The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (22 page)

A further reason for complacency in the summer of 1914 was the extraordinary integration of Europe’s nominal ruling elite. The Archduke Francis Ferdinand was, of course, a Habsburg. But he was also a member of that genealogically intertwined elite of predominantly German royal dynasties that had provided the majority of European sovereigns since the seventeenth century.

Aside from Switzerland, France (after the advent of the Third Republic) and a smattering of city-states, nearly all the states of Europe between 1815 and 1917 were either empires, kingdoms, principalities
or grand duchies. In all of them, the office of head of state was hereditary, not elective. Between the more or less enlightened despotism of Russia and the liberal monarchy of Norway there was a bewildering variety of constitutional forms. Yet none of these entirely deprived the hereditary sovereign of power, nor did away with that crucial institution of government, the royal court. Moreover, quite apart from their domestic political powers – which remained great in terms of patronage even if they were circumscribed in other respects – the emperors, kings, queens, princes and grand dukes had a distinctive role in the sphere of interstate relations. Despite industrialization and all the other associated phenomena of modernization, dynastic politics still mattered. Wars were fought over the successions to the dukedoms of Schleswig and Holstein and the throne of Spain – to give just two examples – not merely because they furnished ingenious statesmen with convenient pretexts for nation-building. When attention is focused on the most important of all the nineteenth-century dynasties, the Saxe-Coburgs, it becomes apparent that there was much about this supposedly modern epoch that was still distinctly early-modern.

The rise of the House of Saxe-Coburg can be dated from the Napoleonic Wars and can be followed in the diary of Augusta, second wife and, from 1806, widow of Francis Frederick, Duke of Coburg. Coburg was one of those petty German states threatened with extinction when Napoleon swept away the Holy Roman Empire and created the Confederation of the Rhine; but Augusta’s sons managed to steer a careful course between France and Russia and were duly rewarded when, under Russian pressure, the duchy was restored to her eldest son Ernest in 1807. Augusta’s children married well. With the exception of one daughter, all either married royalty, achieved royal status in their own right or secured it for their children. One daughter married the brother of Alexander I of Russia; another, the King of Württemberg; a third married Britain’s Duke of Kent, a brother of George IV. But it was Augusta’s youngest son, Leopold, who was the real founder of the Saxe-Coburg fortunes. Leopold suffered a setback when his first wife, Princess Charlotte, daughter of George IV of Britain, died in childbirth in November 1817, just eighteen months after their marriage. But his circumstances were transformed when, having previously
toyed with the idea of accepting the throne of Greece, he became King of the Belgians in 1831.

As
The Times
noted in 1863, the history of the Saxe-Coburgs showed ‘how much one success leads to another in Princely life’. They had

been able to advance to a position in Europe almost beyond the dreams of German ambition. [They] have spread far and wide, and filled the lands with their race. They have created a new Royal House in England. The Queen is a daughter of Leopold’s sister; her children are the children of Leopold’s nephew. The Coburgs reign in Portugal; they are connected with the Royal though fallen House of Orleans, and more or less closely related to the principal families of their own country. Prince Leopold has himself for thirty years governed one of the most important of the minor states of Europe, and his eldest son is wedded to an Archduchess of the Imperial House of Austria.

Moreover, all but one of Victoria and Albert’s nine children married royally. Queen Victoria’s sons-in-law included Frederick of Prussia, briefly Prussian King and German Emperor, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein and Henry of Battenberg, whose brother Alexander became Prince of Bulgaria; her daughters-in-law included Princess Alexandra of Denmark and Princess Marie, daughter of Tsar Alexander II and sister of Tsar Alexander III. Besides George V, Victoria’s grandchildren included Sophie, who married Constantine, King of Greece; Kaiser William II of Germany; Prince Henry of Prussia; Elizabeth, who married Sergei, brother of Tsar Alexander III of Russia; Alexandra, who married Tsar Nicholas II of Russia; Marie, who married Ferdinand I of Romania; Margaret, who married Gustav Adolf VI of Sweden; Victoria Eugenie, who married Alfonso XIII of Spain; and Maud, who married Carl of Denmark, later Haakon VII of Norway. By the time the future Nicholas II made his first visit to England in 1893, a family reunion had come to resemble an international summit:

We drew into Charing Cross. There we were met by: Uncle Bertie [the future Edward VII], Aunt Alix [Alexandra of Denmark], Georgie [the future George V], Louise, Victoria and Maud…

Two hours later Apapa [Christian IX of Denmark], Amama and Uncle Valdemar [Prince of Denmark] arrived. It is wonderful to have so many of our family gathered together…

At 4.30 I went to see Aunt Marie [wife of Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg] at Clarence House and had tea in the garden with her, Uncle Alfred, and Ducky [their daughter, Victoria Melita].

