Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace

by Alan Palmer

  Vienna and Verona (1822)

  Alexander planned to leave St Petersburg, on what was to be the last of his long journeys abroad, during the first week of August. On this occasion, however, his departure stirred Elizabeth to bitterness. Although there had been no close love between husband and wife for several years, she did not wish him to set out for Austria and Italy with no idea of when he would return. When he had been on his travels in the early years of the Congress System she had explained to her mother that his absence, though sad for her, was necessary for Russia: she had contented herself with reading Russian history and novels (including a French translation of Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon, which had shocked her sensitivities). But now she could see no good reason for his journey. She was afraid of trouble within Russia once he left the Empire. Moreover she confessed to her mother that she would be wretchedly lonely: Marie Feodorovna was only interested in ‘the young Court, her children’ (as she called them), who were allowed ‘to follow a way of life she would have been the first to condemn fifteen years ago’. Elizabeth would have liked, she said, to take a holiday at Odessa or in the Crimea, ‘but the Tsar would never let me go there in present circumstances as that area is full of Greeks’, and she added, parenthetically, ‘My poor Greeks! that is a reason for making me wish to go there even more!’ Although her letter shows confusion between her own sorrow and her concern for Russia as a whole, there is no doubt that she sensed Alexander’s constant travelling weakened government within the Empire and lost him credit with many of his subjects.66 She was not alone in her observations.

  But nothing would deter him. By now he had another interest in general policy. In the spring he had let his brother sovereigns know that he wished the Alliance to do something about Spain, and he insisted that the Spanish Question, dormant for two years, should be placed high on the agenda of the conference in Vienna and the subsequent Congress at Verona.67 Russia had no direct interest in the affairs of the Iberian Peninsula, and Castlereagh was probably correct in assuming that Alexander had raised the Spanish Question so as to cover a diplomatic retreat over Greece and re-affirm the validity of the Holy Alliance by intervention in a region where there was less conflict in policy between the Eastern autocrats. Metternich personally was uneasy at this development and unresponsive to Alexander’s offer to send an expeditionary force at once to the foothills of the Pyrenees. But he, too, welcomed the prospect of a Congress where it would be ‘a matter of courtesy not to mention difficulties in Turkey’.68 All the Austrian Chancellor sought was the collaboration of Castlereagh, ready as he was to restrain the Russians from too adventurous a policy.

  In this, however, Metternich was disappointed. Castlereagh committed suicide on 12 August and British interests at the Congress were in the hands of Wellington, a man for whom Alexander had the deepest personal admiration. The conference and the Congress made a mockery of round-table diplomacy. As a social occasion Verona was superior to Laibach and Troppau and far grander than Aix-la-Chapelle. Alexander enjoyed a banquet in the Roman amphitheatre and Rossini operas conducted by the composer himself. It was amusing to flirt with the new Lady Londonderry (poor Castlereagh’s sister-in-law) and to ride in the mornings in the Italian countryside, with November sunshine delaying the coming of winter. But little was achieved. ‘When the civilized world is in danger’, Alexander declared, ‘there can be no English, Prussian or Austrian policy, there can only be a general policy that ought for the salvation of all to be accepted by peoples and Kings alike.’69 The sentiment was splendid; but nobody took it to heart. Wellington refused to approve any plans for restoring order in Spain, a subject on which he was an authority, and made it plain that Britain would never consent to any method of ‘salvation’ which involved interference with the internal affairs of other lands. The true victors of Verona were the French, who (though the British dissented) were authorized to take military action against the Spanish liberals if the situation in Madrid deteriorated to a point where intervention was felt in Paris to be necessary for the well-being of Europe.70 It was hardly worth travelling from St Petersburg to Verona to sign a blank cheque for Louis XVIII. A deputation of Greek patriots, eager to put their case before the statesmen of Europe, was intercepted by the Austrian police and turned back at Ancona: the Tsar was not to be distracted by such matters.

