Russia
The time which I spent in Russia in 1863-64 was a transition period. Transition periods in history are always difficult to describe, and still more difficult to explain. It is comparatively easy to tell the story of some great concrete fact, a world-encompassing war, a revolution, the upheaval of a dynasty; but to set out the causes which, working during a period of externally unruffled calm, are brewing the hell-broth; to show the hidden powers which are silently operating under the surface to bring about a mighty change—that is a task before which even those who have the best information may well hesitate.
Every skilled newspaper correspondent will, without much difficulty, write a brilliant description of an earthquake with all the harrowing and soul-stirring horrors of the upheaval; but even the most experienced seismologist hardly dares to set on paper his estimate of the mysterious hidden forces, which, battling in the bowels of the earth, unseen and unsuspected, burst out in their wrath to wreak the tragedies of Lisbon or of Catania. So it is with transition periods in history. They are generally marked by peace and prosperity. There are often no outward signs to sound the alarm that there is trouble ahead.
The political catastrophe, like the earthquake, comes without warning; like the wrecking typhoon, it may be preceded by a dead calm. It will be said with justice that these violent similes do not fit the case of Russia. There has been no great epidemic of violence, no fierce upheaval like that of the French Revolution. Individual murders there have been. The pages of Russian history are stained by cruelty and murder, culminating in the barbarous tragedy of the death of the Emperor Alexander the Second; but the changes which have taken place have been wrought without disturbing the atmosphere of the world at large. None the less, the revolution here has been far-reaching.
The Russia of to-day differs toto coelo from the Russia of a hundred years ago. Absolutism died with the Emperor Nicholas, and no Russian Tsar will ever again be able to rule, or even try to rule, without taking into account the will of his people. The relations between the sovereign and his subjects are for that very reason happier than they ever were, and the events of the last two years have shown that loyalty has not perished because autocracy has given up the ghost. The strength of Holy Russia to-day, in the face of the German war of aggression, lies in the determined attitude of the people—in their pious love for their country, in their almost fanatical belief in their Church, and in their veneration for the great White Tsar who is the head of that Church.
The nineteenth century opened darkly enough for Russia. The Emperor Paul had been on the throne for four years—a gloomy, unhappy man, not without ability, not without the wish to do what was right, until his mind was unhinged by madness. The first acts of his reign were worthy of all praise. He showed kindly feeling, clemency, and even generosity to the Poles, setting free those that had been imprisoned, and making ample provision for their heroic leader, Kosciusko. His edict enacting that the succession to the throne should be determined, not by the will or caprice of the reigning sovereign, but by a fixed and certain law of primogeniture, was a wise measure, calculated to save his country from the intrigues and bloodshed under which she had suffered so long.
But the early days of his reign were embittered by the knowledge conveyed to him by his Vice-Chancellor, Count Bezbarooks, that it had been the intention of his mother, Catherine the Great, to exclude him from the succession in favour of his own son, Alexander. Apart from that, he was a haunted man. Haunted by the murder of his father, Peter the Third, knowing full well that if the hand was the hand of Orloff, the dictating voice was the voice of his mother, Catherine.
Haunted by suspicion, unable to trust any living soul—if a curtain rustled, stirred by the wind, a murderer stood hidden behind it; if two courtiers spoke in a whisper, it was a conspiracy; a cough was the signal to a confederate; once when the Empress was talking in a low voice to a foreign ambassador, he bade her speak up, saying: “You may be prepared to play the part of Catherine, but I would have you remember that in me you will not find a Peter the Third.” A terrible speech, showing what he knew of the past, what he dreaded in the future!
His wife, his ministers, his officers, were all under suspicion. He looked upon his Court as a hotbed of treason, conspiracy and murder. It was not to be wondered at that in a brain so tortured, the seeds of hereditary madness should have been swift to germinate. Then came all those grotesquely savage edicts which could only be accounted for by insanity. The wearing of trousers, or of a round hat, were crimes to be punished by the knut; short hair without pigtails constituted a criminal offence; ladies must stop their carriages and step out into the snow and mud to salute him when his sleigh or carriage came in sight. Three ladies who disobeyed the order—one of whom was hurrying to fetch a doctor to her dying husband—were seized by the police, carried off to the guard-house, stripped, shaved and whipped. It was clear that the man was as mad as Bedlam, but there were no Anticyræ for Tsars.
Russia took the law into her own hands. A conspiracy was formed, with Count Peter Pahlen, Minister President and Military Governor of Petersburg, at its head, to put an end to despotism—a cruel weapon in the hands of a lunatic. The conspirators were men of the highest rank by birth and by virtue of office—Pahlen himself, prime minister and the trusted friend of his Sovereign, who delighted in loading him with honours. In the night of the 24th of March they forced their way into the Michailow Palace, surprised the unhappy Emperor in his bedroom and strangled him with his own military sash. He fought with the demoniac fury of a madman, for he was of strong and muscular build, and it was no easy matter to overpower him. He tried to burst into the Empress’s apartments, which adjoined his, but here his distrust of her proved his undoing—he had caused the door which led to her rooms to be hermetically fastened. His suspicions closed to him the one possibility of escape, the one refuge with the wife who would not have failed him in his sore need.
Paul’s foreign policy was feeble. He detested the French Revolution, and yet threw himself into the arms of Napoleon; at other times he was prepared to flirt with England. The most noteworthy of his acts was the edict in regard to the succession to which I have alluded above. Its importance lay especially in the fact that it drove the first nail into the coffin of absolutism. It is evident that an “absolute” monarch, who has been deprived of his omnipotence in any one particular, ceases ipso facto to be flawlessly absolute. Certainly, absolutism did not finally die till fifty-five years later. But a rift in the panoply of the Tsars had been made by the Emperor Paul.
I heard much about the reign of the mad Tsar when I was at St. Petersburg in 1863. There were still some old people who could talk about those days. Count Peter Pahlen had been long dead; after the murder he betook himself to his country place and disappeared from public life. But I had to represent my chief at the funeral of his brother, who commanded the cavalry against Napoleon in 1812, and with a still younger brother, Count Nicholas Pahlen, I was intimate in London for several years. Another link with that time was old Countess Rasumowski, who had been divorced and banished from the Court, but forgiven and taken into favour again by Paul. It was one of his acts of clemency. She was sister-in-law of Beethoven’s friend to whom he dedicated the famous quartets. How old she was I know not, but she was a great figurehead in Russian society, and on her name-day all St. Petersburg, from the Emperor downwards, flocked to her house. I had to go, as my chief had a cold, and I represented him. The dear naughty old lady was sitting in state, dressed all in white like a bride, with a wreath of pink roses round her head. That and the rouge with which she had plastered her poor withered cheeks made her look quite antediluvian. She must certainly have been near a hundred. The memory of Count Ribeaupierre, who was Grand Maitre de la Cour, and with whom I was also acquainted, went even further back. He had been page of honour to the Empress Catherine, who died in 1796. These are names only worth mentioning, in order to show that some of my impressions of the unhappy Tsar’s reign were drawn at first-hand.
Judging from the accounts given by the few old people who themselves remembered those times, and from the talk of younger men who had heard from their own fathers—perhaps actors in the crime—the whole history of that midnight murder, the outrage did not arouse any excitement commensurate with the horror of the deed. Men had become callous; they had grown used to seeing the rulers of the reigning dynasty disappear by violent or mysterious deaths. What really would have startled them would have been to hear that a Tsar had died a peaceful death in his bed, for murder had come to be looked upon as the natural end of a Romanoff. On the morning of the 24th of March St. Petersburg, awakening to the gruesome news of the night, heaved a sigh of relief, and went about its business. That business was the accession of a new Tsar.
Alexander has been accused of being privy to his father’s murder, but from all the evidence which I was able to gather, this was a calumny. There is no doubt that he was in touch with the conspirators, and that he was a consenting party to his father’s removal from the throne. Paul’s state was such that not even a son could wish to see his father remain vested with the terrible power of the autocrat of all the Russias. But murder, let alone parricide, was not in his nature. All the acts of his reign gave the lie to so hideous a charge. The man who set free the political exiles in Siberia, who abolished torture from the criminal code of his country, who made it illegal to hold sales of serfs, who helped to extend the blessings of education by founding universities, was a wise and humane ruler. Even the policy which made him countenance the conspiracy against his father was in the interests of humanity. Had he known the extremity to which that plot was to be pushed, we may be sure that he would have fought rather than not interpose his authority.
At the outset of his reign the young Emperor was hypnotized by the glamour of the fame of Napoleon, who was then First Consul and seemed to be destined for the dictatorship of the world. But that crime, and worse than crime, that mistake, as Talleyrand put it—the murder of the Duc d’Enghien at Vincennes in March, 1804—aroused the greatest indignation in the mind of Alexander, and the Russian chargé d’affaires at Paris was instructed to express that feeling in no measured terms. The First Consul’s reply was, in effect, a request that the Emperor would mind his own business. A further note was sent, recapitulating the claims and remonstrances of Russia, and M. d’Oubril asked for his passports.
