THE RUSSIAN LEGITIMIST RESPONDS TO
CRITICISMS OF THE ENGAGEMENT OF
THE GRAND DUKE GEORGE OF RUSSIA
The Russian Legitimist warmly congratulates His Imperial Highness the Grand Duke George of Russia on his engagement to Miss Rebecca Bettarini and wishes them both a long and very happy marriage.
The general international reaction to news of the engagement has been extremely positive. In Russia in particular, the favourable media coverage has been marked by a fascination with the first wedding in Russia of a member of the Imperial House in more than a century. In the midst of this positive coverage, however, we regret to note a couple of ill-timed attacks which seek to cast shadows on the happiness of the young couple. Two recent posts by a pair of amateur bloggers were recently brought to our attention, and we wish to address them. Blogger One writes in English, but from Russia. Blogger Two, who is not Russian, writes from North America. Neither is a trained historian, and we disagree with their vituperations.
Blogger One insists on referring to the Grand Duke George of Russia as a ‘Prince of Prussia.’ He refers to the fact that the Grand Duke’s father is a Prince of Prussia. The Grand Duke does indeed have the subsidiary title of Prince of Prussia, just as many other royal personages have subsidiary titles due to their connections with other dynasties. King Michael of Romania had the subsidiary title of Prince of Hohenzollern, Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg had that of Prince of Bourbon-Parma, and King Simeon II of Bulgaria is a Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
At the time of the marriage of the Grand Duke George’s parents in 1976, it was agreed by the Head of the Imperial House of Russia and the Head of the Royal House of Prussia that children of the marriage would be first and foremost Russian dynasts.
For his part, Blogger Two seems perturbed that the Grand Duke Kirill of Russia, Head of the Russian Imperial House from 1918 to 1938, enforced in exile the Romanoff house laws, including the ‘equal marriage law’ requiring dynasts to marry princesses of royal houses in order to transmit membership of the Imperial House to their spouses and descendants.
Every Russian emperor from Alexander I through Nicholas II had enforced the equal marriage law. What does Blogger Two think the Grand Duke Kirill was supposed to do? Ignore this law? Let’s consider the attitude of Emperor Nicholas II himself. The Russian dynasty had a senior tier (the grand dukes, who were closer in the line of succession) and a junior tier (the princes of the imperial blood, also called Princes of Russia, who were more distant in the line of succession). In the last quarter century of the monarchy, the number of princes and princesses of the imperial blood had multiplied. It was thought unlikely that the throne would ever pass to any of them. In 1911, however, Nicholas II reiterated that the equal marriage rule applied to all dynasts, whether grand dukes or princes of the imperial blood. The Emperor also specified that marriages of princes of the imperial blood to spouses not of royal rank would be morganatic, and that the non-dynastic children of such marriages would be given new surnames and coats of arms. The reigning emperors had traditionally given new surnames to morganatic spouses and children, names like Yurievsky, Paley and Brassov. The Grand Duke Kirill continued the same practice in the 1920s, giving morganatic spouses and children names like Krassinsky and Ilyinsky. But Blogger Two for whatever reason is apparently highly offended by the Grand Duke Kirill’s continuation of this well-established practice. (We must note that the Grand Duke Kirill was actually much more lenient about morganatic marriages than Nicholas II would have been. Nicholas II required that, in order to obtain permission to marry a morganatic spouse, a prince of the imperial blood would first have to renounce his rights to the throne. In exile, Kirill made no effort to deprive such princes of the imperial blood of their rights to the throne. All the dynasts who married morganatically in exile retained their succession rights. Their children of course had no such rights.) One Romanoff dynast once complained humorously that the Russian dynasty seemed to attract all the ‘know it all outsiders’and asked rhetorically why other dynasties shouldn’t have to share the burden of such pontificators.
For legitimist purposes, it is important to reiterate the following key facts, lest they be obscured by a wind storm of garbled analysis and dezinformatsiya:
In June and July 1918, the Bolsheviks brutally murdered Emperor Nicholas II, his son Tsesarevich Alexei, and the Emperor’s brother, the Grand Duke Michael. All three are now saints of the Russian Orthodox Church. These murders ended the lives of all the remaining male dynasts descended from Emperor Alexander III. The succession then immediately passed to the surviving senior male dynast, the Grand Duke Kirill, the eldest son of the deceased Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, the next brother of Alexander III.
