The Three Emperors

by Miranda Carter

  It was George who established the British monarchy as the domestic, decorative, ceremonial, slightly stolid creation it is today. He threw himself into the project, steeled himself to become more visible to his people, visited the poor industrial regions of South Wales, the Potteries and the North East, and cooperated with the press that he so disliked. Charities were set up, philanthropic projects adopted. As the children came of age, they too were co-opted into the family project—the smoothly handsome David was sent to meet the unemployed and tour the Commonwealth; the second son, Albert, went to visit factories and shipyards and lent his name to a camp where public-school and working-class boys could mix. Eventually, George put up a map at Buckingham Palace with flags marking family members’ visits, and at the end of each year he would draw up a chart showing who had done the most. When the children got married, Labour MPs were invited to their weddings. In 1932 George made his first radio broadcast from a script written by Rudyard Kipling. He loathed doing it and the paper still shook as he read it out, but to his immense surprise his slow, deliberate delivery was a huge success.

  His now habitual caution dictated that he no longer pushed or challenged the limits of his constitutional role, and he trained himself to steer away from partisan politics. Combined with the gradual political changes of the previous twenty years, it made him a far more marginal figure than his father or grandmother had been, and he found himself presiding over social and political changes of which he utterly disapproved. Women over thirty got the vote in 1918. In December 1923, after the Conservative Party lost its majority in the House of Commons, leaving the Labour Party as the next largest party, George didn’t hesitate before asking its leader, Ramsay MacDonald, to form a government. His promptness arguably helped to make this political shift less seismic than it might have been, and anchored the Labour Party into Britain’s political traditions. He decided to be graceful about the situation. “I must say they14 all seem to be very intelligent and they take things very seriously,” he wrote in his diary. “… They ought to be given a chance.” Between themselves, however, he and Mary continued to refer to Keir Hardie as “that beast,” and he wondered in his diary what Victoria would have thought. As many of the surviving kings in Europe—in Italy, Serbia, Spain and Romania—fought social and constitutional reform, and even personally ushered in fascist dictatorships, George showed no interest whatsoever in the small English neo-fascist organizations of the 1920s which claimed they wanted to restore the monarchy.

  There were some things he wouldn’t do. The Labour Party wanted to re-establish links with the Soviet Union. George said he wouldn’t shake hands with “the murderers of his relatives.” “The King was rather excited over Russia, and talked a lot of man-in-the-bus nonsense about Bolsheviks, etc,”15 Ramsay MacDonald wrote. When a Russian delegation arrived to discuss trade and compensation for confiscated British property in 1924, George did not receive it. He pleaded illness when the new Russian ambassador came to present his credentials to Buckingham Palace in 1929, and was furious when he was forced to shake hands with the Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, Litvinov, in 1933.

  As the 1930s darkened, George dreaded the thought of another war. He had no doubt that Hitler was a bad thing. Less than a year before his death, in 1935, the king met Lloyd George. The subject of Mussolini, who had just sent an Italian army into Ethiopia, was raised. “HM fired up16 and broke out vehemently, And I will not have another war, I will not. The last war was none of my doing, and if there is another one and we are threatened with being brought into it, I will go to Trafalgar Square and wave a red flag myself sooner than allow this country to be brought in.’”

  Wilhelm, meanwhile, flirted with the Nazis. Some of the party’s senior figures hoped they might glean a useful blessing from the ex-kaiser, and Hermann Göring came to visit Wilhelm at Doorn twice in 1931, talking vaguely and flatteringly of restoration. Wilhelm fancied the Nazis might sponsor his return, and four of his sons became mixed up with the party in the early 1930s. Willy, the former crown prince, wrote articles supporting Hitler in the British press, and Friedrich Eitel and Oskar both appear to have briefly joined the Brownshirts in the 1930s. They drifted away as it became obvious that the Nazis didn’t plan on restoring the Hohenzollerns. Auwi, however, moved up the Nazi hierarchy until he fell out of favour with Hitler in 1942. Neither side had any respect for the other. Privately, Göring considered Wilhelm an “incorrigible fool;” Hitler, who had no intention of restoring the monarchy, said he was “pro-Jew.”17 Wilhelm seemed alternately jealous of and horrified by Hitler’s success—and, of course, considered him common. He was chilled by the “night of the long knives”—he’d talked about suspending the rule of law but had never actually done it.

