Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (65 page)

From there, the plan began to dissolve on both ends. The Russian Provisional Government was unwilling to pay anything on the Romanovs’ behalf. And in Britain, public opinion had long steered against the Romanov dynasty’s autocracy in favor of England’s more liberal, parliamentary monarchy. King George received letters from different classes of British society imploring him not to give the tsar and his family refuge. “Every day, the King is becoming more concerned about the question of the Emperor and Empress coming to this country,” wrote Baron Stamfordham, George’s private secretary. “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 by working men, and that Labour Members in the House of Commons are expressing adverse opinions to the proposal.”
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Even the
Times
was hostile toward the idea, especially when it came to the ex-tsarina. “How can we tolerate this friend of Germany in our midst?” one reporter wrote.
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At Buckingham Palace, the fate of Nicholas and Alexandra gnawed at Queen Mary, who was “harbouring guilt along with her anxiety. If any tragic fate befell them, she knew she would always feel a measure of the responsibility.”
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The fact that Alexandra had been practically raised by Queen Victoria seems to have all but been forgotten. Lord Francis Bertie, the British ambassador to France, was particularly scathing in his opinion of the former tsarina. Reflecting the drastic misconception the public had about her, he wrote in 1917, “The Empress is not only a Boche [German] by birth but in sentiment. She did all she could to bring about an understanding with Germany. She is regarded as a criminal or a criminal lunatic and the ex-Emperor as a criminal from his weakness and submission to her promptings.”
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Alexandra was not oblivious to the accusations being made against her in the foreign press. She poured out her frustration in a letter to a patient she had met at Tsarskoe Selo, when some of the other buildings had been converted into field hospitals earlier in the war: “When they write filth about Me—let them, they started tormenting me long ago, I don’t care now, but that they slander Him [Nicholas], throw dirt on the Sovereign Anointed by God, that is beyond the bearable.”
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Bowing to pressure both from the people and his government, the king had no choice but to withdraw his offer of asylum to his cousins and their family. One night, while the king and queen were having tea with the Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace, a telegram arrived. It asked that, in light of the current pressure against harboring the Romanovs, “would there be any objection from the Palace if a destroyer was not sent to Russia and asylum not offered.” Upon reading it, the queen declared simply, “No.” The king agreed. “To say no was not a callous act,” wrote one historian. “The Queen, conceiving it her prime duty to protect the English throne, was aware that it could not be put at risk even for dear cousins.”
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Shortly thereafter, the Foreign Office issued a statement: “His Majesty’s Government does not insist on its former offer of hospitality to the Imperial Family.”
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But the king’s decision did not abate the criticism that both he and the queen were facing at this time. The German Imperial Air Service had just bombed London. Leading the attack had been the new heavy bomber, the Gotha G.IV. In the aftermath of the attack, the British monarchy was faced with a public relations nightmare. The official name of the royal family was Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. This commonality between their monarchs and the Germans proved too much for some people in British society. Ugly rumors began to permeate Britain that George and Mary were pro-German; the fall of the once-mighty Romanovs only fueled republican sentiments elsewhere. A week after Nicholas abdicated, crowds gathered at the Royal Albert Hall to celebrate the end of the tsarist regime. In a letter to the
Times
, the celebrated author H. G. Wells asserted that “the time has come to rid ourselves of the ancient trappings of throne and sceptre.”
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The very notion of hereditary monarchy was under assault.

The king and queen’s critics believed that evidence of their German sympathies was obvious and came by way of the fact that a number of their relatives were German royals. Then there was George himself, whose grandfather Prince Albert was from the German dukedom of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. As such, all the members of the British royal family had inherited Prince Albert’s German titles. As for Queen Mary, who had been born and raised in England, her brothers Dolly and Alge were the duke and prince of Teck, respectively, making them part of the Württemberger monarchy.

