Authors: Mary McGrigor
General Pahlen, however, miraculously still in favour, managed to persuade the emperor that Platon Zubov, his grandmother’s former lover, and his brothers, together with the Hanoverian mercenary soldier General Bennigsen, should be pardoned for whatever supposed infringements of the law they had committed, and permitted to return to court.
Convinced by now of a conspiracy against him, Paul actually challenged General Pahlen, face to face, demanding that he tell him what he knew. Pahlen, skilfully covering his tracks, admitted that his spies had told him of a conspiracy, but swore he had the situation under very tight control. The traitors would be arrested. There was nothing to fear. The tsar, nonetheless, unconvinced by his assurance, sent urgent word to General Arakcheev – himself banished from court and living on his estate eighty miles away – summoning him to come at once.
It proved a vain attempt at escaping the ever closing trap. Pahlen, rightly guessing what might happen, had the palace gates watched. The despatch rider, arrested, was forced to hand over the tsar’s written message, with which Pahlen then confronted Paul, accusing him of perfidy in acting behind his back.
Terrified, the tsar retained the courage to demand that the note be sent. Pahlen, faced with his authority, had no option but to agree, but knowing now that General Arakcheev, although temporarily out of favour, would never, under any circumstances, subscribe to an intrigue to force Paul’s abdication, decided to bring forward the planned coup with all possible speed.
Within the city the conspirators met at the house of a Madame Zherebzova, sister of the brothers Zubov. Pahlen, a frequent visitor, saw to it that the police never searched or even watched the house. The Guards regiments, secretly questioned, proved to be loyal to the tsar with the exception of the Semeonovski Regiment, whose officers, declaring themselves to be doubtful of the tsar’s sanity, were passionately attached to his son, Grand Duke Alexander.
‘The second in command is a sensible quiet young man in whom the crew have confidence,’ wrote Count Simon Vorontzov, the Russian ambassador to London, after describing Russia as ‘a ship whose captain had gone mad in the midst of a storm’.
21
Meanwhile the tsar, still convinced he was in imminent danger, continued to cross-question Pahlen, demanding that he tell him if his two elder sons were involved in an intrigue against him. Pahlen assured him, categorically, that they were not, and Paul, although unconvinced of his sincerity, pretended to take him at his word.
Mistrustful of all his family, and believing his friends to be enemies waiting to kill him, Paul now placed his faith in the thick walls and intricate means of defence installed under his own supervision within his new citadel, to save him from all attack.
Pahlen again met the conspirators on Sunday, 22 March. It was agreed that the usual guard should be replaced with men of the Semeonovski Guards and that General Bennigsen, with six of his accomplices, would force their way into the tsar’s bedroom at mid-night. There they would arrest him and take him across the River Neva to the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul.
Alexander, told next day of what was intended, was apprehensive. Although once more assured of his father’s safety, he nonetheless felt instinctively that the plan might well misfire. His nervousness increased as that night he and his brother Constantine, together with their wives, dined with their parents in Mikhailovsky Palace where the newly plastered walls still steamed with the heat of the stoves. Noticing that Alexander was not eating, his father told him that he should see Doctor Wylie, of whose loyalty he still felt confident.
Then, as the dinner ended, the officer of the Guard came in with his nightly report. The tsar is reported to have become almost incoherent with anger as he heard that his regular bodyguard was to be replaced that evening with men of the Semeonovski Regiment, whose officers he did not trust.
Alexander, pleading indigestion, went shortly to his rooms, which were opposite those of his father on the other side of the palace courtyard. How anxiously he must have waited, pacing back and forth across the floor while watching the windows of his father’s apartments for any sign of the disturbance that he knew was about to take place.
The night was dark and bitterly cold. The young man watching could not see the officer of the Preobrazhenski Guards who opened the gate of the outer courtyard to admit the cloaked figures of about twenty men. Pahlen headed for Alexander’s rooms, but hearing no sound, and believing him to be asleep, did not disturb him. General Bennigsen and Platon Zubov meanwhile went straight for the tsar’s apartment. His two valets were overcome and the locked door to the bedroom broken down. In the room, lit by a single candle, there was no sign of the tsar. Then Bennigsen saw a figure crouching, terrified, behind a screen. ‘Sire,’ he said, ‘you have ceased to reign and we are arresting you on the orders of the Tsar Alexander.’
