The Three Emperors

by Miranda Carter

  The Anglo-Russian Convention was finally signed in August 1907 and published in September, to less than ecstatic acclaim. From retirement, Sergei Witte sourly called it “a triumph of49 British diplomacy.” Grey, meanwhile, found himself forced into the role of apologist for the Russian government, having to play down unpalatable news. “Russian despotism50 was repugnant to British ideals,” he wrote, “and something was constantly happening in Russia that alienated British sympathy or stirred indignation.” The Convention established frontiers and spheres of influence in Afghanistan, Tibet and China, and Persia was split into three: the Russians taking the northern third, the British the southern third, and the shah and the Majlis, the democratic assembly, squeezed in the middle. The British informally conceded that they no longer felt obliged to block Russian influence in the Balkans and agreed to consider seriously the possibility of supporting the opening of the Bosphorus to Russian ships. There were still plenty of people in Russia who enormously resented the thought that any restraints should be placed on Russian expansion in Asia. In England, there was great anger from the Liberal backbenches and the Labour Party that Britain should have made a treaty with a regime such as Russia’s. Between the negotiators there was a carefully disguised mismatch of intentions: the Russians believed the Convention was mainly about securing its Asian frontiers, whereas Grey and the British Foreign Office saw it in terms of European politics. “It will complete51 and strengthen the Entente with France,” Grey wrote, “and add very much to the comfort and strength of our position.” This was not at all how the Russians wanted to see it. They had no desire to alienate anyone, especially the Germans. But when Izvolsky started negotiating a deal with the Germans in the autumn of 1907 over control of the Baltic and Sir Edward Grey found out, he was furious; Izvolsky was given a stark lesson in just how difficult it would be to steer a balanced course in an increasingly polarized Europe.

  Predictably, the Germans attributed the Convention to Edward’s politicking. A German acquaintance of the English-born aristocrat Daisy, Princess of Pless, told her that he’d asked his Russian acquaintances if they were now praying to little Edward icons.52 One of Wilhelm’s longest-serving ministers wrote on the day of its publication that the Convention was clearly the product of both countries’ fear of “the German army, the German navy, our business sense and the potential of the German people as a whole.”53 Next to this the kaiser scribbled that Izvolsky had “always been an Anglomaniac and is now more so than ever,” and that both countries were clearly “against our nation as a whole.” In Britain, some people, such as the journalist W. T. Stead and David Lloyd George, were beginning to wonder whether the king and the “Hardinge gang,”54 far from securing peace in Europe, were actually damaging relations with Germany.

  In fact, Edward’s role in the Convention was very limited. He and George continued to write occasional letters to Nicholas. (“What a long time55 it is since we met,” George wrote to his cousin at the end of 1907. “You are often in my thoughts, dear Nicky—I am sure you know that I never change and always remain the same in my old friends. I trust that your Duma will work better than the last two and that the country will gradually quieten down and give you less trouble and anxiety than it has during these last few years!”) The king charmed Nicholas’s sisters and Sandro, whom he met in Biarritz in the spring of 1907, which may have helped warm Nicholas up to the idea—though the tsar was no longer as close to them as he’d previously been. Bertie’s personality, Sandro—hitherto a confirmed Anglophobe—now claimed, “made everything look different.” “None could surpass him in clearness of thought or in quality of statesmanship. I am not surprised that Kaiser Wilhelm hated him. It could not have been otherwise because with all his insane conceit the jumping Billy must have felt a miserable dwarf next to that natural-born ruler of overwhelming greatness.”56 Arguably Minny worked as hard as Edward to make the family links bear fruit. She came to England for the first time in thirty-four years in February 1907, and the two sisters, as they had in 1873, went out in public and the papers ran excited stories about the queen’s closeness to the Russian dowager empress. “Everything is so57 tastefully and artistically arranged,” Minny wrote breathlessly from London, “… it makes one’s mouth water to see all the magnificence! … Everyone is so very kind and friendly to me … I do wish you too could come over here a little to breathe the air and live for a while in different surroundings. How good for you that would be!”