  In 1935 George’s Silver Jubilee confirmed the success of the royal postwar project. He and Mary were obliged to appear on the balcony at Buckingham Palace every night for a week; they were cheered in streets in the East End of London which Lord Salisbury had once told Victoria were full only of socialists and the lowest Irish,18 and the Jubilee Trust set up by the Crown to raise money for charity made a million pounds in a few weeks. George was seventy. He smoked too much and his heart was weak, and by the end of 1935 his health was seriously failing. Late on 20 January 1936, as he drifted in and out of consciousness, the court doctor administered a lethal injection of cocaine and morphine, the timing dictated, he later admitted, by “the importance of the death19 receiving its first announcement in the morning papers rather than the less appropriate field of the evening journals.” It was a mark of just how attuned the British monarchy had become to the requirements of “the people.”

  Wilhelm took the opportunity to make contact with the English family once more. He wrote to Mary and sent his grandson Fritzi to the funeral.* Despite everything, he had been unable to rid himself of his attraction to all things English. He continued to read the English papers, drank English tea, guffawed over P. G. Wodehouse, and sprinkled his conversation with “ripping,” “topping” and “damned good fellow.” In his memoirs he wrote wistfully about his former popularity in England. Mary still had what one of her courtiers called “a soft spot”20 for Wilhelm and felt sorry for him. She gave Fritzi a gold box from George’s writing desk as a memento for Wilhelm. “Deeply moved by21 the kind thought that prompted you to send me this gift as a souvenir,” he wrote to her, and signed himself her “devoted cousin.”

  After Munich, in 1938, he wrote again. “I have not the22 slightest doubt that Mr. N Chamberlain was inspired by Heaven and guided by God.” Then when Germany marched into Czechoslovakia twelve days later, he wrote, demonstrating the peculiar mix of understanding and complete misunderstanding that had dogged him his whole life: “I am absolutely23 horrified at the late events at home! Pure bolshevism!” In November he denounced the Kristallnacht pogrom, even though he had become increasingly anti-Semitic himself. He told visitors that it would all go wrong for Hitler, just as it had for him. When war broke out in September 1939, he wrote to Mary of the “political lunacy24 … May heaven preserve us from the worst!” But as the Germans ploughed across Europe, it began to seem to Wilhelm as if old scores were finally, gratifyingly, being settled. When they marched into Paris, he cabled congratulations to Hitler—an act that would result in the confiscation of Haus Doorn after the war. He died of a heart attack on 4 June 1941 at eighty-one, the same age as his grandmother, proud that “his” generals had conquered half of Europe. At the same time, determined to deny Hitler a propaganda opportunity, he had left instructions that his body was not to be returned to Berlin. He was buried at Doorn, with no swastikas. Of his children, only two, Victoria and Oskar, both quietly living on their estates, would outlive him by more than ten years; the crown prince, Eitel Friedrich and Auwi, all of whom had become mixed up with German politics, would die broken, to some extent, by their experiences of the war.

  In the early 1990s, Nicholas’s remains and those of his family were disinterred in a copse outside Ekateri
nburg and their identities confirmed by DNA testing. In 1998 their bodies were reinterred in the Peter and Paul Church in St. Petersburg. Where they died in Ekaterinburg there is now a large white and gold onion-domed church “on the blood” (on the site of their actual deaths). In 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church, buoyed by a great surge in Russian patriotism and a desire to wipe away seventy-two years of Soviet rule, declared the last tsar and his family saints.

  * They mostly went to France and America.

  * Fritzi, Crown Prince Willy’s third son, married into the Guinness family, and became a British citizen in 1947.

