From the assassination of Paul I to Tilsit: The British in Russia and their travel writings (1801–1807)

I

The French Revolution and its aftermath crucially altered the patterns and itineraries of the Grand Tour. It removed the well-used access to Italy via the roads of France and the delights of France itself from the young English ‘milords’ and their tutors and from other travellers of the various Sternian categories. Other routes were explored and other countries benefited, if that is the word, from visits by the British. The ‘northern tour’ became an option, faute de mieux or, occasionally, by choice. Germany, Scandinavia and Russia, if not exactly unknown in the titles of travel literature, became more familiar to the English reading public, although they introduced a whole new lexicon of barbaric places and things. It was therefore something of a shock when ‘crazy Paul’, the tsar Paul I, changed allegiance and the British became personae non gratae in his Russia. Fortunately, his alliance with Napoleon was short-lived. His assassination in March 1801, whether or not precipitated by British money, was an event to be welcomed. Sir Charles Whitworth, the British ambassador expelled the previous year from Russia, exulted: ‘I shall, so long as I live, celebrate as a festival the day on which I learned of the death of that arch-fiend Paul’ (Kenney, 1977: 215). He was not alone, and the accession of Paul’s son as Alexander I seemed to promise the restoration of all the delights enjoyed under the great Catherine.

The event that brought the first influx of British visitors was the coronation of the tsar in Moscow on 15/27 September 1801. In January of the following year, Admiral Pavel Chichagov wrote to Count Semen Vorontsov, restored by Alexander as Russian ambassador in London, of ‘ces curieux qui étaient venus d’Angleterre pour voir courronner les anges tutélaires de la Russie’ (AKV, 1880: XIX, 61), referring specifically to Henry Manvers Pierrepont (1780–1851), third son of the 1st Earl Manvers, who was to become in little more than two years British envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Sweden. Chichagov and his English wife Elizabeth (née Proby) were undoubtedly very aware of, if not acquainted with, a whole group of young men, all in their very early twenties, scions of aristocratic and gentry families, mostly recent graduates from Cambridge and Oxford, who had come to Russia alone, in twos, or sometimes with a tutor. With rare exceptions, however, their identities, their fleeting presence in Russia, and, in some cases, their extant letters and diaries are unknown to scholars.

Two unpublished diaries and an unremarked and relatively recently published collection of letters supply, alongside typical tourist descriptions of the sights of St Petersburg and Moscow, interesting information about social events and mores, intriguing snippets of gossip, brief encounters and concise characterizations, missing pieces in jigsaws of biographies and movements. All cover virtually the same period in Russia, and were in each case part of more extensive European travels; the three authors travelled independently of each other, leaving England on the Yarmouth packet to Hamburg between 26 June and 26 July 1801. The diaries were written by two young men recently down from Cambridge and Oxford, Thomas Lister Parker (1779–1858) of Browsholme Hall, Yorkshire, who became a noted antiquary and collector (Parker, 1801), and Edward Harbord, later 3rd Baron Suffield (1781–1835) of Gunton Hall, Norfolk, a politician, who was to advocate the abolition of the slave trade, and an eccentric sportsman, who had a habit of bending a poker round his neck (Harbord, 1801). Thomas Philip Robinson, 3rd Baron Grantham (b. 1781) of Newby Hall, also just down from Cambridge, wrote 59 letters to his mother during his Grand Tour, 39 of which date from his time in Russia (Grantham, 1979).

All three authors refer to encounters with other compatriots, providing a much fuller picture of the British presence in the two capitals. Parker, however, is much more interested in recording members of the British community whom he met in St Petersburg, and in Moscow only mentions Dr Halliday with whom he dined. Harbord and Grantham, on the other hand, pepper their accounts with the names of their university acquaintances who gathered in Moscow for the coronation under the aegis of the ambassador, Alleyne Fitzgerald, Baron St Helens (1753–1839), also from St John’s, Cambridge, and his embassy secretaries, Garlike and Bidwell. From a dozen or so names two in particular merit our attention, if for very different reasons.

The first is Charles Kinnaird, later 8th Lord Kinnaird of Ichture (1780–1826), who had been at Eton with Harbord and at Cambridge with Grantham. Grantham suggests that the tsar in the days following his coronation ‘never yet has spoken a word to any Englishman, except one evening a few words to Kinnaird’ (Grantham, 1979: 33). It was Kinnaird whom he also describes as preparing to leave Moscow ‘with two carts’ (Grantham, 1979: 28), alluding to the Scot’s passion for collecting art treasures of every kind. He has elsewhere been characterized as ‘an avaricious buyer of works of art dispersed during the Napoleonic wars’ (ODNB, 2004: XXXI, 734), but, like Parker, an equally passionate collector, he was obliged to sell off much of his collection in 1813, some of it going to the National Gallery. What is pertinent to Russia, however, and not previously remarked upon, was his patronage of the Polish painter and engraver Aleksandr Orlowski/ Aleksandr Osipovich Orlovskii (1777–1832), who had arrived in St Petersburg in late 1801 (and not 1802, as is generally assumed). Grantham, incidentally, wrote to his mother on 11 December that:

