by Alan Palmer
But over most spiritual matters there remained a close affinity between the two men. In 1817 Alexander, remembering the orderliness of the Quaker settlement he had visited in England, instructed his ambassador in London to see if the Friends could provide him with a specialist in husbandry who would supervise reclamation of the marshland between St Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo.46 A Quaker from Yorkshire, Daniel Wheeler, duly arrived in the Russian capital and it was Golitsyn who became his principal patron, guide and protector. A year later the Prince made himself responsible for the welfare of William Allen and Stephen Grellet, two of the Friends whom Alexander had met in London, and who now came to St Petersburg from a sense of mission and of service to a sovereign whose Christian virtues they continued to admire.47 It is, of course, true that Golitsyn’s duties necessitated the protection of foreign religious communities within the Empire, but it is clear from the narratives of the Quaker visitors that he shared Alexander’s interest in the Society of Friends and its religious ideals. The quietistic contemplation of the Quakers came closer to the spiritual needs of Golitsyn and Alexander than any orgiastic exhibitionism in the Mikhailovsky or the over-dramatized prophesying of Baroness Julie. On the other hand it was difficult for any Russian in Society, from Alexander downwards, to accept the sober dress and habits of the Friends, however much they might respect their sense of Christian witness. The tradition of the Russian Church expressed itself, not only through words of inspiration, but in the colour and symbolism of ceremonial. Ultimately, for Alexander and for his subjects, there could never be a more intensive climax of religious ecstasy than the surging chant of a choir, the battalion of acolytes with candles and banners, and the crescendo of discordant bells in Holy Moscow.
In one of her letters to Elizabeth, the Margravine of Baden declared emphatically that if Alexander was moved ‘by genuine religion’ it was ‘impossible for him not to return’ to her,48 treating his wife as the natural companion of body and soul. The problem of his own domestic situation bore heavily on Alexander’s conscience, but nowhere so markedly as in Moscow, where he had first been enticed by the seductive allure of the young Maria Naryshkin, during the Coronation festivities. Golitsyn never disguised from Alexander his conviction that God would punish him for the sins he committed in his adulterous love for Maria,49 and indeed was already punishing him with every misfortune that troubled his domestic life. The Tsar respected Golitsyn’s judgement but he was fond of Maria and of the surviving daughter of this liaison, Sophia. He did not feel able to end a relationship which had continued, intermittently, for some sixteen years. But at last, on returning from Moscow in the summer of 1818, Alexander finally broke off his connection with Maria, though seeking as much as possible to lessen the wretchedness of parting from those whom, to his sister Catherine, he had sometimes referred to as ‘my family’.50 Some months later he gave an account of his separation from Maria Naryshkin in a letter written, not to the stern Golitsyn, but to a more sympathetic spiritual mentor, Roxane Stourdza (or, as she had now become, the Countess Edling):
I am guilty but not so guilty as some people think. It is true that when certain unfortunate events ruined my domestic happiness I sought the society of another woman. I imagined, no doubt wrongly as I now clearly perceive, that since convention had united my wife and myself without our own doing, we were free in the eyes of God though bound to each other in the eyes of Man. My rank obliged me to respect convention; but I believed I was free to give my heart where I wished, and for years it remained faithful to Madame Naryshkin. She also, finding herself in a similar position, fell into the same error. We assumed there was nothing for which we should reproach ourselves. Despite the revelation I have lately been given into my obligations, I would never have possessed the courage to break a tie so dear to me had she not herself asked me to do so. My sorrow was beyond words; but the reasons she gave me were so noble, and so creditable to her in the eyes of the world and in my own eyes, that I could not oppose them. Accordingly I bowed to a sacrifice which broke my heart, one for which it continues to bleed even at this moment.51
As an apologia, the letter is a shade disingenuous, and it is probable that Alexander was not being entirely honest with himself, with Maria Naryshkin, or with Roxane. But at least the decisive break had been made. Diplomats, meeting Alexander that autumn for the first time in three years, were surprised by the lightness of his spirits.52 Whatever he might tell Roxane Stourdza, there is no doubt a burden was lifted from his troubled conscience. He was not yet prepared for a full reconciliation with Elizabeth (to her disappointment)53 but one cause of remorse and repentance was at an end. The moral victory made his spiritual quest that much easier.
