“Once the matter had been put as definitely and unequivocally as that, there was nothing for it but to swallow one’s pride, give in and agree,” Nicholas wrote bitterly to his mother, who was staying with her sister in London. The Russian government’s capitulation brought an end to the crisis, but Russian public opinion was furious, unable to understand why the government had backed down. It seemed one more blow to the country’s status. “Shame! Shame!44 It would be better to die! …” Russia’s leading Pan-Slavist, General Kireev, wept into his diary. “We have become a second rate power.” In the Duma the largest party, the Octobrists, accused the government of having betrayed Russia’s historic mission in the Balkans. Novoe vremia described the decision not to fight as a diplomatic Tsushima,* and began to call for stronger ties with France and in particular with England: “the enemies45 of enemies are friends to each other.” In the aftermath of Bosnia, Slavic societies would spring up all over Western Russia, demanding formal government support for the Slavs against the German powers, the imposition of Russia’s imperial influence in the Balkans, and the acquisition of the Turkish Straits. “It was considered46 not only in the Press,” the British ambassador in St. Petersburg wrote to Sir Edward Grey, “but also, so far as I have been able to observe and ascertain, in all classes of society that … there has never previously been a moment when the country had undergone such a humiliation.”
For once Nicholas was in tune with Russian public opinion—such as it was—though he could do nothing about it. “The form and the method47 of Germany’s action—I mean towards us—has simply been brutal and we won’t forget it. I think they were again trying to separate us from France and England—but once again they have undoubtedly failed. Such methods tend to bring about the opposite result.” Wilhelm sent Nicholas an Easter egg—“a token of undiminished48 love and friendship”—and thanked him “sincerely for the loyal and noble way in which you kinly [sic] led the way to help to preserve peace. It is thanks to your high-minded and unselfish initiative that Europe has been spared the horrors of universal war.” By way of an answer, Nicholas summoned the British ambassador and told him that he wanted to see Russia’s relationship with England strengthened, and that the Entente must stand up to Germany. This time Ambassador Nicolson felt there was no mistaking that the tsar was asking for the Convention to be turned into a military49 alliance. The kaiser and the tsar met for a day at Björkö in June, but by the end of the year the German ambassador in St. Petersburg was reporting that there was no point in the kaiser continuing to write to the tsar, as his expressions of sympathy towards Russia were considered worthless.50
For Wilhelm the ultimatum—in which he played no part—had been deeply discomfiting. As the threat of war loomed, Lyncker, the chief of his military cabinet, had disappointedly noted that the kaiser lacked all appetite for it51—in contrast to his military entourage and generals. Afterwards, however, when it was hailed at the German court as a “great diplomatic triumph,”52 he felt obliged to prove that he had led Germany’s aggressively pro-Austrian course all along. In Vienna, the following year, he announced that he was Austria’s knight in shining armour. He told an Austrian diplomat that they should have gone ahead and invaded Serbia. “I hate the Slavs,53 I know it is a sin but I cannot help myself.” “When Germany made54 up its mind to go in a given direction,” Theodore Roosevelt would say of the kaiser, “he could only stay at the head of affairs by scampering to take the lead.”
The British were bemused and worried by the way the Germans had behaved over Bosnia. The former prime minister Arthur Balfour noted that Herbert Asquith had said to him after Bosnia that “incredible as it might55 seem, the Government could form no theory of German policy which fitted all the known facts, except that they wanted war.” He added that the internal conditions of Germany were so unsatisfactory that it might be “driven to the wildest adventures in order to divert national sentiment into a new channel.” When Edward went to Marienbad that summer, he refused invitations from both Franz Joseph and the new German chancellor.
