Authors: Mary McGrigor
Eventually, at the end of October the royal couple left Moscow to return to St Petersburg. Winter was now setting in but Alexander, restless as always, insisted the horses be driven at a furious pace. As the carriage hurtled onwards over metalled roads, while the coach-man lashed the horses to ever greater speed, they passed through dark forests covering much of the distance between the old capital and the new. To Wylie, trundling behind in one of the many coaches carrying equerries, other attendants, and the vast amount of luggage that such an occasion involved, it seemed that the young emperor was possessed by a frantic energy fired by the enormity of his appointed task. Exhausted by the speed and distance of the journey, having barely had time to rest or even wash, Alexander and Elizabeth reached St Petersburg in the space of only five days.
Seen from a distance, the city seemed to rise, almost as if floating, from the marshland on which it was built. In the winter light, as the domes and spires of the many churches shone clear against the sky, it seemed ethereal, divorced from the signs of habitation still remaining out of sight. The stone palaces, the wooden houses, the network of streets and arterial waterways, all might have ceased to exist.
As he approached his capital, Alexander, tireless as he seemed to be, was in fact almost overwhelmed by awareness of the vast responsibility that had been thrust upon his shoulders by his father’s death.
Alexander had barely returned to St Petersburg before he received a letter from King Frederick William III of Prussia. He suggested that the two should meet to discuss the affairs of Europe as the threat of the avaricious French First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, increased.
In February 1802, Alexander, in reply to yet another missive from Frederick, agreed that a personal discussion would be of much advantage to them both. Although strangers to each other they already had a common bond in that Alexander’s second eldest sister Helen, married to Frederick Louis, Prince of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, was a great favourite with both King Frederick and his lovely Queen Louise.
Alexander, accompanied by a train of courtiers – including his doctor James Wylie – arrived at Memel on 10 June.
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The port, founded by the Knights of the Livonian Order in 1252, defended by a citadel, commands a strong position at the mouth of the River Neman on the shore of the sound of the Memeler Tief, an inlet of the Baltic Sea. Some ninety miles north-east of Königsberg, Memel (now Klaipeda and the most northerly town in Germany) was, then as now, an important port, trading largely in timber, wheat and fish.
For Wylie the town held nostalgia, for sea ports are the same worldwide. Memories of his boyhood came back to him as he saw the masts in the harbour so much like those in Kincardine, whence some of the vessels had probably come. But now it was a harbour with a difference, for men other than seamen swarmed along the crowded quays.
As guests of the king of Prussia, Alexander and the members of his entourage were greatly entertained. Banquets were followed by balls at which Alexander, so strikingly handsome in uniform, danced and flirted with ladies, once again bewitched by his charm. He, for his part, was enchanted with Frederick William’s beautiful wife, Princess Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who was the niece of Queen Charlotte, wife of George III of England. However, whereas her aunt was plain, Louise outshone the court ladies with the gracefulness of her movements and the lustre of her wide-set brown eyes.
Everyone thought she was lovely. Alexander was swept off his feet. Both were young, Louise being just a year older than Alexander, and together they danced in the ballrooms throughout the long summer nights.
In the daytime, however, he discussed politics with her husband. Alexander was willing to support Frederick’s authority over the German principalities but the princes themselves, unsure of the worth of the new tsar, were more inclined to deal with Napoleon, now seen as an invincible force.
The Treaty of Amiens, signed between France and Britain in 1802, produced a temperate respite from warfare, which, as most people predicted, was far too good to be true. When war between England and France began again in May 1803, Alexander, although anxious to protect Russian acquisitions in the Mediterranean made by his father during the Second Coalition of 1799, maintained his country’s neutrality. But in March 1803 came devastating news. The Duc d’Enghien, a member of the French royal family, had been kidnapped in Baden, home of Alexander’s wife Elizabeth, and taken to France, had been tried and executed on the orders of Napoleon himself.
Alexander was horrified, the news that Napoleon had now proclaimed himself Emperor of the French adding to his sense of outrage against what he considered to be regicide. Encouraged by Prince Adam Czartoryski, the Polish nobleman who, formerly his aide, and possibly the lover of his wife, had now become his Deputy Foreign Minister, Alexander formed his Grand Design by which Russia, Austria and Britain would unite against Napoleon, forcing him to abandon his avaricious claims. Accordingly the Third Coalition was finally agreed on 28 July 1805.
