Into the Abyss Royal Cousins at War

In May 1913, the royalty of Europe gathered in Berlin

for the wedding of the German Kaiser's only daughter,

Viktoria Luise.

Kaiser Wilhelm was filmed with his cousin,

King George V of Britain.

Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, another cousin, was also a guest.

At that moment, these three close relatives

reigned over almost half of the Earth's population.

But the 19th century world of pageantry,

pomp and royal power was ending.

The modern age hovered like a spectre at the feast.

As the guests assembled that spring day in Berlin,

a Zeppelin flew overhead.

And, just over a year later, the magnificent cavalrymen

would swap their horses and feathered hats

for the mud and blood of the trenches.

For Europe's royalty, a very personal family tragedy loomed.

A tragedy of conflict...

..and betrayal.

Europe's three royal cousins would never meet again.

On the 27th of July 1900, Kaiser Wilhelm II made a farewell speech

to German troops departing to crush the Boxer Rebellion in China.

He was so pleased with it, he later made a recording.

The rest of Europe was alarmed by his bloodcurdling rhetoric.

The perception is that here is someone who is out of control

and you don't know what he's going to do next

and he's leading a very powerful country with a powerful army.

I mean, is he bent on war?

German power means that when the Kaiser opens his mouth,

people listen hard.

He is seen as the symbol of brash, arrogant,

powerful German militarism.

The son of Queen Victoria's oldest daughter,

Wilhelm had been born with a disabled left arm.

He had grown up into an erratic, unpredictable monarch...

..and, by 1900, was widely regarded

as a dangerous, destabilising force in European politics.

His emotions towards Britain and his British family

were particularly tangled.

Wilhelm has a very ambivalent attitude towards England.

On the one hand, he hates England.

On the other hand, he longs to be recognised by England.

So it's a very conflicted attitude that he has towards England,

not just at a personal level but also at a political level.

I think this is crucial to his whole foreign policy, in fact.

At the end of the 1890s, the Kaiser took a fateful decision...

..ordering a dramatic expansion of the German navy.

Having failed to coax the British into friendship,

the naval build-up was Wilhelm's way of forcing Britain

and his British relatives to show him the respect he felt he deserved.

Some people have described Germany at this time,

it's like a sort of adolescent that wants to swing its weight around.

In a way, Wilhelm is the adolescent who never grows up

and who is incredibly bad at seeing

the potential consequences of his actions.

And it's, "Well, if they wouldn't take notice of us this way,

"we're going to play hard and see how they like it."

As a policy, the naval build-up backfired disastrously.

Britain at this time was the world's greatest imperial power.

It ruled over almost a quarter of the world's land surface

and was dependent for its security on its naval supremacy.

In the 1890s, it had been disdainful of the need for friends and allies.

But now the German naval build-up

combined with a series of unexpected military set backs

in the Boer War in South Africa

to force a radical change of course in British foreign policy.

It made the British do what they didn't really like to do

and that is look for peacetime allies.

So the Germans got precisely the opposite of what they had hoped for.

What you do when you have an enemy

is you look for the enemies of your enemy.

In 1902, Britain signed a military alliance with Japan,

easing pressure on the Royal Navy in the Far East.

Then, in the spring of 1903,

the British king, Edward VII, set off for Paris.

Edward VII is conventionally seen as a lazy king

because he's too fat and too interested in going to parties.

I think that this view is, um...

a lazy view.

In terms of foreign policy,

Edward VII is far more active than he's been given credit for.

Paris was a city where Edward, a notorious philanderer,

had spent many pleasurable hours over the years.

But he was now determined to deploy his royal charm and charisma

in the service of his country.

He arrived to find the French capital seething

with resentment over Britain's treatment of the Boers.

There is an atmosphere you could cut with a knife

of hostility to the king of England.

Edward's agenda is basically to turn this around.

So he launches what you might call a charm offensive on Paris.

Over the course of two or three days,

he sort of converts the boos into cheers.

It's a great PR exercise.

Paris is completely on his side and the significance of that

is that it means that opinion in France is completely changed

and so it's possible for the politicians to get together

over the negotiating table and work out an agreement

between the two countries.

Edward's trip laid the ground for the Entente Cordiale,

signed between Britain and France the following year,

to the fury of the Kaiser.

Although short of a formal military alliance,

the Entente ended almost 1,000 years of rivalry.

Combined with the Franco-Russian defence pact

signed a decade earlier,

it meant it was the Germans who now felt isolated.

For Wilhelm, Edward's success was a painful lesson

in the art of diplomacy.

Edward has this savoir-faire, this charm.

And Wilhelm is the opposite.

He tries too hard. He throws himself at people.

