The Three Emperors

by Miranda Carter

  From Vienna, the king progressed to Marienbad, the most fashionable spa in Europe, a diplomatic bazaar of princes, aristocrats, statesmen and dieters, made more so by Edward’s subsequent annual visits. There he networked, cut a figure and was followed everywhere by thrilled crowds. Few other royals had Edward’s appetite for being in public—Wilhelm was almost the only one. “I can still79 remember Uncle Bertie sitting unperturbed in front of his hotel,” Nicholas’s sister Olga later wrote, “puffing a cigar while hordes of Germans stood staring at him with awe and curiosity. ‘How can you stand it, Uncle Bertie?’ I asked him one day. ‘Why, it’s as much entertainment for me to stare at them as it is for them to stare at me,’ the King replied.”

  Wilhelm watched Edward’s success with growing jealousy and irritation. Within days of the king’s departure from Rome in April 1903, he arrived, announcing that he too had come to see the Pope—Bülow putting it about, a little too insistently perhaps, that the trip had been planned for months. When Edward left Vienna, there once again was Wilhelm on his way to see his old friend Franz Joseph. The one place Edward failed to visit was Berlin—he said he was too busy. The truth was that when it came to Wilhelm, his bonhomie failed him. Wilhelm made a scene to the latest British military attaché, who gloried in the name of Colonel Wallscourt Hely-Hutchinson Waters, listing his myriad acts of sacrifice for Britain, and said how wounded he was that Germany had been excluded from the king’s favour.

  In October, seething with resentment of Edward, Wilhelm waylaid Nicholas on his annual visit to Hesse. Revealing a pleasing anxiety about the direction of Anglo-French relations, Nicholas told Wilhelm that “he had to80 keep up relations with France and prevent them from joining the English.” Afterwards, Wilhelm wrote to Nicholas. The world was polarizing, he said, the “democratic countries81 governed by Parliamentary majorities, against the Imperial monarchies.” In April the following year, when Britain and France signed the Entente Cordiale, his words rang only too true.

  Although it was essentially an agreement about colonial disputes, particularly in Egypt, where France acknowledged Britain’s dominant influence, and in Morocco, where Britain reciprocated, the Entente Cordiale couldn’t but seem a great sea change in Anglo-French relations. It promised a new era of cooperation between the two major democratic powers in Europe, it appeared to set42 aside a thousand years of hostility, and it was hard not to feel that it owed more than a little to each country’s suspicions of Germany. Though he had taken no role at all in the negotiations nor had invented the policy, Edward was given much of the credit for the Entente, and he showed no inclination to disabuse anyone of the notion. The miraculous turnaround his visit to Paris had caused was certainly an amazing public relations coup and a catalyst for serious negotiations. It helped to convince the doubters in the British cabinet. But if Delcassé and Lansdowne hadn’t been ready to get down to serious talks, the effect of the visit, like so many royal visits such as the king’s subsequent trip to Dublin that year, would have been negligible. To illustrate Edward’s new status, Count Osten Sacken, the Russian ambassador in Berlin, sent to the Russian Foreign Office a summary of an article in the German magazine Der Tag published just after the Entente was made public in April 1904. It said that Edward, once “regarded with82 scepticism,” was now held up “as one of the wisest state figures of our time. Having made a clever use of circumstances, King Edward has managed to restore England’s prestige as the master of Europe’s fate.” It was painful irony, the piece added, that Bülow’s failed attempts to promote German interests “had greatly contributed” to this. “Germany has failed to secure its interests in either the Persian Gulf, the Far East, or the Northern Coast of Africa.”

  In little over a year Edward established himself as the face of British foreign policy, as well as the most glamorous monarch in Europe. He at last looked effective and successful. He enjoyed his newfound reputation, and it had its uses for Britain. The country needed a front man in Europe, and Edward fitted the role perfectly. With the exception of Chamberlain—who would resign from the government in 1903 to campaign and waste the rest of his career on the excitingly named tariff reform—the British government was notably lacking in charismatic public figures or statesmen who took talking to the public seriously. Lansdowne didn’t travel and his only foreign language was French. His successor, Sir Edward Grey, was even less inclined to travel. Both would be increasingly swamped with the sheer volume of Foreign Office paperwork. Frederick Ponsonby believed that the foreign secretary resented83 the credit the king was given for work that Lansdowne had actually done; on the other hand, he was happy to exploit the access and influence the king’s new reputation offered. When, in late 1903, Lansdowne decided that there was nothing to be lost by suggesting a similar Entente to Russia, Edward was brought in to make sure the proposals got through to Nicholas personally. Everyone knew the tsar was hard to get at. The king also charmed the new Russian ambassador, Count Alexander Benckendorff, whom he invited to Windsor, spoke to of his enthusiasm for the proposal, and asked back to play bridge. After the Entente Cordiale was announced, it was Edward who went round Europe reassuring the various monarchs and presidents that it had only peaceful implications.

