Have I Told You About WWI? The Royal Cousins.
At the turn of the century, Europe was still very much in the grip of monarchs. Despite a growing global desire for national autonomy and self-determination, much of the developing world remained colonized by the European empires, and those empires were almost all ruled by monarchs related to each other by various degrees. By 1914, three cousins headed three of the most powerful nations involved in the First World War: Britain, Russia, and Germany.
Exactly how they all ended up as cousins is difficult to trace, given that the royal family trees in Europe by this time were less like trees and more like that quarantine sweater you tried to knit: yarns so tangled there’s nothing to do but shrug and leave it to the experts. But they were close enough, and important enough, that their family history, friendships, and tiffs played out on a world stage and helped set off the first global war.
Nicholas II of Russia. As a child, Nicholas was adored by his parents. He was small compared to his towering Russian uncles, and viewed by his family as a bit of a weakling, but this only made them indulge him more. He was especially close to his mother, a Danish princess. She and her sister (mother of George V, up next) harbored a deep dislike of Germany following the German unification process, during which it absorbed much of the traditional Danish kingdom. Nicholas married Alexandra, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who believed deeply in the absolute power of the Russian autocracy, and so tried to encourage firmness in her wavering husband. As his father died unexpectedly at a young age, Nicholas felt unprepared when he ascended to the Russian throne, and was widely seen across Europe, and eventually in his own country, as a weak autocrat. He was forced to abdicate in 1917, and begged asylum in England from his cousin George V to escape the Bolshevik Revolution. That request was denied, and he and his family were killed (yes, all of them, despite ongoing rumors to the contrary) the following year.
George V of Great Britain. George was the second son of Edward VII, and did not expect to succeed to the throne. Like Nicholas, he was an adored child, and upon the death of his older brother, was carefully groomed for the crown. Nicholas and George were close throughout their lives, thanks in part to their mothers, who remained the Danish princesses before their other royal ties and were devoted to each other. Nicky and Georgie, as they were known to family, reconnected when the family reunited for the wedding of Kaiser Wilhelm’s daughter in 1913. It’s unclear what they discussed at that visit, but it was friendly enough that the following year George wrote a “private letter” (which nonetheless was seen by senior members of his government) expressing his satisfaction with their renewed friendship and urging continued friendly relations between their two countries. This was, in effect, a state alliance crafted out of a familial friendship.
Given their close relationship, it may seem puzzling that George would deny asylum to his cousin, friend, and ally when Nicholas and his family were in danger from the Bolsheviks. The answer is simple: fear. Monarchs at this point in history feared revolution above all else. George had already had a brush with it in Ireland with the 1916 Easter Rising, and he was not going to take the chance that sheltering his unpopular cousin might turn his own people against him. British historians are fond of arguing that their monarchy survived the war when the other two did not because Britain is a constitutional monarchy, not an autocracy. While this may well be a factor in its endurance, the British monarchy survives to this day because the modern sovereigns have been very careful not to rock the boat. Gone the caprice of George III, or even the stubborn determination of Victoria. George V was a careful realist, and it is reflected in his family name. Due to anti-German sentiment resulting from the war, George and his family shed their ancestral family association with the German-originating house of Saxe-Coburg and Goethe, and invented the brand new family line of the house of Windsor.
Wilhelm II of Germany. The Kaiser, the eldest of the three, was the most complex and contradictory character. He was born breech, with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and left arm, which left him with permanent physical disabilities, including a lame left arm. His mother Vicky confessed in letters to Queen Victoria that she found it difficult to love her son due to his limitations. She worried he would never lead a normal life, and continually, and sometimes harshly, insisted on his learning to do all things independently.
How his difficult childhood contributed to his complex personality is a matter for psychologists. But it is clear that Wilhelm was somewhat personally unstable from a young age. He loved his English family, and particularly his grandmother Victoria — he was present at her bedside when she died. But he also idolized his nationalistic, militaristic German grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm I, and as he got older he increasingly surrounded himself with monarchists who despised Britain. At the wedding of Wilhelm’s daughter when all the royals reunited, George V reported in his diary that the Kaiser seemed ridiculously paranoid that his relatives, particularly Georgie and Nicky, were in cahoots behind his back. Of course, as evidenced by George’s “private letter,” that paranoia was not totally unfounded.
As an adult, Wilhelm was brash, capricious, and combative — attributes which have led some to compare him to a familiar figure in our contemporary politics. He was constantly making bold, rash statements in speeches or to the press which his staff would later have to spin. He also idolized the military and was determined to build a navy to give the world-famous British a run for their money. The growing power and influence of military leaders in Germany was a direct result of his fascination, and perhaps his insecurity. But after the war began that power and influence grew out of even his control, and the army’s decisions and events rolled forward with very little input from its supreme commander.
In 1918, as both sides began discussing an armistice, one condition the Allies demanded was the deposition of the Kaiser. A new world order was emerging, and its creators were determined that autocrats should have no place in it. Wilhelm retreated in exile to the Netherlands, where he died in 1941, vilified as a scapegoat by all combatants of the war (including his own country). Four years of brutal, bloody slaughter needed a cause, an arch-villain, and the blundering, blustering, aggressive autocrat from Germany fit the bill perfectly. But the benefit of a century of hindsight allows us to see that he was just a part of a much larger machine that was grinding Europe toward war — and that his cousins, who snubbed him and allied themselves behind his back, were parts of that machine as well.
