by Alan Palmer
Alexander in the Crimea
The Tsar drove rapidly along the shore of the Sea of Azov through Mariupol and Berdyansk, reaching the Perekop Isthmus on 4 November. He remained in his carriage as far as Simferopol, where he arrived late the next evening. There followed an exciting, exhausting and ultimately fatal week. On Sunday, 6 November, he attended an early service in the cathedral and then set out to cross the main pass (which was still being constructed) linking Simferopol with the coast at Gurzuf. Although he covered twenty-five miles in the saddle that day, he reached Gurzuf at four in the afternoon. The weather was still mild, with some of the trees as green as in early autumn.14 He was delighted by the grandeur of the mountain back-cloth to the largely Tartar village. ‘Was there ever such magnificent scenery?’ he exlaimed as he looked out on the hazy sunlight reflected off a calm sea. Count Michael Vorontsov, as provincial Governor, had been at pains to clean up Gurzuf for some days. He had also seen to it that his personal physician, Dr Robert Lee, administered the new cure of ‘calomel and sulphate of quinine’ to the principal Tartar of the village, ‘who had been suffering severely from intermittent fever for several weeks’.15 It might have been wiser for the Tsar to have gone elsewhere that night than a ‘common Tartar cottage’, newly whitewashed and with its walls hung ‘with a coarse white linen cloth’.
But on the Monday morning Alexander awoke refreshed and in good spirits. He rode slowly along the sub-tropical littoral, dismounting to walk in the botanical gardens at Nikita, which had been founded a dozen years previously. So pleasant did he find this stretch of coast that he immediately arranged to purchase an estate at Oreanda, a few miles south-west of Yalta. Later that Monday he visited Princess Anna Golitsyn, who was living three miles from Oreanda at Kureis, with Julie von Krüdener’s daughter and son-in-law and some of the Baroness’s religious disciples (who, General Diebitsch roundly declared, were all ‘suffering from the ague’).16 It was clear to the small community at Kureis that Alexander was pleased at the prospect of setting up a new palace on the Crimean coast: he told his hostess he hoped it would be possible to bring Elizabeth by sea from Taganrog to Yalta or Gurzuf so that they could spend the winter together in Oreanda.17 That night he stayed on the Vorontsov estate at Alupka. He took little food at dinner, having stopped to eat fruit along the road: there was a worm adhering to the shell of one of the oysters served to the Tsar that evening, but Sir James Wylie assured him it was ‘quite common and harmless’. Alexander was in a happy and contented mood: he began to tell his fellow guests of his plans for having ‘a palace built as expeditiously as possible’, and he made it clear he was looking forward to a future when he would retire from his responsibilities as sovereign, and find rest and contentment with Elizabeth on the Crimean coast.18 It was a remote dream which he had first held more than a quarter of a century previously, although then the banks of the Rhine bounded his imagination. Now at last the possibility of escape to Oreanda made the dream close to fulfilment.
