Willy returned home from his state visit deeply disgruntled. Visits to his English family always unsettled him. One half of him – the English half – longed with fevered intensity to be accepted by his English relations as if, as well as having an English mother, he had been born there. The other half of him – the Prussian half – wanted nothing more than to hammer home to them how superior and powerful he, and the country of which he was Emperor, was.

He was, after all, far more powerful than his grandmother. She had to pay heed to her ministers. Since the day he had been proclaimed Emperor, Willy had never paid heed to anyone. Not even to Bismarck, a statesman the world held in deep respect and whom, with a click of his fingers, Willy had sacked when the Chancellor had overstepped the mark by insisting that Willy pursue a policy he was opposed to. Since then everyone in a high ministerial position had been recommended to him by Phili, and none of them had ever taken such an unforgivable liberty.

None of them, however, felt about England as he did. Damn it all, he loved England. His earliest memory was of being a toddler at Osborne and of being swung in a napkin by his grandfather, Prince Albert.

If only Albert hadn’t died when he had still been a child, what a team they would have become! His German grandfather would have understood him. He would have made sure that his English family gave Willy the love and respect he deserved. And more than anything else, love and respect was what he craved from his English relations. His grandmother loved him of course, as he did her, but she didn’t show respect to him, by coming to him for political advice. And there were times when he felt she was sorely in need of such advice. On one recent occasion, when a French admiral had been a guest at Buckingham Palace, the band had played the ‘Marseillaise’. To his absolute horror, as this most incendiary hymn to revolution and the overthrowing of kings and emperors was being played, his grandmother had not only risen respectfully to her feet, but had remained standing throughout it! Even the memory was enough to make Willy shudder.

Republican France had never been a friend of Germany’s, and the last thing he wanted was England forming an alliance with France or, for that matter, forming an alliance with any country other than his own. It had to be England and Germany or – as Germany already had a triple alliance with Austria–Hungary and Italy – it had to be England, Germany, Austria–Hungary and Italy. It was something he didn’t have a single doubt about. Any cosying up of England to France smacked of disloyalty, and yet Uncle Bertie – England’s next king – spent more time in France than he did in England.