Authors: Mary McGrigor
In accordance with diplomatic agreement the Bourbon prince, who had been living in exile in England, returned to France as Louis XVIII. Born in 1755, he had succeeded his brother Louis XVI, whose son had died in the Temple Prison at the age of only ten. Louis XVI had in fact disowned his cousin, claiming that he had betrayed him out of personal ambition. So much did he hate him that, almost as he went to the guillotine, he gave the papers to his lawyer, banning him from the throne.
Following the revolution, Louis had wandered round Europe. For a time he had actually lived in Russia, at the invitation of Alexander’s father, until Tsar Paul, in typical manner, had suddenly got tired of him, and he had found his way to England. There he had lived at Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire for fourteen years. Returning now to France, his brother’s will was disregarded as he was proclaimed king.
A man of fifty-nine and a widower, Louis proved to be rude and arrogant. Long-nosed and heavy-featured, he used his considerable weight to push himself forward through doors in front of everyone else and, once at the dining-room table, insisted on being served first before any of his guests. Alexander remarked bitterly that anyone seeing his behaviour would think that he had come to return him to his throne, instead of it being the other way around. Nonetheless, despite his personal dislike of the man, he managed to stay outwardly civil and remain on equable terms.
The Peace of Paris, in which the tsar had played a major part as a negotiator, was signed on 31 May 1814. Once the details were completed, Alexander, who had now been absent from Russia for almost five months, began to plan his return.
However, an invitation from the prince regent to visit England made him change his mind. Accordingly, on 5 June, he reached Boulogne where
HMS
Impregnable
, commanded by the regent’s sailor brother, William, Duke of Clarence, waited to take him across the Channel to a country he had long wished to see.
Tsar Alexander travelled to England together with Frederick William of Prussia, Count Tolstoy and the fierce and intrepid hetman of the Cossacks, General Platoff. With him also went James Wylie, now once more gravely concerned for the tsar’s physical and mental health. Deeply saddened by Josephine’s sudden death, he was plunged into one of his periodic fits of depression, which, while exacerbated by the strain of the recent negotiations, was also due to his being very tired. To make matters worse the sea was rough and the ship battled against a contrary wind.
Alexander, in addition to sea-sickness, might have been running a temperature for an onlooker among the crowd that had gathered to witness his landing was greatly disappointed at the sight of this promised hero, who, she described as plump and very pink in the face.
Welcomed to Dover by the thunder of cannons, the tsar came thankfully ashore. Among notable people gathered to greet him was a Mr Fector who, on seeing the tsar’s obvious indisposition, asked him to stay the night. Alexander accepted with gratitude and, ministered to by Wylie, was well enough the next morning to continue the journey to London, this time, thankfully, by coach.
Reaching Canterbury, the Tsar of Russia and the King of Prussia were welcomed by the prince regent.
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The initial exchange of courtesies appears to have been brief. The prince, a corpulent figure compared to both his visitors, had already taken umbrage over Alexander’s decision to join his sister Catherine in the Pulteney Hotel in London rather than accept his offer of a suite of rooms in St James’s Palace. Nonetheless, protocol insisted that royal visitors from abroad must be entertained. Tersely the prince informed them of forthcoming banquets to be held in their honour before, as they parted company, more compliments were paid. Then, climbing back into their coaches, they were off again, rattling over the highway on their way to London.
They drove through the Kent countryside, so aptly named the garden of England, in the full glory of early June. Alexander, although entranced by the vision of hop fields and carefully tended crops within hedgerows in a country so unlike the vast spaces of his own, was nonetheless still exhausted and unwell.
At Blackheath he was met by his Russian ambassador, Count Lieven, who informed him that huge crowds were waiting to see him near London Bridge. Hearing this the tsar lost his nerve. Since his father’s death the fear of assassination had always nagged at his mind, and suddenly terrified of meeting a horde of people at close quarters, he ordered the coachman to take another road.
