tsar to the English court. This visit, in spite of the favourable
personal impression made by the emperor, was the starting-point
of a fresh and fateful divergence; for it was now that the tsar
first openly raised the question of the eventual partition of the
inheritance of the “Sick Man,” as he called Turkey. The whole
question, however, was indefinitely postponed by the events
culminating in the revolutions of 1848. Nicholas foresaw the
troubles brewing, and warned Frederick William IV. of Prussia,
in a tone of lofty and paternal remonstrance, of the inevitable
results of his constitutional experiments. When the storm burst,
he remained entrenched behind the barriers of his own disciplined
empire; sovereigns truckling in a panic to insurgent democracies
he would not lift a finger to help;[1] it was not till Francis Joseph
of Austria in 1849 appealed to him in the name of autocracy,
reasserting its rights, that he consented to intervene, and, true
to the promise made at Münchengrätz in 1833, crushed the
insurgent Hungarians and handed back their country as a free
gift to the Habsburg king. Scarcely less valuable to Austria was
the tsar’s intervention in the quarrel between Austria and Prussia
arising out of the Hesse incident and the general question of the
hegemony of Germany. In October 1850 he had a meeting with
Francis Joseph at Warsaw, at which Count Brandenburg and
Prince Schwarzenberg were present. Prussia, he declared, must
in the German question return to the basis of the treaties of 1815
and renew her entente with Austria; this was the only way of
preserving the old friendship of Prussia and Russia. In face
of the threat conveyed in this, the Prussian government decided
to maintain peace (Nov. 2), Radowitz resigning as a protest.
Thus Nicholas, who refused to believe in the perfidy ascribed by
Frederick William to Austria,[2] was the immediate cause of
Prussia’s humiliation at Olmütz.
Nicholas was soon to have personal experience of the perfidy of Austria. It was a small matter that Count Prokesch-Osten, the Austrian ambassador, was discovered to be supplying a “foul Jew” editor with copy; more serious was Austria’s attitude in the troubles that led up to the Crimean War. Gratitude, in the tsar’s opinion, should have made her neutral if not friendly; the revelation of her ingratitude came upon him with the shock of a painful surprise. The first cause of all the evils that followed was his attitude towards Napoleon III. He was forced to recognize the new French empire, but he would recognize no more than the fact of its existence (du fait en lui-même); he refused to address the emperor of the French as a brother sovereign. He attempted, moreover, to revive the function of the triple alliance as guardian of Europe against French aggression. The resentment of Napoleon awakened the slumbering Eastern Question by reviving the obsolescent claims of France to the guardianship of the Holy Places, and this aroused the pride of the Orthodox tsar, their guardian by right of faith and in virtue of a clause of the treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji (1774), as interpreted in the light of subsequent events. Nicholas could not believe that Christian powers would resent his claim to protect the Christian subjects of the sultan; he believed he could count on the friendship of Austria and Prussia; as for Great Britain, he would try to come to a frank understanding with her (hence the famous conversations with Sir Hamilton Seymour on the 9th and 14th of January 1853, reviving the “Sick Man” arguments of 1844), but in any case he had the assurance of Baron Brunnow, his ambassador in London, that the influence of Cobden and Bright, the eloquent apostles of peace, was enough to prevent her from appealing to arms against him.
The disillusionment that followed was profound. In October 1853 Nicholas met his brother monarchs of the triple alliance at Warsaw for the last time. In December, at the conference of Vienna, Austria had already passed over to the enemy. Prussia was wavering, neutral indeed, but joining the other powers in a guarantee of the integrity of Turkey (9th April 1854), urging the tsar to accept the decisions of the Vienna conference, and on his refusal signing a defensive alliance with Austria (April 20, 1854), which included among the casus belli the incorporation in Russia of the banks of the Danube and a Russian march on Constantinople. Thus Nicholas, the pillar of the European alliance, found himself isolated and at war, or potentially at war, with all Europe. The invasion of the Crimea followed, and with it a fresh revelation of the corruption and demoralization of the Russian system. At the outset Nicholas had grimly remarked that “Generals January and February” would prove his best allies. These acted, however, impartially; and if thousands of British and French soldiers perished of cold and disease in the trenches before Sevastopol, the tracks leading from the centre of Russia into the Crimea were marked by the bones of Russian dead. The revelation of his failure broke the spirit of the Iron Tsar, and on the 2nd of March 1855 he threw away the life which a little ordinary care would have saved.
