Authors: Mary McGrigor
The architect, pressed by Tsar Nicholas to complete the job of modernizing the Winter Palace in a short space of time, in some places had substituted wood for stone. Somehow a fire started and the chimneys of unused fireplaces, covered by newly made wooden partitions, acted as flues for the flames which spread undetected from room to room until the whole building was ablaze. Heroically the palace guards and the servants managed to save many priceless treasures, which were piled up in the snow outside in Palace Square.
Most of the treasures within the Winter Palace were saved but then came new terror as it was realized that the Hermitage, the world-famous museum attached to the palace, was also at risk from the devouring flames. This building, founded by Catherine the Great in 1764, housed Voltaire’s library of 6,780 volumes in all, an immense number of histories, and even a collection said to have been made by the empress for her valets to prevent idleness.
More famously, the museum held the unique collection of 225 European paintings by western European artists, including Raphael, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, Murillo, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck and Nicolas Poussin among many others. All had been obtained by the empress from the Berlin merchant Gotzkowsky as the foundation of collection, since enhanced by her grandsons, tsars Alexander and Nicholas, who followed her reign.
Now it was the younger of those who, as the Winter Palace burned, avoided what might have been a still greater calamity with great presence of mind. Knowing the value of the irreplaceable works of art in the Hermitage he ordered that the three passages leading from the palace itself to the building be destroyed to create a fire break. By his prompt action he saved what was then, and has continued to be, one of the greatest art collections in the world.
Nonetheless his palace was all but destroyed by the fire. The poet Vasily Zhukovsky called it ‘a vast bonfire with flames reaching the sky’, which continued to burn for several days.
Even as the palace was smouldering, the tsar ordered it to be rebuilt within a year, with almost unbelievable results. With the temperature still well below freezing, work began and no fewer than 6,000 men were employed. Some died as they laboured, either from accidents, illness, or sheer physical fatigue. Nonetheless others immediately replaced them and the rebuilding was completed within the allotted time.
The structure was strengthened with the latest inventions of the developing industrial age: the roof supported by a metal framework and the ceilings in the great reception rooms with iron girders. Greatest of innovations was the Jasper Room, which, having been totally burned out, was replaced by the even more magnificent Malachite Drawing Room as the principal reception room of the tsarina’s suite.
One practice that was discontinued after the ruinous fire was the keeping of cows in the attics under the roof. The animals, needed for fresh milk, nonetheless produced odorous manure and the tsar, who had a keen sense of smell (he forbade smoking in the palace and even in the streets) may have detected it.
The Winter Palace, of which the principal façade measures 500 feet in length, is believed to contain 1,057 rooms, 1,945 windows and 1,786 doors, together with innumerable staircases and passages connecting the many suites of rooms. In Wylie’s day, while the ground floor was mostly offices, the royal family lived on the first floor above. The Jordan Staircase, so named because the emperor descended from it at Epiphany, when the waters of the Neva were blessed by priests, led from the state, or ambassador’s entrance, up to the great reception rooms, branching off from either side. Redecorated largely in the rococo style, these were the scene of the lavish receptions, which as the Chief Army Medical Inspector, Wylie was commanded to attend.
Possibly, as he grew older, he found these public duties a physical strain. With no chairs provided, everyone was made to stand. The scale of entertainment was enormous. The dining room alone could seat 1,000 while the state rooms, on occasion, were crammed with at least 1,000 more guests. The restored building was well heated with countless fires and stoves. The rooms and corridors were filled with the scent of hothouse plants as outside the temperature fell far below freezing and the river became near solid with ice.
As a trusted friend of the family to which he had been so long attached, Wylie was present at Romanov family weddings, when the bridal procession walked from the Malachite Drawing Room, through the state rooms, to the Palace Grand Church.
Yet for all the palace’s magnificence, the tsar himself lived a life of austerity within its walls. Obsessed as he was with his army, Nicholas slept on a camp bed on a mattress filled only with straw.
