Britons in the Great Fire of Moscow

One of the key episodes of the Great Patriotic War of 1812 is the capture by the French of Moscow and the destruction of the city by fire. It would appear that all the details of this event are well known. But one of the least researched elements is the question of the size and composition of the Moscow population at the time. There had always been a large number of foreigners living in the city. One of the most influential groups, although comparatively small, was the British.

Police records for the year 1811 show that 188 British people were in residence (111 men and 77 women). These were mostly merchants, entrepreneurs, engineers, master craftsmen, governesses and school teachers, doctors and agricultural specialists. In the village of Voronovo on the outskirts of Moscow, for example, a whole farm was built on the estate of Count F.V. Rostopchin, with the help of Scottish specialists who were living in Moscow. Elsewhere, General A.A. Chesmenskiy set up a factory in his village ‘in the English manner’ where several British experts worked. John Richardson, a groom, lived in the Moscow house of Prince A.M. Golitsyn.

Those Britons who did not manage to get accommodation within the city settled independently, generally living in groups with other Protestants. Some had lived in the area for more than thirty years and had accrued significant fortunes. The rich merchant William Grey was involved not only in trade but also in money lending. Among his debtors were many Russian aristocrats and noblemen, both Russian and foreigners. John Field, an Irish composer and pianist, lived in Moscow between the years 1810 and 1831. Many of his pupils subsequently became famous Russian cultural figures, among them A.A. Alyab’ev, A.N. Verstovskiy, A.L. Gurilyov, A.S. Griboyedov. There were a number of wealthy British horse traders living in Moscow (including John Banks, John Smith and a Mr Jackson), while Catherine the Great’s doctor, John Rogerson, retired there. British tourists also visited Moscow.

The outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15) changed the fate of the British Muscovites. Many left Russia after the Tilsit treaty between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I of June 21st, 1807, which led to a split between Russia and Britain in October 1807. On the other hand, by the end of 1807 naval officers and sailors ‘of British descent’ began to appear in Moscow. Some officers including Admiral George Tait and Captain-Commodore Andrei Ivanovich (Henry) Elliot made their home in the flat of a Doctor Arendt, in the German quarter. Vice-Admiral Robert Crown lived in the house of the merchant Yamshchikov, not far from Hospital Bridge. Nearby lived Rear-Admiral Aleksei Greig, son of the Scottish naval officer Sir Samuel Greig (1735-88) who helped create the modern Russian navy under Catherine the Great. By March 1812, when it became apparent that a war with France was inevitable, all these officers had returned to the service of the Tsar as British-Russian relations gradually returned to normal. By April these men and their families had all left the city.

The citizens of Moscow hoped that their city would never fall. Nevertheless, Napoleon struck fear into the hearts of many Russians. Across Europe, the French emperor and his army were considered to be invincible.

By 1812 fear had taken hold throughout Russian society (to a lesser extent within the army), as the many memoirs written at that time reveal. However, during the Peninsular War of 1808, the British forces under General Arthur Wellesley (the future Duke of Wellington) managed to deal the French army several serious defeats. As a result many Russians, who had lost faith in their own emperor and in the ability of their own army to stand up to the foe, saw the British as the only force equal to the French. There was some hope that Britain would help Russia both financially (‘golden bombs’ was the expression at the time) and with weapons. The arrival of British troops was eagerly awaited. As Lieutenant-General Prince Volkonskiy wrote in his diary on July 3rd, 1812:

In Moscow there is talk of the retreat of our army all the way to the Dvina, while the French had already reached Disna not far away. The British with their navy and the Swedish armies equipped with landing forces are already in the Baltic, and have set up a telegraph in Riga in order, judging by the movements of the enemy, to disembark their troops.

This turned out to be a false rumour; no significant British troops appeared on Russian territory. But the hope that they would come to help defeat the French lived on in the minds of many Russians. One man thought he saw the British cavalry rushing to the aid of Moscow. In his memoirs, N.N. Murav’yov describes how, after the Battle of Borodino (September 7th, 1812), he and his brother Alexander were living in Moscow when one day the director of the broadcloth factory in a village 40 versts away, belonging to Prince Vasiliy Novikov, suddenly appeared at the house. The village had been attacked by French marauders who robbed and beat Novikov, who had ‘lost his nerve’. The memoir continues ‘that the British forces were on their way to the assistance of Moscow and that the factory director himself had seen the British cavalry’. The Murav’yovs could only laugh at this story.

It is possible that the red uniforms of several British dragoons may have been glimpsed on Novikov’s estate. A young British General Sir Robert Wilson was attached to the Russian army and dined with Alexander I himself. Wilson participated in the 1812 war as the British representative in Prince Kutuzov’s headquarters. At the end of August 1812, he and his small escort were retreating, together with the Russian forces, from Smolensk to Vyaz’ma, then to Troitse-Sergieva Lavra, to Dmitrov, Kolomna, Kashira and Serpukhov. It is just possible that Novikov and his cohabitants could have seen them at this point, perhaps mistaking them for the vanguard of an advancing British army.