Back in London after his Berlin visit, Edward put his weight behind the campaign, led by the Admiralty and the Conservative Party, to increase British shipbuilding in order to stay ahead of the German navy. The issue was splitting the government. Jackie Fisher was convinced that Germany was building more ships than it was admitting to—he had Edward informed56 that Germany was buying more building materials than its published plans required. The Admiralty demanded six, better still eight, new Dreadnoughts to stay ahead. Many members of the Liberal Party regarded this as paranoid profligacy which would eat into the money set aside for the new pensions and national insurance plans drawn up by David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. The arguments became bitter. Jackie Fisher and the naval minister, McKenna, threatened to resign. Edward’s secretary, Knollys, wrote that Churchill could not possibly be acting from “conviction or principle.57 The very idea of his having either is enough to make anyone laugh.” Grey, meanwhile, had come round to the Admiralty’s view: he had repeatedly asked Metternich for the correct naval figures, while reassuring him that Britain would slow down its shipbuilding if Germany would too. The ambassador wanted to oblige but couldn’t. The kaiser had told him to stonewall58 any attempts to find out the true figures. In his reports home, Metternich said that the British reaction was understandable given that Germany looked as if it had something to hide, and as far as he could see did seem to be clandestinely building more ships. Wilhelm scribbled “Nonsense!”59 and “This is absolutely not so!”
The situation was resolved only when Asquith came up with a compromise to commission four ships in 1909 and another four in 1910. The irony was, however, that though it was true that Tirpitz had started building more ships than the Reichstag—or even the kaiser—had given him permission for, German government finances couldn’t support the weight of defence spending, which now took up around 43 percent of the Reich’s budget. Despite a further naval bill to try to catch up with the British increases in 1912, Tirpitz would never realize his goal.* Such is the way of arms races. The British naval bill, meanwhile, managed to frighten and alarm the Germans just as the German bill had alarmed the British. In 1909 on a visit to London, Wilhelm’s notably Anglophile brother Heinrich told Fritz Ponsonby that in Germany people were convinced “that England60 would on the slightest excuse come and smash the German fleet, and at the present they were at our mercy.” And Heinrich added—an unconscious admission of the underlying tension and aggression between the two countries—that the Germans “had studied European history and they knew that whenever any European power rose to any predominance, we [the British] smashed them. He instanced the Dutch, the Spanish, and later the French. They did not in Germany mean to follow the example of the others. They had no wish for war, but they did not mean to remain defenceless and at our mercy.”
In Britain, the cost of the additional ships, added to the new pensions and national insurance, forced David Lloyd George to look for a new source of taxation. He found it in the rich and aristocratic, which gave him an opportunity to bring about a confrontation with the Conservative-dominated House of Lords. In Germany, in a strange parallel, Bülow found himself in a similar—even more pressing—situation, with a fiscal crisis brought on by the vast expenditure on defence. Germany had a fantastically inequitable and outmoded tax system which left the Junkers largely untaxed. Echoing Lloyd George, Bülow’s solution was to try to impose death duties and new land taxes that impinged on the aristocracy as never before.
By the spring of 1909 Bülow was fighting for his political life. The kaiser was raring to sack him. The Daily Telegraph affair had destroyed Wilhelm’s trust in him, and the kaiser had resolved to keep him only until he had steered the necessary financial reforms through the Reichstag. Bülow had been casting around for a way of securing his position without the kaiser. He seems to have seriously considered trying to institute some kind of constitutional government, with himself as chancellor. He wrote to Fritz Ho
lstein, “If I am supported61 by the Reichstag, there is a possibility that from now on there will be a different kind of rule.” Bülow appealed to the German conservative parties to agree to make a fair contribution to the country’s finances in return for real power in government: he seems to have hoped that, with their help, he might wrest the constitutional initiative from Wilhelm and establish a parliamentary system where he, Bülow, would govern at the head of a coalition of Reichstag parties, a plan that would effectively turn them from lobby groups into real parties with responsibility for government and to their electorate.
Lloyd George’s 1909 Budget, by contrast, was an attack on aristocratic privilege and the unelected Conservative bigwigs in the House of Lords, rather than an invitation to power. In the end it was forced on the unelected peers, and their resistance resulted in the loss of the Lords’ veto on legislation, the last hurrah of aristocratic power in Britain. The British aristocracy would be left intact as a class, and in 1918 it would still be in existence. In Germany, Bülow failed to persuade the Junker parties to part with their privileges and exemptions, his financial reforms were defeated in the Reichstag in June 1909, his coalition fell apart and Wilhelm sacked him two days later. The system remained inequitable, Junkers held on to their privileges and the government’s finances continued to limp along, a situation which would contribute to Germany’s revolution in 1918.