The Grand Duke Kirill waited for 6 long years before declaring himself Head of the Imperial House and Emperor-in-Exile. Although the strong balance of evidence supported the conclusion that Nicholas II, Alexei and Michael were all dead, there were still scattered reports that one or more of them might still be alive in Russia. By 1924, Kirill was sure that they had all been executed and that he could wait no longer. Lenin had died early in 1924, and there were much turmoil and uncertainty as to what would happen in Russia. After so many murders (a dozen and a half members of the Imperial House had been slaughtered by the Bolsheviks), Kirill thought it imperative to state in no uncertain terms that the dynasty still existed and that he was its head. His rights were crystal clear. Kirill’s declaration upset the aged and emotionally shattered Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna (mother of Nicholas II). She did not challenge Kirill’s succession rights, which she acknowledged, but she deemed the announcement ‘premature.’ She still had not given up hope that her sons and grandson were alive.
The Grand Duke Kirill and his wife Grand Duchess Victoria Feodorovna (born Princess Victoria Melita of Great Britain and Ireland) had one son, Prince of the Imperial Blood Vladimir (1917-1992). During the monarchy, the dynastic laws specified that, when a new member of the dynasty was born, the Emperor would immediately enter his or her name into the Book of the Imperial Family, an act that confirmed the newborn’s membership of the Imperial House and right of succession to the throne. Nicholas II entered the names of the two daughters of Kirill and Victoria Feodorovna into the Book of the Imperial Family: Princess of the Imperial Blood Maria Kirillovna and Princess of the Imperial Blood Kira Kirillovna. Nicholas II had abdicated and the monarchy had fallen by the time Prince Vladimir of Russia was born in August 1917, however, so that Nicholas II was not able to enter further names into the Book of the Imperial Family. After Kirill declared himself Emperor, his three children, as children of an Emperor and Head of the Imperial House, automatically became the Grand Duchess Maria, Grand Duchess Kira, and Grand Duke Vladimir.
The Russian dynastic laws specified male-preference primogeniture. This meant that the throne passed by male primogeniture and that it would only pass to the female line when there were no more male dynasts left. 19 male dynasts survived the Revolution. 15 of them recognised the Grand Duke Kirill as Head of the Imperial House and his son the Grand Duke Vladimir as his father’s Heir.
Only 3 dynasts declined to recognise the Grand Duke Kirill as dynastic head. They were members of a junior branch of the dynasty (descended from the third son of Emperor Nicholas I): Grand Duke Nicholas Nicolaievich, his brother Grand Duke Peter, and the latter’s son Prince of the Imperial Blood Roman. Grand Duke Nicholas (16th in the line of succession at the end of the monarchy but 9th in line by 1924 due to all the assassinations) had been commander of the army during the early part of World War I and, despite his very junior place in the line of succession, was supported as a future tsar by several former generals, as well as by his wife, his brother, and his nephew Roman. Their view was that the succession laws could simply be ignored. Prince of the Imperial Blood Roman did not marry a princess of a royal house and thus his children were not members of the Imperial House. In 1979, his morganatic son Nicholas Romanovich Romanoff formed a private organisation called the Romanov Family Association, which now groups together descendants of the many non-dynastic marriages contracted by various dynasts since 1917. But even Nicholas Romanoff publicly admitted that Kirill and then his son Vladimir had been the heads of the dynasty; he described Kirill’s rights as ‘incontestable.’
The Grand Duke Kirill died in 1938 and was succeeded as Head of the Imperial House by his 21 year old son the Grand Duke Vladimir. The Grand Duke Vladimir remained dynastic head for 53 years, until his death in 1992. With the permission of the Grand Duke Vladimir, the five dynasts directly after him in the line of succession (Grand Duke Andrew, Grand Duke Boris, Grand Duke Dmitri, Prince of the Imperial Blood Vsevelod, and Prince of the Imperial Blood [later Grand Duke] Gavriel) issued the so-called 1938 Declaration, announcing the Grand Duke Vladimir’s succession as Head of the Imperial House and listing all the other living male dynasts in their order of succession to the throne. The 1938 Declaration reiterated what the dynastic laws already made clear: that the children born of post-1917 marriages that did not conform to the dynastic laws were not members of the dynasty. By omitting their names, the 1938 Declaration announced that such people as Paul Ilyinsky (son of Grand Duke Dmitri, who signed the 1938 Declaration), Vladimir Andreivich Romanoff (son of Grand Duke Andrew, who signed the 1938 Declaration), Andrew Romanoff (son of Prince of the Imperial Blood Andrew Alexandrovich), and Nicholas Romanovich and Dmitri Romanovich Romanoff (sons of Prince of the Imperial Blood Roman) were not members of the Imperial House. The Grand Duke Vladimir was also accepted as Head of the Imperial House by many fellow heads of other dynasties, including King Baudouin of Belgium, King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden, King Simeon II of Bulgaria, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany (and his successor Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia), King Constantine II of Greece, King Juan Carlos of Spain, King Umberto II of Italy, Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxemburg, the reigning Prince Franz Josef of Liechtenstein, and Archduke Otto of Austria. In a 1954 letter to the Grand Duke Vladimir signed by his ‘affectionate niece’ and following the 1953 birth of his daughter the Grand Duchess Maria, Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain noted ‘the birth on the 23rd December 1954 of a Grand Duchess, who will bear the name of Marie’ and offered her ‘warm congratulations on these happy events together with my best wishes for your health and well-being and for that of the infant Grand Duchess and her mother.’