Wylie himself, according to his great niece, ‘usually sat in a small room containing only a writing table and two chairs and half a dozen favourite dogs lying on the floor. When at home he, soldier like, made his midday meal on black bread and salt but frequently, according to the custom of the country, he went to some acquaintance, either in the palace or the city, where he dined as a member of the family.’
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Renowned for being careful with money, he was not opposed to gaining some financial return for promoting the tsar’s favourite hair oil, Rowland’s Macassar Oil. The famous hair tonic, discovered by Tsar Nicholas, one imagines on his visit to London in 1844, had to be sent to Russia by the makers. So dark and pungent was the oil that it gave its name to the antimacassars which began to be spread over the backs of seats in railway carriages throughout Europe and likewise used by house-proud Victorians in Britain to protect their sofas and chairs. The oil was sold in bottles, each one of which, even 100 years later, was wrapped in a leaflet containing a copy of a letter from Sir James Wylie, Physician at the Court of St Petersburg, which ran: ‘I have it under command from His Imperial Majesty that you will without delay send ten guineas’ worth!’
It was not only hair oil that came from Britain: Wylie’s aged but still indomitable mother, Janet, announced she was coming to visit him. He did his best to stop her, but determined as ever, she somehow made the long journey, presumably by sea, to arrive triumphantly in St Petersburg.
Wylie’s youngest brother Walter, captain of a ship called the
Baronet
(doubtless in Sir James’s honour) visited several times. Landing in St Petersburg, he was summoned to an audience with the tsar. Asked to dine at the palace, he was much impressed by the gold plate but even more so by the courtesy of Tsar Nicholas, who, despite the fact that French was the language usually spoken, insisted on this occasion that those who were present spoke English throughout the evening to avoid embarrassing his guest. Walter also left Russia with presents of a beautiful gold and platinum cup and saucer and two very large and valuable diamond rings. At a later date his son, then a sailor boy, was given a large silver pen and pen holder by his uncle who, if parsimonious in some ways, was certainly indulgent to his relations.
As he grew older, Wylie became renowned for his eccentricities. Nonetheless, such was the affection of the royal family and eventual esteem of the colleagues whose jealousy had so greatly plagued his early years that he came to be regarded in St Petersburg with the reverence due to his age.
It was in 1838, following its restoration, that Wylie left the Winter Palace to live in the house he had bought in the street known as the Galerney, near the English Quay. It was here that the American Doctor Channing was to find him some sixteen years later. Now aged over seventy, Wylie chose to retire from his positions as Chief of the Military Medical Department and President of the Royal Medico-Chirurgical Medical Academy, which he had held for thirty years since 1808. Nonetheless, although eased from some of his responsibilities, as a privy councillor, a rank that no physician in the Russian service had ever reached before, he remained significant in the government of the autocratic tsar. Already having been awarded Russian noble rank, in 1828, he held the Russian orders of St Vladimir, 1st Class, the diamonds of the St Alexander Nevsky order and St Ann order.
Rulers of other countries who had adopted his medical practices also honoured him with decorations. He held the French Legion of Honour, the Red Eagle of Prussia, the Crown of Württemberg and the Leopold of Austria.
In addition to his estate at Vileiskoye, near Minsk, Wylie had received an additional 7,120 roubles a year for his long service. His many presents included a diamond ring and snuff box from Tsar Nicholas as well as a magnificent coach. In Russia he was regarded as one of the most prominent men of his day.
Most bizarrely, from Appleby’s
Caledonian Phalanx
, comes the claim that Wylie was even honoured by Napoleon. This may, however, refer to the pair of pistols he is known to have possessed, taken some time either during or after the retreat from Moscow.
Wylie was living in his own house in Galerney when the American Doctor William Channing arrived in St Petersburg in the spring of 1854, just before the war with France and Britain began. He left a description of what he found within the house.
The rooms about which I wandered were singularly deficient in furniture but on the walls were some pictures . . . At length the servant reappeared and asked me to follow him to Sir James. Upon entering the room my whole attention was attracted by the figure of a very tall old man between eighty and ninety stretched at full length upon a sofa.’