When this last married Ernst Ludwig, heir to the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, the guests included an emperor and empress, a future emperor and empress, a queen, a future king and queen, seven princes, ten princesses, two dukes, two duchesses and a marquess. They were all related. In 1901, the year of Queen Victoria’s death, members of the extended kinship group to which she belonged thus sat on the thrones not only of Great Britain and Ireland, but also of Austria-Hungary, Russia, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Sweden and Norway.

While more and more commoners fretted about the supposed evil effects of miscegenation, the royal elite of Europe had to worry about the opposite – the dangers of inbreeding. In 1869 Queen Victoria had argued that it might be better to ‘infus[e] new and healthy blood into it [the royal family], whereas all the Princes abroad are related to one another; and while I could continue these Foreign Alliances with several members of the family, I feel sure that new blood would strengthen the throne morally as well as physically.’ ‘If no fresh blood was infused occasionally,’ she had written in defence of the projected marriage of another granddaughter – Victoria Moretta – to Alexander of Battenberg in 1885, ‘the races would degenerate physically and morally.’ This was all too true: systematic inbreeding had genuine medical disadvantages. The blood-clotting disease haemophilia spread through the royal family tree with tragic consequences for the male line (because it is carried in the X chromosome). There were at least nine sufferers among Victoria’s descendants: her eighth son Leopold, Duke of Albany, her grandson Frederick William of Hesse, her daughter Beatrice’s son Leopold, her granddaughter Irene’s sons Waldemar and Henry, her granddaughter Alexandra’s son Aleksei, her granddaughter Alice’s son Rupert, and her granddaughter Victoria Eugenie’s sons Alfonso and Gonzalo. Porphyria too was transmitted
through the royal line, from George III to Victoria’s eldest daughter Vicky and Kaiser William II’s sister Charlotte.

Yet the benefits of royal consanguinity seemed obvious; what better check could be imagined to the fractious tendencies of nineteenth-century nationalism than the systematic intermarriage of the continent’s sovereigns? By 1892, Queen Victoria was happy to accept the convenient advice of Sir William Jenner, who assured her that ‘there was no danger & no objection as they [Victoria Melita and Ernst Ludwig] are so strong & healthy & Aunt Marie also. He said that if the relations were strong intermarriages with them only led to g[rea]ter strength & health.’ Two years later, she was pleased to be addressed as ‘Granny’ by the future Tsar Nicholas II, after his betrothal to yet another of her granddaughters. When her great-grandson, the future Edward VIII, was born two months later, Victoria urged that he be christened Albert, as if to set the seal on the familial achievement:

This will be the
Coburg line
, like formerly the Plantagenet, the Tudor (for Owen Tudor) the Stewart & the Brunswick for George the 1st – he being the gt. gd. son of James I & this wd. be
the Coburg Dynasty
– retaining the Brunswick &
all
the others preceding it, joining in it.

The key to understanding European royalty is thus that it was genuinely European; conventional national identity was fundamentally incompatible with an essentially multinational monarchy. Queen Victoria, for example, always thought of her family as ‘our dear Coburg family’ and regarded Saxe-Coburg as the royal family’s proper surname. She liked her children to converse in German as well as in English, as her ‘heart and sympathies’ were, in her own words, ‘all German’. It was typical of her to Germanize the name of her daughter Helena to Lenchen, for example. ‘The German element’, she once declared, ‘is one I wish to be cherished and kept up in our beloved home.’ ‘My heart’, she told Leopold of the Belgians in 1863, ‘is so German’. Yet she could just as easily speak of herself as the embodiment of England, Scotland – even India. In much the same way, Tsar Nicholas II invariably wrote to his German-born wife in English, as he did in his many affectionate letters to the German Kaiser. The Queen of the Belgians spoke fluent Hungarian because she was an Austrian archduchess; her husband’s father was German, his mother
French. Partly as a result of this cosmopolitanism, the European royals were, literally, in a class of their own. Despite being spread across the continent, the various branches of the family were held together by correspondence and by frequent meetings. State visits by one monarch to another were an integral part of nineteenth-century diplomacy. But behind the formalities, these were genuine family gatherings. The members of the extended royal family even knew one another by affectionate nicknames. Prince George of Battenberg was ‘Georgie Bat’ in Nicholas II’s letters to his wife, while she invariably referred to the King of Greece as ‘Greek Georgie’. To Queen Victoria, Prince Alexander of Bulgaria was always ‘dear Sandro’.

