The Majority Ceremony of Tsesarevich Nicholas, 1884
by Greg King
On May 6/18, 1884, a ceremony took place in the Winter Palace that would be the last of its kind. On that day, the future Nicholas II turned sixteen. By tradition, on reaching what was considered the age of majority, the Emperor’s direct heir pledged allegiance to the Sovereign, to the Russian Empire and its laws, and to its military.
That tradition, though, was just fifty years old. In 1834, Nicholas I introduced the majority ceremony to mark the sixteenth birthday of the future Alexander II; it soon became established ritual for the male members of the Imperial House. In 1797, Emperor Paul had written a set of laws that governed the lives of members of the Romanov Dynasty. According to these, a Tsesarevich was considered of age at sixteen, able to take the throne if circumstances demanded it. Only three Romanovs had majority ceremonies at the age of sixteen: the future Alexander II; Tsesarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich, Alexander II’s eldest son who died in 1865; and the future Nicholas II. For ordinary Grand Dukes, the majority ceremony took place when they reached the age of twenty.1
Nicholas I conceived the ceremony as a visible representation of dynastic continuity and an expression of autocratic power sanctioned by divine blessing. It formally introduced the Heir to his future subjects while providing assurances that he would dedicate his life to serving Russia. Statesman Michael Speransky, who composed the oath in 1834, explained that the ceremony was meant to “give religious sanction” to the Tsesarevich’s future role, writing that it was “an act of consciences and religion, by which he who vows summons God in witness to the sincerity of his promise and submits himself to His wrath and vengeance in case of violation.”2
The ceremony in 1834 established the pattern that would be repeated by successive heirs when they reached the age of sixteen. The elements included a Great Procession through the Parade Halls of the Winter Palace before a specially invited audience of officials, courtiers, aristocrats, and the military; an oath, part civil and part religious, taken in the Palace’s Cathedral before a smaller group of witnesses in which the Tsesarevich pledged to obey the Emperor, follow the country’s laws, and defend the Empire against all enemies; a military oath taken in the Hall of the Order of St. George; and a celebratory banquet for hundreds of guests.
In 1834, the ceremony took place on Sunday, April 22. It was no coincidence that this also happened to be Russian Orthodox Easter. Purely religious celebrations thus fused with a display of autocratic power. Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow designed the ceremony, which he also carried out with the assistance of high-ranking clergy and members of the Holy Synod. Tsesarevich Alexander was nervous: he complained that it was “too early” for him to assume any public role, and his agitated state was apparent as he took the oath in the palace cathedral. Reading aloud from the text, he faltered several times, breaking into tears as he reached the end. His parents shared his obvious emotion: as soon as Alexander completed the oath, Nicholas I and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna – also in tears – rushed forward and embraced him. The ceremony in the cathedral concluded with a Te Deum and a 301-gun salute fired from the cannon of the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul across the Neva.3
Once the religious service was over, the procession moved to the Hall of the Order of St. George, where representatives from various regiments, cadets from military academies, and high-ranking officers waited to witness the Tsesarevich give his second oath, this one to Russia’s Armed Services. The following day young Alexander received congratulations from members of the diplomatic corps, and that night a state banquet was given in his honor, with toasts marked by fanfares of trumpets and salutes from the guns of the Fortress.4
In 1859, the ceremony was repeated for Alexander II’s eldest son and heir, Tsesarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich on his sixteenth birthday. After Nicholas’s premature death in 1865, his brother Alexander became Tsesarevich, and went through the majority ceremony shortly. Barely three months had passed since Nicholas’s death, and the event was shrouded in the continued mourning. Aware that he lacked his late brother’s intellect and preparation for the throne, the new Tsesarevich Alexander, according to Prince Vladimir Meshchersky, “read the oath in an excited but loud and clear voice.”5 At the end everyone again dissolved in tears, the ordinary emotion of the moment now weighted with sadness and loss. “I have little faith in the future,” Empress Marie Alexandrovna confided to her sister-in-law. “How difficult it was when Nixa [the late Tsesarevich Nicholas] at sixteen took the same oath. Will this brother really replace him?”6
Perhaps memories of Alexander III’s discomfort lingered when, in 1884, it came time to plan the majority ceremony for his son Tsesarevich Nicholas. Just as people had doubted the future Alexander III’s abilities and worried over his coming reign, so, too, did the Emperor doubt his young son and heir. Perhaps this led him to alter the usual ceremonial. In a rather insulting move, Alexander instructed his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nicholas de Giers, to warn members of the diplomatic corps that the usual ceremonies would be abbreviated so that the young Tsesarevich would not be publicly embarrassed.7