  NOTES

  Titles of most books quoted from in the text have been abbreviated in the Notes. Where the full title is not cited, it can be found in the Bibliography. The following abbreviations are used:

  PEOPLE

  QV Queen Victoria

  V Vicky, Empress Frederick of Germany

  W Wilhelm, Kaiser of Germany

  G George V

  N Nicholas, Tsar of Russia

  A Alix, Alexandra of Russia

  E Edward VII

  BOOKS

  GP + volume number (e.g., GP, 24)—Johannes Lepsius, Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy Friedrich Thimme (eds.), Die grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette, 1871–1914: Sammlungen der diplomatischen Akten des Auswärtigen Amtes, 40 vols., 1922–27 (German diplomatic papers)

  LQV + series and volume numbers (e.g., LQV, 3.3)—Letters of Queen Victoria, ed. various (see Bibliography)

  DDF + series and volume numbers (e.g., DDF, 2.9)—Documents diplomatiques français, 3 series (1871–1901, 16 vols.; 1901–11, 14 vols., 1911–14, 11 vols.), Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1929–59 (French diplomatic papers relating to First World War)

  INTRODUCTION

  1 STARTED AND GREW: Nicolson, King George, p. 309.

  2 DECLINING POPULARITY … BUNCH OF IDLERS: 13–21 July 1917, Gorlitz, The Kaiser, pp. 285–89.

  3 WHAT SUFFERING OUR: Radzinsky, p. 188.

  1 WILHELM AN EXPERIMENT IN PERFECTION 1859

  1 HORRIBLE … ELECTRIC SHOCK: Röhl, Young William, pp. 8–10.

  2 LEGION OF FRITZES: Cecil, Wilhelm, 1, p. 13.

  3 A FINE FAT CHILD: 25 Sept. 1860, RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ.

  4 OUR MUTUAL GRANDSON: QV to Augusta of Prussia, 30 Jan. 1859, Bolitho, p. 104.

  5 THE GERMAN STANDS: Pakula, An Uncommon, pp. 72–73.

  6 THE “ENGLISH”: A. Ponsonby, p. 10.

  7 IT IS VERY HARD: Footnote, Princess Mary Louise, p. 56.

  8 SHE LOVED ENGLAND: Walpurga, Lady Paget, p. 61.

  9 THE DRAGON: Pakula, An Uncommon, p. 103.

  10 YOU CANNOT THINK: V to QV, 23 July 1863, Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 241.

  11 THAT WRETCH: V to QV, 19 July 1862, ibid., p. 96.

  12 I ENJOY: E. F. Benson, p. 18.

  13 PORPHYRIA: For more on this controversial subject, see J. Röhl, M. Warren and D. Hunt, Purple Secret: Genes, “Madness” and the Royal Houses of Europe, London, Bantam, 1998.

