The Tsar's Doctor Read online

  The Tsar’s Doctor

  This eBook edition published in 2013 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  First published in 2010 by Birlinn Ltd

  Copyright © Mary McGrigor 2010

  The moral right of Mary McGrigor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-564-2

  ISBN 13: 978-1-84158-881-0

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  To the memory of my friend and mentor Professor Alexander Adam FRCS, Honorary Librarian of the Aberdeen Medical Chirurgical Library, who suggested that I write this book

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Map

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  Prologue: The Man from America

  1 The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea

  2 Performer of Miracles

  3 The Reign of Fear

  4 Doctor to the Tsar

  5 The Palace of Intrigue

  6 ‘Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears a Crown’

  7 Doctor to the New Tsar

  8 The Heavy Clouds of War

  9 Austerlitz

  10 The Fourth Coalition

  11 Tilsit

  12 Head of the Russian Military Medical Services

  13 ‘Napoleon Thinks I Am No Better Than a Fool’

  14 Borodino

  15 The Agony of Failure

  16 Victor of the North

  17 The Battle of the Nations

  18 Paris

  19 Celebration, Love and Sorrow

  20 England

  21 ‘The First Medical Person in the Russian Empire’

  22 The Prophetess

  23 Rebuilding From the Ruins of the War

  24 The Military Settlements

  25 Wrestling with Devils

  26 Dark Shadow Over the Sun

  27 The Toll of Long Travel

  28 The Great Flood

  29 Taganrog

  30 The Doctor’s Diaries

  31 The Fateful Journey

  32 ‘Come on, my dear friend, I hope you are not angry with me.’

  33 The Death Certificate of Doubt

  PART TWO

  34 The Shadow of Confusion

  35 The Legend

  36 City of Secret Sedition

  37 Invasion and Rebellion

  38 The Winter Palace

  39 The Last Days

  Envoi

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Sir James Wylie Bt. Wearing his many decorations

  Wylie’s coat of arms, designed by Alexander I

  Catherine the Great

  Tsar Paul I

  Empress Elizabeth, wife of Alexander I

  General Aleksyei Arakcheev

  Queen Louise, wife of King Frederick William III of Prussia

  Maria Naryshkin, mistress of Alexander I

  General Mikhail Kutuznov, commander of the Russian during the Napoleonic war

  Mikhail Speransky, secretary to Alexander I

  The Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlona, favourite sister of Alexander I

  The Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna

  Alexander I in 1818

  Equestrian portrait of Alexander I by Franz Kruger

  The only known portrait of Feodor Kuzmich

  Kuzmich’s cell in Siberia

  Map

  Introduction

  How do you write a biography of a man whose autobiography has been destroyed and who, in his native country of Scotland, is now all but forgotten?

  This was the question I found myself faced with when attempting to research the life of Sir James Wylie, whose own carefully kept journal was obliterated on the order of Nicholas I, the last of the three Russian tsars to whom he was both doctor and friend.

  Described as ‘the most famous Scotsman in Russian service . . . [whose] name is inseparably connected with the creation of the healthcare system in the Russian Army and Navy and with training of military surgeons’,1 Sir James Wylie, as he eventually became, is today revered in Russia as the saviour of soldiers, their fate having been ignored before his time.

  His statue, in St Petersburg, jerks memory alive. Yet his competence as a surgeon and administrator is shadowed by the mystery in which he was involved. Under pressure, and at the risk of his life, he perjured himself to sign the death certificate of one emperor, citing apoplexy instead of strangulation as the cause. Did he then, in later years, comply with the wish of another emperor to allow him to escape from the purgatory known to have eclipsed the reasoning of his mind?

  No one will ever know, unless the discovery of new evidence brings proof of what actually happened, now nearly two centuries ago, in that remote little town of Taganrog by the Sea of Azov. Without it the events of the tragic interlude, in which Wylie was so deeply involved, must remain as mysterious as so many other incidents in the life of this incredible man.