The tragedy of Vincennes had provoked the anger of Alexander; the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor by the Pope summoned from Rome to do his bidding, on the 19th of November in the same year, called up a totally different but no less hostile feeling. That a Corsican adventurer should robe himself in the Imperial purple and pretend to equal rank with himself, was something which the proud Romanoff could not brook. The disgust and indignation engendered by Napoleon’s cruelty and pretensions were enhanced by his territorial encroachments. Alexander threw himself heart and soul into the combination against the French, and Europe was once more ablaze with war until the Peace of Tilsit in 1807, when on board a raft anchored in the river Niemen, the two Emperors fell into one another’s arms, kissed, and swore eternal friendship.
It would be outside of the purview of my task to dwell upon this event were it not for the interest attaching to the secret treaty entered into upon that occasion, an instrument the conditions of which were not made public until the year 1834, but which so clearly illustrated the ambitions of both nations. Napoleon undertook that Russia should become possessed of European Turkey, with Constantinople and the outlet into the Mediterranean, and pursue her conquests in Asia as far as she chose, India being, of course, understood as the objective. France was to have Egypt, Malta, the assistance of the Russian fleet in the capture of Gibraltar—the navigation of the Mediterranean being confined to French, Russian, Spanish and Italian ships. There were other provisions and much detail, but the above were the chief points. The amusing feature of this still-born treaty was that neither party honestly meant business. Each thought that he was jockeying the other, with the firm intention of carrying out no more of it than was for his own advantage. Tomini, who was aide-de-camp to Napoleon,19 wrote and told Paris that Alexander had been made to swallow a strong dose of opium, which would keep him quiet for some time, while Boutourlin told St. Petersburg that the terms of the treaty imposed such liabilities upon Russia that it must only be looked upon as a means of gaining time.
Alexander was present at the meeting of the German princes called together by Napoleon at Erfurt in the following year. Napoleon had provided for the entertainment of what it would be irony to call his guests, by summoning from Paris the famous Talma with his troupe of actors. One of the plays chosen was Voltaire’s Œdipe, and when the player came to the line:—
“L’amitié d’un grand homme est un bienfait des Dieux,”
the gigantic Russian Emperor leant over and theatrically seizing Napoleon’s hand, said “Je n’ai jamais mieux senti!” The stage effect missed fire, for the great little friend was quietly dozing, and had to be aroused to consciousness of what was happening. The “parterre de Rois,” the “pit of Kings,” smiled and applauded, but the demonstration was a fiasco.
The “bienfait des Dieux” was not long lived. In four short years after the meeting at Erfurt Napoleon made the greatest mistake of his life. He was at Moscow, and there we may leave him, standing on the Sparrow Hill in his favourite attitude, his arms folded, his brows bent, looking upon the barbaric splendour of the fantastic pink towers and battlements of the Kremlin, waiting for the delivery of the keys of the citadel—the keys which never came.
The mystery of the burning of Moscow will never be cleared up. Was the city fired by Rostopchin? Did he even connive at the deed? He himself denied it in a pamphlet published at Paris in 1823, but in my day nobody with whom I spoke on the subject believed him. The general opinion was that this great act of patriotism, which was the beginning of Napoleon’s downfall, was indeed his work. He burnt his own country house and destroyed his property, so that nothing should fall into the hands of the enemy—what more consistent than that he should deprive them of all supplies and all communication by burning the sacred capital after removing as many of its inhabitants as was possible. I have called the fire an act of patriotism. I ought to have said Russian patriotism. The attachment of the Russian to the soil is something sacred. The Mujik has two religions—the religion of God and the religion of the soil. Holy Russia is to him not a mere jingle of words, and Rostopchin, when he punished the sacrilege of the invader, knew that he could count upon having with him the most sacred feelings of his fellow-countrymen. He was, indeed, the typical Russian of his time. The placard which he put on the village church, the only building on the property which he left standing, is characteristic:
“For eight years I have been embellishing this place, and I have lived here happily in the bosom of my family. At your approach the seventeen hundred and twenty inhabitants of this property are leaving it, and I set fire to my house that it may not be polluted by your presence. Frenchmen! I have left you my two houses in Moscow, with their contents worth half a million roubles; here you will find nothing but ashes.”
This, of a surety, was a brave, a determined and patriotic man—a true Russian. He had been a great favourite of the Emperor Paul, and by his sage advice saved that unhappy man from many follies. It was said that had he been at St. Petersburg on the fatal 24th of March, 1801, the murder might not have been committed. During the early years of Alexander’s reign Rostopchin was out of favour. But there came a time when the Emperor became aware of his worth and courage, and made him Lord Chamberlain and Governor of Moscow. He was a descendant of the Great Mongol warrior of the twelfth century, Genghis Khan, and so he described himself in the following lines:
“Je suis né Tatare,
Je voulais être Romain.
Les Français m’ont fait barbare,
Et les Russes Georges Dandin.”
There is an excellent article on Rostopchin in the “Biographie Générale,” the book that Carlyle used to prize so highly.
The Emperor Alexander the First died in 1825 in circumstances which gave rise to some suspicion. He had left St. Petersburg in the month of December, with the Empress, who was ailing, his object being to take her to a warmer climate. He seems to have been for some time depressed and haunted by the sinister idea that his death was not far off. He was always more or less dominated by the spell of mysticism, and, indeed, it was under the influence of a mystic, a certain Madame de Krüdener, that he was induced to found the Holy Alliance. Before leaving St. Petersburg it is said that he went to the Church of the Convent of St. Alexander Nevski and caused a funeral service to be read. As he left the town he stopped his carriage to cast a last yearning look upon the city where he had been born and which he loved so well. He left the Empress at Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, and went to the Crimea, where he caught a fever, hurried back to Taganrog and died, not before he was made aware of the discovery of a plot to murder him and the whole Imperial Family.
It is difficult to understand why any Russian should have wished his death. Educated as he had been by his Swiss tutor, the famous La Harpe, in the most liberal principles, in his domestic policy he devoted himself heart and soul to the good of his people. Early in his reign he abolished serfdom in Esthonia, Livonia and Kurland. He introduced reforms into the older universities and created new ones. He promoted the study of science, and gave his active patronage to all the educational institutions in the Empire. He did away with the so-called Secret Tribunal, a sort of Star Chamber, for the arbitrary trial of political offences. Commerce and industry were special objects of his care. He built new harbours and made roads, and in 1818 extended to the peasants the right of establishing manufactories and commercial undertakings, a privilege which up to his time had been confined to the upper classes.
If, later in his reign, he seemed rather inclined to go back upon these liberal principles, it must be ascribed to the poor and unsympathetic return with which his endeavours were met. The country was hardly ripe for his audacious programme—certainly not for parliamentary government, which at one time he had in view. His own wish was to substitute a constitution for the absolutism which had existed up to his day. He was before his time. Napoleon might sneer at his duplicity and call him “un Grec du bas Empire,” but he recognized his talent and his capacity for governing. The vast majority of his people adored the handsome giant, but treachery and treason were plotting underground, and rebellion broke out, as we shall see, as soon as his soul had left his body. That sorrow he was mercifully spared, though the knowledge that it was coming arrived to embitter his last days.
The Emperor Nicholas came to the throne at a moment when a political storm of the greatest violence was ready to burst. More than one division of the army was known to have been tampered with and to be disaffected, and many of the chief nobles were conspiring for a constitutional government. The warning—or was it more than a warning?—received by the dead Emperor was sufficient to prove this, and there were at that moment special circumstances in the succession to the throne which were markedly favourable to revolution.
Alexander, deeply imbued, as I have said, with mysticism, had a foreboding that he would not be long-lived. He deposited with the Council of the Empire a packet, the seals of which were not to be broken without his command except in the event of his death, in which case it was to be opened at once and acted upon forthwith. As he died without issue, the Imperial Crown would, in accordance with the law of succession fixed by his father Paul, devolve upon his next brother, Constantine. He, however, was unwilling to reign. He preferred to remain as he was, governor and practically sovereign of Poland. Tsar of all the Russias he would not be. The mysterious packet was found to contain a letter from him, renouncing his claim to the throne in favour of his younger brother Nicholas. As soon as this was known, Nicholas most scrupulously did all in his power to induce his brother to alter his determination. He even went so far as to proclaim Constantine Emperor. The latter, however, in spite of repeated appeals from his brother, held to his fixed purpose, and Nicholas became Emperor against his own will and endeavours.
