A House Divided Royal Cousins at War

MUSIC: "The British Grenadiers"

On August 4th, 1914,

Britain went to war against an old friend and traditional ally.

A people with whom it shared

countless historical and cultural ties.

It did so in alliance with an authoritarian dictatorship

which had been its most deadly enemy for the best part of a century.

How it is that Britain came to fight alongside Russia against Germany

is one of the great puzzles of the 20th century.

The explanation, in part, lies in the eccentricities

and foibles of a single family -

that of Queen Victoria, whose descendants occupied the thrones

of no less than ten European countries,

a dynastic web that meant

European diplomacy was also a domestic drama.

At the outbreak of war,

three first cousins reigned over Europe's greatest powers.

Tsar Nicholas II of Russia,

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany,

and King George V of Britain.

Their passions,

their friendships,

and, above all, their poisonous rivalries

would play a key role in the realignment of European politics.

A role often overlooked by historians.

This is the story of how royalty helped drag Europe into the abyss.

The story of a family tragedy.

On March 10th, 1863, half a century before the outbreak

of World War I, the royalty of Europe gathered

at St George's Chapel, Windsor,

for the wedding of Queen Victoria's eldest son Bertie,

later King Edward VII, to Princess Alexandra of Denmark.

MUSIC: "Serenade For Strings in E major" by Antonin Dvorak

Beautiful and glamorous, Princess Alix, as she was known,

was the Princess Diana of her day.

Already wildly popular with the British public.

But the wedding would also be remembered as the first

public appearance in England of Queen Victoria's grandson,

the future German Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Wilhelm, who is aged four, comes to the wedding as a page.

And he's very excited because he's allowed to wear

what he calls his "Scotch dress", with a kilt and a sporran

and a sgian-dhu in his socks.

He is sat next to a couple of his uncles,

and first of all he bites the leg of one of them

and then he throws his little dirk into the middle of the aisle

while they're saying their vows!

So at the age of four he's trying to upstage the British monarchy

and his uncle.

It was the beginning of a long, complex and tortured relationship

between the future German Kaiser and his British family.

And the wedding that spring day would prove a turning point

in the Royal Family's relations with Europe in other ways as well.

Within a year of the marriage of Bertie and Alix,

Prussia invaded Denmark.

Prussia was the largest of the states,

in a Germany which, at that time, was still not united.

The troublesome Wilhelm's father, known as Fritz,

was heir to the Prussian throne,

and was married to Queen Victoria's oldest daughter Vicky.

Denmark was the home country of the beautiful new Princess of Wales.

The effect of this is basically to set up

a hostility between Denmark and Prussia

that is to be a major factor

in the sort of alignment of the European powers,

and to divide Victoria's family.

Alix was reported to weep every night,

and Bertie would come in and find her crying over

the tremendous humiliation that Germany had done to Denmark.

But Alix's mother-in-law Queen Victoria took Prussia's side.

She ordered her son Bertie to remember...

'Your connection with Denmark is only of a year's standing.

'Your whole family are German, and you are half-German.'

You've got to remember that she is

pretty much completely German herself -

her mother was German, her paternal grandmother was German,

and her great-grandparents were all German too.

Princess Alix, though,

was determined to signal her support for her Danish homeland.

She became, I think, more deeply anti-Prussian

because she had to bottle it up effectively.

And she found lovely subtle little ways of expressing it.

One of the earliest family photographs of their first child,

she has the baby on her knee,

and he is dressed in what appears to be the traditional baby outfit,

but if you look very closely it's decorated with little Danish flags.

It is literally a very quiet piece of flag-waving

on the part of the Princess of Wales.

Princess Alix, darling of the British public,

wife of one future British king, mother of another,

would never forgive the Prussians for the war of 1864.

And although Prussia won, the war would also have

profound implications for Queen Victoria's daughter Vicky

and her husband Fritz in Berlin.

MUSIC: "Prussia's Glory" by Johann Gottfried Piefke

Prussia was an aggressive, rising power.

When Victoria and Prince Albert

had sent Vicky to marry the Prussian heir six years before,

they were sending her on a mission.

Queen Victoria and Albert had this plan to civilise Prussia.

It was an attempt to use Vicky

to marry the eventual heir to the German throne,

and to rescue Prussia from the excesses of German militarism.

Vicky was just 17 when she married Fritz. A child bride.

But she was highly intelligent,

and had been carefully trained by her father for the task in hand.

It was assumed Germany would soon be united under Prussian leadership.

It was Vicky's job to make sure the new Germany would be a liberal,

pro-British constitutional monarchy.

If you have a liberal Prussia, you'll have a liberal Germany.

So Vicky is fired off like a sort of Exocet missile into Prussia

to kind of create the liberal Prussia.

