The Three Emperors Read online

  Edward might well have been subtly denigrating of his nephew. He had been disgusted by Wilhelm’s unfilial behaviour, and it seems possible he knew about his letters58 to the Russian tsar. Now his amour propre had been dented. Given licence to acknowledge their rift, he was quick to show his hostility, ridiculing Wilhelm’s grand new imperial manner. “My illustrious nephew,” and “William the Great,” he called him. He told Vicky, “his conduct towards you is simply revolting,” and that he lacked “the feelings and usages of a gentleman … the time may come quicker than he expects when he will be taught that neither Germany nor Russia will stand an autocrat at the end of the 19th century.”59 The antipathy was fed by both men’s wives. Alexandra regarded Wilhelm as the epitome of a bumptious Prussian. “Oh he is a60 mad and conceited ass,” she wrote to George a few days after the Vienna incident, “who also says that Papa and Grandmama don’t treat him with proper respect as the Emperor of old and mighty Germany. But my hope is that pride will have a fall some day and won’t we rejoice then.” Dona found Bertie disgusting and immoral. The women didn’t like each other either: both their families had claims to the duchy of Schleswig-Holstein but had been on opposite sides during the Prussian-Danish stand-off over it in 1864, and the old rivalry still stirred.

  In the New Year of 1889 the Germans were suddenly all friendliness. First Bismarck suggested a formal alliance against France, their mutual enemy.

  Then a few weeks later the kaiser sent a message that he was very much hoping to visit his dear Grandmama—for whom, as Herbert Bismarck told the British ambassador, he felt such “great affection and61 veneration”—later in the year.

  There were several reasons for the volte-face. Bismarck was again feeling uncomfortably sandwiched between France and Russia. The Russian press was in the grip of a new wave of anti-Germanism. In France, General Boulanger, the prophet of revanche against Germany, seemed about to launch a coup d’état. Salisbury refused the alliance—as Bismarck must have expected him to. The prime minister could see little reason for European entanglements. He neither felt particularly threatened by France, nor trusted Germany not to drag him into some European conflict. He was, however, deeply relieved by the overture and emphasized he wanted Britain and Germany to be “as friendly62 as possible short of an alliance.” Bismarck might well have suggested it as a way of nudging Russia into a more amenable mood. Wilhelm’s dramatic change of heart, however, seemed to be the result of his mother moving away from Berlin. Accepting her political eclipse, she moved to Frankfurt, where she built a house. Wilhelm’s Anglophobia seemed to disappear almost overnight. Herbert von Bismarck, for one, felt almost betrayed that Wilhelm had cursed “everything English,63 simply in order to annoy his mother: there was no other reason for his Anglophobia.”

  The queen refused to have him. “William must not64 come this year,” she wrote to Bertie. “You could not meet him, and I could not after all he has said and done.” But the pressure for the British family to take Wilhelm back was insistent from both Berlin and Lord Salisbury, and by the end of February Victoria had reluctantly agreed that Willy might come to stay at Osborne for the week of the Cowes regatta—as long as he made “some sort of apology” to Bertie for his behaviour in Vienna. Willy refused to apologize. At a dinner at the embassy in March 1889, in the course of a long paean in praise of his grandmother, he looked the British ambassador, Malet, in the eye and said emphatically that like his mother he had “That good65 stubborn English blood which will not give way.” More than this, he now denied the Vienna episode had ever happened: “The assertion66 that the Emperor had no wish to see the Prince of Wales is an invention. Proposal. To enquire of Sir Augustus Paget [British ambassador in Vienna] where he got his news.”

  He claimed he had never received the letter Edward had entrusted to Colonel Swaine and when pressed to write “a friendly message” expressing regret that Edward had thought he’d been snubbed, he told his uncle-in-law Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, who also happened to be Edward’s brother-in-law and who had come to Berlin to try to resolve the quarrel, that “he could not do67 anything more, and that as he had never uttered the alleged wish he could not express regret for something that he had never said.” The matter was, as far he was concerned, closed.