Nicholas dreaded the coming ceremony. In an essay about the experience, he described it in stark terms. There was no reflection on the larger meaning of the impending oaths: his only concern was his personal discomfort. To some extent, this reflected the way in which Nicholas had been raised. Alexander III regarded court ceremonial as an unwelcome intrusion into his daily life: he resented such obligations, and he passed this feeling on to his eldest son. Nerves might well be expected and even sympathized with, but Nicholas was more concerned with the inconvenience involved. “I found myself in some kind of languorous expectation,” he wrote, “which prevented me from giving myself completely to any pleasure, lesson, or anything else. I would have been very glad to postpone my majority to my twentieth birthday.”8
On the morning of May 6/18, as Nicholas marked his sixteenth birthday, hundreds of specially invited guests began arriving at the Winter Palace. Nearly all would be excluded from witnessing either the civil or military oaths. They would line the Parade Halls through which the processions would pass, their uniforms and court dresses forming a colorful backdrop to the unfolding pageant. Rows of chamberlains and footmen, attired in state livery, opened the procession. The grand masters of ceremonies came next, closely followed, in ascending rank, by the principal dignitaries of the court and members of the military suite. The grand marshal of the imperial court, walking backward and holding his gilded staff of office, preceded the imperial party. Alexander III and Empress Marie Feodorovna appeared; with them walked the Tsesarevich, attired in the dark blue uniform of an Ataman in the Imperial Cossack Guards Regiment. Behind them came members of the Imperial Family and foreign royal guests, among them the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was representing his grandfather.
Passing through the Parade Halls, the procession finally reached the Rococo Palace Cathedral, its white and gold interior glittering in shafts of sunlight from the tall windows. Metropolitan Seraphim stood before the iconostasis, flanked by high-ranking clergy and members of the Holy Synod. Military officials and courtiers were arrayed along the sides, watching as the Emperor and Empress led their son to a small altar that had been erected directly beneath the dome. The Metropolitan presented them with a jeweled cross to kiss and sprinkled them with Holy Oil before Nicholas approached the altar.9 Placing his right hand on a Bible, he read the text of the oath:
“In the name of God Almighty before his Holy Gospel I swear and promise His Imperial Majesty, My All-Gracious Sovereign Parent, to faithfully and without personal thought serve and obey him in all things, not sparing my last drop of blood to defend His Imperial Majesty; to defend the strength of the Autocratic Power and the legitimate rights and powers on which it rests; to the best of my ability to promote service to His Imperial Majesty and the State; and to undertake, as member of the Imperial House, to abide by all decrees on the inheritance of the Throne and maintain order in the Family institution as outlined in the Fundamental Laws of the Empire; and to preserve all the laws of the Empires in their full strength and immune from change, recognizing the terrible judgment before God and this Court to which I will answer.”10
At the end of the oath, the gathered clergy led a Te Deum and prayed for the Tsesarevich. Nicholas later admitted that he had tried to remain calm but, “as the moment to read the oath came closer, my heartbeat louder and louder…. I felt that all eyes were fixed on my back and that all gazes penetrated through it.”11
After the ceremony was over, the procession left the Cathedral and moved to the Hall of the Order of St. George for the military oath. Hundreds of military officials lined the room, waiting to witness the Tsesarevich as he recited the Oath of the Russian Army. Accompanied by the standard bearer of his chief military regiment, Nicholas ascended the dais, grasped the regimental standard in his left hand, and read the oath. He promised to obey all military orders and laws; to oppose all enemies of the Emperor and of the Russian Empire; and to act courageously in all military actions. After receiving congratulations from representatives of the various imperial regiments, Nicholas joined as the crowd sang the national anthem, its conclusion marked by the booming of cannons fired from the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul across the Neva.12
“I am quite happy that it all went so well,” Nicholas recorded in his diary. He spent the evening dining with his parents, “which in the past we have only been allowed to do on rare occasions.”13
The following day Nicholas received members of the diplomatic corps at the Anichkov Palace. He regarded this as even more of an unwelcome ordeal. “This trying exercise,” he confided to his diary, “lasted forty minutes. All the ambassadors and emissaries presented their staffs to me. It was necessary to speak with these people. But I quickly managed to get away from them by simply bowing and leaving!”14 He seemed unconcerned about causing offense: his abrupt flight from the reception was an ominous taste of things to come.
