The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II

2. SCANDALOUS EXILE

MADAME Nathalie Wulfert — known as Natasha — was five foot six inches tall, slender, fair-haired and possessed of deep-set velvety blue eyes which once seen would be rarely forgotten. In December 1907, when Michael first set eyes on her, she was twenty-seven, elegant, poised, and very beautiful, with a way of holding herself, a look about her which turned eyes wherever she went. Her taste was impeccable, she had immense charm, she was unquestionably clever and at the dinner table she could converse easily and knowledgeably about books, theatre, ballet and opera. Her friends included the young composer Sergei Rachmaninov and the famed basso Fedor Chaliapin, and she could claim acquaintance with some of the best-known sculptors and painters in Russia. That was more than could be said of the conventional Guards wife in small-town yet snobbish Gatchina, where salon conversation rarely rose above the trite. However, these same salons had something to talk about when Natasha arrived — a divorcée with a four-year old daughter from her first marriage to a Moscow pianist, Sergei Mamontov, who worked at the Bolshoi opera.

Although divorce had become more common in recent years, it still came with a considerable stigma in conservative circles, and that included the narrow world of Gatchina. The Dowager Empress, like her London sister Queen Alexandra, frowned on divorce and would not entertain anyone who had parted in that way. Since the Blue Cuirassiers was her regiment, divorcées could expect a cold reception from the wives of senior officers. As Natasha would swiftly find out, she was not welcome in the higher salons, and as the wife of a mere lieutenant it was doubtful if she ever would be.

Natasha had been born in a rented summer dacha in Petrova, on the outskirts of Moscow, on June 27, 1880, some eighteen months after Michael. Over the next twenty years her father, Sergei Aleksandrovich Sheremetevsky, had built up a successful law practice, employing eleven lawyers in all, and for a time was a deputy in the Moscow City Duma.¹ Well-known in Moscow, he lived comfortably in a spacious apartment, No 52, at 6 Vozdvizhenkan, close to the Kremlin.² Of his three daughters, Olga married a promising lawyer Aleksei Matveev — destined to play an important role in Michael’s life — Vera a successful businessman, and Natasha, the pianist Mamontov who hoped one day to be a conductor, which in time he would be.

Unfortunately, one score he could never conduct harmoniously was his marriage. Inevitably other admirers stepped into his place, and after five years Natasha was divorced and had become wife of Lieutenant Vladimir Wulfert, with an apartment home at 7 Baggout Street, close by Gatchina’s Warsaw railway station. She and her daughter Tata had been there only a few months when Michael first set eyes on her in early December, 1907, in the regimental riding school;³ having introduced himself, he would never look at another woman ever again. In his case, it was love at first sight.

Michael was very correct, and although local society gossiped inevitably about the way he danced attendance on Natasha, her husband made no complaint, seemingly flattered that he had found himself in a Grand Duke’s inner circle, dining in the palace, a welcome guest at every function at which Michael played host, and in his own mind with prospects of unexpected advancement in a regiment where otherwise he might spend years trying to get on the next rung of the ladder. However, as months passed, the public face of the marriage concealed its failure behind the closed doors of Baggout Street. Wulfert was a violent man, prone to rages, and an indifferent step-father to Natasha’s daughter Tata. By June, 1909, the marriage collapsed, and Natasha walked out never to return. After that the new man in her life became the adoring Grand Duke Michael. The scandal struck when Wulfert, blaming Michael for the break-up, challenged him to a duel.⁴ When news of that reached Tsarskoe Selo in July 1909 a furious Nicholas immediately despatched Michael to command a provincial cavalry regiment, the Chernigov Hussars, in faraway Orel, 240 miles south of Moscow. Wulfert was also removed from the regiment, and given a staff job in the Kremlin.

However, Michael was not giving up on Natasha. By November 1909 he had installed her in a house in Moscow, which he treated as his weekend home, swearing never to ‘leave or abandon’ her. Within weeks she discovered she was pregnant and on July 24, 1910 she gave birth to an illegitimate son to be named George, after Michael’s elder brother who had died so young in the Caucasus. Although subsequently Natasha was granted a divorce from Wulfert — but only after Michael paid him 200,000 roubles (more than $3m in today’s value) to go away⁵ — her prospects remained that of being Michael’s mistress and never his wife. There could be no Marriage No 3; she accepted that as did Michael. He regarded her as ‘his true wife’, but both knew that could never be written on a marriage certificate in Russia. All they could hope for was that they should be allowed to live quietly, and privately, away from the public gaze.

