The Three Emperors

by Miranda Carter

  His influence over Nicky, however, was predicated on his closeness to Nicky’s father’s views. The most forceful and pervasive influence in Nicky’s life was Alexander III, as one courtier wrote, “whom he venerated59 and whose example he followed assiduously even in small details of his everyday life.” But Alexander was six foot one and immune to doubt, and Nicholas, five foot five or six, was a far gentler, probably more intelligent, certainly more accomplished, person. In the claustrophobic, patriarchal atmosphere of his parents’ household, however, there had been little space to develop any independence of mind or much confidence in his own judgement. Nicky’s future sister-in-law, Victoria of Hesse-Darmstadt, would observe perceptively that Alexander’s “dominating personality60 had stunted any gifts of initiative in Nicky.”

  Pierre Gilliard, who thirty years later would tutor Nicky’s son Alexis in similar circumstances, came to believe that raising a child in such an isolated environment was a recipe for disaster. Such a child, he concluded, was Nicky finally left Gatchina Palace and his family in the summer of 1887, just as he turned nineteen and in London Queen Victoria was celebrating her Golden Jubilee. Like Wilhelm, he joined the army, an elite guards regiment, the legendary Preobrazhensky Guards. “I miss you terribly,62 my dear Nicky,” his mother wrote. She also reminded him to be “polite and courteous,” to get along with everyone, but not allow “too much familiarity or intimacy.” “One has to be63 cautious with everybody from the start,” Nicky agreed, but he was very taken with his new life. “I am now happier than I can say to have joined the army and every day I become more and more used to camp life.” There was drilling and target practice, and then afternoons and evenings of cards, billiards and skittles. What could be nicer?

  deprived of61 something which plays a vital part in the formation of judgment. He is deprived of the knowledge which is acquired out of the schoolroom, knowledge such as comes from life itself, unhampered contact with other children, the diverse and sometimes conflicting influences of environment, direct observation and the simple experience of men and affairs—in a word, everything which in the course of years develops the critical faculty and a sense of reality. Under such circumstances an individual must be endowed with exceptional gifts to be able to see things as they are, think clearly, and desire the right things. He is cut off from life. He cannot imagine what is going on behind the wall on which false pictures are painted for his amusement or distraction.

  * Bismarck nevertheless liked to claim that it was a hotbed of anti-Prussianism and called it “The Whispering Gallery.”47 What was true was that the house parties had their share of the Danish queen’s disgruntled German relatives muttering about upstart Prussians.

  * The marriage was not a success. Affie was a bully and a drunk who talked incessantly about himself and inflicted appalling violin recitals on everyone, and Marie hated England. The queen, with characteristic perversity, decided she liked her Russian daughter-in-law: “I have formed53 a high opinion of her … Everyone must like her, but alas! No one likes him! I fear that will never get better!”

  PART II

  FAMILY TIES, IMPERIAL CONTESTS

  4

  WILHELM EMPEROR

  1888–90

  By the spring of 1888 it was obvious that Wilhelm would soon be emperor. His grandfather had died in March of old age. By the time Fritz, crowned Kaiser Friedrich, came to the throne, he was dying of throat cancer, had had a tracheotomy and couldn’t speak, and no one expected him to live long. His orders, scribbled on little bits of paper, were simply ignored. “People in1 general consider us a mere passing shadow soon to be replaced by reality in the shape of William!!” Vicky wrote bitterly to her mother. She poured her displaced distress into her obsessive pursuit of the marriage between her daughter Moretta and Alexander of Battenberg, in which the groom had long since lost interest. Wilhelm, meanwhile, told Bismarck that Vicky “hated him more2 than anything else on earth,” and was killing his father with her hysterical scenes.

  Wilhelm was avid to be emperor. He had honed his whole personality to project the heartily masculine, charismatic, can-do soldier-king he wanted to be: the brusquely jocular manner, the staccato vocal delivery, the purposeful physical stance, the deliberately fierce expression he wore in public. He liked to think of himself as another Frederick the Great: politician, soldier, strategist, philosopher, cultural arbiter; someone who, through sheer force of character, would render democracy obsolete. To emphasize his similarity to Frederick, he had even adopted his habit of scribbling marginalia on official memos and documents: “Lies!” “Nonsense!” “Stale fish.”

