The Three Emperors Read online

  be of good effect for the peace of Europe and for the rest and quiet of my allies. I would have gone later if possible; but State interest goes before personal feelings, and the fate which sometimes hangs over nations does not wait till the etiquette of court mournings has been fulfilled. I hope and trust that much good will come of the proposed meeting, as I deem it necessary that monarchs should meet often and confer together to look out for dangers which threaten the monarchical principle from democratical and republican parties … It is far better that we Emperors keep firm together.

  Nor was Wilhelm feeling amiable. A month later in a speech, he rebuked “those people who have the audacity to maintain that my father was willing to part with what he … gained on the battlefield.” This was a reference to Edward’s suggestion at his father’s funeral that Fritz had been considering returning Alsace-Lorraine to the French. “We who knew him so well cannot quietly tolerate, even for a single moment, such an insult to his memory … we would rather sacrifice our 18 battle corps and our 42 millions of inhabitants on the field of battle than surrender a single stone.”36 Wilhelm was becoming famous for his forceful speeches.

  From Berlin the British ambassador, Sir Edward Malet, reported that “the Emperor” was said to be increasingly “anti-English” and leaning “towards Russia”—though Bismarck was said to be entirely well disposed towards Britain. “I am anxious to place on record that I believe this assertion to be unfounded,”37 the ambassador added. He was entirely correct. It had been Bismarck who had suggested the visit to Russia. Wilhelm’s personal quarrels with his English relations might be the talk of the Berlin and London courts, but his attitude towards Russia was far more hostile. Barely six weeks before his accession he had sent the chancellor a memo proposing a pre-emptive strike on Russia. He had been listening to his old political ally General Waldersee—the chief proponent of an attack on Russia, who had been stirring with stories of Russian troop movements on the border and Russian attacks on Bulgaria—and had succumbed to the old Prussian fears of invasion. Bismarck’s long, exasperated reply warned Wilhelm that if anyone found out the soon-to-be kaiser was advocating war against the advice of his chancellor, international confidence in the German government would collapse. Somewhat abashed, Wilhelm had backed down. But when he became kaiser, he promoted Waldersee to chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Bismarck was soon receiving reports that the Russians considered the new kaiser worryingly anti-Russian.

  Bismarck understood as almost no one else that Germany was caught in an awkward eternal triangle with Russia and Austria-Hungary, its other imperial neighbour. Those two empires were increasingly bitter rivals in eastern Europe; Bismarck was convinced that Germany needed to be on good terms with both. But it was like walking a tightrope. Austria-Hungary, ruled over by the Emperor Franz Joseph von Hapsburg, the latest scion of one of the longest-reigning royal dynasties in Europe, was territorially the dominant force in central Europe, a state comprising 50 million people from about a dozen nations and many different ethnic groups. But in power terms it was regarded as an empire on the way down. Within its borders a dozen nascent nationalist movements were threatening to pull it apart. Respect for the inscrutable, irreproachably correct, dutiful and patient emperor Franz Joseph, now in the fortieth year of his reign, was increasingly cited as the only thing holding the different groups—among them Croats, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians and Ukrainians—together. Though he presented himself as an autocratic monarch with one of the most stiffly hierarchical courts in Europe, Franz Joseph had kept the empire together through a series of peaceful compromises which had turned him into a constitutional one.