That seemed to be the resigned response of Nicholas, and even Empress Alexandra, after the birth of baby George. Natasha was banned from joining Michael in Orel, but she was allowed to stay at his nearby country estate, Brasovo. Michael was also allowed to take her abroad on holiday, provided that they travelled incognito. However, in 1911, two years after Michael’s banishment to Orel, Nicholas decided that it was time for him to return to public duties in the capital, as colonel and commandant of the Chevalier Gardes, the premier cavalry regiment in Russia. Michael pleaded that he would prefer to go on serving quietly in Orel, with his family close by, than be back in the limelight of St. Petersburg, but Nicholas would not hear of it. In consequence, and dreading it, in January 1912, Michael and Natasha found themselves back in the capital, but apart.

MICHAEL had been told by Tsarskoe Selo that if he brought Natasha to the capital he would not be allowed to see her publicly, set up home with her, or move back into the Anichkov Palace on the Nevsky Prospekt, his mother’s home and the place where he had been born; instead, he would have to live in modest quarters at the regimental headquarters. Given that choice, he took the quarters.⁶

For Natasha and the two children he rented a huge 28-roomed apartment at 16 Liteiny, in the fashionable heart of the capital. Natasha protested, saying that it was far too big — ‘I don’t even have the furniture’, she told him. ‘To live on my own in an empty house is very depressing’.⁷ Nevertheless she moved in, and tackled the business of turning the echoing apartment into a comfortable home, though it was one few would ever visit.

Michael’s determination to be seen openly supporting her did not, however, greatly help matters, ‘for the whole of society turned its back on her as it had done before. To please the Court no one wanted either to recognise her or to receive her at their home.’⁸ St. Petersburg was always going to be a disaster for Michael and Natasha, which is why neither had wanted to be there. Moscow had been a different story, since that was Natasha’s home and she had family and a wide circle of supportive friends there; but she had never lived in St. Petersburg, and other than the few who stood by her, or rather stood by Michael, she knew almost no one.

Unfortunately, everyone knew her. Eyes stared through her when she walked in the street, and even in the Chevalier Gardes, Michael’s own regiment, the officers shunned Natasha; none would ever dine in her apartment, and none ‘would bow to her’ if they encountered her in public.⁹

In the hope of making her life more tolerable, Michael decided to move her back to Gatchina, the town where they had met, and which he preferred anyway. He bought her a villa at 24 Nikolaevskaya Street, ‘a charming, simple, pleasant two-storeyed wood house, sunk in a verdant garden’,¹⁰ but it was also an illusion of tranquillity. So long as the capital delighted in its slights and backbiting, there could be no hiding place in Gatchina, which took its lead from the capital and whose salons simply repeated what was being said there.

Moreover, the Blue Cuirassiers, which dominated local society, had neither forgotten nor forgiven that she had been the price of their losing Grand Duke Michael and the favour of their colonel-in-chief the Dowager Empress. The rule in the regiment — and obeyed by officers’ wives no less — was that no one who encountered Natasha in the street or elsewhere should acknowledge her, or even utter her name, and one young lieutenant who broke that commandment, was drummed out of the regiment. The charge against him, a meeting of senior officers was told, was that he had appeared in a theatre box ‘among a small company which included a certain lady who is well known to you’.¹¹

The Blue Cuirassiers also took their war against Natasha into the capital. Remembering the fate of that young cashiered lieutenant, a drunken Cuirassier went up to Natasha during the interval in another theatre, and loudly berated her for having ‘compromised’ the Grand Duke.¹² It was the worst kind of public scene, and Natasha, cheeks red, was left fighting back her tears.

She could not go on like that, and neither, when he found out about it, could Michael. Absent on manoeuvres he wrote to her immediately, telling her that he had reached the end of the road. He had given his word not to marry Natasha, but the quid pro quo was that she should be treated with respect, as the woman he loved, and as the mother of his son. In his mind therefore the contract had been broken. He would marry her, because he had been given no other choice.

ONE concession which had not been taken away from Michael was his right to go abroad with Natasha incognito. Nicholas had agreed to that in 1910, while insisting that Michael and Natasha did not appear together in public in Russia — for example, at a theatre. However, without telling his brother, Nicholas had ordered the secret police, the Okhrana, to trail them wherever they went, and to make sure that Michael did not sneak off and marry ‘that woman’. Alexandra was sure he would if he could; the Okhrana’s job was to make certain that even if he would, he couldn’t.

