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Even Baron Brunov, the Russian ambassador in London, was not told the precise details of the Tsar’s itinerary. Not knowing when his steamer would arrive, Brunov had spent the whole of Saturday at the Woolwich docks. Finally, at ten o’clock in the evening, the steamer pulled in. The Tsar disembarked – barely recognizable in a grey cloak he had worn during the Turkish campaign of 1828 – and hurried off with Brunov to the Russian embassy at Ashburnham House in Westminster. Despite the late hour, he sent a note to the Prince Consort requesting a meeting with the Queen at her earliest convenience. Accustomed as he was to summoning his ministers at all hours of the day and night, it had not occurred to him that it might be rude to wake Prince Albert in the early hours of the morning.¹

This was not the Tsar’s first trip to London. He had fond memories of his previous visit, in 1816, when as a 20-year-old and still a Grand Duke, he had been a great success with the female half of the English aristocracy. Lady Charlotte Campbell, a famous beauty and lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales, had declared of him: ‘What an amiable creature! He is devilish handsome! He will be the handsomest man in Europe.’ From that trip, Nicholas had gained the impression that he had an ally in the English monarchy and aristocracy. As the despotic ruler of the world’s greatest state, Nicholas had little sense of the limitations on a constitutional monarchy. He presumed that he could come to Britain and decide matters of foreign policy directly with the Queen and her most senior ministers. It was ‘an excellent thing’, he told Victoria at their first meeting, ‘to see now and then with one’s own eyes, as it did not do always to trust to diplomatists only’. Such meetings created ‘a feeling of friendship and interest’ between reigning sovereigns, and more could be achieved ‘in a single conversation to explain one’s feelings, views and motives than in a host of messages and letters’. The Tsar thought that he could strike a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ with Britain about how to deal with the Ottoman Empire in the event of its collapse.²

Nor was this the first attempt that Nicholas had made to enlist the support of another power in his partition plans for the Ottoman Empire. In 1829 he had suggested to the Austrians a bilateral division of its European territories to forestall the chaos which he feared would follow its collapse, but they had turned him down to preserve the Concert of Europe. Then, in the autumn of 1843 he again approached the Austrians, resurrecting the idea of a Greek empire backed by Russia, Austria and Prussia (the Triple Alliance of 1815) to prevent the British and the French from dividing the spoils of the crumbling Ottoman Empire between themselves. Insisting that Russia did not want to expand into the Balkans, Nicholas proposed that the Austrians should be given all the Turkish lands between the Danube and the Adriatic, and that Constantinople should become a free city under Austrian guardianship. But nothing he said had been able to dispel Vienna’s deep mistrust of Russia’s ambitions. The Austrian ambassador in St Petersburg believed that the Tsar was trying to engineer a situation where Russia could use the excuse of defending Turkey to intervene in its affairs and impose its own partition plans by military force. What the Tsar really wanted, the ambassador maintained, was not a Greek empire backed by the three powers but a ‘state tied to Russia by interests, principles and religion, and governed by a Russian prince … . Russia can never lose sight of this aim. It is a necessary condition for the fulfilment of her destiny … Present-day Greece would be swallowed up in the new state.’³ Deeply suspicious, the Austrians would have nothing to do with the Tsar’s partition plans without the agreement of the British and the French. So Nicholas now came to London in the hope of winning over Britain to his point of view.

On the face of it, there was not much to suggest that Nicholas could forge a new alliance with Britain. The British were committed to their liberal reform plans to save the Ottoman Empire, and saw the ambitions of the Russians as a major threat. But the Tsar was encouraged by the diplomatic rapprochement between Russia and Britain during recent years, prompted by their shared alarm at France’s growing involvement in the Middle East.