Anatomy of a Royal betrayal

They were royal cousins and could almost have been twins. They wrote to each other as 'Dear Nicky' and 'Dear Georgie'. Yet when one of them needed sanctuary the other refused and left a much-loved cousin to degradation and death.
Why?

Why did Tsar Nicholas II not come to England?

The invitation was sent and then withdrawn—by his own cousin

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The last of the Tsars

When he was crowned in 1894 Tsar Nicholas II was the absolute ruler of Russia and the richest monarch on the planet, with a fortune worth over $300 billion in today's values. Yet in March 1917, with war going disastrously for the Russian army, over which he had appointed himself supreme commander, he was forced to abdicate. He was sent into exile, first to Tobolsk in Siberia and then to Ekaterinburg in the Urals, where on the night of 16 July 1918 he and his entire family--his wife Alexandra, four daughters Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia and his son Alexei--were shot by Bolsheviks, almost certainly acting under orders from Lenin.

The King who refused the rescue

Nicholas abdicated on 15th March 1917. On the 22nd March the British Government, at the prompting of King George V, who was first cousin to both Nicholas and his wife, the Tsarina Alexandra, offered the Tsar and his family asylum in England. The Provisional Government in Russia agreed to the move, but then King George changed his mind and became adamant that the Tsar should not be allowed to come. He claimed to have received representations from all classes of prople against the Tsar and was worried for the future of the monarchy. Despite protestations by his own ministers, George persisted in his opposition and on the 10th April the offer was withdrawn. The British Government tacitly accepted responsibility for the decision. George's actions did not become public knowledge for several decades.

Dear Nicky and Dear Georgie

George was very attached to his cousin. They were similar in age and looked strikingly alike, as can be seen here, photographed in 1913 when they last met, at the wedding of the Kaiser's daughter in Berlin. They spent many childhood summer holidays together at the home of their grandfather King Christian IX of Denmark and corresponded regularly, referring to each other as ‘Dear Nicky’ and ‘Dear Georgie’.

After Nicholas and his family were executed George went into complete denial. He claimed he had wanted to send a cruiser to rescue them but had been prevented in doing so by politicans. “If it had been one of their kind they would have acted soon enough.”

Why did George change his mind?

The usual explanation of George’s change of mind — that he was worried that opposition from British left wing circles and the labour movement might imperil his throne—does not stand much scrutiny. George was a deeply conventional, unimaginative man of modest intelligence, not given to political speculation. While it was probable that there would have been some opposition to the Tsar’s arrival, there is absolutely no evidence that it would have led to a republican uprising in the middle of the war. There is however evidence that there was a deliberate cover up of the real reason for George's actions.

The ambassador's warning

Sir George Buchanan was British Ambassador to Russia in the last days of Tsarism. In early 1917 he warned the Tsar of the coming storm: “Did His Majesty, I then asked, realize the dangers of the situation, and was he aware that revolutionary language was being held, not only in Petrograd, but throughout Russia?... You have, sir, come to the parting of the ways, and you have now to choose between two paths. The one will lead you to victory and a glorious peace – the other to revolution and disaster.” He brokered the deal that initially invited Nicholas and his family to go into exile in Britain. In his book My Mission to Russia he acquiesced in the official British Government line that the deal fell through because of inaction by the Russian Provisional Government and opposition from British labour.

Was the truth suppressed?

Meriel Buchanan, daughter of George, in her book The Dissolution of an Empire, wrote, “Later on, when he had retired from the Diplomatic Service, my father had, I know, the intention of including in his book the truth about the attempt that was made to get the Imperial family out of Russia, but he was told at the Foreign Office, where he had gone to examine some of the documents, that if be did so, he would not only be charged with an Infringement of the Official Secrets Act, but would have his pension stopped,... The account he gives of the promise of the British Government to receive the Emperor in England ... is therefore a deliberate attempt to suppress the true facts.”

The Welsh Wizard

David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister 1916-22. Known as the ‘Welsh Wizard’ for his subtle and machiavellian politics. According to King George’s biographer, Kenneth Rose, Lloyd George largely ignored any requests from the King for particular actions. Throughout the war there was only one important matter in which the King persuaded Lloyd George to change his mind and that was, ‘the most perplexing act of his reign: the abandonment of a loyal ally and much-loved cousin to degradation and death.’

Lloyd George largely shielded the King from criticism over Nicholas’s fate but according to Rose, when Lloyd George wanted to write his war memoirs he was told by the Cabinet Secretary at the time to suppress all mention of the events and when he asked to see the telegrams about them he was told they were not available. The Royal Archives contain almost no documents dealing with what happened to the Tsar between March 1917 and May 1918. All telegrams sent from the Palace dealing with Nicholas appear to have been removed.