I have been this morning to see some drawings by a young Polish Artist named Soloffsky, lately come hither; I admired them so much, for their spirit & boldness, very much in Morland’s style, that I have desired him to come & give me a few lessons. (Grantham, 1979: 41)

Kinnaird evidently, as was his wont, bought a number of drawings that formed the basis of two albums published in 1807 and 1809 by Edward Orme in London: The Costume of the Russian Army, from a collection of drawings made on the spot, and now in the possession of the Right Honourable the Earl of Kinnaird, containing a portrait of His Majesty the Emperor of All the Russias and Russian Cries, in correct portraiture from drawings done on the spot by G[ospodin] Orlowski, and now in the possession of the Rt Honble Lord Kinnaird. ¹

The second person to be mentioned was ‘a great tall blackguard fellow’, who contrived to miss the coronation, arriving in Moscow only on 13/25 October, two days before the tsar’s delayed return to St Petersburg (Grantham, 1979: 35). He was none other than George Clayton Tennyson (1778–1831), like Grantham an alumnus of St John’s, Cambridge, who would return to become rector of Somersby in North Lincolnshire, where in August 1809 would be born his son, the future Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Alfred and other members of his family and their friends would be entertained over the years with stories of George Clayton’s adventures in Russia, increasingly, one suspects, distorted and exaggerated in the telling. The centrepiece was the description of a dinner party given by the British ambassador at which the main conspirators in the assassination of Paul were among the guests, as were Tennyson and other Englishmen. Cautious reference was made to Paul’s assassination, whereupon Tennyson addressed the British ambassador in a loud voice:

Why, St. Helens, what’s the use of speaking so gingerly about a matter so notorious? We know well enough in England that the Emperor Paul was murdered in the Mikhailovski Palace, and we know exactly who did it, Count Zoboff knocked him down, and Benningsen and Count Pahlen strangled him.

Such were the words apparently conveyed by the poet himself and noted down in 1887. ² The people named were said to be at the dinner (although in fact Palen was in exile) and a worried St Helens counselled Tennyson to flee for his life, taking the inevitable ‘droshky’ to Odessa, whence he eventually escaped in an English frigate. Although Tennyson’s gaffe would seem to be completely in character, the story is patently untrue on so many counts, but has not been hitherto disproved. The truth is, not surprisingly, more pedestrian. Tennyson returned to St Petersburg more or less at the same time as his compatriots. Like them, he announced his impending departure in the Sanktpeterburgskie vedomosti (St Petersburg News) (1801: 1312, 1384) for the first time on 1/13 November 1801 and for the third and last time on 22 November/5 December.

Nevertheless, while it was the coronation that hastened the British visitors to Moscow – and there are valuable and fairly detailed descriptions of the event and of subsequent celebrations at, for instance, Sheremetev’s Ostankino by Parker, Harbord and particularly Grantham – it was indeed the demise of Paul that was almost inevitably the chief, if dangerous, topic of conversation and the subject for carefully gathered information. Even before the young milords arrived, a naval officer, Captain, later Admiral Sir Thomas Fremantle (1765–1819), serving in Nelson’s squadron that had approached Revel following the battle of Copenhagen, was allowed to proceed from Kronstadt to visit St Petersburg and wrote to his wife on 9 May 1801 that ‘the affair of his decease is much spoken of at Petersburg and the conspirators pointed out, several of whom I had conversation with’ (Fremantle, 1940: 40). Parker had scarcely arrived in the Russian capital before he was writing up what he had heard about the assassination from Count Palen’s nephew and was soon adding more from other informants (Parker, 1801: 29–30, 31–2); Harbord likewise immediately contacted John Grieve (1753–1806), Paul’s body-physician and one of the three British doctors involved in the tsar’s post-mortem, and was also taken to the Michael Castle by Lord St Helens (Harbord, 1801, unpaginated). Grantham at least waited until his third letter from St Petersburg before he provided his mother with the most detailed and graphic account, also originating with Grieve, and reflected that ‘there are a thousand such stories as these, some true & some false; but it would be endless indeed & impossible to recollect them’ (Grantham, 1979: 20–1).

All these sources were unavailable to the general public, but they are consonant with the sort of material that was making its way to England, by letter, word of mouth and newspaper reports (Cross, 2001: 16–18). It was not, however, until early 1805 that the first detailed but hardly more reliable discussion of the events became widely available in Sir John Carr’s Northern Summer, containing a complete chapter, entitled ‘A Gloomy Catastrophe’, devoted to information he had gleaned from informants in the Russian capital, including ‘one who beheld the catastrophe which I am about to relate, whom I can neither name nor doubt’ (Carr, 1805: 302–20). ³ An indication of British interest in the event was the inclusion of much of what Carr had written in the extensive review of his book appearing in the Edinburgh Review (1805: 399–402).

