PART IV

ARMAGEDDON

17

A WAR

1914–18

In London, Berlin and St. Petersburg, the three monarchs were cheered uproariously by the people; at that moment all three seemed the epitome of nationhood and unity. “May and I¹ went for a short drive in the Russian carriage down the Mall to Trafalgar Square through the Park and back by Constitution Hill,” George wrote on 3 August 1914. “Large crowds all the way who cheered tremendously … We were forced to show ourselves on the balcony three different times.” When Nicholas appeared on the balcony of the Winter Palace on 2 August the vast crowd² fell on their knees. “Russia seemed to have³ been completely transformed,” the British ambassador marvelled. The Duma proclaimed its undying support and passed a massive war budget. The barricades disappeared and the revolutionaries melted away. The country, everyone agreed, had not felt so vibrantly alive, nor been so united, since Napoleon’s invasion of 1812. And in Germany the Berlin crowds cheered Wilhelm at the Brandenburg Gate. In a gush of enthusiasm the Reichstag voted to devolve its power to the Bundesrat, the council of German princes, effectively giving Wilhelm and the army the power to do whatever they liked, including levy taxes. Even the Socialists voted for it. The Russian revolutionary Bukharin called the “betrayal of the⁴ Germans … the greatest tragedy of our lives.” The war promised, one German paper wrote, “a resurrection,⁵ a rebirth of a nation. Suddenly shocked out of the troubles and pleasures of everyday life, Germany stands united in the strength of moral duty.”

In Moscow Nicholas told an audience at the Kremlin, “A magnificent⁶ impulse has gripped all Russia, without distinction for tribe or nationality.” Utro Rossii, the newspaper of the Russian Centre-Left, wrote “There are now⁷ neither Rights nor Lefts, neither government nor society, but only one United Russian Nation.” Wilhelm used almost the same words when he told the Reichstag on 4 August, “In the struggle⁸ that lies before us I recognize no more parties among my people. There are only Germans.” He called on all the party leaders to come and take his hand, and as they walked away he raised a clenched fist and brought it down, as if swiping with a sword. The kaiser, one paper breathed, was “today truly a People’s Kaiser.” As for George, though he wasn’t required to say anything, he put on a military uniform, gave his civilian clothes away and presented himself to his people as the incarnation of the values for which they were fighting: “a good sportsman,⁹ a hard worker, and a thoroughly good man.”

The great extended royal family of Europe, however, was anything but united—national divisions had broken it. In Russia Alix was cut off from her sister Irene and her beloved brother Ernst. George and Nicky’s cousin Ernest of Cumberland, now Duke of Brunswick, who had married Willy’s daughter Victoria, took the German side. So did Charles Edward, the British cousin who had inherited the dukedom of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha after Affie’s death in 1900, and had taken a commission in the German army. The German-born Louis of Battenberg, a naturalized Englishman since the age of fourteen, with a German wife (Alix’s sister Victoria), was forced to resign as the most senior admiral in the British navy by a xenophobic campaign by the right-wing press. (He would also change his name to Mountbatten.) The British government would force George to withdraw British peerages and titles from all his German relations. When he met a couple of Greek cousins there was outrage—though Greece was neutral, cousin Constantine’s twenty-five-year marriage to Wilhelm’s sister Sophie raised British hackles.

Within a short space of time each emperor had become almost completely irrelevant.

George and Mary threw themselves into the war effort, but their endeavours only emphasized George’s inability to distinguish between the trivial and the important and in the main the results were negligible. The king forswore the theatre, closed Balmoral, put the gardens at Frogmore to potatoes, turned the lights and heating off at Buckingham Palace, used the napkins more than once to save on washing, insisted on boiling fowl and mutton instead of poussin and lamb, and at Lloyd George’s request took a pledge in April 1915 to forswear alcohol for the duration of the war, in order to provide an example to the working classes. Prime Minister Asquith privately complained of having to listen to “those infinitesimal¹⁰ problems which perplex and perturb the Court mind—whether he should drive to Westminster in the old gingerbread coach … or … ride on his charger with the streets lined with Khaki-men. Isn’t it marvellous that such things should be read as worth 5 minutes discussion? I am to go to him [the King] early tomorrow to settle this and other equally momentous issues.” When a visitor to York Cottage came to breakfast late and asked for a boiled egg, the king “accused him¹¹ of being a slave to his inside, of unpatriotic behaviour and even went so far as to hint that we should lose the war on account of his gluttony.” The country at large wasn’t experiencing rationing—and wouldn’t until the last year of the war. As for Lloyd George’s initiative, it was a total failure; virtually no other public figures agreed to take the pledge and the working classes remained unimpressed.

There were admirable gestures—the austerity drive allowed George to hand back £100,000 in savings to the Treasury; convalescing officers and their families were invited to use the grounds of Buckingham Palace—but the palace was oddly reluctant to publicize them, taking its cue from the king who called the press “filthy rags.”¹² The king was left alcohol-less—though the Duke of Windsor claimed that after dinner his father would retire to his study “to attend to¹³ a small matter of business,” which everyone assumed was a glass of port.

George’s war work quickly came down to a carefully logged relentless trudge: 7 inspections¹⁴ of naval bases, 5 visits to the French front, 450 military inspections, 300 hospital visits, and 50,000 decorations and medals personally pinned on, along with an uncounted number of trips to munitions factories and bombed areas. It was a job he performed with great and gloomy diligence. “The King came¹⁵ to see us this morning,” the prime minister’s son, Raymond Asquith, wrote from France, “looking as glum and dyspeptic as ever.”

In December 1916 George’s secretary, Stamfordham, asked the cabinet secretary if the king “ought to take¹⁶ a more active share in the government of the country.” The answer was a resounding no. George, however, longed to be more than a figurehead. “I am quite ready¹⁷ to sacrifice myself if necessary, as long as we win this war,” he told his mother in 1917. Quite apart from his constitutional position, the king, while sincere, decent and honest, was well known to be almost obsessively resistant to all change and ruled by his own prejudices. He opposed the reappointment of Admiral Fisher in 1915 because he disliked and mistrusted him. He stayed loyal to Asquith long after everyone else in government had lost faith in the prime minister’s casual, hands-off style, because he had become used to him and couldn’t bear to see him go. Unable to see Lloyd George’s qualities and offended by his cheerfully ruthless methods, he criticized him publicly. (Lloyd George was no less quietly dismissive: describing a memo from George in 1915 as “about as futile¹⁸ a document as I have seen … everything that comes from the Court is like that. But then, as Balfour said to me once, ‘Whatever would you do if you had a ruler with brains?’”) He fought Lloyd George’s efforts to dislodge Asquith and take control of the war effort in December 1916, regarding them as an iniquitous betrayal. He ended up in a blazing row with Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, when he insisted that Lloyd George was the only man for the moment. “The King expressed¹⁹ his entire disagreement with these views,” Stamfordham minuted euphemistically. But there was nothing he could do. Lloyd George ousted Asquith in what was essentially a coup; Asquith helped himself into the wilderness by refusing to serve under another prime minister. Lloyd George’s new government—a new six-man war cabinet—effectively amounted to what Beatrice Webb called “a dictatorship by²⁰ one, or possibly three, men.” He can’t have been unaware of the irony that as prime minister he had more power than any British monarch had wielded for 250 years.

