The crown,
once the ultimate symbol of power throughout the world.
We want the king! We want the king!
But today,
the very nature of royalty is under threat.
In this landmark series,
we use specialized archive colorization techniques
to bring to life over 100 years of royalty.
(dramatic music)
And discover why over half the world's royal families
have lost their thrones,
while others have kept their crowns on their heads.
I declare before you all,
that my whole life shall be devoted to your service.
God help me to make good my vow.
And how royal families
have been forced to adapt
as they struggle to retain their people's support.
(upbeat music)
In this episode,
Queen Victoria attempts to create peace in Europe,
through royal marriages.
Queen Victoria hopes that a network of families
that are linked by blood
would be less likely to go to war with each other.
But when three cousins
linked by Victoria's royal blood turn against each other-
He wants their love and, at the same time,
he wants to kind of crush some.
Victoria's dream of peace
turns into a nightmare.
It was so hard for everybody in Europe
to not only watch as their loved ones die,
but also they didn't know what the point of it was.
I mean, what was the point of it?
(dramatic music)
(explosions blasting)
(guns blasting)
1914, war breaks out in Europe,
and soon the world is drawn into the bloodiest conflict
ever seen at that time.
What we call World War I was then called the Great War,
mainly because there hadn't been a sequel yet.
(guns blasting)
At the time, it was seen as almost Armageddon.
(guns blasting)
Over 30 nations clash in a terrifying war,
using the latest weapon technology.
It saw the biggest armies in history,
millions of dead in single battles
that caused rivers of blood.
The trenches that men had to hide in and then rush up from
meant that the slaughter was on a scale
totally unprecedented in human history.
A generation of young men fight and die
in a war that, in reality,
is a battle between empires and their royal rulers.
(dramatic music)
In this war of empires,
the main combatants are the British Empire.
It covers almost 1/4 of the globe
and rules over 56 countries.
It fights on the same side as Russia,
the world's second-biggest empire.
Its leader, the czar, controls over 160 million people.
Together with France,
these three empires all fight against Germany.
Its empire sits in the center of Europe
and is ruled by the kaiser.
And Austria-Hungary, a powerful empire
spread across Central and Eastern Europe.
Strange as it sounds,
the seeds of all this destruction were sewn decades earlier
by one woman, Victoria, queen of the British Empire.
She tries to link these royal empires
through love and marriage, but her efforts end in disaster.
(suspenseful music)
Queen Victoria rules her empire from London,
and during her reign
sees the British Empire grow across the globe.
Britain is on its way to being
the richest country in the world.
And it's got this navy that trades everywhere.
And this empire builds and builds
until Britain is really the most important
powerful country in the world.
And Queen Victoria is the queen of it.
But there are limits to Victoria's power.
Britain has what's called a constitutional monarchy.
This means the sovereign's power
is kept in check by the British government.
The power is really in Parliament
and the prime minister and his cabinet.
But Victoria has this incredible image,
and she's seen as the symbol of England.
Britain at this time,
is more liberal than most of Europe
and is one of the few countries in the world
to have an early form of democracy.
But it's far from perfect.
Democracy at this point is not how we know it.
Most people in the country still can't vote.
Only people over 21 and men of a certain income can vote.
People that had degrees,
people that possessed a certain amount of wealth,
or people that possessed land.
But even so, this was already much more democratic
than most of the rest of the world.
(upbeat thoughtful music)
Victoria rules with her husband, Prince Albert.
He is also her first cousin.
Now we know it's pretty problematic
to marry your first cousin, for all sorts of reasons.
Back then, it's simply not a big deal,
much more important is that he comes with blue blood.
You needed to be as pure and as royal
and as perfect as possible.
The couple are passionately in love,
as is evident from Victoria's diary entry
after their wedding night.
He clasped me in his arms
and we kissed each other again and again.
His beauty, his sweetness, and gentleness, really,
how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a husband?
It's rather euphemistically expressed,
but there's no doubt she really enjoyed sex.
She underlines they were in one bed.
And she notes in her diary, "We didn't sleep much."
Victoria and Albert
go on to have nine children together.
But they don't just make babies.
They want their children to be ambassadors for peace.
Victoria and Albert are concerned that European countries
have been fighting each other for centuries
and there's ongoing tension on the continent.
So the couple hatch a plan,
to marry their offspring into other European royal families
so their sons and daughters can export British ideas
about democracy and peace.
