matters. Religious training was confined to instruction in the
forms of the Orthodox Church and the repetition of prayers by
rote; dogmatic questions Nicholas neither understood nor
cared about; and, in spite of his reverence for his brother
Alexander, the latter’s mysticism had not the faintest influence
upon him.
Though a colonel in his cradle and a general since 1808, the grand-duke Nicholas did not see any active service until 1814, when he was allowed to join the Russian head-quarters in France but not to take part in any fighting. It is characteristic of him that from this time onwards he never wore civilian dress. In 1815 he was with the Allies in Paris, and in the following year set out on the grand tour, visiting Moscow and the western provinces of Russia, Berlin (where his engagement to Princess Charlotte Louise, daughter of Frederick William III., was arranged) and England, where his handsome presence and charming address created a profound impression.[1] On the 1/13th of July 1817 took place at St Petersburg his marriage to Princess Charlotte (Alexandra Feodorovna), the beginning of those intimate relations between the courts of Berlin and St Petersburg which were later to become of great international importance. On the 17/29th of April 1818 their first child, the future emperor Alexander II., was born. In the autumn Nicholas was placed in command of the 2nd brigade of the 1st division of the Guard. In 1819 the emperor Alexander first mentioned his intention to abdicate in favour of Nicholas, Constantine consenting to stand aside; but he took no steps to initiate his prospective heir in affairs of state, and the grand-duke continued to be confined to his military duties. In 1820 a further important step in the matter of the succession was taken in the divorce of Constantine from the grand-duchess Anne and his re-marriage to Johanna Grudzinska (see Constantine Pavlovich). In January 1822 it was decided in a family council, with the knowledge though not in the presence of Nicholas, that Constantine’s petition to be relieved of the burden of the crown, for which he felt himself unfitted, should be granted. It was not, however, until August 1823 that the emperor drew up the necessary papers, in the presence of the metropolitan Philaret and other witnesses, and deposited them in sealed packets, to be opened at his death, with the council of state, the senate and the holy synod. For some reason, which can only be conjectured, Constantine was not made a party to this proceeding.
Alexander I. died at Taganrog on the 1st of December 1825. When, some days later, the news reached St Petersburg, all was confusion and uncertainty. Constantine was at Warsaw; Nicholas, who on the 3rd of May of the same year had become chief of the 2nd division of the infantry of the Guard, was too conscious of his unpopularity in the army—the fruit of his drastic discipline—to dare to assume the crown without a public abdication on the part of the legitimate heir. No steps were taken to open the sealed packets, and he himself took the oath to Constantine, and, with characteristic contempt for constitutional forms, usurped the functions of the senate and council of state by himself ordering its imposition on the regiments stationed in St Petersburg. But Constantine refused to come to St Petersburg, or to do more than himself take the oath to Nicholas as emperor, and write assuring him of his loyalty. The result was a three weeks’ interregnum, of which the discontented spirits in the army took advantage to bring to a head a plot that had long been hatching in favour of constitutional reform. When on the 14th of December the troops who had already taken the oath to Constantine were ordered to take another to Nicholas it was easy to persuade them that this was a treasonable plot against the true emperor. The Moscow regiment refused to take the oath, and part of it marched, shouting for Constantine and “Constitution,”[2] to the square before the Senate House, where they were joined by a company of the Guard and the sailors from the warships. In this crisis Nicholas showed high personal courage, if little decision and initiative. It was entirely uncertain how many, and Which, regiments could be trusted. For hours he stood, or sat on horseback, amid the surging crowd, facing the mutinous soldiers—who had loaded their muskets and formed square—while effort after effort was made to bring them to reason, sometimes at the cost of life—as in the case of Count Miloradovich, military governor of St Petersburg, who was mortally wounded by a pistol shot while arguing with the mutineers. Nicholas was saved by the very belief of the conspirators in the universal sympathy of the army with their aims. Had the mutinous troops early in the day received the order to attack, they would have carried the waverers with them; but they hesitated to fire on comrades whom they expected to see march over to their side; and when at last the emperor had steeled his heart to use force, a few rounds of grape-shot sufficed to quell the mutiny. The chief conspirators—Prince Shchepin-Rostovski, Suthoff, Ryleyev, Prince Sergius Trubetskoi, Prince Obolenski and others—were arrested the same night and interrogated by the emperor in person. A special commission, consisting entirely of officers, was then set up; and before this, for five months, the prisoners were subjected to a rigorous inquisition.[3] It was soon clear that the Decabrist[4] rising was but one manifestation of a vast conspiracy permeating the whole army. A military rising on a large scale in the south was only averted by the news of the failure of the mutiny at St Petersburg; and at Moscow there were many arrests, including that of Colonel Paul Pestel, the chief of the revolutionary southern league. The prisoners were finally brought to trial before a supreme criminal court established by imperial ukaz on the 1st of June 1826; there were 121 of them and their trial had concluded by the 12th of June. Some were condemned to death, others to solitary confinement in fortresses, others to the Siberian mines and colonies. Of the latter many were accompanied by their wives, though the Russian law allows divorce in the case of such sentences; the emperor unwillingly allowed the devoted women to go, but decreed that any children born to them in Siberia would be illegitimate.
Firmly seated on his throne, Nicholas proceeded to fill up the gaps in his education by studying the condition of his empire. In spite of his reverence for his brother’s memory, he made a clean sweep of “the angel’s” Bible Society,[5] and other paraphernalia of official hypocrisy; as for Alexander’s projects of reform, the pitiful legacy of a life of unfulfilled purposes, these were reported upon by committees, considered and shelved. Nicholas too saw the need for reform; the Decabrist conspiracy had burnt that into his soul; but he had his own views as to the reform needed. The state was corrupt, disorganized; what was wanted was not more liberty but more discipline. So he put civil servants, professors and students into uniform, and for little offences had them marched to the guard-house; thought was disciplined by the censorship, the army by an unceasing round of parades and inspections. The one great gift of Nicholas I. to Russia, a gift which he really believed would be welcome because it would bring every subject into immediate contact with the throne, was—the secret police, the dreaded Third Section.[6]
The crowning fault of Nicholas was, however, that he would not delegate his authority; whom could he trust but himself? In this he resembled his contemporary the emperor Francis I. But Francis would “sleep upon” a difficult problem; Nicholas never slept. His constitution was of iron, his capacity for work prodigious; reviews and parades, receptions of deputations, visits to public institutions, then eight or nine hours in his
- ↑ See Stockmar, Denkwürdigkeiten (Brunswick, 1872), p. 98 seq.; and, for a later impression, Queen Victoria to the king of the Belgians, 4th of June 1844, in Queen Victoria’s Letters.
- ↑ They had been told that this was the name of Constantine’s wife.
- ↑ The prisoners were kept in solitary confinement in the casemates of the inner fortress of St Peter and St Paul. They were brought blindfolded before the commission, and then suddenly confronted with their interrogators. Many went mad under the ordeal, one died, and one starved himself to death (Schiemann, ii. 73).
- ↑ From Russ. Dekabr, December.
- ↑ “The Holy Scriptures distributed with an absurd profusion in a country where the clergy itself is hardly able to understand and explain them” had been the “prime source of all the secret societies established in the empire.” Pièce remise par S.M. l’Empereur Nicolas, in Nesselrode vi. 275.
- ↑ I.e. of the Private Chancery of the emperor.
