ALAN PALMER
ALEXANDER I
Tsar of War and Peace
To Veronica
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
List of Illustrations and Maps
Author’s Note
Preface
CHAPTER 1 THE CROW IN PEACOCK FEATHERS
The Bronze Horseman
Alexander’s Childhood
Betrothal and Marriage
The Last Years of Catherine II
The Succession in Doubt
CHAPTER 2 EMPIRE ON PARADE
The Grand Duke Comes to Town
Doubts of a Tsarevich
Suvorov in Italy and Switzerland
Mounting Tension in the Capital
Murder at the Mikhailovsky (March 1801)
CHAPTER 3 THE CRACKING OF THE ICE
A Promise of Reform
The Secret Committee and its Enemies
Alexander’s Coronation in Moscow (September 1801)
CHAPTER 4 ‘THE EMPEROR WANTS IT THUS’
Foreign Affairs: Isolation or Alignment?
Governmental Reform and the Primacy of Vorontsov
Alexander, Elizabeth and Maria Naryshkin
CHAPTER 5 SHADOW OF WAR
Alexander Disillusioned with the First Consul (1803–4)
Czartoryski, Novosiltsov and the Grand Design of 1804
Military Plans and the Polish Question
Alexander at Pulawy and Berlin (October-November 1805)
CHAPTER 6 AUSTERLITZ AND AFTER
Alexander and Kutuzov in Moravia
Peace Parleys
The Battle of Austerlitz (2 December 1805)
Alexander Humiliated
CHAPTER 7 ANATHEMA
Inquest on Austerlitz
The End of Government by the Tsar’s Friends
Across the Bridge
Preparing for War on Two Fronts, 1806
Eylau and Friedland
CHAPTER 8 TILSIT
Alexander and Napoleon Meet in Midstream
The Fine Phrases of Tilsit
The Tilsit Settlement (July 1807)
CHAPTER 9 AS DESTINY DEMANDS
The Effects of Tilsit Abroad
Alexander’s Throne in Danger?
Caulaincourt arrives in St Petersburg (December 1807)
The Death of Lisinka (May 1808)
Erfurt
CHAPTER 10 THE PRIMACY OF SPERANSKY
The Rise of Michael Speransky
The Reforms of 1808–9 and their Critics
The Council of State at Work
CHAPTER 11 THE VICEROY
Caulaincourt: The Prussian Royal Visit; and the Marriage of Catherine
Russia and Napoleon’s 1809 Campaign
A Russian Empress for the French?
CHAPTER 12 ‘BLOOD MUST FLOW AGAIN’
Alexander at Tver and Gruzino
Personal Sorrows, 1810
Alexander takes Russia out of the Continental System
The War Scare of 1811
Discomforted Diplomats
Portents and Military Plans
The Fall of Speransky and Alexander’s Departure for the Army
CHAPTER 13 CAPTAIN IN THE FIELD
The Pleasures of Vilna
The Eve of Invasion, 1812
Resolution and Retreat
From Vilna to Drissa
CHAPTER 14 THE RAZOR-EDGE OF FATE
Alexander in Moscow (July 1812)
The Clamour for Kutuzov
Bernadotte; General Wilson; and Germaine de Staël
Borodino and its Consequences
Plain Speaking from a Sister
Alexander refuses to make Peace
CHAPTER 15 TSAR WITH A MISSION
Vilna Again (December 1812–January 1813)
The Liberation of Prussia
The Changing Fortunes of War (Spring 1813)
Diplomatic Interlude (June–August 1813)
The Battles of Dresden and Leipzig and the Race for Frankfurt
The Campaign in France, 1814
Alexander Enters Paris (31 March 1814)
CHAPTER 16 PARIS AND LONDON
The Tsar, Talleyrand and Caulaincourt (April 1814)
Peacemaking in Paris
Catherine Blazes an English Trail
Alexander in England (June 1814)
CHAPTER 17 THE PANORAMA OF EUROPE
Preparing for the Vienna Congress in St Petersburg and at Pulawy
Alexander in Residence at the Hofburg
Congress Diplomacy (October 1814–February 1815)
Alexander’s Change of Heart
Napoleon’s Return from Elba and the Close of the Vienna Congress
CHAPTER 18 HOLY ALLIANCE
The Heilbronn Prophetess
Peacemaking in Paris Once More
Julie von Krüdener at her Prime
The Treaty of the Holy Alliance, 26 September 1815
Disillusionment?
