Part 3

Unfortunately, at this period, an officer of rank arrived with details of one of those conspiracies which had been notoriously on foot for some time. His tidings ought to have been concealed: but sovereigns must hear every thing, and the tidings were communicated to the emperor. He was indignant and agitated. The empress exhibited the most unwearied kindness; but all efforts were now hopeless. On the 1st of December he sank and died.

The blow was felt by the whole empire; during the long journey of four months, from Taganrog to St Petersburg, where the body was interred in the church of St Peter and St Paul, the people crowded from every part of the adjoining country to follow the funeral; and troops, chiefs, nobles, and the multitude, gave this melancholy ceremonial all the usual pomp of imperial funeral rites, and more than the usual sincerity of national sorrow.

Europe had been so often startled by the assassination of Russian sovereigns, that the death of Alexander was attributed to conspiracy. Ivan, Peter III., and Paul I., had notoriously died by violence. It is perfectly true, that the life of Alexander was threatened, and that his death by the typhus alone saved him from at least attempted assassination. It was subsequently ascertained that his murder had been resolved on; and one of the conspirators, a furious and savage man, rushed into their meeting, exclaiming at the delay which had suffered Alexander to die a natural death, and thus deprived him of the _enjoyment_ of shedding the imperial blood.

The origin of those conspiracies is still among the problems of history. Nothing could be less obnoxious than the personal conduct and character of Alexander. His reign exhibited none of the banishments or the bloodshed of former reigns. He was of a gentle disposition; his habits were manly; and he had shared the glory of the Russian victories. The assassinations of the former sovereigns had assignable motives, though the act must be always incapable of justification. They had perished by intrigues of the palace; but the death of Alexander was the object of a crowd of conspirators widely scattered, scarcely communicating with each other, and united only by the frenzy of revolution.

In the imperfection of the documents hitherto published, we should be strongly inclined to refer the principle of this revolutionary movement to Poland. That unhappy country had been the national sin of Russia; and though Moscow had already paid a severe price for its atonement, from Poland came that restless revenge, which seemed resolved, if it could not shake Russia, at least to imbitter the Russian supremacy.

The death of Alexander had disappointed the chief conspirators. But the conspiracy continued, and the choice of his successor revived all its determination.

The house of Romanoff had received the diadem by a species of election. Michael Romanoff, a descendant of the house of Ruric only by the female line, had been chosen by all the heads of the nation. The law of primogeniture was declared. But Peter the Great, disgusted by the vices or the imbecility of his son Alexis, had changed the law of succession, and enacted, that the sovereign should have the choice of his successor, not even limiting that choice to the royal line. Nothing is so fatal to the peace of a country as an unsettled succession; and this rash and prejudiced change produced all the confusions of Russian history from 1722 to 1797, when the Emperor Paul restored the right of primogeniture in the male line, in failure of which alone was the crown to devolve on the female line. In which case, the throne was to devolve on the princess next in relation to the deceased emperor; and, in case of her dying childless, the other princesses were to follow in the order of relationship. Alexander, in 1807, confirmed the act of Paul, and strengthened it by an additional act in 1820; stating, that the issue of marriages, authorised by the reigning emperor, and those who should themselves contract marriages, authorised by the reigning emperor, should alone possess the right of succession.

Alexander had left three brothers—the Grand-duke Constantine, born in 1779; the Grand-duke Nicholas, born in 1796; and the Grand-duke Michael, born in 1798: two of his surviving sisters had been married, one to the Grand-duke of Saxe Weimar, and the other to the King of Holland. Thus, according to the law of Russia, Constantine was the next heir to the throne.

The singular commotion which gave so melancholy a prestige of the reign of Nicholas, receives a very full explanation from this author. The Grand-duke Constantine had the countenance of a Calmuck and the manners of a Calmuck. But those were the countenance and manners of his father Paul. The other sons resembled their mother, the Princess of Wirtemberg, a woman of striking appearance and of commanding mind. Constantine was violent, passionate, and insulting; and in his viceroyalty of Poland rendered himself unpopular in the extreme. The result was, that Alexander dreaded to leave him as successor to the throne. Constantine, when scarcely beyond boyhood, had been married to one of the princesses of Saxe Cobourg, not yet fifteen. They soon quarrelled, and at the end of four years finally separated. In two years after, proposals were made to her to return. But she recollected too deeply the vexations of the past, and refused to leave Germany. Constantine now became enamoured of the daughter of a Polish count, and proposed to marry her. The Greek Church is stern on the subject of divorce, but its sternness can give way on due occasion. The consent of the emperor extinguished all its scruples, and Constantine divorced his princess, and married the Polish girl; yet, by that left-handed marriage, which precludes her from inheriting titles or estates. But the emperor shortly after conferred on her the title of Princess of Lowictz, from an estate which he gave her, and both which were capable of descending to her family.

