Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace

by Alan Palmer

  She was not the only one to be surprised by his behaviour that day. His landau sped rapidly past the hedgerows and hop-fields of Kent, covering the sixty-five miles to the outskirts of London in little more than five hours. At Blackheath he was met by his ambassador with the news of great crowds awaiting him south of London Bridge, apparently eager to unhorse his carriage and receive him as warmly as the people of Banbury had his sister. Apprehension, or the peculiar shyness which at times swept unexpectedly over him, made him order a change of route. The landau swung to the south, and, passing through the Surrey villages of Camberwell and Clapham, crossed the Thames at Battersea and turned down Knightsbridge and into Piccadilly. There young Thomas de Quincey, strolling in the afternoon sunshine, was surprised to see a commotion at the corner of Albemarle Street. A tall and smiling man in a dark green uniform stepped down smartly from his carriage, blew a brotherly kiss to a woman at a window on the first floor and hurried up the steps of the Pulteney Hotel.44 ‘The countless crowds that awaited him … in amphitheatres … let at exorbitant prices’, wrote Dorothea Lieven later, were ‘a trifle angry at this smuggling in; the English people loves royalty to show itself in state.’45

  But, if so, they soon forgave him. Within an hour Piccadilly was blocked by onlookers cheering for Alexander to appear on the balcony. The Prince Regent had announced his intention of paying his guest a courtesy call; and the Tsar and his sister waited for him to arrive in their suite on the first floor, occasionally stepping out on to the balcony to acknowledge the cheers, the Lievens accompanying them each time. Alexander grew impatient; Catherine made it clear this was the treatment she expected from the Regent, and Count Lieven was flustered with embarrassment. ‘At last at four o’clock’, writes Dorothea Lieven, ‘came a note from Bloomfield (the Regent’s secretary) to my husband to this effect: “His Royal Highness has been threatened with annoyance in the streets if he shows himself: it is therefore impossible for him to come and see the Emperor”.’ Alexander was forced to make his way in Lieven’s carriage through the crowds to Carlton House for his first meeting with the Prince Regent.46

  It was as frigid an encounter as Alexander’s unfortunate visit to Louis XVIII at Compiègne. Quite apart from the frustrations of the day, the Regent was intensely jealous of the Tsar. Like Alexander he loved the trappings of soldiery but he had never been permitted to command troops in the field. From private letters written by the Regent to his mother during the campaigns of 1812–14 it is clear he identified himself with the fortunes of Allied arms on the continent as a whole and not merely in the Peninsula; he considered himself present in spirit at each great encounter, from the Berezina to Leipzig.47 The arrival of the Tsar in person deflated these illusions. As if that were not in itself galling enough, Alexander had now spurned his invitation to go into residence at St James’s Palace, choosing to stay at the Pulteney Hotel with that insufferable Duchess of Oldenburg who presumed to lecture him on the way he should bring up his own daughter. What each man said to the other in the half hour they were together remains unknown. It cannot have been a happy exchange of words. Afterwards Alexander commented dryly to his ambassador, ‘A poor Prince’, and it is not unlikely that the Regent may have spoken extravagantly of the part he had played in the defeat of Napoleon. At all events the two men remained coldly disposed towards each other for the remainder of Alexander’s stay in England.48 In all fairness the blame was not entirely the Regent’s: the Tsar, as he had indicated to Napoleon at Tilsit, was not well-disposed towards the British, and the elaborate exchange of compliments between the Prince and Louis XVIII had irritated him even before he left Paris. Moreover he had just spent a couple of hours listening to the venomous barbs of his favourite sister’s conversation. Only the most determined and well-disposed of charmers could overcome such prejudice, and this was a role which, in his present mood, the Prince Regent was incapable of fulfilling.

