Part 18

The conspirators found in these difficulties a rare opportunity for the attempt to carry out their plans. The interregnum had lasted fifteen days, and it was not till the 24th of December that Nicholas took possession of the Imperial Palace. On the 25th of December he read to the council the final renunciation of the Crown by Constantine, and on the following day he was proclaimed Emperor. That day the conspirators and the rebels assembled in the huge square—the Isaac Place—and shouted for Constantine and “his bride, the Constitution,” the soldiers believing in their innocence that “Constitution” was the name of the Grand Duke’s real wife. Nicholas, unarmed, but attended by General Milarodowitch, the Governor of St. Petersburg, and a battalion of faithful grenadiers, and accompanied by M. de la Ferronays, the French Ambassador, left the Palace and faced the rebels. The general, who was greatly beloved by the whole army, went forward and tried to speak with them, but he was at once bayoneted and shot.

The new Emperor showed the greatest courage and patience, and it was not until near nightfall that, the rebels having fired the first shot, he ordered his artillery to put an end to the trouble. Some two hundred men were killed by grape and canister. The five ringleaders were taken prisoners, tried and hanged some months later. One of the Princes Troubetzkoi, who had been foremost in his threats against the Emperor’s life, being sent for by the Tsar, threw himself at his feet and implored his pardon. “Sit down,” said Nicholas, “and write to your wife at my dictation.” The Prince sat down and the Tsar dictated: “My life is spared.” The Prince was so overcome that he could write no more. “Now seal your letter and go,” said the Tsar; “take your life, and spend it in remorse and repentance.”

The remainder of the conspirators, men of noble family, were sent to Siberia—so many of them as were still alive were pardoned and set free by that generous and noble sovereign, Alexander the Second, on his accession to the throne thirty years later. With the Dekabrists, the “men of December,” as they were called, the cry for Constantine was a mere pretext—the seizing of a possible chance. The real object was the abolition of Royalty and the proclaiming of a constitution. Nicholas has sometimes been accused of taking too stern measures against the Dekabrists. With that judgment I cannot agree. He was attacked with armed force, his murder and that of his whole family being the object; he did not strike the first blow. He could not expect to quell a formidable revolution in the army with rose-water. It was no sudden, passionate outburst of a people aching under the sense of wrong. The murderous plot, long meditated and carefully prepared, had been executed in cold blood. His brother lay dead at Taganrog. He and his dearly-loved boy, whom he had left entrusted to sure hands in the palace, were to have been the next victims. The whole conspiracy lay revealed as in an open book. It was all the more dangerous in that it was not a mob riot, but a conspiracy of men of high birth, education and position, corrupting the army itself. Put yourselves in his place. That he was horror-stricken at the massacre was proved by the pathetic cry which he uttered to M. de la Ferronays, the French Ambassador, who never left his side throughout that cruel day: “Ah! quel commencement de règne.” It was to him the skeleton at the feast throughout his life.

Shortly after his accession to the throne the Duke of Wellington was sent to Russia as special ambassador, nominally to congratulate him, but also with the object of inducing the new Tsar to adopt a conciliatory attitude towards the Sultan, between whom and the Greeks there was much trouble. The irony of Fate made the Duke take with him as Secretary of Embassy, Lord Fitzroy Somerset (Lord Raglan), the general whose victories twenty-nine years later in the defence of Turkey were to break the proud heart of that same Tsar. It was during these negotiations that Nicholas formed his estimate of the Duke’s character, and caused him to cherish in his heart the memory of the great soldier as of a model to be copied. It was then, too, that he first declared that he had no higher ambition than to be a “gentleman,” using the English word; and whatever may have been his faults, whatever his ambition, a truthful, honest gentleman he remained to his life’s end. To the Duke of Wellington he made no secret of his determination to allow no foreign Power, or Powers, to interfere between himself and the Porte. That was his lifelong consistent policy. If Nicholas was reactionary, if he hated education and opposed the spread of science, if he strained the powers of absolutism almost to the breaking point, he did so openly, and it was the tragedy of his accession which poisoned his many fine qualities.

During his reign the ship of State was seldom in smooth waters. He sent Prince Mentschikoff to Persia to announce his accession to the throne, with instructions to enter into negotiations for the settlement of the frontier questions which were in dispute. If the maintenance of peace be the proper aim of diplomacy, Mentschikoff was not a successful ambassador. His mission to Persia ended in war, as did his embassy to Turkey more than a quarter of a century later. The Russians, under Prince Paskiewitch, were victorious, and the province of Erivan was added to Russia.