  Diplomats who had known Alexander at Paris, and even at Aix, found him much older and low in spirits. Chateaubriand thought his face was now lined with melancholy, and at one moment he told the Emperor Francis he had ‘a presentiment of early death’, a fate which did not especially disturb him as he was ‘becoming tired of life’.71 At Verona, too, he gave an audience to his old Quaker friend, William Allen (who had made the journey under Wellington’s patronage, since no one was admitted to the city who was not a member of an official delegation). Allen found Alexander as distressed as had Chateaubriand. ‘He opened his heart to me’, Allen wrote, ‘told me of his trials and temptations, comparing them to the thorn in the flesh which the Apostle describes.’ And he added, significantly, ‘He felt himself so weak he dared not look far ahead.’72

  Unfortunately he seems to have ‘opened his heart’ to nobody else and William Allen himself was too reticent to indicate the form of the ‘trials and temptations’ with which Alexander believed himself afflicted at this time. His weariness may have had physical origins, for he had not relaxed for a length of days in five years; possibly, though there is no evidence for it, he was troubled again by the venereal disease from which he is said to have been suffering during the Vienna Congress; certainly he was gripped by deep melancholia. Now and again a bright remark from Lady Londonderry or an ornate and flattering reception (such as he received at Venice after the Congress was over) would dispel the mist of gloom in his mind, enabling him to radiate some of the gaiety and charm which had made his reputation in happier times. But these occasions were rare indeed. Rather surprisingly, Metternich insisted on accompanying Alexander back through the Austrian lands, acting as host in Venice and in Innsbruck as though anxious to see him safely across the frontier into Bavaria.73 The Tsar’s movements were not predictable, even by those closest to him. At times it seems as if he did not himself know what he wished to do. Although in mid-November he had written to his sister Anna from Verona and told her he could not prolong his stay abroad, ‘as I urgently need to be back in St Petersburg by January at least’, he showed no sign of hurrying home.74 He lingered in both Bavaria and Württemberg, drove slowly to Warsaw (where he stayed for another three weeks), and did not reach St Petersburg until the second week of February. Even then he chose to escape as soon as possible to Tsarskoe Selo rather than participate in the revels and frivolity of the pre-Lenten carnival.75 There is no doubt that, as it came round once more to the anniversary of his accession, his health was nearer to breaking point than at any moment in his twenty-two years on the throne.

  * See above, p. 357.

  † Ypsilanti’s invasion failed to win peasant support and aroused the resentment of the Roumanians. A Turkish force defeated him to the west of Bucharest in the first week in June and he fled to Transylvania, where he was imprisoned by the Austrians for the remaining seven years of his life.

  21

  ‘An Island Battered by the Waves’

  Procrastination

  Fortunately for Alexander the pace of public affairs slackened in the spring and summer of 1823. He was able to rest and recover some of his lost strength. For six months he remained either in the capital or its immediate vicinity, studying reports from Nesselrode and Pozzo di Borgo on the intractable Eastern Question and going over the problems of the military colonies once again with the indefatigable Arakcheev. Outwardly Alexander was extremely busy. But, as so often in the early years of his reign, he was reluctant to make up his mind over any matter: ‘One scarcely ever repents of having waited’, he would say. Procrastination was second nature to him, unless he could sense clear purpose in what he was doing.

