Download George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I AudioBook Free
Inside the years before the First World Conflict, the great Western powers were ruled by three first cousins: Ruler George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Alongside one another, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the very most destructive war the planet had ever before seen, a warfare that set twentieth-century Europe on course to be the most violent continent in the annals of the world.
Miranda Carter uses the cousins’ correspondence and a bunch of historical resources to tell the tragicomic report of a tiny, glittering, solipsistic world that was often preposterously out of kilter with its times, struggling in which to stay command of politics and world incidents as background overtook it. George, Nicholas and Wilhelm is an excellent and sometimes darkly hilarious portrait of the men—harmed, egotistical Wilhelm; quiet, obstinate Nicholas; and restless, dutiful George—and their lives, foibles and obsessions, from tantrums to uniforms to stamp collecting. It is also alive with fresh, refined portraits of other familiar characters: Queen Victoria—grandmother to two of them, grandmother-in-law to the third—whose conservatism and bullying obsession with family kept a dangerous legacy; and Edward VII, the playboy “arch-vulgarian” who turned out to have a remarkable present for international relations and the theatrics of mass politics. At the same time, Carter weaves through their reviews a riveting bank account of the incidents that led to World Conflict I, showing the way the personal and the political interacted, sometimes to damaging effect.
For all three men the warfare will be a disaster that demolished permanently the illusion with their close family relationships, with any sense of peacefulness and tranquility shattered in a final coda of murder, betrayal and abdication.