He's obviously manipulative. He's over-energetic.

People just don't like him.

Wilhelm is monumentally jealous of his uncle because Edward is so good.

He is so relaxed. He is so good with people.

The King is what he wants to be.

When King and Kaiser met,

German officials were embarrassed by the contrast.

Observing them in conversation, wrote one, was like watching...

"A fat, malicious tomcat playing with a shrew mouse".

The anxious Germans moved quickly

to try and drive a wedge in the new Anglo-French relationship.

In the spring of 1905,

it was decided Wilhelm would take a trip to Tangier in Morocco,

a country which was supposedly under French control,

according to the terms of the Entente Cordiale.

So what this does is basically throw down a gauntlet.

It says to the French, "Germany is now trying to move in on Morocco,

"are you going to let them do it?"

The British are put in a position of do they support France or not?

The Kaiser intended to declare support for Moroccan independence.

Faced with this challenge,

it was assumed Britain would fail to support the French,

revealing itself as a weak, unreliable ally.

It was a grand theatrical gesture of the type the Kaiser loved.

But strangely, when he arrived in Morocco,

Wilhelm suddenly got cold feet.

The great irony about the Kaiser was he talked in this warlike way

but when it came to the crunch in crisis after crisis,

he was the one who wanted to pull back.

He was the one who said, "Let's make a deal."

William II had this characteristic of talking bombastically

and then running away.

On this occasion, the Kaiser's nervousness was compounded

by a simple physical fear of riding a strange horse

with his disabled arm.

Wilhelm is a good rider but he can only ride a horse

if it's been broken in to his very special needs.

Eventually, the Kaiser plucked up courage

and road unsteadily through the streets of Tangier.

In photos, an aide can be seen holding nervously on to his saddle.

But the Tangier initiative proved clumsy and counter-productive.

When the French protested, the British stood firm behind them

and it was Germany that had to back down.

The immediate reaction of his uncle, Edward VII,

is to go to France and have conversations

with all the key French diplomats to strengthen the Entente Cordiale.

The Kaiser is left high and dry, humiliated.

He personally has made this landing.

He personally has stood up for Germany's rights.

And he gets nothing out of it.

It's a moment where Germany faces its isolation as never before.

King Edward regarded the Kaiser's attempt to sabotage

the Anglo-French Entente as underhand and dishonourable.

It was a turning point in their already difficult relationship.

"I have tried to get on with him

"and shall nominally do my best till the end.

"But trust him? Never.

"He is utterly false

"and the bitterest foe that England possesses."

The Kaiser, too, now saw Edward as his greatest enemy.

"He is a Satan. You can hardly believe what a Satan he is."

But Wilhelm was having more luck in relations with his Russian cousin,

Tsar Nicholas II.

By this time, Nicholas and his wife, the Tsarina Alexandra,

had been on the throne a decade and were living at the Alexander Palace,

just outside Saint Petersburg.

By Romanov standards, it was modest. Almost humble.

The Tsarina decorated the walls

with pictures of her beloved grandmother, Queen Victoria...

..and, perhaps less wisely, of the French queen, Marie Antoinette...

..along with countless religious icons.

Both Tsar and Tsarina were firmly committed

to maintaining their own absolute autocratic rule...

..while, in foreign policy, Nicholas was starting to be drawn

to Romantic dreams of imperial expansion in the Far East.

Dreams his older cousin, the German Kaiser Wilhelm,

was keen to encourage.

"Dearest Nicky, it is the great task of the future for Russia

"to cultivate the Asian continent

"and to defend Europe from the inroads of the great yellow race.

"In this, you will always find me on your side,

"ready to help you as best as I can."

"You'll be the emperor of the Pacific

"and I'll be the emperor of the Atlantic."

It's all in those terms.

Trying to persuade an emperor,

whom he clearly regards as a kind of retarded child.

The Kaiser wants to point Nicholas eastwards

because he wants Russia to leave Germany alone.

It's as basic as that.

If Russia's busy in the East

and busy building an empire in the East, it won't be looking West.

Nicholas had little time for his German cousin

but, on the issue of Russian expansion in the East,

their views happened to coincide.

It was a policy that would lead Nicholas to disaster.

In 1904, war broke out between Russia and Japan, Britain's ally...

..after the Japanese attacked Russia's Pacific fleet.

Nicholas was able, briefly, to ride a tide of popular enthusiasm,

blessing the troops before they set off to fight.

Although the Anglo-Japanese treaty did not oblige Britain to intervene,

inevitably, as the fighting intensified,

Britain's relations with Russia deteriorated sharply.

In October 1904,

Russia's Baltic fleet, en route to the Far East,

accidentally fired on British trawlers in the North Sea,

killing three fishermen.

