The Tsar's Doctor (16 page)

Alexander, frustrated, quarrelled openly with Metternich more than once, but at last a compromise was reached. Three quarters of Poland, known as the Duchy of Warsaw, became a subject kingdom of Russia, the remainder would be part of Austria. Saxony was to remain independent under King Frederick Augustus, although one third of his territory was to be ceded to Prussia. France, while forced back to her 1792 frontiers, was to be allowed to keep her former colonies.

In the middle of December, as was typical of him, Alexander, who had so much enjoyed the social life of Vienna, had a sudden change of mood. His health was partly to blame. The erysipelas broke out on his leg again, and Wylie made him sit with his leg in a bucket, filled with a block of ice, sent on the orders of the Emperor Francis every day. Also it was rumoured that he had syphilis, which, although feasible, cannot be proved.

It was at this point, his mental and physical health plainly at a low ebb, that he began an association with the mysterious Baroness Julie von Krüdner, who claimed to have visionary sight. Firstly, while still in Vienna he received a message from her telling him that he was ‘one upon whom the world has conferred much greater power than the world recognizes’.
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Then when she sent a warning of ‘a storm approaching . . . the Bourbon lilies of France have appeared only to disappear’ shortly before the news came of Napoleon’s escape from Elba, Alexander became convinced of the woman’s magical power. When Napoleon sent Alexander a copy of the secret treaty made between Austria, Great Britain and France, Alexander, having read the document, summoned Metternich to his side and told him that ‘
notre sainte loi commande de pardoner les offenses
’.

Alexander finally left the Austrian capital on 25 May. Reaching the town of Heilbronn on 4 June,
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he had retired to read his Bible when his aide-de-camp, Prince Peter Volkonsky, tapped timidly on his door. A strange woman had arrived, he said, looking rather like a peasant dressed in simple clothes, but she claimed she was the Baroness von Krüdner and insisted she must see the tsar.

This was the first of many meetings. She spoke to him with words of hope and consolation, in his words, ‘as though able to read my very soul’. We can only imagine what Wylie thought of her, suspicious of her integrity as he, along with so many others, must certainly have been. But he may have believed her harmless, perhaps even beneficial, as she seemed to bring comfort and tranquillity to Alexander’s troubled mind.

From Heilbronn Alexander moved to Heidelberg, where he heard of the British and Prussian victory over Napoleon at Waterloo. He then travelled on to Paris, which he reached on 10 July. This time, rather than accepting the offer of Talleyrand’s mansion, he stayed in the Elysée Palace, still associated in the minds of Parisians, as in Alexander’s, with the Empress Josephine, whose town residence it once had been.

The trial of Napoleon’s adherents was now the main talk of the city. Several of these desperate men, headed by General Lebedoyère, planned to overpower the guards at the houses where the allied sovereigns were staying and assassinate them all. The plan failed. Lebedoyère confessed and his wife threw herself at the feet of King Louis and then at those of Alexander, pleading that his life be spared. Alexander replied that, although he truly pitied her, he could not interfere with the decision of the French tribunals and Lebedoyère, accordingly, was executed.

Alexander knew that his life was in danger. On 7 August, at a ball held by the Duke of Wellington, a letter was handed to him signed ‘the Captain of the Regicides’ who threatened to kill him if he did not proclaim Napoleon’s son as king of France. It is claimed that a bottle of poisoned wine was placed on his table and that his cook, who tasted it, nearly died as a result.
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The baroness pursued Alexander to Paris where he spent some time with her nearly every day. It was noticed that he became increasingly withdrawn, taking part in only formal ceremonies such as taking the salute of his own troops and standing beside Wellington, whom he greatly admired as, in the Place Louis XV, the Guards and the Highland regiments marched by in a review.
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In September, at another ceremony, when Wellington and Marshal Blücher and the monarchs of Austria and Prussia were present, Julie von Krüdner actually stood by Alexander, wearing a straw hat.

Julie von Krüdner is thought to have been the inspiration behind the Holy Alliance, which, modified by Metternich, was signed by Alexander, Frederick William of Prussia and the Emperor Francis of Austria, on 26 September 1815.