II

Carr (1772–1832) was the author of numerous ‘tours’ of Great Britain and Europe in the first decade of the nineteenth century, much mocked and aptly dubbed by Lord Byron ‘Green Erin’s knight and Europe’s wandering star’ (ODNB, 2004: X, 262). His tour of 1804 took him through Scandinavia, Russia and Poland and the subsequent book, hurried out within months, and no worse – though certainly no better – than similar works appearing during Catherine’s reign, was the only original publication during these years from Alexander’s accession to Tilsit. To some degree, Carr marks the transition from what we might term the first wave of British visitors to Alexander’s Russia to no less significant numbers in the immediately following years. Perhaps they had no single goal such as that provided by the coronation, but they were undoubtedly encouraged by the steady improvement in diplomatic relations between Russia and England, given a boost by the Peace of Amiens in March 1802. The peace saw the appointment of a new British ambassador, again a Cambridge graduate and a naval officer, Sir John Borlase Warren (1753–1822), who was much admired by Carr and by Martha (1775–1873), the younger and first arrived in Russia of the famous Wilmot sisters (Carr, 1805: 321–2; Londonderry and Hyde, 1934: 27–9, 37). Catherine Wilmot (1773–1824) for her part was very complimentary about Warren’s replacement, Lord Granville Leveson-Gower (1773–1846), later 1st Earl Granville, who was to try without success to persuade the tsar to join England against France and was recalled in 1807 following Tilsit (Londonderry and Hyde, 1934: 173–4, 291). ⁴ His replacement, Alexander Hamilton, Marquess of Douglas and Clydesdale (1767–1852), seemed to please no one, certainly not Martha Wilmot (Londonderry and Hyde, 1934: 291). It is the journals and letters of the sisters over the period 1803–8 (Catherine joined her sister for two years, August 1805 – August 1807) that provide on the one hand an incomparable evocation of Russian life and society and on the other an invaluable record of British visitors and residents in Petersburg and in Moscow in particular.

It is impossible to name here, certainly not to discuss the numerous British in Russian service, such as doctors and naval officers, members of the British embassy, British merchants and their families, British chaplains, British governesses, British wives married to Russians, who flit across the pages of the Wilmot letters. It is also not the place for extended examination of the exploits of the Rev. Arthur Young (1769–1827), son of the famous agriculturist, invited by Alexander to investigate the state of Russian agriculture in 1805; of Samuel Bentham (1757–1831), who had spent many years in Catherine’s Russia and was returning with his family in 1807 on a mission from the British Admiralty; of Colonel, later Sir Robert Wilson (1777–1849), sent to St Petersburg on a secret mission in 1806, but soon obliged to depart for the injudicious circulation of a lampoon against the Russo-French alliance; or, finally, of Sir Robert Ker Porter (1777–1842), invited to Russia to paint vast historical canvases for the new Admiralty in St Petersburg and conducting a fraught and protracted love affair with Princess Maria Shcherbatova (1780–1827). ⁵ Porter, of course, was soon to publish his lively and popular Travelling Sketches in Russia and Sweden (1809), and both he and Wilson published accounts of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. ⁶ On the other hand, there are among the young British grand tourists, caught by the Wilmots in vivid pen-pictures, many whose very presence in Russia might otherwise be unsuspected and give the lie to the belief that there were few English travellers in Russia at this time.

Within days of her arrival at Troitskoe, the estate south of Moscow belonging to Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, whose companion she was to be and whom she soon characterized as ‘a red hot English Woman’ (Londonderry and Hyde, 1934: 50), Martha encountered the son of James Harris, the 1st Earl of Malmesbury (1746–1820), the former British ambassador to Catherine’s court. The Hon. Thomas Harris (1782–1823), ‘well-bred, well-inform’d &c. &c.’, though he spoke ‘too much of Politics’, was travelling with his cousin, a Mr Cornwall, and their route would take them to the Crimea, an increasingly attractive destination (Londonderry and Hyde, 1934: 58, 77). In Moscow early the following year Martha was much taken with John, Lord Burghersh, later 11th Earl of Westmorland (1784–1859), who was to enjoy an illustrious and varied career as soldier, fighting with Wellington in the Peninsula, as diplomat with posts in Berlin and Vienna, as the composer of operas and founder of the Royal Academy of Music. ‘A fine manly upright brave fellow slaying by thousands the Princesses of the North – six foot and a half high’, he was, Martha wrote, ‘the Lion of the place’ (Londonderry and Hyde, 1934: 138). Following his return to England his account of Muscovite hospitality was so enthusiastic that his father arranged a lavish supper ‘for all Russians living in London and its suburbs’, according to a report in the Moskovskii kur’er (Moscow Courier)(1806: 97).

