The Three Emperors

by Miranda Carter

  Nicholas stalled, but in the autumn sent Sergei Witte to the peace conference at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, brokered by President Roosevelt, who complained all the way through of Russia’s chaotic behaviour and “literally fathomless mendacity.” Russia continued in free fall. What had gone wrong was not all Nicholas’s fault—the military had been degraded over decades, the hunger for imperial success as a salve for internal failure was deep-rooted across the whole governing and educated class, the institutions of government had long been incapable of running the country, repression had long been a substitute for real governance, and such a large and complex state simply couldn’t run properly with one man making all the decisions. But Nicholas, the wrong man at the wrong time, by taking his country into a war it couldn’t afford and could have avoided, by encouraging the system’s repressions, by allowing his personal revulsion to reform to trump reality, had certainly helped to bring his country to crisis.

  It was something Wilhelm never really wanted to do that brought his relationship with Edward to its absolute nadir. On 31 March 1905, in the midst of a Mediterranean cruise, the kaiser made an unscheduled visit to Tangier, on the northernmost tip of Morocco, which France was trying secretly to turn into a French protectorate. The plan, hatched by Bülow and Holstein, was to make a demonstration of German force to frighten France while its ally Russia was busy, humiliate France and perhaps elicit a concession or two, and create division in the Entente—the British, they believed, would not sweep to France’s defence, because its underhand attempts to gain control broke international agreements and because Germany would look as if it meant business. The idea was that if Germany appeared dangerous and threatening enough—willing to risk even war—everyone else would back down. It seemed a perfect example of what Bülow had intended “Weltpolitik” to be. As an attempt to gain face and status, it was not unlike Russia’s almost enthusiastic initial dive into the Japanese War; like that conflict, it would have devastating, unintended long-term consequences for Germany.

  But the kaiser initially refused to go. He wasn’t interested in Morocco and had been toying with the idea of making up with France in order to gather together a European alliance against Britain. Besides, the thought of landing in a strange place, dealing with a strange horse, frightened him. Bülow, however, was determined and bombarded him with telegrams telling him that if he didn’t go to Morocco he’d be seen as a victim of French pressure, whereas if he did he would be a hero to the German people. Wilhelm relented. At the port of Tangier, before a crowd, and sweating profusely, he struggled down the ship’s ladder in full dress uniform and sword, clutching on with his one usable hand. By the time he reached the bottom, he had to be virtually carried onto the quayside, visibly pale and shaking. With the German consul, he rode nervously on a large, unfamiliar white horse to the sultan’s palace, where he made a speech promising to defend Moroccan independence with German might. When a bunch of flowers hit him in the face, the horse—made jumpyby rounds of ammunition let off by enthusiastic locals—nearly threw him. “The horse was within an inch of costing me my life,” he told Bülow later. Within a few hours he was on Gibraltar, the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean headquarters, boasting about the incident to Louis of Battenberg and happily taking responsibility for it.

  The visit provoked an international crisis. Everyone saw it as dangerously provocative. Lamsdorff thought it gratuitous. Lord Lansdowne called it “clumsy.”63 Edward said it was “The most mischievous64 and uncalled for event which the German Emperor has ever engaged in since he came to the throne … one can have no faith in any of his assurances.” He didn’t stop there; he told Louis of Battenberg it was “A gratuitous65 insult, and the clumsy theatrical part of it would make one laugh were the matter not a serious one … I have tried to get on with him and shall nominally do my best to the end, but trust—never. He is utterly false and the bitterest foe that England possesses.” An attack on the Entente, Edward felt, was an attack on him. It didn’t help that he’d just discovered that Wilhelm had been badmouthing him to President Roosevelt66—to whom the two men had simultaneously been writing.*