This strange pledge was designed to unite the rulers of the continent by taking as their only guide ‘the precepts of the Christian religion’. Emperor Francis, having read it, decided that it simply confirmed his suspicion that Alexander was mad. Nonetheless he signed it, although Metternich shared his doubts as to the sanity of the tsar. So too did Wellington, who happened to be with Castlereagh when Alexander came to explain his idea, and found it hard to keep a straight face.

Julie von Krüdner herself claimed the idea of the Holy Alliance as her own. However, by the time that the treaty, toned down by Metternich, was signed, Alexander, for some unexplained reason, had grown tired of her. Her association with him, however, had now become so well known that shortly after leaving Paris for the German states, suspected by the authorities of being a Russian spy, she was chased from town to town.

A decree of the Second Treaty of Paris declared Alexander King of Poland. Entering Warsaw on 7 November, wearing the Polish uniform with the order of the White Eagle, which he had re-established, he was loudly and joyfully acclaimed. He refused to accept the keys offered by civic dignitaries, saying he had come not as a conqueror but as a friend. Instead he partook of the traditional municipal gift of bread and salt.

‘The Poles exhausted demonstrations of respect, joy, and attachment,’ wrote Count Joseph de Maistre, the lawyer, diplomat and philosopher who, a native of Savoy, was the ambassador of the King of Sardinia to Russia from 1803–17.

The winter had now set in with heavy falls of snow so that it was not until 12 December that, after an atrocious journey over ice-bound roads, the tsar reached St Petersburg at last.

Once there he was back in harness, immediately shouldering the affairs of state. De Maistre, describing the tsar’s amazing physical and mental resilience, describes how ‘Yesterday he went to bed at three a.m., rose at six, and visited all the military hospitals. So active a mind would be useless if it did not command an iron body.’

The ambassador does not mention the even more surprising endurance of the tall, uniformed figure of Wylie, who despite the fact that he was nearly fifty, as head of the medical department was, as his great-niece testifies, dragged out of bed to be present beside the emperor on these exhaustingly thorough tours of inspection, which kept the hospitals and other civic authorities so constantly on the alert.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Rebuilding From the Ruins of the War

Alexander returned to St Petersburg to find the Persian ambassador waiting to see him. He brought with him presents from the shah sent with the intention of persuading him to restore the two provinces ceded by Persia to Russia in 1813. The gifts consisted of three elephants in black accoutrements and red leather boots to protect their feet from the snow. Sadly, however, the huge animals slipped about on the ice.

Alexander did not agree to the shah’s request, to the great consternation of the Persian ambassador, who claimed he would lose his head as the result. He did, however, send his own envoy, General Yermolov, with presents of enormous mirrors, rich furs and crystal ornaments, which so pleased the shah that he agreed to forgo his demands.

The tsar left St Petersburg for Moscow in August. Then it was Warsaw in October, where he found great changes taking place. New houses were appearing and the streets of the city were paved. He then raced north to Vilna before returning to St Petersburg within a matter of days.

This was a time of innovation, as a new steam boat, one of the first in Europe, plied its way back and forth to Cronstadt (Kronstadt), Russia’s great naval base. In the following year Alexander reviewed the fleet there before proceeding to Moscow where, with the rest of his family, he spent the winter. Here again, while staying in the Kremlin, in the very part used by Napoleon from where he had watched the city burn, he was constantly occupied at most hours of the day and night.

An Englishman visiting Moscow a short time later was amazed by the cleanliness and order in the hospitals and public buildings which were ‘enforced by the constant, unexpected visits Alexander pays to them, for he is liable to appear and go through a minute inspection at any hour of the day, and sometimes in the middle of the night’.

Alexander had returned to Russia to find that the Medical Academy in Moscow, established by his grandmother, Catherine the Great, had been burned to the ground by the French. Ordering Wylie to replace it, he gave him a free hand.