  How to calm the inevitable accusations from Germany that the Convention was aimed at them? For lack of any other ideas, the British government went for the tried, trusted and utterly unsatisfactory method of a state visit. Hardinge pressed Edward to invite Wilhelm for November just after the Convention was published. Enthusiasm was muted on all sides. The Foreign Office had suggested the visit as much to counter criticisms from the left wing of the Liberal and Labour parties, as anything else.

  Nor, for once, was Wilhelm keen to come. He had been engulfed in a desperately embarrassing sex scandal, the ramifications of which showed no signs of abating. In April Die Zukunft, a newspaper highly critical of the kaiser’s “personal rule” and his anti-democratic habit of listening to favourites and unofficial advisers such as Eulenburg, had launched a campaign against Eulenburg and his circle—several of whom had been aides in Wilhelm’s entourage—and accused Eulenburg of being the real power behind Wilhelm’s rule, exercising his influence through patronage, “little threads that are strangling the Reich.” More shockingly it directly accused Eulenburg and his circle of homosexuality, “moral degeneracy,” and even of passing secrets to the French. The kaiser was not mentioned, but his name inevitably hovered over the scandal, though the revelations seem to have come as a genuine shock to him. “Little Willy,” the crown prince, described in his memoirs having to tell his father about the accusations against Eulenburg—he never forgot the “despairing, horrified”58 look on his face. Wilhelm had wilfully ignored Eulenburg’s homosexuality for twenty years; it was never referred to in his presence though it had been a more or less open secret in diplomatic circles. Denial allowed him to exhibit his own feelings for Eulenburg without embarrassment. In his memoirs (written seven years afterwards), Sergei Witte rather wickedly recalled meeting Wilhelm and Eulenburg on his way back to Russia from negotiating a French loan in 1906. “He [Wilhelm] sat59 on the arm of the Prince’s chair, his right hand on Eulenburg’s shoulder, almost as if he was putting his arm round him.” Very quickly, homosexuality became the story rather than Eulenburg’s influence, which had peaked in the late 1890s. More than anywhere else in Europe, homosexuality was taboo in Germany, where—perhaps because of the obsessive admiration for military virtues—there was an intense emphasis on masculinity and masculine behaviour within the establishment. One historian has written: “The repression of60 the feminine was pushed to an extreme unknown anywhere else in Europe.”* Exposure was unthinkable: when Wilhelm’s friend Fritz Krupp, heir to the armaments fortune, was accused of homosexuality in 1902, he committed suicide; Emperor Franz Joseph’s brother Ludwig Victor (known, improbably, as “Luzi-Wuzi”) was sent into exile after having an affair with a male masseur. Eulenburg’s own brother had been accused of homosexuality in 1898. Wilhelm had forbidden his friend ever to see him again—an order which began the process of Eulenburg’s disillusionment with the kaiser. After Wilhelm learned about Eulenburg, he cast him out instantly, depriving himself of one of the few people who genuinely cared about him and who had managed occasionally to restrain him.

  Wilhelm made it all the worse by forcing the accused men to sue for libel—for the “honour” of the government. Then, subsequently—heavily pressed by his military entourage who had long hated Eulenburg because his influence over the kaiser rivalled their own—he allowed his friend to be pursued through the courts for perjury. The cases went on and on. Perhaps the ugliest aspect of the whole affair—and a natural corollary of the way that Wilhelm had allowed his government to become a place dominated by int
rigue and competition for favour—was the fact that the information about Eulenburg had come from the government itself: from Wilhelm’s entourage, from Holstein, who blamed Eulenburg for his dismissal, and from Bülow, who had begun to fear the re-emergence of Eulenburg as a rival.

  Naturally such juicy pickings ended up in every paper in Europe. The pervasiveness of the story can be seen in the way that the German word Homosexualität became the popular noun for same-sex sex in Europe, taking over from Proust’s preferred “inversion,” the old British favourite “sodomy,” and even the delightful German synonym warm—as in, “he’s quite warm.” Only a week before the kaiser was due in England, The Times ran an article about Eulenburg and the “disgusting orgies”61 he was supposed to have taken part in, together with another attacking Bülow for associating with extreme Anglophobic German nationalists.

