‘I have to do everything myself, I who have all my life been so spoilt.’ So lamented the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, mother of Tsar Nicholas II, in the diary she kept aboard HMS Marlborough, the British warship carrying her and 16 other Romanovs, in April 1919, from Yalta into perpetual exile.
‘I have to do everything myself, I who have all my life been so spoilt.’ So lamented the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, mother of Tsar Nicholas II, in the diary she kept aboard HMS Marlborough, the British warship carrying her and 16 other Romanovs, in April 1919, from Yalta into perpetual exile.
These remnants of the imperial family had already fled to the relative safety of the Crimea, but now, 17 months after the Revolution, nine months after the assassination of the Tsar, his wife and five children, George V ordered the Marlborough to remove the Dowager (his aunt) and her retinue from the Bolshevik threat.
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