The Three Emperors Page 14
What was really at stake was who was in charge. Wilhelm had come to the throne determined to rule himself, convinced he could make as good a job of it as Bismarck. The chancellor had been effective master of Germany for nearly thirty years and was not ready to give it up. Wilhelm was not interested in the day-to-day work of government, but he had been far from easy to manage. In May 1889 he had told a group of anti-Russian generals, “If Bismarck won’t86 go along against Russia, then our ways must part.” He had told Emperor Franz Joseph that should Austria find itself at war with Russia, Germany would come to its aid, whether Bismarck liked it or not. When Bismarck announced his intention of reopening the German markets to Russian securities as a gesture of goodwill, Wilhelm ordered him not to do it. The chancellor went ahead without telling him. When he discovered this, Wilhelm was incandescently angry. He complained that the Bismarcks were high-handed and demeaned the throne, but he convinced himself he could deal with them.
Alexander III finally came to Berlin in October 1889. To Bismarck’s relief Wilhelm set aside his enmity and with the chancellor reassured the tsar that Germany had no desire for conflict with Russia. In reply, the tsar gave his word of honour that Russia would not attack Germany. As proof of their new intimacy, Wilhelm leapt onto the tsar’s train as it departed for “another short and lively conversation.” He told Waldersee that he had been “very satisfied with the visit,”87 and when a few weeks later twenty Russian divisions were moved closer to the German border—one more feint in the shadow-boxing that the eastern European states indulged in—Bismarck was able to persuade him not to be alarmed.
The real story of the visit, however, was the conspicuous attention the tsar showed Bismarck, who had been distrusted in St. Petersburg for years. He was now being hailed as Russia’s best friend in Berlin. “I certainly have88 full trust in you,” the tsar was reported as saying, “but unfortunately your Kaiser gives others his ear, especially General Waldersee, who wants war. That we are very certain of.”
• • •
With talk of war widespread in Europe, it was an auspicious moment for monarchs to meet and test Albert’s theory that close relations between royal dynasties promoted peace. European royalty converged on Athens for the wedding of Wilhelm’s sister Sophie to the heir to the Greek throne, the slightly dim Constantine (“A good heart89 and good character,” Queen Victoria had said of him, “… go far beyond great cleverness”), who was first cousin to both George and Nicholas and had spent summers with them in Denmark. It was one of only two occasions in their lives when Wilhelm, George and Nicholas would all be in the same place. George, his brother Eddy and Nicholas spent the time talking90 and teasing each other in each other’s rooms with their boisterous cousin “Greek Georgie.” Wilhelm had no time for his younger cousins; he and Dona were too busy offending the Greek royal family. (The kaiser, famous for travelling with a vast suite, had “brought 6791 gentlemen with him. A pity he didn’t bring a few more,” George observed sarcastically.) They’d publicly expressed their horror that Sophie might convert to the Orthodox Church, and threatened to exile her from Germany if she did. They’d also brought a strict Lutheran pastor to the wedding to perform a Protestant service, without consulting the Greek monarch. King George of the Hellenes was so angry he refused to meet Wilhelm off the boat—a slight for which Wilhelm never forgave him.*
By December 1889 Wilhelm’s antipathy to Russia had returned. Waldersee had told him that the Russians regarded his friendliness as a sign of weakness, and that the tsar had said of his Berlin visit, “Everyone laid93 flat on their bellies before us.” In the first months of 1890 the relationship between Wilhelm and Bismarck disintegrated entirely. In January at a crown council—a meeting of Prussian government ministers—Wilhelm was astounded when Bismarck energetically deprecated his new social legislation in front of the other ministers, who then backed the chancellor. The performance was supposed to show the kaiser who was boss. But Bismarck was not quite as light on his feet and as omniscient as he once had been. He was seventy-five and now spent months on his country estates, eating vast quantities of foie gras for his indigestion.
