Authors: Mary McGrigor
The news spread quickly over the teacups. The redoubtable Janet Wylie was not slow to spread word of the prowess of her once disgraced but now successful son. The story spread from mouth to mouth downstream from Kincardine until, in the fishing port of St Ninian’s, it reached a Mrs Willox, a lady indefatigable as was Janet herself. Hearing of James Wylie’s transformation – living in a palace no less – she grasped at the possible chance to save her own son.
John Willox, a sailor on a vessel named the
Ann Spittal
, had sailed from the Firth of Forth for Russia. However, on the tsar’s exclusion of British ships from the Baltic, the ship had been seized and its crew imprisoned. Picturing John ill and starving in a flea-infested Russian jail, his mother, too poor to afford either a horse or a cab, but determined to save her precious son, walked from Stirling to Paisley where she bought the finest silk thread with which, in the Troy pattern, very fashionable at the time, she knitted a pair of socks.
The hose completed, Mrs Willox, illiterate herself, persuaded the local schoolmaster to pen a letter to the Tsar of Russia pleading for her son’s release. Knowing that ships from Kincardine sailed for the Baltic she then found a sea captain who agreed to take the socks, together with the letter, to St Petersburg, which, somehow avoiding the boycott, he managed to achieve. There, as instructed, he gave the package to Wylie, who in turn handed them on to the tsar. The mentally unstable Paul, pleased as a child with his gift, then promptly ordered the release of John Willox, who quickly returned home.
Wylie, although often described as mean – largely because, once installed in the Royal Palace, he never bought himself a meal – was in this instance generous to a fault. Knowing young Willox to be penniless, he gave him a present of money to take home. Arriving at the little cottage in St Ninian’s his mother, while overjoyed at his return, nonetheless as a canny Scots lady determined to use the financial windfall to commemorate the great event. Thus with the money, she bought a grandfather clock, the face of which bore the inscription: ‘wha’d hae thocht it, stockings bocht it’.
The neighbours gathering to see this extravagant purchase now knew, as Mrs Willox poured out the tale of its inception, that James Wylie from Kincardine, wild lad as he had been, was now a man of importance in constant attendance on no less a person than the Tsar of Russia himself.
Wylie now found himself living in the vast building of the Winter Palace. Designed by the architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli between 1754 and 1762, it contained over 1,000 rooms. As elsewhere in similar, if smaller, residences in Europe, and indeed throughout the rest of the early-nineteenth-century world, intrigue was the main occupation of all those within the palace walls. In addition to the uniformed soldiers whom the tsar felt essential to his safety, the building teemed with servants, men wearing livery and powdered wigs and housemaids in dresses and caps. Wylie had his every need attended to by the valet who replaced his soldier servant and by the minions who scurried back and forth with hot water and coals for his fire. Known to have had almost every meal in the palace, he probably dined with the equerries, being senior to even the top servants in the strict hierarchy that was observed.
The apartments of the royal family itself included that of the tsarina, Maria Feodorovna, Grand Duchess of Württemberg, who, as the mother of eight children, had secured the inheritance of the family. Her eldest son, the charming and handsome Alexander, heir to the imperial throne, had been married in 1793 at the age of just fifteen. His bride, some ten months younger, who had been chosen by his grandmother, the formidable Catherine the Great, was the beautiful but fragile Louise, daughter of the Crown Prince of Baden, who, again on the orders of the matriarch, had changed her name to Elizabeth Alexeievna on her marriage.
Also living within the palace were Alexander’s siblings: Constantine, eldest of his three brothers, who at eighteen had recently married Anna Feodorovna of Saxe-Coburg, and Nicholas, the next in age, who was still a baby, born almost as his grandmother died.
Alexander and Constantine, largely brought up by their grand-mother, who had snatched them as infants from their mother’s arms, had shared little of their childhood with the younger members of their family. Of the four sisters, Alexandra, Helen, Marie, Catherine and Anna, it was Catherine who, although eleven years younger than Alexander, was to prove his confidante in later years. The last of Maria Feodorovna’s children, a boy named Michael, was to be born, with Rogerson and Wylie in attendance, in 1798.