  Yet, whatever the feeling at Court, popular adulation of the Russian visitors continued so long as the Tsar was in London. He was cheered to the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket and the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, and even when he drove out to breakfast at the ‘Star and Garter’ in Richmond he was nearly mobbed.49 In a letter written a few days after the Tsar’s departure, Mary Russell Mitford – soon to become famous for her essays on rural life, Our Village – described the excitement in polite Society over Alexander’s charm and grace: ‘Over him the ladies were as mad as maniacs at the full moon’, she said. ‘To obtain a kiss of the same magnanimous hand, they threw themselves toutes éplorées with nosegays at his feet.’50 People up early could see this God-creature walking like a mere mortal beside his sister in the Park or riding out through the fields of Marylebone to the nothern slopes of Hampstead and Highgate, where the City families had their dachas as on the hills west of Moscow. Later in the day it was difficult for either Alexander or Catherine to move so freely. Returning to the Pulteney Hotel from the customary tourist’s visit to Westminster Abbey and the British Museum, they found frenzied women trying to grasp them by the hand as they stepped down from their carriage. But Alexander, who had known this rapturous treatment in Moscow, was not especially troubled. ‘On ascending the steps of his hotel’, The Times reported with reverential awe, ‘His Imperial Majesty turned round to the people and most condescendingly took off his hat.’51

  For most of his three weeks in London Alexander’s time was occupied with State occasions or formal functions. The public saw the Tsar in scarlet and gold dress uniform driving through the streets to banquets and gala performances, his sister invariably accompanying him and wearing, whenever possible, a hat with a pendant feather so as to give her the appearance of a stature she did not possess. Society, of course, amused itself by commenting on the women to whom Alexander seemed attentive. It was noted that his most frequent partner for waltzes was the Countess of Jersey, once the Prince of Wales’s mistress but long since fallen from favour. The Tsar’s preference for the Countess irritated the Regent, much to the amusement of the gossips.52 On the first Sunday he was in London (12 June) they had another morsel to chew on. That afternoon the Tsar (and most of the other ‘visiting heroes’) went riding in Hyde Park, watched inevitably by a cheering crowd of Londoners. Princess Charlotte happened to decide to take a drive through the Park in her carriage while the excitement was at its peak. To everyone’s satisfaction, Alexander ‘gallantly rode up to speak to her twice’. Cam Hobhouse, good Whig that he was, thought the incident worthy of entry in his journal;53 so no doubt did Charlotte.

  Two days later the whole cavalcade of sovereigns and dignitaries made its way to Oxford, where the University had resolved to confer honorary doctorates on Europe’s liberators. Alexander, wearing ‘a plain blue coat’, and Catherine in ‘a plain travelling dress with a large straw bonnet shaded by a broad feather’, arrived in an open barouche and four at the gate of Merton College, where the Russian visitors were to spend the night. They were received by Dr Vaughan, the Warden, and almost immediately taken on a tour of the University, which Catherine had already visited the previous month. The Tsar admired the Hall of Christ Church and the chapel of New College. At that point the Imperial progress was delayed by Catherine, who insisted on her brother being taken to see the rooms of Mr Walls, one of the Junior Fellows, who had entertained her in May. There was just time for a hurried visit to the Bodleian Library before preparing for the formal banquet under the dome of the Radcliffe Camera. Next morning the Prince Regent, the Tsar, the King of Prussia, Prince Metternich, Marshal Blücher and a long procession of generals and diplomats made their way from Christ Church to the Sheldonian Theatre where Alexander was made a Doctor of Civil Law. No less than seven Odes, written especially for the occasion, were then recited: two in Greek, one in Latin and five in English. They were, reported an anonymous member of the University, ‘gracefully acknowledged and appreciated but by no one more than by the Duchess of Oldenburg, who seemed to live upon the applause and the merits of her Imperial Brother�
�.54 This is hardly surprising for, though the metre and rhyming patterns were at times strange, the sentiments were gratifyingly generous. Thus Mr John Hughes B.A. of Oriel College declaimed:

  Reviving Europe breathes at last

  And hails in him th’Immortal Czar,

  The pure and steadfast ray of Freedom’s morning star.55

  No doubt it sounded good on a warm summer’s day in the Sheldonian.