In his absence, opposition had begun to spring up in the corners of government: courtiers, princes, officials sick of his insistence on dominating everything; disgruntled Foreign Office bureaucrats who opposed his Russian policy; army officers who fancied a war; ambitious politicians; Reichstag members who felt his anti-Socialist legislation went too far; and not least Eulenburg, who had come to disapprove of Bismarck’s attempts to dominate Wilhelm. The anti-Socialist laws were defeated in the Reichstag and in February Bismarck’s bloc of support, the Kartell, was smashed in the elections, while the Socialists logged their biggest vote ever, nearly 1.5 million. Without a working majority in the Reichstag to pass his policies a chancellor was lost. Wilhelm grabbed his opportunity. Bismarck held on grumpily for a few more weeks, trying to bully Wilhelm into submitting to him, until in mid-March the kaiser came to visit him and demanded his resignation. There was an ugly wrangle in the course of which Bismarck showed the kaiser a letter from the tsar which described him as “mad, an untrustworthy, badly brought-up boy,” an insult that hit its mark. “Tsar Alexander speaks of me in the most dismissive terms,” Wilhelm told Waldersee. “He’s supposed to have said that I am mad.”94
A few days later Bertie and George arrived in Berlin for a state visit. Wilhelm—all smiles and dressed in his British admiral’s uniform—had arranged celebrations on a grand scale with gala banquets and military inspections. Bertie couldn’t help but enjoy being treated “like a sovereign,” and he listened when Wilhelm talked of his desire to be “on good terms with this country.”95 But the air was full of ambivalence. When Wilhelm wanted to make Bertie an admiral in the German navy, he declined—Alexandra had insisted he turn it down—though George accepted an honorary commission of colonel in a Prussian dragoon regiment. “So my Georgie boy96 has become a real live filthy blue-coated Picklehaube German soldier!!!” Alexandra wrote to her son. “Well, I never thought to have lived to see that! But never mind; as you say, it could not have been helped—it was your misfortune and not your fault—and anything was better—even my two boys being sacrificed!!!—than Papa being made a German Admiral—that I could not have survived—you would have had to look for your poor old Motherdear at the bottom of the sea.” Father and son watched Bismarck make his final departure from the Berlin Schloss. Edward said of the chancellor who had maligned and offended his family, “‘That’s a brave97 man. I like his spirit. We will call upon him.’ Which was just what I wanted to say,” George said later. “I don’t think the Emperor ever forgave us.” Wilhelm had told the queen that the chancellor had been having crying fits, and would “infallibly have died98 of apoplexy” if he hadn’t let him go. They’d parted, he insisted, “under tears after a warm embrace.” “We talked99 to him for sometime,” George wrote in his diary. “He speaks English perfectly.” Bismarck told them that he had always thought he would only last three years with Wilhelm; he was out by only a year.
The rest of Europe watched Bismarck’s fall with fascination. For all his ruthlessness, the chancellor, as Malet reminded Lord Salisbury, had been universally regarded as “a guarantee100 of the maintenance of peace in Europe.” The continent was split on whether the impetuous, energetic young kaiser was splendid, ridiculous or frightening. Some months later the British Daily Chronicle would hail him as “the most conspicuous101 figure in Europe,” a man who projected “indomitable resolution and inexhaustible energy.” But the British satirical magazine Punch mocked his grandiose speechifying, and seized on his liking for naval metaphors, running a cartoon of him, “Dropping the Pilot,” in which he stood on deck having sacked Bismarck, declaiming pompously “the office of watch on the ship of state has fallen to me.” The Russians, extremely alarmed, were suddenly almost fawning. The tsar summoned the German ambassador to explain how much they wanted the Reinsurance Treaty, which was up for renewal, to continue, and how he
had “absolute confidence102 in our Kaiser, particularly as a representative of the monarchical principle.”
The German Foreign Office allowed the Reinsurance Treaty to lapse in June. Bismarck’s subordinates there, to whom he hadn’t bothered to explain his policy, had never seen the point of it. As far as they were concerned it had failed to improve relations with Russia and was a betrayal of Germany’s treaty with Austria. Wilhelm, gratified by Alexander’s apparent desperation to be friends, decided that his own diplomatic advances would be enough to keep the Russians on the boil. No one seemed to understand the huge symbolic significance of the treaty in Russia as a sign of the German government’s fundamental goodwill. It was a decision they would come to utterly regret.