  It was a flat denial of the truth, and everyone else knew it. The queen, who felt she couldn’t withdraw her invitation, made her own attempt to extract an apology. At Salisbury’s prompting she offered Wilhelm a carrot if he would write to say how glad he would be to see Bertie, and how sorry he was about the misunderstanding: she would make him an honorary admiral of the Royal Navy, complete with white and gold uniform, on his arrival at Cowes. Privately, the queen regarded the continental habit of conferring honorary military titles on fellow royals as vulgar. In the past she had prevented Bertie from accepting them.

  Wilhelm fell upon his new title as if nothing had ever given him so much pleasure in his whole life. “Fancy wearing68 the same uniform as St. Vincent and Nelson. It is enough to make me quite giddy,” he wrote to Malet, the British ambassador, who had presented him with the news. “I feel something like Macbeth must have felt when he was suddenly received by the witches.” Not that, he added, he saw the ambassador as a witch. No, he was more of a good fairy … But he completely ignored the queen’s quid pro quo. “Her Majesty wrote69 to me ten days or so ago that she … considered the whole [Vienna affair] as closed and finished to her satisfaction … So you see all is right.” Again, this simply wasn’t true. But the queen, worn down by Wilhelm’s stubbornness and pressed by Salisbury, let the subject drop. Bertie, who felt that the kaiser was implying that he was the rude one and had made it all up, grumpily complained that he had been “sacrificed70 by Lord Salisbury to political expediency,” but was persuaded to accept the inevitable. The incident was tacitly blamed on the Austrians.

  Wilhelm arrived at Cowes on 2 August 1889 in a splendid mood in his new admiral’s outfit on the royal yacht Hohenzollern, with an escort of twelve German battleships. Arriving on your own large private yacht was the equivalent of arriving in your own Lear jet—most major royal families in Europe had two, though royal yachts weren’t quite what most would understand by the word: they were often the size of a warship. The British Victoria and Albert had a crew of 120 and could carry fifty guests. Under the gold leaf, Hohenzollern, the biggest and most powerful royal vessel afloat, was all too identifiable as the warship it had once been.

  The British family was gracious. Bertie met Wilhelm off the boat, accompanied by both his sons: Eddy, who was at Cambridge, and George, who—in stark contrast to his cousin’s sudden elevation to the admiralty—had just become a captain after six years in the navy. Neither boy had seen Wilhelm since the Jubilee of 1887 (and before that not since the early 1880s), when he had held himself aloof from the English relations. Since Wilhelm had become kaiser, George had taken to making little barbed comments about him in letters to his mother, calling him “William the Fidgety,” and affecting to laugh at his endless moving about: “He must have been71 to nearly every capital in Europe by this time except London … Whatever he may think of himself, he is much too frightened to do that.” The queen was prepared to be chilly. She had assured72 Vicky that she would not speak to those around Wilhelm who had been deliberately horrible to her—a difficult promise to keep since the kaiser’s entire entourage had more or less been hand-picked for their dislike of his mother. But in her grandson’s company, she thawed. He “kissed me affectionately,” she noted, and “made a very pretty speech.” He joined her each day for breakfast, which at Osborne she took outside in a little white tent whatever the weather, and dinner. With Edward he attended a naval review and inspected the warships, making a stream of suggestions about how they might improve their guns. He watched the yacht races at Cowes, instantly conceiving a passion for yacht-racing, and Bertie put him up for membership of the Royal Yacht Squadron. When his entourage marched past—demonstrating the goose step, or Stechschritt, as it was known
in Prussia—they did so “beautifully,” the queen wrote, “though in that peculiar Prussian way, throwing up their legs.”73 He invested his two cousins with the Order of the Black Eagle, told everyone how fond he was of Uncle Bertie, appointed his grandmother colonel-in-chief of his 1st Dragoon Guards, and presented her with a portrait of himself in a pointed Prussian helmet. Encouraged by Salisbury, the queen presented Willy’s younger brother Heinrich, a genial plodder whom the English relations liked, with the Order of the Garter, and sent Bismarck her self-portrait.