The conspirators found in these difficulties a rare opportunity for the attempt to carry out their plans. The interregnum had lasted fifteen days, and it was not till the 24th of December that Nicholas took possession of the Imperial Palace. On the 25th of December he read to the council the final renunciation of the Crown by Constantine, and on the following day he was proclaimed Emperor. That day the conspirators and the rebels assembled in the huge square—the Isaac Place—and shouted for Constantine and “his bride, the Constitution,” the soldiers believing in their innocence that “Constitution” was the name of the Grand Duke’s real wife. Nicholas, unarmed, but attended by General Milarodowitch, the Governor of St. Petersburg, and a battalion of faithful grenadiers, and accompanied by M. de la Ferronays, the French Ambassador, left the Palace and faced the rebels. The general, who was greatly beloved by the whole army, went forward and tried to speak with them, but he was at once bayoneted and shot.
The new Emperor showed the greatest courage and patience, and it was not until near nightfall that, the rebels having fired the first shot, he ordered his artillery to put an end to the trouble. Some two hundred men were killed by grape and canister. The five ringleaders were taken prisoners, tried and hanged some months later. One of the Princes Troubetzkoi, who had been foremost in his threats against the Emperor’s life, being sent for by the Tsar, threw himself at his feet and implored his pardon. “Sit down,” said Nicholas, “and write to your wife at my dictation.” The Prince sat down and the Tsar dictated: “My life is spared.” The Prince was so overcome that he could write no more. “Now seal your letter and go,” said the Tsar; “take your life, and spend it in remorse and repentance.”
The remainder of the conspirators, men of noble family, were sent to Siberia—so many of them as were still alive were pardoned and set free by that generous and noble sovereign, Alexander the Second, on his accession to the throne thirty years later. With the Dekabrists, the “men of December,” as they were called, the cry for Constantine was a mere pretext—the seizing of a possible chance. The real object was the abolition of Royalty and the proclaiming of a constitution. Nicholas has sometimes been accused of taking too stern measures against the Dekabrists. With that judgment I cannot agree. He was attacked with armed force, his murder and that of his whole family being the object; he did not strike the first blow. He could not expect to quell a formidable revolution in the army with rose-water. It was no sudden, passionate outburst of a people aching under the sense of wrong. The murderous plot, long meditated and carefully prepared, had been executed in cold blood. His brother lay dead at Taganrog. He and his dearly-loved boy, whom he had left entrusted to sure hands in the palace, were to have been the next victims. The whole conspiracy lay revealed as in an open book. It was all the more dangerous in that it was not a mob riot, but a conspiracy of men of high birth, education and position, corrupting the army itself. Put yourselves in his place. That he was horror-stricken at the massacre was proved by the pathetic cry which he uttered to M. de la Ferronays, the French Ambassador, who never left his side throughout that cruel day: “Ah! quel commencement de règne.” It was to him the skeleton at the feast throughout his life.
Shortly after his accession to the throne the Duke of Wellington was sent to Russia as special ambassador, nominally to congratulate him, but also with the object of inducing the new Tsar to adopt a conciliatory attitude towards the Sultan, between whom and the Greeks there was much trouble. The irony of Fate made the Duke take with him as Secretary of Embassy, Lord Fitzroy Somerset (Lord Raglan), the general whose victories twenty-nine years later in the defence of Turkey were to break the proud heart of that same Tsar. It was during these negotiations that Nicholas formed his estimate of the Duke’s character, and caused him to cherish in his heart the memory of the great soldier as of a model to be copied. It was then, too, that he first declared that he had no higher ambition than to be a “gentleman,” using the English word; and whatever may have been his faults, whatever his ambition, a truthful, honest gentleman he remained to his life’s end. To the Duke of Wellington he made no secret of his determination to allow no foreign Power, or Powers, to interfere between himself and the Porte. That was his lifelong consistent policy. If Nicholas was reactionary, if he hated education and opposed the spread of science, if he strained the powers of absolutism almost to the breaking point, he did so openly, and it was the tragedy of his accession which poisoned his many fine qualities.
During his reign the ship of State was seldom in smooth waters. He sent Prince Mentschikoff to Persia to announce his accession to the throne, with instructions to enter into negotiations for the settlement of the frontier questions which were in dispute. If the maintenance of peace be the proper aim of diplomacy, Mentschikoff was not a successful ambassador. His mission to Persia ended in war, as did his embassy to Turkey more than a quarter of a century later. The Russians, under Prince Paskiewitch, were victorious, and the province of Erivan was added to Russia.
Poland was the chief thorn in his side in 1828; two years after his coronation at Moscow he caused himself to be crowned King of Poland at Warsaw. The ceremonial was gorgeous, and the King-Emperor, invoking the Supreme Majesty of Heaven, prayed that he might govern for the happiness of his people. He also wrote to the Pope, thanking His Holiness for the reception given to the Tsarevitch, promising to “protect the well-being of his Catholic subjects respecting their convictions,” etc. That he was sincere in these undertakings admits of little doubt. Unfortunately he was represented at Warsaw by his brother Constantine, who, as his elder, and as having renounced the throne in his favour, had more influence than an ordinary governor would have had. The revolution in Poland broke out in 1830, and Prince Sanguszko, the head of one of the noblest families in the country, people whom I afterwards knew, was one of the leaders. He was taken prisoner and degraded, and his estates were forfeited. It was said that when he was sent to Siberia, the Emperor, with his own hand, wrote that the journey was to be made on foot. When I was in Russia many years later, I had reason to believe that this was not true. The troubles in Poland lasted for many years—indeed, were never extinguished—and they led to gross exaggerations.
I was in Paris as a small boy in 1845, and I well remember hearing all the horrors that were hawked about there, and all the stories of cruelty. Especially I recollect one day how when certain news came to one of the Prince de la Moskowa’s concerts—he was the son of Marshal Ney and an accomplished musician and conductor—the pious Roman Catholics present lashed themselves into a fury of emotion over the sufferings of the nuns of St. Basil. It was affirmed that they had been stripped naked, flogged and tortured, and that when they were starving and begged for food their mouths were filled with earthworms. Those were the lies by which the indignation of their co-religionists was aroused by Polish agents. The best informed people did not believe them. That the Poles were cruelly treated, and harshly misgoverned, was certainly to be laid to the charge of the Grand Duke Constantine. He had inherited the still-living hatreds and the memory of Moscow in the beginning of the seventeenth century. There were old scores to be settled, and his doctrine was an eye for an eye, the lex talionis in its greatest rigidity. It would have been a hard matter in any case for the Tsar to bring Russia and Poland into harmony. With Constantine at Warsaw it was impossible—yet the Grand Duke had married a Polish lady.
The affairs of Poland were an apple of discord between France and Russia. The military successes of Nicholas were really confined to the Persian campaign, for although in his subsequent operations on the Danube in 1828 (poor Wallachia and Moldavia), his troops had some success, and even took Varna, the expedition served no great purpose, while it effectually showed the Tsar’s incapacity as a leader, for having taken the field in person, he had to return to St. Petersburg a pronounced failure—recognized as such by his own generals.
A civil triumph was the codification of the Russian law, begun in 1827 and finished in 1846, by which the peasants greatly benefited; was the chief feat in internal administration by which his reign was distinguished.
In 1844 the Emperor Nicholas came to England and visited Queen Victoria at Windsor. The object of his visit was twofold. The Queen had received Louis Philippe, whom he hated and despised, and he was determined to see whether he could not counteract the wily old King’s influence. Secondly, the Convention of London of 1841 placed the Ottoman dominions under the protection of the Powers, and this manifestly did not suit the Tsar’s book. He had his own views as to the Sublime Porte, and would brook no interference between himself and the Sultan, whose Christian subjects he wished to place under his own shield. That was for him a principle of religion. It was a momentous visit, destined to bear bitter fruit ten years later.
Sir Robert Peel was at this time Prime Minister, and Lord Aberdeen Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. It was only natural that the Foreign Secretary should have much conversation with his Sovereign’s illustrious guest, and Lord Aberdeen was, by his gentle and conciliatory manners, the man, above all others, fitted to charm the Tsar, who to the last retained an affectionate admiration for him. Perhaps Lord Aberdeen’s deportment towards the Emperor was a little too deferential; at any rate, he left Nicholas convinced that the Russian views as to Turkey were shared by the British Government, and it was with unfeigned joy that in 1852 the Emperor learnt of the accession to power as Prime Minister of a man whom he flattered himself that he had talked over to his way of thinking, and whose peace-loving disposition would never allow him to go to war on behalf of the autonomy of Turkey. That he honestly believed that he had had such an assurance from Lord Aberdeen cannot be doubted.
In its main features the story of the Crimean War will never be forgotten. The storming of the heights of the Alma, which Nicholas believed to be impregnable, the beating back of the tidal wave of Russian infantry at Inkermann, when my old friend, Billy Hewitt, ordered to spike his guns and retire, answered, “Spike be damned!” and went on firing till they were red hot and the enemy were in retreat—just one gallant deed among many of that bloody battle; above all, the heroic charge of the six hundred at Balaclava, are feats of arms which must set men on fire as long as they have pulses to quicken. But how many men are there nowadays who could give any account of the causes which led to the war?