They hope that their children will intermarry
into these different royal families,
that they will spread these type of liberal progressive
democratic values from the UK, across Europe,
so that you then have a network of families
that are linked by blood and are less likely
to go to war with each other.
(gentle thoughtful music)
But their matchmaking mission is put on hold
when Albert dies of typhoid fever when he's just 42.
I think it's hard to over-exaggerate
how devastated Victoria was by Albert's death.
I mean, she basically went into mourning
in her early 40s and never came out of it.
She wore black for the rest of her life.
(dramatic music)
In tribute to her beloved husband,
Victoria continues their plan
and becomes the ultimate royal matchmaker.
It started with their eldest child, Princess Vicky.
(suspenseful music)
Vicky is Queen Victoria and Albert's eldest daughter.
And she is a shining example of what they want to produce.
The closest that the British royal family
has to an intellectual.
She knows about politics.
When Vicky is 17, she marries Prince Frederick,
the future king of Prussia.
Prussia doesn't exist today,
but it used to be the biggest state in the German Empire.
When Prince Frederick inherits the Prussian crown,
he will also become kaiser of the German Empire.
(gentle music)
Queen Victoria has observed Germany's recent growth in power
and hopes this arranged marriage
will secure a peaceful bond
between the British and German Empires.
There's definitely an attempt to use Vicky
as a peace ambassador.
There's a feeling that if she can influence her husband,
particularly in a political sense,
particularly in a diplomatic sense,
then the two countries will be allied together.
The couple would prove a great match.
And Frederick is fascinating to learn from Vicky
how democracy works in Britain.
He takes on her more liberal ideas
and they plan to rule the German Empire
as constitutional monarchs.
(tense music)
But the newlyweds' happiness is short-lived.
Vicky endures a traumatic breech birth
with their firstborn son, Prince Wilhelm.
The baby gets stuck
and the doctor uses excessive force to get him out.
He has to intervene really quite severely.
And in the course of this,
the child's arm is ripped out of its socket
and hangs loose, limp.
Everybody was very thankful that they have a boy,
an heir to the throne,
but when the boy is not perfect, it is a huge issue.
Prince Wilhelm's left arm
is permanently damaged
and his family try to keep this disability
a secret from the public.
You never see a photograph of Wilhelm's arm hanging loose.
It's always sort of tucked into his shirt
or covered with a plaid or a sash.
They make sure that you can never see it.
Royal people are supposed to wield authority
and they're supposed to look perfect.
Vicky is desperate to help her son
and puts her trust into doctors
who attempt to cure Wilhelm's disability.
But their methods cause the young prince huge distress.
Probably the most barbaric method of all,
they rig up the young Prince Wilhelm
into a kind of stretching system,
a bit like a medieval rack,
in which they attempt to pull the arm and make it longer.
Vicky writes a letter to her mother
while the treatment's going on,
in which she includes a sketch of the rack treatment
and says, "It was unbelievably upsetting for me.
"And it was so bad I almost cried."
(suspenseful music)
Eventually, the doctors give up,
but the damage is done.
The future king of the German Empire
grows into a troubled young man with an inferiority complex.
He takes out his pain on his British mother, Vicky.
He blamed his mother for the breech birth.
The determination to use British doctors
when she should have used, in his view, German doctors.
This was her fault.
Then there was the treatment
that was exacerbating that problem.
And thereafter, for the rest of his life,
you very much get a sense
that there was a love-hate relationship,
not only between him and his mother
but also between him and Britain,
which, of course, she represented.
Although Wilhelm grows up in awe
of Britain's empire and powerful navy,
he develops a problematic relationship
with his British relatives.
He wants them all to admire him.
He wants them all to love him.
But he's incredibly envious of them
because they're British and they seem to think
that he thinks they think they're better than him.
He wants their love and, at the same time,
he wants to kind of crush them.
(gentle music)
In 1888, Wilhelm's father, Prince Frederick,
finally becomes the kaiser of Germany,
but he is terminally ill with cancer
and dies just 99 days later.
The crown is passed on to his oldest son
who becomes Kaiser Wilhelm II.
When Kaiser Wilhelm inherits the throne at the age of 29,
he's paranoid, insecure.
He's a little macho desperate to prove himself,
especially to his English cousins.
(pensive music)
Wilhelm immediately cancels his parents' plan
to make Germany more democratic.
His father and mother wanted Germany
to be a liberal, modern forward-looking state,
which was pro-British.
