The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (41 page)

intensive fourteen hours of church service at the cathedral, family

luncheon in a pavilion, high tea in the
Shtandart
, a military review, a gala banquet and speeches in the evening. ‘From the first we all

had a pleasant surprise, and that was Alix’, Marie told her mother.

‘She took part in everything except the parade and tried to smile

and was anyhow very amiable.’53

Marthe Bibesco, a close friend of the Romanian royal family, saw

it rather differently: the empress’s eyes, she recalled, ‘looked as if they had seen all the sorrow of the world and when she smiled . . .

her smile had been one of ineffable sadness, like those smiles which

play on the faces of the sick and the dying’.54 As for the four sisters, they were ‘sweet’, and sat patiently through it all, Olga answering

all Carol’s questions as politely as she could. But her sisters, as Pierre Gilliard noticed, had ‘found it none too easy to conceal their

boredom’ and ‘lost no chances of leaning towards me and indicating

their sister with a sly wink’.55

There was one thing, however, about the tsar’s otherwise charming

daughters that alarmed the Romanian party. Having come straight

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from endless sunny days in Livadia ‘they were baked brown as nuts

by the sun and were not looking their best’.56 Sad to say, as Crown

Princess Marie told her mother, they ‘were not found very pretty’.57

Marthe Bibesco went so far as to say that their unfashionably

sunburnt faces made them as ‘ugly as those of peasant women’.58

The consensus was that the Romanov sisters were ‘much less pretty

than their photographs had led us to suppose’.59 Olga’s face ‘was too broad, her cheek-bones too high’, thought Marie, though she liked

her ‘open, somewhat brusque way’. Tatiana she found handsome

but reserved; Maria was pleasant but plump though with ‘very fine

eyes’; and Anastasia’s looks did not register with her at all, though she noticed how ‘watchful’ she was.60 The girls seemed doomed to

be unremarkable in the eyes of the Romanian court, although they

could not be faulted for their solicitous care of their bored and

rather petulant brother, with his face marked by ‘a precocious

gravity’. In taking the strain off their mother by entertaining and

amusing Alexey throughout the day, the four sisters had remained

‘a clan apart’ from their Romanian cousins, and the presence of

Alexey’s shadow Derevenko reminded everyone ‘of the horrible truth

about this child’.61

Although Olga had, for obvious reasons, been ‘the centre of all

eyes’, Carol had seemed to his mother to be ‘not particularly atten-

tive’ to any of the girls; later it was said that he was ‘not enamoured of Olga’s broad, plain face and brusque manner’.62 Certainly, neither he nor Olga showed any desire whatsoever in ‘becoming more closely

acquainted’.63 Indeed, all four girls had shown far more interest in

Carol’s six-month-old baby brother Mircea, whom Olga had dandled

on her knee in official photographs taken that day. In the end, the

lasting impression left by the imperial family’s visit to Constanza

had been not of the girls, but the extraordinary proficiency with

which the mischievous tsarevich had, at lunch, sat teaching two of

the Romanian children, Prince Nicolas and Princess Ileana, how to

spit grape pips into a lemonade bowl in the middle of the dining

table.64

During the Romanians’ earlier visit to St Petersburg Marie and

Alexandra had already had a private word and had agreed then that

‘neither of us could make any promises in the name of our children,

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that they must decide for themselves’.65 Faced with an inconclusive

outcome to this second meeting, they parted with a smile; they had

done their duty, but the rest ‘was in the hands of Fate’. The two

families took a final drive through the streets of Constanza to displays of fireworks and a torchlight procession, but as they waved goodbye

at midnight it seemed highly unlikely that the ‘spark of love [would]

be lighted between these two’.66
*

It was only after the imperial family had left Constanza that

Marthe Bibesco heard that the girls had had a secret plan to defuse

the entire exercise. They had ‘decided . . . to make themselves as

ugly as they could’ by soaking up the sun, hatless, on the journey

from Livadia, ‘so that Carol should not fall in love with any of

them’.67

*

The Romanov family arrived back at Tsarskoe Selo on 5 June, in

time for Anastasia’s thirteenth birthday; it was followed by a visit

from the First British Battle-Cruiser Squadron commanded by Sir

David Beatty, an important mission intended to further bolster the

entente cordiale
. The squadron arrived at Kronstadt Island on Monday 9 June to a gun salute from Russian destroyers, thousands of pleasure boats with flags flying, and crowds of cheering Russians thronging

the quayside opposite. For the British diplomatic community in St

Petersburg ‘a week of feverish gaiety’ followed, during which Meriel

Buchanan admitted to never getting to bed before 3 a.m.68 The tsar

entertained Admiral Beatty and his officers to lunch at Peterhof,

and at a garden party at the summer villa of Grand Duke Boris

Vladimirovich at Tsarskoe Selo the girls all plied the British officers with questions. The inquisitive Anastasia was the most demanding;

‘her childish voice rang out above the hum of conversation’, recalled

* Evidence suggests that after the failure of the Olga–Carol match, and in the light of his brother Mikhail’s morganatic marriage in 1912, Nicholas began to seriously consider lifting the restrictions on marriages in the imperial family, having been forewarned of the problems that might be faced when and if the tsarevich came of age that ‘there would not be a single suitable [royal] bride in the world’.

See
Royalty Digest
15, no. 7, January 2005, p. 220.

