The Three Emperors

by Miranda Carter

  The Russians were struck by what seemed to them the incredible informality of the British. On the Victoria and Albert, Mossolov observed how the king sat in an armchair, with an empty chair next to him, on which one might be beckoned to sit. “Except when on duty,83 no account was taken of rank. What a contrast there was between the visits of Wilhelm II and the reception of the King and Queen of England at Reval! How entirely at ease everybody was in their company!” Edward flattered Stolypin (whose luxuriant beard the British particularly admired), casually dropped into the conversation the Russian facts he had extracted from ambassador Nicolson on the trip over, and greeted the Standart’s sailors in Russian. Olga laughed so raucously at Admiral Fisher’s jokes that she felt obliged to apologize to her uncle.

  Late on the first night, after dinner on board the Standart, Sir Charles Hardinge came upon Alix, sobbing alone84 on deck. She declined his offers of help.

  What struck the British were the mountains of caviar sandwiches and the Russian obsession with security. In preparation for the imperial family’s arrival at Reval every house and boat had been searched, and during the course of the visit no one, including the British, was allowed ashore. When a local choral society, invited to “sing weird Russian85 songs,” couldn’t be heard from the boat on which they were performing, the Russian chief of security cheerfully told the head of Edward’s police detail that there was no danger in bringing aboard the choir—mostly local ladies—as he had arranged for them all to be strip-searched. Envisaging the headlines in Britain, Ponsonby managed to have him talked out of it.

  In Russia the meeting was an enormous hit. It was called the “feast of peace.”86 Aside from a small court rump, Russian public opinion, such as it was, had become very keen indeed on the Convention in the nine months since it had been published. Even the most conservative constitutionalists regarded the agreement with Britain as a sign that the tsarist regime was gradually moving in the right direction, and that Britain had renounced its historic opposition to Russia’s influence in the Balkans—in contrast to Germany. The truth was that the starkest reason for the new popularity of the Entente was a rising hostility towards Germany. Since 1906, the newly independent Russian press had become noticeably anti-German. It expressed resentment of Germany’s success, its wealth, its economic dominance and its aggressively high tariffs, and a fear of being overwhelmed by Germany, being sucked dry and being turned into a dependent vassal. The coverage bespoke a sense of terrible vulnerability, hair-trigger xenophobia, which seemed now to be common to every country in Europe, and a revived sense of territoriality about the Balkans. Now that Russia’s plans to expand into Asia had been so summarily curtailed, nationalists, imperialists and patriots were turning their attention back to Russia’s traditional preoccupations with Slavdom. And there Germany and Austria were, more powerful than ever, with their own Pan-Germanism and their own anti-Slavic doctrines. When the German ambassador complained about the coverage, Izvolsky had been forced to “confess his impotence87 under the present system of liberty.”

  With Edward’s now annual summer visit to Wilhelm coming up in August, Sir Edward Grey thought that if the king spoke to the kaiser direct, he might perhaps convince him that a slow-down in naval construction would be good for everyone. How much he really knew about the state of Edward’s relationship with the kaiser isn’t entirely clear. What the British also underestimated was how riled Wilhelm had been by Edward’s Russian trip. He had decided it was final proof that the Russian deal was about a military alliance against Germany. That Admiral Jackie Fisher, who had become rather fond of suggesting that the British burn the German fleet, had been taken along too simply confirmed it. Metternich was sent to tell Sir Edward Grey that Germany had regarded the visit “very searchingly,88 since several international agreements have already been linked with his [Edward’s] travels.” In June Wilhelm told a cavalry review that France, Russia and England were conniving to encircle89 Germany. After the visit, by way of a riposte, he ordered that no British officer be allowed to join the German army in the future. Nevertheless Grey was sufficiently hopeful to prepare two different memos for Edward on the subject of naval construction, so he could choose which one to use, a move which just irritated the king.

  The two monarchs spent the morning together at Kronberg, Vicky’s former home. They agreed on a replacement for Sir Francis Lascelles, who was retiring—Sir Edward Goschen, the ambassador in Vienna. His selection was largely due to Edward’s influence, who knew him much better than Grey did. Goschen regarded the post as “the blackest and most nauseous90 of pills;” in his diary he called the kaiser “German Bill,”91 and he agreed to take the job only because he was a fervent monarchist and Edward had personally asked him to. “I cannot resist the King,” he told a British journalist. “But … I am certain my mission to Berlin will end in failure, for there will be no means of avoiding catastrophe.”92 He would prove a dismal manifestation of new British attitudes to Germany.