They fire on them because, bizarrely,

they think it's a squadron of Japanese torpedo boats.

To this day, nobody's ever really understood why an admiral

could think he was encountering the Japanese fleet in the North Sea.

When the trawlers got back to Hull, there was outrage

and war between Britain and Russia was narrowly averted.

When, finally, the Russian Baltic fleet arrived in the Far East,

it was annihilated in a single afternoon by the Japanese.

Russia's land forces were also defeated.

The Russo-Japanese War was an unmitigated disaster for Russia.

It cost huge amounts of money.

It was a total humiliation because Russia, in the end,

was beaten by what was regarded by the rest of the world

as a third-rate power.

The war exposed Russia's backwardness, discrediting Nicholas

and fuelling discontent with his autocratic regime.

On January the 22nd 1905,

troops opened fire on peaceful demonstrators in Saint Petersburg,

killing hundreds.

Events later recreated by Soviet film-makers.

The German Kaiser wrote to congratulate the Tsar.

"I am glad your soldiers showed themselves reliable

"and true to their Emperor."

In contrast, Britain's King Edward, appalled at the slaughter,

was conspicuous by his silence.

Revolution now spread across Russia.

The Tsar, who had previously enjoyed good relations

with his British relatives, became increasingly hostile

and was soon referring to the British as "Zhids" or Jews,

which he, like most Russians, assumed to be an insult.

He picked up his pen to write to his German cousin.

"Dearest Willy, it is certainly high time to put a stop to this.

"Germany, Russia and France should at once unite upon an agreement

"to abolish Anglo-Japanese arrogance and insolence.

"Would you like to lay down and frame the outlines

"of such a Treaty and let me know it?"

Wilhelm didn't need asking twice.

The two men agreed to meet on their yachts

off the Finnish island of Bjorko.

This was very much a royal initiative.

Like schoolboys skipping school, as their yachts neared,

the Tsar and the Kaiser telegraphed excitedly ahead.

"At home nobody informed."

"I'm so delighted to be able to see you."

"All my guests under impression of going to Visby, in Gotland.

"Their faces will be worth seeing

"when they suddenly behold your yacht.

"A fine lark."

The two men met for what they believed would be

an historic encounter, on July the 24th, 1905.

Bjorko is a fantasy for Wilhelm and Nicholas

about sort of what autocratic rulers can accomplish.

Wilhelm says, "You know, this is a new day

"for the autocratic monarchies.

"You know, it's US - it's you and me against those democratic states,

"that's what the future holds.

"We've got to stick together against Republican France

"and evil, democratic England."

Acting on their own initiative,

the two monarchs signed a military alliance between Germany and Russia.

An event that would have transformed the European balance of power.

Wilhelm writes in his memoirs that, as they signed,

a ray of sunshine came through the yacht window and he looked up

and, in heaven, you know, his and Nicholas' grandfathers

were shaking hands.

And they both go home

and their ministers go, "What?!"

The two men had attempted to conduct diplomacy

as if they were medieval monarchs,

but they had revealed themselves as amateurs.

The Bjorko summit fails because, in the end,

Nicholas's advisers tell him the truth, which is that,

"You've got to choose - either you can have this alliance with Germany,

"without the French alliance,

"or you can stick to the Franco-Russian Alliance,

"at which point, you cannot sign Bjorko."

The Kaiser's ministers, too, were furious he had signed the treaty

without consulting them and refused to ratify it.

For both men, it was a lesson that, at the dawn of the 20th century,

royal power was greater in theory than in practice.

Ironically, it was the monarch who wielded least power

that had emerged as the master diplomat.

King Edward VII had almost no say in British foreign policy,

but he was a superb ambassador

and, in 1907, he invited the Tsar's mother, Minnie, to Britain,

keen to smooth the tensions inflamed by the Russo-Japanese War.

The visit was primarily personal.

The ever-youthful Minnie, in black,

was the sister of the equally youthful British Queen Alexandra.

The tsarist regime had only narrowly survived the revolution of 1905

and, for Minnie, it was a relief to escape

the claustrophobic atmosphere of Saint Petersburg,

as she wrote to her son, Nicholas.

"Everyone is so very kind and friendly to me!

"I do wish you could come over here for a little to breathe the air

"and live for a while in different surroundings.

"How good for you that would be!"

The two sisters, seen here on the right, were from Denmark

and had never forgiven the Germans for the invasion

of their native country in 1864.

For over 40 years, they had striven to improve Anglo-Russian relations

and their sons, Tsar Nicholas and the future King George V,

were close friends.

Now, finally, history was on the side of the Danish sisters.

