Miranda Carter certainly has a penchant for awkward, often impossible characters. Her fascinating biography of Anthony Blunt explained, as well as anyone could, that strange mixture of aesthete, snob, revolutionary and traitor. Now she turns to the three monarchs who ruled Russia, Germany and Great Britain at the outbreak of the first world war. Nicholas II, Wilhelm II and George V are not as intelligent or as interesting as Blunt but they sat at the centre of great powers and great affairs.
What a strange and sad collection they were. Nicholas hated being Tsar and did his best to avoid difficult decisions. Even as Russia stumbled towards revolution he refused to cede an iota of power, in the conviction that God had entrusted him with an unalterable autocracy. Wilhelm, so many of his ministers feared, was not quite sane. He may have suffered brain damage when his 18-year-old mother struggled to give birth to him; he was certainly left with a withered arm about which he was painfully sensitive. With his tantrums, sudden enthusiasms, delusions of omnipotence, and crushing bouts of depressions he never really grew up. George V, the most normal of the three, was timid, prone to profound self pity and so conservative that his wife had to dress all her life in the clothes of the pre-war decade when he had first met her.
These days most councils would have taken them into care or at the very least offered family therapy. Wilhelm’s mother was terrified that he would grow up to be a typical Prussian. Her solution — to criticise him and everything German repeatedly — backfired. Not surprisingly he grew up to loathe her and despise his liberal father. He constructed a persona for himself of robust masculinity and was happiest among precisely the sort of men his mother had wanted to keep him away from: unimaginative military officers and obsequious courtiers. The result, as one observer said, was that ‘He always thought he knew everything and no one dared tell him that he was sometimes wrong.’
Nicholas’ childhood was not much better. His father, Alexander III, was suspicious and deeply reactionary. The children grew up in a world completely insulated from both the old Russia of the countryside and the new industrial one of the cities. The luxury was fabulous — six giant trees at Christmas in the Gatchina Palace with its 900 rooms, thousands of servants, Fabergé trinkets covered with jewels — and Russian court etiquette equally oppressive.
George was sent away from home at an early age to join the navy where he spent a miserable, sea-sick time. He was frightened of his father and resented his ill-concealed affairs. He adored ‘motherdear’, who alternated between stifling affection and cheerful neglect. When his beloved older brother, Eddy, died suddenly of pneumonia he found himself to his dismay the heir to the throne. (He also found that he had a fiancée when his parents decided that there was no point in wasting the work that had gone into arranging Eddy’s engagement.) ‘Oh such a piteous, good, feeble, heroic little figure,’ was Max Beerbohm’s assessment of one of George’s first appearances as king in 1910.
All three future rulers were given incompetent or inadequate tutors. In time they learned how to wear their uniforms correctly and how to behave. But none ever learned much of history, politics or economics, indeed of anything that would equip them to be rulers of such great powers. Their upbringing was not untypical of their class and time; as a cousin of the Tsar later said, ‘the education that was given us atrophied our powers and limited our horizons’.
The three men were related, often several times over, in that inbred world of European royalty. Wilhelm and George were both grandsons of Queen Victoria. Nicholas’ mother was George’s aunt and he married one of the old Queen’s many grand-daughters. They met at family weddings or funerals, on each other’s yachts, or on state visits where they jealously reviewed each other’s armies and navies. Wilhelm, the eldest, thought he was by far the cleverest. He infuriated his uncle, Edward VII by offering unsolicited advice on everything from British military organisation to horse racing. Nicholas and George, who looked startlingly alike, were at one in finding Wilhelm tiresome.
In Carter’s skilful delineation, Queen Victoria emerges as a corpulent, monstrously selfish spider with little grasp of the realities of the modern world and with appalling judgement. She believed that if only Europe’s royal families could be drawn closer together, if only they could all be friends, Europe would be a happy and peaceful place. It was a laudable aim but completely unrealistic. In its pursuit, she forced her children and grandchildren into disastrous marriages, in the case of several unfortunate women marrying them off to men who were brutes or simple-minded or not interested in women.
It is hard to think of a worse choice that she could have made for Nicholas than a German granddaughter, Alexandra. ‘Dear Alix’ was shy, nervous, neurasthenic, and prone to hysteria, only comfortable in a small protective circle of family and friends. Before accepting Nicholas, she wrestled with her conscience about changing her faith and leaving Germany. Like many converts, she became fanatical about her new world. Whenever Nicholas’ ministers urged him to make reforms she was even more vehement than him in resisting anything that changed the centuries-old Romanov ways. Worse still, she wrapped him up in a cosy and unreal world where they played ‘hubby’ and ‘wifey’ inside their gilded cage. ‘They slumbered peacefully on the edge of an abyss’, said one observer, ‘lulled by the sweet songs of bewhiskered sirens who gently hummed “God Save the Tsar”’.
There are many methods of trying to understand the way in which Europe landed itself in the catastrophe of the Great War and focusing on the monarchs of three of the key powers is by no means a bad one. Each of them, in his own way, encapsulated something of the fears and hopes of his country. The narrow focus runs the risk, though, that their roles will be blown up to be more important then they really were. In reality their sporadic attempts at personal diplomacy did little to alter the relations between their countries. It is true that Wilhelm, erratic and unrestrained, helped to spread suspicion of Germany and its intentions throughout Europe but there were plenty of other forces at work, from a self-contained and self-willed German officer corps to powerful lobby groups pushing for a bigger navy and army, more colonies, more place for Germany in the sun. Nicholas was the most autocratic of all, but even he had to deal with his civil and military bureaucracy and a growing public opinion. Both he and Wilhelm had the ultimate power to give or withhold permission for decisions such as those which led to war in the summer of 1914 but neither initiated policy. When the moment came to decide on war or peace both went along with their close advisors. As for George V, as constitutional monarch and an inexperienced one at that, he had virtually no power at all, less even than his grandmother Queen Victoria or his father Edward VII.
Wilhelm and Nicholas were both casualties of the war. The former lost his throne and lived out his days in gloomy exile in the Netherlands and, showing bad judgement to the last, flirting with the Nazis; the latter was shot along with his beloved Alix and his children by the Bolsheviks. George, who might have saved his dear cousin Nicky, refused to have the family in England for fear of what it might do to his own throne. Although the Windsors alone survived, George was haunted by the ghastly losses of the war and perhaps by guilt over Nicky.
Carter draws masterful portraits of her subjects and tells the complicated story of Europe’s failing international relations well. There are occasional slips: Bismarck, for example, did not regard the acquisition of Alsace-and-Lorraine as one of the key political triumphs of his career. Rather he was forced to concede to the generals and always thought it a dreadful mistake which fuelled France’s desire for revenge. Nor did Russia and Austria-Hungary ‘instinctively’ hate each other because of decades of rivalry in the Balkans; that was new as the Ottoman empire declined and, moreover, as fellow autocracies they had frequently worked together.
She is surprisingly sympathetic to Queen Victoria’s faith that the more linked by family ties European royalty could be the more stable the continent. When her three emperors were born, she argues, dynasties seemed immovable and their international nature ‘a guarantee of peace and good international relations.’ Family ties among Europe’s ruling families certainly had not prevented wars in the past such as those of the Spanish Succession. The explanation also misses out the real reason for the peaceful decades of the 19th century — the exhaustion of Europe after the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars and the considerable statesmanship displayed by the leading powers.
Over all, this highly readable and well-documented account is a useful addition to the huge literature on the question of why a general European war came in 1914. Carter shows how hereditary monarchies made their contribution to the disaster. It’s enough to make one a republican.
Comments