  14 YOU DO NOT KNOW: V to QV, 14 May 1859, RA MAIN/Z/7/130.

  15 THE WELFARE: St. Aubyn, Edward VII, p. 22.

  16 STILL I DOTE: V to QV, 19 Aug. 1868, Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 206.

  17 HIS POOR UGLY: V to QV, 7 Aug. 1872, Fulford, Darling Child, p. 57.

  18 AWFULLY BACKWARD: V to QV, 23 May 1874, ibid., p. 139.

  19 DEFECTIVE: Cecil, Wilhelm, 1, p. 13.

  20 I CANNOT TELL YOU: V to QV, 16 July 1859, RA VIC/MAIN/Z/2/28.

  21 HE GETS SO: V to QV, 23 Jan. 1861, RA VIC/MAIN/Z/10/47.

  22 HE HAS BEEN: V to QV, 28 April 1863, RA VIC/MAIN/Z/15/15.

  23 NERVOUSLY TENSE: Röhl, Young William, p. 43.

  24 INTOLERABLE PAIN: MacDonogh, p. 23.

  25 NICE LITTLE: V to QV, 8 Dec. 1861, RA VIC/MAIN/Z/12/44.

  26 WILLY IS A DEAR: V to QV, 10 Dec. 1866, Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 112.

  27 THUMPING HIS: Röhl, Young William, p. 77.

  28 WE HAVE A GT: V to QV, 18 August, 1860, RA VIC/MAIN/Z/3/35.

  29 A FURIOUS TANTRUM: Louisa, Countess of Antrim, p. 12.

  30 OF ALL THE: Balfour, The Kaiser, p. 75.

  31 NONE OF YOUR: Poultenay Bigelow in MacDonogh, p. 34.

  32 THAT TERRIBLE: V to QV, 27 Jan. 1865, Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 16.

  33 THERE WERE LATELY: W to QV, 20 May 1869, RA VIC/MAIN/Z/78/3.

  34 ORGAN GRINDER’S: V to QV, 16 Jan. 1869, Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 218.

  35 SHE DRESSED HIM UP: V to QV, 25 May 1861, RA VIC/MAIN/Z/11/15.

  36 HE IS SO FOND: V to QV, 6 July 1864, RA VIC/MAIN/Z/16/60.

  37 EXTOLLING ENGLAND’S: Röhl, Young William, p. 267.

  38 HOW ENTIRELY … EARLIEST RECOLLECTIONS: Wilhelm II, My Early Life, pp. 66, 2.

  39 “ALBERT,” SHE WROTE: QV to V, 27 Jan. 1862, Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 45.