In 1948, the Grand Duke Vladimir had married a princess of a royal house, Princess Leonida Bagration. Vladimir, as Head of the Imperial House, deemed this a dynastic marriage, based on the facts that the Bagrations had reigned over the Kingdom of Georgia until the 19th century and that in a solemn 1783 treaty Catherine the Great had committed to have Imperial Russia recognise the royal status of the Bagrations for all time. Blogger One, in his opposition to the successive legitimist heads of the Russian dynasty, is obviously annoyed and frustrated by this. But unfortunately for him, it is the head of the dynasty who gets to decide these questions, and the head of the dynasty was the Grand Duke Vladimir, not Blogger One. As the late Sir Iain Moncreiffe, lawyer, historian, member of the household of Queen Elizabeth II, and scholar of Byzantine and Georgian history once wrote, ‘[The] Bagration…dynasty had reigned in the male line as Kings from 886 until the 19th century, before the 17th century boyar family of Romanoff dispossessed them. Both Bagration and Romanoff are now equally dispossessed: which needs the official recognition of which?’
From the fall of the monarchy in 1917 to the present, members of the Russian dynasty have contracted 30 marriages. 26 of these were morganatic marriages to commoners. 4 were dynastic marriages to royal spouses: those of Grand Duke Vladimir, his two sisters Maria and Kira, and his daughter Maria. The children and granddaughter of the Grand Duke Kirill obviously thought it important to contract dynastic marriages, in order that heirs would be available. The other dynasts who contracted the 26 non-dynastic marriages apparently did not consider this to be important.
Due to the numerous non-dynastic marriages, only three members of the dynasty have been born since the fall of the monarchy: the Grand Duke Vladimir, his only daughter, and her only son. As various members of the dynasty in exile passed away over the decades of exile, the above-mentioned Prince of the Imperial Blood Roman had by 1973 become second in the line of succession after the Grand Duke Vladimir. If Roman had outlived Vladimir and succeeded as head of the dynasty, he may well have revoked the equal marriage law and promoted his two sons from morganatic descendants to members of the Imperial House. This, however, did not happen. Vladimir outlived Roman and all the other living male dynasts. Other than the Grand Duke Vladimir, the last surviving male dynast was Prince of the Imperial Blood Vasily, who died in 1989. Because the Grand Duke Vladimir was, according to the dynastic laws, the last male dynast of the Imperial House of Romanoff-Holstein-Gottorp, the succession at his death passed to the female line, in the person of his daughter Grand Duchess Maria. The succession laws provided that, upon the death of the last male dynast, the succession would pass to the line of the female dynast most closely related to the last emperor. Whether one considers the last emperor to be the Grand Duke Wladimir (as do the legitimists) or for that matter Nicholas II, the Grand Duchess Maria is the most closely related female dynast.
In 1976, the Grand Duchess Maria of Russia contracted a dynastic marriage with her cousin, H.R.H. Prince Franz-Wilhelm of Prussia (a descendant of a sister of Emperor Nicholas I of Russia). With the approval of the Head of the Royal House of Prussia, the Prince converted to Orthodoxy and was created a Grand Duke of Russia by the Grand Duke Vladimir. It was agreed by the heads of the Russian and Prussian dynasties that children of the marriage would be raised as Russian dynasts and as Romanoffs. (This repeated the precedent set in the 18thcentury, when the Romanoff dynasty consisted of only one female dynast: Peter the Great’s daughter, the childless Empress Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s sister the Grand Duchess Anna had married the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp and had a son, Prince Peter of Holstein-Gottorp. Empress Elizabeth called her nephew Peter of Holstein to Russia and created him a Grand Duke of Russia. He succeeded her in 1762 as Emperor Peter III and was the ancestor of the current Romanoff-Holstein-Gottorp dynasty, of which the Grand Duchess Maria is the last living dynast of its male line.) The 1976 wedding in Madrid was attended by four kings (Juan Carlos of Spain, Umberto of Italy, Simeon of Bulgaria and Leka of Albania) and six queens (Sofia of Spain, Ioanna of Bulgaria, Margarita of Bulgaria, Geraldine of Albania, Susan of Albania, and Farida of Egypt).
