The Three Emperors

by Miranda Carter

  In Windsor, the queen’s sympathies were clannishly with her new in-laws and fellow royals. Her first thought had been that “poor Serge,” who was married to Alix’s older sister Ella, “may be blamed.”83 Her next was concern for the imperial couple, who the British ambassador assured her had done “violence to their84 feelings” in attending the French ball while their subjects lay dead and injured. The queen would never have expressed such sympathy for Nicholas’s father—she would have complained about Russian barbarity. While Wilhelm tried in vain to get himself invited to Cowes, Nicholas and Alexandra were asked to Balmoral for the end of September.

  Balmoral was the large, remote estate in the Scottish Highlands where the queen passed the months from August to November. She loved it and felt free there. She loved it so much in fact, that she had decided that she was Scottish. As she crossed the border her voice would take on a peculiar approximation of a Scottish accent,85 and she’d talk about handing over “woon poond” to some deserving crofter. Everyone else found Balmoral dispiritingly remote, incredibly dull, freezing cold—the queen never45 felt the cold and forbade fires—and full of tartan. Lord Rosebery said86 he thought the drawing room at Osborne was the ugliest room in the world—until he saw the drawing room at Balmoral. Salisbury referred to it as “Siberia,”87 and came as rarely as possible.

  On 22 September 1896 the imperial couple and their baby, Olga—along with an entourage of several hundred, including their plainclothes secret servicemen, plus twenty-four constables and four sergeants from the Metropolitan Police—arrived sodden, having driven through Edinburgh in an open carriage in the pouring rain, and nauseous from having been violently rocked about in the royal train. They were greeted with bonfires and torches. The queen was enthusiastic. Edward wore a Russian uniform—astrakhan hat, knickerbockers, Norfolk jacket, red greatcoat. He never looked his best in uniform, as it was invariably too tight. George wore a kilt. “She is marvellously88 kind and amiable to us, and so delighted to see our little daughter!” Nicky told his mother. “Dear Nicky and Alicky89 are quite unspoilt and unchanged and as dear and simple and as kind as ever. He is looking rather thin and pale and careworn, but sweet Alicky is in great beauty and very blooming,” the queen wrote to Vicky.

  The queen’s household called the visit “the Russian occupation,” because the tsar’s retinue was so enormous; the Balmoral maids had to sleep four to a bed. George and May were boarded out up the road. Nicholas, the household observed, looked absurdly young, but Alicky was “unmistakably lovely … one is always in rapture with her.” Both seemed initially a little aloof. Edward had made zealous preparations to entertain his nephew, and was relentlessly “jolly.”90 Nicholas, as he had before, found Edward rather exhausting. “From the very first day my Uncles took charge of me. They seem to think it necessary to take me out shooting all day long with the gentlemen. The weather is awful, rain and wind every day and on top of it no luck at all—I haven’t killed a stag yet. I see even less of Alix here than at home.” The tsarina was swept off by the queen’s ladies-in-waiting and given the kind of unadulteratedly enthusiastic welcome she rarely got in Russia. Nicholas was relieved when Bertie went to Newmarket to see a horse race. “I could at least do what I wanted to, and was not obliged to go out shooting every day in the cold and rain.”91 “I’m glad92 Georgie comes out to shoot too—we can at least talk over the good times we’ve just had in Denmark.”*

  “Had a talk93 with dear Nicky,” was as expansive as George got. “He is just the same dear boy as he always was.” In his way George was right, Nicky wanted to be the same dear boy and with George he could be. George had no interest in talking politics and required nothing of him except that he was familiar.

  The queen saw things differently. Family bonds should be put to practical use. She went to work on the tsar the day after he arrived. Something must be done about the disintegration of Turkey and the Armenian massacres, she announced. “I remarked that,94 if England and Russia went together, there must be peace, and something ought to be done to bring this about.” Nicky nodded, as he did when cornered, but said it would be difficult. “The Emperor is95 extremely well-disposed and is anxious to put a stop to the Sultan’s iniquities,” she told Lord Salisbury, who arrived the next day.