That night, Nicholas returned to the Winter Palace, where a gala dinner for 2,500 guests was held in the immense Nicholas Hall. In addition to the Imperial Family, members of the Russian Court, the Diplomatic Corps, government officials, and representatives from the Armed Forces and the Orthodox Church, the guests included a number of foreign royal relatives who had come to St. Petersburg especially to attend the service. Round tables, draped in white cloth, each held twelve guests, their place settings marked with elaborately illuminated menus decorated with imperial monograms and a pastoral view of an isolated Orthodox church perched at the side of a tranquil river. The fifteen-course menu included lobster bisque, stuffed trout in a truffle sauce, and roasted woodcock with foie-gras.15
Alexander III made his son an adjutant, and Nicholas received more than a dozen orders and awards from foreign sovereigns and states. In addition to the Order of the Black Eagle presented by the future Wilhelm II on behalf of his grandfather Kaiser Wilhelm I, Nicholas received the Order of the Elephant from his grandfather King Christian IX of Denmark; the Order of Ludwig from Grand Duke Ludwig IV of Hesse; and the Royal Hungarian Order of St. Stephen from Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary. King Ludwig II of Bavaria named Nicholas a Knight in the Order of St. Hubert, and Leopold I of Belgium sent the order that carried his name. The Tsesarevich became a Knight in the Order of St. Alexander of Bulgaria; his uncle King George I of Greece bestowed on him the Order of the Savior. He also received the Order of the Crown of Württemberg; the Order of the Star of Romania; the Order of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem from Pope Leo XIII; the Légion d'honneur from France and the Osman Order from the Ottoman Empire; and three Italian awards, the Order of the Holy Annunciation; the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus; and the Order of the Italian Crown.
In Russia, the Imperial Mint issued a commemorative bronze medal marking the event. One side bore the inscription, “The Majority of the Heir to the Throne, May 6, 1884” circling Nicholas’s monogram beneath an Imperial Crown. On the opposite side, another inscription noting the date of Nicholas’s birth was flanked by another crown and clusters of engraved oak leaves.
A week after the ceremony, Ivan Aksakov described the significance of the event in an article entitled “On the Coming of Age of the Sovereign Heir Nicholas Alexandrovich:”
“On May 6, the whole of Russia solemnly and joyfully celebrated the day of the lawful coming of age of the Heir to the Russian Throne, who took the oath of allegiance to his Sovereign Father, and to the service of the Emperor and Russia. By these ceremonies, by these public rites, a gratifying consciousness of the strength and inviolability of the foundations of our state system is firmly established in the Russian souls, and in them is the pledge of the prosperous and peaceful civil development of our vast country. A firm order of the throne is a great blessing under the monarchical form of government, and Russia, after many vicissitudes, finally prevailed according to good in the law of April 5, 1797, on the Institution on the Imperial Family, included in the number of the Fundamental Laws of the Empire in the first volume of our Codes. From that time on – and its is easy to understand why – future Emperors have sworn by solemn oaths to observe and preserve this law as the cornerstone of the entire state edifice. One of our Russian poets, greeting the birth of this future autocrat, expressed his wish in inspired verse: ‘May He, in His high rank, not forget, the holiest of ranks: man.’ No matter how often and incompetently this expression is repeated, no matter how falsely its meaning is interpreted, it must remain indispensable, and it is precisely the Russian command for everyone who is called by the law to the greatest of earthly services, Imperial service. In this expression dwells the eternal light of truth, and not only the universal truth, but also the particular truth, which is more important to us and finds its application in our land. It is not this element of humanity that seems to be such a necessary condition of the political system as it is in our fatherland. For the supreme power in Russia is entrusted not to a parliament, not to any other collective institution, not to a soulless mechanism, but to a living person, a human being. And the more unlimited this power is, the less it can be thought of as anything but the expression of a human soul and heart. This is our guarantee which does not exist in other countries. In Russia, the people's relationship to the Emperor is based not on a contract, not on an agreement, but on the fear of