It was nothing less than a battle for the soul of the future Germany.

A heavy burden to place on the shoulders of a 17-year-old girl,

as even Queen Victoria recognised.

'Poor, dear child.

'I often tremble when I think how much is expected of her.'

Victoria's plans soon unravelled.

In 1862, Otto von Bismarck was appointed Prussian Prime Minister.

An arch-conservative,

Bismarck's politics were the opposite of Vicky's.

The attack on Denmark in 1864

consolidated Bismarck's grip on power,

resulting in the seizure of the Duchies

of Schleswig and Holstein.

A series of short wars followed, during which Bismarck

crushed the independence of the smaller German states

and defeated Austria and France.

By 1871, he had achieved the dream of German unification,

transforming the map of Europe.

The creation of the united Germany totally threatens the European

balance of power.

Simply because of the number of Germans,

their strategic position in the middle of Europe,

and the fact that Germany has the most vibrant economy,

in many ways it creates in the middle of Europe

a country which potentially could dominate the continent.

Unification also meant a dramatic tilt in the balance of power

within Germany.

The forces of conservative militarism were triumphant.

Vicky was sidelined.

She wrote anguished letters to her mother, Queen Victoria.

'You cannot think how painful it is to be continuously

'surrounded by people who consider your very existence a misfortune.'

But Bismarck was just one of Vicky's problems.

As the British had already observed at Bertie's wedding,

her son Wilhelm was a difficult child.

His problems had begun on the night he was born.

Wilhelm's had been a breech birth.

The baby was firmly stuck.

He was coming out bottom first.

His legs were sort of up over his chest.

His arms were behind his head.

And the doctor somehow got the left arm,

brought it down,

but he said in his own notes

that he had to use considerable force to do it.

Which, even when you think about it, it's hideous.

And it's really in those moments that the Kaiser is made.

Wilhelm's left arm would be permanently disabled -

shorter than his right, and of little use.

His sensitive, intelligent

18-year-old mother Vicky was traumatised.

'It cuts me to the heart when I see all other children

'with the use of all their limbs, and that mine is denied that.

'The idea of his remaining a cripple haunts me.

'I long to have a child

'with everything perfect about it like everybody else.'

It's a militaristic society,

a milieu where you can't be handicapped -

I mean, you can't have a one-armed king,

that's something you don't have in Prussia.

You have to have the perfect body,

and she has a son who hasn't got a perfect body.

Wilhelm's grandfather, the Prussian King Wilhelm I,

reacted with characteristic Prussian tact.

William I, when he sees little baby William,

is said to have wondered aloud to his son Fritz

whether he should congratulate him on the birth of a defective child.

Vicky had failed in what, for the Prussians, was her central mission.

By the early 1860s, Vicky and Fritz were living in the vast,

impersonal grandeur of the new palace outside Berlin.

Here, Wilhelm was subjected to a series

of desperate treatments for his disability.

His right arm was strapped to his body,

to force him to use his left arm,

resulting only in endless painful falls

as he tottered along the marble corridors.

Then, at the age of four, Wilhelm's head began to twist to one side

as a result of the imbalance in his neck muscles.

To treat this, he was strapped into a machine.

Vicky included a sketch in a letter to her mother.

'I cannot tell what I suffered when I saw him in that machine.

'It was all I could do to prevent myself from crying.

'To see one's child treated like one deformed, it really is very hard.'

Wilhelm's young, traumatised mother compounded his problems.

Vicky finds it almost impossible to accept Wilhelm's disability,

that there's no bonding between them.

She clearly sends messages,

perhaps subliminally, to Wilhelm

that he's somehow not up to her expectations.

This is the story of a proud mother

who reacts really badly to her son's handicap.

She TRIES to love him,

and pulls herself together and tries to be a good mother,

but at the end of the day

she looks at him and she thinks, "This is my greatest failure."

That's what she feels.

The relationship between the future Kaiser

and his English mother would be fraught and complicated,

with profound implications for the future of Europe.

MUSIC: "Moments musicaux No.3" by Franz Schubert

Across the North Sea at Marlborough House,

the London home of the Prince and Princess of Wales,

the childhood of the future King, George V,

could not have been more different.

George was born six years after Wilhelm, and was healthy and robust.

The second son, he was not originally intended for the throne.

His brother Eddie was the heir.

George was spared the hothouse education

imposed on his German cousin.

His father, Bertie, the Prince of Wales,

although fond of George's mother, was a notorious philanderer.

It was a situation the beautiful Princess Alix, his future Queen,

had little option but to accept.

But it meant she poured her affection into her children.

Alix is the dominant figure at home. Bertie is often away.

