The marriage itself had come as shock enough when Michael confessed it afterwards, but what added to the fury of Nicholas and Alexandra, and their court at Tsarskoe Selo, was that it was sprung upon them shortly before the long-planned celebrations marking the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913 — and more to the point, to demonstrate that the Romanovs, who had faced ruin eight years earlier in the 1905 Revolution, were back on top. A scandal involving the brother of the Tsar was hardly a welcome prelude to a year intended to boost the prestige of the imperial family across the nation. That fact in itself dictated what the response would be.
At first there had been hopes that the runaway marriage could be kept a secret, thus avoiding public humiliation, at least until after the tercentenary celebrations, scheduled to end in June. That was the immediate response of Michael’s mother, the Dowager Empress Marie, when she received Michael’s letter on November 4, 1912, at her holiday home in Denmark.
As she wrote at once to Nicholas: ‘I only ask that it should remain a secret, so there shouldn’t be another scandal, there have been other marriages in secret, which everyone pretended not to know about. I think it’s really the only thing that can be done now, otherwise I won’t be able to show myself any more, it’s such a shame and disgrace .’24
Nicholas, as appalled as his mother, agreed with her — ‘My first thought was also to keep the news quiet’— though he doubted that it could remain a secret. ‘Sooner or later everyone here will find out.’25 Nevertheless, the hope persisted that somehow the marriage could be covered up. In a ten-point memorandum drawn up at Tsarskoe Selo by the elderly court minister Baron Fredericks, but with a nagging and vindictive Empress Alexandra at his elbow, the idea was that Michael would be granted eleven months’ leave of absence — keeping him out of the way until after Nicholas had basked in the applause of the nation — and then, if he had still not divorced Natasha, he could expect very severe punishment. Meanwhile, to ensure that she could not get her hands on his money, his estates would be put under guardianship. The view of the inner circle was that Michael had acted unconsciously ‘under the hypnotic influence of a malicious vamp’ who was now to be banned ‘from Russia forever …as somebody who has demonstrated criminal disregard for the Head of State and publicly injured the dignity and status of a member of the Imperial House.’26
With this hasty and desperate response in place, Michael’s former trusted ADC Captain A. A. Mordvinov, a man who had come to hate Natasha as much as she despised him, was swiftly despatched in early November 1912 to Cannes and the
Mordvinov’s was no more successful. Michael found him ‘difficult to understand for he was nervous’ — hardly surprising given his task of delivering the Tsarskoe Selo ultimatum of ‘divorce her or else’.
The Tsar had appointed ‘the good Mordvinov’ as one of his own ADCs and that switch of loyalties was enough to ensure an uneasy audience. Michael, who felt betrayed by him, told him brusquely to go away and not come back. ‘We are no longer on good terms’, Michael wrote to Nicholas. He then set out his own settlement of the issue: that he and Natasha should return to Russia to live quietly outside the public gaze, that she should be given the title of Countess, and that — despite the threats passed on by messenger Mordvinov — he was to retain full control ‘of his personal fortune and property’.27
By the time Nicholas read that in his study at Tsarskoe Selo it was already too late to hope that the marriage could be kept secret. As he wrote to his mother on November 21: ‘By now everybody knows… In Moscow it is the same; probably the news came from her relations.’28
The gossip had also spread far beyond Russia: all Europe was agog, and in England Michael’s cousin King George V was as concerned as anyone else, writing to Nicholas that ‘I am so fond of him that I am in despair that he should have done this foolish thing & I know how miserable you must be about it. What a lot of worries & anxieties there are in this world.29
At Tsarskoe Selo it was now clear that there was no choice left but to impose the severest punishment on Michael and quickly before the start of the official tercentenary celebrations, scheduled to begin with a great choral
On December 15, 1912, two months after Michael’s marriage, the Tsar issued at Tsarskoe Selo an imperial ukase or edict to the Ruling Senate. It read:
Two weeks later, on December 30, he issued an imperial manifesto removing Michael from the Regency.
Both the ukase and the manifesto were published for the world to see in the Official Messenger No 2 of January 3, 1913. Two days earlier the same official gazette had announced that ‘Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich, Colonel and Commandant of the Chevalier Gardes Regiment of the Empress Marie Fedorovna… is relieved of his command.’32
These series of official statements caused a considerable stir, within the diplomatic world as well as in society at large. Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador, telegraphed the news at once to the British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, adding that ‘in the event of no one being specially appointed to act as Regent in place of the Grand Duke Michael the Regency would, as I am informed, devolve by law on the Empress’.33
In effect, if Nicholas died, it would be Alexandra who would rule Russia. That was a prospect which even in 1913 was unwelcome; Alexandra and her clique at Tsarskoe Selo were not yet hated as they would be, but there was little liking for her in society or in the political classes. When her mother-in-law had been empress, she had ‘considered her chief function was to charm those who came into contact with her; she had every quality needed for doing so and was venerated at court and by the great mass of the people’.34
In contrast, Alexandra had no interest in charming anyone: her ‘chief function’ was in badgering Nicholas to ‘be firm’ and to show them ‘who is master’. That would bring both of them down in the end, but it was not the end in 1913, though she hoped it would be the end of ‘that woman’ Natasha.
In St Petersburg, even hardened members of society were astonished at the severity of the punishment which, as one observer put it, was ‘as unfortunate as it was unwarrantable’.35 And because Alexandra was judged to be behind this humiliation, sympathy in some quarters swung to Michael rather than to Nicholas. Given the choice between condemning the well-liked Michael and condemning Alexandra, society was more than ready to forgive him if only to have more reason to denigrate her.
At the same time, few could think of anything which would be to the credit of Natasha. Society had cut her dead when she had arrived in the capital eleven months earlier. The runaway marriage seemed its own proof that they had been right to do so. He had been foolish; among those who followed the lead of the the smartest salons, she was unspeakable.
TWO weeks after his runaway marriage, Michael had written to his brother to tell him what he had done and concluded by saying that ‘I know that punishment awaits me for this act and I am ready to bear it.’36 He expected to be banished, relieved of his command of the Chevalier Gardes, and to have his assets frozen, perhaps for a year or so until the storm had abated. He was by no means the first Grand Duke to have married in breach of the imperial statutes — uncle Paul and cousin Kirill were just two examples of that — and there was always a price to pay, but no other Grand Duke had found himself subject to the kind of public humiliation inflicted on Michael. High society would always know when a Grand Duke had been banished and the