The quarrels between the monks of the Greek and Latin churches in Palestine seem trivial enough reason to have started so great a catastrophe. The custody of the key of the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, the right to worship in the Church of the Virgin near the Garden of Gethsemane, and the custody of the Sanctuaries of Jerusalem, were the first pretexts of hostilities. That there was in the mind of the Emperor Nicholas a far wider-reaching motive, hardly suspected perhaps even by himself, will be seen presently.
In the year 1740 a treaty concluded between Louis XV. and the Porte, practically gave the care of the Sacred Places to the Latin Church. To the Greeks certain similar concessions had been made later on by firmans, or edicts of the Sultan, which, however, could not technically be held to over-ride the solemn treaty with France. Louis Napoleon took up the cause of the Latins, and his ambassador, M. de Lavalette, insisted with some violence on the exclusive rights of the Latin monks. The French people at large probably cared little for these squabbles between the rival creeds. But to Louis Napoleon they furnished an opportunity for securing to himself, as Defender of the Faith, a powerful friend in the Church. He wished to arrogate to himself those sacred rights of primogeniture which had been the pride of the Kings of France. It was, moreover, an outlet for that feverish activity which his home policy had made a necessity for him. In the month of December, 1852, a silver star, graven with the arms of France, was deposited in the church at Bethlehem with much pompous ceremonial, attended by the Turkish officials, and the Latin Patriarch with triumphant joy received the coveted keys of the church and Holy Manger.
The fury of the Tsar was terrible. The insult to his Church, which he loved, and the affront to himself, were enhanced by the source from which they came. He had a special horror of all revolutions, pursued to his dying day by the nightmare of the conspiracy of December, 1825, the tragedy which had inaugurated his reign. The revolutions of France were odious to him. Never would he, in the fullest sense, accept either Louis Philippe or Louis Napoleon as sovereigns equal with himself. Neither of them would he address as “Monsieur mon frère.”
And now behold an upstart who was buffeting and opposing him in what he looked upon as the most sacred of his Imperial duties as head of the Church! The spiritual ambitions of the Tsars were hereditary. His father, the Emperor Paul, had been anxious even to don the priestly robes and celebrate the mass; but his wise and brave friend Rostopchin stopped him with a clever conceit. “Sire,” said he, “you have no rights as priest. A priest must only marry once; you have been twice married—you cannot be a priest.” The mad Emperor was convinced and refrained.
On another occasion the Metropolitan boldly stopped him when he tried to enter the Holy of Holies. Although not a priest, the Russian Tsar is head of his Church, much as the English King is the head of ours, and Nicholas took the position very seriously. It was, moreover, intolerable to him that the firmans which had been wrung from the Porte in favour of the Orthodox monks should be set aside as mere scraps of paper, on account of the more binding powers of a treaty, musty with age, extorted more than a century previously by French chicane from an unwilling or callous Sultan. He was determined to resist, and Prince Mentschikoff was sent on a special embassy to Constantinople to demand compliance with the Russian claims on behalf of the Greek Church.
Deeply religious and full of zeal for his Church, Nicholas was animated by the same spirit which spurred on the old Crusaders to face dangers and hardships of which we in these days of easy transport can have no idea, in order to wrest from the Moslem those very shrines for the guardianship of which he was striving. No one can doubt that he was honest and sincere in his pious aims. But there was something more. How could he divest himself of the hereditary ambition of Russia? It is true that in his conversations with Sir Hamilton Seymour he spoke only of the occupation, as distinct from the seizure, of Constantinople; but if he once succeeded in establishing himself there in the guise of Protector of the Greek Church throughout the Sultan’s dominions, would his people ever allow him to give up the city upon which the covetous eyes of all the Russians had so long been fixed? Would he even be willing to do so himself? Only think what it meant: the Black Sea changed from the position of an inland lake; access to the Mediterranean through the Straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles; the potentiality of a huge navy ready to dart out upon the world from hidden and unapproachable harbours; a strategic base from which to attack all the maritime Powers of Europe. The temptation would be great indeed. Kinglake summed up the position in a striking and eloquent passage:
“The strife of the Church was no fable, but, after all, though near and distinct, it was only the lesser truth. A crowd of monks, with bare foreheads, stood quarrelling for a key at the sunny gates of a church in Palestine; but beyond and above, towering high in the misty North, men saw the ambition of the Tsars.”
It is not the first time in history that religion has been made to subserve the needs of politics. Martin Luther was spiritually sincere in his attack upon the clerical abuses of the Roman Catholic Church; but the success of the movement was due to the adhesion of the semi-barbarous German princes, who cared little for religion, but caught eagerly at the chance of shaking off the temporal yoke of Rome in their states. So it was in this case. Nicholas was no doubt honestly eager to establish among the Sacred Places of Palestine the supremacy of the Church that he loved; but he knew full well that even the most agnostic of his Boyarin would be ready to draw the sword if Constantinople was the prize dangled before his eyes.
One man, the most considerable personage in the Empire after the Tsar himself, cared but little for the religious side of the contention. That man was Count Nesselrode, the Chancellor. The squabbles between the Greek and Latin monks interested him in no way, for he belonged to neither faith. Curiously enough, he was a member of the Church of England, having, in December, 1780, been baptized in the Bay of Biscay on board an English man-of-war which had given hospitality to his parents, his father being at the time Russian Minister at Lisbon; and in our communion he gratefully remained till his death, continuing from time to time, as occasion served, never less than once a year, as I have been assured, to attend the services of the English Church. However indifferent he might be to the claims of Orthodoxy, he had, nevertheless, to obey the dictates of his Imperial—and imperious—master; and, of course, to him, as to every Russian, Constantinople was an irresistible lure; still, there is no doubt that his attitude in regard to the war was but lukewarm. He would have avoided it had it been possible.
The historic embassy of Prince Mentschikoff showed the Tsar’s hand. The matter at issue was no longer one confined to the custody of a key, however sacred, or to the position of the feet on a crucifix. In the Greek crucifix the feet are nailed separately; in the Latin crucifix the feet are crossed. The Greek crucifix in the church at Gethsemane was one of the matters in dispute. The Latin monks claimed that the crucifix of the Greeks should give place to one with the feet crossed; but these became minor questions when, in the most arbitrary fashion, the prince demanded that the whole of the Christian subjects of the Sultan should be placed under the protectorate of the Tsar. What this meant will be understood when we remember that it was computed that there were some thirteen millions of these out of a total of thirty-six millions of people, and thus over something approaching a third of the Sultan’s subjects the Tsar was to be King. The Porte, well advised by Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, peremptorily refused. The Turk was ready to make some concession as regarded the Holy Places, but he would not renounce his sovereignty over any portion of his people. Foiled at every step, Prince Mentschikoff left Constantinople, and the Tsar had once more to see himself outwitted and bested by his old enemy, Lord Stratford.
Lord Stratford de Redcliffe has often been accused of having been the cause of the Crimean War, that great calamity in which, as Lord Salisbury said many years afterwards, “we backed the wrong horse.” Nothing could be more false than this charge laid against Lord Stratford, and yet probably nineteen out of every twenty Englishmen, imperfectly instructed as usual in foreign affairs, believe it to this day. The man really responsible for the war was the French Emperor, who, as so often happened during the nineteen years of his reign, was in sore need of the counter-irritant of a foreign war to calm the fever of his own subjects at home. Never was it more needful to him than at the moment when the affairs of Turkey and the religious demands of the Emperor Nicholas began to be discussed in the chanceries of Europe.
Frenchmen, and, above all, Parisians (do not forget the old saying, “Paris c’est la France”), were still under the terrible impression of the massacres of the coup d’état of the 2nd to the 4th of December, 1851. Nothing could better serve the purpose of allaying the smouldering indignation than such a war as that which he saw he could foment, especially if it were carried on in concert with England. Such an alliance would immeasurably increase his prestige both at home and abroad, and, if he could arrange a visit to Queen Victoria, for which he was intriguing, would almost make it appear as if she approved or, at any rate, condoned the wholesale murders of 1851.
As a matter of fact, at the very moment when Lord Stratford was striving with all his might to save England from war, he received instructions from home directing him to order the English fleet to go to Constantinople in company with the French. This was in obedience to the French Emperor, who seemed to have dominated the British Government. Peace did not suit his plans; war did. From that moment Lord Stratford’s endeavours were frustrated; war was inevitable.
In the meantime the angry Tsar had sent his army to occupy for the second time Moldavia and Wallachia, those unhappy provinces, the Danubian Principalities, as they were then called, upon which the curse of Cain seemed to have settled for all time.
