The Three Emperors

by Miranda Carter

  Edward talked about peace—“a universal necessity,” he said, “since all countries groan alike under the burden of their armaments taxations”—and the peaceful aims of the Entente. His “one desire,” he added, was “to reduce all points of frictions between the Great Powers.”24 Wilhelm wrote, “Bertie’s visit is going, of course, off well,” experiencing that surge of desire to have a real relationship with his uncle that often occurred when they first met. “He is very lively25 and active and most kind. His wish for peace is quite pronounced as is his motive for his liking to offer his services wherever he sees collisions in the world.”

  But everyone knew the amicability was phoney. “Everyone is26 pretending that we are on the best possible terms with England. As a matter of fact, however, all the differences between the English and the German people remain as they were,” Zedlitz-Trützschler wrote. The smiling veneer between the two monarchs cracked just once. They disagreed volubly on the Russian-Japanese War. Wilhelm talked about the “Yellow Peril” and how it must be crushed. Edward said there was no such thing. The Japanese were morally in the right, Nicholas had rejected their diplomatic approaches, and they had done brilliantly. They were “a brave, chivalrous and intelligent people—every bit as civilized as Europeans from whom nothing except the colour of their skins distinguishes them.” Bülow observed that Edward spoke of the tsar “with all the affection of a kinsman,” and noted how much he enjoyed giving his German nephew a “rap on the knuckles.”

  Wilhelm, meanwhile, simply couldn’t resist the urge to impress Edward. Tirpitz and Bülow would have preferred the visit to take place almost anywhere in the world rather than at Kiel, which was where the German navy was being built. They had tried to extract a promise from the kaiser that he would curb his wish to show off how it had grown, and that its expansion would be played down as much as possible. But the night before the naval review, he personally instructed his naval cabinet to send “everything, down to the smallest boat”27 to Kiel. At a gala dinner for 180 the next day, he drew attention to how large the navy had grown, observing to his audience that King Edward had “been greeted by28 the thunder of guns of the German fleet.” And with tears in his eyes he described how his desire to build a navy had been born when he had visited Portsmouth as a child: “There awoke in me the wish to build ships of my own like these some day.”

  The new German navy certainly impressed the British spectators—but not in a good way. In his memoirs Bülow wrote that the king warned him there was a growing “conviction in England that the Germans are only building their navy with the intention of falling on England as soon as they have made it strong enough, of ruining her for ever, either by breaking her commerce or even by an invasion.”29 Naturally, he didn’t think this, but since England’s safety depended on her fleet, the British Admiralty would always build two new English ships for every new German one. It was advice which Bülow and Tirpitz might have done well to take. Among Edward’s party was Lord Selbourne, First Lord of the Admiralty—who in 1902 had written a cabinet paper arguing that the German navy was being expanded to target the Royal Navy—and Louis of Battenberg, who ran British naval intelligence. A month after the visit, Selbourne gave his formal support to radical plans to update and expand the Royal Navy, drawn up by the energetic, eccentric and increasingly anti-German Admiral Jackie Fisher. The plans included the commissioning of the Dreadnought, a new species of enormous battleship which would render all other warships obsolete, and which in turn would spawn a new, paranoid and vastly expensive wave of rivalrous shipbuilding in Britain and Germany.