Just a few months later, Britain and Russia signed an historic entente,

resolving outstanding colonial differences

and, in the process, completing the encirclement of Germany.

It is very significant that, at the time of the making

of the Anglo-Russian Entente, Minnie comes to London.

I think she is really playing a key part in trying to engineer

this entente and this, in a way, is the culmination

of all that these two sisters have been working for politically.

At last, they've got it.

Royalty had played a key role smoothing the path to friendship

and the British government now deployed King Edward to seal the deal,

dispatching the royal couple to the Baltic port of Tallinn

for the first-ever visit to Russian territory

by a reigning British monarch.

For Russian officials, the jovial Edward provided a welcome contrast

to the bullying, hectoring German Kaiser.

The Russians are really impressed and they keep saying, you know,

"He's so much easier to deal with than the Kaiser.

"The Kaiser's a nightmare!"

Confronted with the tricky protocol issue

of who should go into dinner first, the Tsarina or the Tsar's mother,

Edward displayed his legendary tact.

He had the wonderful idea of saying,

"Well, now I have the unique opportunity

"of walking into dinner with an empress on either arm,"

so he took them both into dinner and they were both happy.

Privately, Edward regarded Nicholas as...

"Weak as water, deplorably unsophisticated,

"immature and reactionary."

Far more liberal politically than his nephew,

the King startled his hosts by raising the issue

of anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia.

But, overall, the summit was a success.

Tsarist Russia and parliamentary Britain were now allies.

In Germany, the public was horrified.

Suddenly, this dreadful nightmare of Bismarck's has come true

and Germany really is surrounded

by the three great powers left in Europe.

People say, "What kind of regime is this?

"Where have we got to? When Bismarck was dismissed,

"Germany was allied to almost every power.

"Now, almost every power is allied against Germany, what's happened?"

At the new palace outside Berlin, the Kaiser found himself

and his entourage under growing pressure and intense scrutiny.

Wilhelm was now engulfed in a series of surprising scandals.

The Kaiser, without realising it, had gathered a circle

of gay men around him, or bisexual men around him,

and they were very close to him and they were very sort of...

It was all innocent stuff.

I mean, it was like his days in the army, where he'd been with men only

and they sort of played practical jokes on each other

and they called each other very affectionate terms.

The oldest and closest of these gay advisers

was Count Philipp zu Eulenburg,

the bearded figure seen here

with his hand on the shoulder of the Kaiser,

who is wearing sunglasses.

It's unlikely the Kaiser himself was a repressed homosexual.

He was married twice, had seven children

and a number of mistresses.

But Eulenburg and his circle filled a deep emotional need.

He has this feminine side to him.

He is very much interested, for example, in jewellery and in design.

He designs his wife's clothes, he designs uniforms.

He's a great aesthete, he likes beautiful things,

he does flower arrangements.

I mean, he has a feminine side and then this macho side.

I mean, I think the Kaiser probably was someone

who was more sensitive and more artistic

than he could let himself appear.

He is seen by foreigners as an embodiment

of all that is worst about a German mindset.

And the terrible irony of that is that William partly espouses

that mindset because he believes that's what he's supposed to be.

The little boy with the poorly arm,

the little boy who is humiliated by being put in a metal cage

as a child to sort out the unevenness in his shoulders

takes his revenge by becoming a caricature

of a great Wagnerian warrior.

The Kaiser was an emotionally damaged man and he knew it,

as he once told Eulenburg.

"Something is missing in me that others have,

"all poetic feeling in me is dead, has been killed."

With Eulenburg and his gay circle,

the Kaiser could drop the act and be himself.

But now Eulenburg's homosexuality was exposed in the German press...

..Wilhelm was forced to dismiss him.

The Kaiser was bereft

and, at the end of 1908, suffered a serious nervous breakdown.

He just vanishes, he leaves Berlin and goes into hiding

and he writes a letter to one of his friends saying, you know,

"I'm such a sensitive soul and how can they be so awful to me?

"And I feel so hurt, the public has hurt me.

"And everybody is against me." He feels totally encircled.

Wilhelm recovered,

but he was never again as dominant a figure in German foreign policy.

In Saint Petersburg, Tsar Nicholas had also withdrawn

somewhat from political life.

Humiliated by the defeat in the Far East,

chastened by near revolution at home,

he took refuge in his growing family.

By now, the couple had four daughters and a son, Alexis,

finally born to them in August 1904.

The Tsar was essentially a family man.

He was a Tsar because he knew that was his duty

and he performed the roles very diligently,

he accepted it was a role that he had to do,

but he found his fulfilment in private life, so did Alex.

They were the wealthiest, most powerful royal family in Europe,

but the Romanovs' own home movies capture their relaxed private life.

