The Three Emperors Read online

  Over 1890 and 1891, Nicholas was sent on a ten-month Grand Tour of Asia, from the Near East to the eastern edge of Siberia—the first Romanov heir ever to go so far east. As a child he had received dispatches from the Russian explorer Przhevalsky in Mongolia full of assurances that the people of Central Asia were simply longing to be subjects of the tsar, and he was excited by the idea of Russia’s imperial “mission” to rule Asia. Accompanying him was Prince Ukhtomsky, an Anglophobic Asia expert, who told him that the Eurasian steppe was Russia’s historic homeland, and expansion wasn’t so much conquering as coming home. But the trip also pointed up the irritating ubiquity of the British empire, taking in Egypt and India, where Nicholas shot tigers and complained sulkily of “the unbearableness9 of being surrounded once again by the English and of seeing their Red Coats everywhere.” Back in Russia, he began to receive government papers and attend occasional government council meetings. The experience utterly bored him. “I am simply10 unable to understand how one can possibly read this mass of papers in one week,” he wrote after he received the weekly delivery of government files in 1891. “I always restrict myself to one or two more interesting files while others go directly into the fire.” His father did not encourage him to feel otherwise. “He would not even have11 Nicky sit in the Council of State until 1893,” Olga recalled. “… My father disliked the mere idea of state matters encroaching on our family life.” When Sergei Witte, the tsar’s finance minister, suggested that twenty-three-year-old Nicholas should be given more responsibility in state affairs, Alexander snapped, “He’s nothing more12 than a child. His judgment is infantile. How could he be president of a committee?” In truth, there was something immature and unformed about the young tsarevitch. Even in family photographs his as-yet-unbearded face was hard to pick out; it seemed yielding and distinctly unassertive.

  It would have been a good time to take an interest in politics. Beyond Nicholas’s little world, a terrible famine was taking hold in the most fertile regions of European central Russia. By the end of 1892 it would leave half a million people dead, and many more helplessly impoverished. Their plight was made worse by the government’s gross incompetence. It initially denied the famine and forbade private relief efforts, then failed to provide adequate help itself. When the government finally and unprecedentedly called on the public, there was a massive wave of voluntary activity which put it to shame. In its wake came a chorus of criticism, which grew even louder when the government tried to demonize Leo Tolstoy, who had spent two years organizing aid for the famine and volubly criticizing the government. Nicholas, given a seat on the government’s ineffectual Special Committee on Famine Relief, was all but oblivious to this. Wilhelm, still smarting from the tsar’s rejection, wasn’t. He wrote to Queen Victoria with a certain schadenfreude: “A great financial13 catastrophe is looming in the background, and the throng of famished peasants is growing daily … I think this fearful calamity will—with Gods [sic] help—for sometime to come keep the Russians from making war upon their unsuspecting neighbours.”

  On the other side of the world, George was an officer with the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean fleet. In many respects this was the naval equivalent of a European guards regiment: little chance of warfare, lots of parties, lots of sport, in a sequence of Mediterranean cities—Barcelona, Athens, Salonica. His time was constrained only by his parents’ constant fussing that he would be corrupted by the dissipations of Malta, where his uncle Affie, an enthusiastic drinker, held court as commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet. Edward asked old naval contacts to keep George busy on exercises, and both parents were very relieved when George was sent to the North Atlantic to be captain of a small gunboat, shuttling up and down the Canadian coast. The extent of his Maltese “dissipations” had actually been markedly limited. He smoked a bit, drank abstemiously, spent his free time playing cricket and billiards and managed to kiss his cousin Missy—Affie’s lively, pretty daughter, ten years his junior, with whom he was at least a little in love—once. Unlike his cousins, he had been properly trained and his promotions were not honorary ones. He still had no love for the navy though, seasickness dogged him, he missed home and found it hard to make friends.

  Both young men would be marked by their military experience. Nicholas admired what he saw as the straightforwardness and patriotism of the army, and felt comfortable among the privileged young officers as he would in few places beyond his own immediate family. As emperor he would show a marked preference for the company and—not always appropriate—counsel of aristocratic men from army backgrounds. As for George, in the navy he learned a devotion to strict routine, what his son later called “an almost fanatical sense of punctuality,” an intense suspicion of complication or anything not straightforward, a belief in hierarchy and the need for obedience, and a sense of his own Britishness in contrast to the cosmopolitan roots of the royal family. “He believed in God, in the invincibility of the Royal Navy, and the essential rightness of whatever was British.”14 British naval officers, as one historian of the British empire has observed, “were often fearfully15 ignorant of the world and only interested in their beloved navy.” The Royal Navy was not the place for George to have his eyes opened—nor was it meant to be. The forces encircling both young men did not want them to see too far beyond the lives planned for them. The point of Nicholas’s Grand Tour of Asia was the opposite of his ancestor Peter the Great’s mind-broadening European travels—to emphasize the might and right of Russia’s empire, and that its future lay in the domination of Asia.

