused. “It is scarcely121 an exaggeration to say,” the London Standard exaggerated, “that his personal intercourse with the new Czar has effected more in a few weeks than the most painstaking and sagacious Diplomacy would have brought about in a decade … the influence of the Throne in determining the relations between European Powers has never been disputed by those at all familiar with modern politics, it is sometimes lost sight of or ignored by the more flippant order of Democrats.”