The Romance of the Romanoffs

Joseph McCabe

• Publisher: Read & Co. History
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781528704397
• eBook ISBN: 9781528766722
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

"The Romance of the Romanovs" is a detailed treatise on the Romanov Dynasty of Russia and their eventual downfall, written by Joseph McCabe. Within it, McCabe explores this notably autocratic episode of history, looking at its origin, brutality, corruption, and its terrible final struggle and defeat. The House of Romanov was the second ruling Russian dynasty after the House of Rurik, reigning from 1613 until the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Romanov dynasty had 65 members at the start of 1917. By the end of it, 18 had been killed by the Bolsheviks while the remaining 47 had gone into exile abroad. Contents include: "Christianity or Secularism: Which is the Better for Mankind?" (1911), "Goethe: The Man And His Character" (1912), and "The Story of Evolution" (1912). Joseph Martin McCabe (867 – 1955) was an English writer and advocate of freethought. Having been a priest, he was a vocal critic of the Catholic Church and one of the most prominent speakers on the subject of freethought in England. Many vintage book such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern edition complete with the original text and artwork.

CHAPTER XVI

THE LAST OF THE ROMANOFFS

THE crowning act of the drama of the Romanoffs has a peculiar irony. One could well imagine a Romanoff of the seventeenth or eighteenth century making a ferocious struggle against the democratic forces which now threatened the autocracy. For those older monarchs power had been a means of obtaining wealth, of enlarging their individual pleasures to royal or imperial proportions, and they would use all the machinery of despotism to maintain their splendid privileges. But in proportion as the democratic menace grew in the nineteenth century the voluptuous selfishness of the Russian monarchs diminished. The serious, almost ascetic, standard set up by Alexander I lingered in the imperial palaces, and it seemed that the less personal gratification the monarch received from his autocratic power the more resolutely he fought to retain it. The last of the Romanoffs was one of the most sober and industrious of his line; and his reign was disgraced by a more bloody and cruel coercion than had reddened the reign of any of his predecessors.

Nicholas II, son of Alexander III and Princess Dagmar of Denmark, is one of those tantalising personalities whom one knows to be in themselves far removed from subtlety, yet whom one cannot honestly pretend to understand. He came to the throne an unknown man, eagerly scrutinised by every moderate reformer in Russia. He departs from it with his personality and actions still largely enveloped in mystery. This obscurity is, as I said, not due to any depth or subtlety in the mind of the Tsar; it is due rather to the weakness of his character. Two sets of influences surrounded him, bending to their will his frail personality and substituting their cupidity or prejudice for his native impulses. The inner circle was that of his family, in which his mother and uncles were the leading and most mischievous figures. The outer circle was the ring of adventurers or reactionaries whom the strength of his older relatives or the febrility of his own character invested successively with ministerial power. Beyond these, again, were the religious charlatans who at times preyed upon the superstition of the Tsar and Tsarina, the great body of ecclesiastical and other officers whose interest it was to maintain the existing system, and the doctrinaire conservatives who, with purblind eyes, insisted upon the isolation of Russia from the progress of the world. Through this maze of intrigue and influence it is difficult to reach the personality of Nicholas II with confidence, and the fierce partisanship of writers on both sides in the great struggle increases our task of disentangling the precise parts in the final catastrophe.

It seems, however, to be an error to regard the last of the Romanoffs as a mere puppet, a tearful and hysterical implement, of the reactionary influences which surrounded him. Nicholas had not the robustness of his father, whose dwarf intellect had been lodged in the frame of a Russian giant, but he was stronger than many literary portraits of him suggest to us. His education had been severely controlled. Distinguished experts had taught him those branches of culture—law, history, and political economy—which were deemed necessary in a successor of Alexander III, and a rigorous physical training had braced the comparative feebleness of his person. He swam and rowed with skill, he played tennis and hunted, and throughout his reign he loved a long walk, often of ten or fifteen miles, and would at times burden himself with all the equipment of a common infantryman. It is said that the sabre-cut on the head which he received from a Japanese fanatic in 1891, when he made a tour of the Empire and further Asia, injured his brain and led to nervous instability; but this is one of the many statements of revolutionary writers which have not been checked by sober criticism. He came to the throne in 1894, a cool, self-possessed, carefully-educated young man of twenty-six, and some hope was excited in the breast of moderate Russian liberalism.

To this it may be added that throughout his reign Nicholas II adhered to a sober and industrious standard of life. Here, indeed, the writers of the opposing schools begin to differ. That he was a man of comparatively simple and sober tastes none disputes. His table was temperate and conspicuous for old Russian dishes. He spent his leisure in the domestic circle, playing dominoes or billiards in the metropolitan palaces, sharing walks or rides or sails with his family in the provinces. He opened every day with religious observances, had the family ikons brought on voyages, and rigorously kept the fasts of the Church.

But his industry and attention to affairs are differently represented. Conservatives picture him a model of severe self-sacrifice. He worked, they say, without secretaries, ten or twelve hours every day. He minutely studied and annotated every document. He wore his pencil to the stump—the conservative pen records this with awed amazement—and then gave the stump gravely to his son. One imagines him relaxing from the cares of Empire but for an hour in the evening. The revolutionary writers, however, depict him differently. They represent that he attended impatiently to serious affairs and spent an abnormal proportion of the day in the petty amusements of the domestic circle. The truth lies between the extremes. Nicholas II was industrious, and he attempted to discharge his functions very seriously within the limits of his narrow and mediocre conceptions.

His people were not long in doubt as to the nature of his ideal. It was the ideal which each Romanoff of the century had naïvely conceived afresh; a complete ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Copyright
• Title
• Preface
• Contents
• Illustrations
• I The Primitive Democracy of the Slav
• II The Descent to Autocracy
• III The Moscovites Become Tsars
• IV The Rise of the Romanoffs
• V The Early Romanoffs
• VI A Romanoff Princess
• VII The Great Peter
• VIII Catherine the Little
• IX Romance Upon Romance
• X The Gay and Pious Elizabeth
• XI Catherine the Great
• XII In the Days of Napoleon
• XIII The Fight Against Liberalism
• XIV The Tragedy of Alexander II
• XV Enter Pobiedonostseff
• XVI The Last of the Romanoffs