Where the king was able to exercise some influence, it was to potentially tragic effect. He consistently supported General Haig, chief of the General Staff, against Lloyd George. Haig and his colleague General Robertson’s commitment to trench warfare—in the belief that conscripted soldiers were too untrained to do anything other than stand in a line and walk forward—had a devastating effect on the casualty lists. Lloyd George believed there must be another way to use the men Haig seemed almost blithely to pour onto the stalemated battlefields. The king, in an echo of his cousins’ deference to the military, believed the professionals knew best. He liked Haig, whose wife had been lady-in-waiting to Mary. Haig energetically exploited the connection—he had used it to dislodge his predecessor, General French. When Lloyd George tried to get rid of Haig, the king explicitly told the general not to resign, and asked him to write secretly to him whenever he liked. In other circumstances George’s support would have had little force, but the Conservative press and Party also supported Haig, and Lloyd George—now in a coalition of largely Conservative ministers—needed their support. George’s intervention added ballast to Haig’s position. Through 1916 and 1917 in the Somme and at Passchendaele, Haig sent hundreds of thousands of men into the trenches and over the top. At Passchendaele there were between 240,000 and 260,000 British casualties and barely a foot of territory was won to justify them. Haig complained he hadn’t succeeded because he hadn’t had enough men. The king, who believed one did not question military men, wrote to Nicholas, “The French and²¹ ourselves have made good progress on the Somme and we hope to continue to do so.” Lloyd George never got rid of Haig and it took him several years to sideline him.

In Russia and Germany, however, the aristocratic officer class showed even less concern for their cannon fodder. The German crown prince, Little Willy, expended a million men trying to take the fortress at Verdun. After the terrible Russian defeats of Tannenburg and the Masurian Lakes in 1914, which cost 250,000 lives, Grand Duke Nicholas told the French, “We are happy²² to make such sacrifices for our allies.”

Where George didn’t follow his people was in his repulsion at the surge of xenophobia expressed in Britain—due not least to the extraordinarily effective anti-German propaganda purveyed in posters and the mass-market press. The invasion of Belgium produced monstrous stories in newspapers such as the Daily Mail of women raped, children’s hands cut off, priests murdered, libraries burned, and even a Canadian soldier crucified by German troops. None of the accounts were verified. Wilhelm, who had so longed for the British to love him, was turned into a hate figure, portrayed as the incarnation of the evils of German militarism and widely regarded as responsible for the war. Propaganda posters showed him blood-soaked and hunched over the corpses of Belgian women, or goose-stepping in front of burning libraries. In 1900 he’d made an over-excited, ill-advised speech as he saw off a squadron of German soldiers going to quell the Boxer rebellion in China, telling them to put the rebels to the sword, “like the Huns²³ under their King Attila a thousand years ago … pardon will not be given, prisoners will not be taken. Whoever falls into your hands will fall to your sword.” The speech was disinterred by British war propagandists who characterized the Germans as “dirty Huns,” the barbaric enemies of civilization—a historic nonsense; it was the Germanic tribes who had beaten back the Huns.

George tried to resist when the War Office—responding to a campaign by the Daily Mail—asked him to deprive Wilhelm and the German relatives of their honorary military commands, and remove their banners from St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. When Sir Richard Haldane, former war minister, founder of the London School of Economics and well-known Germanophile, was hounded out of office by a hysterical campaign in the right-wing press, George awarded him the Order of Merit. He was offended by the mistreatment of German prisoners of war and the internment of alleged enemy “aliens.” And when, on a visit to the front, Ponsonby regretted the sympathy he’d shown for a gassed soldier who turned out to be German, the king rebuked him, “after all he was²⁴ only a poor dying human being.” As the war went on, however, George found it hard not to hate the Germans. “These zeppelin raids,”²⁵ he wrote to Nicholas, “… murder women and children and have done no harm to any workshop or military establishment; they show that they are simply brutes and barbarians.”

Wilhelm’s eclipse was more dramatic. Within days of the war’s beginning, he joined the army at military headquarters, as his grandfather had in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, then promptly collapsed and took to his bed. For years he had let rip teeth-baring rhetoric, and claimed that in a war he would be his own chief of staff. He had talked of leading his troops into battle as if it were a genuine possibility. A week after the war started, the Supreme Warlord, the Oberster Kriegsherr, told the German General Staff that the war was their responsibility, not his, and handed over to Moltke permission to issue orders in his name, while promising not to interfere in operations. He seemed entirely unable to cope. What must it look like, wondered Admiral Müller, who ran his naval cabinet, “inside the head²⁶ of this man to whom war is, at base, repulsive.” From German army HQ, the Prince of Pless wrote to his English wife, Daisy, in October 1914, “He is extremely nervous²⁷ and it gets worse, the longer the war drags on. It is difficult to find another topic of conversation, because he seldom listens to anything else. If we could only persuade him to play Bridge …”

He veered between euphoria, fury and dramatic lows. One moment he would demand that his soldiers take no prisoners; the next he would declaim with his old grandiosity that if one German family starved as a result of the British naval blockade, he would “send a Zeppelin²⁸ over Windsor castle and blow up the whole royal family of England.” Then he would be plunged into depression and knock back sleeping pills. The entourage and Dona, committed to protecting the kaiser and the senior generals, determined to stop him interfering and colluded to shield him from bad news and keep his faux pas to a minimum. Generals briefed him each day but, as the war minister, Falkenhayn, observed only weeks after the war started, “Now he is no²⁹ longer told about anything that is at the planning stage, all he hears about is what had already happened, and only the favourable events.” By 1916 the war was barely mentioned at government meetings when he was present: “the Conference³⁰ … was confined to stories of the harvesting at Pless, the birth of a zebra calf at Cadinen and the instructions he had given to Hindenburg,” Müller observed. His entourage shuffled him between the fronts and army headquarters to assuage his endless restlessness, and let him stride before the troops in his splendid uniforms and make encouraging speeches. He pinned on medals and shook hands. He was found pointless projects to occupy him—the building of an extravagant fountain at Homburg for which a war contractor gave the money—and was scolded for fraternizing too warmly with British prisoners of war. In moments of self-pitying clarity, Wilhelm grumbled about his position. “The General Staff tells me nothing and never asks my advice. If people in Germany think that I am Supreme Commander, then they are grossly mistaken,” he said in November 1914. “I drink tea and cut wood and go for walks, which pleases the gentlemen.”³¹ In 1916 he complained he’d found out about the latest Verdun attack only from the newspapers. It was vitally important to him, however, that he appear to be in charge: “I put my³² oar in as little as possible, but for the outside world Falkenhayn must maintain the fiction that I personally order everything.”

He was needed to sign orders and issue decrees, so the generals kept him close and isolated from his civilian staff in order to get what they wanted from him, which they almost invariably did, even if he initially disagreed. Seeing him at army headquarters, the Austrian foreign minister thought he was “living an illusion” and described him as “the prisoner of his generals.”³³ As the war progressed, he was deprived gradually of a war minister he liked, Falkenhayn, a chancellor he wanted to keep, Bethmann-Hollweg—who he felt had been loyal and whom he supported for months—and kept away from peace plans he might have favoured. He was eventually talked into agreeing to a policy of submarine warfare against neutral shipping of which he personally and profoundly disapproved, a policy which directly brought America into the war. “No gentleman³⁴would kill so many women and children,” he told the American ambassador embarrassedly after a German submarine sank the Lusitania in 1915, killing over 1,000 civilians.

The irony was that there was a huge role for the kaiser, had he been able to fill it. The state and the military needed a coordinating figure to hold the balance between the two, someone who could make major political decisions. In the constitution the government had no authority over the armed forces, only the kaiser did—a situation Wilhelm had encouraged throughout his reign. But totally out of his depth and in thrall to the glamour of the army, he was incapable. His failure would have a devastating effect on the war effort and Germany’s future. The army and the government slid further and further apart, utterly disagreeing on the war’s basic goals, whether the territories invaded should be annexed, what the criteria for peace should be. It would not be the civilian authorities who would fill the vacuum Wilhelm left, but the army, the most focused, single-minded institution in Germany, which Wilhelm himself had deliberately kept beyond parliamentary control.