Those who have watched the landing of a crowd of Russian pilgrims at Jaffa will realize the power which Nicholas had at his back in the execution of his policy of fighting for the Holy Shrines. I have seen the old people, men and women, the tears streaming from their poor tired eyes, fall down upon their knees, to kiss the soil, the treading of which was the reward of long lives of grinding labour, privation and parsimony. I have seen an old peasant, with matted hair and beard, meanly wrapped in a sheepskin robe, sobbing out his patient heart in an ecstasy of grief at the Holy Sepulchre. In order to save up the money for this pious errand they must stint themselves, they must almost starve themselves, laying up kopeck by kopeck, looking with surety for their reward in another, a better and a less grinding life. The Church has promised it, and God will fulfil the promises of His Church.
Half a century and more has slipped away since I left Russia, and I should have great hesitation in writing down my impressions of the intensely religious character of the Russian people were it not that recent writings by well qualified observers show that those long years have wrought little change. Mr. Stephen Graham’s book, “The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary,” is a most charming and sympathetic study of the complex psychological question of the religion of the Russian. Indeed, the only fault with which it can be charged is that the writer is almost too enthusiastic—more Orthodox than the Patriarch. I call it a complex question because it is so difficult to say how far it is pure religion and how far it is only mysticism, but, be it religion or be it mysticism, it is deeply ingrained in the soul of the Russian mujik; it is part of himself, and is revealed in a veneration for which I have found no parallel elsewhere. But the strange part about it is its powerlessness for restraint from sin. The greatest criminal will obey the harassing prescriptions of his Church as though his very life depended upon it. In Lent he will submit to a fast which is nothing short of cruel even the Mohammedans’ fast in the month of Ramadan is nothing to it, for when sunset comes the pious Moslem is free to feast as he pleases. With streaming eyes, in a frenzy of religious rapture, the Orthodox peasant will adore the sacred shrines and cross himself before the ikon, the blessed picture of his patron saint. But that is all. Piety and virtue are two things. The old Budotchnik (night-watchman), who had his hut upon the frozen Neva, would cut a hole in the ice, into which he might throw the body of the wayfarer whom he had murdered, to be carried down to the Baltic; but in the Budotchka (his wooden hovel) a lamp always burned before the blessed ikon, in the presence of which he would count his unholy spoil. The toper, reeling with the fumes of vodka, before the days of that brave abstinence law of the present Tsar, would never be so drunk as to forget the marks of obeisance due to the sacred image, whose presence he would not hesitate to pollute by any crime. When Nicholas raised the fiery cross of a holy war, he could count upon the fierce valour of an army of fanatics. Death for his religion and for the soil of Holy Russia opens to the Russian the gates of Paradise.
If the religious fanaticism of the people and the ambition of the governing classes was great in Russia, here in England the political frenzy was no less violent. For reasons which they would probably have found it difficult to explain, the people took up the cause of the Turk with the wildest enthusiasm, and the shibboleth, “Balance of Power,” was continually in the mouths of men who were quite ignorant of its meaning. In France the desire for war was, as I have hinted, confined to the Emperor and his surroundings; but it was a sad disillusion for the Tsar when he saw the temper of England and of the Government of his friend Lord Aberdeen, a temper which that lover of peace was powerless to resist, the man whom, when he was at Windsor in 1844, he believed himself to have talked over to his views. Trusting to his conversations with the then Foreign Secretary, the Tsar was firmly convinced that England would not go to war, in spite of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, whom he hated more than ever for his defeat of Mentschikoff, in spite of Lord Clarendon, and in spite of the fact that at the Colonial Office there was a Minister called Palmerston, who, more than any other man, reflected the spirit of his countrymen, and who, by no great stretch of the imagination, might be supposed to have some little influence in foreign affairs.
During his whole life the chief hobby of the Tsar had been his army. To increase its numbers, its smartness, and its imposing glitter was the object of his most watchful care. But his military aptitudes were confined to those of the drill-sergeant. Company drill, battalion drill, a grand review were his chief joy—a shabby uniform, a button awry, a mistake in some detail of kit were crimes to be suitably punished; no stricter martinet ever existed.20 But of strategy, tactics and the science of war, he knew no more than the youngest drummer in one of his pet regiments. Whenever he interfered in any of the wars in which he engaged, he only hindered and hampered his generals.
When it became evident that his occupation of the Balkans was a strategic mistake, he had to call in old Prince Paskiewitch, the hero of his Persian War, to get him out of the scrape. Commissariat, equipment, munitions, transport, and the various subordinate necessaries for his army, were matters into which he did not deign to inquire. I do not propose to treat of the Crimean War; I will only say this much: that when I was discussing it one day, in 1863, with a Russian general, he told me that the losses suffered by the Tsar’s army in the terrible marches to the Crimea cost them more men than all the fighting put together. Want of food, clothes, boots, medicine for the sick, the robberies of commissariat and contractors, killed the soldiers by tens of thousands. I was bound to confess that our men were not much better off, until my old friend Billy Russell roused the indignation of the people.
In the autumn of 1854 the Tsar declared that he looked to “le Général Février” to finish the war. It did, but not as he hoped. In the month of February, 1855, he died suddenly and mysteriously. The stories which have been published of a lingering death lasting several days, and of touching farewell interviews with the Empress and the Tsarevitch, may be dismissed as fables; I have dwelt upon this in my “Memories.” However that may be, whether he died a natural death from influenza, or whether, as many people believed, he took poison, it was a broken heart that killed him. The army that he had loved, the army that he had made and drilled, clothed and cherished, had failed him. Paskiewitch, whom he thought invincible, had been compelled to raise the siege of Silistria; the battle of Giurgevo had been lost; his troops, the bugbear of Europe, had been driven across the Danube by the Turks. The heights of the Alma, the night of Inkermann told the same tale. Sevastopol was doomed. The proud man was beaten; there was nothing left to him in this life; he laid him down and died—a man of many mistakes, but to the last the great “gentleman” that he claimed to be.
Once again the angel of death was merciful. He was spared the misery of the final and supreme defeat. His impregnable fortress fallen, his button-perfect army on which he pinned his faith shattered, the whole edifice of his hereditary ambition and his pious strivings crumbled to dust!
That Nicholas was greatly feared by his people must be admitted; at the same time, he was admired as something more than a man; and by those who surrounded him, though none came so often under the stinging lash of his displeasure, he was venerated and loved. His domestic life was perfect. He adored his wife—as he once said: “The first time I saw her I knew that I had met the guardian angel of my life.” She was the sister of that poor King of Prussia who was chiefly famous for his dullness and his love of champagne—le Roi Cliquot, as his Imperial brother-in-law was wont to call him.
Russia had every right to look forward to a happy time under the milder rule of Alexander the Second, who, as Tsarevitch, had greatly endeared himself to the people by travelling through the country, taking pains personally to ascertain what were the wants and aspirations of the millions whom he was one day to rule, and interesting himself on behalf of the political prisoners in Siberia, and endeavouring, so far as in him lay, to soften their hard lot. One of his first acts on coming to the throne was to release so many of the Dekabrists—the men of December—who were still living.
It has been the fashion among writers upon Russia to depreciate Alexander as a weak ruler. They are kind enough to accredit him with a heart full of good intentions, but they taunt him with a lack of vigour of character. It is a hard matter for a Tsar to satisfy the requirements of historical critics. A Nicholas, with a stern hand, puts down a poisonous rebellion which aimed at nothing less than by corrupting the army to perpetrate the murder of the whole Imperial family. He is written down and held up to execration as a bloody-minded, revengeful tyrant. Then comes his son, who at once sets about a vast number of reforms for the benefit of his people, such as the emancipation of the Law Courts from the supreme power of the politicians, the publication of an annual Budget, the establishment of provincial and district councils, and, above all, the emancipation of the serfs, of which I shall speak later. All these liberal benefits are ascribed to the feebleness of the Emperor, who, as they say, had not the force to resist the persistent demands of ministers. Such is the injustice of men and historians. Nothing astonished me more when I was in Russia than the freedom of speech. I had been brought up in the faith that to criticize the Emperor meant the knut and Siberia. On the contrary, I found at the clubs and in Society men talking, praising and blaming with all the confidence of truly free citizens, little heeding who should hear them, and I soon became aware that all the fables which I had heard of spies and reporters were just moonshine. Even officials and officers in the army unsparingly criticized the measures which they had to carry out and the men whom they must obey.