Some of the footage of the Tsar himself is startlingly revealing.

There are countless photographs, countless footage of the Tsar

and his children playing.

Often quite informal, surprisingly informal, actually.

The Tsar was willing to open up that private family life

to the photographers' lens.

To try, I suppose, to capture something

that was profoundly important to him.

The Romanovs were keen amateur photographers.

They left behind numerous albums containing thousands of images.

A unique, intimate portrait of a close, loving family.

Although the visits of cousin Willy from Germany appear not to have been

the most eagerly anticipated event of the year.

It's often said Nicholas would have made a perfectly good king of England

because he's a nice, relaxed family man.

In a constitutional role,

he would probably have fitted in very comfortably,

but he's not in a constitutional role,

he's in a role where everything devolves on him.

The Tsar considered it a holy duty

to maintain the autocratic political system of his forefathers.

You have what perhaps is the worst of all possible worlds.

You have a man who's rigid in his commitment to autocracy,

but actually doesn't really have the kind of character,

the kind of determination to carry it through.

It's as though sometimes, and this is perhaps a bit harsh on Nicholas,

he's like a small boy trying to play the part of autocrat.

His father played it very well, Nicholas can't do it.

Like the German Kaiser, the Tsar spent his life

trying to be something he was not,

to play a part that did not come naturally to him.

His wife, Alexandra, was no more comfortable in the role of Tsarina.

She was not a good empress in the sense that

she didn't enjoy parties, she didn't enjoy dancing,

she didn't enjoy talking to members of high society.

On the contrary, she thoroughly disliked it.

And the more she felt herself hated and despised

and condemned in Petersburg society, the more, to make up for it,

she herself came to denounce this society as superficial,

alien to Russia.

The imperial couple had also been afflicted by tragedy.

Their son, Alexis, heir to the throne, had haemophilia,

a potentially fatal condition that prevents the blood from clotting.

Alexis had inherited haemophilia from his mother,

who had inherited it from her beloved grandmother, Queen Victoria.

When well, the Tsarevich, seen here rowing, was a feisty lad.

Here, he's third from the right, displaying the imperiousness

his father sometimes lacked.

But often, after suffering attacks of bleeding,

he had to be carried in public by a large sailor.

His condition was kept secret but, in time, it will lead the Tsarina,

always intensely religious,

to dependence on the notorious, debauched mystic, Rasputin,

who appeared to be the only man able to treat her son's condition.

It was a relationship that would have disastrous consequences

for the Romanov dynasty.

In May 1910, King Edward VII of Britain died at the age of 68.

If Queen Victoria was the grandmother of Europe,

Edward was its genial uncle.

Regarded as a philanderer and a playboy when he ascended the throne,

he had surprised everyone with his diplomatic skills.

And he was seen as the architect

of Germany's encirclement by Kaiser Wilhelm,

seen here on the left, walking side-by-side with his cousin,

now King George V, behind Edward's coffin.

Wilhelm, of course, typically dashes to London as quickly as he can

and plays a very prominent part in the funeral procession.

However, I do not think that the Kaiser shed many tears

about the death of his uncle Bertie.

In fact, I think he was probably rather relieved.

"Only the French and the Jews will miss him."

Wilhelm was confident he could look forward

to a better relationship with the new King.

George V and the Kaiser were first cousins, almost equal in age,

but George V was...made no attempt to compete or try to upstage the Kaiser

and so the Kaiser had no need to sort of show off and be difficult.

George had always lived in the shadow

of his more flamboyant father.

George V felt thoroughly inadequate to succeed his father.

His father was this great, majestic personality.

George was small, puny by comparison.

Originally trained as a naval officer,

George's education had been limited.

Like his cousin and close friend, Tsar Nicholas, 16 years before,

he was terrified at the prospect of ascending the throne.

The Tsar wrote kindly to offer him consolation.

"Dearest Georgie, just a few lines to tell you how deeply I feel

"for the terrible loss you and England have sustained.

"I know, alas, by experience what it costs one.

"There you are with your heart bleeding and aching

"but, at the same time, duty imposes itself."

MARTIAL MUSIC PLAYS

George now reigned over the greatest Empire on earth.

And, in 1911, he became the first British monarch

to travel to India to be crowned Emperor.

He didn't impress the locals.

There's this huge durbar in Delhi,

and George makes a sort of ceremonial entry

but, unfortunately, George, who was not very brave,

refuses to ride an elephant

and insists on making his entry on a horse

and the horse is rather a small horse.

So here is the King Emperor entering Delhi,

but nobody can see him in the procession

cos he's below all the elephants.

And as he received homage from countless maharajas and princes,

George found the crown, literally, to be a burden.

