The Three Emperors Read online

  Within weeks, the gossip in St. Petersburg was that Prince Wilhelm wanted “war with Russia and was generally very anti-Russian.” “In England,” Bismarck noted wearily, “the opposite!”88

  * “It is very hard7 to convey to English readers the medieval conditions in which people in our state of life lived in Germany,” Vicky’s niece Mary Louise would write about living in Germany twenty years later.

  * There seems no consensus on whether this was Leopold or Arthur.

  * Wilhelm’s English cousin Princess Mary Louise was one of many women to be charmed by his German grandfather, though she was bemused by his attempts to disguise his baldness by securing his comb-over to his left ear with a piece of dirty old cotton.

  * Wilhelm’s painstaking biographer John Röhl has shown that he could ride years before he met Hinzpeter.

  * Wilhelm and the tsarevitch were third cousins through their shared great-great-grandfather, Tsar Paul the Mad. Wilhelm’s great-aunt Charlotte, sister of his grandfather the kaiser, had married Tsar Nicholas I, Nicholas’s great-grandfather, making them also second cousins once removed.

  * A flogging.

  2

  GEORGE

  Coming Second

  1865

  In 1865, when George Frederick Ernest Albert Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was born, Britain was at the top of the pile, the world’s financial and economic superpower, the greatest of Great Powers. Britain produced two-thirds of the world’s coal, half its iron, well over half its steel, half its cotton and was engaged in 40 percent of its trade. It was the most urbanized country on earth; London was the world centre of banking, insurance and commodity dealing. Its navy was the most powerful in the world. Its empire of 9.5 million1 square miles—increasing all the time—was the envy of the rest of Europe, providing lucrative markets and tremendous lustre. Despite areas of miserable poverty such as the East End of London and the newly industrialized towns of the North, Britain had the highest wages and cheapest food in Europe. Not without reason it was pleased with itself. It considered itself the great country of freedom and liberation, the world’s civilizer—a claim which infuriated the rest of Europe, which considered Britain’s claims to the moral high ground purest hypocrisy.

  George’s grandmother, Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, now a reclusive widow, was despite this still perhaps the most vivid incarnation of Britain and its empire and the dominant figure in the family. Britain claimed to be both a monarchy and a democracy (which made no sense to people on the continent, where it was evident to everyone that the two couldn’t mix, and democrats invariably lined up with republicans). In reality it was not quite either. The monarchy had, over the previous 200 years, been pretty much stripped of its powers and what it had left was increasingly symbolic; the democracy was more of an oligarchy run by the landed aristocracy which dominated the cabinet, Parliament and local government, and populated the two main political parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals, both of which believed in free trade and the avoidance of expensive foreign wars (though they seemed unable to extricate themselves from a steady stream of small colonial ones). Power resided in the prime minister and his cabinet, who were in turn dependent on the confidence of the Houses of Parliament, and the monarch was obliged to follow their advice. Within the system the monarch played a necessary but entirely formal and ceremonial role: bills couldn’t become laws, taxes couldn’t be levied, ministers, judges, churchmen, ambassadors, army officers couldn’t be appointed, peerages handed out or pardons given, without royal assent. The monarch was required to summon and dismiss Parliament and appoint prime ministers, declare war or make peace. But there was no question that they could do any of this without having been told to do so by a government minister. What was left were the monarch’s rather fuzzily defined “rights” to be consulted, to encourage and to warn. The true balance of the relationship was decorously camouflaged by the tradition whereby British politicians addressed the sovereign in flatteringly subordinate language and the ceremonial of government which implied that the monarch was more important than she was. In the world of royalty appearances counted for a very great deal, and her subjects and the rest of the world continued to believe that she had power.

  Unsurprisingly Queen Victoria didn’t much like the idea that she had no function but to look decorative. She resented the description of herself as some kind of disguise, as the constitutional writer Walter Bagehot called her in 1867—a “retired widow” behind whose skirts a republic had “insinuated itself.”2 Within the confines of her role, she pushed and manoeuvred her royal prerogatives, her “rights,” and exploited any advantage she had to make her convictions noted. These advantages weren’t nugatory. Despite her constitutional powerlessness, the queen was en route to becoming the pre-eminent monarch in the whole world, and her dynasty (to some other royals’ chagrin) the world’s most prestigious royal family. This was primarily, of course, due to the empire and Britain’s pre-eminent global position. Before the queen had come to the throne, the British royal family had been mired in rumours of madness, sex scandals, financial profligacy and mismanagement. But twenty-five years of careful investment and exploiting its advantages had somewhat restored the British monarchy itself—under Victoria, the family had become a bastion of irreproachable morality and family values; its jewels were now (with some help from mines in India and South Africa) as good if not better than the Romanovs’ famous diamonds; its art treasures as good if not better than the Hapsburgs’; its palaces were perhaps not as numerous and vast but were more comfortable, its estates not as large but well managed, and its private incomes carefully massaged.