  The bad feeling1 between Britain and Russia reached a crisis on 21 October 1904 after the Russian fleet fired on a small flotilla of fishing boats from Hull, sinking two boats and killing two fishermen. Nicholas had ordered the Russian Baltic fleet to travel round the world to the Pacific to replace the Russian Pacific fleet, which had been destroyed by the Japanese. The Russian admiral in charge panicked and failed to stop to pick up survivors, or to inform his own government. Edward, who heard the news as he was watching his horses at Newmarket Racecourse, fired off splutteringly angry letters to Lansdowne demanding satisfaction. “Mere apologies to us will not suffice. Some punishment must be meted out to the Russian officers,” he wrote. He sent a telegram to Nicholas telling him what a “painful impression”30 the squadron’s failure to stop had caused. The Russians were irritatingly impenitent. The British refusal to allow Russian ships into their ports was making the fleet’s journey much harder, and St. Petersburg was in the grip of a Japanese spy scare. There had been rumours that Japanese torpedo boats were shadowing the Baltic fleet—which was why the warships had been so trigger-happy. “These suspicions,”31 one Russian minister wrote years later, “of course, existed only in imagination,” but the government couldn’t shake off the thought that the British were somehow colluding with the Japanese. Nicky insisted to Edward that the Japanese had been “luring”32 the fishing boats to camouflage their torpedo boats. Even the usually pragmatic Lamsdorff charged round to the British embassy and accused Hardinge of “English perfidy.” “The politest man in the world was nearly rude to me,”33 Hardinge wrote. “If they imagined34 they were Japanese destroyers,” George told his father, “all I can say is they must have been drunk or else they must have been in such a state that they are not fit to go to sea in Men of War.”

  For five days the atmosphere between the two countries was extremely tense. “The English are35 very angry and nearly at boiling point,” Nicky told his mother. “They are even said to be getting their fleet ready for action. Yesterday, I sent a telegram to Uncle Bertie expressing my regret, but I did not apologize—I do not think the English will have the cheek to go further than to indulge in threats.” Lamsdorff, however, apologized to Hardinge for having lost his temper. Angry as they were, the Russians could not afford another enemy. In the meantime, Edward, taken aback by a violent British press reaction, calmed down. “Strongly deprecate36 pressuring for punishment of Admiral. Russia could not accept such a humiliation,” he telegraphed Lansdowne, and Nicky had “a violent military party to contend with.” In a face-saving move, the Russians suggested the matter be taken to arbitration at The Hague, and eventually paid £65,000 in damages.

  Escalation had been avoided, but Nicholas was still furious. “I have no words37 to express my indignation with England’s conduct,” he wrote to Wilhelm, who had been terribly sympathetic. British public opinion seemed to overwhelm the “more reasonable attitude of her government,” Nicholas wrote. British attempts to stop Germany from coaling Russian ships were indefensible. “It is certainly high time to put a stop to this. The only way as You say would be that Germany, Russia and France should at once unite upon an agreement to abolish Anglo-Japanese arrogance and insolence. Would you like to lay down and frame the outlines of such a treaty and let me know it?”

  Wilhelm didn’t need telling twice. Two days later he sent Nicholas a draft treaty, assuring him that it was entirely secret—though in fact Bülow had written it. He added that a “private source” had assured him that the Hull fishing fleet had seen foreign vessels—“So there has been foul play.” The alliance, he told Nicholas, would be “purely defensive, exclusively directed against a European aggressor or aggressors … a mutual fire insurance company against incendiaries.”38 The gist of it was that if either country was attacked by a third European power, the other would come to the aid of their ally with all their forces, though they both knew it was really directed against Britain.

  The treaty, however, left many questions unanswered. What if France attacked Germany or Austria Russia? Within a couple of weeks both sides were hesitating. Nicholas wanted to show it to the French before he signed it. Wilhelm said no, the French president and foreign minister “not being39 Princes or Emperors I am unable to place them … on the same footing as you my equal.” Then he told Nicholas he was worried the British might see the treaty as “direct provocation.”40 The two monarchs exchanged urgent assur
ances41 of their absolute loyalty to each other, and the whole idea was dead before Christmas.

  One reason was that Wilhelm had fallen into the grip of a paranoid conviction that Britain was about to attack Germany. Since Edward’s 1904 visit to Kiel, the British had been increasingly sensitive to the growth of the new German navy. In fact, the new First Sea Lord, the excitable Admiral Jackie Fisher, who had taken up his post in October on the day of the Dogger Bank incident, had made a speech advocating “Copenhagening”—i.e., making a pre-emptive strike on—the German fleet. Fisher was known to be capable but eccentric, and though the government clearly didn’t approve, the right-wing press did. Then after the Russians agreed to arbitration, the British papers suddenly turned on Germany, accusing its government of inciting the Russians against Britain. Incitement was precisely what Wilhelm had been engaging in. He seems to have worried that his letters to Nicholas had leaked out. In November he told his entourage that he was “convinced that it is42 England’s aim to bring a serious conflict about.” It was certainly now accepted by Wilhelm’s officials that, as Bülow said, the British were “absolutely apprised43 of his habit of stirring behind their back.”