One of the shrewdest critics of international politics that I ever knew was old Count Nicholas Pablen, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this paper. A great traveller, and an excellent speaker of modern languages, he had been for half a century intimately associated with all the chief makers of the nineteenth century. He had, moreover, a marvellous memory, of which I may give an example. One day I found him in a great state of mind, fussing and fuming over some annoyance. I asked what was the matter. He said: “I am losing my memory! I wanted to write down the Knights of the Garter—I remembered twenty-four, but for the life of me I could not recollect the twenty-fifth!” All of a sudden his face brightened. “I have it,” he said, “the Duke of Westminster.” The honour of his memory was saved. His memory for political facts never failed him, and his judgment was not to be denied. His view of the state of affairs at the end of the Crimean War is given in one of those delightful letters with which Lord Granville used to keep Lord Canning posted in European matters whilst the latter was Governor-General in India. Lord Granville wrote, on the 3rd of August, 1856 (see “Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice’s Life,” vol. I., page 185):
“Old Pahlen was the most irritable of all on this subject (the Crimean War). He says it has done no one good; not to the English, certainly not to the Russians—and has only been of use to one man in France,21 whom he is not, as you know, fond of. He says that in England they considered him as merely speaking like a Russian parrot when he said that the Emperor Nicholas did not wish for war, and that he was considered in Russia almost a treacherous Anglomane when he declared that our Government did not wish it. He had been right in both cases, and yet by extraordinary bad management the war had come. He thinks it will take a whole generation to efface the recollection of it. He attributes the hatred of us, and comparative forgiveness of the French, not so much to the destruction in the Baltic, not so much to our Press and our public speaking, as to our having been old friends, and their always having thought of the French as enemies. He does not believe in any great changes in Russia. The Emperor has good intentions, but there have always been good intentions at the beginning of each reign. He has one great advantage over his father. Alexander during his life told Nicholas nothing. Nicholas, since his son has been of age, told him everything, and the latter, being of a very amiable disposition, heard everything that others did not dare tell his father. He is supposed not to have military tastes, but he issued new regulations about uniforms almost before his father was buried; and he and Constantine appeared in new hussar jackets a day or two afterwards, which were supposed to be foreign, instead of a new dress which he had been in such a hurry to exhibit himself in. He dismissed Klein Michel and another (two great robbers); and when his mother remonstrated on the ground of their having been his father’s friends, he made a good answer, which he had probably previously prepared. He said: ‘I am not a great man like my father. He could use such men as his tools—I am not strong enough.’ He (Pahlen) lays much stress on the absolute poverty of Russia in able men. He thinks Gortchakoff clever, but indiscreet, vain, and not successful in things which he undertakes. (This is confirmed by everybody.)
“Tolstoi, a great friend of the Emperor, by whom he is called ‘milord Tolstoi,’ has no ability.
“Kisseleff, who is named Ambassador to Paris, is clever, but has never been a diplomat and is seventy years old. Meyendorf, really clever, is done up. Chreptowitch is nobody. Orloff himself clever, but perfectly ignorant. He says that Gortchakoff laments to everyone this dearth of men to appoint. So Bloomfield told me. Pahlen says that in England it does not signify if we want a man, we can always pick up an intelligent man in some rank of life or other who will soon master the specialities of his business. In Russia those who are not diplomatists by profession are profoundly ignorant of all that relates to it.”
A long quotation—but the appreciation of the state of affairs in his own country by so competent an observer as Count Pahlen, recorded, moreover, by no less a man than Lord Granville, seems to me to justify and even invite its insertion here. I myself knew almost all the men whom the Count mentioned, and I can appreciate the accuracy of his estimate. In two cases, that of the new Tsar and that of M. Tolstoi, I think he was hardly fair. As it turned out, the reign of Alexander the Second, if by no other measure than that of the liberation of the serfs, marked an important step in Russian history; while M. Jean Tolstoi—the “milord”—who was Postmaster-General in my time, proved to be a capable minister, none the worse for having travelled and being an accomplished man of the world. As Ambassador to England, Count Chreptowitch, a delightful old gentleman, was not an eagle; and it was not long before the astute old Baron Brunnow—with the
“Baroness Brunnow who looked like Juno”
of the “Ingoldsby Legends”—appeared once more as pilot of the diplomatic ship among the rather difficult shoals of British waters.
Nor at the outset of the new reign was English diplomacy any too strong. England, as Count Pablen pointed out, was in bad odour at St. Petersburg, and it needed all the exquisite tact of Lord Granville, when he went as special ambassador for the coronation, to conciliate the Emperor, while at the same time firmly giving His Majesty to understand that he must insist upon being received with the courtesy and consideration due to the Queen’s personal representative. Lord Granville’s letters to Lord Canning, quoted by Lord Fitzmaurice, tell the story in the most interesting way.
The glove was of velvet, but the hand was of steel. It was no easy task, for Count Pahlen was quite right when he warned Lord Granville that the Emperor was deeply prejudiced against England, and had quite thrown himself into the arms of France—a strange infatuation, considering that it was Louis Napoleon’s personal ambition and aggressive policy which raised the question of the Holy Places, and was the cause of the war, whereas England did her best—a bad best, it must be admitted—to preserve the peace. Yet France was in high favour, while for us there was as yet no forgiveness. At any rate, Lord Granville’s special embassy was a great success, and for years afterwards the Russians spoke with enthusiasm of the English grand seigneur who had conquered à force de plaire and upheld the dignity of his country. If in some future decade, century, or æon, I, on the eve of a new incarnation, should be consulted by the gods as to the quality with which I should prefer to be endowed, I should have little hesitation in asking to be blessed with the tact of Lord Granville.
Lord Wodehouse, afterwards Earl of Kimberley, who was our Minister at St. Petersburg, was a man of great ability, singularly well read and thoroughly posted in diplomatic lore. He knew his trade, but he had not the secret of treating business with charm. His talents were better fitted to the fuliginous atmosphere of Downing Street than to the bright sparkling air of the Russian capital. It was single-stick, very doughty single-stick, against the light play of the foils. The contrast with that skilful fencer, Lord Granville, was great. But the victories gained by the latter could only be temporary. He had to go, and Lord Wodehouse remained, a brilliantly dull man—or would it be better to say a dully brilliant man?—quite out of his element in the glittering gaiety of a Russian salon. Those who knew his solid worth appreciated his wisdom and scrupulous honesty. But he was rather a great parliamentarian than a courtly diplomatist. When he opened the flood-gates of his talk, it was a Niagara that issued forth, carrying all before it, not to be stopped or stayed, and this deluge was made even more overwhelming by a doctoral or donnish manner, which absolutely staggered the delightfully smart and rather cynical Prince Gortchakoff. As for the Emperor, the voluble envoy frankly bored him. Lord Wodehouse could earn respect for England, but not affection.
Nor was England much better served when his place was taken in 1858 by Sir John Crampton, a most delightful personality, but, in spite of his long experience, little fitted for such a post as St. Petersburg. The truth is that he was a Bohemian of the Bohemians, a man who loved his ease and to whom the donning of a fine coat and a star was little short of torture. I knew him well, for he was a contemporary of my father’s in the service, and there were few days—when he was on leave in London—on which he did not knock at our door. He had all the gifts of the Irish raconteur, and his stories were enhanced by the charm of a musical speaking voice—a great, handsome, leonine figure, with his silver hair and beard, whose advent we always hailed with joy. Probably he was at his best in his beautiful Irish home near Powerscourt, where, with a congenial friend or two—notably old Sharpe, the eccentric Dublin artist—he could sit and smoke after dinner in the same frieze coat that he had worn all day. With us and very few other friends he would sit by the fire, a great tame cat, purring the livelong winter afternoon. However great his personal attractiveness might be, he was certainly not successful as a diplomatist.
When he was at Washington, President Peirce broke off relations with him on account of his recruiting activities—when there were men wanted for the Foreign Legion in the Crimean War. It was the one case in which he overcame his constitutional indolence, and it was not lucky. He had to leave the United States, but Lord Palmerston, always the generous defender of his subordinates, stood up for him, and sent him as Minister to Hanover, at the same time decorating him with the K.C.B., and thence he was transferred to St. Petersburg, a post where the members of the diplomatic body, unless they were prepared to face all the requirements of a delightful but rather exacting society, were bound to become mere cyphers.
That is what happened to Sir John Crampton, and that, too, at a moment when it was very important to bury the hatchet and establish relations of cordial friendship and sympathy with the Tsar and his ministers. It was at last the tame cat nature to which I have alluded above brought about his retirement from Russia in 1860, and his transfer to Spain, where at that moment there was little urgency for activity. In an unlucky moment for all concerned, Balfe came to St. Petersburg, with his beautiful young daughter Victoire, who had been engaged at the Opera. Naturally the Irish Minister and the Irish composer forgathered, and Balfe’s rooms were a delightfully congenial place, where, when the young lady was not singing at the theatre, Crampton could pass the lazy evenings, free from the cramping fetters of a tailcoat and from all the irksome restraint and exigencies of a diplomatist’s life. Balfe, whom I knew well for many years, was himself endowed with all the fascination of Irish wit and bonhomie, while his daughter was as attractive as youth, beauty and talent could make her. They must have been a delightful trio—but the lotus-eating was not to last. There came a day when Balfe, in the character of the père noble, told Sir John that his visits must cease—the old story, his daughter’s happiness was at stake—and so the veteran diplomatist hoisted the white flag, surrendered unconditionally, and January and May were united for a very brief time, at the end of which the marriage was annulled, and the lady married the Duc de Friar, a grandee of Spain.