  Historians still argue over Edward’s contributions to foreign policy. Sentimental monarchists invariably overestimate his importance. Brisk political historians dismiss him as a genial sybarite who was surrounded by an efficient circle of aides, such as Knollys and Hardinge, who managed him. Arthur Balfour’s words to Lord Lansdowne after Edward died are often quoted: “So far as I84 can remember, during the years which you and I were Ministers, he never made an important suggestion of any sort on large questions of policy.” Policy was never what Edward was about. Sir Edward Grey was nearer to the mark when he wrote that while Edward was not one for “long sustained discussion85 about large aspects of policy,” he had a remarkable ability for “projecting his personality over a crowd,” and a real talent for personal relationships. His effect was almost Reaganite. There is also a whiff of jealousy about Balfour’s words—his time as prime minister, as it happened, had had less-than-glowing reviews. The truth was that Edward could be selfish, lazy, indulgent, trivial. He was a conventional thinker and an amateur. But within his own limitations and because of the needs of the time, he made a significant contribution to the furtherance of British foreign policy, the consequences of which would be by no means all benevolent.

  * Salisbury was in failing health and depressed by the death of his wife and would die just over a year later.

  * Taff Vale would be reversed in 1906 by the incoming Liberal government.

  * While keeping the Reichstag Right happy, this policy, incidentally, had simultaneously alienated the German urban poor, who were voting in ever-bigger numbers for the Socialists.

  * An ambitious Russian military attaché had been whispering against Lamsdorff to the Germans—but there was endemic intriguing at both the Russian and German courts, and Bülow considered the stories nonsense.

  11

  UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

  1904–5

  For Russia, even more than for most countries, war had often proved disastrous. The Crimean War and the Russo-Turkish War of the 1870s had been disasters. Both had left Russia in debt and near-bankrupt, had crippled development, created internal disaffection and lasting hostility with foreign powers. The government and its institutions were in no state to bear the strains of war, and unlike, say, Britain, the country couldn’t bear the expense. It was a lesson the Russian government would have done well to remember before it found itself at war with Japan in February 1904.

  The two countries had clashed over rival claims to Korea—the country, connected like a small appendix to the edge of northern China, which lay between Siberia and Japan—and Manchuria. In fact most Russian government ministers opposed the war, while the court hailed it. Nicholas was in constant denial about the ricketiness of Russia’s institutions. The tsar had told his war minister th
e year before that he dreamed of extending the Russian empire to China, Tibet, Afghanistan1 and Persia—and his actions had directly contributed to the hostilities. He had taken the running of the Far East out of the hands of his ministers and put it under the command of the hawkish and incompetent General Alekseev—who was said to owe his senior position in the army to having rescued Nicholas’s favourite uncle, Grand Duke Alexis, from a French brothel.2 He had given policy-making to a “special committee,” a group of inexperienced, over-excited court aristocrats who included his own cousin Sandro, who wanted to annex Korea. And whether deliberately or through sheer incompetence, he’d allowed pre-war negotiations with the Japanese to descend into insults. According to Edward VII,3 whose country had an alliance with Japan, the tsar had rejected his personal attempts to bring about a diplomatic resolution.

  The truth was the Russians expected to beat the Japanese. No Great Power had ever been defeated by a minor one, certainly not one with an army as huge as Russia’s, and most Russians regarded the Japanese as an “inferior race”: Nicholas referred to them as “little short-tailed4 monkeys.” The head of the army in Manchuria, General Alekseev, claimed that he needed only two Russian soldiers for every three Japanese. In the world of the Great Powers, making an aggressive demonstration seemed a sure way—and perhaps an overly easy one—of reminding everyone of, or even restoring, one’s status, especially when one felt insufficiently respected.