  “The Emperor has often44 … expressed himself without restraint, not to say vulgarly, about their Majesties,” Zedlitz-Trützschler wrote, “and this naturally has come to their ears.” As if to confirm this, Edward told45 the French ambassador in mid-November that he knew all about his nephew’s intriguing, especially with Russia, and had been writing to the tsar to counteract it. The kaiser’s anxiety may also have derived from his own guilty, vivid, destructive fantasies about England. In early December he told his entourage he had dreamed of the Russian Baltic fleet46 arriving in Asia and descending on British India.

  The other reason the German-Russian treaty idea lapsed was that by Christmas Russia was in absolute crisis. Nicky’s cousin Grand Duke Konstantin wrote in his diary that the country was like a piece of cloth “that is beginning47 to rip up and tear along the seams.” The war was an ongoing disaster. Port Arthur surrendered to the Japanese after a 156-day siege on 21 December 1904 (2 January 1905 in the Russian calendar). “A terrible and48 painful event,” Nicky wrote. “… It is the will of God!” Two weeks later, the imperial guard shot into a large, peaceful demonstration of workers and their families gathered in front of the Winter Palace to deliver a petition begging the tsar to help them and support their pleas for workers’ rights. They killed about 1,000 people. “A terrible day,”49 Nicholas, who had absented himself and given permission for the troops to shoot, wrote in his diary, but “… the troops had to shoot.” Even the ever-tactful Hardinge couldn’t disguise his disgust for the Winter Palace massacre. It was, he wrote, “indisputable” that the crowd was “both peaceful and harmless.” He recalled the “tragic” men who had stood for hours in the freezing cold bareheaded, “for fear that the ‘little Father’ might look from the window and see them standing in the street with their hats on.” He thought the emperor had “missed the chance of his lifetime … if he had received at the Winter Palace a small deputation and promised to give them what has sincerely been promised to them in his name, he would have obtained the undying loyalty and admiration of the lower classes.”50 The Winter Palace massacre was the moment in Russia when the loyalty of even those with a stake in the system broke irretrievably. It was an occasion when Edward did not send messages of support. Wilhelm, however, did. “I am glad51 your soldiers showed themselves reliable and true to their service to their sermon [sic]* to the Emperor.” But later he too suggested that Nicholas might have done things differently: he should have showed himself to the crowd—as Wilhelm himself loved to do—“such an appearance52 would have calmed the masses.”

  After the Winter Palace massacre Nicholas met a small, carefully chosen delegation of workers and told them they had been “duped” by “the traitors and53 enemies of the country,” and that they must have “patience and consideration for their employers.” By the end of January 1905, 400,000 workers were on strike in the environs of St. Petersburg. In February Nicholas’s uncle Sergei, the now utterly loathed governor-general of Moscow, was blown up in his coach. His boots, apparently, were the only bits that remained intact. The country was in revolution, but “the Tsar viewed54 the internal tumult rather indifferently; he … kept repeating that it had spread over only a very small part of the country and could not be very significant.” Nothing, indeed, seemed to penetrate the carapace of the emperor’s inscrutability and received ideas. “He lets everything55 unpleasant run off him,” the latest interior minister sighed exasperatedly. Hardinge was amazed at how even the terrible defeat at Mukden in February 1905—90,000 casualties—seemed to have no effect on him. The rest of the world, meanwhile, adjusted itself to the fact that a Great Power was on the way to being beaten by a second-rank one.