  The queen’s other secret weapon was her relationships with other foreign monarchs, most of whom exercised far more real power than she did. By the traditions of diplomacy they wrote to her as the head of state on matters of foreign affairs. This lent her an influence and weight in British foreign policy that the constitution no longer gave her. The queen worked to extend and tighten those relationships through her children’s marriages—eight out of nine of them married into European reigning houses—and subsequently her grandchildren’s. It would make her the matriarch of royal Europe. Even the tsarevitch of Russia would call her Granny. There was thus some justification that she be kept abreast, as she insisted, of foreign affairs. She demanded, and was given, drafts of treaties, had each line discussed exhaustively. Finally, there was the fact that she was a woman and a widow, which made her seem unthreatening even when she was administering dressing-downs, and gave her considerable leeway in making interventions and giving the kind of “advice” no prime minister would have taken from a male monarch.

  The monarch was supposed to be neutral, detached from and above all political parties. The queen was convinced of her own rightness and was unashamedly partisan. She was also determined and energetic, pouring out letters to her prime ministers, who were obliged to answer her in their own handwriting. She could ignore, or at least strenuously query, the advice of her cabinet. She took an active dislike to some ministers while openly adoring others. Sometimes she wore her governments down. In 1881 she would complain so vociferously about the speech William Gladstone’s cabinet had written for her for the opening of Parliament that they would agree to amend it. Did she have a tangible effect on policy? She failed to stop her cabinets from doing what they were determined to do, but she could certainly hold things up—as more than one of her prime ministers had noted, handling her was like having a whole separate government department to deal with—and when her ideas chimed with public opinion she could be formidably hard to stop. But history was against her. The Great Reform Act of 1832 and its successor in 1867 expanded the franchise, began to clean up corrupt and archaic electoral practices (whereby, for example, the local aristocrat might effectively choose the local Member of Parliament), and pushed on the gradual but inexorable process of shifting power to the House of Commons. And as far as her ministers were concerned the monarch might give
advice, and could sometimes be admirable, but had no real authority in government.

  The other side of the British power equation was the aristocracy which dominated the upper echelons of government. The British aristocracy had a serious, deeply entrenched and self-conscious idea of itself as being both entitled to rule and obligated to serve. It was the most unmilitary and the richest3 aristocracy in Europe; Prussia’s militarism was just the most exaggerated form of the continent-wide tendency of aristocrats to present themselves primarily as a soldier class. The British aristocracy’s epiphanic moment had been the English Civil War: it had been almost destroyed by the Roundheads’ standing army, the New Model Army. This had left it with a profound suspicion of standing armies such as the Germans and Russians had, and had forced it to win its power back by infiltrating Parliament and government bureaucracy—institutions with which most European aristocracies scorned to dirty their hands. As a consequence Britain’s volunteer army had remained relatively small and under parliamentary control ever since, and the navy had become the vehicle of British expansion. Proof that this worked was the huge empire. But it remained a puzzle to European politicians, German ones especially, who could never quite understand how Britain got along without a decent army.

  The British aristocracy regarded serving in government as the highest profession for a gentleman. The power it still wielded made it quite different from the landed aristocracy of, for example, Russia, which had become, under the auspices of a tsarist regime eager to restrict its power, a largely decorative, urban class distanced from the land from which it derived its incomes. The implementation of policies that the more numerous but less well represented sections of society didn’t necessarily favour was lubricated by Britain’s wealth, and was helped by the roots of deference within the culture. But it also worked because aristocratic government lived in a fine balance with a genuinely functioning, mobilizable and much-vaunted public opinion, fuelled by the country’s well-developed infrastructure of good roads, a reliable postal system and railways, alongside high literacy rates and a flourishing newspaper and debating culture. Public opinion—albeit of a relatively limited section of the “public”—had genuinely existed as a force in Britain for almost a century; in most other European states it was only just starting to mobilize. Its successes were tangible; it had—eventually—forced on a reluctant Parliament the abolition of slavery in Britain, and the first Reform Act of 1832. It meant that those without the vote still felt—or sometimes had the illusion—that they had a voice in the democracy. For the moment, however, though the electorate was expanding, the aristocracy showed little sign of being dislodged from its position.

  As if to celebrate the success of the British upper classes, in a piece of triumphant cultural imperialism, the image of the English gentleman was becoming the most appealing manifestation of wealth and status across Europe, if not the world. By the 1890s European grandees, Silesian millionaires, Austrian and Russian grand dukes would be taking up tennis, golf, fox-hunting, shooting and ordering their suits from Savile Row and their guns from Purdey. Wealthy Russians would aspire to what Vladimir Nabokov, scion of an aristocratic Russian family, called “the comfortable products4 of Anglo-Saxon civilization”—Pears soap, Golden Syrup, fruitcake, Huntley and Palmer’s biscuits, toothpaste, playing cards, striped blazers, tennis balls and collapsible rubber baths—purchased from Druce, the English shop on Nevsky Prospekt.

