Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace

by Alan Palmer

  Speransky was a less obvious consultant than Czartoryski on international questions for, until the spring of 1810, the responsibilities of the State Secretary stopped short of foreign affairs. Yet there were good reasons why Alexander should turn to Speransky at this time of crisis; for he alone knew how far the Continental System was hampering Russian trade and, in the last resort, only he could tell the Tsar whether the Empire’s precarious financial structure would collapse under the strain of rearmament or war. Alexander had encouraged Speransky to meet Caulaincourt from time to time in order to discuss commercial relations between the two Empires and, at his own discretion, he occasionally showed Speransky reports from Russian agents and representatives in foreign countries. Hence, although Speransky was less well-informed than Czartoryski about conditions in Europe, he had some knowledge of the economic state of the Napoleonic Empire. Moreover at Erfurt he had met Talleyrand and other great names in the Bonapartist establishment; and he knew as well as anyone in Russia the extent to which the new European order was an autocracy tempered by corruption.43

  In February 1809 Talleyrand himself had suggested to Alexander, in a personal message, that Speransky might serve as a valuable intermediary for communications from Paris which needed to be franker than the formal despatches of accredited diplomats.44 For a year the Tsar does not appear to have acted on Talleyrand’s proposal; but, soon after Napoleon’s betrothal to Marie Louise, Speransky recommended to the Tsar a change in the form of diplomatic representation in France, by which commercial arrangements would be entrusted to a specialist who would report directly to Speransky on the possibility of obtaining from France a financial loan. For this task Alexander selected Karl von Nesselrode, a thirty-year-old Westphalian nobleman whose family had entered Russian service during the early campaigns of the French revolutionary wars and who had already been employed on several delicate diplomatic missions. Between March 1810 and August 1811 Nesselrode sent useful information to St Petersburg, not only on the economic structure of France but on the general trends in Napoleon’s policy.45 Much of what he said was interesting; and this is hardly surprising, for many of Nesselrode’s comments and suggestions originated with a gentleman described in the secret correspondence as ‘Cousin Henry’, a person of wide experience and many identities (among them the Prince of Benevento and Citizen Talleyrand). It was Cousin Henry who urged the Russians to keep on good terms with Vienna so that the two governments might keep the peace of Europe ‘by imposing an obstacle to the encroachments of France’.46 Sometimes, it must be admitted, Cousin Henry’s counsels consist of truisms wrapped in mystery so as to give them an air of genius; and Speransky’s memoranda on foreign affairs lack the profundity or originality of his analyses of Russia’s internal problems; but there is no doubt that the Nesselrode-Talleyrand link strengthened Speransky’s position in Alexander’s circle of close advisers at a time when resentment over his administrative reforms was widespread among the conservative aristocracy. Although Speransky was not himself aware of the importance of his intrusion into foreign affairs,† the fresh prestige he acquired in the Tsar’s eyes may well have enabled him to maintain his influence for as much as eighteen months longer than Alexander would otherwise have permitted.

  There was one man in St Petersburg who had no illusions at all over the change in his personal status. By the spring of 1810 Caulaincourt’s antennae were well-attuned to the moods of the Russian capital and its master; and he could see the Austrian marriage and the failure of the Polish negotiations had cost him his privileged position at Court. In vain he hoped for an early summons back to Paris: France, he believed, needed a different type of representative, one who would not find loyalty strained by friendship for the sovereign to whom he was accredited. But Napoleon had no understanding of such niceties of temperament and, for a whole year, he ignored the ambassador’s request.47

