Princess Olga Romanoff on The Crown - and its depiction of her ancestors’ execution

Princess Olga Romanoff is a third cousin to King Charles. Photo / Getty Images

If you can imagine sitting down with a member of the Royal family to watch an episode of The Crown, you might think you’d be treated to some live commentary on the various inaccuracies and over-dramatised retellings of their own history. Sitting at the kitchen table at Provender House, the home of Princess Olga Romanoff, my experience is a close second.

It’s been three hours since the latest series of The Crown dropped on Netflix, taking us into the 1990s. Olga and I are watching the sixth episode, which tells the story of the brutal execution of her ancestors, the Tsar and his family, by the Bolsheviks in 1918, and the campaign that played out to have their remains excavated. Olga is the most senior member of the Tsar’s descendants, who are now scattered across the globe. Her father, Prince Andrew, was the Tsar’s nephew, who escaped on a British warship in 1919.

The episode sees a newly elected Boris Yeltsin visit London. At dinner at Buckingham Palace, the Russian president asks the Queen if she might come to his country for a state visit. The Queen reminds him of her family’s painful Russian history. Her relatives’ remains, she points out, have never been found and given the “decent burial” they deserve. Our Royal family is related to the Romanovs through the late Prince Philip. Through his father, he was the grand-nephew of Alexandra, the last Tsarina, and through his mother, he was a cousin to the Russian royal family.

Olga, who is a third cousin to King Charles, tends to find any retelling of what happened to her ancestors maddening. She doesn’t watch dramatisations as a rule. “They’re always inaccurate and make me want to scream and throw something at the TV.”

She is glad, though, that The Crown is covering the story. For years, Olga, plus her daughter Alex, and other members of the Romanov Family Association, have been campaigning to bury the remains of two of the Tsar’s children, whose bones were identified 10 years after the rest of the family in 2007. Alexei and Maria, just 13 and 19 when they were killed, are being held by the Russian Orthodox Church, in Moscow. “They are, I believe, in Tupperware,” says Olga.

Tsar Nicolas II with his family.

“Prince Michael [of Kent] has tried. I, on behalf of the Romanov Family Association, wrote letters to Putin. I’m not sure I ever got a letter back. But we did hear on the grapevine that he would more than likely let us have the bones back. Meanwhile, we’ve got the church who doesn’t believe it’s them. It’s become a power game.”

The episode tells the story of the excavation and identification of the other members of the family. DNA samples were provided by the Duke of Edinburgh, Olga’s cousin and her half-brother. Overshadowing the episode is a twist that Olga says is fabrication: that the family could have been saved if it weren’t for Queen Mary, the late Queen’s grandmother, who denied Lloyd George’s offer to send a ship to rescue them.

“There was no one reason why they didn’t come. There were a few secret attempts to rescue them. Off the train on their way to Tobolsk, and when they got to Tobolsk. Once they got to Ekaterinburg, that was it. But they were secret missions by the British army.”

Not long ago, Olga received a call from a man whose grandfather was on one of these missions. “He said, ‘Don’t believe everything you read’. There was a spy, a mole in MI6. Everything had to be worded in such a way that it said one thing but meant another. I don’t think Mary was the one. She might have made a remark, but that wouldn’t have stopped them.”

In any case, Olga says, “Why couldn’t the Danes or the Germans have rescued them?”

Olga’s father “never blamed [King] George. He never said a bad thing about George. He never criticised them. He thought, I think, that they could have been rescued, but not once they got to Ekaterinburg.”

Prince Philip with Queen Elizabeth II on their honeymoon in 1947. Through his father, Philip was the grand-nephew of Alexandra, the last Tsarina, and through his mother, he was a cousin to the Russian royal family. Picture / Getty Images

The episode flashes back to 1918, Ipatiev House, in Ekaterinburg, where the Tsar’s family were kept under house arrest. Olga rolls her eyes at the sight of a stately home with ornate rooms. “They weren’t in comfortable beds. The place was very basic, I mean the lavatories and the bathroom didn’t have doors so that their captors could watch them taking a c***. They wanted to humiliate them as much as possible.”