Poland was the chief thorn in his side in 1828; two years after his coronation at Moscow he caused himself to be crowned King of Poland at Warsaw. The ceremonial was gorgeous, and the King-Emperor, invoking the Supreme Majesty of Heaven, prayed that he might govern for the happiness of his people. He also wrote to the Pope, thanking His Holiness for the reception given to the Tsarevitch, promising to “protect the well-being of his Catholic subjects respecting their convictions,” etc. That he was sincere in these undertakings admits of little doubt. Unfortunately he was represented at Warsaw by his brother Constantine, who, as his elder, and as having renounced the throne in his favour, had more influence than an ordinary governor would have had. The revolution in Poland broke out in 1830, and Prince Sanguszko, the head of one of the noblest families in the country, people whom I afterwards knew, was one of the leaders. He was taken prisoner and degraded, and his estates were forfeited. It was said that when he was sent to Siberia, the Emperor, with his own hand, wrote that the journey was to be made on foot. When I was in Russia many years later, I had reason to believe that this was not true. The troubles in Poland lasted for many years—indeed, were never extinguished—and they led to gross exaggerations.

I was in Paris as a small boy in 1845, and I well remember hearing all the horrors that were hawked about there, and all the stories of cruelty. Especially I recollect one day how when certain news came to one of the Prince de la Moskowa’s concerts—he was the son of Marshal Ney and an accomplished musician and conductor—the pious Roman Catholics present lashed themselves into a fury of emotion over the sufferings of the nuns of St. Basil. It was affirmed that they had been stripped naked, flogged and tortured, and that when they were starving and begged for food their mouths were filled with earthworms. Those were the lies by which the indignation of their co-religionists was aroused by Polish agents. The best informed people did not believe them. That the Poles were cruelly treated, and harshly misgoverned, was certainly to be laid to the charge of the Grand Duke Constantine. He had inherited the still-living hatreds and the memory of Moscow in the beginning of the seventeenth century. There were old scores to be settled, and his doctrine was an eye for an eye, the _lex talionis_ in its greatest rigidity. It would have been a hard matter in any case for the Tsar to bring Russia and Poland into harmony. With Constantine at Warsaw it was impossible—yet the Grand Duke had married a Polish lady.

The affairs of Poland were an apple of discord between France and Russia. The military successes of Nicholas were really confined to the Persian campaign, for although in his subsequent operations on the Danube in 1828 (poor Wallachia and Moldavia), his troops had some success, and even took Varna, the expedition served no great purpose, while it effectually showed the Tsar’s incapacity as a leader, for having taken the field in person, he had to return to St. Petersburg a pronounced failure—recognized as such by his own generals.

A civil triumph was the codification of the Russian law, begun in 1827 and finished in 1846, by which the peasants greatly benefited; was the chief feat in internal administration by which his reign was distinguished.

In 1844 the Emperor Nicholas came to England and visited Queen Victoria at Windsor. The object of his visit was twofold. The Queen had received Louis Philippe, whom he hated and despised, and he was determined to see whether he could not counteract the wily old King’s influence. Secondly, the Convention of London of 1841 placed the Ottoman dominions under the protection of the Powers, and this manifestly did not suit the Tsar’s book. He had his own views as to the Sublime Porte, and would brook no interference between himself and the Sultan, whose Christian subjects he wished to place under his own shield. That was for him a principle of religion. It was a momentous visit, destined to bear bitter fruit ten years later.

Sir Robert Peel was at this time Prime Minister, and Lord Aberdeen Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. It was only natural that the Foreign Secretary should have much conversation with his Sovereign’s illustrious guest, and Lord Aberdeen was, by his gentle and conciliatory manners, the man, above all others, fitted to charm the Tsar, who to the last retained an affectionate admiration for him. Perhaps Lord Aberdeen’s deportment towards the Emperor was a little too deferential; at any rate, he left Nicholas convinced that the Russian views as to Turkey were shared by the British Government, and it was with unfeigned joy that in 1852 the Emperor learnt of the accession to power as Prime Minister of a man whom he flattered himself that he had talked over to his way of thinking, and whose peace-loving disposition would never allow him to go to war on behalf of the autonomy of Turkey. That he honestly believed that he had had such an assurance from Lord Aberdeen cannot be doubted.

In its main features the story of the Crimean War will never be forgotten. The storming of the heights of the Alma, which Nicholas believed to be impregnable, the beating back of the tidal wave of Russian infantry at Inkermann, when my old friend, Billy Hewitt, ordered to spike his guns and retire, answered, “Spike be damned!” and went on firing till they were red hot and the enemy were in retreat—just one gallant deed among many of that bloody battle; above all, the heroic charge of the six hundred at Balaclava, are feats of arms which must set men on fire as long as they have pulses to quicken. But how many men are there nowadays who could give any account of the causes which led to the war?