The Irish connections of both the Wilmots and of Dashkova herself inevitably attracted visits by scions of the Irish nobility, notably Welbore Ellis, Viscount Somerton, later 2nd Earl of Normanton (1778–1868), whose father was the Archbishop of Dublin, and John Ladeveze Adlercron of Moyglare in County Meath (1782–1852). Somerton, who a decade later was to marry Diana Herbert and thus acquire as his stepmother Semen Vorontsov’s daughter and Princess Dashkova’s niece, Ekaterina, Lady Pembroke, gained a modicum of notoriety by apparently refusing to doff his hat on encountering the emperor in St Petersburg and was described by Martha as thinking ‘it a mark of spirit to act with rudeness’ (Londonderry and Hyde, 1934: 334).

Not Irish, but with an Irish connection through his father, the 3rd Earl Hardwicke who was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, was another young viscount, Philip Yorke, Viscount Royston (1784–1808), whom Martha Wilmot met in Moscow in the spring of 1807 and characterized in a striking passage:

A very charming Young Man by all accounts. His appearance is so like a Newfoundland Dog’s Cub that there’s no denying the resemblance, and he gives one the impression of all sorts of brave fearless upright honest qualitys. He is the son of Ld Hardwicke Lord Lieutt of Ireland. He has already visited several countrys & learns languages with peculiar advantage. He has translated I forget which Greek author, but is of so modest a nature that he gives one more the idea of a playful boy than a cleaver & learned Man. He made but a very short stay here, & I have heard him praised by the few who were capable of perceiving his style of character. (Londonderry and Hyde, 1934: 291)

A year later, returning to England, Royston and several English companions were lost in a shipwreck, including Col. Pollen, who was married to the daughter of the former director of the Falkirk Carron Works, Charles Gascoigne (1738–1806), who had defected to Russia. Martha, who would have been with them if she had not been delayed travelling from Moscow to St Petersburg, mourned his death in a sustained eulogy:

Lord Royston would probably have been a Statesman or a Soldier. In any situation in life he must have been an honour to his Country; & a hundred times in listening to circumstances of his Conduct which served to Shew the Man, I have felt as if Engd would count him among her Hero’s & owe him a Day of Glory! He was a Young Man of so superiour a cast, he was a Creature one feels so proud to call Countryman that I never heard his name without exultation & shall never hear it pronounc’d again without a pang of deep regret – yet I beheld him but once. (Londonderry and Hyde, 1934: 341)

Commenting on his journeys in Russia, she adds that ‘I’m told his manner of relating all that he had seen & all the hairbreath [sic] escapes he had had was highly interesting’.

Support for her high assessment of Royston and, crucially, evidence that at least his travel letters had survived were soon to come in perhaps the most influential account of Russia to be published in the first decade of Alexander’s reign, although its contents refer back to the last months of Paul’s reign, of which it is undoubtedly the most vehement British denunciation. In 1810 Edward Daniel Clarke (1769–1822), Cambridge don and future Professor of Mineralogy, published the first part of his renowned Travels in Various Countries of Europe Asia and Africa, but it is in the Preface to the second edition, appearing the following year, that he thanks Royston’s father, the Earl of Hardwicke, for allowing him to quote passages from letters sent by Royston to family and friends. Clarke seeks, not entirely successfully, to use Royston, whom he praises for his ‘great acquirements’ and ‘erudition’, to confirm his own negative assessment of Russian civilization (Clarke, 1816: vii–xii). Fortunately, although only 30 years after his death, Royston’s literary ‘remains’ were published, together with a biographical essay by a college friend, the Rev. Henry Pepys.

Royston’s gift for languages extended to Russian. It is very much to his credit that alone out of British tourists he attempted to master the language, writing a month after his arrival that:

annoyd with my ignorance of the language of the country … I have taken a master and expect in course of time to be able to converse with my friends the Sclavonians, that is if I do not lose my front teeth in endeavouring to pronounce some of their consonants; an accident by no means improbable, as my interpreter desires me to pronounce one letter as if it was written Schtsch. (Pepys, 1838: 58–9)

By April 1807 he was reading ‘with tolerable facility’ (1838: 93) a language which he found ‘exceedingly soft and sonorous’ (1838: 94). Nonetheless, he felt ‘it would scarcely repay any person for the trouble of learning it, from the circumstance of the scarcity of original authors’ (1838: 83). He nevertheless ploughed his way through Kheraskov’s epic Rossiiada, which ‘would be good were it not for the insufferable monotony of the metre’ (1838: 93–4) and sent his father some Russian works for his library at Wimpole Hall (1838: 64).

Royston was an intrepid traveller. Not content with St Petersburg and Moscow – he was particularly critical of society in the capital, but happier in Moscow – he was soon undertaking a journey to Archangel and Kholmogory in December 1806 and then hiring a sledge to visit a tribe of Samoyeds. In April 1807, accompanied by the American Joel Poinsett (1779–1851), ‘one of the few liberal and literary gentlemanlike men I have seen emerge from the forests of the New World’ (Pepys, 1838: 94), he set off down the Volga to Astrakhan and then to Derbent, and to Tiflis. Crossing the Caucasus, which greatly impressed him, they journeyed on to the Crimea. Proceeding via Kherson and Kiev, they reached Moscow at the very end of December. Physically the journey had been exacting and both men were very ill, but Royston retained throughout his keen sense of observation and pithy commentary on people and customs. His letters deserve to be better known.