As for the German navy, the war exposed it as the vanity project it had always been. After all the bitterness and expense it was immediately clear that naval power would not win the war. The navy was deployed only once, at the Battle of Jutland in May 1916, and then never came out of port again. It was trapped by the British naval blockade, which gradually starved the civilian population of Germany, and Wilhelm was reluctant to sacrifice even one of his beautiful shiny ships to try to break it. The ships rusted and the sailors became disaffected. When at the end of the war, in November 1918, the naval chiefs tried to organize a last “death ride,” the sailors mutinied. “The Navy has³⁵ deserted me,” Wilhelm sniffed as he boarded his train out of Germany. “I no longer have a Navy.”

Like George and Wilhelm, Nicholas became a reviewer of troops, a pinner-on of medals, a visitor of munitions factories and hospitals—sometimes he saw as many as 3,000 wounded a day. Like Wilhelm, he had fantasized about leading his armies, a less unrealistic prospect in Russia, where the supreme army command had gone to his largely decorative, popular, six-foot-six cousin, Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich. Just like Wilhelm, the tsar installed himself in the peculiar, unreal atmosphere of Russian army headquarters, a grand officers’ mess under spreading pines and birches in Baranovichi in Poland, packed with the aristocratic officer elite of the cavalry regiments, with whom Nicholas had always loved to mix. There he persuaded himself he was in the thick of it, surrounded by officers who mostly owed their promotions to court connections. He took long walks, ate hearty lunches, lingered over cigars and conversation, organized boat races and charmed foreign visitors. Stavka, as it was called, bore as much relation to the front commands, where the men were dying in droves, as Mount Olympus to a pile of stones, and it was almost functionless, proving quite unable either to supply the various fronts properly or to coordinate them.

Nicholas’s flight was perhaps understandable. The Russian war effort went disastrously wrong within three months. Vast sums had been poured into the army, but it was still run by courtiers. War planning had been minimal. No one had expected a prolonged conflict and the state’s creaking mechanisms simply weren’t up to running a long war. Several devastating defeats—the result both of German effectiveness and the hopelessly archaic ideas of the Russian top brass—were followed by the call-up of barely trained reserves, and a supply crisis. The Ministry of War had made no provision for winter uniforms and boots; ammunition began to run out. By early 1915 soldiers were told to limit themselves to ten bullets a day.³⁶ Losses were huge and pointless. One British observer³⁷ saw 1,800 new recruits arrive at the front without a single rifle. They waited until casualties made guns available. He then watched as 1,600 of them died. Nicholas’s sister Olga, working as a nurse on the Austrian front, was told that Russian soldiers were going to meet German machine guns “with sticks in³⁸ their hands.” Surgeons came to her begging her to intervene with the tsar for medical supplies, and generals came pleading for reinforcements. As with Wilhelm, the worst news was kept from Nicholas. One soldier recalled the tsar’s visit³⁹ to his unit. The most presentable bits of uniform were scavenged piecemeal from all the other regiments to dress one company, while the rest of the men shivered in trenches without trousers, boots or anything much else. At Warsaw train station the president of the Duma, Mikhail Rodzianko, was horrified to find 17,000 wounded soldiers⁴⁰ left lying in the rain. There was nowhere for them to go.

As the losses mounted and morale collapsed, the army was, as one historian has vividly put it, “gradually turned into⁴¹ one vast revolutionary mob.” Nine million men were called up in the war’s first year. Officer casualties were enormously high—not least because of their habit of leading charges dressed in their brightest uniforms. The soldiers who survived found themselves divested of their traditional aristocratic leaders, alienated and very angry at the vast, pointless losses, and began to ask themselves why they were fighting at all. The new Russian officer corps of 1915—those below the rank of captain who actually fought with the men—were soon the biggest meritocracy Russia had ever seen: young men from peasant backgrounds with a talent for survival and leadership, all too aware of the army elite’s lack of interest in the men’s conditions and their losses.

In Russia, as in Germany, there would have been a role for Nicholas as civilian leader, coordinating the government, ensuring the army was supplied, the wounded cared for, the refugees provided for, and that the country worked. But Nicholas, like Wilhelm, was in thrall to the romance of the army, looked down on the civilian administration and was too overwhelmed by government failures to know even where to start. Instead the Zemstvo Union sorted out supplies and relief, turning itself in the process into a formidable machine, and the Duma, working quietly with a number of government ministers, got industry mobilized again. Unable to get beyond the old autocratic orthodoxies, Nicholas refused to see these initiatives as anything other than challenges to his own increasingly compromised authority. When in mid-1915 the Duma demanded a coalition between the government and itself to restore the nation’s confidence and run the war, Nicholas closed it down.

His solution to the crisis was to assume supreme command of the army in September 1915. In a piece of desperate wishful thinking, he had convinced himself that it would be the cure-all for Russia’s ills: if he took charge God would save Russia, and the devoted peasants would fight all the harder. He loved the thought of fighting alongside his soldiers, and escaping the intrigues and cabals and “low personal interests” of St. Petersburg—now renamed Petrograd in order to denude it of its German connotations. “At the front,” he told his son’s tutor, Pierre Gilliard, confidently, “there is only one thought—the determination to conquer.”⁴² Alix had been urging him to do it for months, telling him he was Russia’s saviour and God would protect him. It was so clearly a bad idea that when Nicholas announced it his entire Council of Ministers fell silent. “This is so⁴³terrible,” Sazonov wrote in his diary, “that my mind is in chaos.” It was a decision, another minister noted drily, “fully in tune⁴⁴ with his spiritual frame of mind and his mystical understanding of his imperial calling.” The Council of Ministers, after years of endemic infighting, took the unprecedented action of writing a collective letter begging him not to do it. Even Goremykin, the ultimate yes-man, signed it. Even Nicholas’s mother, even his sister Olga, thought it was a “catastrophe.”⁴⁵ He went ahead anyway. Entirely inexperienced in strategy or battle, at headquarters Nicholas was quickly regarded as an irrelevance. The decision had the predicted effect of making him look more than ever directly responsible for Russia’s deepening military disaster.

Nicholas’s departure from Petrograd and civilian government left a hole which Alix felt herself obliged to fill. Raising herself from her sickbed, she decided to give Russia what she clearly believed would be a master class in autocracy. Within four days of Nicholas’s departure she began dismissing ministers with bewildering speed. As even her own household could see, she “made politics a matter of sentiment and personalities.” The entire government war effort was transformed into a personal struggle between those she regarded as for and those she regarded as against her. The ministers who had asked the tsar not to make himself head of the army were systematically weeded out and sacked. Anyone who suggested that it might actually be sensible to work with the Duma was dismissed. Anyone she disliked or felt had opposed her or criticized Rasputin—whose advice on politics she now actively canvassed, and who, as Pierre Gilliard observed, simply confirmed her “secret wishes⁴⁶”—was sacked. Even old Goremykin fell out of favour. Her letters to Nicholas—still written in English—were saturated with references to “Our Friend” and demands that ministers should be removed. “How I wish⁴⁷ one cld. hang Rodzianko [the Duma’s president],” she wrote, “awful man, & such an insolent fellow.” She urged him to be assertive and autocratic. She ran through ministers with almost comic speed, getting through four chief ministers—each more right-wing and less effective than the one before—in sixteen months, desperate to find that one “loyal” minister, the man who would show sufficient hatred of the Duma and sufficient respect for Rasputin. Her favourite minister was Alexander Protopopov, a former Duma representative who had attached himself to Rasputin’s coat tails, who was widely regarded as mentally unstable, if not actually mad. The empress promoted him, even though she acknowledged that he was “extremely nervous⁴⁸ and often loses the thread,” because he “listened” to Rasputin and was, as she put it, “so devoted to us!” Protopopov appears to have been in the last stages of tertiary syphilis.

