“As to myself, I shall add, by this renunciation, a new guarantee and a new force to the engagement which I spontaneously and solemnly contracted on the occasion of my divorce from my first wife. All the circumstances in which I find myself strengthen my determination to adhere to this resolution, which will prove to the empire and to the whole world the sincerity of my sentiments.”
Another of those documents appointed Nicholas as the heir to the throne. The Senate now declared that Nicholas was emperor. But he refused the title, until he had the acknowledgment from Constantine himself, that he had resigned. The suspense continued three weeks. At length the formal renunciation of Constantine was received, Nicholas was emperor, and the day was appointed to receive the oath of allegiance of the great functionaries of the army and of the people. The emperor dated his accession from the day of the death of Alexander, December the 1st, 1825.
The interregnum was honourable to both the brothers; but it had nearly proved fatal to Russia: it unsettled the national feelings, it perplexed the army, and it gave sudden hopes to the conspirators against the throne.
The heads of the conspiracy in St Petersburg were, Sergius, Prince Troubetskoi; Eugene, Prince Obalenskoi, and Conrad Ryleieff. The first was highly connected and highly employed, colonel of the Etat Major, and military governor of Kief. The second was a lieutenant in the imperial guard, poor, but a man of talent and ambition. In Russia all the sons of a prince are princes, which often leaves their rental bare. The third was simply a noble, educated in the corps of cadets, but who had left the army, and had taken the secretaryship of the American company. He was a man of letters, had written some popular poems, and was an enthusiastic republican. Connected with those were some general officers and colonels, whose revolutionary spirit might chiefly be traced to their expulsion from employment, military disgrace, or disappointed ambition. The Russian campaigns in France, and the residence of the army of occupation, under the command of the great English general, had naturally given the Russian troops an insight into principles of national government, which they could not have acquired within the Russian frontier. The pretext of the conspirators was a constitutional government, which the talkers of St Petersburg seemed to regard as the inevitable pouring of sudden prosperity of all kinds into the empire. The old illusion of all the advocates of change is, that every thing depends on government, and that government can do every thing. There cannot be a greater folly, or a more glaring fiction. Government can do nothing more than prevent the existence of obstacles to public wealth. It cannot give wealth, it cannot create commerce, it cannot fertilise the soil, it cannot put in action any of those great instruments by which a nation rises superior to its contemporaries. Those means must be in the people themselves, they cannot be the work of cabinets; governments can do no more than give them their free course, protect them from false legislation, and leave the rest to Providence.
The Russian conspirators called themselves patriots, and professed to desire a bloodless revolution. But to overthrow a government at the head of five hundred thousand men, must be a sanguinary effort; and there could be no doubt that the establishment of a revolutionary government in Russia would have been the signal for a universal war.
On the 24th and 25th of December, the conspirators met in St Petersburg, and as Nicholas was to be proclaimed on the next day, they determined to lead the battalions to which they respectively belonged, into the great square, seize on the emperor, and establish a provisional government. They were then to raise a national guard, establish two legislative chambers, and proclaim liberty to Russia. The question next arose, what was to be done with the members of the imperial family after victory. It was answered significantly, that “circumstances must decide.” At this anxious moment one of the members told them that information had been given to the emperor. “Comrades,” said he, “you will find that we are betrayed, the court are in possession of much information; but they do not know our entire plans, and our strength is quite sufficient.” A voice exclaimed, “the scabbards are broken, we can no longer hide our sabres.”
Reports of various kinds now came crowding on them. An officer arrived to say that, in one of the armies, one hundred thousand men were ready to join them. A member of the Senate came to tell them that the council of the empire was to meet at seven o’clock the next morning, to take the oath to the emperor. The time for action was now fixed. The officers of the guard were directed to join their regiments, and persuade them to refuse the oath. Then all kinds of desperate measures were proposed. It was suggested that they should force open the spirit shops and taverns, in order to make the soldiery and populace drunk, then begin a general pillage, carry off banners from the churches, and rush upon the winter palace. This, the most mischievous of all the measures, was also the most feasible, for the number of unemployed peasants and idlers of all kinds was computed at seventy thousand and upwards, and from their poverty and profligacy together, there could be little doubt that, between drunkenness and the prospect of pillage, they would be ready for any atrocity. “When the Russians break their chains,” says Schiller, “it will not be before the freeman, but before the slave, that the community must tremble.”
It must be acknowledged that some were not equally ferocious. But when a military revolt has once begun, who shall limit it to works of wisdom, moderation, or security? If the revolt had succeeded, St Petersburg must have been a scene of massacre.
We shrink from all details on this painful subject. The conspirators remained in deliberation all night. As the morning dawned, they went to the barracks of their regiments, and told the soldiers that Constantine was really their emperor, that he was marching to the capital at the head of the army from Poland, and that to take the oath to Nicholas would consequently be treason. In several instances they succeeded, and collected a considerable body of troops in the Great Izaak Square. But there they seem to have lost their senses. An insurrection which stands still, is an insurrection ruined. They were rapidly surrounded by the garrison. Terms were offered, which they neither accepted nor refused. The gallant Milarodowitch, the hero of the Russian pursuit of the French, advancing to parley with them, was brutally shot. When all hope of submission was at an end, when the day was declining, and alarm was excited for the condition of the capital during the night, artillery was brought to bear upon them; and, after some firing on both sides, the mutineers dispersed. The police were then let loose, and numerous arrests were made.
In five months after, a high court was constituted for the trial of the leaders. A hundred and twenty-one were named in the act of accusation, many of them belonging to the first families, and in the highest ranks of civil and military employment. But the sentence was the reverse of sanguinary. Only five were put to death in St Petersburg, the remainder were chiefly sent to Siberia. But Siberia is now by no means the place of horrors which it once was. It is now tolerably peopled, it has been partially civilised; the soil is fertile; towns have sprung up; and, though the winter is severe, the climate is healthy. Many of the families of the exiles were suffered to accompany them; and probably, on the whole, the exchange was not a calamitous one, from the anxieties of Russian life, the pressure of narrow circumstances in Europe, and the common disappointments to which all competitors for distinction, or even for a livelihood, are exposed in the crowded and struggling population of the west, to the undisturbed existence and sufficient provision, which were to be found in the east of this almost boundless empire.