Looking back over my travels, few visits stand out with more pleasant recollections than those I have paid to Petrograd. In the present Tsar, Nicholas II., one finds a type of sovereign not only different from either King Edward or the Kaiser, but, in my experience, unique. Sovereigns may have moments of an affectionate emotion; they rarely have consistent tenderness. In their most intimate relations of family life they are apt to resume suddenly the frigid tones of royalty; and I have seen a king, talking even with his mother, get himself unexpectedly into his royal manner and speak as stiffly as if he were giving his mind to some lower breed of human being. Many a person, chatting tête-à-tête with a sovereign alone, has been charmed by the simple naturalness of his manner, and meeting him an hour later, before others, has wondered if it could be the same man. Not so the Tsar. He has more human tenderness than I ever{158} saw in any other man. He enters a crowded audience-room with the same charming kindliness and unconsciousness of self that he has in the privacy of family life. His eyes have always the one clear gaze of a clean soul.
He is not at first impressive, simply because he is incapable of playing a part, even a royal one. But the more you see of him the more he grows on you. He has no love of display, of uniforms, of the parade of royal power. He is wise with the wisdom of sympathy, and eager to help his people, and benevolent in his thought of them to a degree for which I know no parallel. I think it must be due to the unmistakable irradiations of this kindliness of heart that no attempts have been made upon his life, even during the bitterest frenzies of revolutionary hate.
In the menace with which the existence of royalty is surrounded, one would expect to find the Imperial family living amid all the oppressions of constant fear. On the contrary, I thought them the happiest royal family I have seen. They were so naturally affectionate and happy that it was even possible to forget that they were royal. They had apparently accepted the dangers of their life as soldiers do{159}—as we all accept the lesser dangers of our ordinary day—and were unaffected by them.
What they thought of the problems of their rule I do not know; and I do not know enough of their people to understand what those problems really are. But surely no power could be more beneficently exercised than this man’s must be; and if his spirit could only animate the instruments of his authority and the innumerable officials who are necessary to administer it, the mad asperities of recrimination in Russia would be as impossible to the administration and its opponents as they are to the Tsar himself.
He is a Dane, through his mother, and his qualities are those that make the Royal Families of Denmark and Sweden so charming. But these are the constitutional monarchies of a kindly and contented people, who have no cause to rebel against a government that is their own creation, and who show no awe of a ruling family as unassuming as themselves. I think, if one must be born Royal, it would be wise to be born to a Scandinavian Crown.
I have rarely felt happier than I did when I heard that Nicholas II. had called on his subjects to take a share in the government of the vast Russian Em{160}pire. The publication of the Imperial Manifesto of October, 1905, in which the Emperor announced the creation of the Imperial Duma, was an event of first-class importance, and I admired the spirit of the nation which had shown its determination to limit the power of the Crown and the wisdom of the Emperor in yielding to the desires of his subjects.
“This is the first step,” I said, “on the path which must ultimately lead to the substitution of democratic for autocratic government in Russia.”
My affection for the Emperor and Empress, my enthusiasm for the advancement of democratic ideas, my recollections of a long visit to Russia, all combined to intensify my interest in the dawn of freedom in a land which I felt, when I visited it, was part of Asia included in Europe by some strange mistake of the geographers.
It was mid-winter when I arrived for the first time in Petersburg, magical beneath its snow mantle, and I came as a simple tourist to see the country and to study the conditions of Russian life. I established myself in a hotel as a Spanish countess, feeling delighted that nobody knew who I actually was, and revelling in the freedom of strict incognito.{161} But I had not been in the hotel five hours before a Grand Master of Ceremonies arrived and betrayed my secret. From that minute everybody knew that the countess was an Infanta of Spain, and my liberty was gone. It is my usual experience. I arrive somewhere, believing that not a soul knows where I am, and, almost before I have taken possession of my rooms, there is a whirr of the telephone bell and somebody at the other end saying: “Eulalia, how did you get here? You must come and see us at once.”
The Grand Master of Ceremonies brought me a message from the Emperor and Empress, telling me how delighted they were to know that they were going to see me soon, and suggesting that I should come to the Winter Palace the next morning for the Twelfth Day ceremony of the Blessing of the Waters.
“But I have nothing to wear!” I cried.
It was absolutely true. I had never expected to figure at a Court ceremony, and it had not occurred to me to bring a manteau de cour. Etiquette, however, is less severe in Russia than in Spain or in Prussia, as I soon discovered, and the next morning I{162} put on my smartest frock and drove to the Winter Palace, a gigantic building, painted dull red, with rows of gods and goddesses standing on the cornice of its stupendous fa?ade, looking cold and unhappy in the nipping air.
I had not seen the Empress since we were girls, staying with Queen Victoria at Windsor or in the beautiful Isle of Wight. And what a charming girl she was! A simple English girl in appearance, in a skirt and blouse, utterly unaffected, warm-hearted, and fresh as a rosebud touched with dew. I was thinking of the happy, careless days when we were in England together, as I drove to the palace, forgetting the change that the passage of the years makes in the friends of one’s youth, and when I went into the room where the Empress was waiting to watch the Blessing of the Waters from the window, I felt startled to find, instead of the girl I used to know, a surpassingly beautiful and stately woman. The petals of the rosebud had unfolded. She was the centre of a brilliant group of Grand Duchesses and ladies, all wearing the strange but beautiful dress of the Russian Court, with long hanging sleeves. On her head was a kokoshnik, a crescent-shaped diadem,{163} flaming with diamonds, from which fell a long white veil, and her stateliness and beauty distinguished her from all the other sumptuous figures surrounding her. A stranger who had never seen her before would have been certain that it was she, and not one of the others, who was Empress.