And she creates, what, for small children, must have been a rather

wonderful, atmosphere of endless games. No lessons, nothing serious.

Endless, sort of, romping. A very, sort of, child-centred environment.

Every other summer, Princess Alix would take the whole family off

to stay with her parents, in Denmark.

Although comparatively impoverished, the Danish royal family

had succeeded in marrying into various European dynasties.

Cousins, uncles and aunts, from across the Continent,

would all meet up at the Danish king's

summer home, outside Copenhagen.

Among them were the Russian royal family.

It was here that George first met his cousin,

the future Tsar Nicholas II,

whose mother, Dagmar, always known as "Minnie", was Alix's sister.

What happens is,

Bertie and Alix end up holidaying, you know,

once every two years with the Russian tsar and his wife,

because Alix and Minnie have this very close relationship.

They were obviously sisters and they want to bring families together.

Minnie's husband was Alexander, tsar of Russia from 1881.

A larger-than-life personality,

famous for being able to bend iron pokers with his bare hands.

Both shy and withdrawn, George and Nicholas were somewhat

in awe of their fathers and they would become firm friends.

The informality of these summer holidays is captured

in rarely-seen images from the Danish archives,

taken by the royals themselves, keen amateur photographers.

The atmosphere is completely knockabout.

That circle is

notorious for a very relaxed, very slapstick, sense of humour.

You hear of the Princess of Wales and the Empress of Russia

turning somersaults in full evening dress.

The children turn a garden hose on the Tsar of Russia and he laughs

and turns it back.

They call him "Uncle Fatty". Can you imagine that?!

So, this extraordinary atmosphere

of emperor, empress, several kings and queens

and endless, countless, archdukes and duchesses,

all of them behaving like, sort of, children on holiday.

Traces of the royal holidaymakers remain to this day...

An initial, scratched into a window pane,

probably that of Tsar Alexander.

The heights of the children, marked on a door frame.

But one royal cousin was never invited -

Vicky's son, the future Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany,

who, as a Prussian, was not welcome in defeated, humiliated Denmark.

Many of the other guests were from minor German royal houses,

also beaten in the German wars of unification,

and no more keen than the Danes

to holiday with their Prussian conquerors.

You get the, sort of, losers from the Prussian wars of the 1860s

all gathering on the beach and muttering against Prussia.

For the Tsarina of Russia and the future British Queen,

the holidays had a clear political purpose.

Minnie and Alix hoped to draw their husbands,

Bertie and Alexander, closer to each other -

and away from Germany.

In 1874, the Russian royal family visited London.

Minnie, seen here on the left,

was as glamorous and photogenic as her sister and the British public

was enchanted. The Danish sisters became

the fashion icons of their day

and quickly turned the trip into a declaration

of Anglo-Russian friendship.

They came out together, I think on the first day,

wearing identical outfits and, of course,

they were very striking women, anyway.

This makes an incredible impact

and it makes a very interesting underlying point - perhaps

Britain and Russia DO have something in common,

perhaps there are things that could draw them together.

But in the 1870s, the sisters were fighting an uphill battle

in seeking to forge Anglo-Russian ties.

For the British, Russia was the traditional enemy.

Throughout the 19th century, most Britons looked with fear

and something close to loathing at Russia.

Russia was the country that, in the, kind of,

nightmare imagination of the government in London,

threatened India - India, the jewel in the imperial crown.

They are Asiatic, they are the descendants of the Mongol horde,

they are barbarians.

Queen Victoria spoke for the nation.

"Those detestable Russians -

"horrible, deceitful, cruel.

"They will always hate us and we can never trust them."

The Russians were no more fond of the British

resenting their presence in India and Central Asia.

The Russian perspective is that the British are both hypocritical

and a dammed nuisance.

Britain is the country which blocks Russia, in all sorts of ways.

The moral superiority of Britain,

that sticks in a few gullets.

Rather than to Britain, Russia looked to Germany,

where the chancellor, Bismarck,

had worked hard to cultivate good relations,

fearful of an alliance between France and Russia

that would leave Germany encircled.

In Berlin, in 1884, Bismarck strengthened ties,

by sending a delegation to Russia, for the celebration

of the coming-of-age of Tsarevich Nicholas, the Russian heir.

His choice to lead it was a surprising one -

Nicholas' cousin, Prince Wilhelm, now 25.

This is incredibly flattering for somebody so young and inexperienced

as Wilhelm - he has not done any diplomatic work before -

but it is also a tremendous slight to his father.

because Wilhelm's father Fritz had long wanted to take part

in government and Bismarck had basically kept him out.

Ever keen to marginalise the liberal influences of Wilhelm's parents,

still only heirs to the throne,

Bismarck was exploiting what had become

a complex, troubled relationship,

particularly between Wilhelm and his English mother.

