Roger considered for some minutes. In order to avoid being sent to India he must keep out of Paris for some months to come. He would soon start his liaison with Georgina again, but that would last only a few weeks and then there would be nothing to keep him in England. On the other hand, apart from the misfortune of incurring the displeasure of the Empress Catherine, he had much enjoyed his stay in St. Petersburg in ’88. To spend a month or two in the Russian capital seemed an admirable way of filling in his time, and it would be intriguing to initiate a conspiracy with the object of rendering the mad Czar harmless. At length he said:
‘Why not, sir? If I can succeed in serving my country and yourself in this way, I should be happy to do so.’
So the die was cast. Georgina arrived in London on January 4th and for a fortnight they took their old joy of one another. During this time Roger paid a visit to Vorontzoff at his fine mansion in St. John’s Wood, which had for many years been the Russian Embassy. To the Ambassador Roger made no secret about the purpose of the mission upon which he was being sent. In duty bound Vorontzoff refrained from formally expressing his approval of it. Nevertheless, he furnished Roger with letters of introduction to a number of people who he thought might prove useful to him, and gave him much valuable information about the Court of St. Petersburg.
A few days later he spent an hour with Lord Grenville, who briefed him on what had been occurring in the Northern capitals. It had been towards the end of August that the Czar’s mounting antagonism towards Britain had culminated in his inviting the monarchs of Prussia, Sweden and Denmark to revive with him the League of Armed Neutrality, and in November he had arbitrarily placed an embargo on all British vessels in Russian ports. As the sea trade of both Sweden and Denmark had suffered severely from the restrictions imposed upon it by Britain, the young Gustavus IV of Sweden had given Paul his enthusiastic support, while in Denmark the peace-loving but ailing King Christian VII had been overruled by the pro-Russian Prince Royal and his Minister Bernstorff. The cautious and vacillating Frederick William of Prussia was still sitting on the fence but it was feared that he would soon join the others.
Between them these Powers could muster a Fleet of forty-one ships of the Line, and the British Navy was already severely stretched in the Channel, the Mediterranean and the West Indies. Should it also have to engage the Northern Fleet there would not be enough ships to continue the blockade of France. That might well result in Bonaparte’s invading England; so the importance of Roger’s mission could not be overstressed.
They then discussed possible concessions that Britain might offer to induce Russia to retire from the League should another government replace that of Paul I. Finally, the Foreign Secretary furnished Roger with a Lettre de Marque to show as his credential should he find it possible to initiate negotiations.
On January 18th he took a loving farewell of Georgina and that night embarked in a ship that was about to sail from London to Bremen, as the first stage of his long journey to St. Petersburg.
8
The Mad Czar
Considering the time of year, Roger was lucky in the weather for his crossing of the North Sea, and four days later he landed at the Free Port of Bremen. As the city lay in the middle of Hanover and that country still was a part of the dominions of the British Crown, he received every facility for continuing his journey without delay. After covering the hundred miles to Lubeck in a coach he had to waste two days before he could get a ship that was sailing up the Baltic and, when he did, she had not been long at sea before he was regretting that he had not gone by coach via Berlin and Warsaw. But over icy roads in mid-winter the twelve hundred mile journey might have taken him anything up to six weeks.
The cold was bitter, even the furs he had bought in Bremen could not protect him for long from the icy, knife-like winds, his cabin was little more than a cupboard, and the food so revolting that, had he not brought aboard supplies of his own, he would almost have preferred to starve. But the weather might have been much worse; so he was sea-sick only on two days, and the brig landed him at Riga on her tenth day out.
Ice floes would have made it too dangerous for her to proceed further north at that season, and St. Petersburg itself would remain ice-bound for at least several weeks to come. At Riga he hired a troika and, drawn by three powerful horses, proceeded on his way. The posting service proved reasonably adequate but the inns at which he had to spend the nights were atrocious.
The nobility always sent couriers ahead to make special arrangements for them and travelled with their own mattresses and other furniture. Lacking these amenities, Roger had usually to share a room with several people of both sexes, there was no linen and the sparse furnishings were always riddled with bed-bugs. After suffering stoically for a further eight days, he entered the Russian capital on the afternoon of February 12th.
During his earlier stay there he had found an excellent friend in the Reverend William Tooke, then the chaplain of the English ‘Factory’—as was called a large enclosed area in which stood the warehouses of the British merchants trading regularly with Russia. Making his way to the docks, Roger enquired at the gate for the Reverend William, only to learn that nine years before he had come into a considerable fortune and had returned to England to enjoy it. However, his successor, the Reverend James Peabody, received Roger kindly, said how agreeable it would be to have news from home and offered to put him up until he could find suitable accommodation.
Roger did not, of course, disclose to the Reverend James the purpose that lay behind his coming to St. Petersburg, but said that he found his greatest pleasure in travel, had enough money to indulge his taste and not having been in Russia for twelve years had decided to pay it a second visit.
The parson shook his head, ‘I fear your visit is ill-timed, Mr. Brook. In the Empress Catherine’s day, when you were last here, I’m told St. Petersburg was a wondrously gay city; but it is far from being so at present, and for an Englishman particularly so.’
