Royal Babylon (20 page)

When the Bolsheviks took control, the Yusupovs fled to New York and became overnight celebrities, once bizarrely introduced at a society function as “Prince and Princess Rasputin.” Although they had no income, they kept up appearances by frittering away the jewelry they had managed to escape with until nothing was left. Felix Yusupov's fictionalized version of Rasputin's murder is the one that persisted for decades. In 1927 he wrote the “definitive” account of Rasputin's death,
Rasputin, His Malignant Influence and His Assassination
, which was, he claimed, to set the record straight, but was more to do with the fact that he was desperately broke. Yusupov retold the story many times and it became more flamboyant in the telling as the years rolled by. When Hollywood made a film of Rasputin's death he successfully sued MGM when the film version suggested that Rasputin had seduced his wife. Irena was awarded
£
25,000 in damages—worth more than half a million today.

When his country mobilized for war with the Kaiser, the Czar of Holy Russia did what the Romanovs so often did in times of stress: he hit the bottle. Nicholas spent the final two years of his reign high on a cocktail of alcohol and addictive drugs. A Russian ambassador who visited Nicholas in 1916 found him so heavily drugged that he could “not succeed in fixing the Emperor's eyes or attention.” People who hadn't seen the Czar in twelve months were shocked by his appearance and found him barely recognizable. Visitors remarked on his slurred speech, dull gaze, dilated pupils, hollow cheeks, vacant smile and his apparent lack of concern about the impending crisis. In St. Petersburg it was rumored that the Czar had suffered a mental breakdown or else was insane.

The Czar's slide into alcohol and drug dependence was partly self-inflicted, and partly accidental. Morphine and other opium-based drugs were used as a painkiller for the most trivial of ailments, including coughs, colds and minor headaches, and were quite casually dispensed by doctors. Heroin, introduced in the second half of the nineteenth century to wean people off opium, was considered nonaddictive. (Between 1897 and 1914, Nicholas's British cousins were regular but innocent users of cocaine and even heroin. Record books from a pharmacy near Balmoral show that the royals and their guests were supplied with cocaine and heroin solutions as well as sleeping pills.) The Czar fell into heavy morphine abuse after taking it originally to overcome constipation. Both he and his wife also used opium and cocaine to cure head colds and stomach complaints. Nicholas recorded in his diary in November 1915: “I woke up with a shocking cold in the left nostril, so that I am thinking of spraying it with cocaine.” Nicholas also drank a brew containing “a variety of herb infusions” prepared by a Tibetan herbalist called Dr. Badmaev. This “tea” induced a state of euphoria and contained hallucinogens.

The last ruling Russian Czar may not have had the licentiousness of Alexander I, the drunken debauchery of Catherine or Elizabeth, the cruelty of Peter the Great, or the violent mental instability of Paul or Empress Anne, but while his army remained loyal enough to do his dirty work for him he was capable of being as ruthless a tyrant as any Romanov. “Terror,” wrote Nicholas II, “must be met by terror.” At the first whiff of subversion he sent his troops out into the Russian countryside to wage war on his countrymen, with the personal order “Don't skimp on
the bullets.” His soldiers invaded and wiped out entire villages, burning and executing in their wake, leaving the countryside full of wounded, homeless and starving peasants. When the reports of mass carnage filtered back from his so-called Punitive Expeditions he read them with undisguised glee. When the Soviets lined him up against a wall in Ekaterinburg they did to him what the Royal Martyr would have had done to them given half a chance.

Ultimately, Nicholas II proved to be the weakest link in a Romanov-Holstein-Gottorp chain which had spanned 300 years and fifteen rulers. Nicholas was considered by Russia's right-wing hard-liners too inept and too soft to be a really successful despot, even though he was one of the most reactionary and autocratic of all the Czars. But the real lament of the Romanovs was that Nicholas II was not unfortunately quite ruthless enough.

The story of the Czar and his immediate family ends at the bottom of a mine shaft at Ekaterinburg, but there were five or six dozen other Romanovs around at the start of the Russian Revolution, and there were quite a few potential family embarrassments within their number. A colony of the imperial family sprang up in Paris, populated with their semi-legitimate and illegitimate wives and children. The Czar's youngest brother, the Grand Duke Michael, shocked his family by getting engaged to a twice-divorced commoner. Michael and mistress Natalia were eventually married abroad, but not before she had given him a son. Nicholas's cousin the Grand Duke Cyril had committed a cardinal sin by marrying, without the Czar's consent, his first cousin Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg, a lady who had earlier upset the family by jilting the Czarina's
brother, Alexander of Hesse. The Czar's youngest uncle, the Grand Duke Paul, also married a divorcée, an act that his enraged nephew described as “undisguised selfishness.” Nicholas's remaining uncle, the Grand Duke Alexis, spent the rest of his days in Paris nightclubs.

         

         

BRITAIN WAS SCRAPING
the bottom of the genealogical barrel when the elephantine Queen Anne died heirless and the Crown passed into the hands of George Guelph, the son of a minor German duke from Celle. Fifty-seven living people had a better claim by birthright to the British throne, but they were all Catholics and excluded by the Act of Settlement. From that time to the present day, Great Britain's throne has been occupied by a family of badly inbred Germans with a history of mental instability.