  The future George V was six years younger than his first cousin Wilhelm and could hardly have been more different. While Willy was idiosyncratic, quick, assertive and determined always to come first, George was resigned to being unremarkable. He was a second son, destined to live in the shadow of his brother, and the family environment seemed to encourage a kind of comfortable mediocrity; neither of his parents was exercised by the idea of having to prove oneself, academically or otherwise. George’s father, Albert Edward, the future Edward VII, known in the family as Bertie, had reacted violently against his father’s educational expectations, while his beautiful Danish mother, Alexandra, was cheerfully non-intellectual. Bertie admired and loved his older sister Vicky, but the lesson he had drawn from their childhood was the direct opposite of hers. He hated their father’s rigorous educational regime.

  From the age of three, Bertie’s every waking moment had been crammed with improving experiences. “I had no childhood,” he would say much later, and his early years were, by pretty much everyone’s estimation but his parents’, wretched. Bertie had fought back with sullen resistance and hysterical tantrums; he was rewarded with more pressure and discipline, sterner punishment, and most miserably the withholding of affection and isolation from other children. His rebellion brought out the absolute worst in both parents: Albert was unimpressed and unrelenting; Victoria endlessly bemoaned her son’s “backwardness,” his frivolity and his failure to be just like his father. For his seventeenth birthday she sent him a memo reminding him that “Life is composed of duties,”5 and sacked the tutor with whom, despite everything, he’d built a warm relationship. He emerged, aged eighteen, in 1859, a “disappointment,” with an appetite—a large one—for life at its less serious and most sybaritic: he liked clothes, smoking, shooting, society, gambling, food and girls. Food and girls especially. “His intellect6 is of no more use than a pistol packed at the bottom of a trunk if one were attacked in the robber-infested Apennines,” said his mother. At Oxford, despite his parents’ best efforts to imprison him among a bunch of elderly celibate dons, he found his way to the richest, louchest, most high-living students. Two years later, on military training in Ireland, he managed to have a fling with a local girl even though he’d been confined to barracks. When the story got back to England, Albert wrote Bertie a hysterical letter painting a future of blackmail and paternity suits, and died a month later in December 1861. Though it was typhoid and sheer exhaustion that killed him, Victoria blamed Bertie. “Oh! that boy,”7 she wrote, “much as I pity him I never can or shall look on him without a shudder.” Within a few years Bertie was famous throughout Europe as the playboy Prince of Wales, celebrated for his immaculate dress, a string of public scandals and his passion for Paris and its demimonde, turning up in Emile Zola’s 1879 novel Nana, thinly disguised as the “Prince of Scots,” admiring the protagonist’s fabulous breasts with “an air of8 connoisseurship.”

  Victoria determined to marry the twenty-two-year-old Bertie off quickly, and recruited Vicky to find a suitable princess. Having unsuccessfully trawled the German courts, she came up with Princess Alexandra, the beautiful daughter of the soon-to-be Danish king. Her father, Christian, a captain of the Danish Royal Guard, was the godchild of the King of Denmark, who had decided to name him as his heir in 1852. The royals-to-be had lived in genteel poverty in Copenhagen for most of Alexandra’s childhood—she had shared a room with her sisters Dagmar and Thyra, and had made her own clothes—and experienced a quite extraordinary change in status. Within two years of Christian’s accession in 1863 they had colonized royal Europe. Alexandra married the heir to the British throne; her sister Dagmar married the heir to the Russian empire. Their seventeen-year-old brother, William, was invited to become King of Greece by the Greek national assembly. The Danish royal family were—perhaps because of their relatively normal upbringing—very much themselves: a bunch of close-knit extroverts, known for being outdoorsy, informal, uncultured and unsophisticated: “The special joke was to make 9funny noises and yell if they saw anyone trying to write a letter.” King Christian had no interest in books but pronounced ideas about exercise, and had taught his children gymnastics. Queen Victoria considered the Danes noisy, clannish and frivolous, but envied their closeness: “They are wonderfully united—and never breathe one word against each other, and the daughters remain as unspoilt and as completely Children of the Home as when they were unmarried. I do admire this …” Alexandra was lively, rode a horse stylishly, had a taste for staying up late, and was beautiful. Bertie met her precisely twice before he proposed. The
y married in 1863. The queen—still punishing her son—insisted it be a private wedding, wore widow’s black and refused to attend the wedding lunch.

  Nevertheless, Alexandra was a great hit in Britain, which had been starved of royal spectacle since Victoria had shut herself away after Albert’s death. Tennyson christened her “the Sea king’s daughter from across the sea.” As for Bertie, he was bowled over by her beauty and warmth. She was bowled over by her new life. They were both gregarious, spontaneous and irredeemably extravagant—within a few years Bertie was overspending his income by £20,000 a year—and despite Queen Victoria’s attempts to prescribe whom they saw and what they did—she forbade Alexandra to ride in Hyde Park—they quickly became the centre of the most fashionable clique in London, the Marlborough House set, named after their mansion on Pall Mall. Their doings and those of their friends began to be enthusiastically written about and even occasionally photographed in the British newspapers’ embryonic society and gossip columns. Naturally, Victoria disapproved. “Are you aware10 that Alix has the smallest brain ever seen? I dread that—with his small, empty brain—very much for future children,” she wrote to Vicky. “The melancholy11 thing,” one of Alexandra’s ladies-in-waiting wrote of Bertie, “is that neither he nor the darling princess ever care to open a book.”