‘You mean, sir, that as we no longer enjoy diplomatic representation here I cannot apply to be presented at Court?’
‘That, and the fact that you are an Englishman. Owing to the violent prejudice against our country with which the Emperor has been seized this past year, few of the nobility would be willing to give you a welcome in their houses from fear that the Czar should hear of it and vent his displeasure on them. Such is his rancour against us that last August, when he first announced his intention of reviving the League of Armed Neutrality to our detriment, he actually went to the length of seizing the goods in our Factory here and, on a trumped-up pretext, imprisoned a number of British seamen: both acts that any sane Monarch would have been ashamed to perform.’
‘Indeed! But I take it that British travellers are still free to come and go without interference?’
‘Provided they behave themselves, to interfere with their liberty, either in peace or war, would be an unheard-of barbarity. But I would advise that you keep a guard upon your tongue, and so give the Secret Police no cause to apprehend you for lèse-majesté?
The chaplain was a bachelor so there were only the two of them at supper, and over the meal the Reverend James gave Roger an account of Paul I’s earlier life and of the frustrations that it was generally accepted had caused his weak mind to brood for years upon revenge then, when he had at last ascended the throne, had made him a tyrannical despot.
It was not until he was forty-two that he had succeeded his lecherous, but great and liberal-minded mother. From boyhood she had kept him in a state of tutelage and denied him any say in the government of the country. For years the great nobles and ambassadors had fawned on Catherine’s lovers while treating her Heir Apparent with ill-concealed contempt. She had even taken his children from him and permitted him no say in their upbringing.
The only liberty she allowed him was to play at soldiers. Like his father, Peter III, he was fascinated by the military achievements of Frederick the Great; so Catherine had permitted him
to form his own regiment of Marines at Gatshina, his country place at which he passed a good part of the year. There he had spent eight to ten hours a day drilling his miniature army on the Prussian model and enforcing the harshest discipline.
When he succeeded his mother in November ’96, he had at once sent for his Marines, infiltrated them into the Brigade of Guards and promoted their officers to senior commands in these to senior commands in these èlite regiments. Before the nobles who officered the Brigade fully realised what was happening they found that they were under the thumbs of the newcomers. All leave was abolished and favoured courtier-officers, who had attended only one drill a year, were ordered to march up and down the barrack squares for hours at a stretch. Those who resigned were promptly sent into exile.
Once firmly in the saddle, Paul had changed the aspect of the Court overnight and, out of hatred for his mother, reversed all her policies. Her last favourite, Pluto Zuboff, had been deprived of most of his possessions and exiled to his country estate. Rastopchin had been one of the few ministers to retain his place; but only because formerly he had had the forethought to solicit the favour of wearing the uniform that Paul had designed for his Gatshina regiment.
Under the new régime, familiarity with Gatshina or past loyalty to Paul’s father had become the only passports to promotion. The latter had never been crowned, so Paul had his body dug up, crowned in its coffin and laid in state beside that of the dead Empress who had instigated his murder; then the whole Court was required to kiss the hands of both corpses before they were buried side by side.
In the first months of his reign he gained some reputation for clemency by liberating the great Polish leader Kosciuszko and a number of other people whom his mother had imprisoned but, being strongly opposed to revolutionary ideas, he had initiated a ferocious and senseless persecution of the French exiles living in Russia; and had banned the use of French books, furniture, cooking and fashions, to the intense annoyance of his nobility whose culture was almost exclusively derived from France. Another of his pointless and infuriating orders had been that all carriage-owners had to buy a different type of harness and equip their coachmen in the German style. The Russian coachmen refused to part either with their kaftans or their beards; and the price of new harness soon became prohibitive, because the Czar had instructed his police that, after a fortnight, they were to cut the harness of any carriage on which the old style Russian harness was still being used. The upper classes had even greater cause for rage when he revived an old ukase decreeing that whenever a Czar or Czarina drove through the streets, everyone within sight must immediately abase themselves. This meant that even ladies in carriages must stop them, jump out and prostrate themselves in the snow or slush.
The lower classes, too, had cause for complaint. One of Paul’s inexplicable idiosyncrasies was a hatred of round hats, and these were the general wear of the masses in Russia. After decreeing their abolition he gave orders to his police that any round hat they saw was to be snatched from the head of its wearer and destroyed; and many of the poorer people could not afford to buy others.
More recently, following his revival the previous summer of the League of Armed Neutrality, he had prohibited all trade with Britain. As Russia was almost entirely an agricultural country she had to import nine-tenths of her manufactured goods, and for close on two hundred years by far the greater part of these had come from England. Their present dearth was inflicting a considerable hardship on all classes of people and greatly increasing the rancour against the Czar.
Having listened to all this and more, Roger could only wonder that the Russians had put up with their crazy monarch for so long; but on reflection he realised that the masses, being bond slaves, would have been put down immediately by the military with the full backing of the nobility had they attempted to revolt, and that it was so ingrained in the upper classes to think of ‘The Little Father’ as almost an embodiment of God that they would never dare unite and openly defy him. Clearly the only hope of bringing his tyrannical reign to an end was by a coup d’état carried out inside the Palace by a few courageous men.