To display the warmth of their relations with Britain, and no doubt to make a show of it to the Germans, in August 1909 the Russian imperial family, along with Stolypin and Izvolsky, came to Britain. Or rather—perhaps as a riposte to Edward’s reluctance to set foot on Russian soil—the royal yachts Standart and Polar Star anchored off the Isle of Wight. In London, seventy MPs and two bishops made formal complaints the day the Russians arrived despite the fact that to sweeten the pill Sir Charles Hardinge had produced a series of reports listing a number of entirely fictitious improvements in Russia’s civil liberties record.62 Confidentially, the British ambassador had recently noted that the regime had executed 2,835 people in the three years up to October 1908.63
“Dear Nicky looking64 so well and Alicky too,” George wrote. There are no hints in his diary as to the flow of feelings or the strangeness—it was eleven years since he had last seen them. George took the imperial family to inspect twenty-four battleships and sixteen heavy cruisers gathered at Spithead; they steamed through three rows of ships in the Victoria and Albert. Guns saluted and each crew cheered on cue, a demonstration of force and coordination as much for the sake of the Germans as the Russians. Apart from a few trips to Hesse and Kiel, it was the first time any of the Romanov children had been anywhere outside Russia. Not that they can have seen much. They were allowed to set foot on dry land precisely once, when they were conducted around Osborne House, now a rest home for naval officers. The tsar and the Prince of Wales still looked extraordinarily alike. As they posed in their white British admiral’s uniforms, with their sad eyes and their Vandyke beards, one might almost have mistaken them for twins. David, George’s thirteen-year-old son, who was the tsar’s godson, however, could later remember almost nothing about him, though he vividly recalled his “elaborate police guard.”65
Alix went to visit the eighty-two-year-old former French empress Eugénie, who was in her thirty-eighth year of British exile in the Hampshire town of Farnborough. Alix seemed particularly fascinated by deposed queens and owned various pieces of Marie Antoinette memorabilia, including a series of four tapestries that had belonged to her. Nicholas was, as ever, polite and inscrutable. At the Russian court, the last stronghold of Russian Germanophilia, it was said that Izvolsky had had to force him to make the trip and that the tsar still harboured reservations about a closer relationship with Britain. The tsar’s favourite court official, old Count Fredericks, warned that the Cowes visit would irretrievably embroil the imperial couple in the British democracy’s feud with the kaiser. “Britain would never66 be a loyal ally,” Fredericks was reported as saying, and he “predicted the worst perils for our country.”
* Wilhelm had proposed to rent the castle for several weeks for the hunting; Stuart-Wortley had insisted he come as his guest.
* Eulenburg would pass the next twelve years of his life in depressed, hypochondriacal seclusion. He wrote, “The Emperor is9 the greatest disappointment of my life, I hoped everything of him, and he has not fulfilled one of my hopes.” As for Wilhelm, from time to time he could be heard to mutter pitifully to himself, “Poor Phili.”10
* The Serbian king had been assassinated in 1903.
* After the devastating defeat inflicted by the Japanese on the Russian navy in 1905.
* By 1912 Germany had thirteen Dreadnoughts to Britain’s twenty-two.
14
EDWARD’S MANTLE
1910–11
Edward died on 6 May 1910. He’d just returned from his annual spring visit to Biarritz with Alice Keppel, where his coughing and wheezing had been so bad he’d barely left the hotel in six weeks. Back in England he seemed to rally, playing bridge until midnight, managing five hours of Wagner at the opera, meeting various ministers. But on Sunday 1 May he went for a walk at Sandringham, stayed out in a cold wind and caught a chill. The following Friday, after a series of minor heart attacks, he lapsed into unconsciousness. It was somehow appropriate that the last thing George was able to tell him was that his horse, Witch of the Air,1 had won at Kempton Park.
