Welcomed to Dover by the thunder of cannons, the tsar came thankfully ashore. Among notable people gathered to greet him was a Mr Fector who, on seeing the tsar’s obvious indisposition, asked him to stay the night. Alexander accepted with gratitude and, ministered to by Wylie, was well enough the next morning to continue the journey to London, this time, thankfully, by coach.
Reaching Canterbury, the Tsar of Russia and the King of Prussia were welcomed by the prince regent.50 The initial exchange of courtesies appears to have been brief. The prince, a corpulent figure compared to both his visitors, had already taken umbrage over Alexander’s decision to join his sister Catherine in the Pulteney Hotel in London rather than accept his offer of a suite of rooms in St James’s Palace. Nonetheless, protocol insisted that royal visitors from abroad must be entertained. Tersely the prince informed them of forthcoming banquets to be held in their honour before, as they parted company, more compliments were paid. Then, climbing back into their coaches, they were off again, rattling over the highway on their way to London.
They drove through the Kent countryside, so aptly named the garden of England, in the full glory of early June. Alexander, although entranced by the vision of hop fields and carefully tended crops within hedgerows in a country so unlike the vast spaces of his own, was nonetheless still exhausted and unwell.
At Blackheath he was met by his Russian ambassador, Count Lieven, who informed him that huge crowds were waiting to see him near London Bridge. Hearing this the tsar lost his nerve. Since his father’s death the fear of assassination had always nagged at his mind, and suddenly terrified of meeting a horde of people at close quarters, he ordered the coachman to take another road.
After some consultation, a different route into London was devised through Camberwell and Clapham. Eventually, having crossed the Thames over the bridge at Battersea, the horses clattered into Knightsbridge and thence into Piccadilly where, in the Pulteney Hotel, his sister Catherine waited for him to arrive. Watching from a window she saw him, in his dark green uniform, climb out of the coach and, raising his eyes to her, gallantly blow her a kiss.
The Pulteney Hotel was then one of the smartest establishments of its kind in London. Thick carpets muffled the footsteps both of visitors and the ever attendant staff. Chairs and sofas were upholstered in plush and velvet, the wallpaper heavily embossed, and the chandeliers and brass fittings had been polished until they shone. Mr Escudier, the owner, resplendent in high winged collar and black frock coat, bowed from the waist, nearly overcome with honour as the Tsar of Russia entered his spacious hall. Behind him his wife trembled with excitement in her best bombazine gown, as she carried out the curtsey she had been practising for days. In turn, behind her, the senior members of the staff gave an equally obsequious greeting to the highly honoured guest.
Alexander, having acknowledged them, went leaping up the stairs into the arms of his favourite sister. Katya, as he called her, was now the widowed Duchess of Oldenburg, her husband Prince George having died of a fever at Tver the previous December. Catherine had left her two young sons to come to England, ostensibly to recover from depression caused by her husband’s death, but more truthfully to enjoy herself away from the strictures of court mourning. Handsome rather than beautiful, small of stature and dark haired, she was still only twenty-four. Besides, as she herself said, she ‘always looked her best in black’.
The choice to stay at the Pulteney appears to have been made by Catherine who, rather than staying in a palace, preferred the anonymity of a hotel. The reason for this, as she explained to her brother, was that she could not stand the advances of the Prince regent and his brother the Duke of Sussex, both known to be on the lookout for a bride. The prince regent was now divorced from Caroline, his excessively tiresome German wife, and the marriage of the Duke of Sussex to Lady Augusta Murray had been annulled because, contrary to the Royal Marriages Act, it had not been approved by the king.
According to Catherine, both princes looked her up and down as if she had been up for sale. The prince regent, for his part, declared that the Russian princess, who spoke English fluently, had had the temerity to tell him how to bring up his own daughter, with whom at that time he was on bad terms. Thus primed by their mutual animosity, the tone was set for disagreement even before Alexander arrived.
