Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace
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The moment was ill-timed, for Alexander at least. He was, that April, already deep in melancholy. So disturbed was he at the thought of losing once again to the Archduke Joseph a sister whom he loved that, on the day of the Palatine’s arrival, Alexander took to his bed and remained unwell for nearly a week.38 On this occasion, however, he need not have worried: there were too many obstacles, political and religious, to the marriage, and Joseph returned to Hungary without any prospect of a bride. But the episode appears to have intensified Alexander’s affection for his sister. She became for him, as he wrote in an excess of brotherly endearment, ‘the light of my eyes, the adored of my heart, the polestar of the age’.39 The Empress Elizabeth, though fond of her own sisters and brother, could not abide Catherine Pavlovna. In this instance at least, she found it difficult to understand the intensity of Alexander’s feelings. She was not alone in her doubts. And as Catherine grew prettier – as dark as Maria Naryshkin but (so Alexander wrote) with ‘a dear nose I take pleasure in flattening and kissing’40 – so the intimate friendship of brother and sister became closer. Since Catherine also developed the will-power and much of the ambition of her grandmother and namesake, these bonds of affection gradually assumed political significance.
Outwardly, there was little to show the tensions which troubled Alexander’s spirits in the course of 1803, apart from the days when he felt unwilling to join in the dances which had given him such pleasure a few years before. Alexander and Elizabeth continued to attend most of the formal functions together, as they had been accustomed to do, even before his accession. On 30 July, for example, both were present at what nowadays would be called a passing-out parade of military cadets in St Petersburg. Watching them that day was Martha Wilmot, a young Anglo-Irishwoman, newly arrived in St Petersburg on her way to stay with the Princess Dashkov; and Miss Wilmot wrote back to her mother in Cork giving her impressions of the Imperial couple: ‘He is a tall, fair handsomish looking Young Man – she tall, fair, and would be very pretty, only for a dreadful scurvy she has on her face; her dress was a lilac round Gown of slight Silk always flowing on the ground which is quite Russian, a Shawl and a lace Veil thrown over her head which was all the covering it had.’41 It seems as if the strain of her husband’s unpredictability was beginning to ravage Elizabeth’s good looks, for others besides the gimlet-eyed Martha Wilmot noticed the nervous eczema from which she was suffering that year; and yet the Tsar himself remained as impressive in appearance as ever.42
Certainly Alexander had lost none of his popularity with the mass of his subjects in the capital. But was his temperament changing? Liberal friends among the younger nobility privately expressed disappointment that the reforming zeal with which the reign had opened was yielding such small returns. Alexander still rarely missed a meeting of ministers, but he was interesting himself more and more in military affairs. That autumn the unfortunate Elizabeth complained light-heartedly in one of her letters that life in the small palace of Krasnoe Selo was so dominated by the army and its needs that she felt inclined to write ‘From General Headquarters’ as a heading to every sheet of paper. Almost always nowadays Alexander seemed booted and spurred. It was an ominous development.43
Shadow of War
Alexander Disillusioned with the First Consul (1803–4)
By midsummer 1803 the shadow of general war lay heavily across the continent. There was uncertainty over French intentions in Germany, in northern Italy and in the eastern Mediterranean: and already the British had resumed the conflict. Yet for the moment no one was eager to join them. Experience of two previous coalitions against France showed the folly of entering lightly into military engagements, and the possibility that a political crisis might explode prematurely into war held back each of the Great Powers. They were as afraid of the peace terms which would follow a campaign as of the outcome of the battles themselves, for twice already Napoleon, in victory, had shown scant regard for Europe’s traditional frontiers and institutions. The Empire of the Habsburgs and the sprawling kingdom of the Hohenzollerns were too fragile to risk defeat and, though distance afforded the Russians greater immunity, Alexander and his advisers did not wish to see fresh successes consolidate French mastery over central and south-eastern Europe.1 In St Petersburg it seemed more sense to build up the army as a diplomatic weapon held in reserve than to gamble on a triumph against so perfect a military machine. More than two years elapsed before the marching columns tramped once more westwards to their war stations.
