13
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.
In England, the piece caused amusement. The kaiser genuinely seemed to want to be Britain’s friend, but he sounded so ridiculous, an observation even the kindest reactions in the British press couldn’t resist: the Nation called the interview “sincere and impulsive;”5 the Westminster Gazette, “well meant”6 but “embarrassing.” Lord Esher described it as “amazing,”7 and added, “he thinks himself immortal and omnipotent.”
In Germany, however, the article prompted a frenzy of anger and resentment against the kaiser, both at the revelation that he had supported Britain during the Boer War and—almost more painful to the prickly adolescent nation—because he had made himself and the country a laughingstock. In his memoirs, Bülow described the interview as a “dynamite bomb8 … sad effusions, which could scarcely have been surpassed in tactless stupidity.” The Telegraph interview seemed the last straw, after the rumours of Wilhelm’s insanity, the intemperate speeches and the Eulenburg scandal. The case had ended only in July, with Eulenburg fainting while standing trial for perjury, amid a welter of pitiful and half-substantiated stories about sex with fishermen and milkmen, which dated from the 1880s.* “Of all the11 political gaffes which HIM [His Imperial Majesty] has made, this is the greatest,” Edward told Hardinge.
Within days of the interview, the press, the Reichstag and even the princes of the German empire in the Bundesrat and ministers in the Prussian government were queuing up to express their seething anger. There were calls for Wilhelm’s abdication, or at the very least for some constitutional curtailment of his power. Bülow told the kaiser he needed a free hand to deal with the crisis and offered his resignation just to make it clear, bundling him off to Austria to see his new friend Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire. He then issued a statement in the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, claiming he’d had nothing to do with the article, that he’d been too burdened with other state matters to look at it, and that all the fault lay with the Foreign Office. In fact, he was thoroughly implicated in it. The kaiser had personally asked him to read the draft after Tirpitz among others had advised that it shouldn’t be published. Bülow had read it,12 had suggested some cuts and had then gone on holiday—passing it on to the Foreign Office. The article was handed from minion to minion, and the various cuts and editorial suggestions seem not to have been incorporated before it was sent back to its English author. It’s impossible to say for sure whether this was Bülow’s carelessness, a deliberate decision to allow Wilhelm to embarrass himself or institutional disorganization. It was probably all three. The new British ambassador, Sir Edward Goschen, reported that he’d seen “more muddle13—more confusion—[in the German government] than I have found in any country during my 35 years experience. Chaos is the only word for it.” He wondered what, if anything, was getting through to Wilhelm.
At a Reichstag debate on 10 November, member after member rose to criticize the emperor with a directness that was completely unprecedented. Bülow spoke just once. He seemed ostensibly to be taking responsibility for the gaffe, but it was clear to his audience that he was actually saying his sympathies were wholly with the kaiser’s critics. He made Wilhelm sound like a childish fantasist, when he explained that what the kaiser had described as the winning strategy of the Boer War was in fact a series of clichéd “aphorisms.” He promised that in future Wilhelm would act “with restraint,”14 and as a guarantee of this, he said that if the kaiser overstepped his position, he would feel obliged to resign. When Bülow’s speech was reported to him, Wilhelm burst into tears and denounced it as all-out betrayal.15
In an effort to distract him, the kaiser’s entourage decided to put on an entertainment, the kind that amused him: a ballet spectacular performed by the middle-aged members of his various cabinets. The climax was a performance by Field Marshal Count Dietrich von Hülsen-Haeseler, the hefty, fifty-six-year-old chief of Wilhelm’s military cabinet. Described in some sources as wearing a pink tutu (“not for the first time,” Zedlitz-Trützschler wrote), in others a pink ball gown—what was undisputed was that he was in drag—with a large feather in his hair, he performed a series of energetic pirouettes,16 jumps and capers, flirtatiously blew kisses to his audience, stumbled off the stage and suffered a massive heart attack that killed him instantly. It was reported that by the time the doctors arrived, rigor mortis was so far17 advanced that it was extremely difficult to get Hülsen out of his tutu and into his military uniform. The story made Wilhelm look even more irresponsible and odd; in the French, Italian and British papers there were gleeful screeds about German moral degeneracy.
Back in Berlin on 17 November, four days after Hülsen’s death, an uncharacteristically silent and shocked Wilhelm was persuaded, after hours of haranguing by Bülow, to issue what amounted to an apology for his behaviour, an admission that he had breached his constitutional responsibility, that he had confidence in his chancellor, and that he wouldn’t do it again. He regretted it almost immediately.
It must have seemed as if things couldn’t get any worse. But then, on 22 November, the Observer newspaper in London printed an account of an unpublished interview Wilhelm had given the previous July to an American journalist, which seemed to contradict everything he’d said in the Telegraph: America and Germany, he said, were the two Great Powers of the future. England was “rotten and marching18 to her ruin, and ought to be wiped out.” Germany was “ready for war at any moment with her and the sooner it came the better.” He also expressed “the greatest contempt” for Edward. Bülow immediately repudiated the article as a fake, but the whole British Foreign Office and the king had seen the original. Edward told Knollys, “I know the E[mperor]19 hates me and never loses an opportunity of saying so … whilst I have always been civil and nice to him.”