Brother and sister had much to talk about and soon they were joined by Count Lieven and his wife Dorothea, whose diary describes what then took place. Soon crowds gathered in Piccadilly, and people began shouting for the tsar. Alexander waved from the balcony but kept returning to the room to see if the prince regent, expected to make a courtesy call, had arrived. Shortly, however, a note came to say that the prince, who was then unpopular on account of his treatment of his wife, was afraid of being molested in the streets. Alexander then found himself left with no option but to make use of Lieven’s carriage, in which he drove through the clamorous populace to meet the prince at his own residence of Carlton House.
The meeting was frigid. Prince George, never having been allowed to take part in military action himself, was intensely jealous of the tsar, now fêted throughout London as a hero.
But whatever the prince regent’s attitude, the people of London made up for it, lining the streets and cheering wherever he and Catherine went. At the theatre people who did not have seats and boxes hired spaces in the foyer to see at first hand the handsome tsar and his dark-haired, striking sister, who wore a feather in her hat to give her height.
Alexander may have offended the prince regent but the people of London loved him as their own. Everywhere he went he was mobbed. Women, in particular, went into raptures, throwing posies at his feet. Now, even more than in Paris, he displayed the common touch. He shook hands and talked to those about him in the friendliest of ways. At Portsmouth, where he reviewed the fleet, he charmed not only the officers but also the sailors with whom, on a visit to one of the ships, he shared a meal. On another he drank some grog, issued to the crew each day at noon. ‘You call it grog,’ he said in his guttural English accent, ‘I think it is very good.’ And with that he poured out some for his sister who, as usual, was by his side.
The Russian tsar soon attracted the type of adulation these days given to stars of the media. So desperate were people to see him that in the mornings people got up early to watch him walking in the park with Catherine, or riding through what were then the fields of Marylebone to the villages of Hampstead and Highgate on the rising ground beyond. Crowds of excited citizens gathered round West-minster Abbey and the British Museum to watch them come and go. Hands were stretched out in the desperate hope that their idol would stop to shake them as he passed.
On more formal occasions the citizens of London saw Alexander, resplendent in gold and scarlet dress uniform, driving with his black-garbed sister to the banquets given by the City of London and the Prince Regent. A special journey was made to Oxford, where the university honoured both Alexander and Frederick William as the ‘liberators of Europe’. Again there was a civil banquet before, on the next morning, the whole party – which included the prince regent, the Austrian Prince Metternich and the Prussian Marshal Blücher, together with a host of generals and diplomats – processed from Christ Church to the Sheldonian Theatre, where Alexander was made a Doctor of Civil Law.51
This was followed by a visit to the Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim Palace, where the magnificence of Vanburgh’s greatest creation was compared with the palaces designed by Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli in St Petersburg, so far away.
Returning to London, ‘a dinner as sumptuous as expense or skill could make’ was given for the visiting royalties by the City of London at the Guildhall. Wylie is known to have been present and must have witnessed the frigidity of the prince regent, who, annoyed by the tsar being late, partly because he had stopped to talk to Whig parliamentarians on the way, treated him and his sister to ‘a haughty silence’ throughout.52
Alexander’s popularity with the people of London was
as salt in a wound to the prince regent, who himself had been booed in the theatre with shouts of ‘where’s your wife?’ at the height of the scandal over his divorce. To make matters worse Alexander soon became infatuated with the Countess of Jersey, a former mistress of the prince, which irritated him irrationally despite the fact that he had long since cast her off.
For Alexander himself it was a case of a new love replacing the old. The sorrow over Josephine’s death at least partly vanished as, once again in pursuit of a pretty woman, he found a new zest for life. To James Wylie, long familiar with Alexander’s mood swings, it came as a great relief to see him out of his depression and back in his normally ebullient frame of mind. So enamoured was he of the countess that he insisted on travelling back from Blenheim with great speed to attend a ball she was giving, at which he made up for his late arrival by dancing Scottish reels, which no doubt Wylie had taught him, until six o’clock in the morning.