  Fortunately, although Wylie’s own reminiscences of his sixty-four years in Russia no longer exist, those of another doctor – an Englishman and contemporary of Wylie’s named Robert Lee – have survived.

  It is in fact a miracle that Lee’s writings are still in existence, for he is openly, cruelly critical of both the Russian government and the tsars. Had it been found and read in Russia during his lifetime he would almost certainly have been imprisoned, if not sentenced to death. Nonetheless despite – and indeed partly because of – his abhorrence of the subjugation of the vast majority of the Russian people, his descriptions of the way they lived and of the country itself bring a vivid picture to the reader’s mind. It is therefore thanks to Lee’s diary that, in the absence of Wylie’s own account, an idea emerges of the vast areas over which he travelled, almost invariably with the tsar, a distance he claimed to be over 150,000 miles, and of the people with whom, over more than half a century, he became involved on both a social and professional basis.

  The idea of writing about Wylie was suggested to me by my friend and mentor, the distinguished surgeon, Professor Alexander Adam FRCS, Honorary Librarian of the Medical Chirurgical Society of Aberdeen, and it was thanks to Prince Alexis Troubetzkoy, a descendant of one of the ‘Decembrists’ who died so bravely in freedom’s cause, that I discovered Wylie’s account of the last tragic days of Alexander I. Despite the fact that his memoirs were destroyed, Wylie did leave a diary, written in Russian, which was published as an article in the Russkaya Starina magazine. Jennifer Griffiths, Senior Library Assistant of the Taylor Institute Library in Oxford, most kindly sent me a photocopy. Doctor Kenneth Dunn, of the National Library of Scotland, then sent me an essay in German on Wylie’s medical practices, written on the bicentenary of his birth, by Professor Heinz Müller-Dietz. Both the Russian and German papers were translated by Dmitri Usenko, of Clearword Limited in Essex, while Caroline Roboc translated from the French.

  Thus through the help of both friends and strangers I have traced the life of a reserved and inscrutable man, who today is still remembered in Russia as the champion and saviour of soldiers about whom nobody once cared. With contemporary accounts as my basis I have tried to penetrate the darkness surrounding the personality of this enigmatic Scottish doctor, who died with the secret of what really happened to Alexand
er I, the tsar whose death remains a mystery unsolved.

  PART ONE

  PROLOGUE

  The Man from America

  In the spring of 1854 Doctor William Channing, an American citizen by birth, arrived in the Russian capital of St Petersburg. He came with an introduction to a man famed in that city, a Scotsman named James Wylie, who had been created a baronet in his native land and who, in the capacity of personal physician, had served no fewer than three tsars in his time.

  Channing was in a hurry. War between Russia and France, now allied to Britain, seemed imminent, and he might well have to leave quickly, supposing of course he could even find a ship to take him home.

  For this reason he did not tarry in making his call on Sir James. With his letter of introduction in his pocket he hurriedly left his hotel, leaving his bags packed behind him in case it should prove necessary to make a speedy departure. A hired drosky took him through the city, past the buildings about which he had so often heard and read: the enormous Winter Palace fronting the River Neva, now surging brown with spring floods; the Mikhailovsky Palace on the opposite bank, where, as was now generally known, Tsar Paul I had been murdered over fifty years previously; the towering needle of the spire of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, burial place of the tsars; and the great church of St Isaac’s Cathedral, with its spectacular gilded dome, still in the final stages of construction,

  The doctor noted the landmarks, pointed out by the bearded driver of the drosky with his whip. However, totally absorbed as he was with the prospect of what lay before him, he barely noticed his surroundings. Would he be in time? He had been told that Sir James was near his end. He willed the ancient horse to trot faster, but to no avail.

