The Iron Chancellor allied Germany with the other two conservative emperors, Franz Josef and Alexander II of Russia. The tsar, who had acquiesced in the unification of Germany in return for lifting the limitations imposed by the Crimean War, now focused on Ottoman disintegration as the Orthodox Slavs of eastern Europe sought independence. Serbia and Romania were already autonomous. In 1877, Alexander attacked the Ottomans to forge a new country, Bulgaria – and seize Constantinople and the Straits. As Romanov armies galloped towards the outskirts of the Great City, Disraeli, now prime minister, stopped Russian aggression and saved the sultanate by sending in the Royal Navy. Bismarck supported him, fearing a Russian conquest of Istanbul.
They were from different worlds. Disraeli, son of a bookish Jewish immigrant from Morocco, was the first outsider to rule Britain since the Romans, a rise achieved with brazen intrigue and brilliant wit but without money, land or connections. ‘Mr. Disraeli is Prime Minister!’ Queen Victoria wrote to her daughter Vicky. ‘A proud thing for a man “risen from the people”.’ He celebrated: ‘I’ve climbed to the top of the greasy pole.’
Slim and dandyish with dark eyes and curling ringlets, often sporting green trousers and a primrose, Disraeli had dabbled in shady finance and lived for a time in a ménage à trois with a scandalous potentate and his young mistress before his novels made him famous. Now devoted to a well-off if fey wife, twelve years his senior, who called him Dizzy and who ‘didn’t know’, he joked, ‘who came first, the Greeks or the Romans’, he was the first modern Conservative, an advocate of the unity of aristocracy and the people in ‘One Nation’, and an enthusiastic promoter of British world power, all with shameless panache.*
In 1867, he outmanoeuvred Gladstone’s Liberals to pass a Reform Act that doubled the number of male voters, the start of a real British democracy in which most male adults had the vote. Winning a landslide in 1874 and raised to earl of Beaconsfield, now wizened, weary and languid, he was Britain’s most cosmopolitan leader, having travelled to Cairo and Jerusalem – the first prime minister from an ethnic minority. Now at a Berlin congress he and Bismarck joined forces to restrain Russia, save Constantinople and rearrange eastern Europe.
The two admired each other. ‘Bismarck soars above all,’ wrote Disraeli. ‘Six foot four, proportionally stout with a sweet and gentle voice which singularly contrasts with the awful things he says, a complete despot here.’ Bismarck declared, ‘The old Jew is the man.’ The congress granted Cyprus to Britain, censured antisemitism and created a band of new national states: Serbia and Romania became kingdoms; Bulgaria and Montenegro independent principalities, each aspiring to recreate vanished, often imaginary realms.* But the decay of the Ottomans, the ambitions of the new Slavic states and the rivalry of Russia and Austria meant that the Balkans now became the sparkwheel of European conflict. ‘One day,’ predicted Bismarck, ‘the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.’
Disraeli was welcomed home: ‘I’ve brought you back peace – but a peace I hope with honour.’ This delicate balance in Europe now forced the powers to fight their rivalries outside Europe in a new arena: Africa.
* In 1815, Prussia had received the Ruhr, with its yet unknown reserves of coal – and the Krupps would benefit from the exponential growth of the German economy and the growth of population: twenty-two million Germans had doubled to forty by 1870.
* Bismarck’s ally, the Prussian war minister Albrecht von Roon, watched him ‘construct a parallelogram of forces … of that which has already happened, then he assesses the nature and weight of the effective forces which one cannot know precisely – through which I watch the work of the historic genius who confirms that by combining it all’. The gift of a statesman is precisely in ‘combining’ so much that is moving and unpredictable with what can be assured.
* At Sadowa, a young Prussian lieutenant, Paul von Hindenburg, blond and six foot six, son of a Junker landowner and a descendant of Martin Luther, was proud to serve. ‘If I fall,’ he wrote to his father, ‘it’s the most honourable and beautiful death.’ He was almost killed when a bullet lodged in his helmet and knocked him out. Hindenburg would be a key figure in world history: he ruled Germany in the First World War, and it was he who appointed Hitler as chancellor.
