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A 12toKNOW Guide · Russian History

Willy, Nicky, George — and the Rest of the Family

In 1914 the tsar of Russia, the German emperor and the king of Britain were cousins, and so were the kings of Denmark, Norway and Greece. Here is the family, and what it did — and didn't — do.

The web is tighter than the phrase “royal cousins” suggests. Nicholas II's mother was a Danish princess, his wife a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, his great-great-grandfather a king of Prussia. It was not always so: the first Romanovs married Russian boyars' daughters, and the foreign marriages begin in earnest with Peter the Great and become the rule from Catherine the Great’s reign on. By 1914 the Romanovs were, in the marriage market, indistinguishable from the rest of Europe's dynasties. (The full ancestor chart is on its own page.)

King, Kaiser, Tsar

The three who mattered most in July 1914, and exactly how they were related. (The phrase is the title of Catrine Clay's book about them.)

Three family constellations

Tap or hover any name: the same person lights up wherever else they appear, and the panel says how they were related to Nicholas II. Notice how often the same names recur — that is the point.

Kinship to Nicholas II

Computed from parent links, not remembered: each degree below was worked out from the common ancestors on the ancestry page's data.

What the cousins did with it

Read it carefully. Kinship gave the monarchs a private channel; it did not give them independent power. The July 1914 telegrams show the channel working and failing, not the cousins in control: ministers, general staffs and mobilization timetables were driving events, and the same cousins who addressed each other as “Willy” and “Nicky” signed the declarations of war. Whether more cousinly effort could have changed 1914, or 1917, is exactly the sort of counterfactual to hold at arm's length. The 1917 asylum question in particular is still argued: the record points to George V's own misgivings, but historians differ on how much fell to the King and how much to Lloyd George's government.

Method & sources

Data. Parent links come from the father and mother fields of each person's English Wikipedia infobox (read September 2026). Cousin degrees are computed from the nearest common ancestor: two people whose closest shared ancestor is n generations up for one and m for the other are (min(n, m) − 1)th cousins, |n − m| times removed. Where two lines connect the same pair, the closest is shown and the second named. Alix and Nicholas are second cousins through Louis II of Hesse, on the official record that Louis II fathered Marie of Hesse; court gossip named another father.

Events. The Björkö treaty (24 July 1905), the Berlin wedding of 24 May 1913 and the July–August 1914 telegrams are as given in the Wikipedia articles on those events; the 1917 asylum dispute is as described in the articles on George V and Nicholas II. Read Rappaport, The Race to Save the Romanovs, and Clay, King, Kaiser, Tsar; Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra; Montefiore, The Romanovs.

Go deeper: the last tsar's ancestors, eight generations back →

Part of the Russian History guide. Built the same way as everything else at 12toKNOW: in the open, and for the love of it.