As a teenager, Wilhelm had written strange,

sexually-charged letters to Vicky,

describing dreams, in which he repeatedly

kissed and caressed her hands -

dreams he longed to fulfil.

"In eight days, we will go to Berlin and then what I dreamed about,

"we will do in reality, when we are alone in your room,

"without any witnesses. Promise to do so really as you did in my dream

"to me, for I do so love you."

Well, what does one think of that? It is clearly an erotic dream...

..and, strangely, concentrating on the hands

and, specifically, the left hand.

And one can't overlook the fact that it is Wilhelm's left hand

that is in a glove, to hide the discoloured nature

and the claw-like nature of it.

My interpretation of it is that it is one last appeal that he is making,

through this illicit, incestuous avenue,

to his mother, to love him the way he really is.

Now in his twenties, the future Kaiser's heart had hardened.

He had become fiercely hostile to everything his parents represented.

Vicky wrote in despair to her mother, Queen Victoria.

"Willie is chauvinistic and ultra-Prussian, to a degree

"and with a violence which is often very painful to me.

"He is turning into the archetypal Potsdam Lieutenant,

"with that evil mixture of a very loud mouth

and a chauvinist's hatred and ignorance of all things foreign.

He does everything that annoys his parents, of course.

He is a total rebel. He knows that it will upset his parents

if he mingles in anti-Semitic circles, and he does that.

He wants to be with the winners,

with his grandfather and with Bismarck.

His parents are, to him, the losers in German society.

He does not want to be associated with them.

The tensions between mother and son were exacerbated

by Vicky's ferocious attachment to her British homeland.

She was always saying how fantastic England was and how,

basically, rubbish Germany was.

"You're a little German boy,

"you will never understand what it is to be an Englishman.

"You may praise your navy, but it is nothing compared with OUR navy."

And on and on and on and on.

Wilhelm's trip to Russia,

for Nicholas' coming of age, in 1884,

put the final seal on his defection to the conservative camp.

Wilhelm is absolutely enchanted by the autocracy that he sees

in St Petersburg and Moscow. The fact that there are 12,000 soldiers

lining the railway tracks, all shouting, "Hooray!"

when the Imperial Train goes past -

this is his ideal world.

Wilhelm saw the Russian Tsar,

Alexander III, Nicholas' father, as a demi-god.

Living amidst almost-unimaginable splendour in his numerous palaces,

the Tsar wielded absolute power,

untrammelled by any form of representative government.

Wilhelm was intoxicated.

The emperor ideology that he had developed in 1884 stays with him -

this, kind of, notion of,

"I have been sent by God to rule my people and I must listen

"to the people and I must listen to God and tell them what God

"tells me is best for them."

On returning to Berlin,

Wilhelm began a gushing, private - alarmingly indiscreet -

correspondence with the Tsar, in which it was clear his hostility

to his mother now extended to her British family.

"I ask you only one favour. Oppose the English uncles.

"Do not be shocked by what you will hear from my father.

"He is under the influence of my mother, who, for her part,

"is directed by the Queen of England and who causes him to see everything

"through English eyes."

But Wilhelm's relationship

with England mirrored his relationship with his mother,

in all its complexity.

He is pulled in all sorts of directions.

He is fascinated by Britain, he wants to be noticed by Britain,

he hates Britain!

He loved the pomp of the Empire,

he loved the pomp around his grandmother.

That is all appealing to him, terribly,

but at the same time, there is always this insecurity.

You know, "I am not up to it.

"They think that Germany is not equal."

All his relationships in his whole life are totally conflicted

and so is this one.

His relationship to England is the most troubled one he has.

In 1887, Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee.

Wilhelm was far fonder of his grandmother than his mother.

and now showed his pro-British face,

once again persuading his grandfather to send him,

rather than his parents, as head of the German delegation.

Queen Victoria was having none of it.

When Victoria hears

that Wilhelm has invited himself as the German representative,

bypassing his parents, without telling his parents,

she is furious.

She, sort of, disinvites him and asks his parents, instead,

invites them.

As the grand procession wound its way through the streets of London,

Wilhelm had to make do with a minor role.

In the official portrait of Victoria's extended family,

painted for the occasion,

it was his father, Fritz, who was given pride of place.

Wilhelm was left gnashing his teeth, relegated to a window alcove

with his younger cousin, Prince George.

In private, his anti-English venom returned.

"It's high time that old woman died.

"One can not have enough hatred for England."

A few months later, the royalty of Europe gathered once more in Berlin,

for the funeral of Wilhelm's grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm I,

who had finally died, aged 90.