  The British ambassador told Edward that the tsar was almost preposterously out of touch. “I feel very sorry for the Emperor and Empress,” he wrote to Knollys, the king’s secretary. “They live at Tsarskoe Selo in a world apart, and are almost like prisoners since it is not considered safe to come even to St. Petersburg.” The fences around Tsarskoe Selo had risen higher and higher, until by July 1905 the barbed wire was ten foot high and accompanied by spiked railings. It looked “like some zoo enclosure for wild beasts.” “I often wonder,” he added, “whether the Emperor realizes upon what a volcano he is living—I am told he never speaks of either the war or the internal state of the country if he can help doing so, but that he seems perfectly happy, interesting himself in all sorts of trivial affairs and that the Empress is beaming with happiness.”56 It had also been remarked that the empress was exercising increasing influence on the emperor, urging him—with all the zeal of a convert—never to give way, and fixing him with “her fierce stare”57 if she felt he might be weakening. When asked by English visitors, as she often was, about the state of Russia, the empress, who had been raised in one of the most liberal states in Germany, would say that the “illiterate Russian”58 was simply not ready for “freedom of thought.”

  Behind his habitual inscrutability, Nicholas felt utterly confused and powerless. He seethed and blamed his ministers. “It makes me59 sick to read the news,” he wrote to his mother. “Strikes in schools and factories, murdered policemen, Cossacks, riots. But the Ministers instead of acting with quick decision, only assemble in council like a lot of frightened hens and cackle.” But there were other reasons why he seemed so oddly detached from events outside Tsarskoe Selo. The excitement of his son Alexis’s birth had given way to anxiety when it was discovered six weeks later that the child was haemophiliac—his blood wouldn’t clot, or at least could take days to do so. Small knocks and tumbles produced ugly dark blue swellings on the boy’s body, and terrible pain. The gene came from Queen Victoria and within the extended royal family of Europe the subject seems to have been unmentionable, even though the queen’s youngest son, Leopold, had died of it, as had one of Alix’s brothers and a nephew. As a father and husband, Nicholas was tirelessly supportive, giving, warm and loving. The contrast between his sensitive responses within his little domestic world and his blinkered insensitivity beyond it is almost painful to observe. Fatefully, the couple decided to keep the illness a secret. Doctors were sworn to silence; palace servants weren’t told what was wrong with Alexis, they had to work it out for themselves. The imperial couple’s instinctive tendency to keep the world at arm’s length, together with court etiquette which forbade the discussion of the health of the royal family, convinced them not to reveal the problem. They may also have worried that if Alexis’s situation was known, it would call into question his suitability as heir. George and May took a similar decision some years later when they discovered their youngest son, John, a year younger than Alexis, was epileptic, and probably also what we would now call autistic. George knew that Alexis was prone to illness, but he appears never to have mentioned John to Nicholas at all; the child seems not to have been present wh
en the Romanovs came to visit the Isle of Wight in 1909. Either way, the decision to keep up appearances, somehow so characteristic of fin de siècle royalty, might have denied the imperial family much sympathy and support they might otherwise have enjoyed.

  It was only after the Baltic fleet, having steamed around the world, was annihilated by the Japanese at Tsushima, the largest sea battle since Trafalgar, at the end of May 1905, that Nicholas reluctantly agreed to a peace conference. Acknowledging defeat was a prospect he could hardly bear. “All reports seem60 to agree that he is for continuing the war at all costs,” Hardinge wrote. “The Government and the great majority of the people are strictly in favour of peace.” Several weeks later Hardinge reported that the governing classes had been thrown into utter panic by the Potemkin mutiny. They had assumed that as long as the army and navy could be relied on, “the agitation and disturbance61 throughout the country presented no real danger to the dynasty.” Sedition, he added, was rife. A Russian officer friend told him that “they would have got rid of the Emperor long ago if there had only been a capable Grand Duke to take his place.” Even as he agreed to the peace conference, Nicholas was talking of sending another 200,000 men to Manchuria, and in August told his ministers that St. Seraphim had appeared to him in a dream to let him know that Russia would defeat Japan and Britain and emerge stronger than ever. “Such nonsense is62 incredible,” Hardinge commented drily, “but the Emperor is known to be mystic and all things are consequently possible.”