Pierre Gilliard, who entirely sympathized with Alix’s agony over her son’s illness, thought she might have gone slightly mad: “She often had⁴⁹ periods of mystic ecstasy in which she lost all sense of reality.” Meanwhile, her obsessively polarized view of the world caused her to publicly favour Rasputin and turn a blind eye to his increasingly open exploitation of his privileged position. Long-serving court figures such as Mossolov, head of the imperial chancellery, watched helplessly while the government descended into chaos. Appointments and sinecures were suddenly filled by Rasputin’s toadies and clients, and there seemed nothing to be done but accept it. The government, already in seizure, became even more ineffectual, ridiculous and corrupt. Beside it the Duma and the zemstvo movement appeared effective and appealing. Combined with Nicholas’s assumption of army command, the effect on the imperial couple’s reputation was devastating. Alexandra, long disliked by the Russian upper classes, was soon actively hated. Nicholas looked a weak failure. Resentment at the strains and disasters of the war began to combine with stories about corruption and chaos and even treachery at the top. Given the disasters at the front and the government’s apparent indifference and inability to solve the most basic problems, it was perhaps unsurprising that wild rumours about Alix’s alleged German sympathies and her bizarre relationship with Rasputin began to spread ever more widely beyond the elite into the country and the disaffected army. By 1916 it was widely believed that Rasputin and his cronies were German agents, planning to deliver Russia into German hands, and that the German-born empress was working with them.

Rumour and suspicion blighted Russia’s relationships with Britain and France. From early in the campaign the Russians complained that their huge sacrifices were not appreciated by their allies. They accused the British of using them to take the brunt of the German attack. Lloyd George wrote worriedly that the Russians said “We are not⁵⁰ doing enough, and are ‘on the make.’” (It was a centuries-old complaint in continental wars that island Britain sat back safe while in Europe they slugged it out.) The Russian government accused the British of holding back much-needed supplies, and on the streets of western Russia it was said that Britain had dragged Russia into the war—from which it had nothing to gain. The British in turn were exasperated by the Russian collapse in the East, Russia’s incapacity to coordinate with the Entente, and the incessant grumbling and demands for money and supplies; by 1915 Britain had effectively become Russia’s banker and main supplier of munitions. It lent £40 million⁵¹ over 1914 and 1915, backed a further loan of £100 million, and sent millions of pounds of supplies. When in 1916 Alix took the reins, the British watched the government move ever further to the Right, and every liberal-minded minister purged. They heard the stories about Rasputin, and wondered disgruntledly whether their money was going to hold up a regime that stood for everything they claimed to be fighting against.

Relations between the two royal families were one of the few bright spots—that and the warm relationship Nicholas seemed to enjoy with the British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan. Several grand duchesses had taken up residence in England for the duration, and telegrams bounced between the families, for all the world giving the war an air of a family outing: “Aunt Alix wires⁵² to say they know for certain that the Germans intend to attack Warsaw this week and she hopes we are aware of it … Does Nikolasha [Grand Duke Nicholas] know?;” “I have just⁵³ had a telegram from aunt Alix who wires in despair that they have lost six battleships. But I do hope the German losses are even heavier.”

“It is such⁵⁴ a good thing to keep in touch with one another now that the communication between our two countries is so difficult,” Nicholas wrote to George in early 1916. “We all highly admire the wonderful manner in which the allied troops left Gallipoly [sic].” (The whole Gallipolli campaign had been a disaster—though one conceived in part to take the strain off the Eastern Front.) After the naval battle of Jutland, George wrote to Nicholas, “William’s speech at⁵⁵ Kiel about the great navy victory of the German fleet made me laugh. I am quite convinced that they lost more ships and more men than we did and we drove them back to their ports.”

Their relationship, however, became gradually infused with the wider politics and suspicions of the war. Their letters were thick with unsaid things and unasked-for explanations. “I was very busy⁵⁶ about some changements [sic] among the ministers, which you have probably heard of,” Nicholas wrote after the disastrous Russian retreats of mid-1915. “… That retreat in Galicia … had to be effectuated to save our army—solely on account of the lack of ammunition and of rifles. And this reason is a most painful one. But my country has well understood it and everywhere the people are setting to work for the needs of the army with redoubled energy … it will soon be a year that this terrible war is raging and goodness knows how long it may last—but we shall fight to the end!” George’s answer picked up on another implied criticism: “I can assure you⁵⁷ that in England, we are now straining every nerve to produce the required ammunition and guns and also rifles and are sending the troops of our new armies to the front as fast as we possibly can.” Meanwhile, Minny, whose relationship with Alix had degenerated badly since the tsarina had started sacking ministers—“she is ruining⁵⁸ both the dynasty and herself,” she told Kokovtsov—passed stories of her excesses on to her sister. “I am sure she⁵⁹ thinks herself like their Empress Catherine,” Alexandra told George. Attitudes to Alix started perceptibly to harden in the British family.

Succumbing to old Foreign Office fears, Sir George Buchanan began to take the gossip about Alix and her German sympathies seriously. He was convinced that she was rooting out pro-English moderates such as Sazonov, whom she sacked in 1915, in order to replace them with right-wing pro-Germans who would detach Russia from the Entente. He wondered if she was a conspirator, but decided she was more likely Rasputin’s dupe. His anxieties found their way into the heart of the British government. “The pro-Germans in⁶⁰ the Russian government have succeeded in turning out General Alexaeff [sic], the one hope of the Russian Army,” Lloyd George told his secretary towards the end of 1916. “They are one by one getting rid of all the good men in Russia and putting in rotters or Pro-Germans.” Buchanan was utterly wrong. The imperial couple were completely committed to the war. It was the nation which was turning violently against it. Nicholas couldn’t bear the thought of another defeat. Alexandra had abjured the country of her birth. Germany, she told her son’s tutor, had become “a country I did not⁶¹ know and had never known.” She now presented herself, the French ambassador remarked, as an Englishwoman “in her outward⁶² appearance, her deportment, a certain inflexibility and Puritanism.” No one followed the British armies’ fortunes more devotedly. When her brother Ernst tried to contact her through an old servant living in Austria, she rebuffed him.

The British, however, continued to worry that Russia would leave them in the lurch. In August 1916, almost certainly encouraged by the government, George wrote to warn and express his anxiety to Nicholas. “German agents in Russia have recently been making great efforts to sow division between your country and mine by exciting distrust and spreading false reports … I hear it is repeated and in some quarters believed in Russia that England means to oppose the possession or retention of Constantinople by Russia [which Grey had promised in 1915]. No suspicion of this sort can be entertained by your government.” He begged Nicholas if he had the slightest concerns that “you will at any time instruct your ministers to enter into the frankest explanations with my Government or will yourself communicate direct with me. You know, my dear Nicky, how devoted I am to you and I can assure you that my Government regards your Country with equally strong feelings of friendship.”⁶³ In October he wrote again asking for reassurance: the Germans believed they could “‘detach Russia and⁶⁴ are working hard to this end.’ What nonsense, they little know you and your people.”

By the end of 1916 the war had had a devastating effect on all three men. For Wilhelm the pressures had been too much from the start. By 1916 he was frequently described by senior soldiers and political advisers as a “broken man.” Depression made him lethargic and his entourage worried about complete breakdown and how worn and ill he looked. “Violent and unpredictable,” one of his entourage wrote, “dominated by a single thought, ‘Leave me in peace.’”⁶⁵ Bad news and hard decisions inevitably insinuated themselves into army headquarters. The generals wanted him to back submarine warfare, to sack Bethmann-Hollweg. His attempts to hold out made him anxious and bad-tempered. Unlike his cousins he rarely referred to the casualties and sufferings of his subjects—in the German army it was understood that one was not pessimistic about the effects of war, but Wilhelm had always had difficulty in empathizing with others’ difficulties. As the industrialist and writer Walther Rathenau wrote of him, “The Emperor had no⁶⁶ consciousness of tragedy, even the unconscious feeling of the problem.”