  In June 1891 George came home on leave to shoot, to see his brother Eddy, now a major in the 10th Royal Hussars, a cavalry regiment known traditionally as the Prince of Wales’s Own, and to attend his father’s fiftieth birthday. Eddy, a rather dilatory officer in Ireland, was a sweet-natured and likeable, if superficial, boy who loved clothes—even his father called him “collar and cuffs”—and fell in love a little too easily. He’d had crushes on a series of unsuitable princesses and society girls.* The two returned to Sandringham for their father’s birthday in November, an occasion from which their mother was pointedly absent. She was furious at Edward’s simultaneous involvement in two high-profile scandals. The so-called Baccarat scandal had put him humiliatingly in the witness box in a public trial for libel, and had led to hysterical denunciations of his gambling habits in the British popular press, especially when it was discovered the prince had his own set of chips with the royal insignia on them. (As the London correspondent of the New York Herald commented, you’d have thought the prince had “broken all the Ten16 Commandments at once and murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury.”) The other, marginally more private scandal concerned his former friend Lord Charles Beresford’s threat to make public Edward’s two-year affair with the beautiful and high-maintenance Frances Brooke, Countess of Warwick—a former mistress of Beresford’s. Alexandra, livid at her husband’s behaviour, had refused to come home from a holiday in Denmark and had taken their three daughters to stay with the tsar and tsarina in the Crimea.

  A couple of days after Edward’s celebrations, George contracted typhoid. Alexandra rushed back from the Crimea—the journey took a week—and the family prepared for the worst. The illness had killed Prince Albert, and had nearly done for Edward in 1872. But George survived. By the end of December he was well enough to go to Sandringham for New Year’s. Then in the second week of January, Eddy, who’d got engaged only seven weeks before, came down with influenza. It turned into pneumonia and he was dead within the week. The children of the rich were almost as vulnerable to the killer diseases of the late nineteenth century as the poor. George had lost a brother at birth; Wilhelm two, both much younger than he: Sigismund, aged two, and Waldemar, aged fifteen. Nicholas had lost a brother in infancy, just the year before his younger brother George had been diagnosed with TB during their Grand Tour. Sent to live in the Caucasus for his health, George would die in 1899 of a coughing fit while out cycling. Small wonder that educated Victorians
, so aware of the advances they had made in taming the world and bending it to their will, were obsessed by the power and pathos of death. “The only one17 who can possibly comfort is the Lord who is above us all and whose ways we mortals are sometimes at loss to understand,” Wilhelm wrote to the queen. In his diary Nicky noted, “The poor boy18 had just got engaged. I don’t know what to think—we are all in the Lord’s hands!”

  Edward and Alexandra were devastated. They left Sandringham and it was a year before they could bear to go back. Little has been written about the effect of Eddy’s death on the Prince of Wales, but it seems that—in an agonizing way—it was the event which launched him into real maturity. Later that year the queen would finally give him access to government papers and he would play a significant role in smoothing over her bad-tempered objections to the Liberal Party’s election victory that year, by persuading a politician she liked, Lord Rosebery, to take a position in the government. But George was no less struck. “No two brothers could have loved each other more than we did,” he wrote to the queen in a moment of unusual emotional openness. “Alas! It is only now that I have found out how deeply I did before; I remember with pain nearly every hard word and little quarrel I ever had with him.”19 Eddy was the person, apart from his mother, to whom George was closest, and the one who by his very existence shielded George from a role he had no desire to fill.

  While the prince and princess mourned, the queen set her mind to the practical task of turning George into a suitable heir. She quickly made him Duke of York, got him promoted to the respectable rank of post-captain, before he effectively quit the navy (something that didn’t in the slightest upset him. “Hate the whole20 thing,” he wrote on his last naval exercises off the Irish coast that summer. The rough weather had made him constantly seasick. “I hope I shall never be in any other manoeuvres.”). And she determined to get him married. While posted in the Mediterranean, George had fallen21 for his glamorous, outgoing cousin Missy, one of the best-looking and richest princesses in Europe. His parents made the initial overtures, only to have them turned down by Missy’s Russian mother. It seems that Marie, who had been unhappy in England, couldn’t bear the thought of her daughter coming under the dominating thumb of Queen Victoria. She married Missy off to the dull King Ferdinand of Romania instead. The queen briskly turned to Eddy’s fiancée, Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, known as May. She had expended considerable energy in reviewing suitable princesses for Eddy and saw no reason for her efforts to go to waste. There were precedents—the tsar had married his dead brother’s bride-to-be. But George, still dazed, didn’t want to think about it and found the thought of marrying his brother’s fiancée upsetting. The queen, however, was relentless. “Have you seen22 May and have you thought more about the possibility or found out what her feelings might be?” she wrote to him two months after Eddy’s death.

