For more than 250 years the grand Winter Palace, in St Petersburg, has played a pivotal role in Russian history. With 117 staircases, 1,500 rooms and three million artworks, it is one of Europe’s largest and most opulent former royal residences. This was one of many such palaces from which the last tsar, Nicholas II, ruled with unchecked power over a sixth of the world. The tsar, his wife and their five children were a close-knit unit, insulated from reality in a bubble of obscene privilege. So it may surprise some to learn that, for more than half a decade, the Romanovs’ inner circle included a humble-born Irishwoman.
Margaretta Eagar, one of 11 children, was born into a Protestant family in Limerick city in 1863. In 1898, after training as a nurse in Belfast, she was recommended for the job of nanny to the Romanov children. In her memoir, Six Years at the Russian Court, she recounts travelling to Berlin, where a representative of the Russian embassy presented her with a diplomatic pouch and put her on a train to St Petersburg. She was told not to open the bag, even for customs or the police. When she arrived at the Winter Palace she was given a bed for the night. In the morning a young man knocked on her door. He joked that he had been told that "an English lunatic had arrived, carrying a great bag". No sooner was the pouch handed over to him than Eagar was ushered in to meet the empress.
Intimate terms
During her time in Russia, Eagar appears to have been on intimate terms not only with the royal children but also with their parents. But her memoir was published when the Romanovs were still alive – and, crucially, still paying her a generous pension – so if she had any dirt on them, she kept it to herself.
It’s a fascinating read nonetheless. At a time when Russia was plagued by poverty, pogroms and political upheaval, she describes the Winter Palace in terms that would tempt even the most tepid moderate to storm the gates in protest. There are Rembrandts and Fabergé eggs everywhere she turns. Of the imperial nursery, she writes: “When I explain that one of the rooms is large enough to contain a mountain down which the children toboggan, some idea will be given to its magnitude.”
She meets Fr John, a faith healer with whom the empress is greatly taken but about whom “many curious stories” circulate – a foreshadowing, perhaps, of the empress’s fatal dalliance with Rasputin. She learns to speak Russian and earns a position of respect in the royal household. The little princesses Olga and Tatiana idolise her, copying her Limerick accent and considering her a font of unrivalled knowledge.
“This arises, of course,” she writes. “From their very sheltered lives.”
On a state visit to Romania, Eagar brings Olga to a toyshop and tells the girl to choose any toy she wants. The grand duchess refuses. She turns out never to have been in a shop before. She assumes the toys belong to another child and doesn’t want to take anything that the child would miss.
Pathos
There are moments of pathos. Eagar is present for three attempts on the tsar’s life. In one instance, a friendly priest she often greets in the grounds of one of the family’s rural retreats turns out to be radical armed with a bomb.
She knows her letters are being monitored, despite assurances to the contrary, but doesn’t object, as “there was never anything in them but family news of no interest to anyone but myself”.
She talks constantly of Ireland, most notably about Kilkee, Co Clare, which, based on the number of royals she meets who have holidayed there, must have been the St Tropez of the time. But to the Russians, she is English. When tensions between Britain and Russia ratchet up over the Russian-Japanese war, in 1905, she abruptly vacates her post and returns home.
On October 25th, 1917, in the symbolic climax of the Russian Revolution, the Red Army stormed the Winter Palace. Less than a year later, all seven members of the Romanov family were shot dead and buried in a shallow grave in Siberia.
Margaretta Eagar died in 1936, still grieving for the children she had adored.