In the show, a soldier bangs at the door and shouts they’re to get dressed, they’re being moved to safety. “Cousin George,” the Tsar gasps. “I told you he wouldn’t let us down.” The Tsarina hugs him and tearfully wakes the children.

“Absolute rubbish,” states Olga. “They were moved very quickly. They were all woken up and herded downstairs into the cellar. And just shot. And the ones that didn’t die quickly were bayoneted.

“They wouldn’t have had this conversation and they didn’t necessarily think George would rescue them in Ekaterinburg.”

She sighs. “In one of the girls’ diaries there was something about the fact she knew this was it. She felt that this was the end. Because they were treated quite harshly.”

Having watched past this point, I know the next scene shows the family being shot in the head and stabbed repeatedly. I tell Olga what’s coming.

“Do they line them up in a cellar?” Yes, I tell her, they are told they need to take a photograph to prove they are alive and moments later, soldiers with rifles come in. There’s a pause, then they take aim. “But the guns were already there,” says Olga, exasperated. “They came into the cellar and they saw the soldiers with the guns under their arms. They knew exactly… as soon as they entered the cellar they knew.”

I ask if she wants to continue. “Not really.”

At 72, Olga is still a force of nature. We talk over coffee next to the Aga – the only warm spot in the 13th-century house, she says – while she chastises her boisterous labrador, Angus. She agrees with calls to add a disclaimer at the start of episodes, reinforcing the series is a work of fiction. “It’s about to show things about King Charles and Camilla, lovely Camilla who I’ve always adored. And I think that’s in poor taste.”

She is a “huge admirer” of King Charles, for whom she was once touted as a possible bride. “I think he will do brilliantly. I mean, poor man, he’s been the longest-running Prince of Wales in history.”

Olga has spent most of her life out of the spotlight, but recently has appeared in documentaries about the Romanovs and even dabbled in reality television. She runs Provender House in Kent, where she grew up, as a kind of living monument to her family heritage. She shows groups around the paintings of the Romanovs that hang on the walls and the trunks on the landing from HMS Marlborough, the ship sent to rescue the remaining members of the Imperial family after the executions. Olga’s grandmother, Grand Duchess Xenia, came over on the Marlborough, along with her “modest” collection of Fabergé.

“When they first came over, [they were] given a little place which is rather famous now,” she says, smiling mischievously, “called Frogmore Cottage.”

In the drawing room hangs a sweet portrait of a little boy in a sailor’s outfit. That’s the tsarevich, I’m told, Alexei. His picture hangs above one of Olga’s four-year-old grandson, Andrew. Two blue-eyed boys, one of whom never saw his 14th birthday.

Before Putin began the war in Ukraine, Olga says the tide looked to be turning on the family’s fight to have Alexei and Maria’s remains returned to them. “We were hoping to be able to bury the children on July 17, the anniversary of the murders. But then s*** hit the fan.”

Olga was last in Russia six years ago with Prince Michael for an anniversary of the murders. Before that, she attended the reburial of her great-grandmother, the Tsar’s mother, Maria Dagmar. “She would never ever recognise the fact that they’d been murdered. She always thought they escaped.”

So all those stories of Princess Anastasia? “Oh bulls***. No, we definitely buried her.”

Her great-grandmother’s reburial, in 2006, was extraordinary. “There was a bigger funeral for her, because she was so loved, than there was for Nicholas. The streets were lined with people.”

Imagining what happened to her ancestors is “ghastly”, she says. To Olga, this isn’t merely a story, it’s her family. It will be “a huge relief” she says, when they can finally bury the children.

“It’ll mean so much that they can all be together in heaven. And we can draw a line under it, hopefully with many lessons learnt.”