After some consultation, a different route into London was devised through Camberwell and Clapham. Eventually, having crossed the Thames over the bridge at Battersea, the horses clattered into Knightsbridge and thence into Piccadilly where, in the Pulteney Hotel, his sister Catherine waited for him to arrive. Watching from a window she saw him, in his dark green uniform, climb out of the coach and, raising his eyes to her, gallantly blow her a kiss.
The Pulteney Hotel was then one of the smartest establishments of its kind in London. Thick carpets muffled the footsteps both of visitors and the ever attendant staff. Chairs and sofas were upholstered in plush and velvet, the wallpaper heavily embossed, and the chandeliers and brass fittings had been polished until they shone. Mr Escudier, the owner, resplendent in high winged collar and black frock coat, bowed from the waist, nearly overcome with honour as the Tsar of Russia entered his spacious hall. Behind him his wife trembled with excitement in her best bombazine gown, as she carried out the curtsey she had been practising for days. In turn, behind her, the senior members of the staff gave an equally obsequious greeting to the highly honoured guest.
Alexander, having acknowledged them, went leaping up the stairs into the arms of his favourite sister. Katya, as he called her, was now the widowed Duchess of Oldenburg, her husband Prince George having died of a fever at Tver the previous December. Catherine had left her two young sons to come to England, ostensibly to recover from depression caused by her husband’s death, but more truthfully to enjoy herself away from the strictures of court mourning. Handsome rather than beautiful, small of stature and dark haired, she was still only twenty-four. Besides, as she herself said, she ‘always looked her best in black’.
The choice to stay at the Pulteney appears to have been made by Catherine who, rather than staying in a palace, preferred the anonymity of a hotel. The reason for this, as she explained to her brother, was that she could not stand the advances of the Prince regent and his brother the Duke of Sussex, both known to be on the lookout for a bride. The prince regent was now divorced from Caroline, his excessively tiresome German wife, and the marriage of the Duke of Sussex to Lady Augusta Murray had been annulled because, contrary to the Royal Marriages Act, it had not been approved by the king.
According to Catherine, both princes looked her up and down as if she had been up for sale. The prince regent, for his part, declared that the Russian princess, who spoke English fluently, had had the temerity to tell him how to bring up his own daughter, with whom at that time he was on bad terms. Thus primed by their mutual animosity, the tone was set for disagreement even before Alexander arrived.
Brother and sister had much to talk about and soon they were joined by Count Lieven and his wife Dorothea, whose diary describes what then took place. Soon crowds gathered in Piccadilly, and people began shouting for the tsar. Alexander waved from the balcony but kept returning to the room to see if the prince regent, expected to make a courtesy call, had arrived. Shortly, however, a note came to say that the prince, who was then unpopular on account of his treatment of his wife, was afraid of being molested in the streets. Alexander then found himself left with no option but to make use of Lieven’s carriage, in which he drove through the clamorous populace to meet the prince at his own residence of Carlton House.
The meeting was frigid. Prince George, never having been allowed to take part in military action himself, was intensely jealous of the tsar, now fêted throughout London as a hero.
But whatever the prince regent’s attitude, the people of London made up for it, lining the streets and cheering wherever he and Catherine went. At the theatre people who did not have seats and boxes hired spaces in the foyer to see at first hand the handsome tsar and his dark-haired, striking sister, who wore a feather in her hat to give her height.
Alexander may have offended the prince regent but the people of London loved him as their own. Everywhere he went he was mobbed. Women, in particular, went into raptures, throwing posies at his feet. Now, even more than in Paris, he displayed the common touch. He shook hands and talked to those about him in the friendliest of ways. At Portsmouth, where he reviewed the fleet, he charmed not only the officers but also the sailors with whom, on a visit to one of the ships, he shared a meal. On another he drank some grog, issued to the crew each day at noon. ‘You call it grog,’ he said in his guttural English accent, ‘I think it is very good.’ And with that he poured out some for his sister who, as usual, was by his side.