Disarmament and Foreign Affairs (1816–18)
Alexander’s religious beliefs continued to find their deepest outlet in international affairs. Although he had left Paris so abruptly in 1815 he believed, as much as Metternich and Castlereagh, in the absolute necessity of occasional meetings between sovereigns and statesmen in order to preserve the peace of Europe. As he later explained to his Quaker visitors, William Allen and Stephen Grellet, the notion of a Holy Alliance was intended by him as a gesture of love towards God and towards mankind and, though he knew his motives were misunderstood, he was determined to persevere in the hope he would eventually awaken his fellow Princes to an awareness of the ‘sacred precepts’ of the Christian faith: the scenes of bloodshed and suffering he had witnessed in the advance across Europe had borne heavily on his mind, and he assured his Quaker guests that he shared their abhorrence of war.54
There is no doubt Alexander was perfectly sincere in putting forward such pacific sentiments. Unfortunately, however, the huge size of the Russian army and his own obvious love of military parades made contemporaries doubt his words. There was, as in so many aspects of Russian life at this time, a striking contrast between what was said and what was done. This uncertainty over the Tsar’s motives led to the failure of one of Alexander’s most far-reaching, and least publicized, proposals – a project for general disarmament, first put forward in a private letter to Castlereagh in April 1816.55
It is probable that Alexander’s plan, like many of his later ideas, was a spontaneous gesture of the moment rather than the product of long discussion. The Tsar began his letter by thanking the British Foreign Secretary for having defended in the Commons his honesty of purpose in drawing up the Holy Alliance Treaty. He then went on to suggest that the time had come for ‘a simultaneous reduction of the armed forces of all kinds’ raised during the wars against Napoleon; he argued that the maintenance of troops on a war footing weakened the validity of existing treaties by bringing their good faith into question and he emphasized that large armies inevitably placed a heavy financial burden on the various governments. Accordingly he proposed a joint Anglo-Russian initiative to bring about general disarmament ‘by methods best suited to the present situation and the relations between the various Powers’.56
The British government was interested but suspicious. Castlereagh could not understand why Russia favoured a general and agreed scheme instead of taking unilateral action, and in his reply to Alexander he pointed out there had already been reductions in the size of the British, Austrian and Prussian armies but not in the numbers of Russian troops on active service.57 Although he did not confide all his doubts to the Tsar, he privately informed the British ambassador of the Russian approach and explained that he was worried over the contradiction between Alexander’s assurances and the fact that, despite ‘the magnitude … and invulnerability’ of Russia, Alexander clearly ‘likes an army, as he likes an influence in Europe’.58
The cool response of the British put an end to Alexander’s project. The peculiar nature of the Russian system of recruitment and mobilization meant that the Tsar could not risk ordering extensive cuts without some guarantee that neighbouring Powers would not suddenly increase the size of their own armies; for each of the successive emergencies of the Napoleonic Wars had shown that Russia n
eeded a far longer period of time to bring men to the colours than any other state. Her ‘magnitude’, which Castlereagh regarded as an advantage, was seen by Alexander as an obstacle to modernization. Since anything he attempted within his Empire was slower to take effect than in foreign lands, it was essential for Russia to act in partnership with her former allies over all changes in the general balance of power. But it was difficult to convince other countries of this strategic dilemma, and much of Alexander’s diplomacy in the three years following the Holy Alliance Treaty sought, quite simply, to prove the honesty of his own ideals. When, in May 1817, an officially inspired article in a Petersburg journal declared the Holy Alliance to be ‘the surest guarantee of a well-ordered liberty, the true safeguard of law, and the most implacable enemy of arbitrary power’ the European chancelleries remained politely sceptical.59