On Tuesday Alexander walked in the grounds at Alupka in the morning, mounted his horse about noon, and rode off westwards towards Balaklava, remaining in the saddle for thirty miles. The weather was less hot than on the previous days, low clouds covered the peaks of the mountains and there was some rain. He took the high road through beechwoods into the exceptionally beautiful Baidar valley, but he found the going difficult and reached Baidar tired and hot, only to find there was no opportunity for him to eat there. One of his suite wrote subsequently, ‘He was rather irritable during the whole of the day and complained very much of the horse.’ From Baidar he drove in his open carriage towards Sebastopol, but two miles from Balaklava he again mounted his horse and rode with General Diebitsch to inspect a battalion raised from Greek families in the Crimea. There at last he was able to take some food ‘and eat a good deal offish’. Before going to the fortress he rode, once more in the saddle, for six miles to the monastery at St George. ‘He had neither great coat nor cloak, though the sun had set and the air was very cool;’ and he remained for two hours there. Between eight and nine at night he drove into Sebastopol in his calèche, visited the church by torchlight, inspected troops lining the street; and when at last he was served with an evening meal, he felt unable to eat anything.19
Next morning, at what must have been a cracking pace, he inspected two forts, the ramparts, a military hospital, the dockyard, an arsenal, and an unspecified number of ships in the eleven-vessel Black Sea Fleet. He was then driven to Bakhchisarai, sleeping in his carriage most of the afternoon in utter exhaustion, He remained at Bakhchisarai for two nights, riding out on the Friday to the historic Karaite Jewish walled city of Chufut Kale, four miles away. The Karaites, with their emphasis on a narrowly scriptural source for religious observance and the moral law, interested Alexander; he talked to the Elders of the community and visited the principal synagogue. But he was ruler of peoples of many faiths, and from Chufut Kale he went on to a Greek Orthodox monastery, perched high on a cliff: there, ‘whilst ascending the staircase he felt himself so weak he was obliged to rest’. That afternoon, back in Bakhchisarai, he entertained Moslem dignitaries and visited several mosques.20 At some point during his stay at Bakhchisarai, Alexander sent for Wylie, nominally to tell him how worried he was about the health of the Empress Elizabeth (to whom he did, indeed, write an agitated letter on the Friday evening)21; but Alexander took the opportunity of letting Wylie know he felt unwell and had slept little for several nights. It is not clear why he thus confided in Sir James, because he promptly told him that he needed neither medicine nor advice: ‘I know how to doctor myself, he said defiantly.22
There still remained another six days of the Crimean tour. Although Alexander was obviously tired and disinclined to eat, he continued to carry out all his engagements both in Eupatoria and Perekop. The roads were less difficult in this north-western corner of the peninsula, much of which consisted of steppe-land and occasional marshes, some of them evil-smelling. While riding in his carriage with Diebitsch on Wednesday, 16 November, Alexander was seized with violent shivering and his teeth began to chatter. That night he took some hot punch, but no food, and there was talk of resting at Mariupol. The accommodation, however, was poor; he was anxious to keep to the itinerary; and, since it was only another sixty miles to Taganrog, he insisted on completing the journey.23 He left Mariupol at ten o’clock on the Thursday morning in a closed carriage, his feet covered by a bear skin and his whole frame wrapped in a massive winter greatcoat. Nine hours later Elizabeth caught sight of her husband under the glow of the lanterns at the gate of their residence: she had a presentiment of disaster.24
The Last Fourteen Days
At first no one in the household was especially alarmed. The Tsar’s complexion was yellow, he had an almost insatiable thirst, and he was drowsy; but he spent little time in bed, was dressed by eight o’clock each morning and talked cheerfully to Elizabeth, Volkonsky and Wylie. When Elizabeth wrote to her mother on Sunday evening, she was optimistic: he had been suffering from intermittent bouts of fever, but she thought he had begun to recover; and she added a cheering postscript the following afternoon. No one as yet bothered to alert St Petersburg about the sovereign’s indisposition.25
Alexander, rather strangely, said he knew he had a fever because he could not hear very well, a condition he had noticed during the first days of his erysipelas eighteen months before: ‘I am as deaf as a post’, he remarked to Wylie, in English.26 To Prince Volkonsky Alexander explained that he thought he was suffering from ‘a slight attack of ague … caught in the Crimea in spite of its fine climate, which is so highly extolled’, and he added, ‘I am now more than ever convinced it was best to have the Empress at Taganrog.’27 Volkonsky, who preferred the southern shores of the Crimea to the Sea of Azov, told Alexander that he did not take enough care of himself: he was, the Prince said bluntly, too old to attempt things he might have done easily at the age of twenty.