  May was not anyone’s first choice as bride for the second-in-line to the throne. She wasn’t beautiful, or rich, or, by most European royals’ standards, sufficiently royal. Her father was the child of a morganatic marriage, a son of the ruling house of the large German kingdom of Württemberg, but his mother had been “only” a countess. When the possibility of May marrying the kaiserin’s brother had been floated a couple of years before, Vicky had helpfully reported to her mother that Dona had described the idea as a dreadful “mésalliance!!!”23 More than this, the Tecks were slightly embarrassing. May’s father, Franz, had excellent taste, but also public temper tantrums. Her mother, Mary Adelaide, a granddaughter of George III, was amiable, selfish, loud and seventeen stone. In the family she was known as “Fat Mary,” and Edward and Alexandra couldn’t stand her. Both parents were irredeemably extravagant and had had to flee the country to escape their creditors in May’s teens when they had got themselves into terrible debt. As for May’s siblings, one brother had kicked the headmaster of Wellington school through a hedge. No doubt as a result of years of being embarrassed by her parents, twenty-four-year-old May, however, was a model of quiet, dignified, slightly remote self-control, qualities which, as her biographer wrote, maybe a little ungenerously, “made it unlikely24 that Princess May would ever inspire a violent emotion.” But the queen, who didn’t care about morganism, and had dismissed a slew of other European princesses for being variously Catholic, “ugly, unhealthy25 and idiotic,” decided she was perfect for Eddy, who she judged needed a firm, moral hand. May had other qualities too; she was far better educated than either Eddy or George, and, perhaps in the manner of a poor relation who had always felt herself slightly outside the magic glow of royalty, she was utterly fascinated by, and was delighted to be part of, the British monarchy.

  No one had predicted emotional fireworks but during the seven weeks of May’s engagement to Eddy, they had got on far better than anyone would have expected. But George and May, both extremely shy, did not immediately get on and remained awkward with each other. George was not so diffident with other women. There had been no awkwardness with Missy, who called him her “Beloved Chum,”26 and in his teens he’d fallen in love with Julie Stonor, the Catholic orphaned daughter of one of his mother’s ladies-in-waiting. His mother had allowed the friendship to develop, while rather cruelly making it clear it had no future. His three German cousins—Wilhelm’s younger sisters Sophie, Margaret (Mossy) and Moretta, who had stayed close to their mother and seen more of their English cousins—knew him as good-humoured, jolly and energetic. “George is such a dear & so awfully amusing,” wrote Sophie (but then she was married to the very dim Constantine). “Dear George! pretty red lips and white teeth that are always my delight,”27 wrote Moretta. As for Mossy, Vicky had rather hoped he might marry her.

  It must have been almost a relief for George to escape to Europe. His mother and he went to Copenhagen28 in May, where they met up with Nicholas and the Russian family—a meeting which seems to have renewed the young men’s friendship. They spent hours talking in each other’s rooms. In the autumn George was sent to Heidelberg, a last-ditch attempt to improve his German and to do the rounds of the German relatives. After two months he had made no discernible progress. “It certainly is29 beastly dull,” he confided to a friend, longing to return to Sandringham for the shooting, but he visited Wilhelm in Potsdam, where the kaiser—no doubt because he was now a direct heir—paid him more attention than he ever had before: “William was most kind30 and civil to me. I have never known him so nice.”

  Back in England it was clear that resistance was futile. By the spring of 1893, with everyone—apart from Alexandra—urging him to marry May, George went on a last holiday with his mother. In Athens, he had a long chat with Queen Olga of Greece, who during his years in the Mediterranean had kept a motherly eye on him and called him “Tootsums.” She told him that May would make a good wife. At home, bundled into the Richmond garden of his aunt Louise, a near-neighbour of the Tecks, where May just happened to be sitting, he proposed.

  The whole affair had a pragmatic, anticlimactic air. The queen’s acerbic lady-in-waiting Lady Geraldine Somerset described the bride-to-be as “abundantly satisfied,31 but placid and cold as always,” and George as “apparently nonchalant and indifferent.” “Quite pleased32 and contented,” was the queen’s laconic description of George. The poet and anti-imperialist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, observing them at a party a month later, noted, “He is a nice-looking33 young man, but she one of the least attractive of girls, coarse-featured, with an ill-tempered mouth and a certain German vulgarity, which will be terrible at 35.” The couple were not in love and they had almost nothing in common. May was as close as the royal family got to an intellectual, with a genuine appetite for art and books. George was indifferent to both and obsessed with shooting and stamp-collecting. His mother was still the most powerful force in his life and was determined to remain so. “It is sad to34 think that we shall never be able to be together and travel in the same way,” Alexandra wrote after their Mediterranean trip. “Yet there is a bond of love between us, that of moth
er and child, which nothing can ever diminish or render less binding—and nobody can, or shall ever, come between me and my darling Georgie boy.” But they were both well trained in doing their duty, and for May the marriage meant deliverance from a life of probable spinsterhood and financial security for her parents.

  Time would not relax their mutual and sometimes excruciating shyness. For months after the engagement they remained incapable of talking to each other with any ease, instead sending each other painfully diffident letters. “I am very sorry that I am so shy with you,” she wrote. “I tried not to be so the other day, but alas failed … It is so stupid to be so stiff together and really there is nothing I would not tell you, except that I love you more than anybody in the world, and this I cannot tell you myself so I write it to relieve my feelings.”

  He replied, “Thank God we both understand each other, and I think it really unnecessary for me to tell you how deep my love for you my darling is and I feel it growing stronger and stronger every time I see you; although I may appear shy and cold.”35