  The empire had been further weakened by the loss of Italy after 1848, and Bismarck himself had sent it into eclipse by kicking it out of Germany in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. But Bismarck—always sensitive to Germany’s geographical vulnerability—nevertheless saw Austria as an important bolster and ally against Russia and France, whose politicians made periodic demands for revenge for Alsace-Lorraine. In 1879 Germany and Austria had signed a defensive alliance. At the same time Germany needed to keep Russia friendly because of its proximity, its potential for causing chaos in eastern Europe, and the absolute need to keep it from going anywhere near France, which Bismarck was determined to keep isolated. The problem was, Austria and Russia had become implacable rivals over who had influence in the Balkans, and dealing with the two—allying with Austria, placating Russia, trying to keep peace in central Europe and not being caught doing either—had become increasingly difficult. Now talk in the German army of attacks on Russia was starting to be backed up by the Pan-German movement, whose traditional arguments for the unification of all Germanic peoples were beginning to take on an expansionist, racial dimension, insisting that Germans had a God-given right to dominate central Europe, and that the Slavs—of which Russia was the largest nation by far—were the Germans’ natural enemies, and degenerate to boot. In 1887, in an attempt to bring the two countries closer, Bismarck had signed an absolutely secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, by which each country promised benevolent neutrality should the other go to war, and Germany additionally pledged to back Russia’s claims in Bulgaria and to support it should it “need” to take Constantinople. Simultaneously, however, Bismarck had also secretly brokered an agreement between Austria, England and Italy, one of the consequences of which was that—with no visible signs of German encouragement—Britain agreed to bring its naval muscle to bear to prevent Russia from making any gains in the Balkans and the Ottoman empire.

  Despite his hostility to Russia, Wilhelm was thrilled by the idea of visiting St. Petersburg. It was the site of his great diplomatic triumph four years before—he’d impressed the tsar and almost managed to bring Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary together. Diplomacy was regarded as the grandest and most senior of the political arts—the field of kings and the highest aristocracy—and carried out behind closed doors. Wilhelm believed that it should be conducted through personal relationships between monarchs. His mother had passed on his grandfather Albert’s notion that solidarity between monarchs was the way to preserve strong ties between countries, and he was convinced it would be a triumphant justification of the innate superiority of monarchs and the “monarchical principle,” a repudiation of the claims of democrats and republicans. Wilhelm liked to talk of a “magic tie uniting38 him with all other anointed heads. It was a supernatural, a mythic sacrament … the mystic fellowship of monarchs was heaven-ordained.” The problem was that more than ever before, monarchs—Wilhelm among them—were increasingly having to weigh the claims of their exclusive supra-national club against the demands of their countries’ national interests.

  He arrived at St. Petersburg in the imperial yacht Hohenzollern at the end of July 1888, accompanied by Herbert von Bismarck, with strict instructions to avoid controversy: the visit must be “friendly, neighbourly,39 politically disinterested.” He attended a Romanov family dinner at which the tsar and Nicholas threw wet towels at each other; he toasted Alexander in Russian; the two emperors talked privately. The tsar told the German ambassador that Wilhelm’s “frank, guileless40 character” and “his mere presence dispelled much of the artificially created mistrust of him.” Even the tsarina, whom the German embassy regarded as indefatigably hostile to Germany, had been “enchantingly natural.”41 Herbert von Bismarck was delighted with his informal audience with the tsar, who wore an old grey jacket. Alexander proposed that the two countries collaborate to combat revolutionary tendencies, and told him how relieved he was that Wilhelm was on the throne rather than Fritz. He also asked how Wilhelm was getting on with his English grandmother—even the Russians knew they hadn’t been on good terms. Bismarck had made some pointedly42 anti-British comments and the tsar had laughed uproariously.

  “Rarely before43 have the hosts and the visitors enjoyed each other’s company more,” the German ambassador, von Schweinitz, wrote breathlessly to Bismarck. The emperors’ parting had been an “unforgetta
bly sad moment for everyone.” “The Russians were44 never so conciliatory, so humble, so compliant,” another German diplomat wrote to Fritz Holstein, Bismarck’s senior adviser at the Foreign Office.

  Within a few weeks more sober—and realistic—evaluations emerged. It was quietly acknowledged by both sides’ foreign ministers that personally the tsar and the kaiser were “still not very close,”45 and seemed not to have much to say to each other. But at least peace was in the air.