  Some of those who had known him as a prince, however, worried a little about what kind of king he would make. “Good heavens,3 whatever will happen if Prince Wilhelm becomes Kaiser as early as this?” one senior general had remarked the year before. “He thinks he understands everything, even shipbuilding.” Bismarck, meanwhile, muttered about Wilhelm’s inflated opinion of his own abilities, the “aspiring toadies” who surrounded him, and his minuscule attention span: he would “take a little peek … learn nothing thoroughly and end up believing he knew everything.”4 The British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, thought he’d spotted something dangerously rash in the kaiser-to-be, and worried that he would take Germany into the arms of Russia. Bismarck’s most senior adviser at the German Foreign Office, Fritz Holstein, was concerned about Wilhelm’s hostility to Britain. Six weeks before Fritz had died the queen had visited Berlin, prepared to have a showdown with her intransigent and disloyal grandson. Salisbury had tried to restrain her. Both he and the German Foreign Office, he told her, were “afraid that, if5 any thorny subject came up in conversation, the Prince might say something that would not reflect credit on him; and that, if he acted so as to draw any reproof from Your Majesty, he might take it ill, and a feeling would rankle in his mind which might hinder the good relations between the two nations.” He reminded her that “All Prince William’s impulses, however blamable or unreasonable, will henceforth be political causes of enormous potency; and the two nations are so necessary to each other, that everything that is said to him must be carefully weighed.”

  In the event, both Wilhelm and the queen behaved impeccably and anxieties were quietened. Wilhelm told the British ambassador that he’d been “delighted”6 by his grandmother. The sixty-nine-year-old queen had been, Fritz Holstein observed, “extraordinarily gracious”7 to her grandson, “and vice versa … This will somewhat lessen the Prince’s foolish hatred of England.” In a private audience with the queen, Bismarck assured her that Germany didn’t want a quarrel with England. Vicky reported that he had told her that despite Wilhelm’s inexperience “‘If you throw him8 in the water he’ll swim,’ for he was not devoid of cleverness.” At a state dinner that evening, the chancellor chose a large “bonbon”9 decorated with the queen’s portrait in icing, and very ostentatiously unbuttoned his frock coat and placed it close to his heart. Privately, Bismarck was confident that he could manage Wilhelm just as he’d managed his grandfather, by shameless manipulation, cajoling and, where necessary, a little light bullying.

  Fritz succumbed to his throat cancer on 15 June. He had ruled for three months. Bertie telegraphed George, who wrote in his diary that “Poor dear Uncle10 Fritz has died … it is too terribly sad.” Wilhelm expressed no such tenderness. Moments after his father died, he ordered that the Neues Palais be cordoned off by soldiers and searched and no one, especially his mother, be allowed to leave. The soldiers were looking for documents—Vicky’s letters and Fritz’s war diaries—which Wilhelm had been told his mother was trying to smuggle out of the country. He was too late; she’d already got the boxes to England via the British embassy days before.* Wilhelm’s violent gesture was designed to humiliate and distress, “as though,”11 as his first biographer, Emil Ludwig, later wrote, “a monarch had been murdered, and his hostile successor, long prepared, had seized upon the newly acquired authority.” It was also an act of Oedipal rage. Fritz was burie
d three days later, with none of the traditional lying in state. No foreign dignitaries were invited to the funeral and Bismarck stayed away. In contravention of his father’s dying wishes Wilhelm ordered an autopsy to confirm he had died of cancer, and forbade the marriage of Moretta and Battenberg. Though the new kaiser would later protest his love and admiration for his dead hero-father and put up innumerable memorials to him, he didn’t mention Fritz in his first speech to the Reichstag at all, instead declaiming that he would “follow the same12 path by which my deceased grandfather won the confidence of his allies, the love of the German people and the good will of foreign countries.” Few people at court seemed to mind: the Hohenzollerns were famous for their inter-generational hatreds, the Empress Friedrich, as she now was known, had been regarded as a dangerous and unpredictable force whose eclipse was long overdue, and the kaiser at least looked forceful. After decades of doddery Wilhelm I and the uncertainties of the previous months, Germany was ready for a charismatic young ruler. Wilhelm seemed just that: modern, energetic, able to connect with his audience. When he rode through the poor areas of Berlin a few weeks after his accession, people cheered, “Hail to the13 workers’ king!” He seemed present and immediate and quickly showed a passion for making speeches full of resounding phrases, promising a new age of German greatness, expressing his purposefulness and lack of self-doubt.