The task of interpreting Alexander’s idealism to a doubting world devolved, in the first instance, on his Corfiote adviser, John Capodistrias. Technically, for the first seven years of peace, Capodistrias shared control of the Russian Foreign Ministry with the more orthodox and phlegmatic Nesselrode;60 but Alexander found the Corfiote’s general ideas so close to his own that he tended to rely primarily on his advice in foreign affairs, though maintaining considerable respect for his ambassador in Paris, Pozzo di Borgo. Probably Capodistrias came nearer than any other statesman to understanding the religious fervour which inspired Alexander in later years. Although not himself inclined to introspective soul-searching he was a close personal friend of both the Stourdzas, at one time even hoping to marry Roxane. He had accompanied Alexander to some of Julie von Krüdener’s meetings in 1815 and, like his sovereign, he was interested in the theocratic universalism of the Bavarian Catholic publicist, Franz von Baader. Capodistrias combined service to the Russian Tsar with a deep feeling of patriotism towards his homeland. He never became so intimate a friend as Czartoryski in Alexander’s first years on the throne, nor did his attachment to the Greek cause provoke such resentment within the Russian governing circle as the Pole’s dual loyalty had done; philhellenism was not the menace to Russia’s own traditions that Polish nationalism inevitably seemed to be. Hence although Capodistrias had many critics in St Petersburg he was not, like Czartoryski, assailed bitterly as a foreign favourite of the sovereign.
In London and Vienna, on the other hand, Capodistrias was regarded with considerable suspicion.61 No one in authority in either capital wished to see the Russians re-open the Eastern Question and Metternich distrusted Capodistrias’s alleged sympathy with liberal causes. He convinced himself that Capodistrias, this ‘pseudo-Saint John of the Apocalypse’ as he dubbed him, was Alexander’s evil genius.62 Anxiously the Austrians and British watched for signs of renewed Russian interest in Serbia and the Danubian Principalities and Greece. It was assumed the ascendancy of Capodistrias in St Petersburg foreshadowed a resumption by Alexander of Russia’s historic mission to free Orthodox Europe from the Turks.
But Alexander was resolutely set against any expansionist policy so long as the Empire was still faced by problems left over from the wars. In 1816 Capodistrias drew up a comprehensive memorandum in which he proposed Russia should assume control of the Danubian Principalities and make use of religious protective rights to strengthen political influence in the whole of the Balkan peninsula. To support Christians persecuted by the Turks in the Serbian lands and in Greece would, he argued, prove to all the European chancelleries ‘the justice and generosity of Russian policy’. Although the Tsar received Capodistrias’s memorandum amiably, he refused to be tempted: ‘To carry it out, we would need to set the cannons moving and that I have no wish to do’, Alexander firmly declared.63 He had seen too much of war to support a project so dangerous to the peace of the continent.
Yet although Alexander had checked Capodistrias’s Balkan ambitions, the mutual esteem of the Corfiote and his sovereign remained undiminished. Alexander began to consult him over questions which were not, strictly speaking, the responsibility of the Foreign Ministry. During the Vienna Congress Capodistrias looked askance at many aspects of the Tsar’s Polish policy but once a constitutional kingdom was established in Warsaw he recognized that the Polish experiment was a matter of importance to European liberalism as a whole and not only to the future of Russia. At the beginning of March 1818 he assisted Alexander to draft a remarkable speech which the Tsar-King read to the Diet in Warsaw. The words were wrapped in that ambiguously subjunctive mood so essential to any Tsarist statement of intent but they created a sensation, both in Russia and in the foreign capitals. ‘The salutary influence … of these liberal institutions [ces institutions libérales§] I hope to spread with the help of the Almighty, over every region entrusted by Providence to my care’, Alexander declared, ‘Thus you are giving me the opportunity of presenting before my country something I have long been preparing for her and which she will possess when this great undertaking now beginning shall reach its proper maturity.’64 To most observers it seemed as if the Tsar of Russia had at last aligned himself firmly with the cause of constitutionalism despite the tradition of autocracy within his own Empire.