  Edward raised the navy once, saying he had a memo on the matter. Wilhelm immediately changed the subject, and Edward couldn’t bring himself to raise it again. After lunch, as he went to have his post-prandial cigar in the summerhouse, he told Sir Charles Hardinge that it was up to him to discuss the navy with the kaiser.

  Wilhelm invited Hardinge to speak to him. Hardinge started in on British worries about the German fleet. It was hard, he said, to reconcile the kaiser’s reassurances with the constant increases in the German naval programme, and if Germany continued to build at her current rate, Britain would feel obliged to keep up with it, which would lead to bad feeling. Britain, he emphasized, had no argument with the size of Germany’s land armies, but as an island it believed it needed a larger navy to defend itself. He wanted Wilhelm to agree to a ratio of British naval superiority to German: say five British ships to every three German. Almost immediately Wilhelm lost his temper. He refused to accept Hardinge’s figures on German shipbuilding. “That’s complete nonsense. Who has been telling you such ridiculous tales? … Your documents are wrong. I am an Admiral of the British Navy, which I know all about and understand better than you, who are a civilian with no idea of these matters.” He said there was no reason for the British to fear a German attack, nor to increase its fleet, and that invasion talk was “sheer nonsense and no serious person in Germany had ever contemplated such an idea.”93 Anyway, England had started it all by building the Dreadnoughts, and Fisher had initiated the war talk with his threats to burn the German navy. He ended grandly, by stating he would rather go to war than consider slowing down.

  At dinner, the kaiser, all smiles, invited Hardinge to sit next to him. Wilhelm talked, Hardinge wrote, “a lot of nonsense94 as to his own friendly feelings towards England … ‘The future of the world,’ he said, ‘was in the hands of the Anglo-Teuton race, and that England without a powerful army could not stand alone in Europe but must lean on a Continental Power and that Power should be Germany!’” Later Wilhelm told Bülow that the “frank conversation95 with me, in which I had shown him my teeth, had not failed to have its effect. That is always the way to treat Englishmen.”

  But it was not only the English who wanted the kaiser to cut back on his naval programme. “The only result96 of our naval armaments at the present moment is that we have succeeded in arousing the envy and suspicion of the whole world,” Robert zu Zedlitz-Trützschler had written in his diary in 1907. “England, not without reason, sees in our navy a threat … What is the use of all this enormous expenditure, and of arousing mistrust and jealousy?” There were plenty of ministers and men of influence who felt that, just as Tangier had demonstrated that German aggression tended to backfire, so the naval race had gone too far. Tschirrsky, the former foreign minister, had recommended an agreement on naval quotas after Algeciras. In London, Metternich was convinced that the sole reason for the deterioration of Anglo-German relations was naval rivalry—and was brave enough to say so, which earned him Wilhelm’s respect but also impatience. Alber
t Ballin,97 the Jewish millionaire director of the Hamburg-America shipping line, whom Wilhelm liked to describe as a friend, had recently recommended that the crisis in Anglo-German relations should be solved by an agreement on building warships. He’d also said that while Edward might be rude about Wilhelm, there was no doubting that he wanted peace.

  For a man who changed his mind almost as often as he changed his clothes, Wilhelm was extraordinarily stubborn about his navy. He refused to acknowledge what it cost—when Tirpitz asked for four more ships than had been budgeted for in 1907, he’d told him it was “a mere bagatelle.”98 And he refused to countenance any slowdown.

  Why is hard to answer. The navy was very popular in certain sections of German society, but it was also known to be very expensive and by 1908 its cost had brought about a financial crisis and the prospect of huge tax increases. Somehow the ships had become tightly attached to Wilhelm’s sense of himself: to his deep-seated longing to be connected with Britain, to strike at it, to force it to take notice and to his desire to show that he wasn’t hopelessly irresolute. Tirpitz’s uncompromising refusal to acknowledge any diplomatic or financial limits to the naval programme stiffened Wilhelm’s resolve and seemed to re-arouse his ever-present desire to show that he was the perfect, implacable German soldier. And he seemed genuinely to adore his ships. Tirpitz spoke, witheringly, about the kaiser’s love for his “mechanical toy.”99 Perhaps most of all the humiliation of Algeciras made him feel he couldn’t be seen to react to British pressure—a feeling shared by many Germans.