There was truth in this observation. On several days Al
exander had ridden too far for a man of forty-seven, and he made little allowance for the changes of temperature between noon and nightfall. It was foolish of him to overtax a constitution already weakened by a debilitating illness in the preceding year. On the other hand, there seems also to have been surprising carelessness by some of the Tsar’s advisers. It is extraordinary, for example, that the provincial Governor, Count Michael Vorontsov, should have urged him to come to Alupka at this time of the year. For, only a few weeks previously, Vorontsov was staying in the Crimea and had seen for himself the chronic sickness of ‘this terrestrial paradise’. His personal physician, Robert Lee, wrote, ‘in the villages along the coast between Gurzuf and Simeis, I saw and treated more than a hundred cases of intermittent and remittent fever’.28 Two members of Vorontsov’s suite, Lee adds in his narrative, ‘were seized with severe shivering, headache and the other characteristic symptoms of bilious remittent fever’, one of them dying on his return to Odessa. Lee blamed the high incidence of sickness at this time in the Crimea to ‘noxious exhalations from the earth’.
As Alexander’s condition worsened so the symptoms corresponded more and more with this ‘Crimean Fever’: there were days of apparent recovery, followed by a drastic relapse; burning sensations in the head began on 20 November; and there were fainting fits, bouts of feverish perspiration, mental exhaustion and nausea.29 It was not until the Tuesday evening (22 November) that Elizabeth became seriously alarmed by his condition: he seemed weak, and yet he was obstinately refusing to take the medicine prescribed by Wylie or to allow his doctors to bleed him with leeches. For the first time it was decided to inform Marie Feodorovna in the capital and Constantine in Warsaw of the Tsar’s illness, but not in such a way as to cause undue concern.30 Since it took couriers over a week to travel from Taganrog to St Petersburg, this decision could not well be delayed any longer.
Alexander had a good night’s sleep and seemed much improved on Wednesday morning. Elizabeth went to see him shortly after eleven and found him in good spirits. They chatted inconsequentially until about two o’clock in the afternoon. He wanted to hear about some Kalmuck horsemen who had come to town, and he discussed where she would take her walk that afternoon. Elizabeth told him of the progress being made by an English gardener, Gray, whom he had brought from St Petersburg and was encouraging to lay out a park two miles from the centre of the town. The special cordial drink prepared for him seemed, he said, to leave an unpleasant after-taste: one of his valets had tried it and agreed with his master’s opinion; and so did Elizabeth when she took a sip. Wylie, however, came in, tasted the drink, and found nothing wrong with it. About two in the afternoon Alexander told Elizabeth to leave him and take the main meal of the day. It had been, in fact, a perfectly normal morning for a wife attending her husband’s sick bed.31
The point is important; for a number of writers have seen in the events of Wednesday, 23 November, a vital clue to the ‘enigma’ of Taganrog. To Maurice Paléologue, for example, ‘it is the crucial day’; to Prince Bariatinsky ‘the day of exceptional mystery’; and to Leonid Strakhovsky the date ‘which decidedly marks the turning point in Alexander’s last days as ruler of the Russian empire’.32 According to these writers, the Tsar held an important conversation on this Wednesday in which he told Elizabeth of his immediate plans for the future, a mysterious disappearance from the public eye of which no written record was to exist. They claim she was so upset by this exchange of confidences (‘six hours’ according to Paléologue, ‘the whole evening’ according to Strakhovsky) that she then poured out her sorrow and frustration in a despondent but guarded note to her mother. They also point out, correctly, that there are no extant passages in Elizabeth’s daily journal for any subsequent date during Alexander’s illness. If she continued to keep a diary, the pages were subsequently lost or destroyed, presumably on instructions from Tsar Nicholas I.33
These hypotheses do not stand up to examination. The absence of journal entries is hardly surprising: Elizabeth was only an intermittent diarist and may well, in the following days, have been too emotionally moved by what was happening in the other room of the small house to commit her feelings to paper. Moreover for the last week of his life she was constantly at Alexander’s bedside. The tale of the imparted confidence is not convincing, for there was no moment on that Wednesday when husband and wife could have held a long discussion of this character. The events of the morning have already been described. After dining, as usual, in mid-afternoon Elizabeth appears to have rested and taken the projected walk until five o’clock when she sent for Wylie, who gave her an encouraging report on Alexander’s condition; he told her that the Tsar was still very hot but he was awake, and she should go to his room and see him before he fell asleep.34