That night, he wrote in his diary.

"Rather tired after wearing the crown for three and a half hours.

"It hurt my head, as it is pretty heavy."

The German Kaiser was dismissive of Britain's new King.

"An English country gentleman without political interests,

"whose sketchy linguistic abilities

"will incline him towards staying at home."

It was one of Wilhelm's more perceptive observations,

but King George's accession

did nothing to ease Wilhelm's own isolation.

In May 1913, the Kaiser invited George to Berlin

for the wedding of his only daughter, Viktoria Luise.

The wedding was held symbolically on Queen Victoria's birthday

and would be the last great gathering

of the old Queen's extended family.

King George was filmed being greeted by the Kaiser.

Tsar Nicholas also attended, although both had been wary.

"I'll go if you go," wrote the Tsar to the King.

Wilhelm's delighted that they've all come, he puts on a big show,

big dresses, great feasts,

but he's also paranoid

that they're all talking behind their backs about him.

And so he won't let Nicholas and George ever be alone together,

because he's scared they're going to sort of plot against him.

Now, the truth about Nicholas and George is

you couldn't find two men who less want to talk about politics.

For the King and the Tsar, the wedding was a welcome opportunity

to renew their friendship, as George wrote in his diary.

"I had a long and satisfactory talk with dear Nicky,

"he was just the same as always."

Even at his own daughter's wedding,

it was once again the Kaiser

who was left feeling excluded.

There's a great paradox and irony in the fact

that this huge event in Germany

is a sort of enormous manifestation of the extension of this royal family

and yet, actually, the truth is that Wilhelm's never felt so isolated,

you know, the feeling he takes away from this is that, actually,

his two other closest cousins are ganging up on him.

He's alienated everybody else and he's just on his own.

It was the last time in European history

monarchs who mattered gathered together.

None of the three royal cousins would ever meet again.

Just over a year later,

the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand,

seen here on the left out hunting with his friend, Kaiser Wilhelm,

made a trip to the Bosnian city of Sarajevo.

There, on June the 28th 1914,

he and his wife were assassinated by Serb nationalists.

Serbia was Russia's ally...

..Austria-Hungary was Germany's.

The alliance system now threatened

to drag the whole of Europe into war.

As tensions mounted, telegrams flew back and forth

between the three royal cousins.

"I beg you, in the name of our old friendship,

"to do what you can to stop your allies going too far."

"The peace of Europe may still be maintained by you

"if Russia will agree to stop the military measures

"which must threaten Germany and Austro-Hungary."

"I am most anxious not to miss any possibility of avoiding

"the terrible calamity which at present threatens the whole world."

King George was appalled at the thought of war, but had no power,

while in Saint Petersburg,

Tsar Nicholas had power, but felt he had no choice.

The last thing in July 1914 that Nicholas II wants is war.

The basic problem is

how do you defend what are seen as essential Russian interests

without risking a war?

And the answer is there is no way to do that,

certainly in the perception of the decision-makers.

If Russia crumbles before the Austrian takeover of Serbia,

its military and geopolitical position in Europe

will be undermined.

No-one will believe that Russia will stand up for its own interests again.

To back down now, Nicholas felt,

would be for Russia to abdicate its status as a great power.

In Berlin, the Kaiser's attitude, as ever, was more complex.

I think, as is so often with the Kaiser, he's in two minds.

I think he's afraid of war and the possible consequences,

but he doesn't want to back down and look like a fool.

And there's this very revealing thing he says in the summer of 1914.

He says to a friend, "This time, I'm not going to back down.

"This time, I'm not going to back down."

The friend said, "Really odd to hear him repeating it.

"It seems to me this is something he fears."

And, you know, he knew that a lot of his army

were calling him William The Timid.

The Kaiser initially encouraged the Austrians to crush the Serbs.

Then, faced with the possibility of a war on three fronts

against Russia, France and Britain,

he suddenly changed course,

writing to the Austrians, telling them to accept Serbian concessions.

"Austria has forced Serbia to make a very humiliating retreat.

"There is no longer any reason for war.

"I am prepared to mediate for peace."

But the initiative from the Royal Palace was sabotaged

by Wilhelm's generals and politicians in Berlin,

weary of the indecisiveness of their blustering leader.

He orders Berlin

to transmit that message to the Austrians,

and they don't do so in time, and they weaken it,

they water it down, to the point

where the Austrians can hardly make sense of it any more.

By the time it reaches Vienna,

the bombardment of Belgrade has already begun.

At this point, with Europe on the brink of general war,

family politics intervened, creating fatal confusion.

Kaiser Wilhelm's brother, Heinrich, happened to be in London,

and went to talk to the King.

