Wilhelm was horribly jealous of Edward, who was hugely popular in Europe, and longed for his attention: a disgruntled German courtier wrote that he 'fluttered' round 'fat' Edward 'like a leaf in the wind round a tower'. Within three months of coming to the throne in 1888, he had his uncle Edward publicly evicted from Vienna, then later claimed the episode had never taken place and refused to apologise. He was convinced that he had a talent for persuasion. From the moment he became German emperor in 1888, he wanted to be a force in international affairs and decided that the way to do it was through 'personal diplomacy' – his relationships with other monarchs. What made it extra difficult was that Wilhelm had enthusiastically adopted his grandmother's ideas about mixing personal relations and politics. Told incessantly by his English mother that everything British was better than anything German, he had grown up confused and obsessed by, and resentful of, his English cousins and Britain itself. He was riven with insecurities – in particular towards his English family – which made him desperate always to be in the right, easily hurt and vindictive. He was spoilt, wilful, bombastic and had the attention span of a gnat. Personally, Wilhelm was difficult enough. Things went badly wrong, for example, between Kaiser Wilhelm and his English relations – Queen Victoria, whose oldest grandson he was and who regarded him with a mixture of indulgence and exasperation, his uncle Edward VII and cousin George. But the entanglement of politics and personal relationships placed terrible pressure on both, and when things went wrong, the consequences were often darkly comic and disastrous. Most significantly, George was first cousin to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany (whose mother was the Queen's eldest daughter) and first cousin to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia (whose mother was sister to George's mother).

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