The quarrels between the monks of the Greek and Latin churches in Palestine seem trivial enough reason to have started so great a catastrophe. The custody of the key of the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, the right to worship in the Church of the Virgin near the Garden of Gethsemane, and the custody of the Sanctuaries of Jerusalem, were the first pretexts of hostilities. That there was in the mind of the Emperor Nicholas a far wider-reaching motive, hardly suspected perhaps even by himself, will be seen presently.

In the year 1740 a treaty concluded between Louis XV. and the Porte, practically gave the care of the Sacred Places to the Latin Church. To the Greeks certain similar concessions had been made later on by firmans, or edicts of the Sultan, which, however, could not technically be held to over-ride the solemn treaty with France. Louis Napoleon took up the cause of the Latins, and his ambassador, M. de Lavalette, insisted with some violence on the exclusive rights of the Latin monks. The French people at large probably cared little for these squabbles between the rival creeds. But to Louis Napoleon they furnished an opportunity for securing to himself, as Defender of the Faith, a powerful friend in the Church. He wished to arrogate to himself those sacred rights of primogeniture which had been the pride of the Kings of France. It was, moreover, an outlet for that feverish activity which his home policy had made a necessity for him. In the month of December, 1852, a silver star, graven with the arms of France, was deposited in the church at Bethlehem with much pompous ceremonial, attended by the Turkish officials, and the Latin Patriarch with triumphant joy received the coveted keys of the church and Holy Manger.

The fury of the Tsar was terrible. The insult to his Church, which he loved, and the affront to himself, were enhanced by the source from which they came. He had a special horror of all revolutions, pursued to his dying day by the nightmare of the conspiracy of December, 1825, the tragedy which had inaugurated his reign. The revolutions of France were odious to him. Never would he, in the fullest sense, accept either Louis Philippe or Louis Napoleon as sovereigns equal with himself. Neither of them would he address as “Monsieur mon frère.”

And now behold an upstart who was buffeting and opposing him in what he looked upon as the most sacred of his Imperial duties as head of the Church! The spiritual ambitions of the Tsars were hereditary. His father, the Emperor Paul, had been anxious even to don the priestly robes and celebrate the mass; but his wise and brave friend Rostopchin stopped him with a clever conceit. “Sire,” said he, “you have no rights as priest. A priest must only marry once; you have been twice married—you cannot be a priest.” The mad Emperor was convinced and refrained.

On another occasion the Metropolitan boldly stopped him when he tried to enter the Holy of Holies. Although not a priest, the Russian Tsar is head of his Church, much as the English King is the head of ours, and Nicholas took the position very seriously. It was, moreover, intolerable to him that the firmans which had been wrung from the Porte in favour of the Orthodox monks should be set aside as mere scraps of paper, on account of the more binding powers of a treaty, musty with age, extorted more than a century previously by French chicane from an unwilling or callous Sultan. He was determined to resist, and Prince Mentschikoff was sent on a special embassy to Constantinople to demand compliance with the Russian claims on behalf of the Greek Church.

Deeply religious and full of zeal for his Church, Nicholas was animated by the same spirit which spurred on the old Crusaders to face dangers and hardships of which we in these days of easy transport can have no idea, in order to wrest from the Moslem those very shrines for the guardianship of which he was striving. No one can doubt that he was honest and sincere in his pious aims. But there was something more. How could he divest himself of the hereditary ambition of Russia? It is true that in his conversations with Sir Hamilton Seymour he spoke only of the occupation, as distinct from the seizure, of Constantinople; but if he once succeeded in establishing himself there in the guise of Protector of the Greek Church throughout the Sultan’s dominions, would his people ever allow him to give up the city upon which the covetous eyes of all the Russians had so long been fixed? Would he even be willing to do so himself? Only think what it meant: the Black Sea changed from the position of an inland lake; access to the Mediterranean through the Straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles; the potentiality of a huge navy ready to dart out upon the world from hidden and unapproachable harbours; a strategic base from which to attack all the maritime Powers of Europe. The temptation would be great indeed. Kinglake summed up the position in a striking and eloquent passage:

“The strife of the Church was no fable, but, after all, though near and distinct, it was only the lesser truth. A crowd of monks, with bare foreheads, stood quarrelling for a key at the sunny gates of a church in Palestine; but beyond and above, towering high in the misty North, men saw the ambition of the Tsars.”

It is not the first time in history that religion has been made to subserve the needs of politics. Martin Luther was spiritually sincere in his attack upon the clerical abuses of the Roman Catholic Church; but the success of the movement was due to the adhesion of the semi-barbarous German princes, who cared little for religion, but caught eagerly at the chance of shaking off the temporal yoke of Rome in their states. So it was in this case. Nicholas was no doubt honestly eager to establish among the Sacred Places of Palestine the supremacy of the Church that he loved; but he knew full well that even the most agnostic of his Boyarin would be ready to draw the sword if Constantinople was the prize dangled before his eyes.