‘Let me know how I can serve you,’ said Sir James, without attempting to rise.
Channing then told him that he wished to visit the civil and military hospitals, whereupon Sir James replied that a doctor with the rank of colonel would call on him in the morning and take him to all the hospitals he wished to see.
It appears quite plain from the American’s journal that he and the old Scotsman struck up an immediate rapport. Channing continues to recount how hardly a day passed during his visit to St Petersburg when he did not visit Sir James. Although obviously frail, his mind was clear and he talked much of his experiences during the war with Napoleon when he had seen so many battlefields, nearly always in company with Tsar Alexander, the man of whom in retrospect he spoke with the reverence due almost to a god. Particularly he told of Leipzig, when Alexander himself had so narrowly escaped fatal injury from the cannon ball which, hurtling through the body of Count Moreau’s horse, had destroyed both of its rider’s legs. He described how, with no alternative, he had amputated both of the limbs: the death of the count, although inevitable, still seemed to lie heavy on the physician’s mind.
On a more cheerful note he told his servant to bring the patent of the baronetcy, which Channing understood had been conferred upon him on the battlefield, although actually it had been on Ascot Heath. Perhaps, by this time, bewildered by so many reminiscences, one or both of them was becoming slightly confused. He also showed the American all the decorations and orders he had received from the many monarchs he had served.
On another day something was said which took him back to his boyhood and his servant was sent to bring him ‘a certain package which was very carefully opened and its contents showed to me. ‘‘Here,’’ said Sir James, ‘‘are my school books. My first writing books, my ciphering books, and these are my mathematical manuscripts. You see I have kept them all.’’ ’ His visitor was amazed by the condition of these notebooks, in which the writing was so neat and precise and the paper still almost as good as new, although slightly yellowed with age.
Sadly, Wylie then described how his memoirs, compiled it would seem in his retirement, had been destroyed on the orders of the tsar. ‘The emperor had directed it,’ was all he said.
Why, one wonders, did he obey? Channing was probably the first to be horrified to hear that such an irreplaceable record of Russian history had been lost to the world. Rational explanations remain hard to find, but it can only be surmised that it was the fear of exposure of his grandfather’s undoubted madness, or else a paranoid terror of publicity, which made Tsar Nicholas, whom Wylie had known from his childhood, condemn to the flames an autobiography of such enormous interest.
On the day before he left St Petersburg, Channing paid his last visit to Galerney Street where, to his great distress, he found Sir James Wylie very ill.
He had passed a wretched night and was breathing with so much agony, and was so exhausted, that he could hardly raise his hand to me or say farewell. He was stretched out on the sofa, as he was when I first saw him, and it seemed impossible that he would ever rise from it again. I thanked him for all the kindness he had showed me and took my leave. It was not without sadness, this leave-taking at the borders of the grave.
Wylie died on 2 March 1854. Although a public figure, his private life remains mysterious, hidden by the web of secrecy that he himself did much to preserve.
From the available evidence it would seem that his abiding passion was complete absorption in his work. It is said that he found recreation in gymnastics and bodily exercises, that his favourite sports were swimming, horse-riding, fencing, ice-skating, billiards and hunting. His intellectual interests, however, were limited due to the fact that his immense workload all but monopolized his time.
In mid-life he was described as being stout, with a confident appearance and robust health. His height of 1.88m and his thin red hair marked him as a northerner.
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The same source continues that his character was distinguished by a number of valuable qualities: straight-forwardness and candour, enormous diligence and persistence, confidence and skill in communicating with other people. In Russian literature he is known as an excellent organizer and administrator, with a quick and supple mind.
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Despite this, he had detractors. He is said to have been both arrogant and conceited, a sycophantic courtier ‘who hung upon the lips of the most powerful and surrounded himself with flatterers . . . patronising friendliness alternated with fits of anger where he could be wrong and unjust and reveal all his contempt for those under him’.
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