  By the b
eginning of September he was sufficiently well to set out once more on his restless tours through the Empire. He travelled down to Moscow and then turned south-westwards across the Central Russian Uplands and through the Ukraine to the Austrian frontier on the upper Pruth. He then crossed some ten miles into Austria for a meeting with the Emperor Francis and his Chancellor at Czernowitz (Chernovtsy). But by now the strain of congress diplomacy was proving too much even for Metternich, who fell sick on his way to the conference, and Alexander was left to discuss the great questions of the hour with Francis and the Chancellor’s understudies. Not surprisingly, the meeting resolved nothing.1 But Alexander took the opportunity to reaffirm his faith in round-table diplomacy and suggested that the next congress might meet in St Petersburg and concern itself solely with the affairs of Turkey and Greece. The idea was hardly likely to speed Metternich’s convalescence; for he had no wish to see Alexander or one of his ministers dominating a congress. There was accordingly a whole year in which Metternich was as eager to avoid decisive action in foreign affairs as the Tsar himself. But the Czernowitz meeting was at least a reminder to Europe that, though at Verona Alexander had been little more than a sad spectator of events, over international issues he possessed remarkable powers of resilience. His name and reputation continued to count for something in foreign capitals.

  The domestic scene in Russia remained, none the less, drab and disillusioning. Nothing more was heard of Novosiltsov’s project for a constitution, nor of Alexander’s resolve to end serfdom. Almost imperceptibly the hand of authority tightened its grip on freedom of expression: obscurantist inspectors searched for atheism and heresy in the teaching curricula of the universities; Masonic lodges and other secret societies were placed formally under a ban of the law; and the censorship was active, although casual and arbitrary in methods and totally ineffectual. Young Pushkin, for example, was banished to his mother’s estate in northern Russia for expressing religious scepticism (though it is significant that the authorities only took action after he had started an affair with the wife of an important government official).2 Others of Pushkin’s generation were forbidden to go to German universities, lest the purity of their thoughts be contaminated by false ideals; and a professor of Euclidean geometry was reprimanded for not having emphasized to his students the parallel symbolism between the mathematical concept of a triangle and the doctrine of the Holy and Blessed Trinity.3 Alexander himself had nothing to do with such capricious methods of repression, but he was blamed for what was done in his name, and even more for what was left undone. Despite the hounding of the secret societies, groups of young officers – many of them members of aristocratic families – began to form revolutionary cells: there was talk of kidnapping the Tsar at Bobruisk, on his way back from Czernowitz; vague plans were even drawn up for assassinating Alexander and his brothers as a first step towards the proclamation of a Russian Republic.4 Whatever might be thought of him in Vienna, Paris and London, at home ‘Alexander the Blessed’ – the God-gifted sovereign who had saved Russia and whose nobility of purpose once guaranteed hope for the future – was by now a mythical figure from a past in which it was becoming increasingly difficult to believe. He was a holy ikon refusing to work its miracle.

  Sadly Alexander recognized this failure to live up to his reputation. Once again he began to speak of the possibility of abdication, leaving the problems of government at home and abroad to Nicholas. Although Constantine was still officially termed ‘Tsarevich’, it was clear he would never come to the throne. Privately the two eldest brothers had decided on this before Alexander’s visit to Nicholas at Krasnoe Selo in 1819. A year later Constantine weakened his standing in the eyes of the Orthodox by securing an annulment of his marriage to the Grand Duchess Anna Feodorovna (from whom he had been separated for over twenty years) and then morganatically taking as his second wife a Polish Countess, Joanna Grudzinska, who was a Roman Catholic. Technically there was no reason why Constantine should have forfeited his right of succession, but he was genuinely reluctant to rule the Empire and in January 1822 he wrote a brief letter to Alexander in which he formally renounced ‘that eminence to which, by birth, I may have the right’.5 This should, of course, have settled the matter: but there was an ambiguity in Constantine’s wording which worried Prince Golitsyn, who began to press Alexander for a clear statement of the rules for the Succession. Like so many other rulers, the Tsar was reluctant to be precise in such matters. But eventually, in the summer of 1823, he responded to Golitsyn’s tactful pressure and drew up a decree which recorded the voluntary renunciation by Constantine and at the same time declared Nicholas to be the rightful heir. The decree was, however, prepared in the utmost secrecy, neither of the brothers knowing of its existence until after Alexander’s death. The original document was handed over by Alexander to the Metropolitan of Moscow for safekeeping alongside Paul’s coronation decree on the Succession in the Uspensky Cathedral within the Kremlin.6 Presumably Alexander insisted on this high level of secrecy in order to prevent the growth of a reversionary interest around Nicholas’s miniature Court, a development which might have weakened his own position as well as that of Constantine. But in this instance the Tsar’s fondness for devious ways intensified the confusion in which his reign was to end.