To be quoted by Clarke, this time in extensive footnotes to the description of his own journey from Moscow to the Crimea, was also the fate of Reginald Heber (1783–1826), Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and future Bishop of Calcutta. Heber, accompanied by his old school friend John Thornton, arrived in St Petersburg at the beginning of October 1805, returning to England a year later after extensive travels. Like Royston’s letters, Heber’s journal and other letters from Russia were to appear after his death, edited by his widow, who also included his interesting if unfinished ‘History of the Cossaks’ that has escaped the attention of all scholars writing on the subject (Heber, 1830: I, 563–684).

After nearly three months in St Petersburg, Heber and Thornton left for Moscow but took virtually two months, travelling via Iaroslavl’. They spent six weeks in the old capital before setting out on 13 March 1806 for Taganrog, travelling via Serpukhov, Tula, Kursk, and Kharkov. From Taganrog, they proceeded through the territories of the Don Cossacks, in whom Heber took a particular interest, to Cherkassk. Crossing from Taman to Kerch, they entered the Crimea and saw all the ‘sights’ at Kaffa, Bakhchiserai, Sevastopol and Simferopol, before leaving for the great towns of New Russia: Kherson, Nikolaev and Odessa. Odessa marked their farewell to Russia and in June 1806 Heber and his companion entered Poland on their way to Hungary. Heber is a judicious, non-sensational diarist: his travel journal and letters, though still little known, are free from the prejudices and outbursts of, for instance, Clarke, and invaluable in many respects, not least for the descriptions of the people he met, Russians and British (Heber, 1830: I, 95–278).

A third person acknowledged by Clarke in his second preface for his ‘very valuable communications’ was yet another Cambridge man, Charles Kelsall (1782–1857), of whom we are told only that he had ‘lately pursued a similar route to that of the author, in the South of Russia’ (Clarke, 1816: vii). Kelsall left Cambridge in 1803 without proceeding to a degree. After three years in the Wiltshire militia, and possessing considerable inherited wealth, he decided to devote himself to a life of travelling and connoisseurship, writing and book-collecting. He was eventually to bequeath his library to Morden College, Blackheath. It included copies of the considerable number of works on a great variety of subjects that he published during his lifetime and at his own expense, including his travels through Russia in 1806–7, completely unknown in the context of Anglo-Russian studies.

In 1830, using the pseudonym of Mela Britannicus, Kelsall published his Esquisses de mes travaux, de mes voyages, et de mes opinions in the form of a letter to an imaginary friend ‘Agathomerus’ and, as he said in his ‘Avertissement’, it was ‘la première fois que j’écris en Français; et ce sera très probablement la dernière’ (Mela Britannicus, 1830: v). It is in many respects Kelsall’s autobiography and includes several pages devoted to his Russian travels and experiences. After passing three weeks in St Petersburg, where he visited the Hermitage to see the Houghton paintings ‘très mal traités par un mauvais vernis’ and Voltaire’s library, ‘que jai beaucoup feuilletée’ (1830: 9), he travelled to Moscow and, like almost all his compatriots, found it ‘la ville la plus pittoresque, et la plus attrayante pour les plaisirs de la société’ (1830: 10). He was soon, however, on his way south, following Heber’s route, via Tula, Orel, Kursk to Kharkov, but then struck south to enter the Crimea via Perekop. He ranged through the Crimea, seasoning his narrative with Latin tags and classical references and, like Clarke, Heber and many more before and after them, visited Professor Peter Pallas, ‘l’Anacharsis moderne vivant en philosophe, et dévoué à la culture de la vigne’ (1830: 12). No less obligatory was the visit to the grave of the prisoner reformer John Howard (1726–90), who had died near Kherson while investigating conditions in hospitals and lazarettos (Cross, 1997: 360–3). Kelsall, like Royston, fell desperately ill at Odessa but eventually made his way back to Moscow and to Petersburg. The most interesting pages, however, are devoted not to his travels as such but, using his words, to breaking a lance with Peter the Great over the creation of St Petersburg. Obviously unaware that the tsar had himself briefly considered creating his capital by the Sea of Azov, Kelsall attacked the very idea of the city ‘dans le coin marécageux où on voit Saint-Pétersbourg aujourd’hui’ and promoted the ideal situation and economic, social and climatic advantages of Tsaritsyn on the Volga (1830: 15–19).

It was under the same pseudonym that Kelsall published his last work Horae viaticae (1839), a compendium of works in different genres, of which only the first is of immediate interest. Entitled ‘Journal of a Tour from St. Petersburgh to Vienna, in the Year 1807’, it is a supplement or final chapter to the Russian pages in Esquisses, laconically tracing his route from St Petersburg, which he left on 25 June 1807, out of the Russian Empire, via Narva, Pskov, Vilna and Brest-Litovsk, quitting it on 10 July ‘with but few agreeable recollections, save some kindnesses received, and duly appreciated, at Moscow’ ((Mela Britannicus, 1839: 1–19). The journal is, however, followed by ‘souvenirs of the south of Russia’ which were ‘among the most agreeable in the whole extent of my travels’ and chiefly concerned the ancient remains around Perekop, in which connection he refers to ‘my late friend, Dr. Clarke, of well-earned travelling celebrity’.

