The importance of the 1841 Convention extended beyond securing Mehmet Ali’s surrender. Agreement had also been reached to close the Turkish Straits to all warships except those of the Sultan’s allies during wartime – a very big concession by the Russians because potentially it allowed the British navy into the Black Sea, where it could attack their vulnerable southern frontiers. By signing the convention, the Russians had given up their privileged position in the Ottoman Empire and their control of the Straits, all in the hope of improving relations with Britain and isolating France.
From the Tsar’s point of view, propping up the Sultan’s power could only be a temporary measure. With the French weakened by their support for this insurrection, and Russia having reached what Nicholas believed was a new understanding with the British in the Middle East, he concluded that the London Convention opened the possibility of a more formal alliance between Russia and Britain. The election of a Conservative government headed by Sir Robert Peel in 1841 gave the Tsar some added grounds to be hopeful on this score, for the Tories were less hostile to the Russians than the previous Whig administration of Lord Melbourne (1835–41). The Tsar was convinced that the Tory government would listen favourably to his suggestion that Russia and Britain should take the lead in Europe and decide the future of the Ottoman Empire. In 1844, confident that he could bring the British round to his partition plans, the Tsar departed for London.
The suddenness of his June arrival took everybody by surprise. There had been vague talk of his visit since the spring. Peel had welcomed the idea at a banquet for the Russian Trading Company in the London Tavern on 2 March, and three days later Lord Aberdeen, the Foreign Secretary, had sent a formal invitation via Baron Brunov, reassuring the Tsar that his presence would ‘dispel any Polish prejudices’ against Russia in Britain. ‘For such a reserved and nervous man as Aberdeen to speak so confidently on this matter is significant,’ Brunov wrote to Nesselrode. As for the Queen, at first she was reluctant to receive the Tsar, on the grounds of his long-standing conflict with her uncle Leopold, king of the newly independent Belgium, who had attracted many Polish exiles to his army during the 1830s. Determined to uphold the legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance, Nicholas had wanted to restore the monarchies deposed by the French and Belgian revolutions of 1830, and had been prevented only by the outbreak of the Polish uprising in Warsaw in November of that year. His threats of intervention had earned him the mistrust of West European liberals, who labelled him the ‘gendarme of Europe’, while the Polish rebels who fled abroad after the suppression of their uprising had found a welcome refuge in Paris, Brussels and London. These were the developments that worried Queen Victoria, but eventually she was persuaded by her husband, Prince Albert (who was also a nephew of King Leopold), that a visit by the Tsar would help to mend relations between the ruling houses on the Continent. In her invitation to the Tsar, Victoria had said that she would welcome him in late May or early June, but no date had been set. In mid-May it was still not clear if Nicholas would come. In the end, the Queen learned of his arrival a few hours before his steamer landed at Woolwich. Her staff were thrown into a panic, not least because they were expecting a visit from the King of Saxony on the same day, and hasty preparations to receive the Tsar needed to be improvised.4
The Tsar’s impromptu visit was one of many signs of a growing rashness in his behaviour. After eighteen years on the throne he had begun to lose those qualities that had characterized his early rule: caution, conservatism and reserve. Increasingly affected by the hereditary mental illness that had troubled Alexander in his final years, Nicholas became impatient and impetuous, and inclined to impulsive behaviour, like rushing off to London to impose his will on the British. His erratic nature was noted by Prince Albert and the Queen, who wrote to her uncle Leopold: ‘Albert thinks he is a man inclined to give way too much to impulse and feeling which makes him act wrongly often.’ 5
The day after his arrival, the Queen received the Tsar at Buckingham Palace. There was a meeting with the dukes of Cambridge, Wellington and Gloucester, followed by a tour of London’s fashionable West End streets. The Tsar inspected the building work at the Houses of Parliament, which at that time were being reconstructed after the fire of 1834, and visited the newly finished Regent’s Park. In the evening the royal party travelled by train to Windsor, where they remained for the next five days. The Tsar astonished the servants with his spartan habits. The first thing his valets did on being shown his bedroom at Windsor Castle was to send to the stable for some straw to stuff the leather sack which served as the mattress of the military campbed on which the Tsar always slept.6
Because the Queen was heavily pregnant and the Saxe-Coburgs were in mourning for Prince Albert’s father, there was no royal ball in the Tsar’s honour. But there were plenty of other amusements: hunting parties; military reviews; outings to the races at Ascot (where the Gold Cup was renamed the Emperor’s Plate in honour of the Tsard); an evening with the Queen at the opera; and a glittering banquet where more than sixty guests ate their way through fifty-three different dishes served from the Grand Service, possibly the finest collection of silver-gilt dining plate in the world. On his last two evenings, there were large dinners where the male guests dressed in military uniform, in line with the wishes of the Tsar, who felt uncomfortable en frac and admitted to the Queen that he was embarrassed when not dressed in a uniform.7
As an exercise in public relations, the Tsar’s visit was a great success. Society women were charmed and delighted by his good looks and manners. ‘He is still a great devotee to female beauty,’ noted Baron Stockmar, ‘and to his old English flames he showed the greatest attention.’ The Queen also warmed to him. She liked his ‘dignified and graceful’ demeanour, his kindness to children, and his sincerity, though she thought him rather sad. ‘He gives Albert and myself the impression of a man who is not happy, and on whom the burden of his immense power and position weighs heavily and painfully,’ she wrote to Leopold on 4 June. ‘He seldom smiles, and when he does, the expression is not a happy one.’ A week later, at the end of the trip, she wrote again to her uncle with a penetrating assessment of the Tsar’s character:
There is much about him which I cannot help liking, and I think his character is one which should be understood, and looked upon for once as it is. 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.
Lord Melbourne, one of the most anti-Russian of the Whigs, got on very well with Nicholas at a breakfast at Chiswick House, the centre of the Whig establishment. Even Palmerston, the former Whig spokesman on foreign policy, who was well known for his hard line against Russia, thought it was important for a ‘favourable impression of England’ to be given to the Tsar: ‘He is very powerful and may act in our favour, or bring us harm, depending on whether he is well disposed or hostile towards us.’8