  The family disagreements seemed forgotten. The Bismarcks boasted that “no Sovereign74 was ever so fêted.” The queen quietly reassured her daughter, “It was not in the least75 for William’s sake that he was so well received … It was as your and dear Fritz’s son, my grandson, and the sovereign of a great country with whom it is ever more important we should be on friendly terms.”

  Back home, Wilhelm was seized with a new and voluble Anglophilia. The Bismarcks were in no doubt about its source: the kaiser, the chancellor remarked disgustedly, had been enslaved by a British admiral’s uniform. Even Philipp zu Eulenburg noted disappointedly that he was “like a child” over it. Wilhelm told Herbert von Bismarck that his British naval title meant that “he would have the right, as Admiral of the Fleet, to have a say in English naval affairs and to give the Queen his expert advice. I looked up in surprise, but HM was perfectly serious in what he said.”76 This was a little odd, to say the least. Honorary titles were flashy trinkets traded between monarchs as symbols of friendship. It meant your picture went up in the officers’ mess and they drank to your health and celebrated your birthday. No one took them seriously; but Wilhelm had. “It really gave77 me such an immense pleasure that I now am able to feel and take [an] interest in your fleet as if it were my own,” he told the queen after his visit. “And with keenest sympathy shall I watch every phase of its further development, knowing that the British ironclads, coupled with mine and my army are the strongest guarantees of peace …”

  In October, arriving on the Hohenzollern off the Greek coast for his sister Sophie’s wedding to the heir to the Greek throne, Wilhelm put on his admiral’s uniform, flew the pennant of a British navy admiral, and invited himself—as a real admiral would—to inspect the British squadron anchored there. The officers were a bit startled, but impressed by his encyclopaedic knowledge of British warships. It was, he told his grandmother, “a great treat78 for me and also a source of unqualified satisfaction to me.” In December he sent her a plan for the reorganization of the Royal Navy, along with what he claimed was the on dit about the Mediterranean fleet: “‘The French look79 down upon the British Mediterranean Squadron with disdain and are sure of doing away with it in short time after the opening of hostilities!’ Fancy! What would Lord Nelson say!” The number of battleships in the Mediterranean must, he insisted, “be reinforced as soon as is deemed expedient,” from five to twelve. In 1891 he would send more “humble suggestions”80—which he claimed other officers of the Royal Navy were too respectful to raise—the chief of which was that if the navy didn’t replace its heavy guns now, it would “seriously jeopardize the ‘moral’ of the men.” The Admiralty’s tight-lipped reply was that the guns were already being replaced and the kaiser’s other suggestions “would not be81 improvements.”

  It’s hard to know what Wilhelm thought he was doing with these kinds of letters, but they would become a cornerstone of his “personal diplomacy”: letters in which friendliness was combined with unintentional hilarity, presumptuous advice and stories about another country’s malignity, which were often clumsy and sometimes even made up. What part was sincere, what part lurking ill will, he probably couldn’t have said himself. He was capable of two precisely opposite wishes at the same time—a desire to be politically close to England combined with a desire to see it at war with France—without feeling there was any contradiction. This may have been a function of his own unresolved personality. It also demonstrated the fundamental conflict between the way all leaders of European nation-states saw themselves as in competition with their neighbours, and the notion that friendships between royal dynasties could cross national divides. The culture of German diplomacy, which regarded Bismarck’s extremely successful, ruthlessly manipulative diplomacy and the Hobbesian view of the world that informed it as admirable realism, encouraged this. But it also raised the question of whether the young kaiser, who showed not only an ability to flatly deny something that everyone else knew to be true, but a determination to see the world rather too much the way he wanted it to be, might be, perhaps, a bit mad and even dangerous.

