He was born in 1849, the son of Count Konstantin Alexander Karl Wilhelm Maximilian von Benckendorff (
Berlin, 22 October 1816 –
Paris, 29 January 1858) and wife (
Potsdam, 20 June 1848) Princess Louise Constantine Nathalie Johanne von Croÿ-Dülmen (
Anholt, 2 November 1825 –
Meran, 8 January 1890), grandson of General
Konstantin von Benckendorff and grandnephew of General Count
Alexander von Benckendorff. He was also a second cousin of
Archduchess Isabella of Teschen through his maternal family. Alexander Konstantinovich was educated in France and Germany before entering the diplomatic service in 1869. 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
St. Petersburg and abroad. 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 von Benckendorff received his initiation into the spirit of an Anglo-Russian rapprochement even before it actually resulted in an
entente. From January 1903 until his death in 1917, he was the Ambassador to the
Court of St. James's, the chief Russian diplomat in the United Kingdom. His major achievement was to organize the signing of the
Anglo-Russian Entente in 1907, which solidified relations between the two countries and helped create the
Triple Entente, which, unlike the
Triple Alliance or the
Franco-Russian Alliance itself, was not an alliance of mutual defense. This broad diplomatic alignment would later form the
Allies of World War I. He also formally proposed the agenda for the
Second Hague Conference of 1907. == Death ==