  In early October Edward discovered that he and Wilhelm would be visiting Vienna simultaneously. He wrote to tell Wilhelm and to propose they meet. He received no reply, and when he arrived in Vienna—bringing his spectacularly unflattering German Pomeranian Hussars uniform, in honour of his nephew—it was to be told by an exceptionally embarrassed Austrian foreign minister that he must leave the city, as the kaiser had just informed Emperor Franz Joseph that he would rather there were no other royals46 present during his visit. It was painfully obvious that the gesture was aimed at Edward—a piece of fantastically calibrated rudeness emphasizing that Wilhelm was now the senior royal, and hitting at Bertie’s sense of himself as popular guest and family conciliator. He thought he understood his nephew and had been sending his sister advice on how to handle him. “Nothing could have been47 nicer than his manner towards me …” he recalled incredulously of seeing Wilhelm at Fritz’s funeral in Berlin. “We parted the best of friends.” Edward was so astonished that he couldn’t believe it and wrote to his nephew again, arranging for the British military attaché in Berlin, Colonel Swaine—the man whom two years before Wilhelm had flattered into revealing British military secrets which he had then passed on to the Russians—to deliver it. The kaiser refused to receive Swaine, and when the military attaché came upon Wilhelm the next day by chance, the emperor turned his back on him. Swaine was so upset that he immediately requested a transfer from Berlin. Edward was taken shooting in Romania by Archduke Rudolf, Franz Joseph’s son and heir, who detested Wilhelm’s brash manner, his autocratic views and his brusque way of expressing them, and was probably jealous of him too. It is his unflattering reports in the Austrian government archives that tell us of Wilhelm’s Viennese sexual dalliances in the early 1880s.* The kaiser arrived in Vienna, and was soon—Rudolf was pleased to pass on to Edward—laughingly telling his friends that he much preferred his uncle’s rooms (i.e., the city he’d vacated) to his company.48

  Queen Victoria immediately demanded an explanation from the German government. Bismarck replied with a long point-by-point letter to Salisbury, accusing the Prince of Wales of a series of rudenesses and faux pas: principally that he had claimed49 that Fritz had planned to return Schleswig-Holstein and Alsace-Lorraine, that he had taken advantage of the chancellor’s “amiability” to “force” him to agree to recompensing the Duke of Cumberland, and that he treated Wilhelm “as an uncle treats a nephew, instead of recognizing that he was an Emperor.” He added it had not been appropriate for the two men to meet in Vienna because Germany was in the midst of delicate negotiations with Russia, whose tsar would have been “irritated.”

  Evidently Wilhelm still harboured angry feelings towards the British royal family, and that anger resonated with wider German sensitivities about English superiority and lack of respect: the English family’s mistreatment of the kaiser quickly became a mantra. “The Germans all say50 that the English royal family never treat the Emperor Wilhelm as a sovereign, but like a little boy,” the wife of the British ambassador in Vienna wrote in her diary. Bismarck was happy to air these grievances—they kept Wilhelm’s mother Vicky unpopular in Germany and they reminded Wilhelm he needed to be on good terms with Russia.

  “As regarding51 the Prince’s not treating his nephew as Emperor,” the queen spluttered, “this really is too vulgar and too absurd, as well as untrue, almost to be believed … To pretend that he is to be treated in private as well as in public as ‘His Imperial Majesty’ is perfect madness! … If he has such notions, he better never come here. The Queen will not swallow this affront.” She added that her own sources had confirmed that Wilhelm had set out to provoke and humiliate Bertie deliberately, telling Crown Prince Rudolf that if his uncle wrote him a very kind letter “he might perhaps answer it! … All this shows a very unhealthy and unnatural state of mind; and he must be made to feel that his grandmother and uncle will not stand such insolence.” Relations between the respective governments should not be affected, she conceded, but “with such a hotheaded, conceited, and wrong-headed young man, devoid of all feeling, this may at ANY moment become impossible.”