  When the Japanese sent torpedo boats into Port Arthur, Russian military headquarters in China, in February 1904, and sank the two most modern ships in the whole Russian navy, then declared war, the entire government and military seemed completely surprised and unprepared. The government found out only when Sergei Witte was informed by a telephone call from a Russian trader in Port Arthur. The Russian war effort went downhill from there. Defeat followed defeat. At every turn the conflict exposed the staggering incompetence of overstretched Russian institutions—the army in particular. War planning had been virtually non-existent. Russian generals, whose average age was sixty-nine, spent more time infighting than actually fighting. The conflict would cost 2 billion roubles—all the money Witte had saved up to stabilize the Russian economy. Even then, there wasn’t enough to give the soldiers hot breakfasts, or supply them with powder for their guns. Despite an early surge of patriotic enthusiasm, support for the war soon began to haemorrhage. By May 1904 the new British ambassador in St. Petersburg, Sir Charles Hardinge, Edward’s former protégé, reported that 75 percent of the population were “absolutely indifferent”5 to the war, and most of the educated classes were furious at the incompetence and expense; rising opposition was making itself felt in a series of assassinations of hated senior officials.

  One predictable consequence of the war was an outbreak of virulent Anglophobia in Russia. It was almost too easy to blame Russia’s disasters on Britain’s secret support of its ally. At court, Nicholas and the pro-war clique around him fulminated against Britain. The tsar took to referring to the English as “zhids”6—Jews. Sandro, the tsar’s cousin, muttered darkly about the “British-built7 battleships of the Mikado,” and in St. Petersburg the British ambassador was boycotted by society. Wilhelm, so good at spotting his fellow monarch’s vulnerabilities, had been writing to Nicholas since 1903 informing him that the British were helping with “the Japanese8 mobilization.” He sent copies of British newspaper articles demanding the government help plucky Japan against the beastly Russian leviathan. “To us …9 this hypocrisy and hatred is utterly odious and incomprehensible,” he wrote. “Everybody here understands perfectly that Russia is following the laws of expansion.”

  The war demonstrated the ambivalence of British feelings towards Russia too. The British government initially worried that the war would destroy the Entente by forcing France and Britain to back their allies, but at the same time toyed with helping the Japanese. It had hoped the Entente Cordiale12 would bring Britain closer to Russia, but now also hoped the war would disrupt Russia in Asia. In the end Britain, like France, had agreed on friendly neutrality. As Balfour said, even if Japan was beaten—as the British at first assumed it would be—“nothing could be10 better for us than that Russia should involve herself in the expense and trouble of a Corean [sic] adventure.” But to cover their bets, Edward, at Lansdowne’s suggestion, sent a personal message11 to Nicholas guaranteeing British goodwill and non-intervention. The British version of “friendly neutrality” didn’t seem particularly friendly. Russian ships were refused access to British ports around the world to refuel. The Entente Cordiale, announced in April 1904, looked to the now-harassed and vulnerable Russians like an attempt to snatch France away from them. And just as Russia had exploited British vulnerability during the Boer War, now the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, sent a military force to Tibet, led by the British soldier and explorer Sir Francis Younghusband, in March 1904.

  Wilhelm, by contrast, was only too eager to help his Russian cousin. He offered Nicholas the use of German coaling stations, while telling him repeatedly that the British were pressuring him not to. He promised to “guarantee” the Russian Western Front from attack. German support came at a price, however: Bülow demanded an enormous hike in the German tariffs13 on Russian imports.

  Lord Lansdowne, the British foreign secretary, who after his agreements with Japan and France had gained a reputation as an adept international player, still saw an Entente-like agreement on colonial issues with Russia as an appealing prospect. A bad war might produce a Russia so chastened that it would at last succumb to British overtures. He recruited Edward to massage his Russian relatives. Through the spring and summer of 1904 the king energetically—as energetically as a very large sixty-two-year-old man could manage—demonstrated his goodwill. He wrote to Nicholas to reassure him about the Entente, and offered himself as a mediator with Japan—an offer Nicholas unsurprisingly turned down. In Copenhagen with Alexandra, Edward spotted Count Alexander Izvolsky, Russian minister to Denmark,* a coming man in Russian politics, not least because he was known to enjoy the patronage of Minny—she may possibly have tipped the king off about him. Izvolsky, like most of Nicholas’s leading government ministers, opposed the war with Japan; he also saw an agreement with Britain as a future necessity for peace. And he was very ambitious. The king expressed his desire for an agreement, and Izvolsky showed him a copy of the extravagantly flattering letter he planned to send to Lamsdorff about their meeting: that Edward’s views on a deal with Russia were so important “that I ought to transmit them to Your Excellency as verbatim as possible,” and attributing the Entente Cordiale “above all to the great personal influence of his Majesty.”14 When Hardinge took over as ambassador in St. Petersburg in May, the king gave him a letter for Nicholas which personally recommended Izvolsky as “a man of remarkable intelligence and … I am sure, one of your ablest and most devoted Servants.” He added that it was his “earnest desire15 … that at the conclusion of the war our two countries may come to a satisfactory settlement regarding many difficult matters.” And when on 30 July, at the imperial couple’s summer residence of Peterhof, just after the soup, thirty-two-year-old Alix finally gave birth to a baby boy, Alexis, Edward proposed himself as godfather.