  Edward and Alexandra were two of the few who made it to Fritz’s funeral. The Prince of Wales, who had been a regular visitor to his brother-in-law’s sickbed, found his sister broken and isolated. She “cried and sobbed14 like a child,” he reported. Alexandra wrote to George that “instead of15 Wilhelm being a comfort and support to her, he has quite gone over to Bismarck and Co, who entirely overlook and crush her. Which is too infamous.” Bismarck’s son Herbert, now the German foreign minister, told Edward that Fritz had been “unfit to16 reign,” and the chancellor told him “that in fact17 the Emperor had never been competent, on account of his illness, to reign and that the country had been governed by the Empress but that the Salic law did not exist here.” The couple were angry and offended. At their audience with Bismarck they departed from the usual empty diplomatic pleasantries and started asking awkward questions. What was happening about the kingdom of Hanover, seized and annexed by Prussia during the wars of the 1860s? Its heir, the Duke of Cumberland, was Bertie’s cousin and his wife was Alexandra’s younger sister, Thyra, and he’d been fruitlessly demanding compensation for years. Was it true that Fritz had been considering handing back Alsace-Lorraine to the French, Edward asked—a question which Queen Victoria’s secretary later admitted was perhaps “more … than was18 prudent.”

  Bismarck was not accustomed to being interrogated and he didn’t like it. The Waleses couldn’t have known it, but he was secretly using the Hanover revenues to fund his manipulation of the German press—including the articles that had so traduced Vicky. As for Alsace-Lorraine, its acquisition was inextricably bound, for Germany, with unification. But the dictates of diplomatic etiquette forced him to make polite, affirmative noises. The next day Edward sent a written19 version of Bismarck’s answers to his son Herbert, asking that the chancellor sign off on them—just to ensure they were correct. Bismarck was furious—as Edward meant him to be. The German government made a formal complaint to the British government about “the interview with Their Royal Highnesses when advantage had been taken of a visit of ceremony to put questions to him which it was difficult to answer on the spur of the moment.” Both sides exited angry.

  The Germans were determined to get their own back. Berlin gossip soon had it that the Prince of Wales had demanded that Alsace-Lorraine be returned to the French—a rumour designed to embarrass Edward and to stir a new wave of antipathy for Vicky. And when Wilhelm, with whom Edward thought he’d parted on good terms, sent his representative to his grandmother to announce his accession, he deliberately chose an officer whose dislike of his mother and father was well known, and who neglected to mention Fritz’s name at all. The queen was chilly. Wilhelm complained. “The Queen is20 extremely glad to hear that General Winterfeldt says he was received coldly, though civilly; for such was her intention,” she replied.

  “I do not like21 the look of things in Germany,” the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, sighed barely two weeks after Wilhelm had become kaiser. “It is evident that the Young Emperor hates us and loves Russia.” In her journal, the queen worried that Wilhelm was “leaning towards22 Russia,” and bemoaned “how untrue and heartless” Bismarck had proved to be.

  Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, nearing sixty, had been prime minister, foreign secretary and leader of the Conservative Party since 1885, with one brief interruption, and was the most important figure in British politics (with the exception of William Gladstone, who was coming to the end of his career). The queen trusted and respected him, inviting him to sit in her presence—his knees were starting to go—a privilege she allowed almost no one else. Six foot four, increasingly broad, bald and impressively bearded, he came from a long line of aristocratic statesmen; he was also a misanthropist, a depressive, an intellectual who enjoyed passing himself off as a philistine (he spent his spare time debating theology with his family and working in his laboratory at Hatfield House, where he installed the first electric light system in England) and so famously short-sighted and self-absorbed that he frequently failed to recognize his own family. He was an effective politician with a talent for foreign affairs, combining the prime ministership with the post of foreign secretary, a post invariably held by the grandest aristocrats. Though he presided over the world’s self-described great liberal democracy, his political views were not worlds away from those of Bismarck or Nicholas’s mentor Pobedonostsev. A conservative in the purest sense, he’d entered politics to defend the ruling propertied classes from the ravages of democracy and an expanding franchise. For him, the upper classes represented the best of human endeavour—birth, intelligence and culture—and they deserved to rule; inherited wealth, he believed, made a man less prone to corruption. It was no small irony—though not to him, he would have seen no contradiction—that Salisbury was shamelessly nepotistic, promoting his sons and nephews so liberally that his last administration was referred to as “Hotel Cecil.” He regarded the masses with withering scorn, hated socialism, the “insane passion23 for equality” and public opinion. He particularly disliked the whole idea of consultative government, claiming that “Until my own mind24 is made up, I find the intrusion of other men’s thoughts merely worrying,” and could be suffocatingly secretive—especially when it came to foreign affairs. He ran the Foreign Office as if it were his own feudal fiefdom. A natural pessimist, his political creed was: “Whatever happens25 will be for the worst and therefore it is in our interests that as little should happen as possible.” His cautious, delicate manoeuvres as the guardian of Britain’s world position through keeping the peace in Europe had been, not entirely accurately, dubbed “splendid isolation.”

