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On such giant waves, they could only bob about like so many corks. In the face of national pride, imperial expansion and military glory, the protestations of the crowned heads were swept aside.

Although, technically, Franz Joseph, Nicholas II and Wilhelm II could perhaps have curtailed the coming hostilities, they were at the mercy of more powerful forces: the generals, the politicians, the arms manufacturers, and the relentless timetables of mobilisation. Their constitutional powers counted for almost as little as their cousinhood. But by now there was nothing they could do. Kaiser Wilhelm II (Willie) was particularly assiduous in keeping touch with his cousins Georgie and Nicky. This finally alerted Europe's family of kings to the danger that threatened them.Īs the alliances clicked inexorably into place, a positive snowstorm of telegrams between the crowned heads tried to avert the inevitable. With Serbia's apology not proving abject enough, relations between Serbia and Austria-Hungary were broken off. By now, however, Europe's leading nations were locked in alliances - there was Serbia with Russia, Russia with France, France with Great Britain, Great Britain with Belgium on the one side, and Germany and Austria-Hungary on the other. lt was expected that the Hapsburg Emperor, Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary, would demand and be given an apology from Serbia. Yet at first the monarchs of Europe did not take the incident too seriously. Their kinship simply snapped, like cotton threads, as the storm of war broke over their heads. Instead, World War One proved once and for all that the family ties between the reigning houses of Europe were more or less irrelevant. If their grandmother Queen Victoria had still been alive, said the Kaiser, she would never have allowed them to go to war with each other. For the rulers of the world's three greatest nations - King George V of Great Britain and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia on the one hand, and the German Kaiser on the other - were not simply cousins, they were first cousins. One can appreciate why Kaiser Wilhelm II, at the outbreak of war in 1914, exclaimed that 'Nicky' had 'played him false'. Before it happened, can anyone blame this family of kings, or their subjects, for assuming that a war between these crowned cousins was all but impossible? During World War One there were no less than seven of the old Queen's direct descendants, and two more of her Coburg relations, on European thrones. Queen Victoria was sometimes called the Grandmamma of Europe, and there was hardly a Continental court that did not boast at least one of her relations. Rendering them unassailable (or so they fondly imagined) was the fact that the monarchs of Europe were all closely related. Few of those watching, or taking part in, Edward VII's funeral could have imagined that this blaze of splendour marked, not a royal high noon, but a royal sunset. Whatever the powers of these rulers - whether they were autocrats as in Russia, or virtually powerless constitutional monarchs as in Great Britain - their prestige and position remained almost intact. Without counting the rulers of the kingdoms and duchies that went to make up the German empire, there were 20 reigning monarchs - with a crowned sovereign in every country except France and Switzerland (and even France had restored the monarchy four times in the 19th century).

Instead of diminishing in number, royal thrones had multiplied, and the second half of the 19th and the early years of the 20th centuries had seen the setting up of half a dozen new monarchies, so by the year of Edward VII's death there were more monarchs in Europe than there had ever been. Never since the days of the ancien régime of pre-revolutionary France had monarchy seemed so firmly entrenched. Who, seeing this collection of royalty clattering by, could doubt that the institution of kingship was flourishing? Nothing could better have symbolised the extraordinary early 20th-century flowering of European monarchy than this spectacular parade. Republican envoys, no matter how powerful the countries they represented - even France or the United States - were firmly relegated to the end of the procession.

Here was a moment of supreme monarchical glory.