30 years after arriving in Germany, Queen Victoria's

daughter Vicky was empress, at last,

but there was to be no joyful coronation.

Her husband, Fritz, was dying.

Fritz, Wilhelm's father, contracts throat cancer

and it takes ages to get the diagnosis and, by the time

they have worked out what it is, it is basically too late.

Fritz became Kaiser in March 1888.

But by then, he had just a few months to live.

It is one of the great what ifs of history.

If Wilhelm I had not lived quite so long,

if his son Fritz had taken over sooner,

Germany might have evolved in a different way.

Fritz was a liberal,

he wanted to make Germany a constitutional and modern country.

But his son Wilhelm II did not want to do any of the above.

Vicky knew that she and her husband would never wield real power.

She wrote, tragically, to Queen Victoria.

"I think people in general consider us a mere passing shadow,

"soon to be replaced by reality in the shape of Wilhelm."

Fritz wants to have some effect on German politics,

but he's just too ill and two weak

and he sort of sits there, knowing he's dying

and that everything he'd worked for for 20 years,

this sort of liberal idea of Germany that he'd hoped to create,

is just not going to happen.

It's really, really grim.

Fritz died after just 99 days on the throne.

Aged 29, his erratic, emotionally unstable son

was now Kaiser of one of the most powerful countries in the world.

A country where ultimate power still rested with the monarch.

His first act was to order troops to surround the new palace

where his father had died.

He says that the palace must be searched for papers

relating to his father's time as emperor.

It's sort of monstrous, it's such an aggressive act

because it's really directed at Vicky.

The British family hear of this, Bertie in particular,

and it's an awful, awful thing to do to your mother, obviously,

and they are horrified by this.

Bertie, the Prince of Wales, now in his late 40s,

was close to his sister.

He wrote to Vicky to console her over the behaviour of her son.

"His conduct towards you is simply revolting

"but, alas, he lacks the feelings and usages of a gentleman."

The future British king never forgave his German nephew.

The relationship between Wilhelm's cousin Prince George

and his mother could not have been more different.

George always called Alix, the Princess of Wales,

"darling Mother dear".

While she called him "little Georgie",

signing off one letter...

"With a great big kiss for your lovely little face."

George was 25 at the time.

Princess Alix's loathing for Germany had not dimmed.

In 1890,

George was made honorary colonel in a Prussian dragoon regiment

during a visit to Berlin with his father.

While Bertie squeezed into a somewhat tight uniform,

George kept in the background. His mother reacted with amused dismay.

"So my Georgie boy has become a real live, filthy,

"blue-coated, Pickelhaube German soldier.

"Never mind. As you say, it could not have been helped."

George remained behind his older brother in line to the throne

and had originally been intended for a career in the Royal Navy.

George had the education of a midshipman.

He was extraordinarily badly educated.

Almost uniquely among late 19th century royalty,

George could speak no foreign languages.

I think, to a large extent, George is shaped by his life in the Navy.

He likes small spaces, even after he becomes Prince of Wales.

He is not gregarious. He does not like meeting people.

He likes order, he likes discipline, he likes control.

It was only with the death in 1892

of his older brother, Eddie, from pneumonia that George became heir.

Unlike cousin Wilhelm, he had never had any desire to be king.

The death of his brother comes as a complete shock.

Eddie is almost a twin to him.

At that level, it is devastating.

And then, suddenly to be faced with all these responsibilities

which he had never anticipated is terrifying to him, I think,

at the beginning.

Now a sense of shared destiny drew him more than ever

to friendship with his cousin, the Russian heir, Nicholas.

With whom he also shared a remarkable physical similarity.

They are both rather decent, rather callow, rather nice young men

without really much curiosity to move beyond the rank and station in life

which fate has assigned them to.

Like George,

Nicholas's closest relationship was with his mother, Minny.

His Danish mother, as is the way with her sister,

Queen Alexandra of Britain,

is a very good mother, a very possessive mother,

but one who does her utmost to keep her sons children.

It strikes me as an extraordinary thing

that you have got these two immensely prominent royal figures

who, at home, are little more than big babies.

But there was one key difference between the two royal cousins.

Where George dutifully married Princess Mary,

the girl who had been engaged to his older brother,

Nicholas's marriage would be an epic tale of drama and romance.

One that would alter the course of Russian history.

In Saint Petersburg in 1889, during a family visit,

Nicholas had fallen deeply and passionately in love

with his German cousin,

Queen Victoria's granddaughter, Princess Alix of HesseDarmstadt.

Alix was the daughter of Victoria's second daughter, Alice,

who had married a German duke.

Alice had died of diphtheria when Alix was just six years old.

Queen Victoria had taken the motherless children under her wing.

Victoria has this strong sense that Alice's children have

in some way become her own children.