III

As is evident from the description of the itineraries of Royston, Heber and Kelsall, they were adventurous young men, anxious to explore more of the vast Russian empire than the two capitals and the road joining them. They all produced variations on the route south from Moscow but all were intent on exploring the Crimea which had emerged as the most recommended and desired of destinations. It is interesting that soon after his return to England, Heber was asked by an old college friend R. W. Hay, who was then Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, to indicate routes through Russia to the Crimea and he had replied in great detail (Heber, 1830: I, 325–33). The Crimea had begun to entice British travellers after its acquisition by Russia in 1783 and both before and after the French Revolution. Indeed, the intrepid Elizabeth, Lady Craven (1750–1828), had made the journey in 1786 and her superficial but popular A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople (1789) conveyed the beauties of the region to the British public for the first time. ⁷ Other travellers followed in her wake, but their accounts and letters for the most part remained unpublished at the time, although undoubtedly were passed around in their circle of family and friends (Cross, 1997: 356–91). At the beginning of Alexander’s reign, however, Dr Matthew Guthrie (1743–1807), the third of the Scottish doctors conducting the autopsy on Paul, published as a huge tome the letters he had received from his late wife, Mrs Maria Guthrie (d. 1800) during her sojourn in the Crimea in 1795–6 and extensively amplified to show off his own erudition (Guthrie, 1802). Even more influential and popular was Travels through the Southern Provinces of the Russian Empire (London, 1802–3) by Professor Peter Simon Pallas FRS (1741–1811). The magnificent volumes, illustrated by his compatriot C. G. H. Geissler, relate to Pallas’s travels in 1793–4, but he took up permanent residence in Sudak in the Crimea, where he was visited by numerous British travellers, among whom he remembered Clarke and his travelling companion from Jesus College, John Marten Cripps, with particular affection (Heber, 1830: I, 267).

For many travellers, the Crimea was the furthest point of their travels, but its antiquities and archaeological sites inevitably evoked associations with the classical world, particularly for the young Oxbridge tourists. The Crimea, however, or more often Odessa, founded as recently as 1794 but growing impressively during the early years of Alexander’s reign under its new governor, the duc de Richelieu (1766–1822), ⁸ was the gateway to Constantinople and possibly further to Greece. In Catherine’s reign, Lady Craven travelled on to Constantinople, where she met the noted antiquarian Sir Richard Worsley (1751–1805), about to embark on his journey in the reverse direction. At the end of Paul’s reign Clarke, of course, had crossed to Constantinople and on to Greece and, two years earlier, so had John Tweddell (1769–99), a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Clarke’s exact coeval. Tweddell, who had been at Paul’s coronation, arrived towards the end of October 1797 in the Crimea, ‘the accounts of which have raised my expectations very high’ (Tweddell, 1816: 172). His expectations were justified and he was delighted to find ‘a great many antiquities and inscriptions relating to the time when the Greeks were masters of this island, and after them the Genoese’ (1816: 184). It was always his intention to visit Constantinople and, after a long delay of some six weeks in Odessa, he arrived there towards the end of May 1798, before sailing to Athens, ‘my great object’ (1816: 268). It was in Athens, however, that he was to fall ill and die. He became something of a cult figure and Heber wrote that ‘of former English travellers Tweddell seems to have made the greatest impression; an impression augmented, no doubt, by his melancholy and romantic death’ (Heber, 1830: I, 195). Of the travellers during the early years of Alexander’s reign, Royston ultimately decided against going to Constantinople, but his friend John Adlercron seems to have been there before travelling to Moscow (Pepys, 1838: 166; Londonderry and Hyde, 1934: 289).

Clarke and Kelsall have been identified as contributing to, or strongly influenced, by ‘the academic study of Greece being undertaken about 1800 by a remarkable group of Cambridge scholars’ (ODNB, 2004: XXXI, 130–1). ⁹ Although Tweddell and Royston were not named, they would seem obvious exponents of the same interests. That this Hellenism was not confined to Cambridge is no less apparent in such Oxford scholars as John Parkinson and Reginald Heber. What has not hitherto been remarked is the role that Russia unwittingly played in encouraging these interests, not only by providing a plausible route to Constantinople and to Greece during the Napoleonic wars but also offering the unexpected bonus of the Crimea. Less developed was any interest in the unifying faith of Orthodoxy, except in the outstanding figure of Frederick North, the 5th Earl of Guilford (1766–1827), whose Philhellenism was born after leaving Oxford and visiting Greece around 1791, the year he composed a Pindaric ode in honour of Catherine the Great following the treaty of Galatz. It was early the following year that he was received into the Orthodox church during a sojourn in Corfu. He is known to have visited Russia for the first and only time about 1806, after many years as the first British governor of Ceylon. Sadly, there is no evidence of what Guilford did in Russia and whom he met and what he saw (ODNB, 2004: XLI, 100–2). ¹⁰