When Roger entered the city, the early winter darkness had already fallen, so it was not until the following morning that he again saw it by daylight. Unlike Paris, London and other ancient capitals, St. Petersburg having been built less than a hundred years before by Peter the Great, instead of having narrow, tortuous streets with the upper storeys of the houses nearly meeting overhead, had fine, broad boulevards lined with splendid mansions of stone.
As he was driven at a good pace along the Nevsky Prospect in a droshky, while enjoying the crisp clean air he recalled the names of several of the owners of the palaces but noticed that most of them were now shut, and that in the streets there was not a quarter of the handsome equipages that were to be seen in Catherine the Great’s day.
He was carrying on him a letter from Count Simon Vorontzoff to his elder brother, Count Alexander, and when he reached the Vorontzoff palace he was considerably relieved to find it still occupied. Having left his letter at the door he spent an hour driving round the city, made a few purchases and returned to the Factory. That evening a running footman brought him a reply in which Count Alexander invited him to breakfast the following morning.
There were several people present at the meal and, as Russian gentry used Russian only when addressing their servants, habitually using French, English or German among themselves, Roger had no difficulty in entering into the conversation. For a pleasant hour they talked of general topics or of mutual acquaintances, either that Roger had met on his previous visit to St. Petersburg or that Count Alexander had made when for a short while during the reign of Peter III he had been Ambassador in London. Then, as Roger was about to take his leave he asked the Count in a low voice if he would give him a private interview, to which Vorontzoff replied softly, ‘By all means. Leave with the others and return in half an hour.’
When Roger again entered the house he was taken to a small writing room, and there he told the Count the purpose of his mission.
As soon as he had finished, the Russian said, ‘Mr. Brook, I must warn you that you are courting very grave danger. Should the faintest suspicion of your intentions get out you would find yourself locked up in a fortress for life.’
Roger smiled, ‘I am aware of that, sir; and having had some experience of similar affairs you may be sure that I shall exercise the utmost caution. But, I pray you, tell me your view of the prospects of achieving such a coup.’
‘Many people would welcome it. There can be no doubt about that. His Imperial Majesty is mad beyond question, and now dangerously so. For the sake of Russia he should be deposed. In fact if he is not, the country will be utterly ruined. I take it you are acquainted with the history of his short reign?’
‘As far as a foreigner can be, sir. I know, of course, that he began by being ardently anti-French and sent his army under your great General, Suvoroff, to reconquer Italy; then, after Suvoroff’s brilliantly successful campaign, the Emperor of Austria so misused his army that the Czar broke with the Austrians and recalled his forces. After the breach …’
‘Do you know what has happened to General Suvoroff since?’ the Count put in.
‘No, sir, I have no idea.’
‘When he was bringing his army back to Russia, His Imperial Majesty decreed that the General’s entry into St. Petersburg should be a triumph equal to that any Caesar had enjoyed, made him a present of many thousands of serfs and loaded him with decorations and jewels. When Suvoroff reached Riga he received a despatch by courier. It told him that the Czar had deprived him of the command of the army, of his rank as a Field Marshal, of all his decorations and of all his property. And this without any reason whatsoever. Suvoroff followed his army back a broken man. He refuses to see anyone or receive help from his friends, and now lies dying in a hovel.’
‘Can this be true?’ Roger exclaimed aghast. ‘The great Suvoroff! The Empress Catherine’s most succes
sful General! The hero that all Russia has taken to its heart! I wonder that the whole army did not mutiny at such treatment of its beloved veteran leader.’
Vorontzoff shrugged, ‘ ’Tis true enough, and it’s not that alone that the army has to complain about. Formerly the troops wore a comfortable uniform suited to campaigning in all weathers: a pair of roomy pantaloons with the ends tucked into boots of soft leather, a loose jacket and hair cut short at the back of the neck below a round helmet. Under such a costume they could wear either thick underclothes or only a thin shirt as was best suited to the climate. But our crazy Czar has altered all that. He has put them into uniforms of the German pattern, such as he designed for his Marines at Gatshina. Now they must wear tight tail coats and skin-tight breeches, whether or not they shiver in the cold, long gaiters that cramp the legs, tall shakos that do not balance easily on the head and, a thing they hate above all, grow their back hair long then bedaub it with grease and flour to make it into a queue.’
‘Then ‘tis certain we’d meet with no opposition from the army.’
‘From the army, no. But it is scattered far and wide. The capital is garrisoned by the Brigade of Guards. There are ten thousand of them and the majority of the officers and noncommissioned officers were formerly Gatshina Marines, so are loyal to the Emperor.’
‘Then,’ said Roger, ‘if ‘tis to be done at all, as I expected, it will have to be concerted within the Palace and the troops presented with a fait accompli. What is the situation there?’
Vorontzoff sadly shook his head. ‘In recent years it has changed from a gay and happy meeting place, where the Empress Catherine gave a warmer welcome to artists, philosophers and literary men than they received at any other Court in Europe, into a vast, gloomy fortress hedged about with every form of defence against surprise attack. And through the empty corridors there now stalk bigotry, suspicion, cruelty and fear.’
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