The Three Emperors Read online

  The queen would not relent, and whatever the justification given, it was hard not to see it as a punishment for Wilhelm’s position over the Boers. She became angry with him again when a small war broke out between Greece and Turkey a month later. Wilhelm favoured the Turks, while she felt obliged to back the Greek royal family. She blamed his position on his “personal hatred119 of Greece and enmity to the King and the whole royal family.” She wasn’t entirely wrong, there had been bad feeling between Wilhelm and the Greek royal family since his sister had married the Greek heir; but he also had political reasons for siding with the Turks, whom he’d been pursuing as potential allies since the British had withdrawn from being their supporters in Europe. It was the queen’s position that was informed by personal feelings—the Greeks had brought the war on themselves by landing an army on Turkish-run Crete. That made no odds at the British court. “The German Emperor120 is in bad odour everywhere,” wrote the queen’s lady-in-waiting Marie Mallet, “and the final coup is his acceptance of six Greek guns presented by the Sultan. He ought to be kicked; my only joy is that he is simply frantic at not coming for the Jubilee and would like to kill his poor brother for daring to accept the Queen’s invitation.”

  The Jubilee was a statement of Britain’s moral right to dominate and expand across the globe, an assertion of its status as top dog in the dog-eat-dog world of international politics, and a declaration of Britain and the empire’s sufficiency unto themselves, their need for no one else. It demonstrated that the British empire was, as the Kreuzzeitung, the leading German newspaper of the Prussian establishment, noted both admiringly and enviously, “completely unassailable.”121 It now occupied122 25 percent of the world’s landmass, not including the informal influence it exercised over the economies of several South American countries such as Argentina and Brazil, and encompassed 444 million people.

  In spectacle the Jubilee was quite as splendid as its predecessor. More so. On the day itself, 21 June, the long, glittering parade of soldiers from all parts of the empire followed the queen’s carriage through London to St. Paul’s, where she attended a service of thanksgiving. George described it as “the most wonderful123 crowd I ever saw, perfect order and no accidents, 8 miles of streets we passed through, never heard anything like the cheering, decorations beautiful, fine and hot.” The presentations, garden parties, march-pasts and street parties went on well into July. At Spithead the Prince of Wales reviewed the largest assembly of shining warships ever gathered in one place: 173 battleships in a line seven miles long. The navy claimed that no ship had been withdrawn from foreign stations to make it. It was, as everyone knew, the navy that had turned “a loose aggregate124 of States,” as The Times put it, into an empire.

  And yet a note of diminuendo and superstitious uncertainty seemed to hang around the celebration’s penumbra. The Times published Rudyard Kipling’s new poem “Recessional,” an oddly downbeat commentary on the empire’s triumph, a kind of memento mori warning of complacency and hubris, “frantic boast and foolish word,” reminding his readers that empires fell as well as rose:

  all our pomp of yesterday

  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

  A commentary next to the poem ran, “The most dangerous125 and demoralizing temper into which a state can fall is one of boastful pride.” The flip-side of the Jubilee’s proud and confident assertion of power, wealth and self-sufficiency was the fear that the empire might have peaked, that there was nowhere to go but down, and the worry that Britain might have to be sufficient unto itself because it was surrounded by countries who hated it. The Kruger telegram had forced on the British the realization that the rest of Europe resented their influence and power. At the end of 1896 Salisbury, whose attempts to coordinate the Great Powers over Turkey, China and the Greek War had been consistently rejected, had observed that the only Great Power “which does not126 hate us” was Austria (which was also the only power with no interest in a colonial empire). The queen, meanwhile, was “very much depressed127 by the knowledge that we are so actively hated by other countries. She frequently refers to the subject and says she cannot see why it should be so.”

  Even as the Jubilee celebrations broke out, the uglier side of empire128 was making itself internationally visible. India was in the grip of a horrifying famine exacerbated, if not caused, by an obsessively free-market colonial government which continued to export grain surpluses to England while India starved. Photographs of the hideously starved victims—courtesy of the new light, handheld Kodak cameras—were seen around the world, though they were markedly absent from the British papers, which operated conscious self-censorship on the matter. Away from public gaze, the colonial government in South Africa was quietly importing Chinese indentured labour—effectively slaves—to work in the mines, in order to undercut local wages.