During this uneasy interlude Alexander never contemplated a retreat into the self-imposed isolation which Kochubey had earlier favoured. The Tsar was by now far too conscious of his empire’s prestige to accept voluntary exclusion from Europe’s affairs. Yet at first Alexander remained unsure of his sympathies. Both Chancellor Vorontsov and the deputy foreign minister, Adam Czartoryski, were more convinced of the need to be on guard against Napoleon’s ambitions than the Tsar himself. Indeed, in the first months of the renewed Anglo-French war, Alexander treated the British ambassador in St Petersburg coolly and did not hesitate to blame the Addington Government in London for the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens.2 In June 1803 Alexander even seemed momentarily to have recovered his old admiration for the First Consul, for Napoleon invited the Tsar to mediate in the conflict, a suggestion which pleased Alexander considerably.3 He saw himself accepted by the rival combatants as an impartial arbiter, imposing wise and disinterested counsels upon a grateful continent. This unfortunately was not precisely the role for which Napoleon had cast him. Failure to distinguish between an invitation to mediate and an appeal to arbitrate left Alexander making expansive gestures which nobody but himself took at their face value.
The whole confused episode of Russian mediation lasted barely six weeks. It was on 19 July 1803 that Alexander put forward his proposals for a general settlement.4 They caused consternation in Paris: the British were invited to establish themselves on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, having handed over Malta to a Russian garrison, and the French were assured of their natural frontiers and of a predominant position in nothern Italy; but Alexander’s proposals also included establishing a belt of neutral states across the continent which would have robbed Napoleon of the mastery he had achieved in Germany, Switzerland, Holland and the Italian peninsula. So radical a re-adjustment of the European map was acceptable neither to Paris nor to London. Napoleon himself was righteously indignant with Alexander: he complained, with justice, that he had never invited the Tsar to distribute the prizes of his own campaigns; and he concluded, with far less justice, that if the Russians really believed they could put forward proposals of this nature, they must already have sold themselves to the English. On 29 August the First Consul formally rejected Alexander’s good offices; and thereafter he began to speak of the Russians as potential enemies.5
Alexander was naively puzzled by Napoleon’s attitude. His vanity smarted at the revelation that he was not, after all, to determine the structure of Europe. Soon he had other grievances too. For several years the vicissitudes of Russian policy had been interpreted at the French Court by Count Arkady Morkov, an ambassador whose record of service was impressive but in whom Alexander personally felt little confidence. Nor, it would appear, did Napoleon. For, at the end of September 1803, the First Consul subjected the unfortunate Morkov to one of those melodramatic moments of public abuse which, from time to time, invigorated diplomatic receptions in the French capital. On this occasion, Napoleon openly accused Morkov of conspiring with his domestic enemies in Paris and of showing sympathy for the royalist émigrés and their British patrons.6 There was some justification for the complaint, but when the Tsar learnt of the incident he was angry: though long critical of Morkov, he was not prepared to permit a foreign Head of State to subject his accredited spokesman to such humiliating rebuff. Rather than await a formal demand from Napoleon for the ambassador’s recall, Alexander summoned Morkov back to St Petersburg immediately and, on his arrival home, made a great show of awa
rding him one of the Empire’s highest decorations.7 Within a few days of Morkov’s return, Chancellor Vorontsov was putting forward in St Petersburg a proposal for an approach to the British. Although in earlier months Alexander had invariably frowned on all talk of an English alliance, he now made no effort to hold Vorontsov back.8
The Morkov affair, trivial though it was in form, completed Alexander’s personal disillusionment with the character of Napoleon’s government. His attitude towards the French hardened at the close of 1803; and in the following months events both in St Petersburg and Paris confirmed all his suspicions. More and more in this period the Tsar turned for advice to Adam Czartoryski, partly from inclination and partly because Vorontsov’s health was rapidly deteriorating.9 Czartoryski had never placed much faith in Napoleon’s fair words and promises, and he used the Morkov incident to draw the Tsar’s attention to French intrigues in an area to which the Russians were especially sensitive. Throughout the year of 1803 the Foreign Ministry in St Petersburg had received reports from its diplomatic representatives within the Turkish Empire of the growing activity of French agents in the Balkans and among Greek residents in Constantinople itself.10 If the French embarked on a forward policy in south-eastern Europe, Russia’s Black Sea trade would be challenged and it was even possible that the territories acquired in Catherine’s wars against the Turks might be in jeopardy. The bogey of French intervention in the Eastern Question aroused lively apprehension in St Petersburg: French gun-running on the Adriatic coast and among the Aegean islands, French money bribing the clans of Montenegro, French memoranda planning the establishment of client dependencies throughout the Balkan peninsula; all such tales – true, half-true or false – were certain to provoke a reaction from Alexander. By the autumn of 1804 he had despatched 11,000 Russian soldiers to Corfu, making use of a protectorate over the Ionian Islands claimed by his father during the war of the Second Coalition.11 It was in these waters, rather than on the land mass of the continent itself, that the rival interests of France and Russia came nearest to conflict.
