Prompted by Nothing Really: The Poor Old Romanovs

The Royal Navy was all ready, with Geo V's agreement, to go and blast some bits off a few Bolshies and save the Czar and his family but, because of the instability caused by the First World War; the rise of the union movements, and the Easter Rising of 1916 in Ireland, Georgie got cold feet and left the Romanovs to their fate. Some speculate that his then late elder brother, the Duke of Clarence, would have saved the Romanovs. I think that Georgie was a bit of a squirt for leaving them and that they could have been quite easily and quietly assimilated as quasi-landed gentry in the English shires - as others have been: Louis Napoleon and Prince Tula of [then] Siam - remember too that even Napoleon, as he awaited his fate in Plymouth Sound, pacing up and down on decks of HMS Bellerophon, wanted to be exiled in the Green and Pleasant Land, before he was bundled off to send his snuff orders to Fribourg & Treyer, at [i]Ye Sign of the Rasp and Crown[/i], Haymarket, from St Helena.

However, not all the Romanovs were wiped out because, in April 1919, HMS Marlborough did evacuate the Dowager Empress (Queen Alexandra's sister) and various members (including other senior members), of the family and Court and some of them did settle down in rural obscurity in various countries in exile, and their descendants live on.

Above is a photograph of HMS Marlborough, signed by some of those whom she saved.