What he undoubtedly did see was the architecture of Russia, the old and the new. Given his faith, it is not unlikely that it was the church architecture of old Russia that he admired, while it was the ‘new fashion’ for Greek architecture, imported principally via France, that was of great interest and mixed reaction from Hellenists, such as Kelsall. Professor David Watkin, who has done much to establish Kelsall’s reputation, is nonetheless patently wrong in suggesting that ‘few Englishmen at this date can have acquired Kelsall’s first-hand knowledge of the major monuments of Russian neo-classicism erected under Catherine II and Alexander I’ (Watkin, 1966: 109), but what is important is Kelsall’s references to recent buildings in St Petersburg. Earlier, Parkinson, much taken with St Petersburg, which he saw for the first time in November 1792, wrote that ‘I am particularly struck in all the private as well as public edifices with such an uncommon display of Grecian Architecture, which might lead us to fancy ourselves under the general atmosphere of Athens, instead of so northern a latitude’ (Parkinson, 1971: 20–1). He much enjoyed the company of the Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi (1744–1817), whose restrained Palladian buildings were to appear in many prominent places in the capital over more than three decades. ‘The buildings erected by my friend the Chevalier de Guarenghi, Architect to the Emperor’ impressed Kelsall in 1806. The references to Quarenghi and to buildings in St Petersburg appeared in a remarkable book under the title Phantasm of an [sic] University (1814: 131), in which he set out radical proposals for the educational reform of Oxford and Cambridge within an ideal architectural solution. It is in the section of his work called ‘The Architectural Detail’ that he reveals his preferences for the Grecian style, although he is against slavish imitation. He is not alone among travellers of this period to voice his dislike of Rastrelli’s Winter Palace, specifically for the ‘hideous pediments’ that ‘deface’ it, but offers as ‘good specimens of architecture’ the Taurida Palace and finds ‘the new Exchange and Theatre, by Thomas de Tomon, merit praise’ (1814: 131). His only other reference is when he suggests for his new university ‘grove’ or park ‘iron rails, as those of the Summer Gardens at St Petersburgh, facing the Neva’ (1814: 159). Kelsall was not alone in being impressed by the Taurida Palace which was built in the 1780s for Potemkin by the Russian Paris-trained architect Ivan Starov. Royston’s assessment was also positive, as was his overall assessment of the magnificent appearance of the city, the lack of good building materials notwithstanding, although he was very aware of the mixture of architectural styles:

The style of architecture is not Grecian (would that it were) but generally Roman or Palladian; some houses, particularly the palace, are after the manner of the French architects and others exhibit the most extraordinary mixture of the most incongruous orders. The general effect however is striking, and no person who has not studied Stuart’s Athens ought to be trusted in Petersburgh. (Pepys, 1838: 59, 54)

A ‘Franco-Italo-Grecian’ style might perhaps have achieved a consensus among the young Hellenists and was perhaps epitomized in Thomas de Thomon (1754–1813), who arrived from Paris to build for Alexander the Doric-columned Exchange that was modelled on the Greek temple at Paestum near Naples.

IV

As far as I am aware, the name of Kelsall has hitherto figured only once in an Anglo-Russian context. In his magisterial study of Anglo-Russian literary relations up the middle of the nineteenth century, posthumously published in 1982, Academician M. P. Alekseev devoted several pages to a literary curiosity that purported to be letters written by a British visitor to Moscow in the winter of 1805–6 (Alekseev, 1982: 157–60). They were published for the first time only in 1844 in a literary almanac by the alleged recipient of the three letters, the little-known littérateur M. N. Makarov (1785–1847), who supplied a short introduction and notes (Makarov, 1844: 246–61). The young British tourist, identified in the title as Zh.-K Poil’, had been a frequent visitor to the Makarov home in Moscow and had kept in touch with him by letter when Makarov was suddenly called to St Petersburg on business. The letters had been written in English but translated at the time, probably by Makarov himself, for the amusement of members of his family and several had been retained, although, apparently, the English originals had disappeared. Makarov’s justification for his decision to publish the letters nearly 40 years after the events they describe is their lively evocation of the old Moscow upper-crust lifestyle (Makarov, 1844: 247). ¹¹

Alekseev is understandably cautious about the overall authenticity of the letters and it is very probable that Makarov doctored them to some extent, not only deciphering Russian surnames that would have been mangled by the Englishman or hardly remembered by him, but also adding a wealth of detail that surely would have escaped him. However, overall there is nothing in these letters that we have not already encountered in the diaries and letters of other British travellers, although it must be remembered that the author was only writing about things that he considered amusing and relevant to Makarov, so there was much emphasis on balls and masquerades and on the people who gave them and attended them. Indeed, other British sources only serve to confirm what might otherwise seem dubious. A particularly interesting example is the writer’s extended praise for the Russians’ skill in dancing the waltz, unequalled in Europe, to which Makarov himself added a concurring footnote. Alekseev suggests that the dance, although introduced in France at the end of the eighteenth century, only spread to the rest of Europe after 1814 and the Congress of Vienna, and he refers to Byron and other contemporary sources. However, there is, for instance, a passage on dancing in a letter from Lord Grantham, dated Moscow 27 October 1801, in which he asserts ‘the Waltz is here the favorite dance, which I in my turn must learn of some well skilled Lady’ (Grantham, 1979: 33).

