Review for The Three Emperors

Emperors of misrule - or Queen Victoria would not have been amused!

Carter, Miranda (2009), 'The Three Emperors', Penguin Group, £25.00 (hardback), pp583. Now in paperback, Penguin, (2010) £9.99

This is not a book to take with you as holiday reading - not only for its effect on your baggage allowance but also because it's not the sort of reading matter to flick through during a lazy day on a sunny beach. It's a serious history that needs careful reading, not the least because of the extensive cast of characters, some of whom have the same name; but also because of its detailed treatment of events spanning the years from the later nineteenth century to the aftermath of World War I, and ranging across three empires and royal families. My advice to the reader would be to start by photocopying the family trees at the front of the book to keep them by you to track who was who among Victoria's sprawling multi-national family. It would also help you to cope with the diminutives and familiar names that can otherwise be confusing - Augustus William Hohenzollern ('Auwi'), Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein ('Dona') and so on. (Incidentally, there's a typographical error in the Hohenzollern family tree where Frederick-William IV is mistakenly listed as King of Russia, instead of Prussia.)

I'm full of admiration for the way in which the author charts a way through the maze of events over the years and over the three empires. Her range is from macro world-changing events to the seemingly trivial (but enlightening) domestic routines of court and family life, such as an obsession with clothes, uniforms, protocol and ceremonial; the dullness and dreariness of palaces and court routines; the disparaging of education (Tsar Nicholas II detested the word 'intellectual'); and remoteness from and refusal to engage with the rapidly-changing world outside.

The era covered by Carter is that of the high noon of Empire (with a capital E) as the mark of a Great Power - the scramble for colonies around the world at the expense of the colonised. The curse of empires was that they had to expand or sense a decline in prestige. The inevitable clashes and rivalries frequently brought the major European powers of Germany, Russia, France, Britain and Austria-Hungary onto a collision course. The scramble for Africa, the potentially rich pickings to be found in a moribund China and the declining Turkish Ottoman Empire, rivalries over spheres of influence in Afghanistan, Persia and Tibet were all potential tinder boxes. That plus the fact that the great Powers were engaged in an unprecedented arms race (the Anglo-German naval rivalry was just one symptom) meant, in effect, that a war was waiting to happen. Incidents described in the book like Kiaochow, the Kruger telegramme, Fashoda, the Russo-Japanese war and Algeciras were all symptoms of the potential fragility of European peace.

It was the misfortune of the times that those who saw themselves as the leading players should be so unfitted for their roles. Kaiser Wilhelm II ('Willy') who aspired to be the heroic leader the recently united German nation craved for was in reality beneath all the bombast, fancy uniforms and fierce moustache a 'little' man - an inconsistent vacillator who eventually totally lost control of both events and the autonomous German military machine the roots of whose rise to power lay in his attempted policy of divide and rule and the consequently chaotic government. Add to that his suspiciousness, duplicity and malicious gossip about the intentions of family members, his delusions of grandeur, punctuated by intervals of complete nervous collapse when reality supervened, plus his firm belief in 'the monarchical principle' and the 'divine right' of kings and it's easy to see an accident waiting to happen. Not for nothing was he the offspring of a dynasty - the Hohenzollerns - 'who were a byword for family dysfunction' (p10). No wonder some considered Wilhelm to be mad!

Tsar Nicholas II ('Nicky') was in many ways Wilhelm' doppelgaenger - the self-belief including that of divine right (but carried to mystical excess by Nicholas), the vacillation, the policy of divide and rule, the chaotic government and inability to choose either effective ministers or advisers (the monk, Rasputin, being a byword for unsuitability) - were all there. Add to that an inability to distinguish between the important and the trivial, a firm belief in autocracy and repression and a deliberate policy of literal and figurative isolation from the chaotic reality of the Russia of the time plus a belief in the need to defend the honour of Russia at every turn all made for a lethal dynamic.

The third member of the trilogy, George V of Great Britain, shared many of the characteristics of his fellow emperors but little of their power. The son of the sybaritic and popular Edward VII (known widely, thanks to the efforts of his Foreign Minister, Grey, as 'the peacemaker' in Europe), George who came to the throne in 1908, was very conservative and hated change of any sort at a time of diminishing aristocratic influence; dull, correct, shy, anxious, uneducated, tactless, bad-tempered, autocratic, selfish, self-pitying and unable to distinguish between the trivial and the important, he lived in his narrow, dated world, where he could collect stamps and shoot animals to his heart's content. He was in essence more suited to the life of a country gentleman of his (dated) time. Luckily, his role was purely symbolic, much as he resented the fact. His ministers found him a bit of a joke, even stupid in the opinion of some. He had no interest in foreign policy - not that he had much influence on it - but he did see himself as the glue that held the empire together. That said, after his expensive journey to India for an imperial coronation durbar, one minister remarked of George's wish to go to South Africa next, 'We decided he had much better stay at home and not teach people how easily the machine worked without a king.' (p387) Much the same as could be said for Germany and Russia, in spite of what the monarchs might believe.

Given the continuing dangerous state of European relations, 'Nevertheless, each country, each emperor, continued to paper over the cracks with cousinly gestures, each increasingly irrelevant' (p392). The intimate tones of family letters, the expressions of familial goodwill, the colourful visits, belied the reality of the triumph of nationality (and the politicians) over family.

And so we approach the grand climacteric of the danse macabre that led almost inevitably to the grand conflagration of 1914-18. There was a sense in Germany in particular that war was coming and the sooner the better before potential enemies became too powerful. However, this review is not the place to rehearse all the narrow escapes until the final events that led to Armageddon - they are all detailed in the book. The precipitating cause, the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist, '...demonstrated perhaps more than anything how events had slipped away from Wilhelm, Nicholas and George' (p419). Not one of the three emperors wanted war, which indeed they rightly feared, and they did not initially react to the assassination - but they reckoned without the gung-ho attitude of the Austrian Chiefs-of-Staff who seized the opportunity they had been waiting for to deal with the upstart Serbia in what they thought would be as a quick, decisive stroke, with the secret support of a Germany of which Wilhelm had lost control. Facing them was the 'triple entente' of France, Britain and Russia. With general mobilisation, a cascade of events began and the inevitable became reality.

In the face of such momentous events, 'The great extended royal family of Europe...was anything but united - national divisions had broken it... Within a short space of time each emperor had become almost irrelevant' (p444). The denouement for the family that 'grandmamma' Victoria had so commanded was death in the cellar at Ekaterinburg for Nicholas and his family, years of exile for Wilhelm and the inauguration of the domestic, symbolic, decorative, staid British monarchy it remains today.

Perhaps a suitable epitaph for the characters in this book who 'strutted and fretted their hour upon the stage' are the words of an eighteenth century radical, Tom Paine, in his 'Common Sense':
'But it is not so much the absurdity as the evil of hereditary succession which concerns mankind. Did it ensure a race of good and wise men it would have the seal of divine authority, but as it opens a door to the foolish, the wicked; and the improper, it hath in it the nature of oppression. Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.'

This review cannot do justice to Carter's magisterial work. The answer is to read it for yourself.
Ken Giles