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Meriel. ‘You will take me up into your conning tower,’ she implored,

and added mischievously, ‘Couldn’t you let off one of the guns and

just pretend it was a mistake?’69

Among the young officers on board one of the British ships, the

New Zealand
, was young Prince George of Battenberg, Alexandra’s nephew, whose brother Dickie had taken a shine to Maria during

the family’s visit to Nauheim in 1910. Georgie came to stay with

his cousins at Tsarskoe Selo during which time the officers of the

Shtandart
thought he paid a lot of attention to Tatiana, with whom he agreed to exchange letters.70 On the last day of the squadron’s

official visit, 14 June, a morning of brilliant sunshine and cloudless skies, the imperial family returned the admiral’s visit, dining on

board HMS
Lion
after which the girls were shown round ‘every corner’ of the ship by four eager young midshipmen who had been

specially chosen by him. One of them, Harold Tennyson, remem-

bered the thrill and honour: ‘I showed round Princess Olga, who

is extraordinarily pretty and most amusing.’ She and her sisters were

‘the most cheery and pretty quartette I have met for some time, and

roared with laughter and made jokes the whole time’. ‘If only they

were not Princesses,’ he confided rather ruefully in a letter home,

‘I should not mind getting off with one!’71
*

By the end of the afternoon the crew of the
Lion
were totally captivated by the Romanov sisters: they ‘could talk of nothing but

the Emperor’s daughters, their beauty, their charm, their gaiety, the unaffected simplicity and ease of their manners’.72 A farewell ball

for 700 guests was to be held later that evening on board the
Lion
and
New Zealand
specially roped together for the purpose, but much to the visitors’ dismay Alexandra refused to allow her daughters to

attend. Meriel Buchanan noticed a look of ‘wistful regret’ on the

faces of the British officers as they said goodbye to the four Romanov sisters. The girls, as always, accepted their mother’s decision ‘without demur or argument’, though they had looked a little ‘crestfallen’

and when Olga boarded the imperial launch taking them back to

Peterhof ‘she looked back at the big grey ship, and waved her hand

* Harold Tennyson was a grandson of the British poet laureate. He was drowned in January 1916 when his ship HMS
Viking
hit a mine in the English Channel.

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to the officers standing to attention on deck’. She smiled, but there were tears in her eyes.73 It was a moment that, decades later, Meriel Buchanan would recall with an intense regret tinged by hindsight:

‘Happy voices, smiling faces, golden memories of a summer after-

noon, of a world that could still laugh and talk of war as something

far away.’74

*

On 15 June (28 NS), news came of the assassination at Sarajevo of

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne,

by a Serbian nationalist. Nicholas made no mention of it: political

assassination of this kind was a fact of everyday life in Russia and

the potential significance of the act was made little of at first. Far more important was the family’s imminent holiday among the

Finnish skerries in the
Shtandart
. But it was rather subdued, Alexey having hurt his leg jumping on board and being once more laid up.

At the end of the trip Alexandra told Anna Vyrubova that she sensed

that the family’s wonderful days in Finland were over and that they

‘would never again be together on the
Shtandart
’, though they hoped to be back on board in the autumn when they planned to visit

Livadia, the doctors having recommended that Alexey and his mother

both needed ‘sunshine and a dry climate’.75

The family was back at the Lower Dacha at Peterhof on 7 July

in time to greet the French president Raymond Poincaré on a four-

day visit. The highlight was a review of the Guards at Krasnoe Selo,

led by Nicholas on his favourite white horse, accompanied by all

the Russian grand dukes, and with Alexandra and the children in

open carriages also drawn by white horses. It would prove to be the

last great parade of Russian imperial military glory: two days after

the French president left, Austria-Hungary delivered an ultimatum

to Serbia and on 15 July (28 NS) it declared war. Historically Russia had a duty to defend the Serbs as fellow Slavs and war now seemed

inevitable. In between urgent meetings with ministers Nicholas, who

remembered the debacle of the war with Japan and dreaded the

prospect of hostilities, exchanged urgent messages with his German

cousin Willy. ‘With the aid of God it must be possible for our long-

tried friendship to prevent the shedding of blood’, he telegraphed.76

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Meanwhile he reluctantly capitulated to his General Staff and sanc-

tioned general mobilization, bringing a 600,000-strong Russian army

onto a war footing. This provoked an aggressive response from

Germany, now rallying to the support of Austria-Hungary. Final,

frantic attempts at diplomatic mediation were made in this ‘time of

great anguish’, during which Alexandra sent a desolate telegram to

Ernie in Hesse: ‘God help us all and prevent bloodshed.’ She had,

of course, also sought Grigory’s wise counsel. He had been horrified

at the prospect of war and had repeatedly begged her and Nicholas:

‘the war must be stopped – war must
not
be declared; it will be the finish of all things.’77

On the evening of 19 July (1 August NS in Europe) Nicholas,

Alexandra, Aunt Olga and the children went to church to pray. They

had not long returned and were sitting down to dinner when Count

Freedericksz arrived with formal notice, handed to him by the

German ambassador in St Petersburg: Germany was at war with

Russia. ‘On learning the news the Tsarina began to weep,’ recalled

Pierre Gilliard, ‘and the Grand Duchesses likewise dissolved into

tears on seeing their mother’s distress.’78 ‘
Skoty!
[Swine!]’
wrote Tatiana of the Germans in her diary that evening.79 The following

day, 20 July (2 August NS) was scorching hot. In anticipation of the

imminent Russian declaration of war, people crowded the streets of

St Petersburg as they had in 1904, parading with icons and singing

the national anthem. The news spread like wildfire: ‘women threw

jewels into a collection made for Reservists’ families’, reported the correspondent of
The Times
.80 At 11.30 a.m. about 50,000 people surrounded the British Embassy singing ‘God Save the King’ and

‘Rule Britannia’.81 Church bells rang out constantly, all day long.

The whole city was one huge traffic jam of motor cars and droshkies

and full of people shouting and singing and waving ‘cheaply printed

portraits of the beloved “Little Father”’.82 The shop windows too

were full of Nicholas’s portrait ‘and the veneration was so deep that men lifted their hats and women – even well-dressed elegant ladies