“How good to see you again, Eulalia, after all these years,” she said, coming towards me; and she put her arms round me and kissed me.
And in that greeting I realised that the Tsaritsa had not changed. She was still the affectionate and unaffected friend I had known years before. We had a hundred questions to ask each other, but almost before we had had time to begin, we had to stop talking to attend to the imposing ceremony which was beginning on the frozen Neva.
From the window I saw that a pavilion, like an exceedingly decorative bandstand, had been erected on the ice, just in front of the palace, and I watched a procession of ecclesiastics in stiff Byzantine robes and glittering mitres move slowly across the road separating it from the palace, followed by the Grand Dukes and the Emperor. The singing of the choir floated to us through the frosty air and the{164} Empress crossed herself devoutly. She is a sincerely religious woman.
I watched the Emperor standing motionless beneath the fretted and gilded canopy of the pavilion, and the thought suddenly flashed into my mind that the Russian Emperors alone claim the right to govern the souls as well as the bodies of their subjects. The Autocrat is a great ecclesiastical personage as well as a secular ruler, and the Russian Church depends upon him and can do nothing without his consent. I remembered that banishment to Siberia was the punishment for those who deserted the Orthodox Church and refused to believe as the Tsar believes and to pray as the Tsar prays. The Kings of Spain and the Emperors of Austria are sons, not rulers, of the Church, and I had been taught that the Pope was king of kings. It seemed to me that no worse form of despotism could be conceived than the concentration in the hands of an autocratic ruler of the spiritual and temporal power and, as these thoughts crowded into my mind, there seemed to me something sinister and terrible in the ceremony I was watching, and I realised, as I had never done before, the immensity and the awfulness of the power
 [Image unavailble.]
Courtesy of Collier’s
Nicholas II and the Heir of Russia
{165}
wielded by the motionless figure beneath the gay pavilion. Nobody rejoiced more than I did when the Emperor published the Manifesto of April, 1905, granting his subjects religious liberty, and I realised that the stupendous claim which had made me shudder when I thought of it, as I watched the sumptuous Twelfth Day ceremony from the windows of the Winter Palace, had been renounced for ever. In point of fact, Nicholas II. had no desire to maintain it, and he renounced it as soon as an appropriate occasion arose.
After the picturesque ceremony which had stirred these thoughts had ended and the Archbishop had dipped a golden cross in the water running below the ice of the river, the holy water was brought into the palace to the Empress, and the Emperor joined us. He gave me a characteristically Russian welcome. His manner was engagingly simple and unaffected. The contrast between him and the German Emperor was extraordinary. The Kaiser, a constitutional monarch, whose power is strictly limited, shows by his bearing and his manner, as I have indicated in another chapter, that he holds the divine right of kings to be a cardinal article of faith.{166} When one is with the Tsar it requires a certain effort of the imagination to remember that he possesses autocratic power over the lives of 160,000,000 human beings. The Russians are the most hospitable people in the world, and the Emperor and Empress are not excelled by any of their subjects in kindness and generosity to guests. They both insisted that, so long as I remained in Petersburg, I must be with them as much as possible, and, in point of fact, although I slept at the hotel, I was constantly at the Winter Palace, and had my part in the intimate family life of the Imperial family.
When a man likes nothing better than to remain at home with his wife, it is a sure sign that he is very much in love with her. Judged by that test, there is no happier couple in Europe than the Emperor and Empress of Russia. They are never more contented than when together, and it was obvious to me that the Tsar simply adores his wife. It would be strange if he did not, for there is not a gentler or sweeter woman in the world than the beautiful Tsaritsa. And both of them are devoted to their children. They used to make me come with them sometimes to the nursery, where the little{167} Grand Duchesses used to welcome us with shrieks of delight. What games there were! People who think of the Tsar as a frowning despot would have been astonished to see a vigorous pillow-fight going on between him and his children. And away from the formalities of the Court, closeted with her children, the Tsaritsa was always radiant and happy. Under the spell of their prattle and of their caresses she was transformed. The smiling mother seemed a different woman to the beautiful but grave lady seen by the public in the ceremonies of the Court.
“Do try and get the Empress to smile, Eulalia,” said one of the Grand Duchesses to me at some Court function.
But that was sooner said than done. There is not a trace of artificiality in the Empress’s character. She seemed unable to pretend she was enjoying herself, when, in point of fact, she was fatigued and bored. Moving as the central figure of a splendid pageant, I think she was always wishing the ceremony to be at an end and to find herself free to be with her children again.
The tastes of the Emperor are as simple as those of the Empress and in curious contrast to those of{168} most of the Imperial family. Neither of them likes the late supper-parties in which the majority of their relations indulge. Early to bed and early to rise is my motto, and supper-parties, hardly finished at two o’clock in the morning, bored me unutterably. When I went to the opera with the Emperor and Empress, we used to take time by the forelock and sup in the second entr’acte, in order to be able to go straight to bed when we got home. The ballets given at the Marinsky Theatre were exceedingly beautiful, and the Empress followed the movements of the dancers with evident enjoyment from the stage-box. Behind the box is a charming room, and there it was that supper used to be served.
“Here is your high tea, Eulalia,” the Empress would say merrily, and then we sat down to a square meal of cold meat and countless cups of tea, to which I used to do ample justice, as I did not dine before going to the theatre.
His love of simplicity does not, however, prevent the Emperor from enjoying Society. Like most Russians, he is fond of it, and his animation and vivacity at Court balls were delightful and, moreover, genuine. I liked to watch him dance the ma{169}zurka, that rushing, almost violen............