Authors: Mary McGrigor
In the spring of 1819 Tsar Alexander was off again, first to visit Finland and then to the Russian port of Archangel. On the journey, while crossing a lake in a ferry boat, he survived a violent storm. To Wylie, who was with him, it must have seemed providential that now, for the second time in his life, just as when he had tried as a boy to escape by sea in the little brig lying in the harbour at Cramond, he again escaped being drowned.
In Archangel, with Wylie in attendance, Alexander minutely inspected both the hospitals and the prisons. Then, after making the long journey south to Krasnoe Selo, he watched the annual manoeuvres of his army taking place on the wide surrounding plain.
His brother Nicholas was there with his army brigade. Nicholas had married Princess Alexandra Feodorovna, daughter of King Frederick William of Prussia and his wife Queen Louise, whom Alexander had so dearly loved. She wrote of how they were both taken aback when, one night at dinner, Alexander suddenly said ‘that he was doubly pleased to see Nicholas carry out his duties so well because on him would fall one day a heavy weight of responsibility’.
He looked on him [Nicholas] as the person who would replace him; and this would happen much sooner than anyone imagined, since it would occur while he himself was still alive. We sat there like two statues, open-eyed and dumb. The Emperor went on, ‘you seem astonished, but let me tell you that my brother Constantine, who has never bothered about the throne, is more than ever determined to renounce it formally and to pass on his rights to his brother Nicholas and his descendants. As for myself I have decided to free myself of my functions and to retire from the world . . . I am no longer the man I was, and I think it is my duty to retire in good time’ . . . Seeing us on the verge of tears he tried to comfort us and reassure us by saying that this was not going to happen at once, that some years must pass before he carried out his plan.
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The tsar was in St Petersburg when, in June 1819, the soldiers and peasants in a military colony in the Ukraine rebelled against the harsh discipline they received. General Arakcheev at once travelled down there and punished the leaders of the revolt with terrible floggings, which frequently ended in their death.
Alexander supported him officially although inwardly greatly disturbed. Aware that there were secret societies, many of them Masonic in origin, he refused to interfere with their liberal beliefs. To the governor-general of St Petersburg, who urged him to prohibit the secret societies in the city, he merely replied, ‘You know that I have shared and encouraged these illusions and errors. It is not for me to deal severely with them.’
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Sometimes Alexander suggested he might abdicate but without any clear indication of when this was to take place. A short time after talking to Nicholas and Alexandra, either on his journey to Finland or on the way back, he met Julie von Krüdner again in a church in the small town of Pechory in Estonia. There she told him that the King of Prussia’s life was in danger unless he gave himself up entirely to God and that the Holy Alliance must be continued to confront the evils of the world.
In August 1819 Alexander, again with Wylie in attendance, went to Riga where a deputation was presented to him with a scheme for emancipation. The tsar congratulated the envoys, telling them that they had set an example that ought to be imitated, and that they had ‘acted in the spirit of our age’. From Riga he continued to Mittau to attend the ceremonies involving the enfranchisement of the serfs of Courland. Then, as usual in September, wearing the Polish uniform and the white eagle, he attended the Diet in Warsaw, where the city was illuminated in his honour.
The baroness’s predictions seemed to be coming true as rebellions against the government broke out in both Spain and Naples. In London a plot to assassinate the cabinet was foiled but in France the Duc de Berri, nephew of Louis XVIII, was murdered. Metternich then instigated a meeting at Troppau (Opava), the capital of Austrian Silesia, between the emperors of Russia and Austria to discuss methods of counteracting the threat of revolution facing Europe. Metternich, determined to force Russia and Austria to collaborate, largely succeeded in his aims when Alexander offered an army 100,000 strong to help subdue the insurgents in southern Italy. With him at the congress was the Grand Duke Nicholas, a further indication of his intention to make him his heir.
Negotiations continued far longer than expected and Alexander was still at Troppau when, on 9 November 1820, a message came from Arakcheev that the Semeonovski regiment had mutinied, Alexander was mortified and also greatly alarmed. Since the time of his father’s murder the Semeonovskii had been his special regiment, which he believed to be loyal to the core. ‘It is easy for you to imagine the sorrow this has caused me,’ he wrote to Arakcheev. ‘I think incitement came from outside the army.’