Vorontsov left St Petersburg to recuperate on his estates in the second week of February 1804, though he continued to draft instructions and despatches on foreign affairs for another eighteen months.12 Effectively, however, Russian foreign policy throughout the year of 1804 was determined by Alexander himself and by Czartoryski. They were soon faced by a major crisis. Within little more than a month of Vorontsov’s withdrawal from St Petersburg, the capital was shocked by the news from Paris: the Duc d’Enghien had been seized by French agents on the neutral soil of Baden, conveyed to Vincennes, placed on trial before a French military court, and summarily executed as a traitor in the pay of a foreign country pledged to invade the territories of the French Republic. Not since the days of the Terror had an event in Paris aroused such widespread horror in the capitals of Europe. At St Petersburg it was seen as proof that a new Jacobin spirit was at large in France.13
Alexander was enraged by the crime. The Duc d’Enghien was a member of the French royal house. By conniving at his kidnapping and execution the First Consul became, in Alexander’s eyes, a regicide. Nor was this the only cause of the Tsar’s indignation. He regarded the abduction of the Duke from Baden as a particular insult to Russia, for Napoleon had been repeatedly reminded that Alexander expected the French authorities to respect the lands of his wife’s family. His response was swift and dramatic. A meeting of the Council of State was convened in mid-April at which it was resolved, with only one dissentient voice, to break off all diplomatic contact with France.14 The Russian Court went into official mourning and a solemn note of protest was despatched to Paris.
But the French paid little regard to Russian susceptibilities. Napoleon interpreted Alexander’s complaint as unjustified interference with the domestic affairs and internal security of France. He entrusted the reply to Talleyrand, his Minister of Foreign Affairs, and a bland statement appeared in the official Moniteur: ‘If, when England prepared the assassination of Paul 1, the Russian Government had discovered that the organizers of the plot were no more than a league from the frontier, would it not have seized them at once?’15 No allusion could have been better calculated to wound the Tsar than this deliberate reference to the circumstances of his own accession. It was a rhetorical question which he found hard to forgive or forget. A month later news came from Paris that the First Consul had accepted from the French Senate the title of Emperor.16 Now, to all his other transgressions, Napoleon had added contempt for the dynastic principle. Resolutely the successor of Peter the Great refused to acknowledge the newest of empires.
Czartoryski, Novosiltsov and the Grand Design of 1804
The execution of the Duc d’Enghien and the proclamation of the French Empire had the incidental effect of consolidating Czartoryski’s position in St Petersburg. Indignation at the enormities of the French silenced his opponents. When anger subsided and tempers cooled, all the old suspicion of Czartoryski as a non-Russian and a Roman Catholic returned to the forefront of people’s minds and most of the factions in St Petersburg united against him; but for the moment his disabilities seemed of minor importance provided that he denounced with appropriate firmness the Carolingian make-believe of Paris. Alexander, for his part, gave the Polish Prince his confidence, even though caution made him keep in reserve the full dignity of ministerial rank. Titles, however, mattered little to Czartoryski. Although he signed himself ‘Assistant Minister’ he knew he was enjoying greater freedom of initiative in shaping policy than any adviser on foreign affairs in Russia within living memory. He made good use of his opportunities, never forgetting his loyalty to Alexander personally nor to the Poland of his birth.17
Basically Alexander and Czartoryski were at one on the course Russia must follow: the Tsar would weld together a formidable alliance against the French. If possible, he still wished to avoid a general war and, though more favourably disposed to the British now that Pitt had succeeded Addington as head of the government, he preferred to act independently, building up a defensive league of which Russia, Austria and Prussia were to be the principal members. Once agreed between themselves, the three autocracies would present Napoleon with terms for a general settlement. Only if he rejected their proposals would the league make common cause with his old enemy across the Channel and confront the French Empire with a Third Coalition of the European Powers. Czartoryski placed more emphasis than Alexander on the need for a preliminary understanding with the British, and his Polish patriotism made him suspect the intentions of the Prussians; but he was prepared to support approaches to both Vienna and Berlin so long as there remained general agreement on war aims, and he also encouraged the beginning of conversations between the Russians and the Swedes. Throughout the summer of 1804 Russian diplomats were active in every capital not already under the dominance of the French; and in St Petersburg all thoughts of domestic reform were abandoned in favour of a positive foreign policy.
