There were endless petty humiliations. Soldiers enjoyed taunting them; crowds of spectators at the outer railings would peer in, hissing and booing. It was an ordeal borne with dignity, and in the confidence that it was only temporary — that they would very shortly be sent aboard into exile. Pierre Gilliard, the Swiss tutor employed at Tsarskoe Selo, would remember that ‘there was endless talk about our imminent transfer to England’.29
The Provisional Government, worried by Soviet threats, encouraged that idea as the best way of keeping the family out of reach of vengeful revolutionaries. The British government quickly signalled that it was willing to take them, assuming in doing so that the king, Nicholas’s first cousin, would surely support that — they were family.
Buckingham Palace, however, was aghast at the prospect. King George was alarmed not just by the inevitable left-wing protests which would greet any move to give ‘Bloody Nicholas’ sanctuary but that the British royals were themselves facing increased hostility over the fact that, although British by birth and upbringing, they were all of German descent. When even a dachshund risked being kicked in the street the British king, with a German father-in-law, and German relatives all around him, was understandably sensitive about being damned as a German. British republicanism was not deep-seated but it was very noisy.
It would not be long before anti-German sentiment would be so great that the British royals in the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, as Queen Victoria thought it to be, would reinvent themselves under the more agreeable name of the House of Windsor. By Order-in-Council of July 17, 1917, Alexandra’s eldest sister Victoria, of Hesse-Darmstadt until she married Prince Louis Battenberg, disappeared, to be replaced by the terribly English-sounding Marchioness of Milford Haven, though she had never been there. Other Battenbergs were translated into Mountbatten and Carisbrooke; the German title of Teck became Athlone.
With this looming ahead, King George was not pleased to find himself caught up in the problems of a Russian autocrat with a German wife and for whom there was almost no sympathy in any quarter. However, his objections were at first set aside by the British government on the grounds that the offer having been made, it could not be withdrawn.
It was at this point on March 23 that the cable came into London from Buchanan asking that the names of Grand Dukes Michael and George be added to the list of those seeking refuge in London.
Now two ex-Emperors knocking on the door? It gave opportunity for Buckingham Palace to re-open the case for barring Nicholas. ‘I do trust that the whole question…will be reconsidered,’ wrote the king’s private secretary Lord Stamfordham to the foreign secretary Balfour. ‘It will very hard on the King and arouse much public comment if not resentment.’30
More shots came in from Buckingham Palace. ‘The residence in this country of the ex-Emperor and Empress…would undoubtedly compromise the position of the King and Queen…we must be allowed to withdraw from the consent previously given.’31 Yet George V was fully aware of the dangers facing his cousin if he was not granted refuge. ‘I fear that if poor Nicky goes into the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul he will not come out alive,’ he later wrote in his diary.32
Could the problem be avoided if Nicholas went instead to France? The reply from the British ambassador in Paris was that ‘The Empress is not only a Boche by birth but in sentiment… 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.’33
As the British agonised, the Provisional Government itself stepped away from the idea of sending Nicholas abroad. The Soviet would have none of it, and with that the new government pledged that it would not again give permission for any member of the imperial family to leave Russia without the agreement of the Soviet. That conveniently allowed the British to let their invitation to wither on the vine. The Romanovs were stranded.
17. FAREWELL MY BROTHER
UNLIKE the miserable house-arrest suffered by Nicholas and his family in Tsarskoe Selo, Michael and his family in Gatchina lived very much as before. In many respects his own day-to-day life changed little as the weeks went on. He was free to move within the Petrograd area, though not beyond without a permit. He could drive into the country in his Rolls-Royce or his new Packard — ordered before the war, but which had unexpectedly turned up at his house a year earlier; he could have friends to stay, and afford staff and a houseload of servants. Walking about the town, people still bowed to him in the street,1 and while there were now guards posted in Nikolaevskaya Street they were there only to keep away hooligans and looters. As even George admitted in one letter to his wife, ‘the government is trying to be as polite as possible with us, I must own that they have been quite correct towards us’.2
Although Michael’s annual income from the imperial purse had stopped, as it had for all Romanovs, and his imperial yacht requisitioned along with his train carriage, he still had ample cash in the bank. He also continued to receive some income from his retained private holdings, including his Ukraine sugar factory and his Brasovo estate. His real concern about Brasovo was that he was not permitted to go there to look after its affairs and its people as he usually did. The government in deference to the Soviet had refused a permit.
The man a future constituent assembly might therefore confirm as Emperor was thus virtually a prisoner in his own country, even though he was not confined as was his brother and his family in Tsarskoe Selo. Nonetheless, in itself that made a mockery of the promises given by the Duma men on March 3. The powers he had vested in them to ensure orderly and responsible government had clearly been hijacked by the disorderly and irresponsible men in the Soviet.
Yet otherwise he could not complain about his life in Gatchina. He had bought another house for his staff, on Baggout Street where Natasha had lived when she was married to Wulfert, and at the end of April he rented another in Kseniinsky Street, by the Priorate. ‘The house has two floors, we’re thinking of it for our servants,’ he noted in his diary for May 5, 1917.3 He had spent the day inspecting the house, planning to enlarge the garden, and discussing with Natasha the final furnishings, due for delivery nine days later.4
But would they be left alone as they had been? There were worrying signs that the Soviet was becoming ever more assertive and demanding, now that the Bolsheviks were back in Petrograd and challenging them. Lenin and Trotsky, returned from exile by the Germans in the hope of stirring up even more trouble, were formidable rivals to the Soviet. That did not bode well, and while Michael had no intention of leaving Russia permanently, it seemed prudent to have some sort of insurance policy in case matters worsened.
An exit permit to Finland —the gateway to Sweden, Norway and then England— suggested itself. To get one, he would need to pull strings and do so discreetly, without the comrades finding out. General Polovtsov, his old friend from the Savage Division, had recently been appointed commander of the Petrograd garrison and on an official trip to Gatchina in June he was contacted by Michael’s ADC Prince Vyazemsky.