  The personal and the political were now quite as confusingly and unhelpfully intertwined for Edward as they were for Wilhelm. He probably could not have said whether he was angry because Wilhelm had attacked the Entente or himself. He believed that fellow monarchs could have relationships across national boundaries, but any sense of family kinship with Wilhelm, a relationship which had once been a strong link between Germany and Britain, was now broken. As a riposte to Wilhelm he made his own provocative, partisan gesture. He went to Paris and sent Delcassé—now under pressure from the French Left to resign for inflaming relations with Germany—a personal telegram encouraging him to stay in office. As soon as Edward left Paris, however, the German government demanded Delcassé resign and the French government accept an international conference to decide Morocco’s status, or it would find itself at war with Germany in Africa and Europe. Delcassé resigned on 6 June, and the French government agreed to a conference on Morocco. The British government was dismayed by what it saw as French weakness. The Germans’ intervention had worked splendidly. The kaiser made Bülow a prince. He rather spoilt the effect, however, by subsequently telling a French general that he had no intention of going to war over Morocco—a crack in Germany’s threatening stance which had Bülow biting his tongue. In fact, Delcassé’s departure was the catalyst which stiffened French resolve. In July the French asked Lord Lansdowne if the British would be prepared to discuss secretly a cooperative military strategy in the event of a war. He agreed. Wilhelm’s day in Tangier had released ugly and dangerous tensions in Europe. The Entente, which Edward had seen as a means to peace in Europe, had done nothing to head them off. The kaiser’s gesture had made the Entente look like a treaty based on European priorities rather than colonial ones. The focus of international politics seemed suddenly to have shifted from imperial conflict back to the crowded continent of Europe.

  As a result of Tangier the king and the kaiser’s relationship lapsed into arm’s length tit for tat. George had intended to attend the German crown prince’s wedding, but Edward cancelled, claiming his son had a prior engagement. The kaiser refused to let his son, the crown prince, go to England for the king’s birthday. He accused his uncle of trying to “divide father and son,” and of corrupting his son’s morals—the last time “Little Willy” had stayed with Edward there had been “unseemly romping in unlighted corridors” and a lady had “removed her slipper.”68 Willy, aged twenty-three, disappointed by his father’s strictness and distant lack of interest, was in the grip of a familiar Hohenzollern filial rebellion. He had both identified himself with the extreme far Right who criticized the kaiser for being insufficiently nationalist and aggressive, and upset his father even more by deliberately modelling himself on Edward and his English playboy style. At Willy’s wedding Wilhelm snubbed Sir Frank Lascelles, who was so upset he immediately tendered his resignation. Bülow talked him out of it. Then at the Kiel regatta in June, the kaiser made off-colour remarks69 about Edward’s relationship with Alice Keppel, all of which got back to Edward. In mid-1905 the French chargé d’affaires in London reported to Paris that there was no trace left of the German sympathy that had existed at the English court in Queen Victoria’s day. What worried the older generation of diplomats like Lascelles, who was looking increasingly out of place at the Foreign Office, however, was not the family feud, but that it mirrored a wider loss of confidence in Germany among British politicians and diplomats. It could be seen in George, who had exchanged a dislike of Wilhelm for a dislike of Germany. “Although I like70 Lascelles very much,” he wrote, “I fear he has become too German in his ideas for my taste.”

  There were older diplomats and officials in Germany who felt quite as anxious as Lascelles about the shift in feeling. In August 1905 Count Gotz von Seckendorff, a former and loyal member of Vicky’s household, was so worried at the bad turn in royal relations that he
wrote personally to Edward begging him to meet Wilhelm on his way back from his annual spa trip to Marienbad. A meeting, he suggested, “might create71 wonders.” Edward treated the letter as an impertinence. His reply, written by Knollys, was crushingly haughty. He insisted he had no quarrel with Wilhelm, but refused to “run after [him]72 … it would be undignified for him [Edward] to play such a part, and it would not meet with the approval either of the British Government or the British Nation.” He added that he no longer knew whether Wilhelm had “any affection for him, but from one or two things which he had heard recently, he should say not.” There was no doubt that both men were not far off hating each other. Lord Lansdowne wrote of Edward, “he talks and73 writes about his royal brother in terms which make one’s flesh creep.” As for Wilhelm, his descriptions of Edward were said to be unrepeatable.74