It was subsequently ascertained that, at this period, Alexander had proposed to Constantine the resignation of his right to the throne; either as the price of his consent to the divorce, or from the common conviction of both, that the succession would only bring evil on Constantine and the empire. That Alexander was perfectly disinterested, is only consonant to his manly nature, and that Constantine had come to a wise decision, is equally probable. He knew his own failings, the haste of his temper, his unpopularity, and the offence which he was in the habit of giving to all classes. He probably, also, had a sufficient dread of the fate of his father, whom, as he resembled in every thing else, he might also resemble in his death. His present position fulfilled all the wishes of a man who loved power without responsibility, and enjoyed occupation without relinquishing his ease. The transaction was complete, and Alexander was tranquillised for the fate of Russia.

When the intelligence of the emperor’s death reached St Petersburg, Nicholas attended the meeting of the Senate, to take the oath of allegiance to Constantine. But they determined that their first act should be the reading of a packet, which had been placed in their hands by Alexander, with orders to be opened immediately on his decease. The president broke the seal, and found documents dated in 1822 and 1823, from Constantine, resigning the right of succession, and from Alexander accepting the resignation. Constantine’s letter stated thus: “Conscious that I do not possess the genius, the talents, or the strength, necessary to fit me for the dignity of sovereign, to which my birth would give me a right, I entreat your imperial majesty to transfer that right to him to whom it belongs, after me; and thus assure for ever the stability of the empire.

“As to myself, I shall add, by this renunciation, a new guarantee and a new force to the engagement which I spontaneously and solemnly contracted on the occasion of my divorce from my first wife. All the circumstances in which I find myself strengthen my determination to adhere to this resolution, which will prove to the empire and to the whole world the sincerity of my sentiments.”

Another of those documents appointed Nicholas as the heir to the throne. The Senate now declared that Nicholas was emperor. But he refused the title, until he had the acknowledgment from Constantine himself, that he had resigned. The suspense continued three weeks. At length the formal renunciation of Constantine was received, Nicholas was emperor, and the day was appointed to receive the oath of allegiance of the great functionaries of the army and of the people. The emperor dated his accession from the day of the death of Alexander, December the 1st, 1825.

The interregnum was honourable to both the brothers; but it had nearly proved fatal to Russia: it unsettled the national feelings, it perplexed the army, and it gave sudden hopes to the conspirators against the throne.

The heads of the conspiracy in St Petersburg were, Sergius, Prince Troubetskoi; Eugene, Prince Obalenskoi, and Conrad Ryleieff. The first was highly connected and highly employed, colonel of the Etat Major, and military governor of Kief. The second was a lieutenant in the imperial guard, poor, but a man of talent and ambition. In Russia all the sons of a prince are princes, which often leaves their rental bare. The third was simply a noble, educated in the corps of cadets, but who had left the army, and had taken the secretaryship of the American company. He was a man of letters, had written some popular poems, and was an enthusiastic republican. Connected with those were some general officers and colonels, whose revolutionary spirit might chiefly be traced to their expulsion from employment, military disgrace, or disappointed ambition. The Russian campaigns in France, and the residence of the army of occupation, under the command of the great English general, had naturally given the Russian troops an insight into principles of national government, which they could not have acquired within the Russian frontier. The pretext of the conspirators was a constitutional government, which the talkers of St Petersburg seemed to regard as the inevitable pouring of sudden prosperity of all kinds into the empire. The old illusion of all the advocates of change is, that every thing depends on government, and that government can do every thing. There cannot be a greater folly, or a more glaring fiction. Government can do nothing more than prevent the existence of obstacles to public wealth. It cannot give wealth, it cannot create commerce, it cannot fertilise the soil, it cannot put in action any of those great instruments by which a nation rises superior to its contemporaries. Those means must be in the people themselves, they cannot be the work of cabinets; governments can do no more than give them their free course, protect them from false legislation, and leave the rest to Providence.

The Russian conspirators called themselves patriots, and professed to desire a bloodless revolution. But to overthrow a government at the head of five hundred thousand men, must be a sanguinary effort; and there could be no doubt that the establishment of a revolutionary government in Russia would have been the signal for a universal war.