  At last the drosky pulled up in front of a substantial house in a street called Galerney. The American tugged at the bell rope and heard it ring inside the building. Shortly after he hammered on the door, the bell having produced no response. Was he too late? Sir James Clark, the eminent London doctor who had given him a written introduction to his even more famous colleague in St Petersburg, had warned him of Wylie’s illness, calling him a very sick man. Was this apparently deserted mansion already a house of death?

  Then from inside came the sound of shuffling and the door was pulled back a few inches to reveal a man, who by his dress and demeanour had to be a servant, standing with his hand upon the inside knob. The American explained his business and the man ushered him into a dark and very silent hall where he was respectfully asked to wait. The servant then disappeared into a nearby room in which he carried on a mumbled conversation with another man.

  ‘My master will see you now,’ announced the servant, coming back into the hall, and the American doctor then followed him into the room from which he had overheard the conversation taking place. The light, although brighter than that in the hall, was still dim, heavy curtains being only partly drawn. Channing could only just make out the figure of a very tall man, gaunt and grey with age, lying full length on a sofa with a rug covering his legs.

  ‘Forgive me,’ said a voice in a near-whisper, ‘if I do not rise. My illness precludes much movement. I am, as you see, an invalid.’

  The American handed over his letter of introduction, at which the man on the sofa merely glanced, obviously finding it hard to read. Then, propping himself on his elbow, he asked his visitor to sit on the chair placed beside his couch. The two began talking, hesitantly at first, and then with greater ease. When mention was made of a mutual acquaintance, Sir James Clark, common ground was reached and the conversation flowed more freely.

  The American made his visit short, sensing the huge amount of effort it took Wylie even to talk. Nonetheless on his departure, the old Scotsman begged Channing to come again. He did so, and during the course of subsequent visits the facts of an extraordinary life story were revealed.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea

  Sir James openly admitted that he had been very unruly as a boy. Unlike many of the migrants who, seeking their fortune in the eighteenth century, had found their way to Russia, he had not been raised in poverty. His parents lived in comfortable circumstances, his father running a successful carrier’s business in Kincardine town, then an important port at the head of the Firth of Forth. On the profits made from the business, William Wylie was able to send William and James, the two eldest of his five sons, to the local school, which stood on the north side of Tulliallan Church.

  James’s mind, however, as he struggled with the Latin grammar – in those days such an important part of the curriculum – was largely elsewhere. As soon as lessons were over and the black-gowned master had rung the bell, he was off, running like a hare for the harbour to see the latest ships to have sailed up the Firth of Forth.

  ‘A daft laddie, I was. Always wanting to go to sea.’

  As he spoke the American could picture him, schoolbag dumped on the cobbles, sitting swinging his legs over the harbour wall. This to him was real life; here was a man’s world. Once he had the smattering of education he supposed was necessary for a career and had managed to gather together a few sovereigns, he would be off, on one of those ships lying at anchor, to find adventure far away from home.

  The late 1770s were years of opportunity in Scotland. More than thirty years had passed since the Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the country was becoming slowly more prosperous. Foreign commerce, in particular, was booming. Scottish ports, particularly on the east coast, had much trade with the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and even as far abroad as Russia. Ships sailed up the Forth to Kincardine, which at that time was even more important than Alloa as a port. Masts crowded the harbour. Sloops and brigantines, elegant vessels built for fast sailing, towered over the mundane outlines of fishing boats with their cumbersome, mostly rust-coloured lug sails.

  The harbour hummed with an excitement that must have set the blood rushing through the veins of a boy such as James. The smell of the sea, drifting in from the river, was enough to inspire visions of the wide ocean beyond the Firth, crowded with pirates and gigantic monsters. Or so said the sailors, black-bearded, brown-skinned as most of them were, who came rolling along the quays to ask in their strange, garbled languages of the whereabouts of local inns. James Wylie and his friends, always ready with information, would then try to divert and prolong the conversation by asking them for stories of where they had been.