The effect of Alexander’s address on the Russians was not felt for several months to come, for it took time for the intelligentsia to perceive its full significance. But in Vienna Metternich was seriously alarmed.65 Already Alexander had shown he sympathized with the smaller German States in their efforts to secure constitutional rights within the new German Confederation, a political campaign which ran counter to Austrian policy. How far was he prepared to carry his concept of Providential protection? And what would be the consequence of his remarks on Prussia, whose links with the Russian Empire had been strengthened by Nicholas’s marriage? The diplomatic game, as seen from Metternich’s study in the Ballhausplatz, appeared to be swinging to Russia’s advantage. With Pozzo di Borgo and Richelieu already co-operating closely in Paris, and with Alexander in Poland now setting a bad example in constitutionalism for his relatives on the thrones of Württemberg and Weimar, the prospect of orderly government in Europe seemed bleak to Metternich. There were only two crumbs of comfort to him: the cordial co-operation of Lebzeltern, the Austrian ambassador in St Petersburg, with Capodistrias’s rival, Nesselrode; and the continued strength of the Anglo-Austrian entente, resting on the friendship he had personally reached with Castlereagh in those early weeks of 1814 when Alexander had been so obdurate.66
It was in fact Castlereagh who provided both Alexander and Metternich with an opportunity to check the polarization of Europe into ‘Austrian’ and ‘Russian’ camps. For at the end of March 1818 the British Foreign Secretary proposed that the first of the periodic conferences envisaged in the Quadruple Alliance Treaty of 1815 should be held in the near future: the principal task of the meeting would be to discuss relations between the old wartime allies and France, but it would also consider ‘the several other political questions which are in progress of discussion’.67 Alexander welcomed the resumption of round-table diplomacy and had, indeed, been pressing for a congress for several months. Metternich, for his part, was also pleased at the prospect of an international gathering, believing that confidential exchanges between the leading statesmen always provided an interesting diversion from routine, if nothing more. The only problem was where the Congress should be held and what governments should attend.
The Congress of Aix (1818)
After considering Dusseldorf, Mannheim and Basle, the old allies settled for Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), a city rich in historical associations and militarily easy to secure against neo-Jacobin interlopers.68 It was harder to decide on the composition of the Congress. Alexander, wishing to appear as a protector of small States and not merely as master of the largest Empire on the continent, was eager to invite representatives from the lesser German States and from Spain. The Austrians and British maintained that, since there had never been a conference of this character under normal conditions of peace, success depended on keeping attendance down to a ma
nageable size. Neither Capodistrias nor Pozzo di Borgo were impressed by this argument but Alexander himself, who had always deplored the cumbersome form of the gathering in Vienna, accepted its validity and called his minister and his ambassador to heel.69 It was settled that the Congress should consist of representatives from the four allies, to whom it was eventually agreed, on Russian insistence, that plenipotentiaries from France should be added. This decision, at least, was a concession to the Tsar who firmly believed that peace could only be maintained if spokesmen for Bourbon France joined the victors of Leipzig and Waterloo at the conference table.70
But, though anxious to strengthen the links he already held with the Duke of Richelieu, Alexander was also determined to emphasize the close bonds between the Hohenzollern and Romanov dynasties. In June 1818, four months before the opening of the Aix Congress, Alexander welcomed Frederick William III and his eldest son on a State visit to Moscow, subsequently travelling with them to St Petersburg for a fortnight of parades and festivities in the capital and the surrounding ring of Imperial palaces.71 On his last visit to Russia, at the beginning of 1810, the King of Prussia was given lavish hospitality but treated as a poor non-relation. Now the hospitality was even more ostentatious and the respect shown by Alexander to his brother’s father-in-law would have gratified any royal visitor, let alone the soulful widower from Berlin. Politically the Tsar wished to prevent Prussia from meekly following the Austrian lead in German affairs. Sentimentally he still felt bound to the pledges he had given to Louise. Both monarchs enjoyed revelling in an idealized past. In the autumn Alexander broke his journey to Aix at Berlin, so that he and Frederick William could once more cross Germany together as in the historic months of 1813.
