Margaret Macmillan

In the hands of fools

Three Emperors: Three Cousins, Three Empires and the Road to the First World War, by Miranda Carter

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.

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