Makarov’s correspondent had singled out as a particularly skilled exponent of the waltz none other than Princess Dashkova’s estranged son, Pavel (1763–1807), an Edinburgh graduate, a Fellow of the Royal Society and fluent English speaker, raised to lieutenant-general by Paul and as summarily dismissed. It is relevant to note that Pavel was from the beginning of Alexander’s reign marshal of the Moscow nobility and kept virtually open house for British visitors at his Tuesday lunches. A constant theme not only in the letters of Makarov’s correspondent but in every British source is the generous hospitality of the Russian nobility in Moscow, which is acknowledged even in the context of a generally critical attitude to many aspects of Russian society. There are many references to Dashkov in letters and diaries, including from the ‘first wave’ the opinion of Harbord, who ‘found him a very eccentric man, had good wine & a good dinner which he intended to be in the English style’ (Harbord, 1801, unpaginated). The great shock occasioned by Dashkov’s sudden death in January 1807 is, incidentally, recorded in great detail by Martha Wilmot (Londonderry and Hyde, 1934: 277–80).

Who was the author of the letters sent to Makarov? Makarov refers his readers to the Moskovskii kur’er (1806: 209, 211), where indeed the name of ‘Poel’’ appears on two occasions, the first as among English visitors to Moscow and the second as the subscriber to a fund for an impoverished colonel’s widow (to which Heber also contributed!). On this second occasion his name is given as ‘H. W. Poel’’, a curious mixture of Latin and Cyrillic scripts and making Makarov’s reference to ‘Zh.-K. Poil’’ in his title even stranger. Alekseev for his part confesses that he had been unable to find any further references to ‘H. W. Powel’ or ‘Poyle’ (sic), adding that this was ‘the name of a person in no way remarkable, which, incidentally, also applies to the name of “Kellesal”’ (Alekseev, 1982: 157). The mysterious ‘Kellesal’, who was in fact responsible for introducing Powell to Makarov, was, as we have seen, far from ‘insignificant’. Powell was less so, but he can be identified as Henry Weyland Powell (1787–1840), a mere 18 years old when he arrived in St Petersburg and still to be admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, at the beginning of 1807. Like Kelsall, he never in fact graduated and pursued a career in the army for a number of years, fighting in the Peninsula and at Waterloo, before retiring to Lyndhurst in Hampshire and the life of a country gentleman and local JP. ¹² The letters to Makarov apart, little is known of Powell’s movements in Russia. Perhaps he was yet another British traveller to take the road south to the Crimea. In his letter of 20 November 1805 he informed Makarov that he was making for Odessa, for ‘to be in Russia and not see Odessa was the same as being in Rome without seeing the Pope’ (Makarov, 1844: 248–9). He was still in Moscow at the beginning of January 1806 and between then and late May, when his name appeared the statutory three times among the departees in the Sanktpeterburgskie vedomosti, he had ample time to have accomplished his desired itinerary. ¹³

The signing of the Peace of Tilsit on 7 July 1807 soon led to the general exodus of British travellers and visitors from Russia. News of the treaty reached Moscow on 16 July and was said by Martha Wilmot to be ‘very unpopular’ and the British generally blamed (Londonderry and Hyde, 1934: 299–300). In a letter written in October, Robert Ker Porter described how

the whole cry here is the non-arrival of our troops off Dantzic and he who then greeted every Englishman as a brother, now turns from even a friend of that nation with a cold bow of suspicion. The battle of Friedland has been lost, the treaty of Tilsit signed, and the whole face of affairs entirely changed. (Porter, 1809: II, 72)

The painter was obliged to put his planned marriage with Princess Shcherbatova on hold and left the Russian capital in December, only returning at the tsar’s invitation in 1811 after the collapse of the Russo-French alliance. In the interim he had fashioned and published his Travelling Sketches (1809) from the letters he had sent to his sisters, the novelists Jane and Anna Maria Porter, which gave a positive portrayal of the tsar and of Russian aristocratic society. It was, however, the stridently negative assessments of Clarke, published the following year and feeding the anti-Russian mood provoked by Tilsit, that prevailed in England. It was only after the events of 1812 that we again find the British travelling to Russia as tourists and publishing generally sympathetic accounts, such as those by the Oxford graduates John James (1816) and Robert Johnston (1815).