  When Wilhelm made a state visit to St. Petersburg after the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, in August, his new foreign minister, Bernhard von Bülow, took great delight in reporting that “Emperor Nicholas,129 Count Murawiew [sic]* and Mr. Witte expressed mistrust and tension with England at every opportunity.” Nicholas said130 he believed that the English were trying to provoke a European war. Actually the tsar was about as personally enthusiastic about the kaiser as he was politically about the British. “Thank God the German visit is over,” he wrote to his mother afterwards. “… On the whole Wilhelm was very cheerful, calm and courteous, while she [Dona] tried to be charming, and looked very ugly in rich clothes without taste; the hats she wore in the evenings … were particularly impossible.” (It was an open secret that Wilhelm designed Dona’s clothes and forced her to diet to stay slim.) Nicholas added that he had had to make Wilhelm an honorary Russian admiral because he’d accepted a similar rank in the German navy the year before, and the thought—“C’est à vomir!”131—made him sick.

  Only a few months later, in mid-November 1897, another German colonial intervention provoked paroxysms of rage in Russia quite as strong as and distinctly similar to the British reaction to the Kruger telegram. Wilhelm sent a naval squadron to occupy the northeastern Chinese port of Kiaochow. The reason—the pretext—was the murder of two German missionaries. “We have … to132 show them with the most brutal ruthlessness that the German Kaiser is not one to fool about with,” he told the German Foreign Ministry. The truth was, with Africa looking distinctly crowded with would-be colonial empires, Germany had begun to cast its eye—just like Russia—over China. It fancied acquiring a province and a port in which to refuel its ships in the Pacific, from which it might claim some Pacific islands. Kiaochow was as yet not dominated by other foreign influences, it was easily accessible, with a good protected harbour. Having seized it, in the New Year of 1898 the German government took a lease on it and the surrounding region from the Chinese government.

  The Russians were furious. They believed the Germans had grabbed the port from under their noses. They’d long fancied Kiaochow, which was in Manchuria, the Chinese province that bordered Siberia, as a warm-water port for their own navy. They issued a formal demand that Germany vacate it, going so far as to threaten war. In response, Wilhelm claimed that the tsar knew all about it. He had mentioned his interest in Kiaochow during their meeting that summer, he said, and Nicholas had raised no objections. This was true. During his summer visit the kaiser had asked Nicholas whether he had any intentions towards Kiaochow. Nicholas had replied vaguely that he wasn’t opposed133 to the German fleet making use of it as long as they asked permission first. Wilhelm decided this amounted to a formal “agreement with the Emperor134 in person,” and another victory for his personal diplomacy. Nicholas, who had clearly never expected the Germans to mount a land grab in China, felt misled and cheated.

  Military action against Germany, the Russian government admitted to itself, was not really an option. The new foreign minister, Muraviev, proposed that instead Russia send warships to take over the nearby Chinese port of Port Arthur. Witte opposed the idea; sending ships and troops ran absolute
ly counter to his plans to create a sphere of influence in Manchuria by promising friendly diplomatic support and loans. It made his previous inroads look dishonest, it would be expensive, and it would instantly alert the British to Russia’s intentions. Initially Nicholas listened to Witte. But Muraviev went behind Witte’s back, asked for a private audience and convinced the emperor to send the ships because the “yellow races” understood only force. The Russians sailed into Port Arthur weeks later. “Thank God we135 managed to occupy Port Arthur … without blood, quietly and almost amicably!” Nicholas wrote to his brother George. “Of course, it was quite risky, but had we missed those docks now, it would be impossible later to kick out the English or the Japanese without a war. Yes, one has to look sharp, there on the Pacific ocean lies the whole future of the development of Russia and at last we have a fully open warm water port … What did you think of the articles in the English papers? Greedy scoundrels!—they are never satisfied! The devil take them!”