22
Paul tried to protest. Despite his mental confusion he was still immensely strong and grappled like a demon with the men trying to hold him as he screamed for help. But no one came and one officer, to silence him, hit him on the forehead with a heavy snuff box with a strength that sent him crashing to the floor. Stunned, he lay helpless as another tied a silk scarf round his throat and began to strangle him while a third held a heavy paperweight to his windpipe until the life was choked out of him by force.
The murderers vanished, quickly and silently, through the shattered door of the bedroom and along the passages of the palace into the anonymity of the night.
Behind them they left utter confusion. Servants and aides, alarmed by the terrible noises, rushed to the tsar’s room. Wylie, summoned by a near hysterical aide, knew at first glance that he was dead.
Two Scottish compatriots, Doctor Guthrie and Doctor Grieve, were with Wylie when, commanded to sign the death certificate, he stated that the tsar had died of apoplexy. Few people believed it, yet the lie continued to be perpetuated for over 100 years. Doctor Grieve, who helped Wylie to embalm the body, noticed that while there was no evidence of the knife wounds supposedly inflicted by the assassins, there were clear signs of ‘a broad contused area round the neck which indicated strangulation’.
Yet the court was said to have been ‘very pleased’ by Wylie’s verdict. Obviously he had been told what to say. But why did he agree to such a deception, which, had it been discovered, could have ruined his professional career?
Clearly the most obvious answer is that he perjured himself to save his life. It is hard to believe that he was actually involved in the conspiracy to kill the tsar, but those who were would not have hesitated to make him the next victim had he exposed their crime.
One man who does cast aspersions, however, is the late-nineteenth-century historian Joyneville who makes the wild – and it would appear totally unfounded – accusation that Wylie was actually among the murderers and that following the tsar’s strangulation, he cut his carotid artery to ensure his death.
23
Joyneville gives no sources for his story and contemporary accounts do not even hint at cooperation with the murderers on Wylie’s part, other than his signing of the death certificate in compliance with the wishes of the imperial family as. Thus it can only be assumed that it was because he performed the post mortem that, no doubt due to the known jealousy of colleagues, a rumour evolved of his supposed involvement in the crime.
Most importantly, it must be remembered that, in addition to the lack of any written evidence linking Wylie to the assassination of the tsar, it is altogether improbable that Alexander, whose own supposed involvement in his father’s death weighed so heavily on his mind, would have placed such implicit trust in Wylie had he, even for one moment, believed him to have been party to the crime. It cannot be denied that thanks to his association with Alexander, and later with Alexander’s brother Nicholas who succeeded him as tsar, Wylie, like so many Scots in Russia, did eventually become a rich man. Yet considering the lack of evidence, it should not be imputed that this doctor of reputedly upright character was in any way seduced by gold. It is more likely that, under the circumstances, he had little or no option than to comply with what was demanded of him or else lose his position in the royal household – and with it, most assuredly, his life.
That said, can it be surmised that in falsifying the tsar’s death certificate Wylie was acting, at least in part, for altruistic reasons of his own?
It was by then five years since Tsar Paul, ecstatic at Count Kutaisof’s apparently miraculous recovery, had made him his personal physician. During that time, in constant attendance, no one had seen more of Paul’s decline into madness than had Wylie himself. It therefore seems logical to believe that, recognizing incurable insanity, he thought it better for a man, now dangerous not only to his family but to the millions of people over whom he ruled, to die, if not of natural causes, then by an assassin’s hand.
Wylie’s lifelong devotion to Alexander – ‘My adored Emperor’, as he was later to call him – is well known. Watching him grow into manhood, in the years spent in the palace, he had recognized his potential as the leader he was born to be. Now, in this moment of tragedy, dreadful as the circumstances were, he must have recognized the wisdom of the grandmother, the omnipotent Empress Catherine, whose own sudden death had prevented her from naming Alexander as her heir.