The day the Observer story appeared, Wilhelm announced that he could20 no longer cope and would have to abdicate, and he collapsed in a heap. The entourage gathered him up off the floor and put him to bed. He spent the next two weeks, his daughter’s English governess, Anne Topham, later wrote, in “a kind of stormy stupor … crushed under the weight of the universal displeasure.” For a few weeks the crown prince, Willy, took over his official functions—reviewing soldiers, leading parades, meeting Bülow, though he took no significant decisions—while the kaiser paced up and down for hours, quiet, for the first time in decades, but giving way occasionally to tears. “One felt pity for the tortured man suffering so acutely under the blow to his self-esteem, his infallibility.” In her memoirs Topham remembered “the ghastliness of the dreadful luncheons of the next few days … the silence that prevailed was terrifying.”21 Periodically Wilhelm would complain about Bülow’s betrayal.
He seemed exhausted. Fritz Ponsonby saw the extent to which Wilhelm’s martial identity was a disguise, and the tired, confused little man beneath it. “He was the22 creation of the Germans themselves,” he wrote. “They wanted a sabre-rattling autocrat with theatrical ways, attempting to dominate Europe, sending telegrams and making bombastic speeches, and he did his best to supply them with the superman they required.”
Masochistically, Wilhelm bared himself to the family members who liked him least, and for whose approval and sympathy he perhaps most longed. He sent a telegram to Alexandra and Edward early in December, asking after Edward, who had had a bad cold. When Alexandra responded, enquiring tactfully after Wilhelm’s own “cold,” he replied—en clair so everyone could read it—“I am not suffering from cold but from complete collapse.” Edward commented, “We do live in marvellous times.”23
Sir Edward Grey wrote to an old friend after the Daily Telegraph interview:
The German Emperor24 is ageing me; he is like a battleship with steam up and screws going, but with no rudder, and he will run into something some day and cause a catastrophe. He has the strongest army in the world and the Germans don’t like being laughed at and are looking for somebody on whom to vent their temper and use their strength. After a big war a nation doesn’t want another for a generation or more. Now it is 38 years since Germany had her last war, and she is very strong and very restless, like a person whose boots are too small for him. I don’t think there will be war at present, but it will be difficult to keep the peace of Europe for another five years.
Serbia and Austria continued to swap threats. With the kaiser in the equivalent of quarantine, Bülow had decided that Austria had to be supported because it was now Germany’s only reliable ally and couldn’t be seen to be weak—a reaction on which the Austrian foreign minister, Aloys von Aehrenthal, had counted—though at the same time he said that Germany must take care not to be dragged into a war over Bosnia. Wilhelm, however, had initially been angry about the annexation—he had called it “a piece of brigandage”25—and said he was “wounded in my deepest feelings” that Franz Joseph had failed even to give him a hint about it. Nor was he entirely certain that Austria deserved German support. Bülow, however, told him that Germany should encourage Austria not to back down. If there were to be a future “European conflagration,”26 he told Wilhelm, the two would fight together, and Austria would “concentrate all her powers against Russia.” It was a sign of how easy it had become in Germany’s governing circles to talk about war. Helmuth von Moltke, the chief of the German General Staff, went further. He told his opposite number in the Austrian army that Germany would protect Austria even if it invaded Serbia and provoked a war.27 Moltke actively welcomed a war with Russia; he felt the timing and circumstances, with Austria ready to take part, were “propitious.” His views were shared by many senior German officers—such as the head of Wilhelm’s military cabinet, Moritz von Lyncker, who talked freely about war as a solution to Germany’s “internal and external difficulties.”28
In Russia, meanwhile, the press was demanding action against Austria more and more insistently. The government, painfully aware of Russia’s post-war weakness, knew it simply couldn’t offer Serbia military support. In late December Nicholas wrote directly to Wilhelm asking him to use his influence with Austria to resolve the crisis29 once and for all. Wilhelm refused, but he insisted that the annexation had been a genuine surprise to him—as indeed it had—and added, in a tone that combined an unconvincing airiness and aggrievedness, that, while he quite understood why Russia had to cosy up to Britain, he was disappointed that since 1906 it had pulled away from Germany “more and more.”30 He asked Nicky how he could support Serbia, a nation which had assassinated its monarch.* If only, he said, the tsar had approached him sooner, he might have been able to help.
A few weeks later, in February 1909, Edward and Alexandra arrived in Berlin for their long-delayed state visit. The king had made strenuous efforts not to come, but Grey said that the times required that “informal relations” be as friendly as possible. “The FO to gain their own object, would not care a pin what humiliation I should put up with,”31 the king grumbled.