  Now it was the turn of the British to be furious. The last thing they wanted was a scramble for China.136 Moreover, the Russians consistently lied about their intentions. They had initially turfed British ships out of Port Arthur, insisting their warships needed to winter there; then they assured the British that the occupation was temporary, while taking out a lease on Port Arthur in return for paying off China’s indemnity to Japan. Finally, they promised that Port Arthur would be open to foreign ships, but, when asked to put his assurances in writing, Muraviev admitted the Russians had no intention of making it an open port. All the while, he had sweetened his denials with occasional mentions of an Anglo-Russian agreement. He’d even got the tsar to charm the British ambassador, O’Conor, at the Winter Palace ball, and murmur encouragingly about Anglo-Russian relations.

  In Africa it had become accepted that if one Great Power acquired a large amount of territory, other powers with rival interests could expect some form of compensation. So the British, half-reluctantly since they’d preferred the old less formal arrangement, demanded their own port in China, and got nearby Weihaiwei, in compensation.

  Now Germany was disgruntled. The country had been almost hysterically delighted at the acquisition of Kiaochow, but almost immediately it was eclipsed by the Russians and the British. And when Wilhelm wrote to Nicky in the New Year of 1898 boasting of the German success—“We follow in137 the fulfilment of the task, which has been set us by the Lord of all Lords … in promoting civilization, ie Christianity in the Far East!”—the tsar’s reply was “cold and138 reserved.” He would pointedly avoid Berlin and the kaiser for the next three years. In 1899 a German diplomat would report that Nicholas’s hostility towards Wilhelm was so strong that it was now an obstacle to good relations, and the kaiser’s own indiscretion was making it worse. On the report Wilhelm scribbled, “I never say139 anything about him in front of strangers.” He was actually only too quick to describe Nicky as a “ninny” and a “whimperer,” and barely a year later would tell the British foreign secretary that the tsar was “only fit to live in a country house and grow turnips.”140 Though the Russians had made it clear that warm personal relationships wouldn’t be allowed to affect politics, it was obvious that bad relationships could.

  * Alix destroyed the correspondence after the queen’s death.

  * Queen Victoria felt36 quite as anti-republican. When the French president, Félix Faure, came to pay his respects to her in 1898 in the South of France, she told Edward he was a commoner and could not be treated as an equal. Edward must remain on the stairs when he arrived, forcing the president to climb up to meet him. Faure, perfectly aware of the intended snub, was very insulted.

  * Swaine was the man from whom Wilhelm had extracted military information which he had then passed to Tsar Alexander III. The military attaché had remained a consistent and sympathetic advocate for what he believed was Wilhelm’s underlying sympathy for his mother’s country.

  * In fact rumours of the Ottoman empire’s collapse would turn out to be premature; it would lumber along into the First World War.

  * Between Wilhelm and George’s cousin Alexandra (youngest daughter of Affie, now Duke of Coburg, and Marie of Russia) and the German diplomat Prince Ernst zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg.

  * Nicholas and George had just spent a few days with their grandparents in Denmark.

  * The new Russian foreign minister, usually rendered as Muraviev.

  8

  BEHIND THE WALL

  1893–1904

  Even people who disapproved of Nicholas talked about his “kind eyes.”1 The British journalist W. T. Stead, given several very rare audiences with him in 1898, reported breathlessly to his readers that the tsar was “charming, sympathetic,2 alert, lucid, modest.” As a man Nicholas took an appealingly modern view of marriage: he was a far more devoted, faithful and supportive husband than most men—or monarchs—of his generation. Entry after entry in his diary complained about the amount of time he had to spend away from his wife and children. “After tea,”3 he wrote a few days before the birth of his first child, Olga, in late October 1895, “I read, and set myself to composing a reply to Wilhelm. A thoroughly irritating thing to be doing when one has so many things to do, and so much more important!” His daily routine was arranged so he could take his daughters—there were three by 1899—and his dogs—English collies—out for a daily walk, or in winter a sledge at 11 a.m., and have his meals with his family. In the evenings, unless he had to go to the opera or ballet, he liked to retire to his wife’s boudoir. Alix created a cosy, gemütlich nest within the echoing imperial grandeur of the Romanov palaces. The world, including the royal household, was shut out. “Never did I4 believe there could be such utter happiness in this world,” she had written in Nicholas’s diary after their wedding night. “I am indescribably happy,” he added a few weeks later. They called each other “hubby” and “wifey” (using the English words). “My sweet old5 darling, many kisses, wifey loves you so deeply and strongly! You are my one and all,” she wrote in his diary. They would chat together in English, or German or French; he would read Pushkin, Tolstoy or the latest fashionable English or French novel to her; they might paste photographs of themselves into an album—albums which still today conjure a vivid portrait of idyllic turn-of-the century family life.