When he came to the throne, didn't want any of these things.
He was bent on making the German Empire
a rival to the British Empire.
Wilhelm is determined
to make the German Empire the biggest power in Europe.
He builds up its navy and begins to threaten war.
Wilhelm is heavily invested in the idea
of the monarch of the emperor being superior.
While he's seen among the people,
he's not pretending to emphasize,
he's not bringing himself to their level,
'cause he doesn't care about anyone but himself.
Queen Victoria's dream of ensuring peace
and tranquility through royal marriages
has already given birth to a problem.
A grandson who hates Britain
and appears to be itching for one thing, war.
But Queen Victoria doesn't give up on a grand plan
and begins looking for a match
for another one of her grandchildren,
Princess Alix of Hesse.
But Alix doesn't want grandmother to choose her husband
because ever since she visited Russia for a family wedding,
she's been madly in love with her cousin,
the heir to the Russian throne, Nicholas Romanov.
They were deeply in love.
Queen Victoria wasn't awfully sure
that she should let this go ahead.
But she had no option because they insisted.
And so they had this huge wedding.
And Nicholas and Alexandra were like two lovebirds.
After Alix and Nicholas marry,
Queen Victoria attempts to advise her granddaughter
on how to make Russia more democratic.
So Victoria writes to her granddaughter.
She says, "No, it's very challenging,
"the craft of ruling these days.
"Every day," she says,
"I worry about what my subjects think."
To which she's batted off by her granddaughter,
"Yeah, but Russia is not England, Granny."
She's like, "Here we don't need to worry about
"what the subjects think."
(dramatic music)
Russia is ruled by an emperor, called a czar,
and he expects his people to revere him like a god.
There is no democracy
and the czar has unlimited power over his subjects.
The czar is a complete autocrat.
And that means what he says goes.
He's head of the armed forces. He is head of the Church.
He's head of absolutely everything in his land.
He has the final say.
And if you question him, he can kill him.
Russia's royal family, the Romanovs,
have ruled with an iron fist for 300 years,
but the world is changing fast
and the Russian people want more autonomy,
but they have no way of getting their voices heard.
People can't vote them out.
They can't even vote for ministers to do anything
'cause the czar appoints all the ministers,
the czar appoints all the generals.
The czar has total control
and doesn't even have to bother to inform himself
about his starving, miserable people.
(upbeat thoughtful music)
When Nicholas inherits the Russian crown,
he becomes the czar and Alix, the czarina.
The couple completely ignore
Victoria's ideas about democratic reform.
There's a dark irony that Alexander
falls hook, line, and sinker for the bible of autocracy.
She absolutely loves the idea of being all-powerful,
of being invested with a divine right to rule.
And doubts, and there are many of them,
that her little weak husband may possess,
she helps him overcome.
She looks him in the eye,
"You are the man ordained by God to rule, be in no doubt."
Nicholas and Alix believe all they need to do
to keep that family on the throne is one thing,
produce a male heir.
During the first seven years of marriage,
they welcome four daughters.
Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia.
My father was Nicholas's eldest nephew.
And they were very close. My father adored Nicholas.
His best friends, at the time, were the daughters.
And they all were of similar ages.
They were just really good fun.
They had a great sense of humor.
But Russian law means Nicholas and Alix
are not allowed to make any of their daughters
the heir to the throne.
(gentle thoughtful music)
Eventually, Alix gives birth to a son, Alexei Nikolaevich.
As the heir to the Russian throne,
he is called the czarevich.
The Romanovs finally have a male heir
and take pride appearing all together at royal events.
(upbeat music)
And behind closed doors,
they're much like any other happy family,
as can be seen from these home movies,
shot on Nicholas's personal camera.
They love the holidays 'cause it was freedom for them.
So they were able to be themselves and relax.
And also, the Romanovs were very keen on skinny dipping.
My father was a great believer
in the sun getting at the body and taking your clothes off,
and apparently, Nicholas felt the same.
(gentle music)
But things aren't as perfect as they seem.
Alix has, unknowingly, passed onto her son
a rare hereditary disease called hemophilia,
which stops the blood from clotting.
This meant that whenever the czarevich injured himself,
bruised himself, this was a major medical crisis.
He would bleed quite a lot.
And it would be very difficult to stop
these uncontrollable bleeds.
Hemophilia is a genetic disease women carry
and can pass on to their children,
but only their sons will suffer from the effects.