Convinced now of the threat of revolution in his own country Alexander, concurring with Metternich’s decision to refuse to receive an emissary from the Neapolitan insurgents, reached agreement with the Austrians and the Prussians to unite against further unrest wherever and whenever it should occur.
The conference adjourned, the tsar returned to St Petersburg where he ordered the rebels to be treated with mercy although the officers were to be cashiered.
The city itself was now in the midst of one of the coldest winters ever known. Starving wolves roamed the streets. After three coach-men were frozen to death Alexander issued a decree prohibiting evening entertainments in St Petersburg when the temperature dropped to seventeen degrees below zero. Yet despite the Arctic conditions Alexander set off for Troppau, where the conference was to resume, in an open sleigh. Wrapped in furs he survived the journey, as did his now aging doctor whose resilience must be marvelled at considering the rigours he endured.
From Troppau Alexander went to the city of Ljubljana (Laibach in German) in what was then Carniola and is now Slovenia. There he heard that the Piedmontese army had mutinied, demanding a war against Austria in support of the Neapolitans. Convinced of his belief that God had sent him there to defend the Austrians, Alexander proclaimed, ‘If we save Europe it is because he has desired it’, and immediately ordered that 90,000 men be ready to march to Austria’s aid.
At Laibach, perhaps due to the cold and the jolting he had endured during the long sleigh journey, Alexander was again laid low with another attack of erysipelas. While there he received a plea from Napoleon’s aide Las Casas, begging for Napoleon’s release. Alexander officially refused to countenance an arrangement which he rightly believed might threaten the already fragile stability of King Louis. He did, however, suggest through his ambassador that the British government might hold out some hope of the exiled emperor’s eventual release, which is said to have raised Napoleon’s hopes of freedom. Then, on 5 May 1821, the man once thought to be invincible suddenly and unexpectedly died.
The tsar was still at Laibach when told that one of his own aides-de-camps, Prince Alexander Ypsilantis, had raised a rebellion against the Turkish rulers in the principalities of the Danube. Soon the Greek Christians were fighting the sultan and Ypsilantis made a dramatic appeal to Alexander to ‘save our religion from those who would persecute it’. But Alexander’s hands were tied. By the terms of the recent congress he had condemned revolution and he now promised Metternich that he would not interfere in the Balkan conflict, thus assuring Ypsilantis’ defeat.
Alexander returned to St Petersburg a tired and worried man. The war in the Balkans was escalating. Appalling atrocities, committed on both sides, included the execution of the Greek Patriarch Gregorios outside his own palace in Constantinople.
Monsieur Dupré de St Maur, an official in the imperial household, was among those who noticed the tsar’s obvious despondency. ‘I do not know if I deceive myself, but I frequently observe in Alexander’s features a sad and painfully occupied expression. If I meet him on the high road when alone in his carriage and he does not try to compose his face, I recognize that same expression. How many times I have said to my wife, ‘‘I have just seen the Emperor. Ah! What shadows and uneasiness there were on his brow!’’ ’
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Depressed and stricken with remorse at his inability to help those of his own faith, Alexander, through his friend Prince Golitsyn, arranged another meeting with the mysterious Baroness von Krüdner. They met in a peasant’s house by the road to Tsarskoe Selo. No record remains of their conversation although it is known that the baroness publicly announced that Alexander would be in Constantinople by the year 1823. It proved to be their last meeting. Having pestered him with a long written screed in which she ordered him to lead a campaign against the Turkish infidels, she disappeared to Latvia, whence she never returned.
Alexander attended, two more conferences, in Vienna and then in Verona, in the following year of 1822. At the latter event he recovered some of his former love of entertainment as he attended a banquet and an opera by Rossini, conducted by the great composer himself. Again he noticed pretty women. He was seen to flirt with Lady Londonderry and, on a more serious note, to converse with the Duke of Wellington, whom he so greatly admired.