Pawns in a web

Could the real explanation be that George and Nicholas were pawns in a complex web of geopolitics? The War was remaking the political, social and cultural map of Europe in ways which were to dominate the rest of the century. By 1917 the outcome hung in the balance. Lloyd George was desperate to keep Russia in the War and was looking round for new sources of support for the Allies, particularly in America. He had too to juggle official British policy with his own private aims and ambitions, as well as try to avoid being entangled by the policies of previous administrations. Nicholas coming to England could well have complicated his efforts.

Constantinople

Constantinople, founded by the Roman Emperor Constantine, was known as the “Second Rome”. It was the seat of Orthodox Christianity. Conquered by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 it became the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Soon after its fall elements in Russia, which also had adopted Orthodoxy, began calling Moscow the “Third Rome.” It became an object of Russian policy to acquire Constantinople for their Empire, for both religious and strategic reasons.

Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary at the start of World War I, agreed to a direct request from Nicholas that Russia could annex Constantinople after the war, despite admitting that it “involves a complete reversal of the traditional policy of His Majesty's Government.” According to Winston Churchill the decision was kept secret even from the British Cabinet. British policy had been to prevent Russia controlling the entrance from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean because of the threat to the Suez Canal, Egypt and India.

Lloyd George and the arms dealer

Sir Basil Zaharoff, arms dealer and one of the richest men in the world. was Instrumental in aiding Lloyd George to overcome the shell shortage which had threatened defeat for the Allies. That success was largely responsible for Lloyd George becoming British Prime Minister in 1916. He employed Arthur Maundy Gregory, later convicted of selling British honours, to spy on Lloyd George and obtain evidence of indiscretions for possible blackmail. He opposed the Sykes-Picot pact, the secret deal between Britain and France to split the Middle East between them, and any attempt to allow Russia to control Constantinople because he wanted it to be part of a greater Greece.

In 1919 Lloyd George, against the opposition of almost his entire Cabinet, supported the disastrous Greek invasion of Asia Minor, an attempt to create a greater Greece, including Constantinople. The Greek army was routed by the Turks under Kemal Ataturk and over a million Greeks were expelled from Anatolia.

The Balfour Declaration

The 1917 Balfour Declaration, named after the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, promised to set up a national home for Jews in Palestine, despite it being Ottoman territory at the time and despite it also being promised by the British to the Arabs for their support in the War against the Ottomans. The Declaration was made as a reward for support from Zionists in the US, including Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, for American entry into the War and to counter German propaganda, particularly among Jews in Russia to encourage Russia to abandon fighting and sign a separate peace with Germany.

The direct connection between the Balfour Declaration and American entry into the war was only revealed ten years later by Samuel Landman, who was secretary to the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, and later secretary of the World Zionist Organization.

Trotsky goes to Russia

Leon Trotsky, Russian socialist revolutionary, was bailed from a Spanish jail in 1916 and sent first class by steamer to New York, courtesy of a mysterious benefactor, Ernst Bark, cousin of Peter. On 27 March 1917, following the collapse of the tsarist regime on the 15th, Trotsky and his family boarded the SS Kristianfjord in New York, bound for Petrograd via Scandinavia. He travelled with an American passport, a Russian entry permit and a British transit visa. The British blockade of Germany required Scandinavian bound ships to call at Halifax, Nova Scotia for inspection. On the instructions of William Wiseman head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, he was detained at Halifax for a month before being allowed to go to Russia.

The exact reasons for his release have never been revealed but Wiseman was known to be anxious to send to Russia socialists and Jews opposed to a separate peace with Germany. Trotsky was adamantly opposed to a separate peace and abstained in the vote on the Brest Litovsk treaty that saw Russia quit the war. After seizing power the Bolsheviks revealed the existence of the secret agreement envisaging the incorporation of Constantinople into the Russian Empire after the War and renounced any claim to the city.

Lloyd George and the King

Lloyd George must surely have feared that Nicholas coming to England might lead to a revival of monarchist sentiment in Russia and the real possibility of the toppling of the Provisional Government that he strongly supported. Tsarism was notoriously anti-semitic and its restoration would have meant the claim to Constantinople would have still been in force. Together that would have made it almost impossible to win American support for entry into the War and meant that the Balfour Declaration was dead in the water. Lloyd George headed a coalition government, several members of which strongly supported the Tsar's coming. The only person capable of convincing them otherwise would have been the King. He had to find some way of changing George's mind. Did he go beyond mere persuasion to bribery and even blackmail?