Today, it's widely believed this disease
entered the Romanov family
from genes passed down from Queen Victoria.
Hemophilia was Queen Victoria's gift
to all European royal families.
It is ironic that the monarchy,
which is traditionally a system which demands male heirs
and values men more than anything,
and this is a disease that affects only kings, not queens.
Queen Victoria's dream
of marrying her children into European royal families
has put a ticking bomb
into the heart of the Romanov dynasty.
The family keep Alexei's illness a secret from the public
and invent excuses for why the little prince
is often at public events.
Alexei is constantly sick or at risk of being sick.
He's expected to for a young.
There is no cure for hemophilia at this time.
And so they have this unanticipated succession crisis
looming over the royal family.
The heir to the Russian throne
is chronically ill.
And this family secret
will put the Russian crown into crisis.
(dramatic music)
In 1901, the world is at the dawn of a new century
when Queen Victoria's reign comes to an end.
She dies of a stroke after 63 years on the British throne.
She's been around
for as long as almost anybody alive can remember.
She was an incredibly important woman.
The symbol of Britain and her empire.
So it was almost unimaginable
that she was no longer going to be there.
Victoria may have gone,
but thanks to her matchmaking
eight of her children now sit on European royal thrones.
But will her dream hold Europe together or tear it apart?
(pensive music)
After Victoria's death,
the crown is passed to her eldest son, King Edward VII.
This man has had up, until that point,
the longest wait in history to become the British monarch.
He was a philanderer, he was overweight,
he was overindulgent, and ironically enough,
he was really rather a good king.
But he didn't have very long at the top job.
A heart attack cuts Edward's reign short,
and he dies after just nine years on the throne.
(upbeat music)
In 1910, the British crown is passed on to Edward's son
and Victoria's grandson, King George V.
George has already, dutifully,
married a woman his grandmother approved of,
his second cousin, the Princess Mary of Teck.
The new king is more conservative than his playboy father.
George V is perhaps probably one of the most
boring people ever to become the king of England.
He basically doesn't do anything
except shoot and collect stamps.
But now George is king
his hobbies take a back seat.
He has a very real crisis on his hands.
Although Queen Victoria thought uniting European royals
would maintain peace, the British crown is under threat
from something on its own shores,
disenfranchised members of the public.
Britain is the richest country in the world
but, at the same time, has the poorest people in the world.
And in 1910, this explodes into a series
of organized labor strikes.
Workers' unions across Britain
are demanding better working conditions.
And the suffragette movement is asking fundamental questions
about who should exercise power
by demanding womens' right to vote.
The suffragettes believed that men didn't listen
to people who were quietly writing in
and acting all meek like women.
No, they believe that men liked to fight,
and they only respected violence
and people shouting loud enough.
And so this is what the suffragettes did.
They were little terrorists.
They bombed certain buildings.
They burnt down certain buildings, repeated businesses.
They cut phone wires. They blew up postboxes.
(gentle thoughtful music)
In June 1913, the British king and queen
witnessed the suffragettes protesting
against the established order at the Epsom Derby,
(crowd cheering)
the most watched horse race in Britain.
An English teacher called Emily Wilding Davison
makes a game-changing act of political protest.
Emily Wilding Davison
was notorious in the suffragette movement.
I mean, she was brilliant.
You'd look at her and you'd just think,
"Oh, there's a nice little lady."
No, not a nice little lady.
Incredibly brave, incredibly passionate.
In front of thousands of spectators,
Davison steps in the path of the king's horse.
(dramatic music)
I believe that Emily Wilding Davison
deliberately committed suicide in order to show her passion
for the cause of the suffragettes.
There's no way that George V didn't see this.
When you have something as shocking as a middle-class,
well-educated woman sacrificing herself for her beliefs
right in front of you, I mean, you can't just dismiss that.
So George had to be very aware and very politically savvy
in order to negotiate these changing times.
(suspenseful music)
Despite George's conservative personality,
he begins to do royalty differently.
He visits workers in industrial regions with Queen Mary.
It's the first time royals are seen
informally engaging with the public.
(crowd cheers)
So, for the first time in Britain,
you have the monarchy in a pit.
I mean, literally, they went down into mines
and saw how the working people
were helping the British economy
and producing coal for the nation.
They would smile.
This is something that the royal family
never felt the need to do before.
They had a walkabout,
and it made the royal family tremendously popular.