Fashions were changing in Russia, influenced by countries in western Europe, as the new century approached. Wylie himself, as a civilian, when not in breeches and boots for riding, wore the long trousers and swallow-tail coat then common to most professional men. A portrait of a later date shows him in the uniform of the tsar’s army, emblazoned with decorations. His hair, unpowdered, frames a thin, high cheek-boned face in which the dominant feature is a long straight nose. The mouth is sensuous and the eyes, although wide apart, hold a somewhat cynical expression – the whole giving an impression somehow sinister in effect.
A portrait of the tsar himself, painted at about the same time, shows him in a coat embroidered with decorations, tight breeches and knee-length boots. A wide-brimmed hat above his pug-nosed face sur-mounts a well-curled wig.
Women’s fashions were changing too. The Empress Maria Feo-dorovna clung to the old style, wearing the full-skirted dresses with the low waists which remained popular in Russia, unflattering to the figure though they were. Her daughters-in-law and her daughters, who were old enough to be at court, wore the simple gowns with high waists, now all the rage in London and in Paris where Josephine de Beauharnais, married to the brilliant French general Napoleon Bonaparte, was setting the trend in fashion.
In the following year of 1799, there was much celebration and rejoicing when the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, by now a young woman of twenty, gave birth to a baby girl. Wylie, who was present at the accouchement, may have delivered her himself. Hardly had she been born, however, before tongues started wagging when it was noticed that the child, christened Maria Alexandrovna, was seen to be exceptionally dark whereas both her parents were fair. Rumours circulated that her father was not in fact Alexander but his friend the Polish Prince Adam Czartoryski, renowned for his powers of seduction. The Grand Duke, however, to whom Czartoryski was ‘a man in a million’, was delighted with his daughter and both he and his wife were devastated when the little girl died of convulsions when she was only fourteen months old.
Despite attending to the children’s ailments, and to those of the tsarina, Maria Feodorovna, now pregnant for the ninth time, Wylie’s main concern was the mental state of her husband, the Emperor Paul. By the year 1802 it was obvious, not only to the courtiers and palace staff, but to all with whom he came in contact, that the tsar was suffering from rapidly increasing fits of madness. His mood swings were unpredictable. A favourite one day would be disgraced and sent to Siberia the next. Even old General Suvorov, hero of the war against Turkey, was soon to be treated with a cruelty that seemed insane.
Napoleon Bonaparte was by now advancing across Europe, annexing territory in his path. The Empress Catherine had planned to send an expeditionary force to help the Austrians but Paul, with typical autocracy, had cancelled it. However, in the summer of 1798, as the French seized the island of Malta, headquarters of the Knights of Malta of which Tsar Paul was Grand Master, he decided to join forces with Great Britain and with his former enemy Turkey, in attempting to curb the French advance. Subsequently, when in February 1799 the Second Coalition was formed, Suvorov was recalled to command the combined army of Russia and Austria to fight France in the Italian Peninsula.
Suvorov won a brilliant victory, driving the French from the plains of Lombardy and even threatening Paris as he advanced into the Swiss Alps. Returning to Russia, again a national hero, he expected to be honoured by the tsar. But Paul, both jealous and suspicious, on the excuse that Suvorov had contravened army regulations when appointing his staff, at the last moment cancelled plans for his reception. The old general, ill and tired, died a few months later. He was buried in the crypt of the Nevsky Monastery in St Petersburg, but the tsar, for whom he had won such victories, did not attend the funeral of the man who had served him so well.