When I reached St. Petersburg in 1863, and went through the archives of the Embassy, which were in my charge, I found that there was a dispatch missing. No trace could be found of it and no one had ever seen it. I wrote to London, asking the Foreign Office to send out a copy. When it came, it turned out to be a severe wigging from Lord Russell, scolding Crampton for not keeping him better informed on Russian affairs. Crampton had burned the dispatch! It was easy for him to do this, for the messenger arrived about ten o’clock at night, and he was in the habit of opening the bag himself, and only sending down its contents to the Chancery on the following morning. This particular document he kept to himself. In 1869 he left the service, and from that time lived chiefly at his Irish home in County Wicklow, where he died, full of years and comfort, in 1886, greatly regretted by all of us who knew him as a dear, kind, affectionate old friend.
Never was there a happier appointment than that of Lord Napier, who succeeded him in Russia in 1860, with the more exalted rank of Ambassador, seconded by an ambassadress who seemed to have been born for the position. The British Embassy soon became the most popular centre of society in Russia. John Lumley—afterwards Lord Savile—was First Secretary (what would now be called Councillor), and he was a most valuable aide-de-camp socially to his chief. In these happy circumstances the prestige and influence increased every day, until at the end, when Lord Napier, in 1864, was transferred to Berlin, the Emperor Alexander wished to give him the Order of St. Andrew, the Garter of Russia, but unfortunately in those days the acceptance of foreign Orders was strictly forbidden. Queen Victoria was like Queen Elizabeth, who said that she would not allow her dogs to wear any collar but her own.
Few men ever had a much more difficult task than that with which Lord Napier was confronted when he took possession of the Embassy. Not only did he conjure into life a new popularity out of the ashes of the dead indifference, and worse, in which England was held, but he succeeded in winning the personal love and affection of all with whom he came in contact; and this he did in spite of the emasculate meddlings in Polish affairs which were the favourite pastime of Lord Russell and the cynical amusement of Prince Gortchakoff.
It must not be supposed that Lord Napier did not himself openly condemn much that was going on in Poland; but he did so with tact, as an onlooker, and not like Lord Russell, with the appearance of impertinent interference in the internal government of a friendly country. There were, as I have shown in my “Memories,” many Russians in high positions who were outspoken in their detestation of General Muraieff, whom Prince Suvoroff did not hesitate to call a “hangman” in the Tsar’s presence at a banquet at Tsarskoe Selo. Lord Napier would have cried “Amen” to that. But though he was an uncompromising critic, he never forfeited the goodwill of the court to which he was accredited.
The honour and reputation of England were safe in his hands, and he enjoyed an influence which had been vouchsafed to none of his predecessors. What Prince Gortchakoff and all other Russians resented in Lord Russell was the schoolmaster tone of his dispatches. That Prince Suvoroff’s condemnation of the cruelties of Warsaw did not meet with an Imperial reproof was significant enough, and an English ambassador would find plenty of men who would applaud a similar reproof from him. But none of them, even of those who were loudest in their blame, would accept Lord Russell’s sermons and prescriptions. The Polish Revolution was a terrible first act in the drama upon which the curtain was to fall in so tragic a fashion.
The liberation of the serfs in 1861 was manifestly the greatest achievement of Alexander’s reign—indeed, it was one of the greatest and noblest achievements in the whole history of Society. It was a great upheaval, far more wide-reaching and searching than the abolition of negro slavery which rewarded the humane labours of Clarkson, Sharp and Wilberforce. That only affected the planters of the West Indies. There were no negro slaves in London, Edinburgh, or Dublin. In Russia, on the contrary, serfdom was universal. There were serfs even among the tradesmen of St. Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw, and all the great towns—men who had raised themselves by industry and knowledge into a higher status than that of the drudge or labourer, the hewer of wood and drawer of water, but who yet remained serfs, and had to pay a share of their gains to their lords. The fortunes of rich Boyarin were calculated in the souls of men. There had been more than once talk of putting an end to this horror, but it was left to the generous and good Tsar to carry the reform into execution. He was ably seconded by M. Valouieff, Minister of the Interior, who worked out all the details of the scheme. It was no easy task to carry out so mighty a change, for, of course, the vested interests were powerful and the mighty ego was on guard, as ever; but the Tsar was in deadly earnest, and in spite of all opposition, twenty-three millions of dead souls were born again into life.
It was an audaciously bold piece of statesmanship. Even an autocrat is dependent upon the will of others for his power. He cannot stand up in the Agora, and, like a god, proclaim himself “I am that I am!” He needs support, and in Russia at that time, when the proletariat had not yet even the semblance of political existence, the only prop upon which the Tsar could rely was the noblesse, and it was precisely their privileges that he was attacking. It needed moral courage, it needed physical courage, to set such a machinery in motion. Remember who and what were the men who murdered the Emperor Paul. Not a gang of revolutionary carbonari—Turgénieff was not yet born and the word “Nihilist” had not yet been coined22—but a band of powerful nobles, headed by his own prime minister. Remember who were the leading Dekabrists, men bearing historic names, proud of their descent from the sacred stock of Rurik. It was men of that importance who would be the most affected by the change, and whose opposition was to be feared. No weak man would have braved them. It is true that emancipation had long been in the air, and that a great number—perhaps even a large majority—of the landed aristocracy had pledged themselves to it. But there was a dangerous leaven of discontent, and none could say how far the taint might have penetrated.
M. Valouieff, the minister who was the Tsar’s right-hand man in this difficult business, was a remarkable personality. Strikingly handsome, tall and dignified, with all the characteristics of blue blood, he was not dwarfed even by the mighty stature of his Imperial master. When, two years after the liberation of the serfs in Russia, the measure was extended to Poland, I was present, as I have related in my “Memories,” at the reception of the Tsar of the peasants’ deputation who came to St. Petersburg to thank the Tsar. It was impossible not to be struck by the commanding aspect of the Emperor and his minister, both sons of Anak, towering above the rest of the crowd.
The emancipation of the serfs was, of course, Valouieff’s masterpiece in statesmanship, but he had several other measures of first-class importance to his credit. It was he who in 1864 established the Zemstvo—elected bodies for the local conduct of provincial business—and another of his achievements was the regulation of the laws relating to the Press. He, moreover, had something of a literary reputation as the author of two or three novels. But these were rather amateurish, and it is upon his statesmanship that his fame must rest.
Like the Chancellor, Prince Gortchakoff, he was very kind to me, and whenever we met in Society, he always had a friendly word for me. When I got back to London, he was next to Prince Gortchakoff, the Russian statesman in whom I found Lord Palmerston and Lord Clarendon the most interested. They fully appreciated the greatness of his work in the emancipation business, and were glad to have some first-hand impressions of his very remarkable personality.
The emancipation was a colossal task. It is not possible by a mere stroke of the pen to revolutionize the lives of twenty-three millions of men. The serfs were to be freed—that is easily said; but the interests of the landed aristocracy must also be taken into consideration, and it says much for Valouieff’s statesmanship and wisdom that the measure should have been carried into effect practically without any friction.
It was impossible suddenly to deprive of its labour the whole of the agricultural land of that vast empire. There had to be a transition period during which the peasants, though no longer serfs, still remained under certain obligations to their former masters; but within the space of two years the landlords were bound to make over to them their houses with suitable allotments of land against a fair rent, with the further privilege of purchase, with the consent of the proprietor. The obligations of the peasant and his rent were capitalized on a basis of six per cent. Of this capital, twenty per cent. was to be paid at once to the landlord, while the Government gave him the remaining eighty per cent. in Government bonds bearing five per cent. interest, the Government recouping itself for this advance in forty-nine years by a payment of six per cent. from the peasant. The purchases might be effected by single individuals or by partnerships. This would be facilitated by the Russian communal system, by which the members of each commune were able to combine for the redemption money and other expenses.
It was calculated that about one-third of the property of the landed aristocracy, equal to 390,886 square kilometres, was made over to the peasants. This is Brockhaus’ calculation. He goes on to point out that for various reasons, chiefly the ignorance and intemperance of the peasants, there were not a few troubles arising out of the great economic change. Although in some instances land soon rose in value fifty per cent. above the estimate of 1861, in others it suffered great deterioration.
There is one feature in this great economic change which is worthy of note. If we read the lives, memoirs and correspondence of the ministers who have ruled England in modern times, it is impossible not to recognize an underlying element of personal ambition in all their contentions. That, I take it, is inseparable from a constitutional Government where the “Outs” are always struggling to become “Ins.” Here there was no such motive possible. A Tsar of Russia could become no greater than he already was, and even the minister who did his behest had nothing to fear or to gain from the arbitrium popularis aurae. The Emperor had, and could have, nothing in view but the good of his people, and for that those who saw him at work knew that his efforts were untiring. It is strange that it should have been precisely in the reign of so good a monarch, a real benefactor of the world over which he ruled, that the seeds of the poisonous plant of Nihilism should have germinated, spreading like the virus of cancer, which, cut out of one place by the surgeon’s knife, still travels through the system and reappears in some new spot.