Edward was not in good shape. “The King of England32 is so stout that he completely loses his breath when he has to climb upstairs,” Zedlitz-Trützschler wrote in his diary. “The Emperor told us that at the first family dinner he fell asleep … he eats, drinks and smokes enormously.” Edward was now sixty-eight and his chronic bronchitis and great weight were wearing him down. The striking energy of a few years before was on the wane. The only accommodation he would make for his worsening health was to promise his doctor—who, with a nurse, numbered among the thirteen members of his suite—he would smoke only two cigars before breakfast. He asked, uncharacteristically, that speeches might be read rather than made impromptu—dreading that Wilhelm might slip in some unexpected horror33 to which he would have to respond. But Edward’s demeanour was not merely the result of illness. He had been terribly upset34 by what he saw as Franz Joseph’s dishonesty. In August 1908, just before Bosnia, the Hapsburg emperor and his foreign minister, Aehrenthal, had gone out of their way to assure him of their desire for “the closest cooperation35 between the two countries especially in the Balkans,” and insisted they were committed to stability. Afterwards, Edward had persuaded the emperor to take his first trip in a motor car. They’d reached the princely speed of thirty miles an hour. The king had been proud of his relationship with Franz Joseph, “the dearest36 and most courteous old gentleman that lives,” as Hardinge called him. He’d regarded it as a prime example of his diplomacy, a genuine friendship which mitigated some of the hostility with which he was regarded in German-speaking Europe. Now it seemed to have been worth nothing. His dreams of peace appeared to be ebbing away, and at home he had seen a government schism blow up over the extent of the German threat.
Wilhelm, by contrast, seemed to have bounced back remarkably from his collapse. Despite everything, he persisted in feeling excited. He told the tsar that he expected the visit to have “useful results37 for the Peace of the World.” While he was still bruised by the Daily Telegraph affair, the new year had brought a resurgence of sympathy for him in parts of the press, where it was being suggested that the chancellor had not been altogether supportive of his emperor. He was very solicitous of his uncle and aunt, though Fritz Ponsonby found him brittle and full of “forced jokes.”38
Truth be told the whole visit had a slight air of farce and disaster about it. When the train rolled up at the Berlin station, the king was in the queen’s carriage, and the emperor, empress and their entourage had to scuttle undignifiedly down the platform to greet them. Then the horses drawing Alexandra and Dona’s carriage in the procession to the Berlin Schloss stopped and refused to move, two cavalrymen were thrown off their horses, and the whole procession had to be re-ordered. Wilhelm and Edward arrived at the Berlin Schloss to find no one behind them. On the second day, after a long lunch at the British embassy, Edward sat down on a sofa with a cigar next to the glamorous English aristocrat Daisy Pless, began to cough horribly and passed out, the cigar popping out of his fingers. Daisy and Alexandra scrabbled to loosen his—even tighter than usual—clothing, and Edward’s doctor rushed into the room and ordered everyone out. The king reappeared fifteen minutes later, insisting that everything was fine. But his projected trip to Potsdam was downgraded to a day in Berlin, visiting Wilhelm’s stables, Wilhelm’s motor cars, Wilhelm’s ballet (one he had “devised”) and the Hohenzollern museum, most noted—apart from its collection of Frederick the Great’s snuffboxes—for memorabilia about Wilhelm. Edward recovered his old easy charm only once: when he addressed a large crowd of Berliners at the town hall with an off-the-cuff speech in fluent German, which was greeted—to everyone’s relief—by enthusiastic applause. The kaiser, meanwhile, was piqued by the snootiness of some of the British entourage. He complained that they had behaved as if Germany was in the Stone Age; one lady “openly expressed her astonishment” that there were “bathrooms, soap and hand-towels.” Another was amazed that Berlin “actually had streets on which one could find handsome hotels and big stores.”39
The king and queen departed on 14 February, escorted by the kaiser to the Berlin station. The two men embraced. Edward boarded his train. They never saw each other again.
Both men colluded in the fiction that the meeting had achieved something. Edward told the banker Ernest Cassel it was “in every respect40 a success;” Wilhelm told his new friend and correspondent Franz Ferdinand that it had “had a very41 relieving and satisfactory effect.” Fritz Ponsonby, however, was sure that “The effect of this42 visit was nil. One felt that a few charming men really liked us, but with the majority one derived the impression that they hated us.”
By early March 1909 the Austrian army was mobilizing to attack Serbia. In response Russia—its press already in a lather about its failure to defend the Slavs of Bosnia-Herzegovina from the Hapsburg empire—began to mass soldiers on the Austrian border. The Russian government knew it could not afford to go to war, but it was desperate to glean a shred of dignity from the crisis. It appealed to the German government to intervene on its behalf—effectively to broker some face-saving device with the Austrians.
Bülow and Moltke decided that the request must be refused. That Germany might negotiate a deal between the two countries and emerge the power broker of middle Europe was nowhere in German Foreign Office calculations. Instead on 22 March Germany sent the Russian government a brusque ultimatum that left Russia with no graceful way out, insisting that it back down and unconditionally accept the annexation or it would find itself at war with Germany. “We expect a43 precise answer, Yes or No, any vague, complicated or ambiguous reply will be treated as a refusal.” Bülow approved the tone of the message, presumably feeling that a show of toughness would lend the government an air of brute effectiveness that it was sorely lacking.
“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 Holstein, “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.