On the 24th and 25th of December, the conspirators met in St Petersburg, and as Nicholas was to be proclaimed on the next day, they determined to lead the battalions to which they respectively belonged, into the great square, seize on the emperor, and establish a provisional government. They were then to raise a national guard, establish two legislative chambers, and proclaim liberty to Russia. The question next arose, what was to be done with the members of the imperial family after victory. It was answered significantly, that “circumstances must decide.” At this anxious moment one of the members told them that information had been given to the emperor. “Comrades,” said he, “you will find that we are betrayed, the court are in possession of much information; but they do not know our entire plans, and our strength is quite sufficient.” A voice exclaimed, “the scabbards are broken, we can no longer hide our sabres.”

Reports of various kinds now came crowding on them. An officer arrived to say that, in one of the armies, one hundred thousand men were ready to join them. A member of the Senate came to tell them that the council of the empire was to meet at seven o’clock the next morning, to take the oath to the emperor. The time for action was now fixed. The officers of the guard were directed to join their regiments, and persuade them to refuse the oath. Then all kinds of desperate measures were proposed. It was suggested that they should force open the spirit shops and taverns, in order to make the soldiery and populace drunk, then begin a general pillage, carry off banners from the churches, and rush upon the winter palace. This, the most mischievous of all the measures, was also the most feasible, for the number of unemployed peasants and idlers of all kinds was computed at seventy thousand and upwards, and from their poverty and profligacy together, there could be little doubt that, between drunkenness and the prospect of pillage, they would be ready for any atrocity. “When the Russians break their chains,” says Schiller, “it will not be before the freeman, but before the slave, that the community must tremble.”

It must be acknowledged that some were not equally ferocious. But when a military revolt has once begun, who shall limit it to works of wisdom, moderation, or security? If the revolt had succeeded, St Petersburg must have been a scene of massacre.

We shrink from all details on this painful subject. The conspirators remained in deliberation all night. As the morning dawned, they went to the barracks of their regiments, and told the soldiers that Constantine was really their emperor, that he was marching to the capital at the head of the army from Poland, and that to take the oath to Nicholas would consequently be treason. In several instances they succeeded, and collected a considerable body of troops in the Great Izaak Square. But there they seem to have lost their senses. An insurrection which stands still, is an insurrection ruined. They were rapidly surrounded by the garrison. Terms were offered, which they neither accepted nor refused. The gallant Milarodowitch, the hero of the Russian pursuit of the French, advancing to parley with them, was brutally shot. When all hope of submission was at an end, when the day was declining, and alarm was excited for the condition of the capital during the night, artillery was brought to bear upon them; and, after some firing on both sides, the mutineers dispersed. The police were then let loose, and numerous arrests were made.

In five months after, a high court was constituted for the trial of the leaders. A hundred and twenty-one were named in the act of accusation, many of them belonging to the first families, and in the highest ranks of civil and military employment. But the sentence was the reverse of sanguinary. Only five were put to death in St Petersburg, the remainder were chiefly sent to Siberia. But Siberia is now by no means the place of horrors which it once was. It is now tolerably peopled, it has been partially civilised; the soil is fertile; towns have sprung up; and, though the winter is severe, the climate is healthy. Many of the families of the exiles were suffered to accompany them; and probably, on the whole, the exchange was not a calamitous one, from the anxieties of Russian life, the pressure of narrow circumstances in Europe, and the common disappointments to which all competitors for distinction, or even for a livelihood, are exposed in the crowded and struggling population of the west, to the undisturbed existence and sufficient provision, which were to be found in the east of this almost boundless empire.

Among the anecdotical parts of these volumes, is a slight account of the appearance of the Duke of Wellington as ambassador to Russia, in the beginning of the new reign. Count Nesselrode, on the accession of the Czar, had sent a circular to the European courts, stating his wishes for amicable relations with them all. But England dreaded to see a collision with Turkey, and Canning selected the Duke as the most important authority on the part of England. The Duke took with him Lord Fitzroy Somerset as his secretary. On his arrival at Berlin, he was treated with great distinction by Frederic William. Gneisenau, at the head of the Prussian general officers, paid him a visit in his hotel; and he was fêted in all directions. General officers were sent from St Petersburg to meet him on the Russian frontier. The emperor appointed a mansion for him, beside the palace of the Hermitage, paid him all the honours of a Russian field-marshal, (he was then the _only_ one in the service,) placed him on a footing with the princes of the imperial family, and was frequently in his society. The people were boundless in their marks of respect.