The Queen takes a particular interest in the daughters

and that inevitably means the daughters' marital prospects.

Alix was always said to have been Victoria's favourite grandchild.

And the thought of her marrying the Russian heir

revived all the Queen's old fears and suspicions.

My blood runs cold

when I think of her placed on that very unsafe throne.

The state of Russia is so bad, so rotten that,

at any moment, something dreadful might happen

and the wife of the heir to the throne

is in a most difficult and precarious position.

But strangely, one obvious obstacle to Nicholas marrying Alix

was never mentioned. Haemophilia.

It seems extraordinary that, given Alix's only purpose, really,

is going to be as a breeding machine

that this potential defect isn't raised.

Haemophilia is an hereditary condition

that prevents the blood from clotting.

It afflicts primarily men, but is passed through women

and had entered the royal family through Queen Victoria herself.

Alix's brother Fritz

had died from the condition at the age of just two.

Queen Victoria's own son, Leopold, had died at the age of 30.

But European royalty appeared to be in a state of denial.

By the 1890s, doctors understood that it was inherited,

but are you going to tell the Queen,

or the Tsar that all their children's futures might be compromised

because they might just be carrying haemophilia?

The whole business of royalty is heredity.

You have to produce healthy children to produce healthy children.

The Russian royal family,

related to the British through the Danish connection,

were at this stage free of haemophilia.

The failure to confront the possibility

that Alix might be a carrier

would have tragic consequences for the Romanov dynasty.

But in 1894, the principle obstacle to Nicholas and Alix's wedding

was a religious one.

Marriage to the Russian heir

would require Alix to convert to Russian Orthodoxy.

Deeply religious, she was loathe to abandon her Lutheran faith.

She was in love with Nicholas,

she would have married him readily if he had not been Russian.

The relatives who tried to persuade her on the grounds of,

it's a formality, it doesn't have to mean anything,

were reading her completely wrong.

Because if she converted, she would do it wholeheartedly, completely.

Alix initially rejected Nicholas.

Then, in 1894, they were brought together again

when the royalty of Europe gathered for a wedding in Coburg, Germany.

Nicholas and Alix spent hours alone together.

He pleaded with her to change her mind until, finally, she relented.

"I cried like a child and she did too.

"But her expression had changed.

"Her face was lit by a quiet content."

The next day,

Queen Victoria's extended family gathered for a group photo.

An extraordinary snapshot of European royalty.

Nicholas and Alix were stood side-by-side.

Also present were the Queen, her daughter Vicky,

Bertie the Prince of Wales,

and the German Kaiser,

who believed he had played a key role

in bringing the happy couple together.

Wilhelm always liked to put himself at the centre of every story

and this was no exception.

In his memoirs, he claimed that it was he who had, basically,

bolstered Nicholas's courage, taken him off to his room,

put a bouquet of flowers in his hand,

dusted him off and said, "Go on, ask for her!"

By now, Kaiser Wilhelm had been on the throne almost six years

and was proving an alarming, unpredictable

if energetic presence on the European stage.

His reign had begun

with a catastrophic trip to Saint Petersburg in 1888.

Wilhelm had hoped to seal a conservative alliance

with his hero, Tsar Alexander III.

Instead, he had offended Alexander

by his lack of grief at the death of his own father, Fritz,

just a few weeks before.

Himself a devoted family man, the Tsar was appalled.

He is a rascally young fop who throws his weight around,

thinks too much of himself and fancies that others worship him.

Wilhelm, though,

retained a disastrous confidence in his own diplomatic abilities.

Determined to control German foreign policy himself, in 1890,

he sacked Otto von Bismarck, the architect of German unification.

Within months, the German alliance with Russia had disintegrated,

Russia signing, instead, an alliance with France,

the first stage of the encirclement of Germany

Bismarck had always dreaded.

By now, the erratic young Kaiser was veering wildly

back in the other direction towards his British family.

Suddenly, Wilhelm turns round and says,

"Oh, Grandmamma, I really want to come and visit you

"and I really want to come and visit you at Cowes."

Cowes is this famous regatta

which takes place once a year in August on the Isle of Wight.

It is a gathering place of the richest people.

It's as if all the oligarchs and zillionaires

and rich Eurotrash gathered to show off their Learjets in one place.

Wilhelm desperately wants to be invited.

Queen Victoria doesn't really want him to come,

but her Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, says,

"Look, we need to be friendly with the Germans."

So she says, "OK, you can come."

And he comes and loves it.

To his delight,

the Kaiser was made an honorary admiral in the Royal Navy.

Fancy wearing the same uniform as St Vincent and Nelson,

it is enough to make one quite giddy.

Wilhelm returned to Cowes regularly through the early 1890s.