Wylie had long since decided that the policy of importing doctors – many of whom were Scottish – into Russia, as established by Catherine the Great, was now greatly out of date. He believed it to be better by far to train native doctors, familiar with Russian customs and with indigenous disease.

Told that a house of three storeys with Doric pillars was available, he successfully approached the government for a grant of money to allow the building to be bought. Once converted, and with large extensions added, it became the centre for the new training college for doctors. The pediment, showing the cipher of Alexander I, bore the inscription in Russian: ‘The Medical-Chirurgical Academy’.

A similar institution was commissioned in St Petersburg. As in Moscow, it was modelled on the Medical Society of Edinburgh University where Wylie had studied as a young man. Each Academy contained an anatomical museum and a botanical garden where much rhubarb, then thought a panacea for most illnesses, was grown. In addition there was a Medical Section, a Veterinary Section and a Pharmaceutical Section. Three languages – Latin, Greek and German – were compulsory, being essential to medical students, the first two for medical classification, and the third as the language in which many treatises were transcribed. The annual cost of the maintenance of the St Petersburg Academy alone was 169,000,300 roubles
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while the building in Moscow took 147,000,340 roubles. In addition a sum of 69,000,650 roubles, common to them both, included pensions to professors, prizes to the students, uniforms for the pupils on taking up professions, and finally travelling expenses and the upkeep of libraries and museums.

Wylie remained head of both colleges for thirty years. In April 1836, a contributor to the
British and Foreign Medical Journal
paid tribute to his achievement with these words:

It is to Sir James Wylie that Russia is indebted for the organization of her medical schools both civil and military and it has been by his persevering industry that the medical academy of Petersburg and Moscow has arrived at the honourable rank which it now holds amongst medical institutions.
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Wylie, with the tsar’s encouragement, had already begun transforming the military hospitals, which, at the time of his arrival in Russia, were in the most deplorable state. Old dilapidated buildings, dark and badly ventilated, infested with rats and other vermin such as lice, were, to the patients who entered them, practically a death sentence. Yet despite this he met with great obstruction in his attempts to modernize and reform these long-established institutions. The old Russian doctors, hidebound in their methods, were utterly opposed to change. To convince them, he hit on the simple but clever idea of placing plants in various windows. Those facing south sprouted happily while the others withered and died.

The new hospitals were built on the lines of the institutions which Wylie, with the tsar, enthusiastic as himself for improvement, had inspected in London and Paris. A doctor who visited the Military Hospital in Moscow in 1819, described it as situated in a high and airy suburb, with an elegant frontage and two extensive wings.

It contained twelve-hundred patients but is capable of receiving fifteen-hundred. Opposite the foreign burying ground are a number of one-storey, wooden, yellow painted houses, which belong also to this hospital and which are provided with beds for three-hundred-and-fifty sick. At this establishment everything seems conveniently arranged. There is a receiving room where the patients are examined by a physician or surgeon and accepted; a bathroom and baths well supplied with cold and warm water in which those admitted, when their state allows it, are all well bathed and cleaned, or in which the sick receive particular baths by order of the physician, and a room for the deposition of the patient’s own clothes when they receive the dress of the hospital. Upstairs, in the centre of the front, a grand saloon with a lofty arched roof, embellished in the ends by Corinthian pillars, contains pictures of Peter the Great, Catherine I, Elizabeth and Catherine II. From this hall is the entry into the balcony opposite the summer gardens from which the view is extensive and pleasant. This hall is designed for the reception of the Emperor who never fails to visit this hospital when he comes to Moscow.

Most of the wards are immensely large and capable of containing a hundred-and-twenty beds. A single ward occupies the whole breadth of the building, in the centre, running lengthwise. Ranges of beds are disposed along the walls of these wards. The bedsteads of wood are painted green. Each patient has two sheets, the upper one of which is stitched to the counterpane. The heating of the wards in winter and the ventilation at all times are excellently managed . . . we found everything in the cleanest and best order . . . The Military Hospital is a splendid establishment. It does the highest honour to the Empire and to all those concerned in its direction. The cost per patient is little more than half of the Civil Hospitals – 10 to 12 kopeks per day.
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