The Okhrana chief, Major-General Aleksandr Gerasimov, had been given a Top Secret order on the authority of Nicholas himself, charging him with the task ‘of taking all reasonable measures to prevent the marriage of Madame Brasova (Wulfert) to Grand Duke Michael abroad; all Russian embassies, missions and consulates shall render Major-General Gerasimov every reasonable assistance that he might need to accomplish the task and, should necessity arise, to put under arrest any persons at the discretion of Major-General Gerasimov’.¹³

A year earlier, when they had gone to Paris and Cannes, the Okhrana had followed them and watched them day and night. There had been nothing to arouse their suspicions, but their trail had been ludicrously obvious, their car blundering hopelessly in the wake of Michael’s grey open Opel tourer. The Okhrana therefore decided to change tactics: in future their agents were instructed to follow the baggage and Michael’s staff and servants as they journeyed from place to place by train, whether or not Michael was with them or travelling separately by car. Their purpose was to prevent a marriage, not watch them having a picnic.¹⁴

This year they were going first to Berlin. They set off on September 12, 1912, leaving two-year-old George and nine-year-old Tata to be looked after by their staff in Gatchina. In itself, that seemed evidence that they would be back, since they were hardly likely to run away without their children, and knowing the consequences of any marriage abroad.

Although the order authorised the ‘arrest of any persons’ the Okhrana thought complicit in any marriage attempt, in practical terms that was hardly feasible abroad where Russian law did not apply. However, what the Okhrana could do was to warn the priests in any Russian church — whether Berlin, Paris or Nice — that they faced serious punishment if they agreed to any marriage, and to intimidate the two formal witnesses required to make a marriage valid by threatening their interests in Russia. The Okhrana would have plenty of notice of any such attempted marriage since the banns would have to be called in the preceding three weeks.

Michael had no chance, it seemed. The Okhrana would always be one step ahead of him. Whatever ideas he might have, he would return to Russia a bachelor.

Senior Agent Bint, the man entrusted with the task of watching Michael, was satisfied that all was well in Berlin, for no banns were called there in the Russian church and in any case on September 23 Michael and Natasha left and took the train to Bad Kissingen, where both signed into to a health sanatorium, Michael ‘drinking the waters and taking baths’ as he jovially noted on a postcard to his brother.¹⁵ With Michael holed up in the sanatorium it would be three weeks before the bored Okhrana needed to stir themselves again.

Bint, a practised hand at bribing telegraph clerks and hotel porters, was quickly tipped off on Sunday October 14 that Michael and his staff were heading for Paris, and then almost immediately that he had cancelled his rail tickets and instead was going to Cannes, though he would be driving there separately via Switzerland and Italy, leaving his staff to take the train with the baggage.

There was no doubt about Michael’s intentions, for on that same Sunday he sent a second postcard to his brother telling him that ‘having now completed my treatment, I am setting out in the car towards Cannes, where I expect to be on Saturday’.¹⁶ Since the Okhrana read that postcard, having paid their informants to make sure they could, they duly boarded the train, following the baggage, but confident that Michael would turn up when he said he would — on Saturday, in Cannes.

What they did not know, however, was that Michael, wise to their ways, intended that they should read his postcard, as he had intended that they should read his first. Addressing them to ‘His Imperial Majesty,’ what he meant to do was to address them to the Okhrana.

What the Okhrana also did not know, and would not find out until some time later, when it was too late, was that on the way to Cannes, Michael‘s chauffeur-driven Opel tourer had gone only 30 miles, before the chauffeur put the car on a train to Cannes, while Michael and Natasha caught an overnight express to Munich, Salzburg and their intended destination, Vienna. They were going to get married there, but it would not be in a Russian church, but in a backstreet Serbian church.

What the Okhrana forgot, but Michael remembered, was that Serbian Orthodox marriages were as valid as Russian ones; while he and Natasha had been in the sanatorium for three weeks, the banns had been duly called in the Serbian church — the first on September 30, the last on October 14 — without anyone tipping off the Okhrana that they were his.¹⁷ The man who arranged all this while the Okhrana was asleep in Bad Kissingen was undoubtedly the redoubtable Matveev, Natasha’s lawyer brother-in-law, though he left no calling-cards. Given the level of secrecy required, he was the only man competent enough and trusted enough to arrange a marriage the Okhrana would not think a possibility.