  Edward was genuinely taken aback by Wilhelm’s absolute refusal to discuss the naval programme. When he saw the eighty-year-old Franz Joseph a few days later, he asked him straight out to raise the subject of the ships with the kaiser, a request Franz Joseph, who had learned long ago to keep clear of the grimy details of politics, politely declined. In Marienbad, the king met the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, and told him how disappointed he was that Wilhelm had refused to discuss a naval agreement, and that, while European peace might hold for the next five or six years, a certain “impulsive sovereign”100 would almost certainly eventually do something that would lead to war. Britain, he assured Clemenceau, would keep building ships so as to outstrip Germany. Back in London, he told Lord Esher that Wilhelm had been “‘impossible … Two keels to one, is the only right and safe thing,’ said the King!”101 In Berlin, Wilhelm scrawled that “Stop the King!”102 should be the goal of German policy.

  * Nabokov’s great-uncle29 avoided being blown up with his friend Grand Duke Sergei only because he declined the offer of a carriage ride home. (He also refused a ticket for the Titanic.)

  * By the time the Conservatives were back in power in 1918, their social make-up was also different and their leader a brusque Scottish businessman.

  † The Conservatives and the Liberal Unionists—that is, Liberals who opposed Irish Home Rule, like Chamberlain—began to work together in 1895.

  * It is no small irony that at the same time, in the other Germany, of innovation, creative thought and intellectual investigation, Magnus Hirschfeld and Krafft-Ebing were undertaking the most advanced, explicit, serious and sympathetic research into sexual orientation in the world.

  * One can only speculate what Dona felt about the Eulenburg scandal. She conducted herself publicly with the irreproachable dignity which had made her very popular in Germany—rather in the same way that Alexandra’s forbearance had brought her admiration in Britain—but it must have pierced her. The couple were locked in a painfully imbalanced relationship. Wilhelm, Zedlitz-Trützschler observed, found her company oppressive, while she clung to him and longed for him to pay her attention. “He is always anxious65 to get away, but his wife’s one desire is to keep him in sight as much as possible.”

  * When earlier that year the Portuguese king had installed in government a hugely unpopular extreme right-wing dictator, however, Edward told his doctor, “A constitutional monarch78 must not do such things.” The Portuguese king and queen were later assassinated in a horrific bomb attack.

  13

  A BALKAN CRISIS

  1908–9

  Part of the logic and tragedy of empires is that they are always looking to expand—they can never stand still. The European empires had mostly pursued their conquests in far-flung places. But a great opportunity for expansion closer to home promised itself in the break-up of the Ottoman empire, which still ran large swathes of the Balkans. The Ottoman empire’s government—corrupt, chaotic and apparently unreformable—had been in a state of near-collapse for decades. The pickings attracted lots of would-be empire-builders, however, which meant that land-grabbing in the Balkans always produced conflict. Sometimes, though, an opportunity seemed too good to pass up. In mid-1908 a revolt by the liberal opposition in Constantinople, the “Young Turks,” turned the Ottoman government upside down. Several European countries took their chance. On 6 October 1908 Austria-Hungary. announced to the world that it was formally annexing the small Ottoman-owned Balkan state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bulgaria declared its independence from the Ottoman empire (and its ruler Ferdinand proclaimed himself “tsar”), and Greece claimed the island of Crete. Of these, the one most potentially explosive and likely to trigger wider conflict was Austria’s grab of Bosnia because—though Austria had been administering the state for thirty years—it was bound to enrage Russia, which regarded itself as the protector of the independent Balkan states (whether they wanted protecting or not), and Serbia, the most ambitious and aggressive of them, which aspired to absorb Bosnia into its own Slavic empire, and was Russia’s closest Balkan ally.

