On 3 May 1915, Kramář told the Agrarian deputy in the "Reichsrat" Josef Dürich who was about to go abroad to seek Allied support for independence that he should seek a "great Slav empire" under the House of Romanov in which Bohemia would be an autonomous kingdom ruled by some Romanov grand duke. During the First World War the Austrian authorities charged Kramář with treason, tried him and ultimately sentenced him to 15 years of hard labour. Kramář was arrested and charged with high treason on 21 May 1915. His imprisonment acted however to galvanise Czech nationalist opinion against the Austrian state. Kramář's imprisonment sidelined him for much of World War I, and allowed his rival Masaryk who was in London at the time to become the public face of the Czech independence movement. On 3 June 1916, Kramář was convicted of treason and sentenced to death. In March 1917, when waiting on death row in prison, Kramář heard of the February Revolution in Russia, which marked the end of his dream that after the war a Romanov would sit on the throne of a restored Bohemian kingdom. Kramář's cellmate Alois Rašín remarked "We are finished!". The new Austrian Emperor Karl I released Kramář as part of a general political amnesty in 1917.