God, on the faith in the sanctity of the human conscience and soul. Such attitudes are also in line with the entire moral outlook and the way of life of our people. Acknowledging last year, on the occasion of the triumph of the Coronation [of Alexander III], the need for precise and clear formal law for civil society, the Russian people preserve in themselves a constant striving for moral and higher truth. We are not enslaved in our lives to a dead state of crude formalism; truth lies in our political system which rests on the personal conscience of the ruler as enlightened by Christ. This is the essence of the union between Emperor and People. They share a single divine moral life reflecting truth and conscience, one judged by God according to His Supreme Law. Only under such conditions can the heaviest of gifts be bestowed on one man, the gift of sovereignty over men, and it is given in Russia with the consecration of the people’s prayers in the name of God and in the gear of God. This is why Russian autocracy fulfills our national interest: any foreign alternative is inconceivable in the Russian land, either in the literal or in the figurative sense. It is in this sense that the message of the Russian poet, which is now neglected by some, must be understood, and may it penetrate deep into the heart of the Tsesarevich! It goes without saying that to be a man and a Christian, to revere the sanctity of the human calling over one’s subjects, does not mean to neglect the duties of royal rank, does not mean to turn to sentimental pulp. Quite the opposite. Just as truth and mercy do not contradict the concept but only complement each other, so humanity in a sovereign does not abolish either firmness, energy, or will, which is strict and formidable for evildoers who violate the peace entrusted to him by God. He must be resolute and persistent in relation to deceitful and negligent servants, and unswerving in the implementation of good statesmanship. The Sovereign’s humanity means that he understands all the needs of his people, broadens his horizons, and sanctifies and enlightens the onset of his power. This is a personal principal belong solely to the ruler of the Russian State, where the Emperor is the country and, as a man of initiative and direction leads his people to the fulfillment of their historical calling across the world. The solemn day of May 6 marked the beginning of the Tsesarevich’s service to the Russian Emperor and to Russia, and the beginning of his advanced studies despite his youthful age. In truth for His Imperial Highness service now means learning….Beautiful are the words of the prayer lifted up by the Church to God on the significant day of May 6, which we will repeat here from the fullness of our hearts: ‘Raise him up to be a perfect man, that an enlightened mind may reign in him through Thy light, and a pure heart over every lust, that so that Thy people may have dominion over them.’”16
We don’t know if Nicholas read this article, but in his reign, he would certainly take its message to heart, clinging to the Autocracy with a religious conviction that many found infuriating.
The ceremonies of May 6, 1884, would never be repeated. Although Grand Dukes would duly swear their oaths on their twentieth birthdays, never again would a direct Heir to the Throne make such declarations. Nicholas’s son Tsesarevich Alexei would have repeated the ceremony on July 30, 1920, when he reached the age of sixteen. Revolution, abdication, and murder ensured that this was never to be.
Source Notes
1. Wortman, 1:357.
2. Ibid., 357, 361-62.
3. Ibid., 351, 357-60.
4. Ibid., 361.
5. Meshchersky, in Chernukha, 62.
6. Wortman, 2:170.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 2:171.
9. Novoe Vremya, May 7, 1884.
10. Ibid.
11. Wortman, 2:172.
12. Wortman, 1:361; Wortman, 2:173.
13. Tsesarevich Nicholas, Diary entry of May 6, 1884, in GARF, F. 601, Op. 1, D. 219.
14. Ibid., May 7, 1884.
15. Vernova, 212; Timms, 420.
16. Rus, May 15, 1884.
Bibliography
Meshchersky, in V. G, Chernukh, editor. Memuary, dnevniki, pis'ma Aleksandra III, edited by V. G. Chernukh, St. Petersburg: Pushkina, 2001.
Novoe Vremya.
Rus.
Timms, Robert, editor. Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family of Tsarist Russia. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998.
Tsesarevich Nicholas, diary for 1884, in the State Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF), F. 601, Op. 1, D. 219.
Vernova, Nina. Treasures of Russia: From the Peterhof Palaces of the Tsars. New York: Forbes Custom, 1999.
Wortman, Richard S. Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, Volume I: From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
___ Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, Volume 2: From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.