The Tsar's Doctor

by Mary McGrigor

  Yet the court was said to have been ‘very pleased’ by Wylie’s verdict. Obviously he had been told what to say. But why did he agree to such a deception, which, had it been discovered, could have ruined his professional career?

  Clearly the most obvious answer is that he perjured himself to save his life. It is hard to believe that he was actually involved in the conspiracy to kill the tsar, but those who were would not have hesitated to make him the next victim had he exposed their crime.

  One man who does cast aspersions, however, is the late-nineteenth-century historian Joyneville who makes the wild – and it would appear totally unfounded – accusation that Wylie was actually among the murderers and that following the tsar’s strangulation, he cut his carotid artery to ensure his death.23 Joyneville gives no sources for his story and contemporary accounts do not even hint at cooperation with the murderers on Wylie’s part, other than his signing of the death certificate in compliance with the wishes of the imperial family as. Thus it can only be assumed that it was because he performed the post mortem that, no doubt due to the known jealousy of colleagues, a rumour evolved of his supposed involvement in the crime.

  Most importantly, it must be remembered that, in addition to the lack of any written evidence linking Wylie to the assassination of the tsar, it is altogether improbable that Alexander, whose own supposed involvement in his father’s death weighed so heavily on his mind, would have placed such implicit trust in Wylie had he, even for one moment, believed him to have been party to the crime. It cannot be denied that thanks to his association with Alexander, and later with Alexander’s brother Nicholas who succeeded him as tsar, Wylie, like so many Scots in Russia, did eventually become a rich man. Yet considering the lack of evidence, it should not be imputed that this doctor of reputedly upright character was in any way seduced by gold. It is more likely that, under the circumstances, he had little or no option than to comply with what was demanded of him or else lose his position in the royal household – and with it, most assuredly, his life.

  That said, can it be surmised that in falsifying the tsar’s death certificate Wylie was acting, at least in part, for altruistic reasons of his own?

  It was by then five years since Tsar Paul, ecstatic at Count Kutaisof’s apparently miraculous recovery, had made him his personal physician. During that time, in constant attendance, no one had seen more of Paul’s decline into madness than had Wylie himself. It therefore seems logical to believe that, recognizing incurable insanity, he thought it better for a man, now dangerous not only to his family but to the millions of people over whom he ruled, to die, if not of natural causes, then by an assassin’s hand.

  Wylie’s lifelong devotion to Alexander – ‘My adored Emperor’, as he was later to call him – is well known. Watching him grow into manhood, in the years spent in the palace, he had recognized his potential as the leader he was born to be. Now, in this moment of tragedy, dreadful as the circumstances were, he must have recognized the wisdom of the grandmother, the omnipotent Empress Catherine, whose own sudden death had prevented her from naming Alexander as her heir.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Doctor to the New Tsar

  On the death of Tsar Paul, James Wylie had already become personal physician to his son, Alexander I, whom he was to serve for twenty-four years. No one knew better than he the agony of mind of the new ruler, who felt himself partly responsible for the death of the father whom he believed he had betrayed. For a short while Wylie feared for Alexander’s sanity, as, already in a state of deep depression caused by his guilt, he had then to be told that his eldest sister, Alexandra, who had married the Palatine of Hungary the year before, had died while giving birth to a child.

  Wylie now understood that, although not insane like his father, Alexander had the seeds of instability in his mind. He reasoned with him effectively as, refusing to talk to anyone other than his immediate attendants, he kept to his bedroom for some days. This period of intense mental suffering, endured within a darkened room, proved to be the onset of moods of depression which Wylie, through his understanding of them, did his best to assuage.

  The one person, apart from his doctor, who helped to maintain Alexander’s sanity during those days of torment following his father’s death, was his wife Elizabeth. The quiet, fair-haired, almost waif-like figure of the child bride, chosen by his grandmother, to whom he had now been married for eight years, was constantly by his side. While his mother Maria Feodorovna, always a dramatist, had hysterics, and throughout the palace total chaos prevailed, Elizabeth alone remained calm.