Nonetheless, despite his public appearance, he was secretly beset with terror at the sight of the milling crowds. Later, in the Crimea, Sir James Wylie was to tell Doctor Robert Lee that while they were in Verona ‘so great was the Emperor’s fear of assassination by the Carbonari that he durst not venture into the streets until they had been inspected by guards sent out for that purpose, and that this dread even prevented His Majesty from going to Rome, which he had a great desire to visit’.
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Lee was also told by the Belgian diplomat, Count Caraman, that:
While at Verona he had often taken long walks with the Emperor into the surrounding country and that he was then affected by an unaccountable gloom and melancholy, and believed that he was destined to be miserable and unfortunate. He conceived that this feeling, with the horrible attack meditated on his life, reduced him to a state of utter despair, and rendered him anxious not to live, and induced him to refuse all help.
Wylie alone knew the reason for his paranoia, but others who had known him beforehand noticed the sadness in his face. To the Emperor Francis he confided that he knew he was soon to die, and to the Quaker William Allen, a friend from his time in England, he poured out all his troubles, telling him that ‘he felt himself so weak he dared not look far ahead’.
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Returning to St Petersburg, depressed and restless as ever, the tsar again began travelling, always at a furious pace. In an open carriage, accompanied only by Wylie, two equerries and a valet, his horses pulled him at a reckless rate, north and south, east and west, over Russia’s vast distances.
Refusing to hold any formal receptions, and avoiding the palaces of the nobility, he stopped instead by the wayside to chat with the peasants, asking about their crops and animals and sometimes going into their cottages or to the local churches to talk to the parish priests.
During the following summer Alexander went to watch the manoeuvres near Grodno. An officer lost control of his horse, which reared and then lashed out suddenly, striking the tsar on the left leg. Wincing with pain he was helped to dismount, and although the bone was discovered not to be broken, he was very badly bruised.
Travelling back to St Petersburg the tsar made a brief visit to Moscow where the crowds surged round his carriage, calling him their ‘little father’ and waiting just to catch a glimpse of him in a deluge of icy rain. But on receiving a message that Elizabeth was far from well, he went rushing back to St Petersburg again with all possible speed.
Alexander found her looking drawn and tired, coughing constantly from an infection in her lungs. Elizabeth now looked an old woman although she was only forty-five. Gone was the near ethereal beauty, the shining hair and the fair complexion. The court gossips made the most of her illness, claiming that, as had happened on previous occasions, Alexander was looking elsewhere. But instead their love for each other was rekindled. The bond between them strengthened as Alexander realized the true worth of the wife to whom he had so often been unfaithful but whose love for him had never changed.
At Epiphany, on 6 January, while forbidding the usual escort of guards to be exposed to the freezing weather, the tsar himself stood on the palace’s Jordan Staircase bareheaded and without gloves while prayers were chanted by the Metropolitan for nearly half an hour. Three of his fingers were frostbitten and had to be rubbed with snow before he returned to the Winter Palace, shivering and blue with cold.
Such was the intensity of the weather that one young courtier actually died of hypothermia. Alexander himself was plainly unwell, but a few days later insisted on going to Tsarskoe Selo over roads packed hard with snow. There, while he was taking his usual morning walk, he was caught in a snowstorm and returned to the palace soaked through. Soon he became feverish and delirious as the dreaded scourge of erysipelas spread over his body and into his head.
His illness at this point, however unlikely, is claimed to have saved his life, for he was due to have gone to Belaia Tserkov to review the troops stationed there. Had he done so he would have stayed in a small isolated house in a park where some officers, disguised as ordinary soldiers, planned to strangle him before raising a rebellion throughout the empire.
At Tsarskoe Selo, however, he became so ill that Wylie insisted he return to the Winter Palace in a carriage with a closed roof.
Now it was Elizabeth who nursed him as his left leg, damaged already by the horse’s kick, and hurt again by a fall on the Winter Palace stairs, became red and swollen as the erysipelas returned. In Vienna, where Wylie had treated it successfully with iced water, the affliction had been confined to his limb, but now it spread across much of his body. His leg began to turn black and gangrene became recognizable by its noxious smell.