Elizabeth cannot, however, have talked to Alexander for long. Half an hour after her conversation with Wylie she began a letter to her mother which she headed, ‘Taganrog, 11/23 November 1825, Wednesday at half past five’. It is this letter which, it is maintained, shows the Empress’s despair.* She writes:
The Emperor is still not free from his fever. How sad it is that he is kept from benefiting from this finest weather in the world and that I also am deprived of the privilege of enjoying it, although I go out every day! Where can one find peace in this life? When you think you have arranged everything for the best and can enjoy it, there comes an unexpected trial which robs you of the ability to revel in the blessings around you …35
There is no evidence that Elizabeth returned to converse at length with Alexander later that evening; and clearly she cannot have had the alleged discussion before writing the letter. Nor, indeed, does it show her to have been disturbed by any sudden revelation: she is sorry for Alexander, and for herself, because a holiday in splendid weather during the first month of winter has been ruined by an unforeseen illness. As she subsequently admitted, she still did not appreciate the gravity of the mysterious fever, which seemed from time to time to leave him, only to return suddenly a few hours later.36 Her letters for the first nine days after his return to Taganrog show less anguish than in the weeks when he was suffering from erysipelas.
But by the weekend she began to realize the full tragedy facing her. ‘Oh, Mamma’, she wrote on Sunday, 27 November, ‘if God does not come to our aid, I foresee the greatest of misfortunes.’ That morning a Greek priest came to administer the sacraments to Alexander, urging him as a Christian duty to take the medicine and cures prescribed by his doctors.37 By now the Tsar, too, knew he was gravely ill and placed himself fully in the hands of his physicians. But it was too late. Hour by hour he became increasingly weak, the periods of unconsciousness growing longer until he was virtually in a coma. At ten minutes to eleven on the morning of Thursday, 1 December 1825, he died, with Elizabeth, his aides-de-camp and his physician around his bed.38 He was just twenty-three days short of completing his forty-eighth year.
The Aftermath
There followed six weeks of misery and confusion for the little group at Taganrog and, in a different sense, for Russia as a whole. Elizabeth spent days of self-mortification, praying beside his bier and later beside the catafalque in the Greek church where his body rested: she hoped, she said in more than one letter, she would soon be re-united to him in another world; and so weak was her heart that those around her believed this to be likely.39 In her wretchedness, the day-to-day responsibilities for the bereaved Court fell on Prince Volkonsky and General Diebitsch, although arrangements for the autopsy and embalming were left to Sir James Wylie. The body was examined by ten doctors, physicians from the local garrison as well as from the Imperial household, thirty-two hours after Alexander’s death. The post-mortem showed that the liver was much enlarged, swollen with blood and dark in colour; the bile duct and colon were ‘unusually large’; and there appeared to have been a rush of blood to the head.† It was formally recorded that ‘our August Sovereign was suffering at first from a disease of the liver and other organs secreting the bile. This disease, little by
little, degenerated into a high fever, with frequent fits of delirium, the secretion and accumulation of serum on the brain being the cause of His Imperial Majesty’s decease.’40
It was not until 23 December that Alexander’s body was moved from the room in which he died to the church where he had gone to pray beside Elizabeth on her arrival in Taganrog eleven weeks before. Even before the corpse was removed to the church putrefaction set in, for the morticians’ skills in a small town in southern Russia were not suited to long embalming, and Elizabeth, alarmed at the speed of decomposition, had the face covered from 11 December onwards.41 The head of the coffin was, however, left open during the solemn procession from the Governor’s residence, and for a time it was also exposed in the church, but its features were barely recognizable and some who went to pay their respects to the body lying in state found it a macabre experience.42 The funeral procession did not set out for St Petersburg until 10 January 1826, nearly six weeks after the Tsar’s death, and the coffin was not finally lowered into a tomb in St Petersburg until 25 March.