All in the Family

Three cousins, Willy, Nicky and Georgie, met for the last time at a wedding celebration in 1913. They had known one another since they were children, and had a plethora of relatives in common. Nicky and Georgie were particularly fond of each other -- and so similar in appearance that people could not always tell them apart -- while Willy was the odd one out, reduced to listening through the keyhole to the others' late-night tete-a-tetes. Just ordinary family tensions, perhaps -- except that these three cousins could be seen to hold the fate of Europe, and beyond, in their hands. For Willy was Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Nicky was Tsar Nicholas II of All the Russias, and Georgie was King George V of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The question the writer and documentarian Catrine Clay sets out to answer in this well-constructed book is to what extent the three cousins -- king, kaiser and tsar -- contributed, through their own personalities and their relationships to one another, to the political developments and failures that led to the disaster of World War I. Clay has no doubt at the outset that "the relationships between the three, their personal likes and dislikes, did indeed contribute to the outbreak of hostilities," and it would be very hard to disagree with her.

The conclusion that all three cousins were flawed seems inescapable. Georgie was perhaps the least flawed, or perhaps his flaws were merely less visible and of less consequence. For though British monarchs reign, they do not rule.

Georgie was also perhaps fortunate in being that much older and more mature when he eventually succeeded his father, Edward VII, in 1910. Nicky, by contrast, was completely unprepared for his position as autocrat when his father, Alexander III, died suddenly at the age of only 49. His brother-in-law Sandro, another cousin, related how a tearful Nicky confided in him: "Sandro, what am I going to do? I am not prepared to be a Tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling."

Willy, unfortunately for everyone, had no such qualms when he became German emperor. It is very clear from Clay's account that the damage was done in Willy's childhood, and that the whole family must bear some of the blame for how he turned out. First in the dock are the family doctors who bungled the delivery of this first of Queen Victoria's grandchildren. The clumsy use of forceps inflicted damage on the child's ear, and there was always a fear that the resulting growths and excretions would have a detrimental effect on his brain. It was a breech birth, and the baby emerged with his left arm wrapped around his neck. That arm remained crippled and useless all his life.

Walker & Company Among the nine kings who attended Edward VII's funeral in 1910 was Wilhelm II of Germany, standing behind George V (center).

This was unfortunate, but it need not have been significant. Willy was a determined little boy and, apart from a life-long inability to cut up his food, he managed to keep up with his peers and overcome his physical difficulties. The real problem lay in the attitude it provoked in others, particularly in his mother, whom in childhood and adolescence he adored. She, however, could never quite reciprocate his love, writing to her mother after her second child, Charlotte, was born: "I am so proud of her and like to show her off, which I never did with him as he was so thin and pale and fretful at her age." That Willy the adult rejected his mother should hardly have come as a surprise.

Willy also suffered from a condition that we might now diagnose as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. He was constantly restless and unable to concentrate. Again no help was forthcoming. By the time he was 18, Willy was arrogant, overbearing, and convinced he could never be wrong and that he was answerable only to God. Nicky felt the same about being a divinely ordained autocrat; his saving grace was that he was personally modest -- if anything, too modest. He tended to agree with whoever had spoken to him last, a weakness which did not stand him in good stead amid the crises of war and revolution.

Incidentally, Clay seems to regard Queen Victoria as a purveyor of wisdom to her family, but I'm not so sure. Some of the attitudes she inculcated, particularly in her favorite granddaughter, Alix or Alicky, who married Nicky and made a significant contribution to the collapse of the Russian Empire through her stubborn upholding of the autocratic principle, were less than helpful. It was from her grandmother that Alix had imbibed the idea that public relations are not important and that monarchs can with impunity hide themselves away from their people and, even worse, ignore the advice they are given.

Walker & Company Nicholas II of Russia and George V of Britain, summer of 1909.

One of the most troublesome aspects of the story of these three cousins has always been George V's apparent rejection of his dear Nicky in the hour of the Romanovs' greatest need. These two men were clearly such good friends that it is hard to understand how the king -- and it was the king and not the politicians -- came to retract the offer of hospitality to his Romanov cousins after the 1917 Revolution, a decision which surely contributed to their assassination. Georgie condemned that assassination wholeheartedly, and attended a memorial service for Nicky against the advice of his ministers, but he seems never to have realized the extent of his own culpability. The excuse seems to have been that he really did fear for his throne. He was aware of the extent of anti-monarchist, and especially anti-autocratic, sentiment in England after the slaughter of the trenches, and recognized that overt support for the fallen autocrat of All the Russias would play into the hands of republicans in Britain. Better, he thought, that the Romanovs should be offered refuge by the French, where republicanism already reigned and so they could do no further damage. But events took their course, and for Nicky and his family there was no escape. Perhaps rescue would anyway have been impossible, but it is hard not to view this as the saddest hour of the cousins' relationship.

Clay's contribution to her subject is in the arrangement of her material, rather than in the presenting of any fresh discoveries. Though she mentions having had help in researching documents from the State Archives of the Russian Federation, there is no evidence of her having used such documents directly. The quotations she uses from letters and diaries held at that archive have already been published in 1996 in a collection compiled by Andrei Maylunas and Sergei Mironenko, but the way she uses the material does offer illuminating insights into the psychology of this extended family.

There are one or two inaccuracies of fact. When Nicky's prime minister Pyotr Stolypin was assassinated at the opera in 1911, for instance, it was not the tsarina who was in the imperial box with the tsar, but his two elder daughters, Olga and Tatyana. The latter, in particular, was understandably traumatized by what she had witnessed, and could not stop crying. But such quibbles aside, this is an immensely readable book, one which makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the complex world of king, kaiser and tsar, and of the collapse of that world in 1914.

Virginia Rounding is the author, most recently, of "Catherine the Great: Love, Sex, and Power."