  Salisbury’s view of the queen seems to have been an ambivalent combination of respect, condescension and occasional exasperation. He came from the tiny group of very grand aristocratic families who, as one of Bertie’s cleverer mistresses observed, “believed they26 had the prescriptive right to rule England in the same way as they ruled their estates.” There was a hint of condescension in their attitude to the monarchy. But at the same time they gloried in the ritual obeisances they were obliged to make to it. Salisbury said that he respected the queen as a reliable barometer of public opinion. He coaxed, occasionally indulged and sometimes actively misled her to get his way. But at the same time he seemed to like talking to her—among the few people he did regularly discuss and debate with were the women in his close-knit family; they both shared a very similar political outlook and a certain world-weary experience. She was a useful ally in the maelstrom of European politics, with decades of experience behind her, and was a valuable source of intelligence through her cousinage. But on the subject of her Europe
an relatives (as opposed to European relations) they disagreed. When he was a journalist in the 1860s, Salisbury had written an article critical of her German sympathies, concluding, “the national will27 must necessarily be supreme in the last resort.” Personal relationships between monarchs could be useful, but they mustn’t be allowed to compromise foreign policy. He quietly deplored the fact that his queen was “very unmanageable28 about her conduct to her relations; she will persist in considering William only as her grandson.”

  Salisbury urged the queen to try to normalize relations by writing to her grandson to congratulate him on his accession. Reluctantly, she agreed. “Let me also29 ask you to bear with poor Mama if she is sometimes irritated and excited,” she wrote. “She does not mean it so; think what broken and sleepless nights she has gone through, and don’t mind it.” Willy replied, “I am doing30 my utmost to fulfil [sic] her desires.” This wasn’t true. In public he called his mother “that fat, dumpy31 little person who seeks influence.” He was determined to get her away from Berlin and Potsdam and eventually settled a measly pension on her. He was far keener to tell the queen that he was about to go to St. Petersburg to meet the Russian emperor, “which will,”32 he told her, The letter was in English, though the two might just as comfortably have corresponded in German. But as Wilhelm had been writing to his grandmother in English since childhood, it seemed natural to continue and he was proud of his fluency. The contents, however, seemed to confirm all Salisbury’s and the queen’s worries about Wilhelm’s enthusiasm for Russia. The swiftness of the visit, barely a month after Wilhelm’s father was in the ground, also offended Victoria. Mourning the dead was almost a religion with her; forever in black, she kept the British court in an eternal state of “light mourning” for a constant stream of dying relatives, so that the most exciting colours ladies-in-waiting were allowed to wear were white, grey, purple and mauve. She wrote a reproving letter. In his not always reliable memoirs, Wilhelm claimed that Bismarck “gave way to a violent fit of rage” on reading it. He himself composed a calm reply which “laid stress upon the position and duty of the German Emperor, and that his grandmother must leave to him the question of deciding in what manner this was to be … From that day onward my relations with the Queen, who was feared even by her own children, were of the best imaginable.”33 This was not how it appeared to the queen. “How sickening34 it is to see Willy, not two months after his beloved and noble father’s death, going to banquets and reviews!” she wrote angrily to Edward. “Trust that we shall35 be very cool, though civil, in our communications with my grandson and Prince Bismarck, who are bent on returning to the oldest times of government,” she told Salisbury.