The Russian tsar soon attracted the type of adulation these days given to stars of the media. So desperate were people to see him that in the mornings people got up early to watch him walking in the park with Catherine, or riding through what were then the fields of Marylebone to the villages of Hampstead and Highgate on the rising ground beyond. Crowds of excited citizens gathered round West-minster Abbey and the British Museum to watch them come and go. Hands were stretched out in the desperate hope that their idol would stop to shake them as he passed.
On more formal occasions the citizens of London saw Alexander, resplendent in gold and scarlet dress uniform, driving with his black-garbed sister to the banquets given by the City of London and the Prince Regent. A special journey was made to Oxford, where the university honoured both Alexander and Frederick William as the ‘liberators of Europe’. Again there was a civil banquet before, on the next morning, the whole party – which included the prince regent, the Austrian Prince Metternich and the Prussian Marshal Blücher, together with a host of generals and diplomats – processed from Christ Church to the Sheldonian Theatre, where Alexander was made a Doctor of Civil Law.
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This was followed by a visit to the Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim Palace, where the magnificence of Vanburgh’s greatest creation was compared with the palaces designed by Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli in St Petersburg, so far away.
Returning to London, ‘a dinner as sumptuous as expense or skill could make’ was given for the visiting royalties by the City of London at the Guildhall. Wylie is known to have been present and must have witnessed the frigidity of the prince regent, who, annoyed by the tsar being late, partly because he had stopped to talk to Whig parliamentarians on the way, treated him and his sister to ‘a haughty silence’ throughout.
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Alexander’s popularity with the people of London was as salt in a wound to the prince regent, who himself had been booed in the theatre with shouts of ‘where’s your wife?’ at the height of the scandal over his divorce. To make matters worse Alexander soon became infatuated with the Countess of Jersey, a former mistress of the prince, which irritated him irrationally despite the fact that he had long since cast her off.
For Alexander himself it was a case of a new love replacing the old. The sorrow over Josephine’s death at least partly vanished as, once again in pursuit of a pretty woman, he found a new zest for life. To James Wylie, long familiar with Alexander’s mood swings, it came as a great relief to see him out of his depression and back in his normally ebullient frame of mind. So enamoured was he of the countess that he insisted on travelling back from Blenheim with great speed to attend a ball she was giving, at which he made up for his late arrival by dancing Scottish reels, which no doubt Wylie had taught him, until six o’clock in the morning.
Despite their private incompatibility, protocol demanded that the prince regent and Alexander must appear outwardly as friends. Together with Frederick William of Prussia, they rode in Hyde Park. On one occasion, as Princess Charlotte, the prince’s daughter, appeared in her carriage, Alexander rode up to doff his hat and pay his respects to the pretty bonneted young lady, which were most joyfully received.
On another occasion, at Ascot Races, the tsar asked the prince as a special favour to knight his doctor, James Wylie, in honour of his achievements during the recent campaign. The prince agreed with good humour, borrowing General Platoff’s sword to tap him on the shoulder as he knelt before him on the grass.
Later, during the same visit, and at Alexander’s special request, Wylie was created a baronet of Great Britain by the prince. Alexander himself then sat down and drew out the design for the coat of arms which today can be seen engraved on a plaque on the rock on which his statue is mounted in St Petersburg. Consisting of a shield divided horizontally into two parts, the upper bears the imperial coat of arms of Russia above a silver sword. The lower portion contains a blood-stained glove, two five-pointed stars and a running fox. The shield is surmounted by an open helmet and a Cossack of the Don, mounted and charging at full speed. It is supported by two soldiers of the Zimeroff Guards, fully armed in ceremonial dress, and the Latin motto below reads:
Labore et Scientia
(‘Labour and Science’).
It would seem to have been at this time that the tsar presented his doctor with the large gold ring-seal. The seal was a carved red cornelian representing two Napoleonic soldiers. A Latin inscription on the gold circumference read ‘To Jacobus Wylie from the Tsar of Russia
per cum felici
’. Sadly this ring was lost by a descendant, but a pair of pistols, believed to have been taken from Napoleon’s carriage, were later given by Wylie to the Wellcome Museum.