  After years of backing Turkey, which he now considered to have been “the wrong horse,” Salisbury had come to the conclusion, just like Rosebery before him, that an accommodation with Russia had much to recommend it—though almost all his fellow ministers thought the likelihood of Russia agreeing vanishingly remote, and the country still hated Russia. But with the Suez Canal under its control, Britain no longer had a pressing need to keep Russia out of Turkey. In fact, the Royal Navy had recently concluded it no longer had the capacity to defend Constantinople from Russia, a prospect Salisbury seems to have accepted but didn’t relish. He also believed the Russians might be persuaded to work with Britain to force a settlement or resolution on the Ottoman empire, perhaps even a change of regime, before its much prophesied collapse caused further international instability. The prime minister was sufficiently keen on the idea to make one of his rare visits to Balmoral in order to see the tsar personally—though he also instructed his private secretary to inform the queen’s private secretary that it would be actively dangerous for him to come, unless his room was heated to a minimum of 60 degrees Fahrenheit. An added bonus was the fact that Nicholas’s tricky foreign minister, Lobanov, had suddenly died of apoplexy in August as the imperial cortège had set out on a visit to Austria—so the tsar would be all on his own.

  “I had two96 very serious talks with [Lord Salisbury],” Nicholas reported to his mother. “It’s good at least for him to learn from the source what the opinions and views of Russia are.” The source, however, didn’t always seem entirely clear on those opinions. The first meeting went well enough. The tsar assured the PM that Russia had no designs on India—his own visit in 1891 had convinced him of “the absurdity of Russia ever trying to obtain it … no sane Russian Emperor could ever dream of it.” Salisbury suggested that Russia and Britain should act together to stabilize the Ottoman empire. There had been another massacre in Armenia several weeks before, and Salisbury told the tsar that petitions and letters demanding some form of action had been pouring into the British Foreign Office. There was a certain irony in the prime minister referring to public opinion since he despised it, though the demands coincided with his own pragmatic belief that Turkey needed to be brought under control. There was another irony in his appealing to Russia on moral and humanitarian grounds—a country which had authorized its own pogroms and ruthlessly suppressed basic democratic rights. Nicholas didn’t seem at all averse to putting pressure on the sultan, and he became positively animated when Salisbury suggested that Britain would no longer object to Russia taking control of Constantinople and the Bosphorus, though he didn’t like the idea of opening it to all ships, as this created the possibility of foreign warships getting into the Black Sea, not just the Russian fleet getting out. The Straits to the Black Sea, he told the prime minister, were “the door to the room in which he lived,” and he needed the key—a phrase that had become a cliché in Russia when discussing Constantinople. When Salisbury pointed out that Austria and the Balkan states might feel rather differently about this, and would have to be compensated, Nicholas seemed surprised. The prime minister must have been taken aback by his naïveté.

  The tsar, Salisbury observed, also “expressed himself in terms by no means friendly to the Emperor of Germany.”97 Two weeks before, Nicholas had made an overnight stop with Wilhelm at Breslau. “I am extremely98 satisfied with my interview with Emperor Nicholas,” Wilhelm had purred after the meeting. “He was natural, open, communicative and heartfelt as he has always been with me. We completely agreed on all issues.” Nicholas told Salisbury that he couldn’t bear Wilhelm’s company for long and added that the kaiser had told him that England was trying to set up a “rival Sultanate” in Arabia—i.e., trying to stir
up trouble in the Ottoman empire for its own advantage. The prime minister told the tsar, “this was a rather99 perfidious proceeding, as he was at the same time telling us that Russia was preparing an attack upon us about Egypt.” Salisbury was pleased with the meeting, and told the queen that he’d been “much struck by100 [the tsar’s] great candour and desire to be on the best terms with us.” He was also overheard observing to the Prince of Wales that the tsar was “very different from101 the other Emperor!”