Despite their private incompatibility, protocol demanded that the prince regent and Alexander must appear outwardly as friends. Together with Frederick William of Prussia, they rode in Hyde Park. On one occasion, as Princess Charlotte, the prince’s daughter, appeared in her carriage, Alexander rode up to doff his hat and pay his respects to the pretty bonneted young lady, which were most joyfully received.
On another occasion, at Ascot Races, the tsar asked the prince as a special favour to knight his doctor, James Wylie, in honour of his achievements during the recent campaign. The prince agreed with good humour, borrowing General Platoff’s sword to tap him on the shoulder as he knelt before him on the grass.
Later, during the same visit, and at Alexander’s special request, Wylie was created a baronet of Great Britain by the prince. Alexander himself then sat down and drew out the design for the coat of arms which today can be seen engraved on a plaque on the rock on which his statue is mounted in St Petersburg. Consisting of a shield divided horizontally into two parts, the upper bears the imperial coat of arms of Russia above a silver sword. The lower portion contains a blood-stained glove, two five-pointed stars and a running fox. The shield is surmounted by an open helmet and a Cossack of the Don, mounted and charging at full speed. It is supported by two soldiers of the Zimeroff Guards, fully armed in ceremonial dress, and the Latin motto below reads: Labore et Scientia (‘Labour and Science’).
It would seem to have been at this time that the tsar presented his doctor with the large gold ring-seal. The seal was a carved red cornelian representing two Napoleonic soldiers. A Latin inscription on the gold circumference read ‘To Jacobus Wylie from the Tsar of Russia per cum felici’. Sadly this ring was lost by a descendant, but a pair of pistols, believed to have been taken from Napoleon’s carriage, were later given by Wylie to the Wellcome Museum.
The tsar had intended to travel on to Scotland and to sail back to Russia from Leith. This would have fitted in well with Wylie’s plans, allowing him to visit Kincardine, where many of his family still lived. Janet is known to have made the long journey to St Petersburg, departing back to Scotland with several much treasured shawls.
His eldest brother William, however, now Master of the Public English School in Dundee, came down to London with his family to visit their now famous relation. The sight of the esteemed doctor, a tall, imposing man in his late forties, with decorations of foreign countries emblazoned on his uniform, both impressed and intimidated his relations. Long gone and near forgotten was the thin, rebellious young man who had sailed away to Russia at the age of only twenty-two. So long in fact had he been absent that they probably found it hard to comprehend some of his words, the Scottish accent of his youth being imbued with inflection of the Russian tongue. Lodged as he would seem to have been with the rest of the tsar’s entourage in the Pulteney Hotel, he may even have found it difficult to get used to the food and customs of a country that now seemed foreign to him.
Reunited with his relations, he is known to have given valuable presents, in addition to a hundred pounds, to each of his five nieces. More importantly, he tried to persuade his nephew, the Reverend Doctor John Wylie, respected Church of Scotland minister at Carluke, to return with him to Russia as his secretary. But the young man refused, probably for family reasons, or else intimidated both by his uncle and the thought of going so far from home. Wylie bore him no grudge; years later, when his nephew did finally go to visit him in Russia, he was to receive yet more expensive gifts.
Also included in the present-giving was Madame Escudier, wife of the proprietor of the Pulteney Hotel, to whom Alexander presented a valuable brooch on his departure from the hotel. The tsar and his entourage left London on 22 June. Travelling to Portsmouth, both he and his sister were entertained by the prince regent, for the last time, on the royal yacht. At Spithead they saw the strength of Britain’s navy as they watched a review of the fleet. Then moving on to Petworth, they said farewell to the prince regent before sailing to Ostend on 27 June.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
‘The First Medical Person in the Russian Empire’
Tsar Alexander, with his personal doctor and Surgeon in Ordinary, now Sir James Wylie, returned to St Petersburg on 24 July 1814. That Wylie had committed himself to his adopted country is proved by the fact that his engagement to an English woman, who lived in St Petersburg, although sanctioned by Alexander, was nonetheless broken off because she wanted to go back to England. Nothing would make him resign his high position in the country he now considered his own. If not a misogynist, he seems to have preferred the company of men to the point where a group of Russian military surgeons became his ‘family’ in whose undemanding company he liked to spend his time.53
While in England, the tsar and his doctor had visited hospitals in London where Wylie, thanks to his reputation, had found himself warmly received. The main hospitals were the Westminster, with ninety-eight beds, the London Hospital on the south side of White-chapel Road, and St Thomas’s in Southwark, which had been much endowed by the wealthy merchant Sir Thomas Guy, founder of the infirmary on the opposite side of the road which to this day bears his name.