On Sunday morning, Heinrich turns up at Buckingham Palace,

sees George for five or six minutes,

who says, "I don't really have time to talk to you

"because I'm going to church, the service is starting."

It's a sad moment, really.

And Heinrich says, "Well, the question I have is,

"what will you do if there's a war on the Continent?"

George said, "Oh, I don't think we will come into the war.

"You know, I can't see why we would."

"But, you know, obviously I can't say for certain."

Heinrich goes home and, like a lot of people around Wilhelm,

he likes to tell Wilhelm what he wants to hear,

and so he says, "Oh, George says they're not going to get involved,"

and Wilhelm seizes on this.

He says, "I have the word of a king, and that's good enough for me."

And now he's all full of strength again, thinking Britain

will stay out of the war and he can have the Continental war

that he does want without fear of British interference.

By the time the British made clear they would stand by their allies,

it was too late.

Germany was already at war with Russia.

As troops mobilised across Europe,

the Kaiser blamed Britain's Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey,

for what he saw as a betrayal.

"Grey makes the King a liar. Dirty bastard!

"The encirclement of Germany has become a fact.

"The net has closed above our heads."

In Russia, Nicholas's bitterness was directed towards Wilhelm.

"He was never sincere, not for a moment.

"In the end, he was hopelessly entangled

"in the net of his perfidity and lies."

King George's diary entry was characteristically low-key.

"Fairly warm, showers and windy.

"I held a council at 10:45 to declare war with Germany.

"It is a terrible catastrophe, but it is not our fault.

"Please God, it may soon be over."

Crowds surged onto the streets of Europe's capitals.

In Berlin, the Kaiser was recorded rallying the nation.

In Saint Petersburg, the Tsar appeared on the balcony

of the Winter Palace and was also later recorded rallying his troops.

But this was a war none of the cousins had wanted.

The Kaiser's blustering, erratic personality

had done much to destabilise Europe.

The Tsar had revealed himself an inept amateur.

Only George can be excused all blame,

because he didn't matter.

But, in the end, all three cousins were tired -

very ordinary men steamrollered by history.

Over the next four years, more than 10 million people would die.

Queen Victoria's extended family was ripped, brutally, apart.

Of the 120 descendants of the old Queen alive in 1914,

42 were living in enemy countries.

11 would fight against Britain and her allies,

including the Tsarina Alexandra's own German brother.

She was distraught.

"What a horrible war this is. What evil and suffering it means."

Others had more mixed emotions.

The outbreak of war happened to find the Danish sisters -

who had never forgiven the Germans

for the invasion of their native country half a century before -

together in London.

The Tsar's mother, Minnie, was blunt.

"You cannot imagine what a satisfaction it is for me,

"after having been obliged

"to dissimilate my feelings for 50 years,

"to be able to tell the whole world how I hate the Germans."

Her sister, Alex, the widow of Edward VII,

wrote to her son, King George, urging him to remove what she called

"the vile Prussian banners" of his German relatives

from the chapel at Windsor,

where she had been married 51 years before.

But this was a conflict

that would break the power of monarchy for ever.

Under the intense pressure of war, King George V,

a figurehead even before 1914, found himself relegated

to an entirely ceremonial role,

visiting the troops, bolstering morale.

The Kaiser, too, who had wielded very real power,

found it was now wrested from him by his generals.

"The general staff tells me nothing and never asks for my opinion.

"If they imagine in Germany that I command the Army,

"then they are very much mistaken.

"I drink tea and saw wood and go for walks."

Only the Tsar bucked this trend,

appointing himself Supreme Commander of the Russian forces.

It was a disastrous move.

Nicholas was now held personally responsible

for Russia's defeats on the battlefield.

As the casualties mounted, discontent grew.

The mood in the Army became sour, bitter.

But still Nicholas refused demands for political reform,

bolstered always by letters from his wife, the Tsarina, Alexandra.

"We must give a strong country to Baby.

"Be firm.

"Russia loves to feel the whip, it's their nature.

"How I wish I could pour my will into your veins.

"Be Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible.

"Crush them all under you."

At the end of 1916, the Tsarina's favourite, Rasputin,

viewed as the evil genius behind the regime, was brutally murdered.

Then, in March, 1917, bread riots turned into a full-scale revolution.

The Tsarist regime was overthrown.

The Imperial family were made prisoners

in their own home at the Alexander Palace.

The question now was what to do with them.

In London, the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George,

seen here with the King, was prepared to grant asylum.

Kaiser Wilhelm agreed to allow his cousin safe passage.

But then the Government received an unexpected letter

from King George's private secretary.

"The King has been thinking much about the government's proposal

"that the Emperor Nicholas and his family should come to England.