  In the harbour the clamour of shouting seamen and screaming gulls mingled with the yells and curses of the drivers and the clatter of iron-shod hooves and the grinding of wheels on cobbles as drays pulled by heavy horses, many of them owned by James’s father, carried cargoes unloaded from the holds of the ships. Such a scene inspired in James a sense of euphoria. He could not wait to go to sea! But his parents had other ideas. They had not paid his fees at the local school (two shillings and sixpence or thereabouts per term for each subject) for nothing. He and his elder brother William were ear-marked for professional careers. William was to become a schoolmaster, while James, it was decreed, would study medicine, then an increasingly respectable and indeed lucrative career in Scotland, as elsewhere.

  Accordingly James was sent as an apprentice to the local practitioner, old Doctor Meldrum. Pedantic and short of temper, Meldrum proved a hard task-master who had little sympathy with a boy too inclined to voice his own opinions. James was set to mundane tasks, such as grinding herbs like rhubarb, then a panacea for many ills, in a mortar. He became increasingly bored. The doctor, a martinet for discipline, chastised him, whereupon James, furiously resentful at such treatment, decided to run away to sea.

  Having gathered up a few essentials, he contrived to slip out of the work room at the back of the surgery where all the medicines were prepared. No one saw him go. With his pack on his back he tramped along the metalled road beside the river feeling he had foxed everyone. At Cramond, further down the Forth, he managed to find the captain of a sloop lying at anchor, who agreed to take him on as an extra hand. A delighted Jam
es hurried to get on board. He had escaped!

  But he had failed to reckon on his formidable mother. This resourceful and intractable lady, born Janet Meiklejohn, was every bit as wilful as her son. Guessing his intentions, she contrived to follow in his tracks and, after locating the sloop in the harbour at Cramond, she found a boatman to take her out and who agreed to lie on his oars while she went aboard. The captain must have gasped in amazement as this woman of commanding presence, towering over him in rage, seized his newly recruited deck hand by the collar and dragged him into the waiting skiff to be rowed quickly back to the shore.

  The redoubtable Janet Wylie, her son still in her firm grasp, then set forth for home. Tramping side by side, James by now cowed into silence, they headed upriver for Kincardine, a distance of some twenty miles. Their feet ached, they were tired and hungry, and now, to make matters worse, heavy clouds darkened the sky in ominous sign of a storm. Soon the wind rose. Janet pulled her shawl around her head and, stumbling on in the near darkness, took a stronger grip of James’s hand. Thus they struggled through ever more torrential rain, until, utterly exhausted, they knew they must find shelter or die. Suddenly, through the blackness, came a gleam of light among some trees. It proved to come from a cottage where they were able to shelter for the night

  Next morning, as the sky cleared after the storm, a passer-by called in with local news. The gale had caused havoc. Trees had fallen, buildings had lost their roofs, but most tragic of all were the losses at sea. Even in the supposedly sheltered waters of Cramond harbour a sloop had gone down. Only her mast stuck forlornly out of the water marking the grave of all who had been aboard.

  Shaken by his close brush with death, the hitherto rebellious pupil went on to complete his apprenticeship with the taciturn Doctor Meldrum, primarily because this was the only way by which he could gain entry to Edinburgh University.2

  Enrolling at the prestigious university in 1786, the young Wylie was fortunate in having among his teachers some of the greatest intellects of the day. Among them were Daniel Rutherford, an uncle of the novelist Sir Walter Scott, who was later to become famous as the discoverer of nitrogen gas, and Alexander Monro ‘Secundus’, a member of the Academies of Paris, Berlin, Madrid and Moscow, who was the second of three generations of world-famous professors of anatomy. Joseph Black, who held the Chair of Chemistry, was one of the most distinguished chemists that Scotland has ever known and William Cullen, the Professor of the Practice of Medicine and Surgery, continued the method of clinical teaching introduced by Doctor John Rutherford (brother of Daniel) who, having studied under the famous Boerhaave at Leyden, had introduced this system to Edinburgh University shortly after the Jacobite Rising of 1745.