But prolonged exposure did nothing to improve relations

with his British family.

Wilhelm, the Kaiser, could never understand the English royal family

who see Cowes and Osborne, basically, as a picnic by the sea.

They're not on show in the way that William is. He gets it wrong always.

One year he brings this enormous bloody band

which plays all over the place all the time and is incredibly noisy.

Another year, he brings two warships which shoot endless gun salutes,

get in the way of all the boats and everyone goes...

"Why doesn't he just go home?"

His cousin Prince George dreaded the Kaiser's visits,

as he wrote to his wife.

"I am just off now with Papa

"to pay Wilhelm a visit on board the Hohenzollern.

"I hope he will be out."

But Cowes became, above all,

the stage for a growing rivalry

between Wilhelm and his Uncle Bertie, the future King Edward VII,

now entering his 50s and as rakish as ever.

I think Edward VII is perhaps one of the most attractive characters.

He was a bon viveur, which is something attractive.

He loved the theatre, he liked life, he enjoyed himself,

he had lots of friends, people liked him, he was fun to be with,

he was widely respected.

And here was Wilhelm, who has always this feeling

that someone is laughing at him, that he's not being taken seriously.

He tries to throw his weight around and make people like him

and, of course, that makes people dislike him even more.

Far from encouraging friendship,

for the Kaiser, Cowes became a competition.

With national prestige at stake.

Each year, he comes along with a more and more expensive boat

because each year he failed to beat Bertie.

And the year he actually beat Bertie,

Bertie sold his boat because clearly,

actually, he'd quite enjoyed beating Wilhelm

and once the battle was over and Wilhelm had won it,

he didn't want to play that game any more.

"The regatta at Cowes was once a pleasant holiday for me,

"but now that the Kaiser has taken command there,

"it is nothing but a nuisance."

I think this rivalry, it's incredibly interesting

because it encapsulates

not only the relationship between Wilhelm and his uncle,

this constant jostling and jousting for position,

but also the relationship between England and Germany

and the English fleet and the German fleet.

It prefigures so much of what is later to come.

By the mid-1890s, the erratic young Kaiser was veering once more

away from Britain and back towards Russia.

In 1894, Tsar Alexander III died.

The coronation of his son Nicholas

provided the first moving images of any royal figure.

But beneath the pomp and grandeur, the new tsar, just 26,

was desperately insecure, as he told one of his cousins.

"What am I to do? What is going to happen to me?

"To Alix, to Mother, to all of Russia? I'm not prepared to be Tsar.

"I never wanted to become Tsar,

"I know nothing of the business of ruling."

Nicholas II is very badly prepared to be tsar in terms

of having played an effective role of any sort in government.

He is also, simply, emotionally younger than his age of 26.

And just by character,

here is a man whom fate has placed in the middle of politics,

here is also a man who dislikes politics and politicians.

But Nicholas's beautiful young wife,

Queen Victoria's favourite granddaughter,

now the Tsarina Alexandra, was already on hand,

offering a combination of sugary devotion and steely resolve.

"Darling boysy, me loves you, oh so very tenderly and deeply.

"Be firm and show your own mind and don't let others forget who you are.

"Forgive me, lovey."

I think Alexandra is like people who convert to another religion,

they often overdo it.

She underwent this tremendous emotional struggle,

did convert to Russian Orthodoxy

and I think became more Russian than the Russians,

became more orthodox than the orthodox.

She invests her husband with this sort of quasi-divine character

which doesn't allow him ever to compromise.

If you are a representative of God on Earth,

then you can't be told what to do by anybody else.

Adrift and uncertain,

Nicholas also clung to Russia's authoritarian traditions.

"I shall maintain the principle of autocracy

"just as firmly and unflinchingly

"as it was preserved by my unforgettable, dead father."

Kaiser Wilhelm thoroughly approved

of his young cousin's anti-democratic instincts.

He wrote to Nicholas,

complaining that his own German parliament was...

"Behaving as badly as it can,

"swinging backwards and forwards between the Socialists,

"egged on by the Jews, and the Catholics.

"Both parties being soon fit to be hung,

"all of them, as far as I can see."

The two men would meet

during summer cruises on their royal yachts in the Baltic.

For the Kaiser, Nicholas's accession provided the opportunity

for a fresh start in Russo-German relations.

But like most people, Nicholas found his German cousin difficult.

Wilhelm had this very unfortunate manner.

He would go around smacking people on the bottom

and playing practical jokes,

turning all his rings inward

and then squeezing your hand very tightly so it really hurt.

The Kaiser's sense of humour was crude and infantile.

In this Christmas card, he has drawn in the bodily functions himself.