  Wilhelm manifested many symptoms of “narcissistic personality disorder”: arrogance, grandiose self-importance, a mammoth sense of entitlement, fantasies about unlimited success and power; a belief in his own uniqueness and brilliance; a need for endless admiration and reinforcement and a hatred of criticism; proneness to envy; a tendency to regard other people as purely instrumental—in terms of what they could do for him, along with a dispiriting lack of empathy. On the other hand, plenty of royals shared these attributes. It was hard not to have an inflated sense of uniqueness and self-importance, an expectation of constant deference, a certain blind selfishness and assumption that others were there only to serve if you had been brought up amidst constant deference. Queen Victoria was immensely selfish. Plenty more royals were actively eccentric. The Hapsburg family, for example, had its fair share of odd-balls (though this owed quite a lot to endemic syphilis and in-breeding): one archduke was so obsessively religious that he killed himself by drinking water from the river Jordan; several were enthusiastic cross-dressers. Empress Elizabeth, wife of Franz Joseph, sister of mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, devoted her entire existence to the maintenance of her eighteen-inch waist with a regime of obsessive exercise, leather corsets and a diet of raw steak and milk. She insisted on being sewn into her clothes rather than bear the imperfection of creases. It is hard to say for certain whether Wilhelm’s problems stemmed from pathology or the eccentricities of the European royal production line.

  If the queen received her grandson’s cheerily presumptuous missives with gritted teeth, there was always Lord Salisbury to remind her how much better things now were than they had been. “The Emperor’s attitude82 towards Your Majesty is now very satisfactory. He is a changed man from what he was twelve months ago,” he reassured her. In some ways she and the navy got off lightly. Wilhelm considered himself an expert on many things and was not shy about saying so. In subsequent years, he would personally inform the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg that he was conducting Peer Gynt all wrong; tell Richard Strauss that modern composition was “detestable” and he was “one of the worst;”83 and, against the wishes of its judges, withdraw the Schiller Prize from the Nobel Prize–winning German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann, whose downbeat Ibsen-esque social realism he didn’t like. A hundred years before, when courts had still been centres of cultural patronage, such decisions might have been accepted without comment; now, however, even in Germany the emperor’s taste was frequently the subject of hilarity.

  Bismarck was not pleased with Wilhelm’s new-found passion for England, not least because it was accompanied by a fresh wave of hostility to Russia. Since Wilhelm’s trip to St. Petersburg in 1888, the tsar had shown no84 inclination to make a return visit to Berlin. Wilhelm felt spurned, and by early 1889 he was back in General Waldersee’s anti-Russian camp, a fact Bismarck also didn’t like—he knew that Waldersee had his eye on the chancellorship himself. For his part the tsar had decided he disliked Wilhelm too. In the New Year of 1889, when his ministers pressed him about going to Berlin, he lost his temper and called Wilhelm a German “pipsqueak” and “a rascally young fop, who throws his weight around, thinks too much of himself and fancies that others worship him.”85

  The chancellor and the kaiser were also disagreeing over domestic policy. In the spring of 1889 a miners’ strike over reduced wages and twelve-hour days had spread across industrial
Germany, had politicized large swathes of the urban working classes, and threatened to become a general strike. It was a manifestation of some of the unresolved contradictions in the new Germany. Bismarck had made no attempt to address the tensions and differences; in fact he’d more often used them to play political factions off against each other, and gradually to close off political power from liberal groups, leaving it in the hands of the old Prussian Junker elite. But Germany also had the largest and best organized Socialist Party in Europe and the disenfranchisement of the emerging lower-middle and working classes only fed it. Bismarck, who regarded the working classes as greedy children who needed to be managed and coerced, wanted to send the army in to smash the strikes and then destroy the Socialist Party with strenuously repressive legislation. The kaiser, however, had different ideas. Encouraged by his old tutor Hinzpeter, he’d decided that the government must try to woo the workers away from socialism by demonstrating the monarchy could be sympathetic to their needs and that he was critical of exploitative and unscrupulous employers. He invited a strikers’ deputation to meet him, an unprecedented event in German politics, then a group of mine owners, lecturing them on the welfare of their workers. He proposed legislation to regulate Sunday work and shorten working hours for women and children. Bismarck was utterly horrified—as were the tsar and Queen Victoria.