The Church of St. Savva, on the ground floor of a modest three-storey building at Veithgasse 3, was hardly known outside the world of the émigré Serbs living in Vienna. The bearded priest-in-charge, Father Misitsch, was a worldly man greatly impressed by the enormous fee he was being offered for an hour or so on a quiet Tuesday afternoon — 1,000 Austrian crowns ($5,000 in today’s money), according to informed gossip afterwards.¹⁸ To make it even better business, the two witnesses were members of his own family, including his wife Vrikosova.¹⁹

None were vulnerable to any threat from the Okhrana; as for the banns, the names mumbled each Sunday morning were stripped of any rank, and meant nothing to the half-attentive Serbs in his congregation. Nobody of importance married at St. Savva; whoever Michael Romanov might be — or Rom’nov in the mumbled mouth of Father Misitsch — he was no one of any interest.

Matveev also arranged the necessary residential qualification for Michael and Natasha, even though they were not there. Officially, for the purposes of the marriage register, they would be said to be living at Johannesgasse 23, which thus disguised the fact that it was actually a modest hotel, the Tegetthof — a hotel was not sufficient for residential qualification — managed by one of Father Misitsch’s Serbian flock, and a man more than agreeable to the good business Matveev had on offer for ‘borrowing’ his private flat in the hotel.²⁰ After all, Michael and Natasha were not going to live there, and would not be in the hotel for more than an hour or so, while they freshened up after their journey.

Since Michael was fully briefed on the arrangements, and knew precisely where he was to be and at what time, Matveev was clearly in telegraphic contact with someone other than Michael, given that any cable to him ran an unacceptable risk of being intercepted by a paid Okhrana informant.

Michael’s valet and chauffeur were both absolutely trustworthy, and his chauffeur certainly knew what was afoot when he took over the car at Wurzburg, and put it on a train. It can be assumed, therefore, that one or both were party to the plan, and key to its success, though there is no trace of their complicity —or of anyone else’s.

Suffice that at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, October 16, 1912, when Michael and Natasha arrived at the church to be greeted by Father Misitsch and his two witnesses but no one else, it was exactly as they expected it to be.²¹ Shortly afterwards they were married and signing the register in their full and proper names. With that done, they left Vienna immediately and caught the train to Venice. The Okhrana had been outwitted and made to look like fools.

It was the briefest of honeymoons: next day they were in Vienna, three days later they were in Milan, and then a week after their marriage, on Tuesday, October 22, 1912,²² they turned up at the lavish Hotel du Parc, a little later than they had ‘promised’ the Okhrana, but not so much later that the Okhrana were in any way troubled. They had been out of sight for only a week; nothing could have happened in that time.

Within the next week, Matveev — now Michael’s brother-in-law —turned up at the hotel with his wife Olga, bringing with them little George and Tata. The Gatchina house had been locked up and secured; the children were safely out of Russia.

Michael and Natasha were free. Farewell, Gatchina. Farewell Russia. They would live in England.

AT the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, the news of his marriage produced consternation. There was no doubt in Nicholas’s mind about where the blame lay —‘that woman’ as his wife Empress Alexandra sneeringly described Natasha. Nicholas was no less condemning: ‘She’s such a cunning, wicked beast that it’s disgusting even to talk about her’, he wrote to his mother after Michael’s runaway marriage.²³

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 Hotel du Parc which Michael had made his family base for the past three weeks — still under surveillance by the complacent agents of the Tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana, as yet wholly unaware that the marriage they were there to prevent had already taken place, and that their mission had failed utterly.

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 Te Deum in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan on the Nevsky Prospekt on February 21. Michael was to be swept away, as a reminder that no one, however high, could defy the Emperor of All the Russias, and think that they could be excused.

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:

Deeming it expedient to establish a guardianship over the person, estate and affairs of the Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich, we have considered it advisable to take upon ourselves the chief control of the guardianship and to entrust to the Central Administration of the Imperial Duma the direct control of all estate, personal and real, and also funds possessed by the Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich.³⁰

Two weeks later, on December 30, he issued an imperial manifesto removing Michael from the Regency.

By our Manifesto given on the first day of August 1904, we, in the event of our decease before the attainment of his majority by our beloved son, his Imperial Highness and Heir, the Tsarevich and Grand Duke Alexis Nikolaevich, appointed our brother the Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich, to be Regent of the state until our son should come of age. Now, we have deemed it advisable to divest his Imperial Highness, the Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich of the obligations laid upon him by our Manifesto…³¹

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 reasons for it, but officially these were matters kept within the imperial family, and not something which the ordinary Russian should know about. Romanov prestige was not to be damaged by its private scandals becoming street gossip.