  On 24 July 1905 Wilhelm and Nicholas met secretly off the coast of the northern Swedish town of Björkö. Wilhelm had brought the draft treaty Nicholas and he had discussed the year before, without telling Bülow. Nicholas had stolen away on his yacht from his summer residence at Peterhof on the Gulf of Finland, without telling his own ministers. They had planned it like two naughty children playing truant. “At home nobody75 informed,” Nicholas wrote. “Am so delighted to be able to see You.” Both were fleeing from intractable problems: Nicholas facing the collapse of the Russian state and putting off ending a war that had brought the country to its knees, and Wilhelm in flight from all the disappointments and frustrations, along with the worst strikes since 1888, demonstrations in Berlin demanding the reform of the Prussian Landtag,* and the imminent prospect of the Social Democrats, the Socialist Party, becoming the largest party in the Reichstag.

  The two men met for dinner on the Hohenzollern. They both agreed, Wilhelm wrote in his account of the meeting to Bülow, that Edward was “the greatest mischief-maker76 and the most dangerous intriguer in the world.” The tsar, he said, fumed over the Dogger Bank incident—and said that France’s failure to support Germany over it was proof that the British were using77 the Entente to draw France away from him. He complained bitterly that the king had made the Entente without telling him. Bertie, Wilhelm opined, had an “absolute passion for78 making a ‘little agreement’ with every country, everywhere.” At this, according to Wilhelm, Nicholas banged the table with his fist and said, “Well, I can only say, he shall not get one from me, and never in my life against Germany—my word of honour on it.” Wilhelm proposed that they make “a little agreement” of their own. “That’s quite splendid,” Nicholas said. “I entirely agree.” Wilhelm drew the treaty from his pocket. “Would you like to sign it?” he asked coyly. “Yes, I will!” Nicholas said. “You are Russia’s only friend in the world.” Their signatures were witnessed by Wilhelm’s latest foreign minister, Heinrich von Tschirrsky, and one of Nicholas’s men, Birulov, who was not permitted to see what he was signing. As he laid down his pen, Wilhelm told Bülow, “a ray of sunlight79 gleamed through the cabin window onto the table … it was as though his Grandfather William I and Tsar Nicholas I had clasped hands in Heaven, and were looking down with satisfaction upon their grandsons.”

  The agreement stated that if one country was attacked by another European power, the other would come to its aid with all its forces within Europe. There was an extra clause that the Russian government would show the treaty to the French and that the French could join the agreement. France, Wilhelm wrote to Nicky three days later, “must remember she is wedded to you and that she is obliged to lie in bed with you, and eventually to give a hug or a kiss now and then to me, but not to sneak into the bedroom of the ever-intriguing touche-à-tout [all-groping]—on the Island”—i.e., Edward.

  Björkö was a fantasy of autocratic effectiveness. The two men were drawn together by a sense of lost control, by personal frustration and failure, by a desire to feel effective. “The 24th of July 1905 is a cornerstone in European politics and turns over a new leaf in the history of the world,”80 Wilhelm wrote grandly to Nicholas. He returned to Germany certain that he had won a great victory, restoring Russo-German relations, dealing a deathblow to the Franco-Russian alliance and delivering Germany “from the hideous pincers81 of Gallo-Russia.” Not that he was quite sure whether he wanted to administer another crushing blow to France or ally with her, for he was still fantasizing about forming an international union against England. In time, he mused, “even Japan may fell [sic] inclined to join it … This would cool down English self assertion and impertinence.” As for Nicholas, plagued by the endless evidence of his own ineffectuality, it’s not hard to see why the treaty appealed. It allowed him to feel he was acting independently of his ministers, countering bureaucracy with imperial decisiveness, doing something that might have some effect. Moreover, life as an autocrat was lonely. Wilhelm was one of the very few who understood. “You were like a dear brother to me,” Wilhelm told him afterwards. “I shall always respond to your feeling with the same warmth and with the same intensity as you and you can count on me as a firm friend.”82 There must, however, have been a part of Nicholas that knew it couldn’t work. In his diary, he made no mention of having signed the treaty, and back in St. Petersburg, when he showed it to Lamsdorff he seemed “very much worried83 and even embarrassed.”