"The King has a strong personal friendship for the Emperor,

"but His Majesty cannot help doubting whether it is advisable

"that the imperial family should take up their residence in this country."

Bolshevism was raising its ugly head,

and George V saw Bolshevism

as a universal danger to the established order.

And he felt that this contagion

was liable to spread across Europe.

King George was about to change his family name

from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor

to distance himself from the Kaiser.

He now feared he might be tainted by association with his Russian cousin.

The international brotherhood of royalty was unravelling.

When Lloyd George's government hesitated,

a further letter was dispatched from the palace.

"The opposition to the Emperor and Empress coming here

"is so strong that we must be allowed to withdraw

"from the consent previously given to the Russian government's proposal."

The offer of asylum for the Tsar and his family was withdrawn.

George V's refusal to accept Nicholas II

was an act of cowardice,

or certainly an act of political...

..coldness.

But then, after all, monarchs are hereditary politicians.

At that level, their relations with each other are not, ever,

relations of ordinary human beings.

These are relations of state.

And a monarchy thinks of his dynasty.

The supreme law, as far as royalty is concerned,

is to survive, and that's what George did.

At the end of 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in Saint Petersburg.

Shortly afterwards, the Tsar and his family were moved

to this house in Yekaterinburg in the Russian Urals.

On the night of July the 16th 1918,

they were herded along with four servants into a basement room,

where a drunken execution squad awaited them.

The Tsar and his wife died almost immediately,

but the daughters had sewn the family diamonds into their corsets.

The bullets bounced off them

and they had to be clubbed and bayoneted to death.

The Tsarevich also survived the first volley.

Groaning and clutching at his dead father's coat,

he was kicked in the head, then finished off at point-blank range.

The basement room later became a tourist attraction

for triumphant Bolsheviks.

In London, King George opened his trusty diary.

"I hear from Russia that there is every probability

"that Alicky and the four daughters and little boy

"were murdered at the same time as Nicky.

"It's too horrible and shows what fiends these Bolshevists are.

"For Alicky, perhaps it was best so, "but those poor innocent children!"

When George does learn about the death of the Romanovs,

his reaction is basically to forget about his refusal of asylum.

He never expressed any guilt, any sorrow,

any admission of having let his cousin down in this way,

and, indeed, he did his best to cover the whole thing up

and let Lloyd George take the blame for it.

It was not until decades after George's death

that the truth about his role emerged.

By the summer of 1918,

the Kaiser, too, was entering his last days in power.

As British, French and American troops surged forward,

Wilhelm continued to view the vast human tragedy

in intensely personal terms,

suffering nightmares that his English and Russian relatives

were marching past, mocking him.

As defeat loomed, revolution broke out in Germany.

Wilhelm was defiant.

"I wouldn't dream of quitting my throne on account

"of a few hundred Jews or a thousand workers."

Then, on November the 9th 1918, he was confronted by his generals.

Finally, the generals

tell Wilhelm, "The game's up."

And Wilhelm looks around, agitatedly, for support.

He realises there's none and then one general writes in his diary,

"And so we took him, like a little child, by the hand

"and led him to Holland to exile."

Wilhelm never returned to Germany,

and never spoke to his cousin, King George, again.

He would live comfortably in exile in Holland for 22 years,

chopping wood and writing his memoirs,

blaming others for the disaster that had befallen his country.

"While commanded by me,

"the brave army was achieving victories.

"The war was lost by the people at home,

"led by their incompetent statesmen, lied to by the Jews."

The former Kaiser would congratulate Hitler on his early victories.

And when finally he died in 1941,

the Fuhrer sent a huge wreath to his funeral.

Just one of the three royal cousins held on to his throne -

King George, through luck and judgment.

Over the next two decades, he and his wife, Queen Mary,

would become the pioneers of modern monarchy,

converting George's very mundanity into an asset.

In 1932, he inaugurated the tradition

of the Christmas broadcast.

'His Majesty the King.'

'Through one of the marvels of modern science...

'..I am enabled this Christmas Day...

'..to speak to all my people throughout the Empire.'

George V's virtues as King seem to me

that he is essentially dutiful. He recognises that

the irony of royal position is that,

very far from having infinite opportunity,

you have rather limited opportunities,

because you, in order to survive successfully in the modern world,

must appear to do what is expected of you.

This is helped by the fact that he's not a very imaginative man.

I think if you are unimaginative,

you're much less likely to rock the boat.

George and Mary would become the first service monarchs -

dull, diligent, dutiful

and utterly powerless.

This was the deal royalty had had to make to survive.

Never again would the peace of Europe hinge

on the eccentricities of individuals selected by the lottery of birth.