Also in London was Bethlem Hospital at Moorfields, the lunatic asylum famously featured in many of Hogarth’s cartoons. Commonly known as Bedlam, it was a great tourist attraction, the visitors being allowed to peer at the antics of the ‘unfortunates’ as they were then termed. They were even permitted to bring long sticks with which to poke at them through the bars to enrage them into performing the antics thought amusing by their tormentors, to whom madness was a form of sport.
In the absence of records of their visit it seems unlikely that the tsar and Wylie were among the 96,000 visitors to the Bethlem Hospital that year. It is known, however, that they did visit several of the hospitals named above. Touring the wards they had found that, contagion now being recognized as a cause of disease, the beds were placed further apart. This was just one example of the advancement of medical science, thanks to the chance for experiment offered by the carnage of the recent war.
The war had also produced a more humane outlook towards the suffering of the men, who had hitherto been regarded as being as dispensable as the bullets they fired. Wellington, who had so caustically referred to his soldiers as ‘the scum of the earth’, had added that he would ‘never fight a battle without them’.
Ironically, however, it was the French who had led the way in reforming conditions for the fighting men. Foremost among them was Baron Larrey, Napoleon’s Surgeon General, who had invented the well-sprung ambulances, the ambulances volantes, by which wounded men were spared the agony of jolting carts. He had also perfected the art of surgery, famously amputating limbs in two minutes as his opposite number in Wellington’s Peninsular army, Doctor James McGrigor, could vouch for, having witnessed him operating in Paris following the armistice with France. McGrigor, who kept a journal throughout the Peninsular War, describes how he, like Wylie, influenced his commander-in-chief – in his case the cantankerous Iron Duke – to establish the field hospital
s which saved so many men’s lives.
Unfortunately his diary ended with the armistice and, as we know, Wylie’s own memoirs were destroyed. Nonetheless it is more than likely that the two men, both Scotsmen, and with so much experience to share, should have met, either in Paris or in London, to which, at the time of Wylie’s visit, McGrigor had just returned. Appointed Chief of the Army Medical College (later the RAMC) at Millbank, he then held a position in British army circles similar to that of Wylie in Russia.
Wylie’s importance in Russia is emphasized by a contemporary physician, Doctor Lyall, who, possibly jealous of his predominance in Russian medical circles, and of his influence with the tsar, described him as:
One of the most notorious and powerful individuals in Russia . . . with not very brilliant medical talent, with very moderate scientific acquirements, and with much singularity and little refinement of manners. Sir James Wylie has risen from the most obscure parentage to be the first medical person in the Russian Empire.54
Wylie was obviously outspoken, a characteristic inherited from his mother, but Lyall’s envy shines through when he criticizes his work.
Prior to the reign of Alexander the care of the sick in the peasant population had been left almost entirely to parish priests. Likewise even the prestigious Guards regiments had only a few surgeons to deal with the accidents and diseases inevitable among hundreds of men. The Russian soldier was considered expendable, but it seems as though it must have been Wylie who opened the eyes of the emperor to the suffering and waste of life that was draining his army’s strength. Certain it is that, deeply concerned over the great losses among his soldiers in the Crimea, the tsar asked him to produce a treatise on considering ‘preventive and curative instructions for the Russian troops’, and that subsequently, with typical efficiency, came the medical papers on yellow fever and plague, written in his neat, small hand in both Russian and French.
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