George doesn't justice to the people,
he gives them more of a voice
and agrees to democratic reform in Britain
by diluting his own power
and giving more to the elected government.
But can George persuade his cousins in Europe
to contain social unrest by also doing monarchy differently?
(gentle upbeat music)
Thanks to Queen Victoria's matchmaking,
George is a cousin of Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm.
And because George's father and Nicholas's father
both married Danish princesses, they're also cousins.
George and Nicholas are similar in age
and as children, their families took vacations together.
Nicholas and George were very close
and there's lots of letters saying,
"Dearest Nicky," "Dearest George," and all that.
George writes to Nicholas and says,
"I really think of you as one of my closest friends.
"And if there's anything I can ever do for you
"do let me know."
They spend a lot of time together when they were young
and growing up and they looked so alike, it was incredible.
(tense music)
But the two aren't as close
to their German cousin, Wilhelm, who is several years old.
Wilhelm really does not get on with his other cousins.
Wilhelm is the odd one out.
The others, in fact, build part of their friendships
on their dislike of Wilhelm
because he was so arrogant, aggressive, annoying.
(gentle upbeat music)
As the royal rulers,
the three cousins govern their empires
in very different ways.
While George is embracing British democracy,
Wilhelm enforces autocracy
and prepares to take Germany to war.
And Nicholas believes he has a divine right to rule Russia
and won't give up autocracy.
He cannot see that things are changing.
Europe is changing,
that there will be a demand for political representation.
That must mean he has to relinquish some of his power.
(tense music)
Nicholas is fearful of moving away
from the autocratic way of ruling,
passed on to him from his father.
And although he eventually agrees to some political change,
he doesn't go far enough.
Set up this thing called the Duma,
which is like a parliament, it's a bit like the congress.
And the trouble with that was Czar Nicholas
put in these fundamental laws which says
basically anything that the Duma decides I get a veto on it.
The Duma has no real power
and the Russian public see it for what it is,
a token gesture.
Civil unrest has continued to build in Russia ever since.
But Nicholas is totally occupied
with a family crisis at home.
Behind closed doors, that Romanovs are struggling
to cope with their son's declining health.
And this increases this ever greater divide
between a very loving personable family life
and an evermore harsh authoritarian political life.
(horse hooves clopping)
At the same time,
civil unrest is building elsewhere in Europe.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire is a royal house untouched
by Queen Victoria's blood,
and he doesn't share her vision for peace.
Ever since this empire had expanded to include Bosnia,
in 1908, tension has been growing
with its neighboring state of Serbia.
Serbia nationalists were very worried
that if the Austro-Hungarian Empire expanded in any way,
it was likely to be at their expense.
Pressure builds until June the 28th, 1914,
when a Serbian nationalist terrorist group
assassinates the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
When the Austrian Archduke Franz is assassinated in 1914,
it creates extraordinary shock waves.
Austria is determined
the country that's responsible must be punished.
Austria-Hungary
wants to avenge the murder of its heir by attacking Serbia,
and Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm immediately offers to help.
In many ways, Germany is itching for a war.
And Germany is very keen on
territorial expansion in Eastern Europe.
In Russia, Czar Nicholas puts his army on standby
because Serbia is a neighbor
and he promised to defend the smaller country from attack.
Queen Victoria's dream is quickly falling apart.
Family ties of failing to maintain peace
and the cousins are prioritizing their imperial interests.
Although they knew each other well from their young days,
Nicholas and Wilhelm, nonetheless,
had to put their nation's territorial
and other ambitions first.
When George V hears the news,
he doesn't want to pick sides between his cousins,
but because Britain is a democracy,
he has to support his government's decision.
His ministers don't care about the blood ties
between the British and German royal families.
They're alarm by Wilhelm's aggressive pursuit of power
and decide Britain should side with Russia
and fight against Germany.
Queen Victoria's grand plan
for peace between the empires has failed.
Queen Victoria and Albert's intention
was to create a system of royal families
that were interlinked and therefore it made it
less likely that you would have war.
When push came to shove, blood,
that is the blood that connected these families
was not thicker than water.
(dramatic music)
Wilhelm is distraught that both his cousins
have entered the war on the opposite side from him.
Wilhelm feels that Britain and Russia,
and indeed George and Nicky have ganged up against him.
He always takes things very personally,
and that's exactly how he sees it.
(ominous music) (explosions booming)
(gun blasting)
A month off to Franz Ferdinand's assassination
war breaks out in Europe.