Nihilism was not confined, as has been popularly supposed, to the students of the universities and a few clever but discontented literary men and artists. As a matter of fact, it had invaded all classes. The civil service, the army, the police—even the secret police—were infected.
The diplomatic negotiations which took place at St. Petersburg in the winter of 1863-64 were big with the fate of Europe and of the world. It was the result of the grievous blunders made by Lord Russell that Prussia was enabled to take the first step in that career of plunder and aggrandisement which has wrought such terrible tragedies. I have dealt with that story fully in my “Memories.” I was at St. Petersburg at the time, and owing to my confidential relations with Lord Napier, and to the kindness of Prince Gortchakoff and other Russian ministers, I had the opportunity of being well posted, not only in what took place publicly, but also in the feeling which was prevalent in Russia in regard to the Danish war.
In his brilliantly fascinating fourth volume of the “Life of Lord Beaconsfield,” Mr. Buckle23 revives the time-honoured fallacy that Russia was not ready to join hands with us in defence of Denmark. That fallacy can only owe its existence to the careful handling of persons whose aim it was to whitewash Lord Russell. It is true that his blustering and bullying in the Polish Revolution—followed by the eating of the leek with appetite—had made England very unpopular in Russia; but in regard to Denmark there was another motive at work, and a very powerful one, in the prospective marriage of the Princess Dagmar to the Tsarevitch.
In principle, Russia did not want to go to war, but she was ready to sacrifice her wish for peace if only England would join in with her and cry “Hands off!” to Prussia and Austria. England did not want war in July, 1914, but on the 4th of August war was declared. The cases are exactly similar. In both cases a “scrap of paper” was torn up by Prussia, who only a few months earlier had guaranteed the integrity of King Christian’s dominions. In 1914 mercifully Lord Russell had been long “resting and being thanked” over the mischief he had wrought. Sterner and more chivalrous doctrines prevailed, and this time England was ready to draw the sword for a principle of honour.
It is, I know, an absolute mistake to suppose that if we had carried out the policy indicated by Lord Palmerston in Parliament at the end of the Session of 1863 we should have stood alone. Russia would have been with us. Our position, supposing we had gone to war, would have been all to our advantage—as Lord John Manners pointed out, it would have been “the most popular, the easiest and the cheapest war (for it can be managed by our navy alone) of the century.”24 Lord John Manners was quite right. We should have sent our navy to Danish waters, and we need not have sent out a single soldier.
To march upon Berlin would have been a mere holiday task for the Russian army, a sort of picnic, like our march upon Magdala. But I can assert that it was the firm conviction of the best informed diplomatists of Europe that the mere knowledge that England and Russia were determined to uphold the rights of Denmark would of itself have sufficed to avert war. I have written elsewhere how, when Lord Napier had to tell Prince Gortchakoff that England would not join with him, the Prince answered: “Alors, milord, je mets de côté la supposition que l’Angleterre fasse jamais la guerre pour une question d’honneur.” That was the conviction which guided him in all his subsequent dealings with England, the advances in Central Asia, in defiance of all treaties, until the gates of Afghanistan were reached, and in 1870, when France was crippled, the tearing up of the Black Sea Treaty obligations of 1856.
Mr. Buckle is so clear-minded a critic of foreign politics that I should hesitate to differ from him were I not possessed of absolute knowledge not from hearsay. A study of the “Origines diplomatiques de la guerre de 1870” can only confirm what I have said; and that exhaustive publication proves up to the hilt my contention that since the origin of the war of 1870 was due to the betrayal of Denmark in 1863-64, it is to the grave political blunders then made that we must ascribe the outrage of 1914.
Free of England and Russia, Bismarck was able to carry out his full programme: (1) Kiel and a navy. (2) The crippling of Austria. (3) The humiliation of France. (4) Who can doubt what that was? The destruction of England’s sea power, and the world under the heel of Prussia.
Lord Russell’s meddling and muddling in the affairs of Poland had, it is true, estranged Russia and France. But the former Power was, nevertheless, keenly in favour of Denmark; as regards France, there was perhaps another consideration which was not without its influence. It is a matter of common knowledge that Louis Napoleon was very ambitious to build up a navy which should be able to hold its own with ours. In the “Origines diplomatiques” there is published a dispatch from the French chargé d’affaires at St. Petersburg, M. de Massignac, a very clever man, with whom I was intimate, urging upon M. Drouyn de Lhuys the expediency of furthering the views of Prussia. He pointed out that the success of Prussia would give her Kiel, and enable her to build a navy which might, in given circumstances, help the other Continental Powers to destroy England’s preponderant supremacy at sea! I am inclined to think that this view may have had more restraining influence with Louis Napoleon even than the snubbing with which Lord Russell met his proposals for a conference or congress at Brussels. We know, moreover, that the Emperor had a distinct leaning towards Prussia, which he looked upon as making for progress in contradistinction to Austria, which in his eyes was antiquated and retrograde.
It was, then, at St. Petersburg that the fate of Denmark was sealed and the first triumph of Bismarck’s policy secured. The Danish Duchies were stolen by Prussia, and, as my old friend M. de Massignac had foreseen, the foundations were laid of a navy which up to that time had been a dream in Cloudcuckooland. For the shameful abandonment of Denmark we are now, fifty years later, paying the just penalty.
The End
Footnotes
1 See my “Garter Mission to Japan,” pp. 193-203.
2 Max Müller, “Chips from a German Workshop,” IX., 178.
3 Max Müller, ut supra.
4 Even the famous Laws of Manu were only held to be Smriti—tradition.
5 See Max Müller’s “Ancient Sanskrit Literature,” pp. 57 and 80.
6 How like a passage in one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s prayers written at Vailima: “We thank Thee, Lord, for the glory of the late days and the excellent face of Thy Sun.”
7 “Chips from a German Workshop,” Vol. I., p. 13.
8 Max Müller’s “Chips,” Vol. I., pp. 36-37.
9 Picea pungens glauca.
10 The Japanese, following the horology of the Chinese, used to divide the day of 24 hours into 12 periods, each of which had its sign, something like the sign of the Zodiac.
| Midnight | until | 2 | a.m. | was the hour of the | Rat | |
| 2 | a.m. | ″ | 4 | a.m. | ″ ″ | Ox |
| 4 | a.m. | ″ | 6 | a.m. | ″ ″ | Tiger |
| 6 | a.m. | ″ | 8 | a.m. | ″ ″ | Hare |
| 8 | a.m. | ″ | 10 | a.m. | ″ ″ | Dragon |
| 10 | a.m. | ″ | 12 | noon | ″ ″ | Snake |
| 12 | noon | ″ | 2 | p.m. | ″ ″ | Horse |
| 2 | p.m. | ″ | 4 | p.m. | ″ ″ | Ram |
| 4 | p.m. | ″ | 6 | p.m. | ″ ″ | Ape |
| 6 | p.m. | ″ | 8 | p.m. | ″ ″ | Cock |
| 8 | p.m. | ″ | 10 | p.m. | ″ ″ | Hog |
| 10 | p.m. | ″ | midnight | ″ ″ | Fox | |
11 See my “Tales of Old Japan: the Loves of Gompachi and Komurasaki.”
12 Morning Post, May 8th, 1915.
13 Quoted in the Spectator, May 8th, 1915.
14 Lord March, afterwards “Old Q.”
15 The Duke of Queensberry.
16 Mr. Thrale’s profits from the brewery were estimated at £30,000 a year.
17 Mügge, pp. 131, 134.
18 “As when upon a trancèd summer night
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-chainèd by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir.”
Hyperion, I., 72.
19 Tomini later quarrelled with Napoleon and entered the service of Alexander.
20 The craze for absolute uniformity was exemplified in the Kurros (snub-nosed) Grenadier Regiment of the Emperor Paul. Not only was every nose in the regiment tip-tilted, but the meter-like brass shakos of the old pattern seen in Hogarth’s pictures—“The March to Finchley,” for example—each has a bullet-hole exactly in the same place. This was to commemorate an attempt on the Tsar’s life. The bullet missed him, but found its billet in the shako of one of his guards. Whether the snub-noses and the shakos still exist I know not. They were very conspicuous in my time.
21 The Emperor Louis Napoleon.
22 The word, “Nihilist” first appeared in Turgénieff’s story, “Fathers and Sons,” in 1861.
23 “The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield,” Vol. IV., p. 342.
24 Buckle’s “Life of Disraeli,” ut supra, Vol. IV., p. 343.