  There followed a ceremony in Oxford Town Hall, where Alexander was made a Freeman of the City. At last, around two o’clock, lunch was served in All Souls’ College before the Tsar and Frederick William were hurried off to Woodstock to be entertained at Blenheim Palace by the Duke of Marlborough. When he was about to leave Blenheim it was noticed that Alexander, unlike Frederick William, showed no interest in ‘the magnificent prospect of the Park and the woods’.56 This, however, was no sign of flagging energy or of sudden insensitivity to landscape, as at least one onlooker suspected. Alexander was becoming impatient. That night Lady Jersey was giving a ball, and he was determined to be back in London before it ended.57 He arrived soon after 3 a.m. and was still dancing reels a couple of hours later. Was he not, after all, ‘Freedom’s morning star’?

  The most impressive and ornate banquet of the State visit was offered by the City of London at the Guildhall on the following Saturday, 18 June. It was, the Annual Register declares, ‘a dinner as sumptuous as expense or skill could make it’.58 But it was marred by niggling friction between the Regent and the Tsar and his sister. The trouble had begun that morning when the Prince Regent invited Alexander to accompany him in the State Coach to the Guildhall. The Tsar declined to go unless Catherine could also travel with him. The Regent sent a messenger back with the curt rejoinder that this was impossible ‘as no woman ever went in the same coach with the sovereign when he appeared in public as such’.59 Eventually the State coach bore the Prince Regent and the King of Prussia to the Guildhall at half-past five and returned to Piccadilly for the Tsar and his sister, who did not arrive until an hour later. Alexander then distinguished himself by stopping to talk to the leaders of the Whig Opposition as the solemn procession made its way between seven hundred guests to the dais of honour; and Catherine, faced by the prospect of operatic artists with patriotic songs, dampened the festivities by reminding her neighbours that music always made her ill. The Prince Regent throughout the evening treated the Tsar and his sister to ‘a haughty silence’.60

  Such episodes rapidly lost Alexander favour in Society. Even Lord Grey, a member of the Whig Opposition especially befriended by the Tsar, was annoyed and embarrassed by his behaviour, describing Alexander to Creevey as ‘a vain silly fellow’.61 It is difficult to understand why a sovereign who was, in St Petersburg, so full of charm and grace should have deliberately persisted in this adolescent mood of social revolt. Was it a reaction from the tensions of the war years? Was it an irrational and largely subconscious resentment of England’s urbane prosperity? Or was it, perhaps, a political miscalculation, a belief that the Regent was so unpopular with the London masses that the best way to retain public sympathy was to snub him on every occasion?

  There is another possibility. Alexander’s boorishness may well have reflected an inner struggle of conscience; he might thus, in a clumsy fashion, have been protesting against the complacent frivolity of life in London at such a time of European crisis. Certainly, in the closing days of his visit to England, the serious side of his character suddenly asserted itself. The Tsar had long known of the existence of the ‘Quakers’, the Society of Friends. As a child he had been inoculated by Thomas Dimsdale, who was widely known as ‘the Quaker Doctor’, and Mrs Dimsdale had briefly nursed Alexander in an illness.62 The concept of the Friends was therefore by no means strange to the Tsar, and when the London Quakers presented him with a petition seeking protection for ‘the many pious persons’ in Russia ‘searching for themselves into the things pertaining to salvation’, the Tsar was at once interested. This language corresponded so closely with the habit of religious contemplation which had come to mean so much to him in the previous two years that he asked his ambassador, Lieven, to keep in touch with the Quakers who had brought the petition to the Pulteney Hotel.63

  On the Sunday morning following the Guildhall Banquet the Tsar suddenly asked Lieven to arrange for him to attend a Quaker meeting that day. By good chance the ambassador was able to contact the prominent Quaker, William Allen, who conducted Alexander and Catherine to the Friends’ Meeting House off St Martin’s Lane, where they heard two brief addresses and an inspired prayer.64 Alexander was so impressed that he invited William Allen and two other Friends to visit him at the Pulteney on the following Tuesday morning, the day before his departure from London.