Of course, Queen Victoria
would have been utterly devastated
to know that only 13 years after her death,
three of her grandchildren were going to war
with one another,
a war that was going to cost the lives
of some 25 million people.
It would have had her turning in her grave.
Although King George is no war leader,
he shows support by visiting the front line.
George basically spends his whole time pinning on medals,
inspecting troops, visiting hospitals,
and looking always incredibly melancholia and miserable.
This is George really trying to do his best.
(crowd yelling)
George is also quick
to react to the anti-German feelings growing in Britain
and prevents a PR disaster.
His family's surname,
inherited from his grandfather, Prince Albert,
is Saxe-Coburg Gotha.
Gotha is also the name of a bomber
Germany is using to kill British civilians.
To distance his family from Germany.
George changes the royal surname to Windsor.
Let's pretend we are nothing to do ever with the Germans
and let's make ourselves as quintessentially English
as we can.
And apparently, his advisor looks out
to the round tower of Windsor,
the ancient citadel of the Normans,
hearkening back to William the Conqueror, Windsor it is.
Windsor is, after all,
only the name of a British castle.
(dramatic music)
In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm
attempts to lead his army at the front,
but he is immediately sidelined by his generals.
Ironically, when his greatest fantasy,
a pan-European mass war to prove his masculinity
finally comes true, he gives up most power to two generals.
They kept him out of the key decision-making,
especially the grand strategy,
which was just as well because he was no strategist.
But thanks to the skill of Wilhelm's generals,
Germany defeats Nicholas's troops,
despite Russia having the biggest army in the world.
Russia is able to mobilize a huge army,
but this does not mean that it's a good army
or that it's effective.
It is really badly trained.
It is a construct army essentially consisting
of under-equipped and underfed peasants
that do not have good training,
do not have good morale,
and expect this war to be very short
and want to go back to harvest their fields.
To make things even worse,
Nicholas takes full charge of the Russian Army
and only takes military advice from God.
The czar prays with his troops
and sprinkles them with holy water,
but he fails to provide the ammunition, clothing,
and leadership they need.
Now the Russian people get absolutely massacred.
Literally, hundreds of thousands die
within the first few weeks.
It is a tragedy beyond tragedies.
The men they're sending to the front were all farmworkers.
They were largely from the country, which there was no food.
Food started to run out really quickly.
Although Czarina Alix and her daughters
help nurse the wounded soldiers,
ultimately Nicholas's military leadership
leaves millions of Russians dead
and the nation on the brink of starvation.
His leadership of the Russian military
was not only catastrophic but also seriously destroyed
the prestige of the Russian monarchy.
Because if your argument is that I lead
because God tells me how we're going to win
and you don't win, then it is all revealed to be a lie.
(dramatic music)
After multiple military defeats,
the Russian people have finally had enough.
A violent revolution erupts,
and it's led by soldiers within the Russian Army.
So they turn their guns on the men giving them the orders.
And that is what happens in 1917.
The people finally take control of their own destiny.
What makes this revolution
so dangerous to Nicholas is it's led by a communist
called Vladimir Lenin.
And he won't stop until the Romanovs are dethroned.
In Britain, King George is horrified
to see Nicholas's subjects rally behind
a new alternative to monarchy, communism.
Communism entirely makes kings and queens redundant
because it is an egalitarian system in which, in theory,
every member of society has a say in politics.
(dramatic music)
George fears his Russian cousins are in danger
and wants to offer them protection.
Britain discusses a plan
to get the Romanov family out of Russia.
Cousin will save cousin.
But George's government spies a problem.
People in the UK knew what had been going on in Russia.
England had a lot of civil unrest,
could it cope with also having
Nicholas and his family on its shores?
The British government becomes concerned
that if the autocratic czar
is given a safe haven in the United Kingdom,
communist ideas could gain popularity in Britain.
You can't have him back in your family
and have your family associated with him
if you want some remain king of England.
George must decide whether to save Nicholas,
Alix, and their children,
or leave the Romanov family to an uncertain fate.
In early 1917, communist revolutionaries
force Czar Nicholas to abdicate the throne
and move Nicholas, Alix, and their children to Siberia,
where they're kept under house arrest
in a building ominously called
The House of Special Purpose.
(tense music)
While the Romanovs cling on to the hope there'll be rescued,
the girls stitch the family jewels into their underwear,
so that when they escape they'll have means to survive,
wherever they end up.