George looked at least ten years older than he was: his beard had almost turned white, his face was lined and bagged, he looked, someone remarked, like an old, worn penny. His dogged, melancholic, unsmiling stare became ubiquitous. “He feels it⁶⁷ profoundly,” Lord Esher wrote of the king, “every pang that war can inflict.” Each year he made an increasingly gruelling visit to the Western Front. The more he saw, the more depressed he became. “Very often I⁶⁸ feel in despair,” he wrote to Mary in 1918. In October 1915 he had a serious accident there when the horse he was riding got frightened, reared up and fell on him. With the typical concern of the British royal family he anxiously enquired after the horse; his own fractured pelvis and ribs weren’t diagnosed for several days. It was an injury from which George never quite recovered; the pain made him more grumpy, but he was at least now permitted a small occasional tipple for medicinal purposes. “I still have to⁶⁹ walk with a stick,” he told Nicholas in early 1916. “A horse is a very heavy thing to fall on you and I suffered a great deal of pain, as I was badly crushed and bruised.” In July 1917 the queen and her old friend Mabell, Countess of Airlie, accompanied George on his fourth visit to the Western Front. The royal couple seemed to feel it was their duty not to acknowledge too vividly how awful it was: a gruelling parade of ammo depots, railway depots, hospitals and walks—to the sound of far-off artillery shells—through a no-man’s-land blasted by enormous craters. The Countess of Airlie felt no such compunction. “The most harrowing⁷⁰ sight,” she wrote,

a vast stretch of land that had once been fertile and smiling with crops, but was now only a tumbled mass of blackened earth fringed by sparse and splintered trees … We climbed over a mound composed of German dead … all that was left of a whole regiment who had died in wresting a strip of land from Our troops, only to lose it again … We stood there speechless. It was impossible to find words. The Queen’s face was ashen and her lips were tightly compressed. I felt that like me she was afraid of breaking down.

At the hospitals the countess was struck by the “terrible sameness of young faces and broken bodies.” Even the reticent George wrote of driving through “ruined villages and towns, utterly destroyed by shell fire.” He described the deaths in a night raid, during the visit, of twenty-five patients and three staff at a nearby hospital. And he recorded a story he’d ⁷¹heard about the Premier of New South Wales standing next to an Australian general, who was killed by a shell only yards away from him. The carnage he saw in France overwhelmed him; xenophobia depressed him, republicanism alarmed him. “You can’t conceive⁷² what I suffered going round those hospitals in the war,” he said years later.

By the end of 1916 Nicholas was stick thin and looked somehow hollowed out.⁷³ When his former chief minister, Kokovtsov, saw him for the first time in a year in January 1917, he was genuinely disturbed. It wasn’t just the ageing. The tsar’s famously “kind eyes” were faded, yellowed and “lifeless.” He wore a constant, awful, vacant, almost “sickly,” smile, he glanced about nervously. In the middle of the conversation he completely lost the thread. There was an awkward silence. A simple question reduced him “to a perfectly incomprehensible state of helplessness.”⁷⁴Almost in tears, Kokovtsov told Nicholas’s doctor, Botkin, that he was convinced the tsar must be on the verge of a breakdown. Botkin smiled and said he was merely tired. But the French ambassador had reached similar conclusions. “Despondency, apathy⁷⁵ and resignation can be seen in his actions, appearance, attitude and all the manifestations of the inner man,” he wrote in the autumn of 1916.

Through the last months of 1916 and into 1917, person after person tried to alert Nicholas to the bomb under his throne—how angry the country was and how the malign influence of Rasputin and the disastrous meddling of the empress were making it so much worse. He remained deaf to all warnings. Contradiction now constituted betrayal. Vladimir Orlov, one of his few friends, was exiled to his estates for criticizing Rasputin. The tsar’s devoted court chancellor, Fredericks, breaking the habit of a lifetime, spoke out and was warned, “Let us remain⁷⁶ friends and never, mind you, never, touch on the subject again.” Sandro’s brother Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, well known for his liberal constitutional beliefs, returned from England in November 1916 with news that George was genuinely worried because “well-informed agents of⁷⁷ the British Secret Service predicted a revolution in the very near future.” The grand duke wrote Nicholas a letter urging him to get rid of Rasputin and to make the reforms the Duma wanted before it was too late. Nicholas passed the letter to Alix, who professed herself disgusted and told him to send Mikhailovich to Siberia. At the end of 1916 Alix’s sister Ella left the convent where she had lived since 1905, to plead with her to send Rasputin away. “She dismissed me⁷⁸ like a dog,” Ella reported. Alix wrote to Nicholas interspersing descriptions of their new kitten climbing into the hearth with hysterical denunciations of Duma members and demands that ministers be sacked. “Be the Master, & all will bow down to you.” He signed himself, “your very own poor little huzy with a tiny will.”⁷⁹

Three days later, on 17 December 1916, Rasputin was murdered. The assassins were Prince Felix Yusupov, a twenty-nine-year-old bisexual cross-dresser and Oxford graduate, who was the son of the richest woman in Russia and married to Nicholas’s niece Irene; Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich, a first cousin of Nicholas’s; and Vladimir Purishkevich, an extreme right-wing anti-Semitic monarchist. The idea was to save the monarchy and the nation by killing Rasputin and consigning Alix to a mental institution. They lured Rasputin to a small “party,” with the promise that he would meet the Grand Duchess Irene, and tried to poison him. When several pieces of cyanide-filled cake and a glass or two of poisoned Madeira failed to do the trick, they shot him in the back. When he staggered up again, they panicked, fired an entire gun barrel into him, loaded his body with chains, and threw it into the Neva. In England, Alexandra—informed by Minny—told George, “the wretched Russian monk⁸⁰ caused a tremendous sensation in the world! but [is] only regretted by poor dear Alix who might have ruined the whole future of Russia through his Influence.” The murder had entirely the opposite effect to that intended. It merely reinforced the imperial couple’s sense that the world was against them, and drew them closer together. “I believe in no⁸¹ one but my wife,” Nicholas told his cousin Sandro (Yusupov’s father-in-law) icily in the aftermath.

By mid-January several Romanov family plots to get rid of Alix and depose Nicholas were being so widely discussed in the salons of Petrograd that General Henry Wilson, a member of the British delegation which had come to Russia in a last-ditch attempt to try to coordinate strategy, noted wonderingly that “Everyone—officers,⁸² merchants, ladies—talks openly of the absolute necessity of doing away with them.” Even Minny and Nicholas’s sister Xenia discussed the plan to send Alix and her much-hated best friend, Anna Vyrubova, to a convent. “If things don’t⁸³change it will be the end of everything,” Xenia wrote to her mother. The president of the Duma, Rodzianko, requested an audience with the tsar and told Nicholas tactfully that the country wanted a new government and that the empress was universally hated and must be stripped of all authority. Rodzianko claimed the tsar put his face in his hands and asked him, “Is it possible⁸⁴ that for twenty-two years I tried to act for the best and that for twenty-two years it was all a mistake?” To which Rodzianko answered “Yes.”

One of the people who, as he described it, made “one last effort⁸⁵ to save the Emperor, in spite of himself,” was the British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan. Like many others he had been charmed by Nicholas and had come to feel almost protective of him. In his last audience with the tsar, fully aware he was overstepping his position, he told Nicholas that he felt “like a man trying to⁸⁶ save a friend whom he sees falling over a precipice.” He said that Protopopov was “bringing Russia⁸⁷ to the verge of ruin,” that the empress was “discredited and accused of working in German interests,” warned him about the gossip in Petrograd, and asked him to give the Duma what they wanted—a representative government. Buchanan knew he was treading a fine line, but thought on balance the interview had gone well—Nicholas pressed his hand as he left. In fact, the tsar, so characteristically veiling his true feelings, was outraged by Buchanan’s presumption. According to two⁸⁸ of Alix’s ladies-in-waiting, he had turned against the ambassador months before, after he discovered he had been talking with several senior Duma members and had therefore, as Nicholas saw it, joined the other side. In her memoirs, Anna Vyrubova accused Buchanan of being “personally” involved in the grand ducal⁸⁹ plot to overthrow Nicholas, in order to “weaken” Russia when peace negotiations came. Nicholas had apparently considered asking the king to recall him, but decided he didn’t want to make public his distrust of his British allies.