George I was born on March 28, 1660, son of Ernest, Elector of Hanover, and Sophia, granddaughter of James I. When King George I landed at Greenwich on September 30, 1714, most people in Britain had never even heard of Hanover, one of a cluster of states in northern Germany known to historians as the Holy Roman Empire. He arrived with a full complement
of German cooks, attendants and servants, and a couple of black men, Mohamet and Mustapha, captured during a Turkish campaign. All were determined to profit from the adventure. Thackeray noted, “Take what you can get was the old monarch's maxim. The German women plundered, the German secretaries plundered, the German cooks and attendants plundered, even Mustapha and Mohamet .  .  . had a share in the booty.”

George's arrival marked the point at which the British royal family could be ridiculed by writers and artists with impunity, because the Hanoverians were certainly ridiculous. It was with good reason that the first two Georges were known as Dunce the First and Dunce the Second. The Hanoverians liked their gardening, but their courts were artless and witless. Ever since George I announced, “I hate all boets and bainters,” the British royal family reveled in their simple ignorance.

“Farmer” George III loved the theater, as long as the entertainment featured clowns or pantomime, and certainly nothing as cerebral as Shakespeare, which he thought was “bunk.” His son William IV, the last English monarch to dismiss a ministry on a whim, was of desperately limited ability. His visits to the West Indies made him, he thought, an expert on slavery. He came home believing that slaves were “the happiest people in the world” and made several impassioned speeches in the House of Lords in support of slavery. His deliberations on “these newfangled principles of liberty” were by and large ignored as few people took him seriously.

Edward VII was too busy chasing women to ever sit down and read a book: in spite of the vast educational resources available to him it is likely that the only Latin he ever knew was “coitus interruptus.” At a literary dinner that had been forced
on him, he inquired about the identity of a fellow guest and was informed that the gentleman was “an authority on Lamb.” The King threw down his knife and fork and bawled in disbelief, “An authority on lamb?”

         

Like most of the male Hanoverians, George I was afflicted by a weakness for adulterous fornication. When he was sixteen he impregnated his sister's under-governess, which was a family embarrassment as the girl was from an influential German royal dynasty, the Heidelbergs. His father, Ernst August, took him aside and told him he could sleep with whoever he liked providing he wasn't careless enough to let half of Europe know about his bastards. The child, said to have been the spitting image of George, was never acknowledged and nothing is known of its fate or that of the mother. George, however, had learned his lesson, because, although a succession of women bore him children in later years, none was ever acknowledged to be his. He took such care to cover his tracks that only one of his bastards can be named with any degree of certainty—Maria Katharine von Meysenburg.

George I was already divorced when he took up his throne and he never remarried. Instead, he slept in rotation with his three concubines. Two of the King's mistresses came with him from Hanover. One, a vast fräulein named Madame Kielmansegge, soon to be created Countess of Darlington, was described as “an ogress” with “two acres of cheeks spread with crimson.” She was reputedly a nymphomaniac, and was probably George's half-sister. Lord Chesterfield remarked, “The
standard of His Majesty's taste, as exemplified in his mistresses, makes all ladies who aspire to his favor .  .  . strain and swell themselves, like the frogs in the fable, to rival the bulk and dignity of the ox. Some succeed, and others burst.” The other was Melusine von der Schulenberg, which was later anglicized as the Duchess of Kendal. She was as tall and skinny as her rival was fat, and completely bald, having lost her hair through smallpox. Together, Mesdames Kielmansegge and Schulenberg were known as “the Elephant and the Maypole.” The King's third regular mistress, the much younger Countess von Platen, stayed behind in Hanover so that George had someone available for sex on his frequent trips home. All three were said to be proof of “the King's strong stomach.”

George and his British subjects were conspicuously indifferent to each other. At fifty-four he was too old to absorb any of the new English culture and spent at least half of his time avoiding it by living in Hanover. His preference for Germany meant that Cabinet positions assumed great importance. As the King and his son, George II, quite literally hated each other, he preferred to rely on his ministers when he was abroad rather than leave power in the hands of the son. The King's ministers represented the executive branch of government, while Parliament represented the legislative. George's absences also required the creation of the post of Prime Minister, the majority leader in the House of Commons who acted in the King's stead. Robert Walpole was the first, and he went on to dominate British politics for the next twenty years. When Walpole retired in 1742, he had overseen the foundation of modern constitutional monarchy—an executive Cabinet responsible to Parliament, which was in turn responsible to the electorate.

Thackeray, in
The Four Georges
, noted of George I:

         

Though a despot in Hanover, he was a moderate ruler in England. His aim was to leave it to itself as much as possible, and to live out of it as much as he could. His heart was in Hanover. He was more than fifty-four years of age when he came amongst us: we took him because we wanted him, because he served our turn; we laughed at his uncouth German ways, and sneered at him. He took our loyalty for what it was worth; laid hands on what money he could; kept us assuredly from Popery and wooden shoes.