According to the rumors, the king and queen were supposed to be in league with their extended family, namely the other children and grandchildren of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. As far back as 1871, the British court had been sneered as little more than an arcane “pack of Germans.”
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Though harsh, this was not inaccurate. Six of Queen Victoria’s nine children married Germans, giving rise to two generations of British royals who were princes and princesses of Hesse-Darmstadt, Battenberg, Teck, or Schleswig-Holstein. This did not include Queen Victoria’s grandchildren (by birth or by marriage) from Prussia, Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Saxe-Meiningen, Hesse-Cassel, Schaumburg-Lippe, and Anhalt. Officials at Buckingham Palace were heard remarking that the king and royal family were more German than Wilhelm. By 1917, the British court was made up of so many foreign royals that H. G. Wells once called it “alien and uninspiring,” to which King George famously replied, “I may be uninspiring, but I’ll be damned if I’m an alien.”
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These protestations on the king’s part seemed to go unnoticed by the British public. During a dinner party at Buckingham Palace in May 1917, Lady Maud Warrender mentioned to the queen that London was rife with rumors that the king and queen must be pro-German since their family names were German. George was sitting nearby and overheard the remark. Growing pale, he abruptly left the table, looking shaken and disturbed. There was little recourse but to take drastic action.

On June 19, 1917, a special session of the Privy Council was called by the king at Buckingham Palace. At the meeting, the king announced that he was ready to support British nationalist opinions and cut the monarchy’s ties with its German past. Under the advice of his Privy Counsellors, George issued an order-in-council formally changing the name of the British royal family. A list of historic English surnames were reviewed by the king, queen, Prince Louis of Battenberg, George’s uncle the Duke of Connaught, and Lord Stamfordham. The names Lancaster, York, Plantagenet, Tudor-Stewart, England, D’Este, and Fitzroy were all considered and unanimously voted down. Only after Lord Stamfordham suggested a name that once belonged to Edward III did the king and queen agree. No longer known as the German-sounding House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the royal family would be henceforth known as the House of Windsor. One of Queen Mary’s biographers observed that for her, “there was a sense of great pride at her new name and in the fact that she was to be the matriarch of a new dynasty—the Royal House of Windsor.”
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The king went even further than just changing the family name. He issued letters patent that revoked the titles of his and Mary’s German relatives living in Britain, replacing them with English ones. Officially, the king only “requested” that his relations voluntarily surrender their titles, although the “request was in effect a command.”
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The king “deemed it desirable in the conditions brought about by the present war that those Princes of his family who are his subjects and bear German names and titles should relinquish these titles and henceforth adopt British surnames.”
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Prince Louis of Battenberg wrote to his daughter Louise in June, “It has been suggested that we should turn our name into English, viz: Battenhill or Mountbatten. We incline to the latter as a better sound … of course we are at his [the king’s] mercy. We are only allowed to use our German title as the Sovereign has always recognized it, but he can refuse this recognition [at] any moment.”
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The Tecks and the Battenbergs became the Cambridges and the Mountbattens. In his official statement, King George V announced the following:

Now, therefore, We, out of Our Royal Will and Authority, do hereby declare and announce that as from the date of this Our Royal Proclamation Our House and Family shall be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor, and that all descendants in that male line of Our said Grandmother Queen Victoria who are subjects of these Realms … shall bear the said Name of Windsor:

And do hereby further declare and announce that We for Ourselves and for and on behalf of Our descendants of Our said Grandmother Queen Victoria who are subjects of these Realms relinquish and enjoin the discontinuance of the use of the Degrees, Styles, Dignities, Titles, and Honours of Dukes and Duchesses of Saxony and Princes and Princesses of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and all other German Degrees, Styles, Dignities, Titles, Honours and Appellations to Us or to them heretofore belonging or appertaining.
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Between September and November 1917, two generations of English-born royals found themselves stripped of their rank and titles. Even Queen Victoria’s daughters Helena and Beatrice reverted to their premarital English titles. The rest were forced to adopt English peerages that placed them on par with the country’s aristocracy. Louis of Battenberg’s wife and Tsarina Alexandra’s sister Victoria was now the Marchioness of Milford Haven. She wrote to her lady-in-waiting that she regretted the loss of her royal rank: “I am unduly influenced by the recollection of brewers, lawyers, bankers [and other] Peers.”
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Following this declaration came the equally bold Enemy Princes Bill—also known as the Titles Deprivation Act—passed by Parliament later that year. The controversial document stripped all German royals of any British titles or privileges. Eight Knights of the Garter, England’s highest honor, had already been stripped of their order in 1915 and declared “enemy knights.”
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Among the disavowed members of the order were Wilhelm II, his son Willy, and his brother Prince Henry; King Wilhelm II of Württemberg (“Uncle Willie”); Grand Duke Ernie of Hesse; Charles Eduard, Duke of Coburg; and Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick. Uncle Willie aside, all of these men were George’s cousins.

The foreign press was soon united in covering Britain’s severing of all ties with its German heritage. One tabloid cartoon showed King George, covered in coronation robes and wearing the imperial crown, furiously sweeping away a dust ball that spelled out the words “Made in Germany.” The reaction on continental Europe was just as biting. Wilhelm II was outraged by his cousin’s actions. He immediately stripped King George of all the German military honors that had been bestowed upon him. He also destroyed many of the pictures and mementos that the two cousins had acquired over the years. Later, speaking to one of his staff, Wilhelm caustically remarked that he planned to see a performance of Shakespeare’s play,
The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha
.

At the same time that King George was reforming the British monarchy, his wife was living through an exceptionally difficult time. For a number of years, their youngest son, John, was plagued by violent seizures accompanied by extended periods of anxiety and disorientation. Even as an infant, his nurses observed that he had trouble sitting upright. He was eventually diagnosed with epilepsy in an advanced stage. Research conducted in the past several years has indicated that Prince John also suffered from a debilitating form of autism. So severe was his condition that he was the only member of the royal family to not attend the king and queen’s coronation in 1911. The feelings Mary associated with John’s illness remain unclear. She made no mention of him in her letters or diary entries. Even her letters to Aunt Augusta, her closest relative, lack any reference to John, his illness, or their impact on the family. According to her biographer David Duff, there was a marked difference in the way Queen Mary treated John compared to her other children. “His mother loved him,” he wrote, “spent much time with him and treasured his quaint little sayings, but he was an everlasting worry to her.”
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Like Tsarevitch Alexei, Prince John’s seizures kept him incapacitated for long periods. The difference in the lives of Alexandra’s and Mary’s sons came by way of the fact that Alexei suffered through his illness with his family. By contrast, in 1917, John was given a separate establishment of his own, Wood House, on the grounds of the royal estate at Sandringham where the prince led a quiet life surrounded by a team of devoted nurses led by the lovable Charlotte Bill. Queen Mary was harshly criticized for sending John to Sandringham, but the young prince thrived at Wood House. He led a happy life where he received a well-planned education from his tutor, Henry Peter Hansell, and enjoyed trips into the Norfolk countryside with his equerry, Thomas Haverly. Although Mary did not visit her son as frequently as her other children, she was able to see him regularly when she was at Sandringham. As spring turned to summer and little John settled in at Wood House, the strain of the last year began to take its toll on the queen. She was plagued by severe pain in her right arm and shoulder, and her hair became tinged with gray. “I have never in my life suffered so much
mentally
as I am suffering
now
and I know you are feeling the same,” she wrote to George.
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It did not help that she was soon forced to turn her attentions back to the war, which was set to take an important turn. The wholesale, internecine destruction of Europe over the past three years had blinded many—including George and Mary—to the fact that the First World War had eroded the foundations of the continent’s two remaining empires, which were set to collapse at any moment.