CHAPTER 19 CONTRASTS
Alexander in Congress Poland (November 1815)
St Petersburg Once More
The Arakcheev System and the Military Colonies
Imperial Weddings
Alexander continues his Spiritual Quest
Disarmament and Foreign Affairs (1816–18)
The Congress of Aix (1818)
CHAPTER 20 THE ABSENTEE TSAR
Sad News from Stuttgart (January 1819)
Government by Post Chaise
The Tsar Goes to Troppau
Mutiny in the Semeonovsky Regiment (October 1820)
Laibach and the Re-opening of the Eastern Question
Alexander’s Dilemma over the Greek Insurrection
Vienna and Verona (1822)
CHAPTER 21 ‘AN ISLAND BATTERED BY THE WAVES’
Procrastination
Alexander’s Illness; His Reconciliation with Elizabeth; and the Ascendancy of Photius
The Flood of 1824
The Decision to go to Taganrog
CHAPTER 22 TAGANROG
To the Sea of Azov
Alexander in the Crimea
The Last Fourteen Days
The Aftermath
Legends
Genealogical Table
Reference Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Plates
Copyright
Illustrations
1 The six eldest children of Paul and Marie Feodorovna (Mansell Collection)
2 Catherine the Great by Lampi (photo Alinari–Giraudon)
3 The Mikhailovsky Palace in 1807 (Collection Viollet)
4 Tsar Paul I shortly before his death. Engraving by Wolf (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
5 Alexander from the painting by Monnier, 1806 (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
6 Empress Elizabeth in 1814 (The Wallace Collection)
7 Prince Adam Czartoryski after an engraving by Soliman (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
8 Arakcheev as a young man (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
9 Queen Louise of Prussia by Grassi in 1802 (Mansell Collection)
10 Maria Naryshkin, Alexander’s mistress (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
11 The meeting between Alexander and Napoleon on a raft at Tilsit in 1807 (from Imperator Aleksandr by N. K. Shilder)
12 A contemporary English cartoon satirizing the new-found friendship between Russia and France (photo Françoise Foliot)
13 Marshal Kutuzov (Novosti Press Agency)
14 Michael Speransky (Novosti Press Agency)
15 The historic letter from the Grand-Duchess Catherine to Alexander informing him of the loss of Moscow
16 Letter from Alexander to the Grand-Duchess Catherine
17 The Allied leaders in Hyde Park, 1814 (reproduced by gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen)
18 The Grand-Duchess Catherine Pavlovna. An engraving of 1814 (Mary Evans Picture Library)
19 The Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna. An engraving by T. Wright from a painting by George Dawe (Mary Evans Picture Library)
20 The Imperial villa on Kammionyi Island where the Tsar spent the anxious weeks after the burning of Moscow in 1812 (photo by Victor Kennett)
21 The river front of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg (photo by Victor Kennett)
22 Baroness Julie von Krüdener (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)
23 Alexander in 1818. Engraving by V. Bromley from a drawing by Igleson (Novosti Press Agency)
LIST OF MAPS
The Europe of Alexander I
St Petersburg in the Early Nineteenth Century
The Battle of Austerlitz
Author’s Note
Throughout the narrative and reference notes of this book my practice has been as follows:
Dates. Unless specifically stated otherwise, all dates are given according to the Gregorian Calendar, common to western Europe and the Americas, rather than to the Julian Calendar which was followed by the Russians until the Bolshevik Revolution. In the eighteenth century the Julian Calendar was eleven days behind the Gregorian Calendar and in the nineteenth century the difference was twelve days.
Spelling of Foreign Words and Names. So far as possible, I have tried to follow the currently fashionable system of transliteration except when common English usage commends an alternative spelling more naturally acceptable to the general reader. For arbitrary distinctions of this kind I ask the indulgence of linguistic purists.