  The unfortunate Caulaincourt was thus left to waste his own funds on maintaining a social position to which he had aspired solely on his Emperor’s orders. He behaved with remarkable dignity: only occasionally did members of his staff or the spokesmen of other governments perceive the strain. On 23 May 1810, he gave the finest ball of his term of residence in St Petersburg to celebrate the marriage of Napoleon and Marie Louise.48 It was a splendid occasion attended by the Imperial family (including the Dowager Empress), by ambassadors, ministers and envoys, and by the greatest names in Russia. The ball began at nine in the evening, while (according to the American minister) ‘it was daylight as at noon’; and the Imperial party was still joining in the celebrations at ‘past two in the morning’. The Tsar, wrote Adams in his journal, ‘was gracious to everybody beyond his usual custom, which is remarkable for affability’; and he danced a polonaise not only with Mrs Adams but with her young sister, Catherine Johnson, who had not as yet been presented at Court. But, Adams himself noted, ‘a very small part of the company took real pleasure in the fête’.49 By now everyone sensed the hollowness in the feigned friendship between the two Empires of France and Russia, and feared for the future. Caulaincourt duly informed Paris of the ‘graciousness and condescension’ with which the Imperial party had ‘deigned to stay’ and honour Napoleon’s marriage.50 Yet it is a rather different Caulaincourt who finds his way into Adams’s journal: ‘I heard the Ambassador himself say to some one that he gave this ball because he was obliged to do it – it gave him no pleasure.’51 The words might almost have been an epitome of ‘the Viceroy’s’ whole mission.

  * Marie Feodorovna arrived at the Tauride Palace from Gatchina on 4 January 1810 with the intention of remaining in the capital for the (Russian) New Year and Epiphany celebrations. She did not leave for Gatchina again until 31 January and was therefore able to discuss matters with Alexander at great length. These were the same weeks in which the Tsar was inaugurating the Council of State and persuading Arakcheev not to retire to his estate at Gruzino (see previous chapter).

  † Speransky also established an agent in Vienna, Joseph Mallia, who supplied him with information on the policy of the new Austrian Foreign Minister, Metternich; but, since ‘secrets’ leaked as readily from Vienna as from a sieve, Mallia’s value to Speransky and Alexander was ona far lower level than Nesselrode’s. (For the Mallia-Speransky connection, see Schilder, Alexsandr, Vol. III, p. 494.)

  12

  ‘Blood Must Flow Again’

  Alexander at Tver and Gruzino

  For Alexander the summer and autumn of 1810 were months of mingled elation and sorrow, a fitting prelude to the years of widening apprehension which lay ahead. They began happily enough. In the second week of June his carriage sped rapidly southwards to Catherine at Tver, who was then in the sixth month of pregnancy and bored by her relative isolation. The seasons were wretchedly late and Alexander was surprised by ‘a very considerable flight of snow on the road’; but the warmth of his reception soon compensated for any earlier discomfort.1 Catherine, irritated beyond reason at alleged slights by Speransky as State Secretary, was determined to impress her brother: she let him know the views of the Moscow conservatives who flocked to her soirées; she gave him a book list of improving titles she wanted from St Petersburg for her library (which he promptly lost); and, more effectively, she saw to it that ‘her ladies’, as Alexander called them, attended to his needs. He was particularly charmed by her principal maid-of-honour, Catherine Muraviev-Apostol, ‘a heavenly creature’, as he remarked in a later letter to his hostess. Although Alexander knew his sister too well to pay undue attention to her political strictures, he listened with sympathy, said nothing, and enjoyed himself. It was good to shake off the bustle of the capital for a week. ‘They were delightful days I spent at Tver’, he wrote afterwards.2

  From his sister’s miniature Court he travelled due north by way of Novgorod to Arakcheev’s estate at Gruzino, which he had never visited before. He spent a night as the General’s guest and was impressed by the tidiness and symmetry of everything around him. ‘It really is a charming place’, he
wrote back to Catherine, ‘but it is the order which reigns here that is unique … The streets of the villages have precisely that quality of cleanliness I have been trying so hard to establish in the towns’; and he urged both his sister and her husband to visit Gruzino as soon as they had the opportunity and observe for themselves the wonders wrought there by ‘the corporal of Gatchina’.3