  When they met again two days later, however, Nicholas had changed his tune. It was obvious that someone, almost certainly the Russian ambassador, de Staal, had got to him. He was now “distinctly averse, at this stage, to any effort to dethrone the Sultan,” and worried about the dangers of “interfering in other people’s concerns.” When the subject moved on to Egypt, he seemed to be about to say he had no objection to the British occupation, “But he stopped suddenly and turned the conversation, as though he felt he was committing an imprudence.”102

  The queen refused to be put off by Nicholas’s opacity. On his last night she summoned him to her room before dinner and asked him bluntly what he thought about deposing the sultan. Nicky said “he thought it would be a great risk, and might lead to dangerous complications.” She went further and asked him about the “friendship” between Russia and France, and his visit to Paris, where he would be travelling the next day. Nicky explained that “It was a purely military agreement,” which had come about because both countries had been excluded by the Triple Alliance. “Nicky did not seem at all to relish the French, and regretted the visit to Paris, which was unavoidable,” she reported optimistically. “I said it was so important that Russia and England should go well together, as they were the most powerful Empires, for then the world must be at peace.”103

  The Russian party departed the next day for France. The emperor left a breathtaking tip104 of £1,000 for the staff, the empress a trail of diamond and pearl brooches among the ladies-in-waiting. The queen pursued Nicholas to Paris with a letter, asking him—with a persistence that Salisbury could not have employed, and an expectation of the power of the family relationship which Salisbury did not share—to “kindly use105 your influence and let the French understand that you do not intend to support them in their constant inimicality towards England, which is the cause of much annoyance and difficulty to us, in Egypt amongst other subjects.” She added, in an attempt to mollify, “I would not have written this had you not told me that the agreement, or alliance, or whatever it is called, was only of a military nature.”

  From Paris—where to their great surprise and eventual pleasure, the imperial couple were mobbed and cheered everywhere—Nicholas was more forthright. He told Victoria he had not discussed hostility to England with the French, and “As to Egypt, I must own, dearest Grandmama, the question is of a very serious character.” The Russians felt the same as the French on the subject; they wanted Britain out of Egypt because her control of the Suez Canal was a “threat to our maritime route to the Far East … Politics alas! are not the same as private or domestic affairs and they are not guided by personal or relationship feelings. History is one’s real positive teacher in these matters and for me personally, except that, I have always got the sacred example of my beloved father and also the result and proof of all His deeds!”106 Among competing nation-states, Nicholas let Grandmama know as gently as he could, family was worth little or nothing—a more realistic acknowledgement of the state of international affairs than the queen’s.

  The answer must have been a blow to the queen. It can be no accident that the flow of chatty family letters from her to Nicholas now shrank to a dribble. Salisbury, however, persisted. He made more overtures to the Russians in the autumn of 1896, but their response was unenthusiastic. Just to illustrate the Russian detachedness, in late December Nicholas—contrary to everything he had said to Salisbury at Balmoral—was persuaded to green-light an extraordinarily rash secret plan to solve the Eastern Question with a Russian-backed coup d’état in Constantinople to depose the sultan. The Nelidov Plan, named after the Russian ambassador who proposed it, would have alienated all the Great Powers and quite possibly have started a war in the region. As a senior Russian diplomat later wrote in his memoirs, it “would unquestionably have107 spelt disaster for Russia.” It was quashed by Sergei Witte and the horrified French. But it showed that Nicholas was worryingly susceptible to risky imperialist adventures.