But what the Romanovs don't know is the British government
has canceled the plan to rescue them.
For years,
the U-turn is blamed on the British prime minister,
but the recent discovery of a letter
from the king's private secretary to the British government
has cast doubt on just who made the decision.
"George V must beg you
"to represent to the prime minister
"that from all he hears and reads in the press,
"the residence in this country
"of the ex-emperor and empress
"would be strongly resented by the public
"and would undoubtedly compromise
"the position of the king and queen."
It's not clear whether it was George
or whether it was his private secretary,
but basically they both get really worried
because Nicholas has become worldwide very unpopular.
And here is George offering to give him asylum.
On the other hand,
this is his cousin who spent his life saying,
"You're my dearest friend.
"And if there's ever anything I can do."
The consequence of this betrayal
is more terrible than anyone could have ever imagined.
(guns blasting)
The communists execute the czar and his family
in the basement of The House of Special Purpose.
And we know that the daughters took a few shots to be killed
because all the jewels that were hiding in their clothes
were acting as a type of armor,
which made their killing a lot longer
and a lot more bloody and harder.
After 300 years of ruling Russia,
one of the longest-running royal families
the world has ever known, the Romanovs have been destroyed.
They wiped out a whole generation of Romanovs.
When George hears about the family's murder,
he's horrified.
In his diary, George says
that it's absolutely awful what's happened
to poor Nicky and Aliki and the children,
but he never acknowledges any responsibility
for failing them.
In fact, he and his private secretary
have a sort of willful amnesia.
For the surviving Romanov descendants,
many questions remain unanswered.
Could more have been done to save the family?
They could have gone to one of their other
many cousins in Europe.
I mean, England wasn't the only place they could've gone to.
I don't expect anybody thought they would be murdered.
God willing, it'll never happen again.
(wind whistling) (gentle somber music)
(crowd cheering)
In November 1918,
World War I comes to an end,
when Germany finally surrenders.
The entry of millions of American soldiers,
fighting alongside the British and French,
is credited with helping to tip the balance against Germany.
After four years of bloodshed,
countries across the globe mourn their dead
and begin to question the royals who took them to war.
So you had entire towns who lost
an entire generation of men.
It was so hard for everybody in Europe
to not only watch as their loved ones die,
but also they didn't know what the point of it was.
I mean, what was the point of it?
In Germany,
Kaiser Wilhelm's beloved military turns on him.
Ordinary Germans,
especially those fighting in the Navy and the Army,
were furious with the kaiser, in particular,
for having taken Germany into a war
that they subsequently lost.
Wilhelm is forced to give up the throne
and escapes to the Netherlands
where he spends the rest of his life.
He never sets foot on German soil again.
He lived extremely comfortably.
And most evenings were spent
complaining about how everybody betrayed him.
I don't feel very sorry for him.
He lived to a reasonable age amongst enormous wealth.
(dramatic music)
Germany isn't the only empire to fall
at the end of World War I,
the monarchs of Russia and Austria-Hungary
all lose their thrones.
But the British Empire not only survives,
it grows in size,
and George V now rules over about 1/4 of the planet.
On the last day of war,
the crowds came to Buckingham Palace
and cheered the royal family,
given that all over Europe
kings were falling like nine pins.
Although it helps to be on the winning side,
what did George V get right to hold on to the crown?
(suspenseful music)
Perhaps the key factor in George's success
is the fact he dilutes his power by embracing democracy
and relies on his military to run the war.
The reason he keeps his throne,
frankly, is that he didn't have much power.
So he wasn't able to make the kind of mistakes
that his cousins did because they had proper power
and they wield it very, very badly.
George was basically mainly ornamental,
and that worked very well for the British system.
(crowd chattering)
The war tested
Queen Victoria's royal matchmaking experiment,
and it failed.
Her dream of peace turned into a nightmare,
and overthrowing monarchies has become the new normal.
To survive in this post-war world,
some royals begin to pay attention to a new movement
that begins in Italy and soon spreads to Germany, fascism.
In the aftermath of World War I,
militaristic, fascistic, and extreme right politics
are very attractive for many monarchies
because they promise to bring about a natural order.
And of course, many kings around Europe
believe, quite naturally,
that a natural order means monarchy on top.
Will George give in
to the temptations of fascism?
And how far will the remaining royals of Europe go
to hold on to their crowns?
(dramatic music)