  The Russians immediately expressed their utter outrage at Austria’s evil Germanic appropriation of poor Slavic Bosnia. At which point the Austrians announced that Alexander Izvolsky, the Russian foreign minister, had given his unconditional approval to the annexation. It was embarrassing but true. In September the Austrians had summoned Izvolsky to a secret meeting and told him they were going to annex Bosnia with or without Russian approval. Knowing this would enrage Russian opinion, Izvolsky had tried to extract some benefit for Russia by offering formal approval of the annexation in return for Austria agreeing to the opening of the Bosphorus to Russian ships. He thought he had a deal, but the Austrians announced the annexation and Russia’s approval without mentioning the Bosphorus at all. Izvolsky was utterly humiliated, the Russian government was angry and wrongfooted, the Russian press was furious that its government had been involved in grimy backroom politics and failed in its duty to protect a Slav state. Serbia, meanwhile, declared that if Austria didn’t withdraw it would mobilize its army. The two states had a history. After a bloody coup in 1903, Serbia had morphed from an obedient Austrian satellite into a territorially hungry independent state, the self-styled leader of all southern Slavs not only outside but more dangerously inside Austria-Hungary The Austrians regarded Serbia as a cancer undermining their multi-ethnic empire. If matters escalated, it seemed certain that Austria would ask for German support, while the Russians would back Serbia.

  Desperate to stave off a possible war—and to save his career—Izvolsky begged the British government to support a conference on the annexation and the opening of the Turkish Straits. The British were less than enthusiastic. The Russians had recently breezily been breaking the terms of the Convention, moving troops into Persia to put down a democratically inspired rebellion against the shah, and planting soldiers on the Afghan border. Grey agreed to support a conference, but the Austrians and Germans refused. Only the king, Izvolsky’s long-time patron, was all for backing him up. “Unless some hope is1 given to Russia …,” he wrote anxiously to Prime Minister Asquith, “Isvolski will return to his country a discredited [man] … and it is impossible to say who his successor might be.” With Grey’s support, however, he did write to the tsar telling him how vital the British regarded Izvolsky to Anglo-Russian relations.

  To everyone’s amazement Izvolsky held on to his job, though the Russian chief
minister, Stolypin, would keep him on a tight leash: there was no more secret negotiating. That he survived was due to Stolypin’s conclusion, as the threat of war showed no sign of abating, that Russia needed Britain. The tsar suddenly gave the British ambassador, Sir Arthur Nicolson, a rare audience2 and told him, smilingly, that he hoped the two countries would get much closer. Nicolson, deeply flattered, reported what a “very straightforward3 and honourable man” the tsar was. (Actually Nicholas had known all about the annexation from the start and had encouraged Izvolsky to pursue a deal on the Straits. Now, however, he denied all knowledge and said he was disgusted that his foreign minister had shamed him.) Almost simultaneously, Izvolsky asked Nicolson, and Benckendorff, the Russian ambassador in London, asked Grey, what Britain would do if there was a war in the Balkans and Germany supported Austria. Grey, who was becoming practised at answering such questions, never committed himself to going to war. He answered that Britain would not automatically fight with either France or Russia, but would naturally place itself against the “aggressor.”4

  As the international situation continued to look gloomy, Wilhelm managed to introduce a little light relief—at least for everyone apart from the Germans. On 28 October the Daily Telegraph published an interview with the kaiser written by Colonel Edward Montagu-Stuart-Wortley, a none-too-bright senior army figure and champion of Anglo-German relations, who had amalgamated a series of conversations he had had with Wilhelm when the kaiser had come to stay at his home, Highcliffe Castle near Bournemouth, the previous winter.* The interview was a sincere attempt to show the British public what a keen Anglophile the German emperor was. The authentic Wilhelm was unmistakable: pompous, unerringly tactless, more than a little deluded and unintentionally funny. “You English are mad, mad as March hares,” he said. “What on earth has come over you that you should harbour such suspicions against us.” British suspicions were a “personal insult,” bolstered by the British press’s repeated “distortions” of his “repeated offers of friendship.” Out came the litany of selfless acts he had performed for Britain—now so often repeated that he had come to believe them himself: how he personally had prevented France and Russia from combining to attack England during the Boer War, how he had thought up the strategy with which Lord Roberts had won the Boer War. He finished by assuring his readers that the German navy existed only to defend German trade from the likes of the Japanese. In so doing, he calumnied, among others, the Russians and the Japanese—both took umbrage—and implied that apart from himself the rest of Germany hated Britain.