  While war continued, there could be no real resolution. Edward’s patronage might give Hardinge entrées to the highest Russian social circles, including to the imperial couple themselves. “… I am looked upon16 as the bearer of an olive branch,” he told the king. But when Russian warships from the Black Sea sailed into the Suez Canal and began to seize British cargo ships, claiming they were carrying contraband bound for Japan, the British press howled, and Lansdowne threatened reprisals if the ships weren’t released.† And in September 1904, late at night, Hardinge discovered an intruder hiding17 under a sofa in the embassy drawing room, and almost killed him with a curtain pole. It transpired it was one of the footmen trying to break into the embassy safe in order to find evidence that England was helping the Japanese. The tsar, moreover, Hardinge
observed, was utterly committed to the war with Japan, and surrounded himself with Anglophobes. The same month, having killed a couple of thousand Tibetans, the Younghusband expedition signed a deal with the rulers of Tibet guaranteeing trading concessions and the exclusion of other powers—Russia specifically. The Russian press breathed fire. In Britain the expedition had been extremely controversial. Since the Boer War the country’s “right” to murder a few natives in the prosecution of its business was no longer felt to be a given—but Edward, the alleged champion of a Russian rapprochement, met Younghusband and told him, “I approve18 of all you did.”

  For the Germans, news from St. Petersburg of Edward’s overtures19 to the Russians suddenly cast the Entente Cordiale in a rather different light. Though some German observers had seen it as a dangerous shift, Bülow had initially decided to be unconcerned by it—it was, after all, a purely colonial agreement—and he told the kaiser that it couldn’t20 last. He may also have thought that anything which might alienate Russia from France was to the good. Now British diplomacy—and Edward’s efforts—didn’t look so innocuous. Wilhelm began to complain that Edward seemed to want alliances with everyone except him.

  To mitigate his nephew’s frequently expressed feelings of rejection, Edward agreed to attend the Kiel regatta in June 1904. Regarded by both sides as a chance to relieve some of the friction between the king and the kaiser, and between England and Germany, the visit would have one big unintended consequence.

  Preparations for the visit were epic. It was apparent to Wilhelm’s entourage that, however much he might dislike his uncle, the kaiser was painfully desperate to impress him. An observant new comptroller of the imperial household, Robert zu Zedlitz-Trützschler, kept a diary in which he confided his daily amazement at the excesses of the large child whose household he managed. “The importance21 the Emperor attached to this visit was extraordinary,” he wrote. “He interfered with the smallest details of decoration.” The Hohenzollern was decked out with great canopies and spouting water features. Every cabinet minister was present, every secretary of state, and “a whole troop of22 Excellencies, magnificent in Orders and gold braid, were arranged in a dignified row along the shore. All the Royal Princes had been ordered to swell the Guard of Honour.” Wilhelm grew so overexcited that he put on his parade uniform hours in advance and paced the deck “hardly able to wait for the appointed time.” When Edward did arrive, Bülow later cruelly remembered, Wilhelm looked agitated, while Edward appeared positively serene. He was at his zenith: even to Wilhelm’s people his glamour seemed palpable. He was a “man of the world, ten times tried in the furnace, who had every move of the game at his finger tips,” Zedlitz-Trützschler wrote. Wilhelm by contrast was an “idealistic big child, who had grown up with none but flatterers about him in ignorance of the world.” The king’s private life might be open to criticism, “but to-day he has all the glamour of a personality that has gained the high esteem of his country. I believe that he has acquired in his life an experience of the world such as seldom falls to the lot of a royal personage. He has a keen knowledge of men, the value of which for a prince cannot be overestimated.”23