Count Alexander Konstantinovich Benckendorff was a Russian diplomat, who served as ambassador to Denmark and the United Kingdom.
Background
He was born in 1849, the son of Count Constantin Alexander Constantinovich Benckendorff (22 October 1816 - Paris, 29 January 1858) and wife (Potsdam, 20 June 1848) Princess Louise Constantine Nathalie Johanne de Croy (Anholt, 2 November 1825 - Meran, 8 January 1890), grandson of General Count Konstantin von Benckendorff and grandnephew of General Count Alexander von Benckendorff, and was educated in France and Germany before entering the diplomatic service in 1869.
Career
He began as an attaché in Florence, and eventually served in Rome. He resigned in 1876 and lived nearly ten years on his estates, in Saint St. Petersburg and abroad. A younger son died in one of the first battles of World War I on the East Prussian front.
Returning to diplomacy in 1886, he became First Secretary at the Embassy in Vienna, and from 1897 to 1903 he was the Ambassador to Denmark.
The Copenhagen post gave him a vantage point for watching the principal moving powers of European politics since the matrimonial alliances of the Danish royal family occasionally brought together in a friendly family circle the widow of Alexander III, Nicholas II and the Prince of Wales who was to become King Edward VII. In this way, Count Benckendorff received his initiation into the spirit of an Anglo-Russian rapprochement even before it actually resulted in an entente. From 1903 until his death in 1917, he was the Ambassador to the Court of Saint James"s, the chief Russian diplomat in the United Kingdom.
He also formally proposed the agenda for the Second Hague Conference of 1907. In 1911 Benckendorff"s daughter Nathalie married an Englishman, Jasper Nicholas Ridley, and later became the grandmother of the economist Adam Ridley.
Alexander Konstantinovich Benckendorff died on 11 January 1917 and was buried inside the Westminster Cathedral, where he worshipped weekly.