  It was during this period that Wylie conceived his great respect for her, a feeling perhaps inspired by love. Certain it is that he went to great lengths to protect her by encouraging Alexander to make constant arrangements for her comfort and by making him realize that, with her delicate constitution, she needed a great deal of rest. Moreover he was soon to be both distressed and angered by the pain inflicted upon her by Alexander’s infidelities, which could now no longer be ignored.

  Wylie went with Alexander and Elizabeth to Moscow for their coronation in September 1801. The city, founded in 1147, had become in the early fourteenth century the capital of the principality of Slaviansky, when the white-stoned Kremlin was developed into an impregnable fortress. From that time onwards, the many churches crowned with domes and cupolas built in the expanding city had turned the old capital of Russia into a metropolis reminiscent of Rome.

  Wylie was among the crowd of enthralled spectators who watched Alexander ride on a white horse from the Petrovsky Palace to the walled citadel of the Kremlin, a distance of four miles. The crowd was ecstatic, calling blessings on the little father, the tall, handsome, fair-haired, blue-eyed prince, so different from the simian-featured Tsar Paul who had died seven months before.

  Alexander and Elizabeth remained in Moscow for a month while countless festivities took place. Ball followed ball as the aristocratic ladies of Moscow vied with each other in their efforts to entertain – and in some cases to captivate – the handsome and charming young tsar whose smile was enough to sweep most of them off their feet. Elizabeth soon became exhausted. Never strong, she could not stand the pace at which Alexander plunged so recklessly into anything with which he became involved. Freed at last from the constraint of his grandmother’s governance and the terror of his father’s regime, it is hardly surprising that, in an age when amorous alliances were considered de rigueur, he plunged into the social melee with scarcely an effort at restraint.

  It was then that Wylie was to notice how Alexander had an eye for many of the pretty women who virtually fell at his feet. Most were merely flirtations but among them was one more dangerous, a dark-haired, voluptuous Polish beauty, Countess Maria Naryshkin, skilled as a courtesan. She set her cap at Alexander, pursuing him relentlessly, and he, unable to resist the lure of this dominant, sensual woman, succumbed to the attraction of her charms. Shamelessly she revelled in her conquest, flaunting her possession of the man every woman in Moscow wished to seduce, to the chagrin of his young wife.

  Standing in the sidelines, Wylie could only watch helplessly the drama that was taking place. Alexander, hopelessly infatuated, was losing control of his senses, regardless, it seems, of the hurt he was causing Elizabeth. There was nothing new in the situation – most men of the aristocracy had mistresses at the time – but to the doctor who now knew them both so well, aware as he was of Elizabeth’s love for her husband, and of the instability of Alexander’s mind, it was plain that a situation was developing which could result in far-reaching effects on the stability of the Russian hierarchy, if not of the country itself.

  Eventually, at the end of October the royal couple left Moscow to return to St Petersburg. Winter was now setting in but Alexander, restless as always, insisted the horses be driven at a furious pace. As the carriage hurtled onwards over metalled roads, while the coach-man lashed the horses to ever greater speed, they passed through dark forests covering much of the distance be
tween the old capital and the new. To Wylie, trundling behind in one of the many coaches carrying equerries, other attendants, and the vast amount of luggage that such an occasion involved, it seemed that the young emperor was possessed by a frantic energy fired by the enormity of his appointed task. Exhausted by the speed and distance of the journey, having barely had time to rest or even wash, Alexander and Elizabeth reached St Petersburg in the space of only five days.

  Seen from a distance, the city seemed to rise, almost as if floating, from the marshland on which it was built. In the winter light, as the domes and spires of the many churches shone clear against the sky, it seemed ethereal, divorced from the signs of habitation still remaining out of sight. The stone palaces, the wooden houses, the network of streets and arterial waterways, all might have ceased to exist.