One man, the most considerable personage in the Empire after the Tsar himself, cared but little for the religious side of the contention. That man was Count Nesselrode, the Chancellor. The squabbles between the Greek and Latin monks interested him in no way, for he belonged to neither faith. Curiously enough, he was a member of the Church of England, having, in December, 1780, been baptized in the Bay of Biscay on board an English man-of-war which had given hospitality to his parents, his father being at the time Russian Minister at Lisbon; and in our communion he gratefully remained till his death, continuing from time to time, as occasion served, never less than once a year, as I have been assured, to attend the services of the English Church. However indifferent he might be to the claims of Orthodoxy, he had, nevertheless, to obey the dictates of his Imperial—and imperious—master; and, of course, to him, as to every Russian, Constantinople was an irresistible lure; still, there is no doubt that his attitude in regard to the war was but lukewarm. He would have avoided it had it been possible.

The historic embassy of Prince Mentschikoff showed the Tsar’s hand. The matter at issue was no longer one confined to the custody of a key, however sacred, or to the position of the feet on a crucifix. In the Greek crucifix the feet are nailed separately; in the Latin crucifix the feet are crossed. The Greek crucifix in the church at Gethsemane was one of the matters in dispute. The Latin monks claimed that the crucifix of the Greeks should give place to one with the feet crossed; but these became minor questions when, in the most arbitrary fashion, the prince demanded that the whole of the Christian subjects of the Sultan should be placed under the protectorate of the Tsar. What this meant will be understood when we remember that it was computed that there were some thirteen millions of these out of a total of thirty-six millions of people, and thus over something approaching a third of the Sultan’s subjects the Tsar was to be King. The Porte, well advised by Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, peremptorily refused. The Turk was ready to make some concession as regarded the Holy Places, but he would not renounce his sovereignty over any portion of his people. Foiled at every step, Prince Mentschikoff left Constantinople, and the Tsar had once more to see himself outwitted and bested by his old enemy, Lord Stratford.

Lord Stratford de Redcliffe has often been accused of having been the cause of the Crimean War, that great calamity in which, as Lord Salisbury said many years afterwards, “we backed the wrong horse.” Nothing could be more false than this charge laid against Lord Stratford, and yet probably nineteen out of every twenty Englishmen, imperfectly instructed as usual in foreign affairs, believe it to this day. The man really responsible for the war was the French Emperor, who, as so often happened during the nineteen years of his reign, was in sore need of the counter-irritant of a foreign war to calm the fever of his own subjects at home. Never was it more needful to him than at the moment when the affairs of Turkey and the religious demands of the Emperor Nicholas began to be discussed in the chanceries of Europe.

Frenchmen, and, above all, Parisians (do not forget the old saying, “Paris c’est la France”), were still under the terrible impression of the massacres of the _coup d’état_ of the 2nd to the 4th of December, 1851. Nothing could better serve the purpose of allaying the smouldering indignation than such a war as that which he saw he could foment, especially if it were carried on in concert with England. Such an alliance would immeasurably increase his prestige both at home and abroad, and, if he could arrange a visit to Queen Victoria, for which he was intriguing, would almost make it appear as if she approved or, at any rate, condoned the wholesale murders of 1851.

As a matter of fact, at the very moment when Lord Stratford was striving with all his might to save England from war, he received instructions from home directing him to order the English fleet to go to Constantinople in company with the French. This was in obedience to the French Emperor, who seemed to have dominated the British Government. Peace did not suit his plans; war did. From that moment Lord Stratford’s endeavours were frustrated; war was inevitable.

In the meantime the angry Tsar had sent his army to occupy for the second time Moldavia and Wallachia, those unhappy provinces, the Danubian Principalities, as they were then called, upon which the curse of Cain seemed to have settled for all time.

Those who have watched the landing of a crowd of Russian pilgrims at Jaffa will realize the power which Nicholas had at his back in the execution of his policy of fighting for the Holy Shrines. I have seen the old people, men and women, the tears streaming from their poor tired eyes, fall down upon their knees, to kiss the soil, the treading of which was the reward of long lives of grinding labour, privation and parsimony. I have seen an old peasant, with matted hair and beard, meanly wrapped in a sheepskin robe, sobbing out his patient heart in an ecstasy of grief at the Holy Sepulchre. In order to save up the money for this pious errand they must stint themselves, they must almost starve themselves, laying up kopeck by kopeck, looking with surety for their reward in another, a better and a less grinding life. The Church has promised it, and God will fulfil the promises of His Church.