  Alexander’s enthusiasm was not merely an expression of delight at seeing villages trimmed up as though on parade. Already that spring he had begun to consider the establishment of pioneer settlements, in which a battalion of troops would cultivate neglected fields and, together with their families, establish a new community, agriculturally self-supporting and socially constructive as life in a barracks could never become. If Arakcheev was able to convert the flat and often flooded marshland around Gruzino into a model agrarian settlement, then great tasks must await him in the Empire as a whole; and the Tsar returned to St Petersburg convinced he should be assigned responsibility for setting up these ‘military colonies’. The General, tired of abortive paper-work in the military department of the Council of State, welcomed the chance to control a project in which the Tsar himself was clearly so interested.4 No time would be wasted on long-term planning. Within twelve weeks of Alexander’s visit Arakcheev had requisitioned land between Smolensk and Minsk and sketched out regulations for the first military colony; and, before the coming of the winter frost, a battalion of musketeers found itself, a little surprisingly, building new villages and cultivating fields in this colony near the upper Dnieper. It was not exactly what Alexander originally had in mind – for the region was already showing a good yield of crops before the army moved in – but Arakcheev was too experienced a showman to set himself an impossible task. Provided there was neither a drought nor a foreign invasion, the experiment had no reason to fail. Unfortunately, in successive summers, there was both.

  Yet, in those white nights of June 1810, such hopes and disappointments were still far ahead in an uncertain future. Good news followed Alexander back to the capital from Gruzino. The war with Turkey, so often delayed by diplomatic parleying, was at last going well. On the Sunday after the Tsar’s return a bulletin from General Kamensky reported he had taken the fortress of Silistria on the Danube. Alexander was excited to learn of Kamensky’s success and promptly ordered the priests in his chapel to stop singing the Liturgy in order that Barclay de Tolly, the Minister of War, might read Kamensky’s message to the distinguished congregation (which he did so badly that most of what he said was incomprehensible).5 Other victories followed in August and October, celebrated in a more conventional manner; and before the coming of winter it was possible for the Tsar and his ministers to consider moving troops away from the Danube to the new danger zone along the Niemen and the Bug. Now that they no longer had to consider French sensitivities the Russians were able to recover the initiative in foreign affairs.

  Personal Sorrows, 1810

  But, swiftly offsetting the Silistria triumph, came personal tragedies which plunged Alexander once more into deep depression. His principal mistress, Maria Naryshkin, had given birth to two more daughters since the death of the first child she bore Alexander in 1804. Now, in June 1810, the eldest of these girls, Zinaida, suddenly and unexpectedly died, and Alexander was left to mourn ‘the passing of some of the happiness I possess in this world’, as he wrote to his sister.6 A month later an emissary from Berlin brought Alexander further sad news: Queen Louise, permitted at last to return to Prussia’s capital, died suddenly on 19 July while visiting her family home in Mecklenburg. Officially it was said she had died from damaged lungs and a polyp in the heart but it was generally accepted that her life had been shortened by the strain of maintaining Prussia’s liberties against the encroachments of Napoleon. According to the Prussian envoy to St Petersburg, Major von Wrangel, Alexander was so distressed by the news that he promptly declared, ‘I swear to you that I shall avenge her death and shall make certain that her murderer [Napoleon] pays for his crime.’ The Tsar is reported to have told Wrangel that in four years’ time he would have an army powerful enough to march against the French and liberate all Germany. Although Wrangel’s story could well have been manufactured later, a melodramatic and anticipatorily boastful response of this kind was certainly consistent with Alexander’s character.7

  Under this double blow Alexander responded as when Elizabeth’s daughter had died. He shut himself in his study, absorbed in the minutiae of administration, not always bothering to inform ministers or counsellors precisely what he was doing. Though no doubt such behaviour was therapeutic, it did not make for efficient government and exasperated both the State Secretary and Chancellor Rumiantsev. Speransky’s private comments (eagerly seized upon by his enemies) were less sympathetic than experience or tact dictated. Even Adams, one of the least perceptive foreign envoys, noted the confusion at Court and predicted the early resignation of the Chancellor, although in this instance he proved to be wrong.8

  Naturally these personal sorrows had their greatest effect on the Tsar’s private life. When Maria Naryshkin’s first child died Elizabeth consoled Alexander with all the tenderness of a starved heart. But that was six years ago. Since then she had suffered the tragic loss of ‘Lisinka’ and a series of vexatious affronts heaped upon her both by the Polish courtesan and by the Grand Duchess Catherine. The burden of sustained grief, often misunderstood by her husband, seemed gradually to dry the wells of compassion in Elizabeth’s soul. She cared, as ever, for Alexander; but her tone now was firmer than in earlier years. When it was rumoured among her ladies that Alexander was having a suite of rooms prepared in the Winter Palace for one of his favourites, Elizabeth let it be known that should he seek to install a mistress in any of the official residences (as his father had done at the Mikhailovsky) she would move out and return to Baden.9 In fact, Alexander never inflicted on Elizabeth so public a humiliation, if only because he had too deep a sense of dignity to endure an open breach with his wife.

