Extra: King George V - Betrayer of the Romanovs?
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This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Welcome to Forbidden Fruit, the Forbidden History Podcast Extra. In our last episode, we heard about the tragic story of the Romanovs, the Russian royal family brutally murdered by the then newly empowered communist Bolsheviks.

In this episode, we're going to explore a question that has fueled debate ever since. Could Tsar Nicholas and his family have been saved by his cousin, King George V? It's May 1913, and in Berlin, the world is coming together for a royal wedding.

Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia, the only daughter of the German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, is marrying Prince Ernst August of Hanover. They make for a glamorous couple. Theirs is not a dynastic alliance, but rather a love match. And it captures the media's attention. The pair will feature on the front page of the New York Times for several days. But at its heart, the event is a family affair.

European royalty, connected through their family ties, flocked to Berlin for the occasion. Wilhelm II greets his cousins, the British King George V and the Russian Tsar Nicholas II, and a carriage procession parades them through the city to an adoring public. It is hard to imagine that in only the following year, George and Nicholas would be at war with their cousin Wilhelm. And by the war's end,

the trio's fates would be drastically different. George V's reign would continue, setting the foundations for the most successful monarchy in history. Wilhelm II, however, would be forced to abdicate after the German losses of World War I and would live out his days in exile in the Netherlands. Nicholas II would also be forced to abdicate, but he and his family, including his children, would be brutally murdered.

Since then, the charge has been leveled at George V that he could have saved his cousin, that he could have offered him asylum in Britain, but that he callously abandoned him. It has only been in recent years that the truth has come to light. Now it's 1917 and the First World War has been raging for two and a half years.

Britain and Russia are allied against Germany, but Russia is performing poorly. Much of the blame is placed on Tsar Nicholas II himself, and in March, he is forced to abdicate the Russian throne.

But 300 years of Romanov autocratic rule are not easily replaced. Nicholas II's abdication sees the emergence of two separate centers of authority. Both claim to speak for the people, but neither represent more than one group of citizens. Officially, in the wake of the revolution, power is held by the provisional government, a collection of high-minded Democrats.

As the name implies, the Provisional Government is designed to be a caretaker administration. Its tasks are to organize elections as Russia transitions into democracy, and to maintain essential government services in the meantime. But with much of the country's citizens at war, full democratic elections are impossible. Hence the Provisional Government lacks any legitimacy.

It can only exist in an uneasy truce with the Petrograd Soviet, a council that represents the interest of Russia's soldiers and workers. The Petrograd Soviet develops into an alternate source of authority to the provisional government, and becomes increasingly radical in its aims. Critically, the two groups also have very different ideas about what to do with the former Tsar and his family.

At first, Nicholas and his family are placed under house arrest in the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, near Petrograd, that would later be called St. Petersburg. For his part, the former Tsar has few worries about his fate. He is expecting that he and his family will be exiled to their estate in Crimea to quietly live out the rest of their days.

The Provisional Government wants to protect the Romanov family, but it is concerned that allowing them to remain in Russia may encourage a counter-revolution among loyalists who would want to see Nicholas reinstated. The Petrograd Soviet has a far more radical agenda. It wants to put the Tsar on trial and, by implication, execute him. In its view, Nicholas should pay for his despotic rule with his life.

While Nicholas and his family live in limbo, in Britain, George V is faced with a quandary. On the one hand, he may instinctively want to help his royal relatives, but it remains a popular misconception that the decision is his to take. As a constitutional monarch, it is up to the British government to decide whether to offer the gift of asylum in Britain. And they make no voluntary offer.

The first consideration of Britain as a place of asylum, in fact, begins in Russia, in the Provisional Government. Spying a way of preserving the Romanov family's lives while removing them from the domestic picture, Pavel Milyukin, the Foreign Minister, presses the British ambassador of Petrograd, Sir George Buchanan, for Britain to offer the Romanovs asylum.

The British government, under Prime Minister David Lloyd George, are tellingly slow to respond. And while after a few days they do extend an offer of asylum, they attach a very specific condition: it is to be for the duration of the war only. Perhaps surprisingly given his family connection, this reluctance to offer asylum extends to George V himself.

The reasons for this lie in the way in which Nicholas II was seen by the British people. Twelve years earlier, in 1905, when revolution in Russia was first in the air, his soldiers fired on peaceful protesters outside the Winter Palace. The resulting massacre earned the Tsar the nickname "Nicholas the Bloody" or "Bloody Nicholas" and a reputation in Britain as a despotic ruler.

There is even support in Britain, particularly among the working classes, for the new revolutionary communist regime. To make matters worse, Nicholas's wife, Tsaritsa Alexandra, is German-born.

At a time when Britain is at war with Germany, even the British royal family is concerned about its German heritage, so much so that they change their own surname from the German-sounding Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the quintessentially British-sounding Windsor. And so, the idea of having a seemingly brutal tyrant and his German-born wife take up residence in Britain, in the heart of the First World War,

is fraught with difficulties. Not to mention the underlying threat to British power of some citizens even supporting the anti-monarchy, pro-communist revolution in Russia. And so, soon after the offer of asylum is made, it is withdrawn, the risk being deemed too great. An alternative asylum location is then urgently searched for.

Norway and Sweden offer help with an evacuation, but refuse to take in the Romanovs. And neutral Denmark is deemed too close to Germany. France and Switzerland point-blank refuse to take them in. Even the Tsar's European relatives take a less than sympathetic line. Many believe that Nicholas and Alexandra face a disaster of their own making, their own mistakes having led to their downfall.

They have endangered the positions of royal families throughout the continent, and they should sort out their own mess. By now, events in Russia itself are moving fast. A renewed Russian offensive on the Eastern Front in July 1917 ends in disaster and results in anti-government rioting in Petrograd.

With fears that further disturbances could easily reach Tsarskoye Selo, the Romanovs are moved to a safer location: the town of Tobolsk in western Siberia. But the provisional government's days are numbered. In October, the Bolsheviks seize power under the leadership of Lenin.

In March the following year, this new government signs the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ending Russia's participation in the First World War by giving up vast swaths of territory to Germany. Nicholas is appalled by the price the Bolsheviks pay for peace, but his spirits are high. He believes that his Western allies are plotting to break them out and smuggle them to safety, but he is mistaken.

In April, with the anti-Bolshevik White Army approaching Tobolsk, the Romanovs are moved once more to Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains. Meanwhile, in Britain, the fact that the Romanovs are in distant Yekaterinburg leads to a simple case of out of sight, out of mind. With Russia now out of the war, for George V, the political pressure to get the Romanovs to safety is alleviated.

His focus is returned to Britain's war effort. And even if planning had been in motion, the logistics of getting the Romanovs out of Yekaterinburg, past trigger-happy revolutionaries and overseas patrolled by German submarines, would have been almost certainly insurmountable. The Bolsheviks still initially intend to put Nicholas on trial, but when their position in Yekaterinburg is threatened, they take a drastic step.

And so, on the 17th of July, 1918, the Romanov family are murdered. Upon hearing the news, George V is devastated. He writes in his diary those poor, innocent children, and attends a memorial service held in his cousin's honor. But the charge that George V abandoned Nicholas to his fate remains a complex issue.

The need to balance domestic opinion, the pressures of the war, and family ties provided a situation with no easy answers. But even if he, or more accurately, the British government, had maintained their offer of asylum, who knows if Russia would have so easily let them go.

This is an audio production by Like A Shot Entertainment. Presented by Bridget Lappin. Executive Producers Danny O'Brien and Henry Scott. Story Producer Maddie Bowers. Assistant Producer Alice Tudor. Thank you for listening.

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