Place-Names and First Names. The names used for places are normally those which were current in Alexander’s reign; I have at times added modern alternatives to assist the reader to identify them on a map. First names have been anglicized: thus ‘Catherine’ for ‘Ekaterina’. The only occasion upon which I have used a foreign form is to distinguish a person from somebody with a similar name who has already appeared in the text.
Titles. I have used the word ‘Tsar’ where contemporaries would have said ‘Emperor’ so as to distinguish Alexander from Napoleon and Francis of Austria. I have, however, referred to Alexander’s wife as the Empress Elizabeth, his mother as the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna and his grandmother as the Empress Catherine II. This is a totally illogical personal foible caused by the fact that I do not like the English rendering ‘Tsarina’. Moreover reigning Empresses, unlike their husbands, do not crowd out the page.
I would like to acknowledge my debt to the authors of the specialized studies cited in the bibliography and to express my gratitude to the staffs of the London Library and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for their kind assistance and courtesy. It is also a pleasure to thank Miss Gila Curtis for the care she has taken in editing this book for publication, and I wish particularly to thank Mrs M. D. Anderson who once again prepared the Index with such remarkable speed and skill. I am especially indebted to my wife, Veronica, who accompanied me on both my trips to Russia and who read and discussed every chapter with me in detail as it was written.
A.W.P.
Preface
Alexander I, ruler of Russia for the first quarter of the nineteenth century, is remembered today mainly on three counts: as the Tsar who refused to make peace with the French when Moscow fell in 1812; as the idealist who sought to bind Europe’s sovereigns in a Holy Alliance in 1815; and as the Emperor who died – or gave the impression of having died – at the remote southern seaport of Taganrog in the winter of 1825. Recent interest has concentrated, perhaps excessively, on the third of these dramatic episodes although it is natural that the epic years of the struggle with Napoleon should continue to excite the historical imagination.
There was, however, much of significance in Alexander’s life and reign besides these events. ‘A more virtuous man, I believe, does not exist, nor one who is more enthusiastically devoted to better the condition of mankind,’ declared President Thomas Jefferson six years after Alexander’s accession; and Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary, writing a private note to his own brother eleven years later, was prepared to assert he knew ‘of no Sovereign in history who has had so rich a harvest of glory’. Napoleon and Metternich, on the other hand, both complained that Alexander was inconsistent and untrustworthy; and there were numerous occasions when he puzzled, or exasperated, contemporaries. Was he sincere in his principles of government? Did he understand how to manage the armies he delighted to see on parade? Were his hours of religious devotion an escape from the responsibilities of Empire or a necessary means of finding strength and inspiration? Could he ever be relied upon to follow through logically a line of thought or action?
The questions, and the doubts, accumulated readily enough in his own lifetime. It was the answers which posed difficulty then, and the passage of a century and a half has made them no easier to attain. Alexander was a remarkably complex personality. There remains about the nature of his reign and his character sufficient mystery for him to have been clubbed, in retrospect, ‘the enigmatic Tsar’. This present book attempts to assemble clues to understand him as a man and as a sovereign; it does not pretend to present a final and definitive answer, for that is impossible. Pushkin once declared Alexander was ‘a Sphinx who carried his riddle with him to the tomb’. There are some who say that tomb is empty.