Tsar Paul was now so paranoid that he believed the rambling, easily accessible building of the Winter Palace to be a dangerous place for him to live. Despite the sentry boxes, where armed men stood ready to fire at anyone even remotely suspicious who approached, and regardless of the fact that armed bodyguards abounded within the building itself, the tsar was convinced that among them were enemies aiming at his death. Even the sight of army officers chatting harmlessly to each other was transformed in his frenzied mind into a murderous cabal. His fantasies soon increased to the point where he suspected not only the soldiers and courtiers but his own family as well. His wife, Maria Feodorovna, and a former mistress, both totally loyal, came under suspicion, as did his eldest sons and their wives. Alexander, in particular, was forced to deliver his reports twice a day. His fear of his father was so excessive that he could hardly eat or sleep. Watchers saw his hands trembling as he stood before him. At one point his father, having been particularly charming to his son one evening, next morning sent him a message that he should remember the fate of Alexis, whose own father, Peter the Great, had him killed on suspicion of treason.
Yet this strange man, schizophrenic as he plainly was, could still be kind and gentle when pressure was released from his brain.
Obsessed as he was by his delusions, he began building himself a fortress in St Petersburg in 1797. The site he chose was that of the beautiful summer palace of the former Empress Elizabeth, which was summarily pulled down before his own enormous Gothic citadel took its place.
The building, to be known as the Mikhailovsky Palace, was protected by drawbridges and towers where armed men could stand constant guard. Further secluded by moats and drawbridges, there was also a system of underground passages by which, in a case of emergency, Paul believed he could escape. The foundation stone was laid on 8 February 1798, the day that his wife give birth to their ninth and youngest child, named Michael after the saint his father revered. Tsar Paul, having personally inspected the security measures, the water defences, and every single one of the double doors, moved his family, together with his new mistress, Princess Gagarina, into his specially constructed fortress, on 13 February 1801.
By this time it was known throughout Europe that the Tsar was incurably insane. On the rare occasions that he rode through the streets, brandishing a horse whip at any luckless passer-by, people fled in terror at the sight of him. Doctor Rogerson, who had witnessed Tsar Paul’s mental deterioration over more than thirty years and was now approaching retirement, wrote, ‘Everyone about him is at a loss what to do. Even Kutaisof is becoming very anxious.’
20
In St Petersburg itself the tension increased but no-one dared to confront him, so great was the terror he inspired. A great admirer of the Consul Bonaparte, as Napoleon then was known, he had so far sent him three personal letters suggesting they should meet to confer on ways to destroy the power of Britain, which he believed to be a menace to unity in Europe. Paul, having already put an embargo on British trade with Russia, and thereby infuriating traders, now proposed to send an army to the Indus as the advance of a combined French and Russian invasion of India.
His army commanders were horrified by the sheer impracticability of such a scheme. There was no way that the soldiers, let alone the horses, could be provisioned over a route into Central Asia, which was still partly unmapped. Paul’s own son Constantine declared that now his father had ‘declared war on common sense’. More forcefully Nikita Panin, adviser on foreign affairs, told his sovereign quite unequivocally that Russia was totally unprepared for such a war.
It was Panin who first asked the British ambassador, Lord Whit-worth, to describe how George III, in his fits of recurring madness, was restrained. Panin, given this information, next conferred in secret with General Pahlen, who as Governor-General of St Petersburg was in constant touch with the Grand Duke Alexander, whom he agreed to approach.
Some two weeks passed before, at the end of February, General Pahlen managed to speak privately with Alexander, putting it to him that his mad father should be deposed and a regency, with himself at its head, established in his place. Alexander, at first horrified, was eventually talked around on the promise that no harm should come to his father, who, he was assured, would be installed in one of the royal palaces near the city, at least until his sanity returned.
‘Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears a Crown’
(Henry IV,
Part 2
)
On 13 February 1801, Tsar Paul with his wife and his new mistress moved into the Mikhailovsky Palace. Before doing so he personally inspected the fortifications, the moat, the drawbridges, the strong shutters on the windows, the heavily barred double doors. All were secure. Cocooned within his fortress he truly believed he was safe at last.
Once installed himself, he ordered his family to join him. His two eldest sons and their wives moved into their new apartments in the building, which resembled a prison rather than a home.
With them went Wylie, now more than ever indispensible to the tsar, whose suspicion of all around him intensified. As was typical of his unpredictable and idiosyncratic actions Nikita Panin, so recently the tsar’s closest advisor but now disgraced for some minor transgression, was sent in exile to the country.