  Yet in the last days of July 1810 Elizabeth did, temporarily, leave Kammionyi Island and take a long holiday at the seaside village of Plöen, on the Gulf of Riga.10 Her doctors had recommended for several years that she should seek to strengthen her frail constitution by bathing in the salt sea (as opposed to the almost fresh waters of the Gulf of Finland). But one wonders if she chose those particular weeks purely by chance. For a few days before her departure from St Petersburg the Dowager Empress arrived at the Tauride Palace to meet the Grand Duchess Catherine and escort her back to Pavlovsk to await the birth of her first child. Throughout August and early September Alexander was thus subjected even more than usual to earnest advice from his mother and sister; and it was, from Elizabeth’s point of view, a good time to absent herself. The Grand Duchess tended to accord Countess Naryshkin a privileged status as the mother of her brother’s children; and this was an affront which Elizabeth found hard to forgive.

  At Plöen Elizabeth’s health improved rapidly. She enjoyed the sunshine, rare in that wretched summer, and the novelty of almost immersing herself in the waves (‘There are few sensations so pleasant as sea-bathing, even when the water is cold …’); and there is no doubt that she was happily fêted by her small suite of friends and ladies-of-honour.* She returned to the capital in the first week of September and, with some apprehension, journeyed out to Pavlovsk for the baptism into the Lutheran Church of the ‘little Oldenburg’, to whom the Grand Duchess gave birth on 28 August. But Elizabeth’s nerves were less strained than earlier in the summer and the visit was not such a social ordeal as she feared. Although, as usual, she had to accord precedence to Marie Feodorovna, some attempt was made to acknowlege her existence as a person. During the evening festivities a short ballet was mounted, based upon Elizabeth’s favourite waltzes; and it was still possible, by such trivial gestures, for Alexander to win back Elizabeth’s loyalty and reconcile her to his mother and sister.11 The month’s absence from St Petersburg (the first holiday she had taken sin
ce Alexander’s accession) had a remarkable effect upon her standing at Court: and there was even a letter to the Tsar from an eccentric German émigré scholar, whom Alexander had met some years previously, which proposed that the Tsar should put himself at the head of his army, challenge the might of Napoleon, and proclaim Elizabeth the Regent of Russia. It is unlikely Alexander showed this letter either to his mother or his sister, each of whom naturally assumed she alone possessed the qualities and standing of a Regent.12

  Alexander takes Russia out of the Continental System

  The general situation did not, however, yet require such drastic steps. Napoleon was still troubled by the intractable problems of the Iberian peninsula; and he was now stung by the back-lash of his own Continental System, with banking-houses failing first in his Germanic dependencies and subsequently in Paris itself. The French harvest of 1810 was poor and the price of corn rose so steeply that Napoleon feared he might soon be faced by agrarian troubles, especially in Brittany. During August Alexander was disturbed by reports that three French divisions had been moved from southern Germany to the Baltic coast and that 50,000 new muskets had arrived in Warsaw for Poniatowski’s Polish brigades.13 But the Tsar did not believe there was any immediate danger, for he was well-informed about Napoleon’s difficulties by Nesselrode and the impenitent ‘Cousin Henry’. Indeed, in the late autumn, Alexander received clear evidence of financial embarrassment at the French Court by a sudden request from Talleyrand for fifteen hundred thousand francs, which he was sure the Tsar ‘with his richly endowed qualities of generosity’ would despatch to him. Although Alexander felt ‘compelled with regret to forgo the pleasure of obliging’ Talleyrand on this occasion, he was ironically amused by the blatant cupidity of so influential a figure in Paris.14 There might well come a time when benevolence to the needy rich would prove a useful political investment.