  Embarrassed and concerned that his reception in Britain might for the first time actually be hostile, Wilhelm tried to cancel. “Am suffering62 since a week from Bronchitis and acute cough, effect of a very virulent attack of influenza, which have quite upset my constitution,” he informed Edward. As Lascelles had just seen the kaiser galloping through the Tiergarten “in very good63 spirits,” Edward was not inclined to let him off. “Your telegram64 has greatly upset me—as your not coming to England would be a terrible disappointment to us all—my family—and the British nation. Beg of you to reconsider your decision.”

  There was no booing. The English crowds loved a show, and they still harboured a soft spot for the showy kaiser, who smiled with such pleasure when in public. George, who met Willy and Dona* in his Prussian field marshal’s uniform at Victoria Station, wrote, “There were great66 crowds in the street and they got a splendid reception.” At Windsor, the town corporation put on a medieval pageant for Wilhelm, who told the gathered crowd that they had made him feel as if he were “coming home67 again.” Edward played the solicitous host, avoided politics, but observed in what “good health” Their Majesties were suddenly looking. Members of the new Liberal government who hadn’t met the kaiser before were impressed. “Even those68 who were the most sceptical about any good coming of it now admit that the visit has been in every way advantageous,” wrote John Morley, one of the party’s most respected figures. Sir Richard Haldane, who was both war minister and a genuine Germanophile, was charmed when Kaiser Wilhelm invited him to join a late-night discussion on Britain’s long-standing opposition to the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway continuing through Persia. “Be a member69 of my Cabinet for tonight,” the kaiser said. Haldane believed that by the end of the evening they had come up with the germ of a solution. Not everyone was impressed. Lord Esher wrote, “Our King makes a70 better show than William II. He has more graciousness and dignity. William is ungraceful, nervous and plain. There is no ‘atmosphere’ about him. He has not impressed Grey.”

  Only three days after Wilhelm arrived back in Germany, the proposals for the German Navy Bill of 1908 were published. They called for the commission of four more battleships per year for the next three years and guaranteed that ships would be replaced every twenty rather than twenty-five years. It was a very dramatic increase—a direct response to the new British Dreadnought ships. In Britain, anger at the increases led to the founding of a naval lobby group, the Imperial Maritime League. No more was heard of Haldane’s late-night solution to the Baghdad railway impasse. It transpired that the kaiser71 had deliberately delayed publication of the new bill until his return from England. Holstein wrote that no one “except perhaps the Kaiser himself” could deny that this had made “all his kindnesses useless and meaningless, and even given them the air of fraud.”72 John Morley was genuinely puzzled: he’d been convinced that the kaiser intended “peace.” “You may laugh73 at this in view of the fine brand-new naval programme which the Germans have launched,” he wrote in his diary.

  In February 1908 Viscount Esher allowed a letter he’d written to the new Imperial Maritime League to be published in The Times. It was very clear from it that Esher believed the German navy had malign intentions towards Britain, and he added, “there is not a man in Germany from the Emperor downward who would not welcome the fall of Sir John Fisher.” Wilhelm—not for the first time paying more attention to the British press than to the one at home—decided the letter must be protested against. But he didn’t write, as etiquette demanded, to the king, but instead to the naval minister, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Tweedmouth. In his most excitable, high-blown prose he denounced Esher’s letter as “unmitigated balderdash” and said it was “preposterous to infer” that the German government would connive against Fisher. “It is as ridiculous as it is untrue and I hereby repudiate such a calumny.” In his “humble” opinion, the British obsession with the “German danger” was “nearly ludicrous … Once more the German Naval Bill is not aimed at England and is not a challenge to British supremacy of the sea.”74

  Like so many of Wilhelm’s foreign initiatives, the letter spectacularly backfired—and not just because he failed to send his complaints through the sovereign, though Edward completely lost his temper over that. Lord Tweedmouth was suffering from an undiagnosed brain tumour from which he would die the following year; his behaviour had become erratic. He sent the kaiser all the latest estimates for British naval spending which had not yet been presented to Parliament, and showed the letter to almost everyone he met. The story ended up in The Times; the paper’s military correspondent described it as an outrageous attempt to influence British policy. The kaiser’s letter put the German navy on the front of every British newspaper for months—Esher couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome. By mid-March 1908 Arthur Balfour had extracted from the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, who had recently replaced the seriously ill Campbell-Bannerman, a promise that Britain would build enough new battleships to maintain its naval superiority over Germany—the one thing Tirpitz had wanted to avoid.