Lord Salisbury saw the ironies of Bismarck’s fall: “It is a curious103 Nemesis on Bismarck. The very qualities which he fostered in order to strengthen himself … have been the qualities by which he was overthrown.” Wilhelm, however, worried him. A few months before the kaiser’s accession in 1888, the prime minister had been informed by the British surgeon general, John Erichsen, that some fifteen years before, when Wilhelm was fourteen, a group of German doctors had sent him detailed medical notes about the heir, asking for his opinion of the young man’s condition. Erichsen, who admitted he was breaching medical etiquette but felt “the circumstances were so104 serious that they justified the breach,” had concluded that Wilhelm would never be “normal.” He would be subject to “sudden accesses of anger,” during which time he would be “incapable of forming a reasonable or temperate judgement on the subject under consideration,” and while “it was not probable that he would actually become insane, some of his actions would probably be those of a man not wholly sane.”
Salisbury’s private secretary would tell George years later that whenever the prime minister encountered some particularly odd piece of behaviour from Wilhelm, he could be heard to mutter “Erichsen” under his breath.
* Her justification of this by no means legal act was that she was saving the documents from Bismarck, who had already conspired to minimize the important role Fritz had played in persuading his initially reluctant father and other German princes to accept unification.
* Barely three months later Rudolf would commit suicide with his mistress at Mayerling, the deaths initially presented as an accident.
* It was claimed that she had passed state secrets to foreign powers, and that she’d had an affair with her court chamberlain while Fritz was alive.
* Present-day Tanzania.
* When Sophie did convert in April 1891, Wilhelm banned her from Germany for three years. “Another fine92 specimen of a domestic tyrant!” Queen Victoria expostulated.
5
YOUNG MEN IN LOVE
1891–94
Nicholas loved the army. As in Germany, the officers’ messes of the grandest guards regiments were gathering places for the sons of the grandest Russian families—“a jolly crowd1 of healthy young men discussing horses, ballerinas and the latest French songs,” as Nicholas’s cousin Sandro put it. Some of Nicholas’s days were full of drill. Plenty more were filled with late-morning lie-ins,2 skating with fellow guards officers, lunch with grand duke uncles and English afternoon tea with grand duchess aunts. During the season the nights were crowded with receptions, balls and trips to the ballet. Back at barracks, dinner involved getting fabulously drunk on champagne and port, then rushing out into the snow, stripping naked and howling like wolves. In 1891 Nicholas even acquired that obligatory aristocratic accoutrement, a ballerina mistress—with a great deal of prodding from his father, who set him up at the Imperial Ballet School’s graduation ball with a young dancer called Mathilde Kschessinska. Until its reinvention fifteen years later by Diaghilev, the ballet was regarded by the rest of St. Petersburg as old-fashioned, its main function to please the court and provide grand-ducal mistresses. The girls were both from respectable backgrounds and thrillingly demimondaine; they were also clean, as their health was constantly monitored, which was important in a city where over half the small ads in the newspapers were cures for VD.3 Giggling and flirtatious, the tiny Kschessinska—at four foot eleven nearly six inches smaller than Nicholas—played the charming, breathlessingénue. She was actually a pragmatic and unsentimental adventuress determined to grab her opportunities. It took her nearly two years of—highly decorous—near-stalking to persuade the extraordinarily diffident Nicholas to install her as his mistress. It was a further six months before the affair was actually consummated.*
Nicholas also had a passion for uniforms and correct dress. He possessed the kit of every regiment in the empire down to the last inch of gold braid, and was starting to collect honorary ranks from foreign regiments. He also had several Russian “peasant” outfits, which like his father he liked to wear from time to time—trousers and a bright red blouse made out of silk no Russian peasant could have afforded. He thought of himself as frugal—just like his father, he had holes darned, collars and cuffs replaced—but the uniforms and outfits had cost millions of roubles. The appetite for uniforms and their tiniest details had become a mania ubiquitous at all the European courts. Wilhelm’s passion was worse than Nicholas’s. Even his entourage, the sine qua non of court conservatism, regarded him as “obsessed4 by this question of clothes and externals,” and he was constantly redesigning regimental and court uniforms, the helmets becoming increasingly Wagnerian, the plumes taller, the sashes thicker and shinier. Uniform was a reminder of royalty and the aristocracy’s control of the military, but it was also a marker of their superiority to the lower classes—black tail coats, one Russian grande dame observed, failed to “differentiate a5 gentleman from his lackey.” In Berlin, one writer noted, “Uniforms, no6 longer the livery of duty, were worn like feathers, to strut the owner and attract the eligible.”