On his yacht, he would force his ageing entourage

to perform morning gymnastics,

snipping their braces so their trousers fell down...

and sitting on them.

He was invariably delighted by his own wit,

as one British statesman observed.

"If the Kaiser laughs, which he is sure to do a good many times,

"he will laugh with absolute abandonment, throwing his head back,

"opening his mouth to the fullest possible extent,

"shaking his whole body, and often stamping with one foot

"to show his excessive enjoyment of any joke."

The Tsar found his cousin's visits an ordeal.

And the Tsarina Alexandra was no more fond of him.

The Kaiser considered her a German,

but she considered herself an Englishwoman

and had always been part of the anti-Prussian club.

A whole new generation of royals was now holidaying in Denmark.

For the Tsar and Tsarina,

it was an escape from the stifling atmosphere of Saint Petersburg.

This footage dates from 1899.

In it, Tsar Nicholas can be seen fooling around with royal relatives.

In this company, Tsar and Tsarina could truly relax.

Play the fool even.

In a way that was unthinkable at home.

Nicholas's mother and aunt, the Danish sisters Minny and Alix,

seen here on the right,

continued to be the centre of this boisterous,

anti-Prussian grouping of cousins.

A grouping of which the Tsarina was very firmly a part.

And from which the Kaiser remained excluded.

He is paranoid.

He sees a conspiracy

and it's the Russian and the British

and then all these funny little German cousins and principalities

all ganging up against him

and talking behind his back.

The Tsarina made little attempt to conceal her contempt for the Kaiser.

He thinks himself a superman, but he's really nothing but a clown.

Wilhelm was the cousin no-one wanted to play with.

The Kaiser's paranoia worsened as it became clear

Nicholas's accession had led to a thawing of relations,

not with Germany, but with Britain.

In 1896, Nicholas and Alexandra visited Balmoral.

They can be seen here walking either side of Queen Victoria's carriage.

Victoria was enchanted by the new Tsar.

I think if one is looking for a case

where actually personal chemistry

does matter in international politics,

Victoria's fond attitude towards Nicholas is very clearly one of them.

"Nicky is charming and wonderfully like Georgie.

"He always speaks English and almost without a fault.

"He is very unaffected."

In 1899, Queen Victoria wrote to Nicholas

to warn him about his German cousin Wilhelm.

"I am afraid William may go and tell things against us to you,

"just as he does about you to us.

"If so, pray tell me openly and confidentially.

"It is so important that such mischievousness

"and unstraightforward proceedings should be put a stop to."

Tsar Nicholas immediately wrote back.

"I am so happy you told me in that open way about Wilhelm.

"It is a dangerous double game he is playing at.

"As you know, dearest Grandmamma, all I am striving at now

"is for the longest possible prolongation of peace in this world."

In the evening of Queen Victoria's life,

a slow motion reversal of traditional power relationships was under way.

Britain was drawing closer to its former enemy Russia

and away from its traditional ally, Germany.

It was a process driven primarily by politicians and national interest.

But the Kaiser's tangled relationship

with his British relatives had played a key part.

For the old Queen, the distancing between the two nations was painful.

During the Boer War,

she was subject to vicious attacks in the German press.

Her daughter Vicky wrote to Kaiser Wilhelm to protest.

"You can imagine my feelings

"when I see her made the subject of gross and insulting caricatures.

"Her mother was German, her husband was German,

"her sons-in-law and daughters-in-law nearly all.

"Her sympathies always were German."

The Kaiser, too, for all his occasional hostility,

never lost his affection for his grandmother.

"People have no idea how much I love the Queen,

"how profoundly she is interwoven

"with all my memories of childhood and youth."

I think the Kaiser,

as much as he could love anyone except for himself,

really loved Queen Victoria.

She was his grandmother.

He had very happy memories of going to stay with her

and she was good with him.

He listened to her when he would not listen to other people.

She is very clever at handling him,

getting him to do what she wants,

by being firm but affectionate,

and he responds to that.

But Victoria was now 81

and at Osborne at the start of 1901, she entered her final illness.

The Kaiser dashed to her side.

He came rushing over when it was clear she would not last much longer.

And he was actually beside her as she died.

He held her in his arms and said how little and how light she was

and I think he was genuinely very moved.

Queen Victoria died in the arms of the German Kaiser

and he helped lay her body out

beneath the portrait of her beloved German husband, Prince Albert.

A few days later,

Wilhelm rode side-by-side with his old sailing rival,

now King Edward VII,

behind Queen Victoria's coffin, uncle and nephew united in grief.

But everyone present knew the old Queen's passing

meant the end of an era.

The Grandmother of Europe,

the woman who held the extended royal family together was dead.

A chilly, uncertain new century was dawning.