  Wilhelm decided the whole furore had been engineered by Edward, though Metternich assured him that the king had reprimanded Esher for starting the affair. “Only now!75 After five weeks!” Wilhelm scribbled on Metternich’s report. “He never did the slightest thing four or five weeks ago, when the attack of his friend and official on me took place, to make known his displeasure and regret!” On the bottom of the memo he wrote, “it is not our fleet that is responsible, but the absolutely crazy ‘Dreadnought’ policy of Sir John Fisher and His Majesty.”

  The British press—the Left especially—was also angry with the king at the news that Edward was to make a state visit to Russia in June 1908, or rather, meet Nicholas off the coast of Russia. The British government kept the Russian trip a secret until the last minute, precisely in order to head off domestic criticism. It was right to be apprehensive. The Labour MP Ramsay MacDonald published an article called “An Insult to Our Country,”76 in which he scolded the king for “hobnobbing with a bloodstained creature”—the tsar—and a group of Labour and Liberal MPs signed a Commons motion deploring the visit. The reaction in Parliament was so negative that Grey had to deny publicly that the government had any plans to make any further formal arrangements with Russia, and agree to a Commons debate on the visit. Several MPs were highly critical of Edward, and Kier Hardie, the leader of the Labour Party, made a speech describing the tsarist government’s treatment and execution of political prisoners, implying that the king was condoning atrocities. The government won the debate, but Edward was affronted at being criticized. He took the position that it was not for him to judge other monarchs (at least not in public); the loyalty of one monarch to another, he said, “couldn’t be destroyed77 by the faults of a regime.”* He responded by disinviting the offending MPs—among them Hardie and Fritz Ponsonby’s brother, Arthur, a radical Liberal MP highly critical of Grey’s anti-German foreign policy—from a garden party at Buckingham Palace. Hardie said the Crown had been outside politics since Charles I and ought to stay there. The whole of the parliamentary Labour Party signed a resolution condemning
Edward’s behaviour and sent their invitations back. Dynastic relationships and domestic politics directly collided, and Parliament, unsurprisingly, won. The king was forced to reinvite those whose invitations he’d withdrawn, attempting, unsuccessfully, to hold out against Ponsonby, who he said “should have known79 better.”

  Edward, Alexandra and their suite arrived on the Victoria and Albert on 9 June 1908 at Reval (now Tallinn), in the Gulf of Finland, to meet Nicholas, Alix, his sister Olga and the children on Standart and Polar Star. The weather was calm, and the sun didn’t set until 11:30. In his Kiev Dragoons uniform, Edward told Nicholas how splendid he looked in his Scots Grey uniform. On the spur of the moment he made the tsar an admiral of the British navy (for which, having failed to consult his government in advance, he was told off by Asquith). Though he might consider Nicky “deplorably unsophisticated, immature, and reactionary,” Edward had learned the value of tact. He knew not to offer unsolicited advice, and said he had “no desire to play the part of the German Emperor, who always meddles in other people’s business.”80 Nicky was visibly grateful—and his palpable ease was perhaps the most important outcome of the whole event. Nicholas’s latest chief minister, Peter Stolypin, observed to Hardinge the “marked difference” between the tsar’s “spirits and attitude during the King’s visit to Reval compared with what they were at the Emperor’s recent visit to the German Emperor at Swinemünde, where he felt anxiety all the time as to what might be unexpectedly swung at him.”81 (Less tactfully, at his friends the Rothschilds’ request, the king raised the subject of Jewish persecution to Stolypin, who was politely noncommittal. He also rather tackily asked the tsar to meet his friend Ernest Cassel, who wanted to get into the Russian money markets, and he told Alix that the children spoke English with a déclassé accent.82 She was so mortified she hired an English tutor almost at once.)