  Lamsdorff was horrified by Björkö; he regarded it as a crude attempt by Wilhelm to cut Russia off from France, just when France was most vulnerable. Like Sergei Witte, he was in favour of an agreement with Germany, but it was obvious that France—forced by German threats to participate in a conference on Morocco and with a German gun still at its head—would never sign. Nicholas made murmuring protestations that he’d signed the thing and therefore it must stand, but with the country in the throes of revolution he did not press the point.

  When the kaiser proudly showed the treaty to Bülow, the chancellor threatened to resign. He said that Wilhelm had made emendations to the original draft of the treaty which rendered it unusable. The kaiser had limited Germany’s obligations to defending Russia just to Europe rather than Asia too. As Bülow had made better relations with Russia one of the cornerstones of his policy, his reaction was unexpected. It seems most likely he did it to punish Wilhelm for once again acting without him. He had become heartily sick of managing the kaiser, complaining to Tirpitz about his “boundless vanity,”84 his “abnormal lack of logic” and his “incessant boasting.” Moreover, Eulenburg was back in favour after several years in retirement, and Bülow was furious at the thought that his former patron might become a rival. Wilhelm was astonished by Bülow’s reaction and became hysterical. “To be treated in this way by the best and closest friend I have … has been such a terrible blow to me I have quite broken down!” He wrote to him, and begged Bülow not to leave him in the lurch. “Such a thing I could not survive … The morning after the arrival of your resignation would not find the Kaiser alive … Think of my poor wife and children.”85 Bülow relented and agreed the treaty could be ratified. But when the Russians said the treaty couldn’t be ratified, the German Foreign Office did not pursue the matter, and when Wilhelm insisted to Nicholas, almost plaintively, that the treaty must stand—“We joined hands86 and signed before God, who heard our vows!”—Nicholas replied that it could not come into force unless France signed it. Within a few months Nicholas’s answers to Wilhelm’s letters were coming later and later, and Wilhelm was freely insulting his cousin.

  By October 1905 there was no question but that the Japanese War had been an unrivalled disaster for Russia. It had brought defeat, debt, humiliation and now all-out revolution. The trains stopped, the factories ceased production, riots broke out. Ugly pogroms took place in the Ukraine and White Russia. “In England, of course,”87 Nicholas wrote resentfully, “the press says that those disorders were organized by the police; they still go on repeating this worn-out fable.” The government was losing control. It was Sergei Witte, triumphantly returned from the Portsmouth peace conference having extracted extraordinarily good terms for Ru
ssia, who drew up the October manifesto. It promised civil liberties—freedom of religion, of speech, of assembly, of association—as well as an elected assembly, whose consent would be required for laws to come into force, and universal male suffrage, though all this was subject to the tsar’s right of veto. Nicky hesitated to sign it; he wanted his cousin, Grand Duke Nicholas, head of the army, to quell the rebellion by force, but he refused. “Either you sign it,88 or I shoot myself,” the grand duke allegedly said. “There were only two ways open,” the tsar wrote in justification to his mother.89

  To find an energetic soldier and crush the rebellion by sheer force … that would mean rivers of blood and in the end we should be where we started … The other way out would be to give the people their civil rights, freedom of speech and press, also to have all laws confirmed by State Duma—that of course would be a constitution. Witte defends this very energetically.500