The royal arm is twisted

Meriel Buchanan in The Dissolution of and Empire wrote that, "My father told me that the whole plan of the Emperor’s journey to England had been wrecked because Mr. Lloyd George had warned the King that the feeling in the country was violently against the Russian Imperial family, that the Labour members had sworn to create trouble if they were re­ceived, and that it would be very unwise to risk offending them at that critical juncture of the war. He had at the same time managed to convince the King that the danger to the Imperial family was grossly exaggerated, and had created the impression that the British Embassy in Petrograd was inclined to listen to scare­mongers and be unduly influenced by the old Court faction who still believed in the possibility of a counter-revolution."

The mysterious Peter Bark

Piotr (Peter) Bark was the Tsar’s last Finance Minister. He controlled a secret fund worth nearly £50 million in today’s values for the use of the Tsar. In his memoirs he describes that he gave Nicholas 200,000 roubles in cash from the fund, worth close to £1 million today, less than a week before he abdicated. That was the first and only time the Tsar had ever requested cash from the fund. Why did Nicholas need it and what happened to it and the rest of the fund?

Bark escaped from Russia after the Revolution and came to England. He was quickly received into the British establishment. He became a confidant of King George V and was given a knighthood, a personal gift of the sovereign. He also received large loans from the Bank of England and was given charge of several banks dealing with central Europe. Not bad for a refugee. Did he know something or bring something with him that gave him an instant entry to the highest British circles?

Blunt and the Royal connection

Anthony Blunt was an art historian and Soviet spy. His father was a clergyman and his mother a childhood friend of Princess Mary of Teck, later Queen Mary, wife of George V. Their friendship continued in later life. He wrote a number of influential works on art and architecture and was an acknowledged authority on the work of the painter Poussin. He was knighted and appointed Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and was a frequent visitor to the Royal palaces. In his position he met with members of the Royal family on a regular basis.

In 1964 Blunt confessed to being a member of the Cambridge spy ring, which included Philby, Burgess and Maclean. His confession was known to the Queen at that time but it was not until 1979 that it was revealed publicly by Margaret Thatcher. The question of why he was never prosecuted or even removed from any position of contact with royalty and allowed to continue with all his public appointments, has never been satisfactorily explained. There have been persistent reports that it was because he was the illegitimate son of George V. The evidence included the lifelong friendship between their families, despite the gulf in social class, the favouring of his nominal father, particularly appointment to a coveted position as chaplain to the British embassy in Paris, and the striking resemblance between Blunt and George's eldest son, the Duke of Windsor, the former Edward VIII.

Blunt and the Spycatcher

Peter Wright, MI5 operative and author of Spycatcher which Margaret Thatcher had banned in Britain and failed in a much publicised case to have banned in Australia. He interrogated Blunt after his confession and wrote that the Queen's private secretary had asked him not to press Blunt on a mission to Germany in 1945 that he had carried our for the Royal Family. Wright claimed that he never found out what the mission was. Later evidence suggests that it was either to recover letters between Queen Victoria and her daughter, Victoria, or some potentially incriminating correspondence between the Duke of Windsor and Adolf Hitler. Was the Palace determined not to allow Blunt to be interrogated on anything to do with his Royal connections because they feared that he might blurt out something highly embarrassing?

Maundy Gregory, spy and gossip

Arthur Maundy Gregory became notorious for the sale of British honours with the connivance of Lloyd George and was jailed for two months in 1933. In earlier life he had been a theatrical impresario with a talent for social climbing. In 1909 he was recruited by Vernon Kell, then head of MI5, ostensibly to keep an eye on potential German spies in London. In 1910 he started the magazine Mayfair which featured articles on London society, many paid for by those mentioned. This provided him with a steady stream of information and gossip that proved useful both for him and others, including the security services and newspaper proprietors, like Horatio Bottomley, owner of the mass circulation John Bull.

Did his talent for ferreting out information lead him to the rumours about the Blunt birth? Since during the War he was certainly acquainted with Basil Zaharoff, and probably with Lloyd George, did he inform them? George may have had a very staid reputation in later life but that was not always true. He and elder brother Eddy reputedly shared a mistress and there was a sensational trial in 1911 when a magazine called the Liberator was sued for criminal libel after it claimed that George had secretly married a Miss May Culme-Seymour, daughter of an Admiral, in Malta in 1890.

Want to know more?

Then read The King Was In His Counting House by Daniel McCoy in which a South London chancer stumbles across a hundred year-old mystery when a rich and beautiful woman asks him to find her missing husband. He finds himself in a world he barely understands, of cryptography and cryptic puzzles, of secret funds and great power politics. And most puzzling of all, what was the connection between a murder, a small, exclusive bank and what one royal biographer described as the most perplexing act of King George the Fifth’s reign: The abandonment of a loyal ally and much-loved cousin, Tsar Nicholas the Second of Russia, to degradation and death?