Yet that was precisely what had happened in Michael’s case, and in particular with open publication of the fact that his assets had been placed under guardianship, a step normally reserved for situations where someone was adjudged to be no longer mentally capable of managing their assets themselves. Michael, the order implied, had lost his mind — the fevered view at Tsarskoe Selo in blaming Natasha for it all, but not a view which ought to have been promoted across the whole of Europe.

Understandably, Michael was appalled by that more than by anything else. Indeed, after reading newspaper reports of Nicholas’s actions against him he was so incensed that he could not bring himself to write to his brother even in protest.

When he did so a month later, he explained that ‘it took me some time to get over the guardianship decision, which you had announced for all the world to know. I will never believe that it was your own idea and it is painful to know that you listened to those people who wished to discredit me in public opinion.’ Knowing what was being said, he added: ‘It has already done a lot of harm’.³⁷ The people he had in mind, in particular, were Alexandra and Mordvinov — and what added to his sense of outrage was that it was Mordvinov who had now been appointed to oversee his guardianship, thereby adding insult to injury.

That order, and Mordvinov’s role of servant turned master, continued to enrage him. There would be repeated protests that he did not want ‘this man anywhere near me or my affairs’³⁸ and that he was not competent to exercise powers which he ought never to have been given in the first place. As Michael said in one of his letters to his brother:

The combination of trusteeship over my estate with the guardianship over my person, without doing anything to protect my fortune, has put me in the position of an imbecile or madman and made my situation totally unbearable. As things are, even a short visit to Russia is impossible for me, for I shall be seen as a man who has been subjected to a humiliating punishment.³⁹

Michael’s assets were very considerable. The inheritance and savings accumulated by his original trustees until he was twenty-five had provided him with a capital of several million roubles; from the imperial purse he also drew, as did all Grand Dukes, an annual allowance of 280,000 gold roubles, a huge sum in those days. In addition he had substantial earnings, rising to a further one million roubles a year, from farms and factories owned by him across Russia, including, in the Ukraine, the country’s largest sugar refinery. As one measure of the value of all that, a six-seater Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost he had bought in August 1911 had cost him £1,367 or the equivalent of just over 12,000 roubles — petty cash when set against his overall annual income (equivalent to some $20m in today’s monies).

But he was worth a great deal more than that. His other assets included a palace on the English Embankment facing the Neva in St Petersburg — though he never chose to live there — a vast country estate, which he ran at a substantial profit, at Brasovo, near Orel, as well as another in Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. To this could be added his ‘invisible’ assets — his homes in both the Gatchina and Anichkov palaces, as well as the elegant imperial yacht Zarnista, with a crew of 120 men, ten officers and a priest, and his own blue-and-gold imperial railway carriage, lavishly furnished, which would be hooked onto any express train whenever he wanted to travel by rail — all now lost to him as they would have been anyway by his leaving Russia as he did.

Nonetheless, Michael had no immediate cause for financial worry. In preparation for his runaway marriage, and the certainty of enforced exile thereafter, in the summer of 1912 he had transferred a large amount of cash to the Crédit Lyonnais on the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris — the Russian rouble was then an international currency, freely traded — ostensibly for the purpose of buying a large estate in France,⁴⁰ so there was no need to be unduly concerned about cash in the short-term; nor was it in the power of the Tsar to stop payment of the imperial allowance to any Grand Duke — a figure of just over 23,000 roubles a month, the equivalent of £2,500, or almost $12,000 in the values of the day.

At the same time, his costs were considerable. He was paid as a Grand Duke, and not surprisingly he spent as a Grand Duke. He had not booked rooms at the Hotel du Parc, he had booked a whole floor to house not only himself and Natasha in a grand suite, but the children, nanny and governess, maids, chauffeurs, and a new secretary, Nikolai Johnson who, despite his surname, was a Russian. Johnson, a shortish, round-faced young man who spoke three languages — though his English was heavily-accented⁴¹ — was a more than competent pianist, his mother who also joined the household having been a court music teacher; Johnson’s keyboard talent was one reason why he and Michael got on so well, playing duets together — indeed, it was why he had been hired in the first place. In the end, it would be a post which would cost Johnson his life.