The Europe of Alexander I
The Crow in Peacock Feathers
The Bronze Horseman
The city of St Petersburg awoke early in the summer sunshine. It was Wednesday, 7 August 1782, and from soon after dawn the long avenues of the Russian capital echoed with all the anticipatory bustle of a grand parade. Bugles sounded in the fortress of St Peter and St Paul; cavalry hooves rang out sharply on the Nevsky Prospect and down the granite quays along the left bank of the river Neva; bands led the Guards past the ordered line of public buildings – the green and red of the Preobrazhensky Grenadiers, the green and white of the Izmailovsky, the blue and white of the Semeonovsky. By mid-morning eight regiments were drawn up facing outwards in a circle at the centre of the huge square between the Admiralty and the Senate House. From ornamented windows to east and west the great families of the Empire waited and watched. Less privileged onlookers – masons, carpenters, minor government officials and their wives, foreign traders and seamen, peasants come to town from the island villages or the fields to the south – jostled each other along the new embankment above the Neva. Some labourers clambered among the foundations of St Isaac’s Cathedral: they felt at home there, knowing every stone after ten years’ or more work, sleeping during the summer months in a cantonment at the foot of the church’s massive walls. Off the quay, a dark flotilla of warships rode at anchor, dressed overall. In the clear northern light flags and bunting were caught so sharply that the smooth grey river gleamed with rare colour. Someone had calculated that, over the previous decade, the citizens of the capital had enjoyed bright sunshine on only one day in four and that on almost half the days of the year it either rained or snowed. This morning they were fortunate. An artist who sketched the scene shows cloud rolling in from the Gulf of Finland, but the weather was good. Oddly enough, the elements always treated Catherine the Great’s days of public spectacle with proper respect.
At last the long French windows of the Senate House opened; the troops sprang to the salute; and Catherine II, Empress of All the Russias, came out on the balcony. Eyeing her with wonder from a room above was her eldest grandson, Grand Duke Alexander Pavlovich, four months short of his fifth birthday. It was unusual for members of the Imperial family to be in St Petersburg during July and August, but the Empress had insisted on bringing Alexander and his younger brother, Constantine, with her when she left the summer residence at Tsarskoe Selo on Monday morning. This was an occasion for associating
the future with the past, as well as with the present. Attention that day was to be focused for once not on the Empress herself but on the most renowned of her forerunners. In the centre of the square Falconet’s massive equestrian statue of Peter the Great was ready to be unveiled, after fifteen years of dispute and weary labour. To the sound of ceremonial cannon the last wooden palisades were knocked away and, as the smoke and dust cleared, the Bronze Horseman stood revealed to St Petersburg in all his majesty, the animal prancing wildly on a granite pedestal while its master, with arm outstretched towards the river and the Gulf, commands the waters on which he had dared to build his city to keep their distance. An eloquently simple inscription was carved in the rock base of Finnish stone – Petro Primo Catharina Secunda. Thus one great autocrat hailed another in comradely greeting, projecting herself to twenty million subjects as his true and undoubted successor.1
Yet Catherine was not a Russian Empress by inheritance but a Germanic usurper, converted from Lutheran Protestantism to Orthodoxy as a convenience of marriage and thrust on the throne in a palace revolution. She was born in April 1729 at Stettin on the Baltic coast, the eldest daughter of Prince Christian of Anhalt-Zerbst. At sixteen she was married to her first cousin, Peter the Great’s grandson and namesake, who succeeded his aunt (Elizabeth) as Peter III in the first days of 1762. Both as husband and sovereign Peter was ineffectual. According to Catherine’s memoirs, the marriage was never consummated. A son, Paul, was indeed born in September 1754 but his paternity has always been in doubt and Catherine herself indicated that the father was Prince Serge Saltykov, a not unattractive member of an old Russian family. Peter III reigned for only twenty-seven weeks, alienating the nobility and Church dignitaries by his contempt for the customs and interests of the Empire he had inherited. By contrast, Catherine’s attachment to Russian traditions won her a following in the capital. During the last week of June 1762 the Guards Regiments shifted their allegiance from Peter III to his consort, forced the Tsar to abdicate and proclaimed Catherine his successor. Peter was banished to Ropsha, some twenty-five miles from St Petersburg. A few days later there was a drunken brawl around the dinner table at Ropsha and, in the confusion, the ex-Tsar was strangled. His custodians went unpunished and his widow announced he had died from a sudden attack of colic. Within three months she was solemnly crowned by the Metropolitan Archbishop of Novgorod in the Uspensky Cathedral, Moscow. ‘The Lord has placed the crown upon thine head,’ the Metropolitan declared, with the comforting assurance of inner revelation. Foreign envoys, watching Catherine prostrate herself before Russia’s holy relics, knowingly discounted her chances of survival in such a barbaric land.2