  The only blight was Alix’s chronic ill health and their failure to have a son. From the beginning of their marriage she lived in a permanent state of exhausted semi-invalidity. It’s possible the symptoms were psychosomatic; the court doctor, Eugene Botkin, seems to have thought so. It’s also possible, however, that along with the carrier gene for haemophilia which would manifest itself in their son, Alexei, Queen Victoria had passed on to Alix porphyria, the illness that sent George III mad, but which also had a range of more common chronic physical symptoms.* As the evening closed they went to sleep in the same bed—unlike most of their royal contemporaries.

  The problem was that Nicholas wasn’t a simple family man who could shut himself away from the world. From the start of his reign, it was clear that domestic life was more vividly important to him than anything to do with his public office. Even the most reactionary members of the court recognized that this was a problem and the tsar was isolated. The head of his Chancellery, A. A. Mossolov, actually gave it a name; he called it “sredostenie,” “the wall,” that surrounded Nicholas, preventing him from getting “fresh ideas” and “sound information.” Mossolov, like other court conservatives, believed the wall was made up of the bureaucracy and its ministers, the intelligentsia and the press. Ministers deliberately obscured the information the tsar received and perpetrated all sorts of unknown evils in his name; the intelligentsia agitated against the regime; the press “misrepresented” the tsar and his relationship with the people. In truth, the wall was made up of tradition, etiquette and Nicholas’s own withdrawal and refusal to accept the need for change. Russia was in the grip of great social and economic change, and the government was increasingly inadequate to confront it,
and he himself believed utterly that he was the only man who could rule it. But he closed himself away. “I only hear6 good reports about No 1,” the German diplomat Prince Radolin told his friend Fritz Holstein in late 1895. “The only thing I regret is that he cuts himself off and sees only Lobanov and Witte, who don’t like each other. People think that this shutting himself off will cease after the coronation.”

  In the winter of 1895, however, the couple moved out of St. Petersburg altogether, fifteen miles east, to Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, “the Tsar’s village,” fifteen miles east of St. Petersburg. Tsarskoe Selo was an elegant provincial town, though in Russia there weren’t any other towns like it. Built originally by Catherine the Great, it was a weird, idealized miniature royal theme park—two royal palaces and the holiday homes of the highest aristocracy, set in 800 acres of perfectly manicured gardens and hedges, surrounded by a high fence and Cossack guards, maintained by thousands of servants and a permanent garrison of 5,000. Within its borders were the only town-wide electrical system in the country, the first railway, a telegraph and radio station, and the most advanced water and sewage system in the whole of Russia. Most Russian villages had no running water or drains.

  There, in the midst of vast neoclassical splendour and circumscribed by imperial etiquette, they lived a life of almost self-conscious bourgeois moderation. Nicholas wore his clothes until they wore out. They ate simply—Alix wasn’t interested and his digestion couldn’t take it. The family apartments were comfortable rather than grand. Alix, her lady-in-waiting Sophie Buxhoeveden observed, “loved a homely home, with children and dogs about it.” The rooms had been made more intimate and “cosy” with dark polished wood galleries and panels in the Jugendstil (German art nouveau) style patronized by Alix’s brother Ernst of Hesse-Darmstadt. They were decorated in English chintzes—“just like those in a comfortable English house”7—and packed with small framed photographs, knick-knacks, bookshelves and icons. The knick-knacks, however, came from Fabergé and the icons were priceless. The food arrived on silver platters, the palace chef was one of the greatest of his generation, and Alexandra came to the family dinner table wreathed in diamonds.