  It must be admitted that throughout the years 1823 and 1824 the behaviour of all three of his brothers troubled him. Constantine, who spent most of his days at the Belvedere outside Warsaw, was personally happier than at any previous time in his adult life: he was also more popular inside Russia than ever before, largely because he was acquiring, among the Russian liberals, an undeserved reputation as someone who knew how to deal justly with a political assembly. In Warsaw, on the other hand, his partiality for certain families alienated many of the great names in Poland, while his hot temper and liking for parade-ground discipline reminded the older generation of his father’s unstable temperament. It is significant that Alexander made a point of travelling to Warsaw whenever possible for the opening and closing of the Diet: he had no confidence in his brother’s tact or his sense of discretion.

  By now, too, Alexander was less pleased than in earlier years with Nicholas. He faithfully reflected the views of the military establishment in the capital and made little effort to hide his hopes of seeing active service in a campaign against the Turks.7 But it was the youngest of his brothers, Michael – twenty-one years Alexander’s junior – who remained the perpetual problem for all the family. As Constantine remarked in a private letter, ‘The two things he cares about are giving [military] service and sleeping.’8 He showed no desire whatever to take a wife, but in the closing months of 1823 he was betrothed to a Württemberg princess, who took the name Elena on being received into the Orthodox Church, and it was arranged that their marriage should take place early in the following year. There was, however, never any prospect of the marriage being a success. Again to quote Constantine, ‘the married state is an accessory which he [Michael] might well have been able to do without’. Elena was much too intelligent for him.* Both Alexander and Elizabeth admired her wit and strength of character; but these qualities did not make her popular with her mother-in-law, nor indeed with the soldier-courtiers around Nicholas and Michael. The Romanovs were not a closely knit and happy family, and Elena fitted uneasily into the group.

  Alexander’s Illness; His Reconciliation with Elizabeth; and the Ascendancy of Photius

  The arrival of Elena at the Russian Court was in part responsible for a happy change in Alexander’s private life. Although her own existence at St Petersburg was, all too often, wretchedly depressing, she was fond both of her eldest brother-in-law and his Empress. Since she was a kind-hearted girl, with courage and initiative, she went out of her way to see that Alexander and Elizabeth, though nearly thirty years her senior in age, re-kindled the mutual warmth and affection they had once known and which was so sadly lacking in her own marriage. It would be incorrect to regard Elena as a second match-maker, for there were already ot
her sentiments drawing the Imperial couple closer to each other, but (as Elizabeth herself admitted) it was the seventeen-year-old Grand Duchess who prevented new misunderstandings from cooling their relationship, enabling them to enjoy an Indian summer of happiness for the last two years of their married life.9

  There had, of course, never been a complete breach between Alexander and the child-bride his grandmother had chosen for him back in 1793. Elizabeth accepted his infidelity over the years just as he had resigned himself to the attachment she felt, on more than one occasion, for Adam Czartoryski. Yet their marriage remained essentially a convenience of State: he looked on her as a companion to whom he turned for support when his domestic sensitivity was strained, just as he would look to Golitsyn for guidance in the troubles of a spiritual life. Each was in the habit of taking the other for granted: they exchanged confidences as friends; they even regretted the increasing number of occasions upon which State affairs separated Alexander from his home; but the intimacy of a husband and wife relationship continued to be strange for them. Then suddenly, at the start of the year 1824, Alexander’s emotions were stirred by the patient care which Elizabeth was lavishing on him, and they recovered some of the lost raptures of love.10