The level of denial seems astonishing. A couple of weeks before the end Nicholas crossly upbraided the courtier Mossolov when he made a stray comment that betrayed anxiety about the future: “What! You Mossolov,⁹⁰ are you too going to tell me of the peril that menaces the dynasty? People are continually harping on this supposed peril. Why, you have been with me and have seen how I was received by the troops and the people! Are you too, even you, panicking?” Mossolov answered, “I have seen all that Sire, but I also see them when they are not in Your Majesty’s presence. Forgive my freedom of speech.” Nicholas collected himself and reverted to his usual “smile” to denote he was not put out.

Why was Nicholas so insistently resistant to the warnings? Because they attacked his wife. Because he had become practised at dismissing the rest of the world as wrong. Because he had come to believe that the October manifesto, which he regarded as his greatest failure, had been unnecessary and extracted from him by deceit, and that if he’d held his nerve he would never have had to agree to it. Because, encouraged by Protopopov, he’d convinced himself that the alarming reports of growing disaffection were simply a ploy to frighten him into more reforms he didn’t want to make. And perhaps because, at some level, he wanted a crisis, something so awful, a national catastrophe so great, that he would be forced to abdicate, to give away the burden of ruling which depressed, overwhelmed and crushed him, and be able to tell himself he hadn’t done so willingly. That’s not to say that the tsar brought on the revolution, but that he did nothing to stop it. Several observers half-suspected something of this nature. A few weeks before the end, his cousin Sandro felt he’d given up, taking refuge in his infuriating fatalism. “God’s wishes shall⁹¹ be fulfilled,” Nicky told him. “I was born on May sixth, the day of Job the Sufferer, I am ready to accept my doom.” The French ambassador, Paléologue, seeing the tsar for the last time, wrote that he “feels himself overwhelmed⁹² and dominated by events, that he has lost faith in his mission;” he had “… abdicated inwardly and is now resigned to disaster.”

By February 1917 Petrograd was a seething hub of anger and desperation. It was the third year of the war, and the whole of Europe was thick with “war weariness.” Millions had died on battlefields across Europe; the civilian populations of Russia and Germany were suffering from terrible shortages. In Petrograd neither food nor fuel was arriving in sufficient quantities to supply the population, which had swollen by a third since 1914. Lack of fuel had brought industry to a standstill in December 1916. In January 1917 150,000 people hunger-marched through the capital, frightened by rumours that the city would be left to starve. The railway network was sagging under the demands from the front. It couldn’t deal with supplying the civilian population too. In his last letter to George, Nicholas wrote about “the weak state”⁹³ of the railways. “The question of transport of stores and food becomes acute.” The cold reached minus thirty-five. “Children are starving in the most literal sense of the word,” ran one secret police report. Some food prices had more than quadrupled since 1914—eggs, for example—while wages had decreased in real terms by 20 percent.

On 8 March 1917 by the Western calendar, an angry group of women textile workers marched up Nevsky Prospekt demanding bread. Crowds poured onto the streets to join them. Within a few days there was full-scale anarchy. By 10 March, most of working Petrograd was on strike, trams had stopped running and newspapers had not been printed. Locked up in her palace, like the rest of aristocratic Petrograd, Xenia could hear shooting and shouting. The crowds chanted slogans against “the German Woman,” Protopopov and the war. The Council of Ministers cabled the tsar begging him to return to Petrograd. With the exception of Protopopov, they offered their resignations and asked him to appoint a ministry acceptable to the Duma.

Back at army headquarters, Nicholas insisted that the disturbances were minor. His children had come down with measles⁹⁴ and all he could think about was missing them and worrying about Alexis. He sent a telegram to Petrograd’s military governor ordering him to “make these disorders⁹⁵ stop immediately.” The next day, 11 March, soldiers shot dead 200 people across the capital, but they failed to disperse the crowds, and some regiments began to refuse to fire on civilians and retired to their barracks. In an attempt to communicate the seriousness of the situation, the Duma president, Rodzianko, sent a final cable to Nicholas, telling him the troops were joining the revolution, begging him to appoint someone trusted by the country to run a government. Nicholas told his senior commander Alekseev, “Fat Rodzianko⁹⁶ has sent me some nonsense which I shall not even bother to answer,” and suspended the Duma.

On 12 March the Petrograd garrisons mutinied and joined the revolution. In the church at army headquarters that morning, Nicholas was stricken with “an excruciating⁹⁷ pain in the middle of my chest,” that left him almost unable to stand for fifteen minutes. That night the Council of Ministers, despairing of the tsar, adjourned and handed itself over to the Duma—even Protopopov, who initially muttered that he was going off to shoot himself. The Duma, by no means confident that it could control the mobs and soldiers, announced it would form a government, and that workers and soldiers would be represented by a soviet, their own council. The celebrations on the streets of Petrograd were frighteningly intense. Several units shot their commanding officers. The last soldiers abandoned the defence of the Winter Palace. At Stavka, Nicholas wrote in his diary that his officers were uneasy,⁹⁸ and decided to take the imperial train to Tsarskoe Selo the next morning. En route to Tsarskoe Selo, Nicholas’s generals effectively kidnapped him, took him up a branch line and told him to abdicate. General Alekseev had been in touch with Rodzianko and the new provisional government, whose hold on power was fragile. The crowds in Petrograd were baying for the imperial couple’s blood, the new workers’ soviet looked disconcertingly powerful, and the provisional government had agreed that the tsar must go. A voluntary abdication might help to stabilize the situation. Alekseev knew Nicholas would need pushing. So he canvassed the generals at the fronts. Their replies were unanimous: the tsar must go to save the war effort.

Even Grand Duke Nicholas “begged on his knees”⁹⁹ for Nicholas to abdicate. Nicholas looked vacant. He went for his afternoon walk. He returned for tea. He agreed. “My abdication is necessary,” he wrote in his diary, “… to save Russia and bring order back to the armies on the front.” Throughout the whole process he seemed, the officers all agreed, unnervingly calm, even when he signed the document of abdication on the evening of 15 March. But in his diary he wrote, “All about me is treachery, cowardice and deceit.”¹⁰⁰ Unable to bear the thought of separation from Alexis, and the pressure on his health, Nicholas had decided to abdicate on his son’s behalf too. This left his younger brother Misha as heir and he, confronted by the scary crowds on the Petrograd streets demanding a republic, quickly stepped down too.

“Bad news from Russia,” George had written in his diary on 13 March. “Practically a revolution has broken out in Petrograd, and some of the Guards Regiments have mutinied and killed their officers. This rising,” he added, “is against the Govt. not against the war.” By 15 March there was more information. “I fear Alicky is the cause of it all and Nicky has been weak … I am in despair.”¹⁰¹

He was almost the only one. Across the streets of the Russian empire, from Moscow to Tiflis, the end of autocracy was greeted with bells, songs, cheering and flags. The symbols of imperial power, the insignias and statues, were ripped off buildings and plinths. In France and Britain the fall of the tsar was greeted with relief. The regime’s excesses had become an embarrassment, and it was hoped a democratic Russia would be much less likely to make a deal with Germany. The United States, which had just entered the war, enthusiastically recognized the new government a week after the abdication. Lloyd George, who was struggling to combat war weariness with the idea that the Entente’s sacrifices were in the great cause of liberty and democracy, sent a telegram congratulating the revolution, “the greatest service¹⁰² that the Russian people have yet made to the cause for which the Allies are fighting.” It demonstrated “the fundamental truth that this war is at bottom a struggle for popular government as well as for liberty. It shows that, through the war, the principle of liberty, which is the only sure safeguard of peace in the world, has already won a new resounding victory.”

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 old¹¹²man.” 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 government. 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 himself 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.