Though England’s upper classes didn’t share the continental obsession with uniform, Edward and George were quite as obsessed with clothes as their European relations. Edward had led gentlemen’s fashion since the 1860s, despite his increasing girth, and though he looked dreadful in a uniform, he was the epitome of the English gentleman style and even had a tweed check named after him. He harboured what even those who liked him described as a childlike obsession with decorations and “buttons.” An incorrectly worn medal, an ill-matching pair of trousers and waistcoat, would send him into paroxysms of irritation, moments when trivia won out over significance. “It is very interesting7 Sir Henry,” he once interrupted a minister reporting on the latest exploits of the Amir of Afghanistan, “but you should never wear a coloured tie with a frock coat.” Lord Salisbury, who was famous for his extreme shabbiness, induced hysterics. Salisbury, who wielded real power and had no interest in clothes, regarded Edward as a fool. George was equally obsessed—the Royal Navy’s addiction to appearances merely compounded the tendency. He would never lead fashion, in fact he’d cleave stubbornly to the past. But like his father he was never less than perfectly attired, a white gardenia in his buttonhole. As king, he would send furious little notes to the prime minister of the day whenever a minister wore the wrong frock coat to the House of Commons.
The intricacies of dress were an expression of the pointless arbitrariness and the leisurely emptiness of court life, which had been invented in the eighteenth century by absolutist monarchs to keep control over their most senior subjects. Ironically, it had been embraced by those subjects as a manifestation of their exclusivity and their freedom from having to do anything useful—the more arbitrary and pointless the rules, the more complicated and peacock-like the uniforms, the more differentiated they were from the common herd. Now, by the 1890s, the courts had become disengaged in all senses from the rest of society, and their labyrinthine pointlessness and the elaboration of their uniforms seemed to have grown in inverse proportion. In Russia, as one historian noted, “The absence of public8 initiative … was attested all too vividly by the prevalence of uniforms.” At the Russian court every official had four uniforms, adorne
d with peacock and ostrich feathers, gold embroidered oak leaves and eagles, scarlet cuffs and braid—the more gold, measured to an inch, the higher the status.
The obsession with appearances extended further than uniforms into an insistence on certain rules and conformity of behaviour and had more sinister consequences than mere pointlessness and triviality. It almost guaranteed that a kind of hypocrisy became encrusted in the culture of court and the upper classes. In Germany, the dominance of and cultural fascination with the army pressed upon the Berlin court and predominant class a caricature hyper-masculinity In England the aristocracy’s insistence that they lead society by virtue of their virtue meant that they believed they must appear above reproach in everything. Too much was expected, too much forbidden. The conflict could be seen in Wilhelm himself: the imperative to be manly and soldierly all the time had turned him into a caricature and forced him to take refuge in periodic breakdowns. Among Edward’s aristocratic set public exposure was the ultimate sanction, but one could do almost anything society in the wider sense condemned—have mistresses, gamble, take an unseemly interest in livestock or small boys—as long as one wasn’t discovered or didn’t open up that world to scrutiny, for example by leaving one’s spouse. It was the price the ruling class found itself increasingly paying for laying claim to social seniority and power on the basis of seemingly pristine morality and perfect appearances. Aristocracies had perhaps always lived by appearances, but with a public increasingly self-aware and demanding, and a press increasingly powerful, when the rest of the world got a handle on scandal behind the court’s closed doors, the effects could be devastating; while those who kept irreproachably to the rules would too often be forced to live lives of desiccated self-denial.