The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II

with an oak banqueting hall, four-poster bedrooms, state drawing room, picture gallery — and a small army of servants, including footmen who at dinner wore knee-breeches and powdered hair.⁸ Called Knebworth House, and owned by the Earl of Lytton, it was available for a year from that September 1913 at an annual rent of ?3,000 or a tenth of Michael’s annual income from the imperial purse. On the lease, Michael was described as ‘at present residing at Palace Anichkov in St Petersburg’.⁹ The drafting lawyers in Belgravia knew, as did everyone else, that His Imperial Highness the Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich, ‘hereinafter the tenant of the other part’ ought properly to be described as ‘of no fixed abode’; however that would have appeared unseemly. A palace sounded better than a hotel room.

He paid the first six-month rental in advance. However, he found it a struggle in March 1914 to pay the next six months. After almost two years his cash was running out. Suddenly, having to find ?1,500 from his monthly income of ?2,500 was both a problem and a cause for bitter complaint. In his absence his personal estate had generated some two million roubles of profit — and not a penny of that had come his way. Mordvinov was deaf to pleas. He and his department were ‘unfair and discourteous’ he complained to Nicholas. ‘Life in England is very expensive… this month I have had to pay a six-month rent for the estate in which I am living, which is why I have been left without any money.’¹⁰ The only concession was to agree that his monthly income could increase to 30,000 roubles, or ?3,300.

Yet in all other respects he was more content than he had been for the past five years. At least in England he and his wife Natasha were left in peace and that had never been the case in their lives together in Russia. Looking ahead, they planned to move that September of 1914 to another but much larger estate, Paddockhurst in Sussex, owned by Lord Cowdray, with a two-year lease at a slightly higher rent of ?3,460 a year.¹¹

There would be time enough to decide by 1916 what next to do. After all, who could know what might happen in the interval?

Who indeed.

THE announcement in the Court Circular published in The Times a few months earlier, that Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich was taking possession of Knebworth House, would normally have been enough for crested invitations to fall thick and fast on their doormat. Society, however, had turned a polite back on Michael and Natasha, taking its lead from Michael’s cousin King George V and his aunt the Dowager Queen Alexandra that while Michael remained family, ‘that woman’ was not welcome in any respectable household.

One other influential and determined enemy in the British camp was Countess Torby, married to a namesake Grand Duke, Michael Mikhailovich, the 52-year-old brother-in-law of Michael’s elder sister Xenia, and known in the family as Miche-Miche. On the face of it, Michael might have expected Miche-Miche and his wife to have been the first to come to his support, since they too had been banished from Russia for a very similar offence — a runaway marriage which had caused almost as much uproar as had Michael’s.

In 1891, Miche-Miche had secretly married the well-born but not royal Sophie von Merenberg — a grand- daughter of the celebrated Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin. The news came as such a shock that when Miche- Miche’s mother Grand Duchess Olga received his telegram while standing on a station platform she collapsed with a heart attack and died.¹²

Alexander III banished the couple from Russia, and like Michael and Natasha 22 years later, they moved to England. Sophie was re-invented as Countess Torby, and they settled down happily in British society, eventually taking a long lease on Kenwood, a magnificent house overlooking London’s Hampstead Heath. The British took a much more relaxed view about ‘morganatic marriage’ — between a royal and a non-royal — which was why London was seen as a sanctuary for those who had blotted their copybook in the other stricter European courts. Knowing that in St. Petersburg they would never be accepted as they were in London, Miche-Miche and his wife had no interest in returning to Russia and never would.

At the same time, they closed their own doors on Michael and Natasha. Miche-Miche was pressing George V for a British title¹³ and that being so — though she would never get one — the much grander Countess Torby did not want the arrival of Natasha to remind anyone of her own runaway marriage. Natasha was too close for comfort, and therefore was on her black-list. She discouraged her friends from having anything to do with her, making clear that she disapproved — a double divorcee was enough for that.

Yet the British did not ignore her altogether. Since she was accepted in Britain as the lawful wife of Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich, her name was included whenever he was mentioned in the Court Circular, published in The Times and Morning Post; however, on the three occasions when her name was listed, confused Buckingham Palace officials changed the spelling each time.

She was listed as the ‘Comtesse de Brassow’ when she stayed with Michael at the Ritz Hotel on London’s Piccadilly in December 1913, ‘Mme de Brasov’ when she went to a luncheon two weeks later, and ‘Countess’ when she came back with Michael from Cannes in May.¹⁴ It did not help that at Knebworth she had personal notepaper designed with her initials NB under a coronet.¹⁵ That in itself did not encourage invitations: no one really knew what to call her.

Michael did not mind about that. He had never cared greatly for fashionable society in St. Petersburg and never would; he took the same view in London. What mattered to him was that after the long and bitter family battles over Natasha they were at last able to live openly and peacefully together, as man and wife, and with the two children — his baby son George and her ten-year-old daughter Tata.

Nonetheless, they were by no means cold-shouldered everywhere. The luncheon at which in January 1914 the Court Circular recorded Natasha as ‘Mme de Brassow’ was at the home of Sir Frederick Pollock and the guests included Walter Hines Page, the US ambassador, and his wife, and the Russian actress Princess Baryatinskaya, whose stage name was Lydia Yavorska.¹⁶ She was playing the title role in an English adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a love story with some uncomfortable reminders of Natasha’s own life; Michael and she had gone to the opening night with the Russian charge d’affaires and the consul-general¹⁷ — both carefully arranging themselves so that they were dutifully beside the Grand Duke, but not next to his wife.

His Russian connections apart, Michael’s principal interest that evening was a business one: he had joined with Sir Frederick in a theatrical enterprise, the New International Theatre, which had backed the play. It was a world in which both Michael and Natasha felt very much at home, and Michael took a five per cent stake in the company¹⁸ — with his assets frozen he needed to make some money — though after some ‘unlucky’ investments it was to prove ultimately a total loss.¹⁹

There were also small victories which could bring no pleasure to Tsarskoe Selo. Grand Duke Andrew, for example, showed what he thought of it all by turning up at Knebworth House in January as he had done at Cannes after the marriage, and two months later Michael and Natasha went off to St. Moritz to join his cousin and his long-time mistress Kschessinska. Michael and Andrew skied; Natasha and Kschessinska ice- skated.²⁰

They made an interesting foursome: two Grand Dukes and two of the best-known women in Europe — both the mothers of illegitimate children, with the dainty but dazzling Kschessinska admired as the celebrated prima ballerina assoluta, the younger and beautiful Natasha known as the most notorious woman in high society; each was outrageous and what made them more so was that each was clearly adored by the two proud Grand Dukes hovering around them. Society, pretending to look the other way, could only stare in wonderment.

They were back in England in time to offer ‘open house’ at Knebworth to the stars of Diaghilev’s famed Ballets Russes, then taking London by storm. They had already conquered Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vienna and Budapest and had done much the same when they came to London in 1911. Their return in 1914 was eagerly awaited, and Natasha invited the dancers en bloc to Knebworth, along with the stars of the Russian opera who also were appearing as part of the ‘Russian season’ at Drury Lane.

Her old friend Chaliapin, who had visited them in Cannes after their marriage, was among them. Another guest was the celebrated Russian sculptor and stage designer Sudeikin, whose ‘thank you’ was a bust of Michael, George and Tata.²¹

Natasha was in her element in those days at Knebworth, when the house rang with laughter and music and no one went to bed until the early hours. ‘On the morning after the parties, the gardeners were not allowed to start work near the house, so as to leave undisturbed the slumber of the guests, who would eventually arise,