By the terms of the treaty Napoleon’s empire was to be assaulted by a pincer movement from three sides. The Austrians were to attack southern Germany, supported by a Russian army. The British would send a strong force to the mouth of the River Weser from where, together with Swedish and Russian detachments, they would head through Hanover for the Netherlands. Meanwhile, as Austria attacked Venetia and Lombardy, a joint force of Russian and British soldiers would invade the Kingdom of Naples, whose monarch had pledged his support.
Alexander determined immediately to go with his soldiers. Not even the pleas of Prince Czartoryski would persuade him to change his mind. Wylie would of course go with him. Hastily Wylie assembled his instruments and together with his orderlies packed the bandages, splints and available drugs – mainly laudanum as a painkiller and wine to ease the shock of injury and amputation – into the medical chests which could be carried to the front. All was in readiness when, on the morning of 21 September, after praying for a long time in the cathedral, the tsar led his entourage from St Petersburg to the battlefields ahead.
Alexander went first to the Russian part of Poland, which he reached in September. From there he wrote to King Frederick of Prussia asking him to allow Russian troops to pass through his country en route to the Netherlands. Frederick, despite their personal friendship, was unwilling to break his neutrality, and refused. However, when French troops marched through the Prussian enclave of Ansbach to join up with Napoleon’s army in Bavaria, he changed his mind. Thus on 21 October 1805, as the British defeated the French and Spanish fleets off Cape Trafalgar, Alexander set off to meet Frederick in Berlin.
James Wylie once more had the chance to witness the reception given by one monarch to another. Bands played, fireworks lit the sky, and banquets and balls were held to entertain the tsar. In the first week of November it was agreed that, should Napoleon fail to consent to the terms of the Third Coalition, Frederick would declare war on France.
There was one informal act to follow, in the form of a personal pledge. On the last night of his visit Alexander, Frederick William and Queen Louise, heavily cloaked against the wind, walked through the streets of the darkened city to the garrison church. There in the candlelit crypt, Frederick William and Alexander leaned forward to embrace each other above the tomb of the Prussian king’s ancestor, Frederick the Great. Alexander, who was always emotional, sobbed openly as the two men swore to eternal friendship and to lasting peace between their realms.
On 20 November, Napoleon, who had already taken Vienna and occupied the palace of Schönbrünn, captured Brünn (Brno), the capital of Moravia. The combined forces of Russia and Austria were by then stationed in the small town of Olmutz, about forty miles away from Brünn near the border with Hungary. On 24 November the combined commanders agreed to launch an offensive, aimed at attacking Napoleon at Brünn, before liberating Vienna.
Alexander was now ill, suffering from a bad attack of fever, with Wylie constantly in attendance. As always he proved the worst of patients. Delirious, as his temperature rose, he refused to be bled to reduce the fever or to swallow medicines. Restless as ever, the moment he felt slightly better he tried to leap out of bed, but Wylie restrained him, humouring as a father would a child, a role he increasingly adopted with a man who, while only ten years younger than himself, was nonetheless excitable as a young and petulant boy. Recovering, but still so weak that he actually submitted to Wylie’s advice, he proceeded by coach, rather than on horseback, to the town of Wischau (Vykov) twenty miles to the south. Here he received an emissary from Napoleon, who could not have been worse chosen, proving to be General Savary, formerly chief of the gendarmerie who had been instrumental in kidnapping the Duc d’Enghien prior to his execution. Savary brought a message from Napoleon asking for a meeting to discuss terms of peace with Alexander.
Incapacitated as he was at that moment, suffering from a return of the fever, Alexander sent his own envoy in return in the form of Prince Peter Dolgoruky who, considering Napoleon to be an upstart wearing a dirty shirt, affronted him to his face. Napoleon, for his part, called the Russian prince ‘a perfumed booby’,
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and went back in anger to his headquarters near Brünn.
