THE THREE EMPERORS

Carter (Anthony Blunt: His Lives, 2002) examines the well-worn but endlessly fascinating history of the tight, treacherous ties that bound the royal families of Europe in the early 20th century.

Queen Victoria’s “secret weapon” had been to manage world affairs through the intricacies of her far-flung familial relationships, and all three reigning monarchs by the start of World War I were bound to her by blood and marriage: Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, was her first grandchild via daughter Vicky; George V, King of England, was another grandson, via her son Edward VII; and Tsar Nicholas II was married to one of her granddaughters, Alexandra. All three cousins spent time together when they were young, and more or less got along. Carter creates elucidating snapshots of their respective dysfunctional upbringings. Wilhelm, who resented his pushy English mother, exhibited symptoms of “narcissistic personality disorder” and went through a period of Anglophobia (he had insulted his grandmother and the English regarded him as a “bumptious Prussian”), before relations improved with his accession to emperor in 1888. Nicholas had suddenly become tsar with the early death of his father in 1894; terrified and wholly unprepared, he was comforted by his English royal cousins before his inscrutability and “opacity” isolated him in Europe in terms of affairs in Africa, the Ottoman Empire and Manchuria. George, probably dyslexic as well as given to bursts of private rage, became the reluctant king in 1910 and was deeply attached to his entitlement and hostile to change such as socialism and trade unions. When the war in the Balkans broke out, the three cousins found themselves entrenched in “deepening cracks of mistrust and tension,” as events slipped beyond their control.

Carter sharply sorts history in terms of the personal ruling styles of these three fallible monarchs.