  40 A CAUSE OF … INTEREST EITHER: QV to V, 8 May 1872, Fulford, Darling Child, p. 40.

  41 A DUCK … WITH IT ALL: RA QV Journal, 28 Feb. 1863.

  42 SHE WAS A PROPER: Wilhelm II, Aus meinem Leben, p. 72.

  43 TO HIS ETERNAL: Wilhelm II, My Early Life, p. 46.

  44 A CERTAIN RECEPTIVENESS … IT WAS PATRIOTIC: Feb. 1871, Röhl, Young William, p. 178.

  45 GROW UP IN IGNORANCE: V to QV, 30 Jan. 1871, Fulford, Darling Child, p. 316.

  46 PERPETUAL RENUNCIATION: See Röhl, Young William, p. 170.

  47 THE GRIM POETRY: Wilhelm II, My Early Life, p. 20.

  48 HE IS VERY … HIS BEING: V to Fritz, 22 Dec. 1870, Röhl, Young William, pp. 171–73, 199–200.

  49 IT IS IMPOSSIBLE: F. Ponsonby, Empress Frederick, p. 168.

  50 GRASP HOLD … HUMILIATION: Kohut, Wilhelm II, p. 41.

  51 FALSE ESTIMATION: Röhl, Young William, p. 199.

  52 WHEN NOBODY LOOKED: Wilhelm II, Aus meinem Leben, p. 30.

  53 THE IMPOSSIBLE WAS: Wilhelm II, My Early Life, p. 18.

  54 BUTTON HER OWN BOOTS: See Marie, Grand Duchess, Things, p. 5.

  55 POOR BOY’S: Röhl, Young William, p. 195.

  56 WHAT WE WILL DO: Pakula, An Uncommon, p. 363.

  57 HE WAS THE ACKNOWLEDGED: Anonymous, Recollections, p. 79.

  58 EL DORADO: Röhl, Young William, p. 367.

  59 LIKE ALL: Balfour, The Kaiser, p. 80.

  60 COMPLETE FAILURE: Röhl, Young William, p. 227.

  61 COLDNESS: Cecil, Wilhelm, 1, p. 35.

  62 BEFORE I ENTERED: Cecil in Röhl and Sombart (eds.), p. 98.

  63 BITTER DISAPPOINTMENT: Viereck, p. 38.

  64 HIS MILITARY ADJUTANT: Cecil, Wilhelm, 1, p. 60.

  65 A HIGH SPIRITED: Pless, p. 93.

  66 NOTHING SHORT OF: Röhl, The Kaiser, p. 83.

  67 I HAVE KNOWN: Röhl and Bellaigue, p. 188.

  68 DER LIEBCHEN: Hull, The Entourage, p. 199.

  69 PRINCE WILHELM IS: Röhl, in Sombart and Röhl (eds.), p. 33.

  70 THE PRINCE IS: Waldersee 1, 26 Dec. 1884, p. 247.

  71 SELF-WILLED: 6 Jan. 1884, Holstein, 2, p. 46.

  72 WILLY AND HENRY: V to QV, 18 Jan. 1882, RA VIC/MAIN/Z/36/5.

  73 THE VISIT WAS: For Wilhelm’s account, see Wilhelm II, My Early Life, pp. 245–47, 322.

  74 A BLUNT SOLDIER … A SERIES OF NOTES: W to Tsar Alexander, 13 March 1885, Lee, 1, pp. 485–86; see also Röhl, Young Wilhelm, p. 441 (for the original French of these letters, quoted both in Sir S. Lee and J. Röhl, see Polovtsova, Krasny Arkhiv, 2, pp. 120–26).

  75 IT WOULD BE SUCH A: 3 May 1885, Röhl, ibid., p. 446.

  76 AS INTERESTING: Tsar Alexander III to W, 7 [OS]/19 May 1885, Geheimes Staatsarchiv, HA Rep 53 J Lit R Nr 6.

  77 OBSEQUIOUS: Witte, pp. 401–3.

  78 THE TSAR TOLD HIM: Röhl, Young Wilhelm, p. 582.

  79 THAT VERY FOOLISH: QV to V, 13 Feb. 1885, Fulford, Beloved Mama, p. 183.

  80 CLUB THE BATTENBERGER: Röhl, Young William, p. 517.

  81 THE DREAM OF MY: 23 April 1887, F. Ponsonby, Letters of, p. 215.

  82 HE IS A CARD: V to QV, 2
6 March 1887, RA VIC/MAIN/Z/39/13.

  83 HE HATES HER: Radolinsky to Holstein, 4 July 1887, Holstein, 3, p. 214.

  84 TO PROVE TO: Herbert von Bismarck 1891, quoted in Röhl, Young William, p. 688.

  85 IT WAS HIGH TIME: 1 June 1887, Eulenburg, 1, p. 225.

  86 IN DEEP GRIEF: Radolinsky to Holstein, 10 Nov. 1887, Holstein, 3, p. 227.

  87 THE SLIGHTEST POSSIBLE: Kennan, p. 366.

  88 HM DID NOT … THE OPPOSITE: Röhl, Young William, p. 744.

  2 GEORGE COMING SECOND 1865

  1 ITS EMPIRE OF 9.5 MILLION: See Ferguson, Empire, p. 240; also source of other figures.

  2 RETIRED WIDOW … INSINUATED ITSELF: Bagehot, English Constitution, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 38, 48.

  3 THE MOST UNMILITARY AND THE RICHEST: For more on this, see Lieven, Aristocracy.

  4 THE COMFORTABLE PRODUCTS: Nabokov, p. 79.

  5 I HAD NO CHILDHOOD … DUTIES: Plumptre, p. 24.

  6 HIS INTELLECT: Weintraub, Victoria, p. 274.

  7 OH! THAT BOY: Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 152.

  8 AN AIR OF: Zola, Nana, ch. 5.

  9 THE SPECIAL JOKE … ADMIRE THIS: Bradford, pp. 21, 11.

  10 ARE YOU AWARE: Weintraub, Victoria, p. 321.

  11 THE MELANCHOLY: Battiscombe, p. 216.

  12 HE HAD: Lord Greville quoted in Plumptre, pp. 17–18.

  13 VERY SMALL: Hibbert, p. 138.

  14 I CANNOT ADMIRE: Rose, p. 1.

  15 OH! IF BERTIE’S: QV to V, 13 Feb. 1864, Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 45.

  16 HOW I HATE: A to Dagmar, 10 Feb. 1864, Klausen, Alexandra, p. 88.

  17 THE ROUGH, OFF-HAND: Marie, Queen of Roumania, 2, pp. 226–27.

  18 HE EVEN WROTE REGULAR: The letters are now in the Russian archives at GARF.

  19 TRASH: F. Ponsonby, My Recollections, p. 134.