  It is difficult to recognize in the sober prose of William Allen’s journal the same man who had caused such offence at the Guildhall:

  The Emperor having been engaged till six o’clock that morning, was not up when we arrived, and we had to wait about two hours and a half. At last a message came for us, and Stephen Grellet, John Wilkinson and I were shown upstairs … The Emperor stood to receive us; he was quite alone and dressed in a plain suit of clothes and, with a look of benignity, seemed to meet us as friends, rather than as strangers … The conversation was carried on partly in English, which he spoke and even pronounced very well, and partly in French … On the subject of worship he said he agreed entirely with Friends, that it was an internal and spiritual thing. He said that he was himself in the habit of daily prayer, that at first he employed a form of words but at length grew uneasy with them as not always applicable to the present state of his mind, and that now the subject of his prayer was according to the impression he felt of his wants at the time, and in this exercise he felt sweet peace … He remarked that divine worship consisted not in outward ceremonies or repetition of words, which the wicked and the hypocrite might easily adopt, but in having the mind prostrate before the Lord … He expressed how much he was disgusted with the practice which prevailed in this country, of sitting several hours after dinner, saying it was a waste of time which might be employed for the good of our fellow creatures.65

  The conversation, which included many questions about the domestic way of life of Quaker families, lasted for ‘about an hour’. At the end of it the Tsar asked that if any Friends visited St Petersburg they should at once come and see him. William Allen and his two friends were convinced of Alexander’s sincerity of faith; and there is no reason for doubting that, at the time, the Tsar meant every word that he said.

  Alexander set out for Portsmouth on Wednesday, 22 June. The Prince Regent entertained the Tsar and his sister, for the last time, on the royal yacht and they witnessed the magnificent spectacle of a naval review at Spithead. They bade farewell to the Regent at Petworth and followed the coastal road through Sussex and into Kent. On the Downs behind Hastings, Alexander noticed two people in Quaker dress and immediately ordered his coachman to stop. Nathaniel Rickman and his wife, Mary, were a little surprised to be accosted in this way, but they too were deeply impressed by Alexander’s searching questions and willingly showed their royal visitors around the farmhouse and their small dairy.66 After taking refreshment, Alexander and his sister climbed back into the barouche and disappeared towards Dover in a cloud of summer dust.

  The Tsar sailed for Ostend on Monday, 27 June. This time it was a calm crossing. He parted from his sister in Ghent, paid a brief courtesy visit to the Netherlands and then travelled on through the Rhineland, which was swept that midsummer by torrential thunderstorms.67 On 5 July he reached Bruchsal, the summer residence of the Badenese royal family twenty miles north of Karlsruhe, and there at last he was reunited with the Empress Elizabeth. He spent five days at Bruchsal recovering from the rigours of the English visit and the strain of an exhausting journey.68 Now that there was a lull in the excitement of Peace he needed some moments of rest and reflection before continuing the long drive to St Petersburg.

  There was
much with which he could occupy his mind. Socially and politically the three weeks which Alexander spent in London had proved to be a disaster. No major decisions were taken over the future of Europe, although Czartoryski had useful conversations on Poland with eminent members of both the Tory and the Whig establishments. Alexander himself did not realize the devastating effect of his apparent boorishness. Naturally he knew he had offended the Regent, and Castlereagh’s cold manner left him in no doubt of the attitude taken by the Government but he was convinced that the attentions he had paid to the Whig leaders would win him support from the Opposition, particularly for his Polish policy. This was a double error of judgement. The Whigs, especially Brougham, did subsequently champion the liberties of Poland in their writings and speeches; but they wanted a more genuinely independent Polish State than Alexander contemplated. Moreover it was foolish for any foreign visitor to court the Opposition at a time of intensive feuding between the political parties: radical backing in the Commons for Polish nationalism confirmed Castlereagh’s belief he was right to resist official Russian policy. None of the Whigs publicly lauded Alexander. They resented what they felt to be an arrogantly patronizing manner and they mistrusted his immediate intentions. Even the British people were disillusioned with their earlier idol. Significantly the popular cartoonist Cruickshank began to ridicule the Tsar, making great play with his surprise descent on the Rickman family at their farmhouse in Sussex. Only the English Quakers were pleased with the outcome of the Tsar’s journey across the Channel, and politically they were of no account whatsoever.