  As he approached his capital, Alexander, tireless as he seemed to be, was in fact almost overwhelmed by awareness of the vast responsibility that had been thrust upon his shoulders by his father’s death.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Heavy Clouds of War

  Alexander had barely returned to St Petersburg before he received a letter from King Frederick William III of Prussia. He suggested that the two should meet to discuss the affairs of Europe as the threat of the avaricious French First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, increased.

  In February 1802, Alexander, in reply to yet another missive from Frederick, agreed that a personal discussion would be of much advantage to them both. Although strangers to each other they already had a common bond in that Alexander’s second eldest sister Helen, married to Frederick Louis, Prince of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, was a great favourite with both King Frederick and his lovely Queen Louise.

  Alexander, accompanied by a train of courtiers – including his doctor James Wylie – arrived at Memel on 10 June.24 The port, founded by the Knights of the Livonian Order in 1252, defended by a citadel, commands a strong position at the mouth of the River Neman on the shore of the sound of the Memeler Tief, an inlet of the Baltic Sea. Some ninety miles north-east of Königsberg, Memel (now Klaipeda and the most northerly town in Germany) was, then as now, an important port, trading largely in timber, wheat and fish.

  For Wylie the town held nostalgia, for sea ports are the same worldwide. Memories of his boyhood came back to him as he saw the masts in the harbour so much like those in Kincardine, whence some of the vessels had probably come. But now it was a harbour with a difference, for men other than seamen swarmed along the crowded quays.

  As guests of the king of Prussia, Alexander and the members of his entourage were greatly entertained. Banquets were followed by balls at which Alexander, so strikingly handsome in uniform, danced and flirted with ladies, once again bewitched by his charm. He, for his part, was enchanted with Frederick William’s beautiful wife, Princess Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who was the niece of Queen Charlotte, wife of George III of England. However, whereas her aunt was plain, Louise outshone the court ladies with the gracefulness of her movements and the lustre of her wide-set brown eyes.

  Everyone thought she was lovely. Alexander was swept off his feet. Both were young, Louise being just a year older than Alexander, and together they danced in the ballrooms throughout the long summer nights.

  In the daytime, however, he discussed politics with her husband. Alexander was willing to support Frederick’s authority over the German principalities but the princes themselves, unsure of the worth of the new tsar, were more inclined to deal with Napoleon, now seen as an invincible force.

  The Treaty of Amiens, signed between France and Britain in 1802, produced a temperate respite from warfare, which, as most people predicted, was far too good to be true. When war between England and France began again in May 1803, Alexander, although anxious to protect Russian acquisitions in the Mediterranean made by his father during the Second Coalition of 1799, maintained his country’s neutrality. But in March 1803 came devastating news. The Duc d’Enghien, a member of the French royal family, had been kidnapped in Baden, home of Alexander’s wife Elizabeth, and taken to France, had been tried and executed on the orders of Napoleon himself.

  Alexander was horrified, the news that Napoleon had now proclaimed himself Emperor of the French adding to his sense of outrage against what he considered to be regicide. Encouraged by Prince Adam Czartoryski, the Polish nobleman who, formerly his aide, and possibly the lover of his wife, had now become his Deputy Foreign Minister, Alexander formed his Grand Design by which Russia, Austria and Britain would unite against Napoleon, forcing him to abandon his avaricious claims. Accordingly the Third Coalition was finally agreed on 28 July 1805.

  By the terms of the treaty Napoleon’s empire was to be assaulted by a pincer movement from three sides. The Austrians were to attack southern Germany, supported by a Russian army. The British would send a strong force to the mouth of the River Weser from where, together with Swedish and Russian detachments, they would head through Hanover for the Netherlands. Meanwhile, as Austria attacked Venetia and Lombardy, a joint force of Russian and British soldiers would invade the Kingdom of Naples, whose monarch had pledged his support.