In Tobolsk the Romanovs lived in the governor’s mansion, perhaps not in imperial levels of comfort, but with a household which nevertheless included six chambermaids, ten footmen, three chefs and a wine steward. There was space to exercise, and the local people were respectful, removing their caps and crossing themselves when they saw the former tsar. The Bolshevik victory in early November 1917 hardly registered—it took a week for the news to arrive. What upset Nicholas most was that Lenin had immediately begun peace talks with Germany, an outcome the British government, whose contacts within the Bolsheviks were minimal, had dreaded. Thankfully for them, the Americans had now joined the war. Though Lenin regarded the war as a bourgeois fight foisted on the peasants and workers, the peace deal was a bitter pill even for the Bolsheviks: German military successes and the Russian army’s collapse meant that Germany got Poland, Finland, the Baltic states, the Ukraine, the Crimea—where Nicholas’s sisters and mother were holed up—and most of the Caucasus, a million miles of Russian territory which contained virtually all its coal and oil, half its industry and a third of its population. For Nicholas, it nullified the whole justification for his abdication—a meaningful sacrifice so long as others would win the war and save Russia. “It now gave him pain to see that his renunciation had been in vain,” Pierre Gilliard, who had followed the family to Siberia, wrote. When the Peace of Brest-Litovsk was signed in March 1918, Nicholas was deeply depressed by it: “It is such a disgrace for Russia and amounts to suicide … I should never have thought the Emperor William and the German Government could stoop to shake hands with these miserable traitors.”¹³⁵

Captivity turned harsher that month. The soldiers became markedly less friendly, luxuries disappeared from the table. Servants and members of the suite were gradually dismissed. Two days before the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was signed, the tutor Gilliard wrote in his diary, “Their Majesties¹³⁶still cherish hope that among their loyal friends some may be found to attempt their release.” After arguments over whether Nicholas should stand trial in Moscow—Trotsky fancied himself as principal prosecutor—the family were moved to Ekaterinburg, the centre of Bolshevik militancy in the Urals, in April 1918. They were met by an angry crowd, and imprisoned in a large house which was swiftly enclosed with a high wooden fence. The windows were painted over; the family were confined to their rooms for most of the day, and Alix and the girls were accompanied to the lavatory by guards who graffitied drawings of her and Rasputin having sex on the lavatory walls. The former empress was now barely able to walk and spent days on her bed. The daughters did the housework, and Nicholas read War and Peace for the first time in his life, and daydreamed about a nice hot bath. The top brass in Ekaterinburg wanted an execution, but the order for their murder came from Lenin in Moscow, who decided—as the counter-revolutionary White troops, representing an uneasy coalition of anti-Bolshevik groups, and a Czech regiment closed in on Ekaterinburg in July 1918—that they could not afford the tsar to be a “live banner.”¹³⁷

On 3 July in the Old Style calendar (16 July by the Western one), at 1:30 in the morning, the prisoners—the tsar, his family and all that remained of his servants, his doctor, valet, cook and Alix’s maid—were woken and led down to the basement. They were told there had been shooting in the town and they would be safer there. Nicholas carried his sleepy son. At his request chairs were brought for Alix and Alexis. Anastasia brought her dog. After several minutes the local secret police chief, Yakov Yurovsky, came into the room with an eleven-man squad, one to shoot each victim. The room was too small, however, and the executioners found themselves facing the wrong people. Yurovsky read out the order to shoot the Romanovs. As Nicholas spoke an incredulous “What?”¹³⁸ Yurovsky shot him point blank. His men started firing. Most of the adults died quickly, but Alexis, protected by his father’s arms, survived the first volley, as did the daughters, who were protected by the jewels they had sewn into the bodices of their dresses for safe-keeping. They were bayoneted. The bodies were taken fourteen miles from Ekaterinburg and burned, the remains thrown down a mine shaft, their faces deliberately disfigured to prevent identification if they were found. Eight days later the town fell to the Whites.

We have such a horribly vivid account of the Romanovs’ murder because one of the executioners, Medvedev, was later captured by the White Russian army and described every detail to Nikolai Sokolov, an investigator appointed by the Whites to uncover the fate of the ex-tsar. Its hideous graphicness gave the Romanovs’ deaths a terribly poignant immediacy. In death—as never in life—they stood in for the millions of victims of undescribed, anonymous murders and massacres that would be perpetrated by the Soviet regime and other totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, regimes that would prove so good at killing, but little else. In death also, Nicholas would become the martyr-tsar, a useful figurehead for the Whites, who had had no use for him alive.

Over previous months there had been several tragically ineffectual attempts to plan a rescue. With Alix’s permission, the Romanovs’ English tutor, George Gibbes, who followed them to Siberia, wrote a letter meant for George, addressed to the former tsarina’s English governess, with a full plan of the family’s house in Tobolsk and details of their routine. There’s no indication it ever reached him. Several monarchist groups managed to raise funds but failed to come up with anything approaching a plan; money was sent to Tobolsk, but it never arrived. There were rumours that the German terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk included a demand that the imperial family must be handed over to Germany unharmed. Nicholas had not been able to bear the thought: “This is either a manoeuvre to discredit me or an insult.” The rumours were not, as it turned out, true. In Moscow, Nicholas’s old court chancellor, Benckendorff, brother of the former British ambassador, tried to get the German ambassador, Mirbach, to support a rescue mission. In Kiev, now occupied by the Germans, Mossolov attempted to persuade the German commanders to back a plan to travel up the Volga to Ekaterinburg. He wrote personally to the kaiser about it. He never received a reply. A former German ambassador to Petrograd told him with much embarrassment that the kaiser couldn’t reply without consulting his government, and the local German commanders refused to help.

After the war Wilhelm swore that he had tried to get the tsar out. “I did all that was¹³⁹ humanly possible for the unhappy Tsar and his family, and was seconded heartily by my Chancellor,” he told General H.-H. Waters, whom he’d known as a British military attaché in Berlin, in the 1930s. He said that Bethmann-Hollweg had come to him with a Danish plan for rescuing the tsar. “How can I do that? There are two fighting lines of German and Russian troops facing each other between him and me!” Wilhelm quoted himself. “Nevertheless 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.” In Wilhelm’s version, Kerensky answered that he was only too happy to provide a train. Wilhelm said he had informed Bethmann-Hollweg he would order the High Commander on the Eastern Front to arrange safe conduct for the tsar’s train, and told his brother Heinrich to escort the ship holding the tsar through the minefields. “The blood of the unhappy Tsar is not at my door; not on my hands,” he told Waters, though why this foolproof plan had failed he was unable to say.

What Wilhelm certainly did do was give his permission on 24 March 1917 to allow Vladimir Lenin—a man more radical than any German Social Democrat—to travel via Germany to Russia, with the explicit intention of creating as much chaos and destabilization in Russia as possible.^*The German authorities had already spent hundreds of thousands of marks on funding agents provocateurs to encourage strikes and unrest in Russia, and on Lenin’s own¹⁴¹ circle of Bolsheviks. Lenin was taken from the Swiss border through Germany in a “sealed” train—no passport or luggage inspections—“like a plague bacillus,” in Winston Churchill’s famous phrase.

On 16 July, the day of Nicholas’s murder, George went to Roehampton to watch the balloon-training wing of the RAF. The news of the former tsar’s death was officially announced three days later. The Bolsheviks claimed the rest of the family were still alive. On 25 July George decreed a month of court mourning and wrote that he and Mary had attended “a service at the Russian church in Welbeck Street in memory of dear Nicky, who I fear was shot last month by the Bolshevists [sic]. I was devoted to Nicky, who was the kindest of men, a thorough gentleman: loved his country and people.” Three days after that he noted that the former British vice-consul in Moscow, Robert Bruce Lockhart, had reported that “dear Nicky” had been shot by the local soviet at Ekaterinburg. “It was nothing more than a brutal murder.”¹⁴² At the end of August he wrote, “I hear from¹⁴³ Russia that there is every probability that Alicky and four daughters and little boy were murdered at the same time as Nicky. It is too horrible and shows what fiends those Bolshevists are. For poor Alicky, perhaps it was best so. But those poor innocent children!”

