Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 35. (1982)

WILSON, Keith: Isolating the Isolator. Cartwright, Grey and the seduction of Austria-Hungary 1908–1912

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Keith Wilson

lected items of German behaviour which could be so interpreted2). Within a short time, they had enough material to convince themselves that Germany was deliberately and systematically attempting to sow discord between England and other countries, in particular Russia, France, the United States of America, and Spain. The Austrian Ambassador in London, Count Mensdorff, reported a surge of anti-German feeling within the Foreign Office at the time of the Dogger Bank incident (October 1904), when the German Press Attaché in London, Bemstorff, had once again been discovered trying to bribe English journalists to write against the recently made agreement with France and the making of any agreement with Russia3). In the spring of the following year even Lord Lansdowne, the Foreign Secretary since the end of 1900, described the Kaiser’s visit to Tangier as an example of ‘putting spokes in our wheels’: as such, it was ‘no isolated incident’4). His Private Secretary was convinced that it was intended ‘to drive a wedge into the Anglo-French Agreement’, ‘to separate us from France’5). When in September 1905 Har- dinge in St Petersburg discovered that the German Ambassador there had told the Russian Foreign Minister that the recently renewed Anglo-Japanese Alliance was directed against Russia, his comment was that ‘the Germans never seem to leave a stone unturned’6). Though the Germans had looked forward to a change of government in Britain at the end of 1905, there was not, in the eyes of these British officials, any change in German conduct or policy. On the contrary, E. A. Crowe, who became a Senior Clerk in February 1906, would not let himself, or his colleagues, or the Germans, forget what the Prussian Minister at Hamburg, von Tschirschky, was reported as having said to the British Consul General there on New Year’s Day 1906:

‘Germany’s policy always had been, and would be, to try to frustrate any coalition between two states which might result in damaging Germany’s interests and prestige, and Germany would, if she thought that such a coalition was being formed, even if its actual results had not yet been carried into practical effect, not hesitate to take such steps as she thought proper to break up the coalition’7).

2) Public Record Office London (= PRO) Foreign Office (= FO) 800/243 (Crowe MSS) passim.

3) Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv Wien (= HHStA) Politisches Archiv (- PA) VTII/131: Mensdorff to Goluchowski 18 November 1904; ibid. 135: same to same 28 July 1905. I am grateful to Dr F. R. Bridge for showing me his transcriptions of these documents.

4) PRO FO 800/130 (Lansdowne MSS): Lansdowne to Lascelles (British Ambassador in Berlin 1895—1908) 9 April 1905.

5) British Library London Add. MSS 49747 (Balfour MSS): Mallet to Sandars (Private Secretary to Balfour) 20 April, 6 May 1905.

6) Cambridge University Library Har dinge MSS vol. 5: Hardinge to Knollys (Private Secretary to King Edward Vn) 13 September 1905.

7) British Documents on the Origins of the War 1898-1914 (= BD), ed. by G. P. Gooch and H. W. V. Temperley, 3 (1928) no. 419: Minute by Crowe 26 June 1906; ibid. p. 400: Memo by Crowe 1 January 1907; PRO FO 371/1374/14421: Minute by Crowe 6 April 1912.