By the autumn it was clear that one at least of Czartoryski’s reservations was correct: the key to future action lay in London, if only because of the need for subsidies to bring the armies of the remaining independent Powers into the field. In September it was accordingly resolved to send Novosiltsov to England to negotiate an alliance.18 The choice of Novosiltsov as a special emissary was significant: he had been a member of the Secret Committee and therefore a close associate for many years both of Czartoryski and Alexander himself; and he had contacts in London, not only with Pitt and the Tories, but with Fox and the Whig Opposition as well. It was intended that he should be the Tsar’s personal representative, capable of giving to the British statesmen a more direct assessment of Alexander’s intentions than the ambassador, Simon Vorontsov, could ever have made. Not unnaturally, Vorontsov resented Novosiltsov’s intervention. The tension between the two men was so evident to the British ministers that it hampered negotiations and increased the suspicion with which Alexander’s overtures were received.19 In London it remained difficult to under
stand the Russians.
Novosiltsov’s instructions were drafted by Czartoryski and based upon memoranda which he had submitted to his sovereign in the previous year.20 Their combination of high-sounding idealism with a realistic attempt to attain Russian primacy in central Europe and the Balkans appealed so closely to Alexander’s temperament that he appropriated Czartoryski’s proposals and made them his own. The instructions to Novosiltsov of 23 September 1804 therefore represent the earliest draft of the Tsar’s general plan to establish a new order in Europe; they are, in consequence, of considerable significance in the evolution of his thoughts on international policy. The moralistic phrases which puzzled and irritated Pitt and his ministers in 1804–5 re-appeared in a new guise ten years later: concern for the collective security of Europe and its identification with the imperial future of Russia became the characteristic feature of Alexander’s diplomacy, at once both the most responsible and the most pretentious of his historical innovations.
The Grand Design of 1804 was indeed staggeringly comprehensive, Alexander and Czartoryski assumed the allies needed an ideological appeal which, to the peoples of Europe, would counter the attractions of France’s revolutionary principles. No attempt would be made to impose discredited régimes from the past on lands liberated from French military rule. The French people themselves were to be told that the Coalition was fighting, not against their natural rights, but against a government which was ‘no less a tyranny for France than for the rest of Europe’. The new map of the continent must rest on principles of justice: frontiers would be so drawn that they coincided with natural geographical boundaries, provided outlets for industries, and associated in one political unit ‘homogeneous peoples able to agree among themselves’. Novosiltsov’s instructions were often vague but they contained three specific proposals of considerable originality: the establishment of a German Confederation independent of both Austria and Prussia; the conclusion of an agreement between Britain and Russia to determine the eventual partition of the Ottoman Empire if the Sultan’s rule collapsed from internal strains or from excessive dependence upon French patronage; and the acceptance of a revised code of maritime law to safeguard the commerce of neutral states from British naval interference in any future war. Yet it was hoped there would be no occasions for a major conflict in the years ahead: the new Europe was to rest upon a careful balance of power between potential rival states; and, once peace was established, it was proposed that the European governments in concert should put forward ‘a new concept of law among nations’ based upon ‘an obligation not to wage war unless all means of mediation had been previously exhausted’. The principle of ‘reasonable freedom’ guaranteeing ‘the sacred rights of humanity and the true interests of lawful government’ must be an absolute condition for ‘close and cordial union between Russia and England’.