         

King George II was a satirist's dream, lampooned by cartoonists, the paparazzi of the day, with his breeches round his ankles, breaking wind and defecating. Foul-tempered, ludicrously vain and sexually promiscuous, he was in the words of his own eldest son “a miserly martinet with an insatiable sexual appetite.” Unlike his parents, George II and his wife went on to achieve something like a solid and lasting relationship, although not in the conventional sense.

The King fancied himself as a sexual athlete and liked to boast about his prowess in bed, usually with other women. He normally had at least two adulterous affairs on the go at the same time. His wife, Queen Caroline, a shrewd and pragmatic woman, handled his compulsive philandery with the skill of a seasoned diplomat. When she found out about his first mistress, Henrietta Howard, she simply offered her rival a job in court. From then on she always selected the King's mistresses for him. George II thought nothing of seeking his wife's advice, or even enlisting her help in picking up other women. When he was
away on one of his frequent excursions to Hanover, he regularly consulted his wife about his adulterous affairs in forty- and fifty-page letters; highly personal and intimate correspondence which Queen Caroline perversely liked to share with, among others, Horace Walpole and Lord Hervey.

One of the King's more high-profile affairs began in 1735 when, as a middle-aged man, he took up with a courtesan named Amelia Sophia von Walmoden. She was a niece of one of his father's regular mistresses, Countess von Platen. The King shared his new sleeping partner with at least two other men, a husband he knew about, and a young army officer he had yet to discover. One night he found a ladder leading from the garden into her bedroom and a young man hiding in a bush. When the King confronted his mistress she swore it was a plot to blacken her name. George gave her the benefit of the doubt and the incident was forgotten.

Although the King was apparently incapable of staying faithful to his wife for more than a few hours at a time, it was to the Queen's bed that he always returned. Caroline helped to achieve this largely by carefully selecting mistresses for her husband who were even uglier than she was. However, one of the King's daughters, Princess Anne, hoped he would take even more mistresses so that “Mama might be a little relieved from the ennui of seeing him in her room.” Unusually, George II continued to sleep with his wife until her death. In 1737 the fifty-three-year-old Queen Caroline fell seriously ill when she was at the receiving end of a badly bungled attempt to cure a neglected strangulated hernia. After her operation, as she lay in bed surrounded by courtiers, her bowel burst open, showering a torrent of excrement all over the bed and the floor. After an embarrassed silence, one of her courtiers said that she hoped
the relief would do Her Majesty some good. The Queen replied that she hoped so too, because that was the last evacuation she would ever have.

As she lay dying of what
Gentleman's Magazine
later confirmed as “a mortification of ye bowels,” the Queen selflessly begged her husband to remarry. The King spoiled the moment by declining her offer, adding that he'd rather stick to his mistresses. Upon her death soon afterward, Alexander Pope was moved to write:

         

Here lies wrapt in forty thousand towels

The only proof that Caroline had bowels.

         

The year after the Queen's death, George II's favorite courtesan, Sophia von Walmoden, was brought over to England from Hanover and installed on a more permanent basis. The King continued to take mistresses for another twenty-three years, until death came ingloriously on October 25, 1760, when he was seventy-seven. At about 7:30
A
.
M
. his German valet de chambre heard a roar which he judged to be “louder than the royal wind” and found the King slumped on the floor, his face covered with blood. He had died of a heart attack while straining to overcome constipation on the lavatory, slicing his face open on the edge of a cabinet as he fell.

         

George II's heir, Frederick the Prince of Wales, never made it to the throne. Years earlier, he had caught a chill, which was probably aggravated by an old cricketing injury, and died
suddenly and unexpectedly a few weeks afterward on March 20, 1751, aged forty-four. The King's reaction would have been considered unusual coming from anyone other than a Hanoverian. “I have lost my eldest son,” George observed, “but I was glad of it.”

One of the less endearing features of George II's reign, as was the case with many members of his dynasty, was the infamously bitter and long-running feud between father and eldest son. The deep and personal enmity which existed between the Prince of Wales and both parents ran much deeper than the usual royal family squabbles about money. When they moved to England, Frederick was deliberately left behind in Hanover. At the age of twenty the prince became Heir Apparent and his parents, who hadn't seen him since he was seven, reluctantly summoned him to London and proceeded to openly insult him at every opportunity.

Queen Caroline described her son as “the lowest stinking coward in the world,” adding for good measure that he made her want to vomit and that she hoped he would drop down dead with apoplexy. The feeling was entirely mutual: when King George II traveled to Hanover, the Prince of Wales prayed that his father would drown. Even as she lay terminally ill the Queen thought it worth pointing out that at least death would bring the consolation of never having to set eyes on her son again. The Prince, meanwhile, sportingly dispatched relays of messengers to find out whether his mother was dead yet. Perhaps a clue to the King and Queen's aversion to their son may be found in Sir Robert Walpole's vitriolic description of the Prince of Wales. The Prime Minister found Frederick to be “a poor, weak, irresolute, false, lying, dishonest, contemptible wretch, that nobody loves, that nobody believes, that nobody will trust.”