Product Description

In the years before the First World War, the great European powers, Britain, Germany and Russia, were ruled by three cousins: George V, King-Emperor of England, the British Empire and India; Wilhelm II, the last Kaiser; and Nicholas II, the last Tsar. Together, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the most destructive war the world had ever seen, a war which set twentieth century Europe on course to be the most violent continent in the history of the world. Miranda Carter uses the cousins’ correspondence and a host of historical sources to tell the tragicomic story of a tiny, glittering, solipsistic world that was often preposterously out of kilter with its times, struggling to stay in command of politics and world events as history overtook it. The Three Emperors is a brilliant and sometimes hilarious portrait of three men – damaged, egotistical Wilhelm, quiet, stubborn Nicholas and anxious, dutiful George – and their lives, foibles and obsessions, from tantrums to uniforms to stamp collecting. It is also alive with fresh, subtle portraits of other familiar figures: Queen Victoria – grandmother to two of them, grandmother-in-law to the third – whose conservatism and bullying obsession with family left a dangerous legacy; and of Edward VII, the playboy ‘arch-vulgarian’ who turned out to have a remarkable gift for international relations and the theatrics of mass politics. At the same time it weaves through their stories a riveting account of the events that led to World War One, showing how the personal and the political interacted, sometimes to devastating effect. For all three men the war would be a disaster which destroyed for ever the illusion of their close family relationships, with any sense of peace and harmony shattered in a final coda of murder, betrayal and abdication.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #856 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 640 pages

About the Author
Miranda Carter's first book, Anthony Blunt: His Lives, won the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Orwell Prize and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, the Duff Cooper Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The book was named as one of the New York Times Book Review's seven best books of 2002. Miranda lives in London with her husband and two sons.

Customer Reviews

What an awful family!
I have long held the belief that, had Queen Victoria lived until she was 95 instead of dying in January, 1901, at the age of 81, she might have boxed the ears of two (Georgie of England and Willy of Germany) of her grandsons and the husband (Nicky of Russia) of one of her grand-daughters - 'The Three Emperors' of the title - and many millions might not have died in the 'Great War.' But Victoria was obviously as ignorant and tiny-minded as the rest of the royals and may well have been as unwilling to call the others to order as they were to call themselves to order.

This well-researched book provides plenty of proof of the ignorance and tiny-mindedness of these people and, is therefore, fascinating and rewarding in its own right. But it also gives a disturbing insight into what many of us know already, namely, that Victoria's family carried on a long royal tradition of being dysfunctional. Not to put too fine a point on it, many members of the family were quite nasty, probably certifiable by modern standards and positively dangerous because of the power that they wielded.

Of course, two of the emperors, Willy and Nicky, were autocrats running autocracies and that has grave and inherent dangers. But Georgie was a would-be autocrat, too, not only in his outlook on the world but also within his family. Thankfully, he was kept in check by successive Prime Ministers under our 'constitutional monarchy' system, unlike the other emperors, who were barely checked at all.

As to the most notorious of all of the extraordinarily awful episodes involving the cousins - that of Georgie's selfish refusal to extend succour and sanctuary to Nicky in 1917 - the author expresses her revulsion in a manner that is restrained whereas I would have gone for the jugular. King George V, Emperor of India but of German blood like his imperial cousins, disgraced his adopted British Empire and brought everlasting shame on his adopted imperial subjects.

Miranda Carter also mentions briefly another curious and seemingly cowardly act of King George V, that of changing his family name from the German 'Saxe-Coburg-Gotha' to the 'stick-a-pin-in-a-map-of-England' one of 'Windsor.' So much for this family's love of heritage and history.

It is interesting to speculate, too, that given the mad and dangerous examples of this family that Ms. Carter has studied in such depth and given the importance that they and others attached and attach to heredity, if it is wise for anyone nowadays to place much store by the sanity and safeness of those of the descendants still living? I don't intend to divulge for this review those whom I might have in mind, but readers can infer what they want from my words.

The downside of this otherwise excellent literary effort is that the author seems to have set out to entertain her readers as well as to educate them and, sometimes, just sometimes, her language is too slanted towards entertainment and is not as elegant as that used by more experienced historians. Nevertheless, I give it five stars and recommend it without hesitation.