Royal Anachronisms and the Great War

At the age of four the future Kaiser Wilhelm ii of Germany, after being scolded, bit one of his uncles on the leg. “Very small and not very pretty” was Queen Victoria’s description of the infant George, who would be her successor once removed. The future tsar of Russia, Nicholas, grew up in a palace with 900 rooms, and his family had an estimated 15,000 servants scattered among the Romanov estates.

All three monarchs were, as Miranda Carter writes, “anachronisms,” and yet in July 1914 all participated in the decisions that led to the Great War. To be sure, King George v’s role was far more modest than that of his belligerent cousin, Wilhelm, or of his inept cousin, Nicholas, in converting a Balkan quarrel into a world war. But all three men participated and all signed the proclamations that brought about the fighting. A plethora of books are in the process of publication to commemorate the centennial of the July Crisis. These studies might well be more reliable, but few will be as readable as this lengthy comparative biography of three men who were linked by kinship but had little else in common—men whose fates were poignant, tragic, and sad.

The author tracks the early years of each future ruler, providing a comprehensive analysis of their awkward childhoods. Wilhelm hated his English mother, Victoria; Edward vii barely paid attention to young George, who joined the navy at the age of twelve and who had little formal education; and Nicholas joined a Guards’ regiment when he was nineteen. Though the cousins saw one another throughout their childhood and adult years, it was almost always in pairs. After 1889 the three men were only together twice. If Queen Victoria’s progeny provided the links for the men, it did not ensure their friendship. Moreover, once they assumed their thrones (Wilhelm in 1888, Nicholas in 1892, and George in 1910), diplomatic considerations often governed their personal relationships.

Of the trio Wilhelm played the most significant political role in international affairs, veering from adoration for things British to a determined effort to clip British wings by building his own navy. The kaiser’s efforts to pursue a course of Weltpolitik worried both London and St. Petersburg right up to the July Crisis. Yet even the German ruler found himself less in charge of his own government after 1909 and a series of personal political mistakes. For his part George came to power in the midst of a major effort by the Liberal government to reduce the power of the House of Lords, the natural allies of the monarchy. In St. Petersburg Nicholas saw his government repair the losses of the Russo-Japanese War, while he, convinced of his own divine right to rule, sought to undo the concessions that led to the creation of the Duma. At the same time the tsar withdrew farther and farther away from St. Petersburg; he was almost isolated in his own country and had the holy devil, Rasputin, as a frequent houseguest of his beloved wife, Alix, as she fretted over the hemophilia of their son Alexis.

Carter describes the ebb and flow of European international politics during the first years of the twentieth century. In these years a fourth person also had a major role—Edward vii—who finally gained the crown at the age of fifty-nine in 1901 and who worked hard to restore the public image of the British monarchy (even as he cavorted with his mistress) and to play a role in diplomacy. During his years Britain became part of the Triple Entente with France and Russia and began conducting secret military and naval conversations with Paris.

In Berlin the Triple Entente created a sense of encirclement, exacerbated by the fact that Austria-Hungary’s future after the death of the aged Emperor Franz Joseph looked unpromising. The German military, meanwhile, increasingly alarmed at the growth of the Russian...