George and Stamfordham seem to have tacitly agreed on a kind of wilful amnesia. They were also quick to blame the government for the failure to act. The day of the memorial service for Nicholas, Stamfordham wrote in an outraged tone to Lord Esher:

Was there ever¹⁴⁴ a crueller murder and has this country ever before displayed such callous indifference to a tragedy of this magnitude: What does it all mean? I am so thankful that the King and Queen attended the memorial service. I have not yet discovered that the PM … [was] even represented. Where is our national sympathy, gratitude, common decency … Why didn’t the German Emperor make the release of the Czar and family a condition of the Brest-Litovsk peace?

This was somewhat disingenuous, as only three days before, Stamfordham had told Balfour that George shouldn’t¹⁴⁵ attend the service for fear of irritating public opinion.

George’s son, the Duke of Windsor, said that the murder shook his father’s “confidence in the innate¹⁴⁶ decency of mankind. There was a very real bond between him and his first cousin Nicky.” He claimed that his father “had personally planned to rescue him with a British cruiser, but in some way the plan was blocked. In any case, it hurt my father that Britain had not raised a hand to save his Cousin Nicky. ‘Those politicians,’ he used to say. ‘If it had been one of their kind they would have acted fast enough.’”

Wilhelm’s time came three months after Nicholas’s death. In August 1918 Ludendorff overstretched the German army on the Western Front and the Entente—or the Allies, as it now called itself—began to break through. Wilhelm spent most of his time at German military headquarters at Spa, in Belgium, in a Marie Antoinette–esque villa that looked as if it had been built from spun sugar. He entertained himself by digging little trenches and diverting a dam. The industrialist Albert Ballin met him for the last time at the end of September when even the German High Command had admitted it was all but over. He was accompanied by a military minder.

I found the Emperor¹⁴⁷ very misdirected and in the elated mood that he affected when a third party was present. Things had been so twisted that even the fearful failure of the offensive, that had caused a severe depression in him at first, had been turned into a success … the offensive had achieved no more than the loss of the lives of round 100,000 valuable people. The whole thing was served up to the poor monarch in such a way that he had not noticed the catastrophe at all.

In early October, with Wilhelm back in Berlin, a new chancellor, Max von Baden, a cousin of Wilhelm’s, formed a government which claimed to represent the liberal left-wing Reichstag majority for the first time, and asked the Allies for an armistice. The Allies demanded stiff terms. The American president, Woodrow Wilson, issued a series of “notes” insisting that Germany must become a full parliamentary democracy and divest itself of its emperor. “It aims directly¹⁴⁸ at the fall of my house, and above all at the abolition of the monarch!” Wilhelm sputtered of Wilson’s note of 14 October. The fact that his abdication was being debated across Germany was kept from him.

On 29 October, encouraged by Dona and the entourage, Wilhelm left Berlin for army headquarters at Spa. It was a bad move; it looked as if the kaiser was running away to the army. Austria made terms that week, and the whole of Germany—with almost the sole exception of Wilhelm’s entourage, his family and a few of the High Command—came to believe the kaiser must go. But once in Spa Wilhelm delayed and delayed, chopping wood to calm himself down, saying that if the “Bolsheviks” tried to make him abdicate he would put himself at the head of his army, march to Berlin and hang the traitors, or at very least, “shoot up the town.”¹⁴⁹ The army and navy chiefs were full of mad plans: a march to Berlin; a suicide cavalry charge led by Wilhelm to save the honour of the monarchy; a last-ditch “death ride” by Wilhelm’s beloved navy.

With almost exquisite irony, it was that “death ride” plan that sparked the German revolution. On 4 November, at Kiel, the sailors on Wilhelm’s precious ships mutinied. They demanded political reform and the removal of the royal family. Workers’ risings spread across Germany. By early November there was a general strike in Berlin. The revolutionaries threatened to put up barricades if Wilhelm didn’t go. The Reichstag was terrified that the workers’ councils might take over as they had in Russia. Still Wilhelm held out. On the ninth the latest war minister told the kaiser that the army would not fight for him if there was a civil war, and he must abdicate. Wilhelm stared vacantly through lunch and bit his lip. He said he would abdicate as emperor but remain King of Prussia, and sent someone off to draft the papers. Half an hour later he was wondering whether he really had to abdicate at all. The news came that Chancellor Max von Baden had lost patience. With Berlin on the verge of uproar and both the kaiser’s phones engaged, he announced that Wilhelm and his eldest son were renouncing the throne, then resigned himself, handing over power to the leader of the Reichstag Socialists, Friedrich Ebert. When he heard the news Wilhelm shouted, “Treachery, treachery,¹⁵⁰ shameless, outrageous, treachery!”

In London George wrote in his diary:

We got the news¹⁵¹ that the German Emperor had abdicated, also the Crown Prince. “How are the mighty fallen.” He has been Emperor just over 30 years, he did great things for his country, but his ambition was so great that he wished to dominate the world and created his military machine for that object. No one man can dominate the world, it has been tried before, and now he has utterly ruined his Country and himself and I look upon him as the greatest criminal known for having plunged the world into this ghastly war with all it’s [sic] misery.

While his generals tried to persuade him to make for neutral Holland, only thirty miles away, Wilhelm sat and smoked, refused to move, insisted that he would return to Berlin or stay with the troops, and grumbled about his former subjects. “The German people are a bunch of pigs,” he said, and “There is no other instance in History of a universal act of treachery by a nation against its ruler.”¹⁵² In Berlin the revolutionaries broke into the Berlin Schloss and somewhat appropriately stole the emperor’s clothes.

Eventually Wilhelm was persuaded to leave Spa in the small hours of 10 November. Foreign troops were said to be only a few miles away. He was quietly driven to the Dutch border in a car from which all imperial insignias had been scratched off. He reached Holland early in the morning of 11 November. He seemed completely crushed and was desperate not to be left alone, telling his entourage that he was a broken man. The message came finally that the Dutch would offer him asylum, at least temporarily. It was decided that Wilhelm should be moved by train to a small seventeenth-century manor house called Amerongen near Utrecht.

His first words at Amerongen were, “How about a¹⁵³ cup of good, hot, real English tea?” As he sat down to contemplate his new life, the armistice was signed in Marshal Foch’s train in the forest of Compiègne.

“William arrived¹⁵⁴ in Holland yesterday,” George wrote in his diary. “Today has indeed been a wonderful day, the greatest in the history of this Country.” Elsewhere in Europe, it was not a good moment for monarchies. Within Germany, the kings of Bavaria and Württemberg had been deposed; the ruling grand dukes of Coburg, Hesse and Mecklenburg-Strelitz had all abdicated, and the latter had then shot himself. Emperor Karl of Austria-Hungary, who had inherited after the death of his great-uncle Franz Joseph in 1916, had abdicated on Armistice Day. Ferdinand, self-styled “tsar” of Bulgaria, who had cast his lot in with Germany at the height of its successes, also went that month. George’s cousin “Tino,” King of Greece, had abdicated in 1917 in favour of his younger son, who would be little more than a puppet and would die of infection from monkey bites in 1920. In Turkey, Sultan Mehmed V had died in May; his brother and successor, Mehmed VI, would be deposed in 1922.

As the Armistice Day crowds came to Buckingham Palace to cheer, George was the only emperor still standing on his balcony.

* “Gospodin”: Mr., the new semi-honorific that had replaced the old imperial titles; “Polkovnik”: Colonel.

* There is great variation in estimates of civilian deaths during the First World War, but all figures agree that German civilian deaths were at least twice and perhaps even four times the British ones. See, for example, the Web site 20th Century Atlas—death tolls.

* Lenin, not expecting help from the German government, had at one stage planned to get through Germany disguised as a deaf, dumb and blind¹⁴⁰ Swede.