  Alexander determined immediately to go with his soldiers. Not even the pleas of Prince Czartoryski would persuade him to change his mind. Wylie would of course go with him. Hastily Wylie assembled his instruments and together with his orderlies packed the bandages, splints and available drugs – mainly laudanum as a painkiller and wine to ease the shock of injury and amputation – into the medical chests which could be carried to the front. All was in readiness when, on the morning of 21 September, after praying for a long time in the cathedral, the tsar led his entourage from St Petersburg to the battlefields ahead.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Austerlitz

  Alexander went first to the Russian part of Poland, which he reached in September. From there he wrote to King Frederick of Prussia asking him to allow Russian troops to pass through his country en route to the Netherlands. Frederick, despite their personal friendship, was unwilling to break his neutrality, and refused. However, when French troops marched through the Prussian enclave of Ansbach to join up with Napoleon’s army in Bavaria, he changed his mind. Thus on 21 October 1805, as the British defeated the French and Spanish fleets off Cape Trafalgar, Alexander set off to meet Frederick in Berlin.

  James Wylie once more had the chance to witness the reception given by one monarch to another. Bands played, fireworks lit the sky, and banquets and balls were held to entertain the tsar. In the first week of November it was agreed that, should Napoleon fail to consent to the terms of the Third Coalition, Frederick would declare war on France.

  There was one informal act to follow, in the form of a personal pledge. On the last night of his visit Alexander, Frederick William and Queen Louise, heavily cloaked against the wind, walked through the streets of the darkened city to the garrison church. There in the candlelit crypt, Frederick William and Alexander leaned forward to embrace each other above the tomb of the Prussian king’s ancestor, Frederick the Great. Alexander, who was always emotional, sobbed openly as the two men swore to eternal friendship and to lasting peace between their realms.

  On 20 November, Napoleon, who had already taken Vienna and occupied the palace of Schönbrünn, captured Brünn (Brno), the capital of Moravia. The combined forces of Russia and Austria were by then stationed in the small town of Olmutz, about forty miles away from Brünn near the border with Hungary. On 24 November the combined commanders agreed to launch an offensive, aimed at attacking Napoleon at Brünn, before liberating Vienna.

  Alexander was now ill, suffering from a bad attack of fever, with Wylie constantly in attendance. As always he proved the worst of patients. Delirious, as his temperature rose, he refused to be bled to reduce the fever or to swallow medicines. Restless as ever, the moment he felt slightly better he tried to leap out of bed, but Wylie restrained him, humouring as a father would a child, a role he increasingly adopted with a man who, while only ten years younger tha
n himself, was nonetheless excitable as a young and petulant boy. Recovering, but still so weak that he actually submitted to Wylie’s advice, he proceeded by coach, rather than on horseback, to the town of Wischau (Vykov) twenty miles to the south. Here he received an emissary from Napoleon, who could not have been worse chosen, proving to be General Savary, formerly chief of the gendarmerie who had been instrumental in kidnapping the Duc d’Enghien prior to his execution. Savary brought a message from Napoleon asking for a meeting to discuss terms of peace with Alexander.

  Incapacitated as he was at that moment, suffering from a return of the fever, Alexander sent his own envoy in return in the form of Prince Peter Dolgoruky who, considering Napoleon to be an upstart wearing a dirty shirt, affronted him to his face. Napoleon, for his part, called the Russian prince ‘a perfumed booby’,25 and went back in anger to his headquarters near Brünn.

  The weather was now very cold, the icebound roads pot-holed and dangerous. Alexander’s favourite chestnut mare stumbled and came down on her knees, giving him a heavy fall. Two days later, still badly bruised, he rode to a nearby village to meet the Emperor Francis of Austria.

  Napoleon had by now retreated to within a few miles of Brünn. Military genius that he was, having guessed at his enemy’s intention, he had chosen his position expressly to entice Prince Mikhail Ku-tuzov, the Russian commander, to outflank him in an attempt to cut off his line of retreat to Vienna.

  The two armies were so close that on the still, moonlit night of 1 December, they could see each other’s camp fires. At three o’clock in the morning, Alexander was woken by his anxious staff as commotion broke out in the French camp. But it proved to be only the soldiers cheering their emperor on the anniversary of his coronation, an event they believed to be a lucky sign.