  Salisbury was increasingly exasperated by what he saw as a family squabble getting out of hand. He told the German ambassador, Count Hatzfeldt, that Wilhelm would not be welcome in England—though he added emphatically that “discussions of this kind52 on personal questions, whatever we might feel upon them, would not affect the general policy of the two nations.” Hatzfeldt, an experienced and respected diplomat—Bismarck called him “the best horse in the diplomatic stable”—simply did not dare to pass the first part of the message on to his German masters. This was less unusual than it sounds, especially in Germany, where everyone was scared of Bismarck. “From the hints53 he let drop,” Lord Salisbury told the queen, with some relish, “… the young Emperor was very difficult to manage, that Prince Bismarck was in a great perplexity, and his temper had consequently become more than usually unbearable.” But he also asked the queen to cancel Vicky’s upcoming visit to England as a gesture of peace. “It would be54 impossible, heartless and cruel to stop my poor broken-hearted daughter from coming to her mother for peace, protection and comfort,” she protested. Politically, it would have been a sensible move; personally, it was unkind. Vicky was desperately unhappy, abandoned by former allies now looking to Wilhelm for favour, and the continuing victim of the Bismarcks’ vicious whispering campaign.* The queen, however, couldn’t resist turning her daughter’s visit into an ostentatious retaliatory snub to the kaiser. She treated her like a visiting head of state: Edward met her in the royal yacht; the English court and the entire German embassy staff, including Hatzfeldt, were summoned and presented to her. The queen let Salisbury know that she wanted no communications on this or any other royal matter to be sent to Wilhelm and the German court.

  This was not good news for Salisbury. Politically, Britain needed Germany’s goodwill. Germany was a key supporter of Britain’s controversial occupation of Egypt—at a time when France was trying to harness international opposition against it. In an attempt to counter the potential political fallout of the family feud, he sent British warships to support a German blockade of the Sultanate of Zanzibar on the East African coast.* The alleged reason for the blockade was to stop an illegal trade of slaves and arms. In reality, it was to pressure the sultan into taking back the German East Africa Company, which had been kicked out of Zanzibar after a local revolt against its heavy-handed treatment of the natives. The German Foreign Office had asked for support, hinting that if it wasn’t forthcoming, Germany might rethink its position on Egypt. Salisbury saw it as an inexpensive gesture of friendliness at a moment when it was needed. The reasons he gave to the queen were a little different, though. Britain must send ships, he told her, because of the “extreme untrustworthiness” of the governments in Berlin and Rome (which also had interests in Zanzibar). He felt sorry for the sultan, he told her, because German colonialists were famously “brutal.”55 As the first year of Wilhelm’s reign drew to a close, the hint of a threat and the marked hostility of Wilhelm made Salisbury feel distinctly pessimistic about the future of Anglo-German relations.

  It’s hard to locate the precise source of Wilhelm’s dislike of Edward. He was more than just a proxy for the queen—whom it is true Wilhelm could not have directly insulted. The kaiser’s feelings went back at least to 1884, when he had accused his “false and intriguing”56 uncle of nefarious plots and double-dealing in his letters to Tsar Alexander III. At the time, Edward had come to Berlin to convince the ol
d kaiser to allow Wilhelm’s sister Moretta to marry Sandro of Battenberg, the match Wilhelm so angrily opposed. A year later he’d summoned a furious Wilhelm to Hungary to inform him Queen Victoria refused to invite him to England. It may well have dated back further. Edward’s slightly louche, relaxed, hedonistic, civilian lifestyle seemed degenerate compared to the austere, puritanical, martial identity Wilhelm wanted to project. And yet he was jealous of his uncle, wanted his approval and resented the fact. He saw Edward, who was so obviously imperfect, effortlessly receiving his mother’s approval. He envied—though he would never have admitted it—Edward’s great popularity in Europe. It wasn’t just in Paris that Edward cut a dash—even in Berlin fashionable young men wanted to copy the Prince of Wales’s suits. Wilhelm craved and aspired to the kind of approval that Bertie seemed to attract effortlessly. Although the world talked about his masterfulness, his authority, his promise, he envied Bertie’s easiness. It scratched at him. It was all tied up, of course, with Edward being British, which brought out confused feelings of inferiority, desire and anger. He longed for Bertie to show approval of him—years later his best friend Philipp zu Eulenburg would observe crossly that he fluttered “round fat King Edward57 like a leaf in the wind round a tower.” All royals minded about their status, but Wilhelm seemed to mind more than most. Slights—real or imagined—touched a nerve that sent him into violent retaliation. He complained that at his father’s sickbed his mother had treated him like a dog; that Edward didn’t treat him like an emperor; and a few months later he would moan that Bismarck treated him like a schoolboy.