In Britain Edward had made royalty visible, glamorous and enormously popular. The same papers that had covered his vices in salacious detail when he was Prince of Wales now extravagantly praised him. Hundreds of thousands of mourners filed past his coffin in Westminster Hall. From Europe came grandiloquent tributes. In Russia Novoe vremia wrote that Edward had “moulded the destinies of his realm.” A Viennese paper called him “The most influential man of the present day. His own foreign minister.” In Germany the Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung described him as “the great opponent … We stand at his bier as at that of a mighty and victorious antagonist.”2 “He might have been3 a Solon and Francis of Assisi combined if characters drawn of him were true,” the anti-imperialist poet and diplomat Wilfrid Scawen Blunt noted drily.
In some respects, however, Edward had failed to be what he had set out to be—a peacemaker. He had helped to put Britain back in Europe, he had encouraged the deals with France and Russia, but he had become the incarnation of Germany’s old fears of being trapped and surrounded by hostile forces—and though the accusation was ridiculous, he was unable to summon the energy or inclination to counter it. His association with the anti-German hawkish party in Britain and the very public failure of his relationship with Wilhelm had compounded this. A few months before he died, he had confidentially told a British journalist that in a European war Britain would be obliged, by “honour and interest,”4 to come to France’s aid against Germany.
Before he set out for the funeral, Wilhelm passed judgement on his uncle. “The scheming and intrigues … which for so long have caused unrest abroad and made Europe hold its breath, will hopefully come to a stop,” he told his new chancellor, Theodore von Bethmann-Hollweg. “All the Cabinet alliances and private coalitions will fall apart without a man at the top to bind them together.” Edward, he claimed, would be missed only by “the French and the Jews.” Europe would be “much calmer.”5 As for George, Wilhelm described him, unusually perceptively, as “An English country6 gentleman without political interests … whose sketchy linguistic abilities will incline him towards staying at home.” Finally, Wilhelm felt, he was the pre-eminent monarch in Europe. And relations with the British royal family would be more temperate since George was perfectly friendly. It was unlikely, however, that this would make any difference to the impacted nature of Anglo-German relations.
George was devastated by his father’s death—though the sheer dread of becoming king was inextricably enmeshed in his feelings of loss. “I have lost7 my best friend, and the best of fathers,” he wrote in his dia
ry. “I never had a word with him in my life. I am heartbroken and overwhelmed with grief. I am quite stunned by this awful blow.” Nicholas wrote to him, “How deeply8 I feel for you; the terrible loss you and England have sustained. I know alas! By experience what it costs one. There you are with your heart bleeding and aching, but at the same time duty imposes itself and people and affairs come up and tear you away from your sorrow … How I would have liked to have come now and be near you!”
Even without Nicholas an embarrassment of European royalty turned up at the funeral: seven kings (of Belgium, Greece, Norway, Spain, Bulgaria, Denmark and Portugal), one emperor (Wilhelm), and thirty European princes and heirs, including Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Alix’s brother Ernst of Hesse, Nicholas’s younger brother Misha and their mother, Minny. The United States was represented by Theodore Roosevelt, who had recently, and rather reluctantly, stepped down from the presidency. The bill for feeding the kings alone was said to have come to £4,644 (around £325,0009 in today’s money). Nothing politically significant was said or suggested. The kings changed into their uniforms, waxed their impressive beards and moustaches, ate their dinners, posed for photographs. British guards regiments marched perfectly through the streets; the funeral was, as Minny wrote back to Nicholas, “beautifully arranged,10 all in perfect order, very touching and solemn. Poor Aunt Alix bore up wonderfully to the last. Georgie, too, behaved so well and with such calm.”
Only five months later the first of the royal guests would lose his throne: Manuel of Portugal, deposed by a country tired of his attachment to the extreme Right. He escaped to Gibraltar and was brought to exile in England on George’s yacht the Victoria and Albert. In 1912 the Italian king Vittorio Emmanuele, whose father had been assassinated, would narrowly avoid the same fate. George’s uncle George of Greece would fall victim to an attack at Salonika in 1913. Franz Ferdinand would die in Sarajevo in 1914. Misha would be murdered the day after his brother in 1918. Kings were parting company with history.
The Three Emperors Page 44