The character of the emperor Nicholas was summed up with great insight by Queen Victoria in a letter to the king of the Belgians, written during the tsar’s visit to England (June 11, 1844). “He is stern and severe—with fixed principles of duty which nothing on earth will make him change; very clever I do not think him, and his mind is an uncivilized one; his education has been neglected; politics and military concerns are the only things he takes great interest in; the arts and all softer occupations he is insensible to, but he is sincere, I am certain, sincere even in his most despotic acts, from a sense that that is the only way to govern; he is not, I am sure, aware of the dreadful cases of individual misery which he so often causes, for I can see by various instances that he is kept in utter ignorance of many things, which his people carry out in most corrupt ways, while he thinks that he is extremely just . . . and I am sure much never reaches his ears, and (as you observed) how can it? He is, I should say, too frank, for he talks so openly before people, which he should not do, and with difficulty restrains himself. His anxiety to be believed is very great, and I must say his personal promises I am inclined to believe; then his feelings are very strong; he feels kindness deeply. . . . He is not happy, and that melancholy which is visible in the countenance made me sad at times; the sternness of the eyes goes very much off when you know him, and changes according to his being put out or not. . . . He is bald now, but in his chevalier Garde uniform he is magnificent still, and very striking.”
The emperor was a kind husband and father, and his domestic life was very happy. He had seven children: (1) the emperor Alexander II. (q.v.); (2) the grand-duchess Maria (1819–1876), duchess of Leuchtenberg; (3) the grand-duchess Olga (1822–1892), consort of King Charles of Württemberg; (4) the grand-duchess Alexandra (1825–1844), married to Prince Frederick of Hesse-Cassel; (5) the grand-duke Constantine Nikolayevich (1827–1892); (6) the grand-duke Nicholas Nikolayevich (1831–1891); (7) the grand-duke Michael Nikolayevich (b. 1832). The second son of the latter, the grand-duke Michael Mikhailovich (b. 1861), who was morganatically married, his wife bearing the title of Countess Torby, took up his residence in England.
Authorities.—All other works on Nicholas I. have been more or less superseded by Professor Theodor Schiemann’s Geschichte Russlands unter Kaiser Nikolaus I., of which the 1st vol., Kaiser Alexander I. und die Ergebnisse seiner Lebensarbeit, was published at Berlin in 1904; the 2nd, carrying the history of Nicholas’s reign down to the revolutions of 1830, in 1908. It is based on a large mass of unpublished material, and considerably modifies, e.g. the account of the accession of Nicholas and of the Decabrist conspiracy given in chapter xiii. of vol. x. of the Cambridge Modern History, and tells for the first time the secret history of the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29. The great Recueil des traités conclus par la Russie of T. T. de Martens (St Petersburg, 1874–1909) contains admirable introductory essays, based on the unpublished Russian archives, and giving much material for the study of Nicholas’s character and policy. Many documents are published for the first time in Schiemann’s work; some, from the archives of Count Nesselrode, are published in the Lettres et papiers du Chancelier Comte de Nesselrode, t. vi. seq. For other works see bibliographies attached to the chapters on Russia in vol. x. and xi. of the Cambridge Modern History. (W. A. P.)
- ↑ “Russia cannot aid a power which has abjured its traditions and is under the empire of revolutionary institutions.”—Nicholas to Frederick William IV., Sept. 26, 1848. Martens, Recueil, viii. 376.
- ↑ See Frederick William’s letter to the tsar (Nov. 4) and the latter’s reply. Martens, viii. 384, 386.