On the death of Tsar Paul, James Wylie had already become personal physician to his son, Alexander I, whom he was to serve for twenty-four years. No one knew better than he the agony of mind of the new ruler, who felt himself partly responsible for the death of the father whom he believed he had betrayed. For a short while Wylie feared for Alexander’s sanity, as, already in a state of deep depression caused by his guilt, he had then to be told that his eldest sister, Alexandra, who had married the Palatine of Hungary the year before, had died while giving birth to a child.
Wylie now understood that, although not insane like his father, Alexander had the seeds of instability in his mind. He reasoned with him effectively as, refusing to talk to anyone other than his immediate attendants, he kept to his bedroom for some days. This period of intense mental suffering, endured within a darkened room, proved to be the onset of moods of depression which Wylie, through his understanding of them, did his best to assuage.
The one person, apart from his doctor, who helped to maintain Alexander’s sanity during those days of torment following his father’s death, was his wife Elizabeth. The quiet, fair-haired, almost waif-like figure of the child bride, chosen by his grandmother, to whom he had now been married for eight years, was constantly by his side. While his mother Maria Feodorovna, always a dramatist, had hysterics, and throughout the palace total chaos prevailed, Elizabeth alone remained calm.
It was during this period that Wylie conceived his great respect for her, a feeling perhaps inspired by love. Certain it is that he went to great lengths to protect her by encouraging Alexander to make constant arrangements for her comfort and by making him realize that, with her delicate constitution, she needed a great deal of rest.
Moreover he was soon to be both distressed and angered by the pain inflicted upon her by Alexander’s infidelities, which could now no longer be ignored.
Wylie went with Alexander and Elizabeth to Moscow for their coronation in September 1801. The city, founded in 1147, had become in the early fourteenth century the capital of the principality of Slaviansky, when the white-stoned Kremlin was developed into an impregnable fortress. From that time onwards, the many churches crowned with domes and cupolas built in the expanding city had turned the old capital of Russia into a metropolis reminiscent of Rome.
Wylie was among the crowd of enthralled spectators who watched Alexander ride on a white horse from the Petrovsky Palace to the walled citadel of the Kremlin, a distance of four miles. The crowd was ecstatic, calling blessings on the little father, the tall, handsome, fair-haired, blue-eyed prince, so different from the simian-featured Tsar Paul who had died seven months before.
Alexander and Elizabeth remained in Moscow for a month while countless festivities took place. Ball followed ball as the aristocratic ladies of Moscow vied with each other in their efforts to entertain – and in some cases to captivate – the handsome and charming young tsar whose smile was enough to sweep most of them off their feet. Elizabeth soon became exhausted. Never strong, she could not stand the pace at which Alexander plunged so recklessly into anything with which he became involved. Freed at last from the constraint of his grandmother’s governance and the terror of his father’s regime, it is hardly surprising that, in an age when amorous alliances were considered
de rigueur
, he plunged into the social melee with scarcely an effort at restraint.
It was then that Wylie was to notice how Alexander had an eye for many of the pretty women who virtually fell at his feet. Most were merely flirtations but among them was one more dangerous, a dark-haired, voluptuous Polish beauty, Countess Maria Naryshkin, skilled as a courtesan. She set her cap at Alexander, pursuing him relentlessly, and he, unable to resist the lure of this dominant, sensual woman, succumbed to the attraction of her charms. Shamelessly she revelled in her conquest, flaunting her possession of the man every woman in Moscow wished to seduce, to the chagrin of his young wife.
Standing in the sidelines, Wylie could only watch helplessly the drama that was taking place. Alexander, hopelessly infatuated, was losing control of his senses, regardless, it seems, of the hurt he was causing Elizabeth. There was nothing new in the situation – most men of the aristocracy had mistresses at the time – but to the doctor who now knew them both so well, aware as he was of Elizabeth’s love for her husband, and of the instability of Alexander’s mind, it was plain that a situation was developing which could result in far-reaching effects on the stability of the Russian hierarchy, if not of the country itself.