Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
Stand the two men side by side in the photographs and the joke tells itself. Same neat beard, same hooded eyes, same wary set of the mouth. King George V of Great Britain and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia were first cousins who looked less like relatives than like a man and his reflection. In the spring of 1917 that resemblance stopped being a party trick. One cousin sat secure on his throne in London. The other had just lost his, was under arrest outside Petrograd, and was looking to the family in England to save his life. What happened next, an offer of asylum made and then quietly killed, is one of the most uncomfortable episodes in the modern monarchy’s history, and for decades it was kept out of the official story.
Two sisters from Copenhagen
The likeness came down the female line. George’s mother was Alexandra of Denmark, the Princess of Wales who became queen consort to Edward VII. Nicholas’s mother was her younger sister Dagmar, who converted to Orthodoxy, took the name Maria Feodorovna and married the future Tsar Alexander III. Both women were daughters of King Christian IX of Denmark, whose success at marrying his children into half the courts of Europe earned him the nickname “father-in-law of Europe”. That made George and Nicholas maternal first cousins, and it is why they took after their mothers rather than their very different fathers.
The web was denser still. Nicholas’s wife, the Empress Alexandra, “Alix” of Hesse, was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, which made her George’s first cousin on the British side too. Kaiser Wilhelm II, the third man in the family portraits, was another Victoria grandson and so George’s cousin as well. When the First World War came, three of the crowned heads tearing Europe apart were, quite literally, cousins. George and Nicholas were also fond of each other. They wrote as “Georgie” and “Nicky”, shared a naval-minded, dutiful temperament, and were by the standards of royal relatives genuinely close.
One face, printed twice
Contemporaries found the resemblance disorienting. At George’s wedding to Princess Mary of Teck at the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, on 6 July 1893, the Russian heir, then still Tsesarevich Nicholas, was among the guests. The likeness was such that, as the historian Miranda Carter has noted, the two men were not uncommonly mistaken for one another; they wore their beards and hair the same way, which only sharpened the resemblance.
The camera preserved it. The best-known image dates from Berlin in 1913, where the cousins were photographed together in military dress at a Hohenzollern family wedding, the last occasion George, Nicholas and Wilhelm would all be in one place before the war. A viewer coming to those portraits cold could be forgiven for thinking a single sitter had merely changed his sash. It is a story that belongs as much to the history of portraiture and photography as to dynastic politics: two of the most reproduced faces of the age, and almost impossible to tell apart.
The offer, and its quiet death
On 15 March 1917 Nicholas abdicated, ending three centuries of Romanov rule. The Provisional Government placed the former Tsar, the Empress and their five children under guard at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo. Within days the question of where they might go became urgent, and Britain was the obvious refuge: allied, royal and family. Pavel Milyukov, the new government’s foreign minister, was anxious to see the family safely out of Russia.
Later in March the British government, with the King’s initial assent, let it be known through Sir George Buchanan, the ambassador in Petrograd, that the Romanovs would be given sanctuary. Then London lost its nerve, and the King lost his first. Britain in 1917 was a country at war, hungry, strike-prone and increasingly republican in mood. The arrival of an autocrat widely blamed for Russia’s misery, together with a German-born empress, looked to Buckingham Palace like a spark carried close to a magazine.
The pressure to withdraw came not from the politicians but from the palace. In a series of letters in early April 1917, the King’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, pressed the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, to have the invitation rescinded. The residence of the ex-Emperor and Empress, Stamfordham warned, “would be strongly resented by the public, and would undoubtedly compromise the position of the King and Queen”. The government of David Lloyd George gave way. By the middle of April the offer had been allowed to die, and no alternative safe passage was ever arranged.
Crown before cousin
George V’s reasoning was self-preservation, and he did not really hide it from himself. He had watched one imperial cousin fall to revolution and feared the contagion. The same instinct produced a more visible gesture that summer. On 17 July 1917, to scrub the dynasty of its German associations, he proclaimed that his house would henceforth be styled Windsor rather than Saxe-Coburg and Gotha; the proclamation declared that “Our House and Family shall be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor”. It was rebranding under fire. As it happened, the House of Windsor was born a year, almost to the day, before Nicholas and his family were shot.
The distinction the King’s defenders draw, that the government and not the crown held the constitutional responsibility, is technically fair and largely beside the point. The surviving correspondence shows the move to close the door came from the palace. For decades afterwards the failure was laid at the door of the politicians rather than the palace, and the King’s household was content to let that version stand.
What the archives gave up
For a long time none of this was public. Harold Nicolson’s authorised biography of 1952 passed over the King’s part in the affair, and the impression left was of a monarch swept along by events he could not control. It was Kenneth Rose’s King George V of 1983, a life built on the royal archives and a Whitbread Prize winner, that set the episode out plainly and put the responsibility back where the letters placed it. Later historians, among them Helen Rappaport in The Race to Save the Romanovs (2018), have filled in just how narrow and how badly managed the rescue window really was.
The private George remains sympathetic, which is what makes the story land. On learning of the murders he wrote in his diary that it was “a foul murder”, adding: “I was devoted to Nicky, who was the kindest of men and thorough gentleman: loved his country and people.” Both things are true. He grieved his cousin, and he had helped shut the last door out. Anyone drawn to the way biography and the slow release of documents can rewrite a reputation will find a clean case study here, one that sits squarely in the territory of history and letters.
The cellar at Yekaterinburg
The end came in the Ipatiev House at Yekaterinburg, in the Urals, where the family had been taken by way of Tobolsk. On the night of 16 to 17 July 1918, Nicholas, Alexandra, their four daughters, their haemophiliac son Alexei and four attendants were killed by their Bolshevik guards. Nicholas was fifty. In London the cousin who had been mistaken for him at a wedding a quarter of a century earlier lived on until 1936, reigning over an empire at its territorial height, his own throne intact.
Two men, one face, two endings. The photographs that once made courtiers laugh now read almost as an accusation. Proximity, even a shared reflection, counts for nothing against a throne’s instinct to survive. That is the hard lesson the Romanov asylum affair leaves to the British monarchy, and a large part of why it stayed out of the authorised story for so long.
Image: Cousins King George V (left) and Tsar Nicholas II (right) in Berlin, May 1913. Photograph by Ernst Sandau. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