  Wilhelm’s pursuit of Nicholas also came to nothing. Watching the tsar’s progress around Europe, he felt less and less confident that his meeting with him at Breslau had made the lasting impression he’d hoped. The German Foreign Office reported that between Breslau and Balmoral Nicholas had met his mother108 in Copenhagen and that she had talked him out of his good impression with Wilhelm; then there had been all the cheers in Paris. In a panic, the kaiser invited himself to Hesse-Darmstadt, where the tsar was staying with his brother-in-law Ernie before returning home. It was a great blunder. Nicholas regarded his stays at Hesse-Darmstadt as his private holiday when he could unwind from the demands of formal travel. He and Alix relaxed there as they did nowhere else. Wilhelm’s arrival was unwelcome. Moreover, the French visit had coloured Nicholas’s view of Germany. Crossing the border into Germany, he observed that everything suddenly seemed “black, dark and109 boring!” Confronted by a blankly unfriendly Nicholas, Wilhelm decided to blame his failure on Grand Duke Sergei, the tsar’s bullying anti-German uncle. “In his presence110 the Emperor is remarkably awkward and reserved … Sergei is the Emperor’s evil demon and our most energetic enemy.” It was hard to blame it all on Sergei, though. When Nicholas got back to St. Petersburg, he asked Wilhelm to stop writing personally to him, giving as the reason his concern that Chancellor Hohenlohe was not aware of the letters. Wilhelm ignored this. The new Russian foreign minister—appointed an indecisive five months after Lobanov’s death in Vienna—was another disappointment. Count Mikhail Muraviev was smooth and courtly, an enthusiastic Russian imperialist with a taste for champagne, and regarded as inveterately hostile to Germany—not least because a couple of years before Wilhelm had personally blocked his appointment to a post in Berlin. Fritz Holstein’s informant in Moscow called him a “swine”111 and bootlicker. On the plus side, Holstein’s contact observed, he wasn’t “a friend of France … he thinks the English are disgusting and he has a fanatical hatred of the Poles.” Holstein concluded that Wilhelm’s personal interventions had backfired. “Without Breslau and without Darmstadt things might perhaps be better. There is no question that the Tsar had no desire whatever to meet our Kaiser again, and it is really deplorable that the latter absolutely runs after him.”112

  Messages from Russia, however, were contradictory. Just at the moment when Nicholas appointed Muraviev, whom the British considered “conceited and vain113 as a woman,” Nicholas’s finance minister, Sergei Witte, now widely regarded as his most impressive and influential adviser, hinted to the latest British ambassador, Sir Nicholas O’Conor, that the Russian government might after all be interested in a resolution with Britain. In the New Year of 1897 Witte told the ambassador, “Russia doesn’t114 want a foot more of territory, she has more than she can develop in the next 200 years. She wants peace; to foster trade, commerce and industry and to improve the condition of the people. The old school who wanted to extend Russia to the Bosphorus is dead.” As the Nelidov plan showed, this might have been how Witte felt, but there were plenty of “old school” politicians and army chiefs who felt quite the opposite. Nevertheless, somewhat desultory talks were begun between England and Russia to discuss their mutual policies in China, and behind the scenes and despite public sympathy in Britain for Russian dissidents, Special Branch115 began to cooperate with Okhrana, the Russian secret police, on the surveillance of Russian anarchist and terrorist groups based in London.

  In early January 1897, almost a year to the day that he’d sent the Kruger telegram, Wilhelm wrote hopefully to his grandmother, “Have you an
y116 plans or wishes about our coming or not coming for Your Jubilee, and whether some of our children are to come with or not?” The queen’s Diamond Jubilee, celebrating her sixty years on the throne, was planned for June. Her answer was to the point: he couldn’t come; as the Jubilee was to be a celebration of empire, no foreign crowned heads were to be invited. Instead, the queen told him, his brother Heinrich would come “as one of her grandchildren.” “And I am117 her eldest grandchild,” Wilhelm scribbled forlornly on the letter. Determined to change her mind, he wrote her a splendid letter in April, likening himself to a horse:

  I feel like118 a charger chained in the stables who hears the bugle sounding, and stamps and champs his bit, because he cannot follow his regiment. I had hoped to lead the Royals as their Colonel past their Sovereign, if not as her Escort, and to join their cheers when they salute their Queen in the exuberance of their loyal pride … in the great final charge I would have borne my sword proudly before the saluting point at the head of that magnificent regiment … But it was all idle dreams! But such dreams are hard to give up for a passionate soldier!