This system could only be preserved if the members of the various dynasties continued to marry one another; to wed even the grandest of non-royal aristocrats would break up the magic royal circle, because aristocratic families were emphatically members of one or other national elite. When Queen Victoria’s daughter Louise married a son of the Duke of Argyll, the match seemed so unusual that its constitutional propriety had to be defended by the Queen. But she drew the line when her son-in-law Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstadt contemplated marrying ‘a divorced Russian lady’ following the death of his first wife, Victoria’s daughter Alice. The root of Alexander III’s grudge against Alexander of Battenberg – and one reason he forced him off the Bulgarian throne – was that the Battenbergs were the issue of a morganatic (non-royal) marriage. When the Archduke Francis Ferdinand defied his uncle, the Emperor Francis Joseph, by marrying Sophie, Countess Chotek, he was never really forgiven at court. Indeed, the old Emperor regarded the couple’s assassination in Savajevo as a kind of divine retribution for this lapse; mourning at the court in Vienna verged on the perfunctory. In 1907, for similar reasons, Kaiser William II effectively forbade what would have been the morganatic marriage of Prince Frederick William of Prussia to Paula, Countess von Lehndorff. Marriage to fellow-royals was the rule, and exceptions were made only
in extremis
, when the sole alternative was spinsterhood.

The result of all this was an extraordinary genealogical tangle. To give just one example, which Queen Victoria noted with evident relish, Queen Maria Christina of Spain was the ‘daughter of the
late Archduke Frederick and the Archduchess Elisabeth, Marie of Belgium’s elder sister. Her Grandfather was the celebrated Archduke Charles, whose wife was a Princess of Nassau, and she is second cousin to Helen, also second cousin to Lily, on her mother’s side.’ Christopher, Prince of Greece, had an equally convoluted family tree: ‘My father was King George I of Greece, born Prince William of Denmark, brother of Queen Alexandra of England… My mother was the Grand Duchess Olga of Russia, daughter of the Grand Duke Constantine and granddaughter of the Czar Nicholas I.’ It was scarcely surprising that this inbred multinational elite aroused enmity in certain quarters. In the wake of the ill-fated Bulgarian adventure of Alexander of Battenberg, Herbert von Bismarck – the son of the Saxe-Coburgs’ most formidable adversary – complained half-seriously: ‘In the English Royal Family and its nearest collaterals, there is a sort of worship of the undiluted family principle and Queen Victoria is regarded as a kind of absolute Chief of all branches of the Coburg clan. It is associated with codicils, which are shown to the obedient relation from afar.’ What really made the Saxe-Coburgs so successful, and what rankled so much with the Bismarcks, was that they were broadly liberal in their social and political inclinations (something that distinguished them from that other German dynasty associated with Britain, one which was to come to grief at Bismarck’s hands, the Hanoverians). The French polemicist who compared the Saxe-Coburgs with the Rothschilds in the 1840s was closer to the mark than he knew: for these two South German dynasties had an almost symbiotic relationship with one another. Dismayed by the influence of Queen Victoria’s daughter and namesake over her husband, the ill-starred Frederick III, Bismarck did his utmost to drive a wedge between their son and the so-called ‘Coburg cabal’.

Yet it would be a mistake to see this rift as presaging the war of 1914–18. To be sure, William II felt a deep ambivalence towards his English relations. For example, he refused to see the Prince of Wales when both men were in Vienna in 1889, having heard that the Prince had called for the return of Alsace and Lorraine to France. When it turned out that he had been misrepresented, the Kaiser refused to apologize. As Prince Christian of Denmark explained, ‘The Kaiser is
as yet too new in his position to feel quite sure of himself and his ability to do the right thing. He is therefore constantly afraid of compromising his dignity, and he is particularly sensitive lest his older relatives should treat him as the “Nephew” and not as the “Kaiser”.’ Only with the passage of time, however, did such tiffs take on the aspect of harbingers of war (not least in the Kaiser’s own excitable mind). In the years before 1914, he had in fact made sincere efforts to improve relations with Russia, the state most feared by German military planners and diplomats. He had positively encouraged the Tsar to take a hard line over Manchuria, pledging German support if it came to war. In 1904 he was asked to become godfather to the Tsar’s son, a request he welcomed with enthusiasm. In 1909, too, when he sent his Easter gift to the Tsar, he was careful to point out that it was ‘a token of undiminished love and friendship… a symbol for our relation to each other’.