Members of the dynasty who requested permission from the Grand Duke Kirill or the Grand Duke Vladimir to marry non-dynastic spouses immediately received permission and also were given, if they sought them, morganatic noble (that is, non-royal) princely titles for their wives and children. For example, Grand Duke Dmitri, Prince of the Imperial Blood Vsevelod, and Prince of the Imperial Blood Gavriel requested and received permission to marry morganatically, and their spouses were given the morganatic titles of Princess Romanovsky-Ilyinsky, Princess Romanovsky-Pavlovsky and Princess Romanovsky-Strelninsky, respectively.
The two living members of the Imperial House today, the Grand Duchess Maria and her son, the Grand Duke George, have made clear that they are not members of the Romanov Family Association (RFA), a private organization. The current elected president of the RFA, Olga Romanoff, is the daughter of Prince of the Imperial Blood Andrew Alexandrovich and Miss Nadine McDougall. Although he may have lost interest in legitimism later in his life, Prince of the Imperial Blood Andrew in 1924 signed an oath of allegiance to Emperor Kirill and his son and heir, the Grand Duke Vladimir. After Kirill’s death in 1938, Prince of the Imperial Blood Andrew also sent a letter dated 1 November 1938 to his uncle confirming that the Grand Duke Vladimir had succeeded as head of the dynasty (‘ it is self-evident that after the death of Kirill as Head of the Imperial House, his son inherits by right of seniority: personally, I considered Kirill as such and now I recognize his son as such. Vladimir, by his declaration, will himself confirm his position as Head of the House’).
Facts are stubborn things. To the extent that today some morganatic descendants of Alexander III may still regret that the succession passed from the dynastic descendants of Alexander III to those of his brother Vladimir Alexandrovich, it is nonetheless a fact. This would likely have happened anyway, even if there had been no revolution: a haemophiliac born in 1904 like the Tsesarevich Alexei would be unlikely in that period to live to adulthood and have children, and Nicholas II’s brother Michael married morganatically, so that his descendants would be excluded from the succession. To the extent that children or grandchildren may regret that their dynastic forebear did not contract a dynastic marriage, that is now past history. To the extent the descendants of Prince of the Imperial Blood Roman may regret that he did not outlive the Grand Duke Vladimir as dynastic head and then revoke the equal marriage law, that too is a fact.
Blogger Two seems to accuse the Grand Duchess Maria of hypocrisy. He argues that her branch of the family enforced the equal marriage law to exclude others but that she was now changing the law for the convenience of her son. This is a very specious argument for two reasons. First, based on the documents issued by the Grand Duchess Maria’s chancellery in Moscow, she clearly has not changed the law. Her treatment of the marriage of her son to a spouse who was not born a princess of a royal house conforms fully to the dynastic laws. Second, the comparison is highly flawed. The 26 morganatic marriages mentioned above occurred decades before the Grand Duchess Maria became head of the dynasty. The last one was in 1961. All these dynasts are now long dead. Most of the morganatic children of these marriages are also no longer alive. The situation of European dynasties in 1921, and even in 1961, is very different from that of 2021. In the first half of the 20th century, equal marriage laws applied to numerous dynasties. Many dynasties have now dropped their equal marriage rules (including the Austrian dynasty in the 1990s and the Spanish dynasty early in the 21stcentury) as no longer appropriate to the modern age. Other dynasties, including the Russian dynasty, have retained the rule. Should the Grand Duchess at some future point change this law? Will her son, when he succeeds as dynastic head, decide to change it? Whatever decision they might make, it should be based on what is appropriate for the dynasty in the 21st century. What may have occurred in the 1917 to 1961 period belongs to the past and is now largely irrelevant.
[The following sources for the above chronology are gratefully acknowledged: Succession to the Russian Imperial Throne by Archbishop Antony; The Russian Imperial Succession by Brien Purcell Horan; The Russian Succession in 2013, Simplified by Brien Purcell Horan; and A Throne, Which Not For An Instant Might Become Vacant by Professor Russell E. Martin, Ph.D. These source materials are all available on this website.]