The weather was now very cold, the icebound roads pot-holed and dangerous. Alexander’s favourite chestnut mare stumbled and came down on her knees, giving him a heavy fall. Two days later, still badly bruised, he rode to a nearby village to meet the Emperor Francis of Austria.
Napoleon had by now retreated to within a few miles of Brünn. Military genius that he was, having guessed at his enemy’s intention, he had chosen his position expressly to entice Prince Mikhail Ku-tuzov, the Russian commander, to outflank him in an attempt to cut off his line of retreat to Vienna.
The two armies were so close that on the still, moonlit night of 1 December, they could see each other’s camp fires. At three o’clock in the morning, Alexander was woken by his anxious staff as commotion broke out in the French camp. But it proved to be only the soldiers cheering their emperor on the anniversary of his coronation, an event they believed to be a lucky sign.
As dawn broke a fog descended, making the enemy invisible to the Russian soldiers, who, as Napoleon had predicted, advanced on his right flank. They broke through and, again in accordance with Napoleon’s plans, were surrounded and disseminated by heavy artillery.
Suddenly, as the sun dispersed the mist, Marshal Soult’s cavalry bore down on the centre of the allied line. The two emperors, Alexander and Francis, watching from a knoll, came under fire. Amid much confusion and cries for their safety they left their vantage point. The fighting then continued until, at about midday, the tsar’s brother Constantine led the Imperial Guard into a heroic counter-attack.
Napoleon himself was watching as over 1,000 horsemen galloped up the slope of the Pratzen Plateau into the mouths of his waiting guns. ‘There are many fine ladies who will weep tomorrow in Petersburg,’ he said as he saw the dreadful result.
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The battle of Austerlitz – claimed both then and thereafter as the French emperor’s greatest victory – was over. ‘Roll up the map of Europe. It will not be needed hereafter’, was the verdict of William Pitt.
Alexander, mentally and physically exhausted, his mind numbed by incomprehension of the horrors he had witnessed during the course of that day, was on the verge of collapse. Nonetheless, hearing that Emperor Francis was at the small town of Czeitsch, some eight miles away, he insisted on riding there immediately. The short December day was ending, and in near darkness, at a small village on the way, he collapsed, falling forwards on the neck of his horse. Wylie, with him as ever, managed, with the help of the guards who formed his escort, to lift him from the saddle and to carry him into a hut where all he could find to cover his shivering body was a peasant’s straw-filled quilt. He had no medicines with him, not even quinine.
The night hours seemed endless to Wylie as he sat, fighting off his own longing for sleep, by the side of the restless, desperately ill tsar. The crisis came at three o’clock in the morning when Alexander screamed in agony, sobbing with the pain of violent cramp. Quite unable to help him, Wylie asked Prince Adam Czartoryski to stay with him before stumbling out into the night to shout for his horse. Once astride, by the wavering light of a lantern, he managed to make the animal pick its way over the rough road, churned up by many vehicles into frozen ruts, over the four miles or so to the small town of Czeitsch, headquarters of Emperor Francis.
Dismounting, he somehow gained entry into one of the houses requisitioned for the occupation of the emperor’s staff, where he begged an Austrian officer to let him have some red wine. Amazingly, the man refused. Wylie, incensed at such inhumanity and well known for speaking his mind, must at this point have let fly, doubtless telling him what he thought of him in the language of the Kincardine docks. Somehow he got past him into the interior of the house where he found a servant who, either by bribery or intimidation, he forced into giving him a little rough red wine.
It proved effective. Or, more probably, Alexander’s strong constitution brought him back to life. By morning, now fit enough to ride, he joined the long-faced, frigid Emperor Francis and the portly, one-eyed Russian General Kutuzov at Czeitsch.
Although told of the dreadful casualties (25,000 to 30,000 soldiers of the allied armies had been killed) Alexander remained determined to pursue the campaign. Convinced that Frederick William of Prussia would honour their agreement by bringing his army into the field, he assured the Austrian emperor that Napoleon could be defeated in a renewed assault. However, Francis, mistrustful of Frederick William, refused to believe that any such hope remained. Subsequently, on the following day, 4 December 1805, a treaty of peace between France and Austria was arranged. Included was the term that the Russians must also capitulate and withdraw immediately from Moravia to return within the frontier of their own land.