But the Duke is evidently not a favourite with the Frenchman—and we do not much wonder at this feeling in a Frenchman, poor as it is. Without giving any opinion of his own, he inserts a little sneer from the work of Lacretelle on the “Consulate and the Empire.” On this authority, Wellington is “a general of excellent understanding, _phlegmatic_ and _tenacious_, proceeding not by _enthusiasm_, but by _order_, _discipline_, and _slow_ combinations, trusting but little _to chance_, and employing about him all the popular and vindictive passions, from which he himself is _exempt_.” By all which, M. Lacretelle means, that the Duke is a dull dog, without a particle of genius; simply a plodding, positive man, who, by mere toil and time, gained his objects, which any Dutchman could have gained as well, and which any Frenchman would have scorned to gain. With this French folly we have not sufficient time, nor have we sufficient respect for the national _failing_, to argue.

But the true view of Wellington’s character as a soldier would be, _brilliancy_ of conception. What more brilliant conception than his first great battle, Assaye, which finished the Indian war? What more brilliant conception than his capture of Badajoz and Ciudad in the face of the two armies of Masséna and Soult advancing on him from the south and north, and each equal to his own force; while he thus snatched away the prize in the actual presence of each, and left the two French generals the mortification of having marched three hundred miles a-piece, only to be lookers-on? What more brilliant conception than his march of four hundred miles, without a stop, from Portugal to Vittoria; where he crushed the French army, captured one hundred and fifty pieces of cannon, and sent the French king and all his courtiers flying over the Pyrenees? What, again, more brilliant conception, than his storming the Pyrenees, and being the first of the European generals to enter France? and, finally, his massacre of the French army, with Soult, Ney, and Napoleon at their head, on the crowning day of Waterloo?

But all this was mere “pugnacity and _tenacity_,” and sulkiness and stupidity, because it was not done with a theatrical programme, and with the air of an opera-dancer. Yet M. Lacretelle’s sketch, invidious as he intends it to be, gives, involuntarily, the very highest rank of generalship to its object. For, what higher qualities can a general have, than trusting nothing to chance, being superior to enthusiasm—which, in the French vocabulary, means extravagance and giddiness—and acting by deep and effective combinations, which, as every man knows, are the most profound problems and the most brilliant triumphs of military genius? Let it be remembered, too, that in the seven years’ war of the Peninsula, Wellington never had twenty-five thousand English bayonets in the field; that the Spanish armies were almost wholly disorganised, and that the Portuguese were raw troops; while the French had nearly two hundred thousand men constantly recruited and supplied from France:—Yet, that Wellington never was beaten, that he met either six or seven of the French field-marshals and beat them all; and that at Waterloo, with a motley army of recruits, of whom but thirty thousand were English—and those new troops—and ten thousand German, he beat Napoleon at the head of seventy-two thousand Frenchmen, all veterans; trampled his army in the field, hunted him to Paris, took every fortress on the road, captured Paris, destroyed his dynasty, dissolved the remnants of the French army on the Loire; and sent Napoleon himself to expiate his guilt and finish his career, under an English guard, in St Helena.

We need not envy the Frenchman his taste for “enthusiasm,” his scorn of “science,” his disdain of “profound combinations,” and his passion for winning battles by the magic of a village conjuror.

M. Schnitzler disapproves even of the physiognomy of the Duke. “His nose was too aquiline, and stood out too prominently on his sunburnt countenance, and his features, all strongly marked, were not devoid of an air of pretension.” He objects to his appearing “without a splendid military costume, to _improve his appearance_!” And yet, all this foolery is the wisdom of foreigners. No man, however renowned, must forget “the _imposing_.” Hannibal, or Alexander the Great, would have been nothing in their eyes, except in the uniform of the “Legion of Honour.” His walking, and walking without attendants, through the streets, was a horror, rendered worse and worse by his “wearing a black frock-coat and round hat.” Even when he appeared in uniform on state occasions, “he was equally luckless;” for the _costume_ of a Russian field-marshal, which had been given to him by Alexander, did not fit him, and was too large for his thinness. On the whole, the Duke _failed_, as we are told, to “gain any remarkable success in the Russian salons.” The countesses could make nothing of him; the princesses smiled on without his returning the smile; the courtiers told him _bons mots_ without much effect; and the politicians were of opinion that a Duke so taciturn had no tongue.

Still the emperor’s attentions to him continued; and, on the day of distributing medals to the army, he gave Wellington the regiment of Smolensk, formed by Peter the Great, and of high reputation in the service.

But he succeeded in his chief object, which referred to Greece; and which ultimately, in giving independence to a nation, the classic honours of whose forefathers covered the shame of their descendants,—and by a succession of diplomatic blunders, has turned a Turkish province into a European pensioner, enfeebling Turkey without benefiting Europe, and merely making a new source of contention between France, Russia, and England.

The career of Nicholas has been peaceable; and the empire has been undisturbed but by the guilty Circassian war, which yet seems to be carried on rather as a field of exercise for the Russian armies, than for purposes of conquest.