False rumours were intentionally  spread about the arrival of British and Swedish troops to the aid of the Russians. Assured by the Russian army command that Moscow would never fall, Rostopchin the governor-general tried at all costs to calm public anxieties and keep the people in the city. For this reason, he may have influenced the rumours. E.A. Kharuzin, a Moscow merchant who had been a young boy at the time, later recalled:

As a result of the general mood, many welcomed the invading French forces as though they were our British allies and the proprietress of the houses where I and my mother lived and where our relatives lived and were captured, rushed with such gladness to offer their hospitality, sending out before the gates her son and servant with two pots of butter and half a dozen loaves. The French, upon seeing such hospitality, rushed to grab the buttered slices of bread; other troops joined in and the remaining offerings were ripped out of the hands of the servant and son, who barely managed to retreat and close the gates behind them.

A servant of the Novodyevichy Monastery, Semyon Klimovich, recalled how on the first day that the French took over Moscow, he and a friend met a foreign soldier at the walls of the Monastery who demanded bread. Frightened, they ran away but returned shortly after to the soldier with a loaf of rye bread and a round of white bread:

We went up and bowed, and he held out his hands, we gave him the bread, he tore off  a bit and gave it saying ‘Eat’ and when he tore off a piece of the round I asked: ‘Are you English or French?’ He said ‘French’, then drew his pistol out from under his left side and said again ‘French’, then pulled out his sword, showed his pocket watch, said ‘French’ then having had enough food he took the bread and wrapped it up in his kerchief, bowed and left, and we went back into the Monastery.

Having returned to the monastery the servants told all to a priest. Soon afterwards, the steward of the Moscow household of Count Golovkin, came to the monastery and asked the priest ‘What do you think Holy Father? It isn’t the French but the British who are coming!’ The priest replied, ‘Don’t pretend that it is the British, our employees were at the Milyukov fence and brought out some bread to a soldier and asked, who are you, English or French, it was a French under-officer, or so they were told.’ These incidents show the widespread confusion as a result of the activities  of the Moscow authorities while the Russian forces were leaving the town.

What happened, then, to those British who remained in the capital? Most of them left Moscow in a hurry in July and August 1812. Anything they could not take with them was either given to their friends for safe-keeping, hidden or  dumped. Most of these personal effects were destroyed during the war or stolen by the Napoleonic forces and even by Russian peasants. This happened to the British merchant James Rowand, of the firm Rowand, Thomson and Co, which had its premises in Myasnitskaya Street. Rowand hid here a large quantity of his personal property, alongside the effects of a fellow merchant Thomas Gas, a doctor Y.V. Ker and two British travellers Arthur Young and Martha Willmot. All of the property was lost, and Rowand himself suffered losses of up to 9,811 roubles. A British leather trader Christopher Shuttleworth, who lived in the same district, was fortunate enough to save part of his wares thanks to his German clerk, Jacob Kerler. Before leaving Moscow when the French had already taken the city, Kerler safely hid the most expensive leather items in the basement of another foreigner’s house. On the whole, the Moscow Britons fled to St Petersburg from where it would be possible, as a last resort, to return to Britain by sea. In October 1812, N.M. Loginov, the secretary of Empress Elizabeth Alexeevna, wrote from the northern capital that

... the Britons, and in fact all foreigners, became frightened and were the first to park their belongings and now they are still here but haven’t unpacked, because they are still afraid of the same thing being repeated (that is the approach of the enemy.) Many left. It was they that caused the general turmoil. God knows where they get their news from, but evildoers and the Poles, whom I hate, can get people to believe anything. The Britons have spent significant sums hiring boats here (in St Petersburg) and in Kronstadt, so that the ships were ready to load everything on board.

But not everyone could do this. One English teacher, Thomas Evans, left Moscow University with his colleagues on September 1st, 1812, for Vladimir and then Nizhniy Novgorod where they all lived in very cramped conditions. Other British teachers living in noblemen’s families had to accompany their pupils on their flight from Moscow to a safer place.

The memoirist I.A. Yakubovskiy mentioned another teacher, who in 1812 was living in the household of General D.F. Rayevskiy. On September 1st, Rayevskiy sent his young son Samson and Yakubovskiy, accompanied by their two teachers, one Russian and one  English, to their estate in the village of Nyeplyuyevo twelve versts away from Moscow. But on September 2nd Rayevskiy called the Russian teacher back and advised the others to leave immediately for the Siberian province, where his mother was living. Yakubovskiy recounts the adventures of this journey, and his unsophisticated tale provides a full collection of Russian sterotypes of  the British national character.

Although they left Moscow in a hurry, the Englishman was the only one who managed to pack his silverware. He is described as stubborn and unco-operative. While the party were waiting for a ferry to cross the river Oka, Yakubovskiy describes an altercation:

… Then Senator Lunin’s horse train turned up, but we had arrived before him. His official was with the train and didn’t let us cross. My Englishman got very angry, and would not let them pass, and the matter gets as far as pistols. I didn’t know what to do; Samson Dmitrievich began to cry. I grabbed him [the teacher] by the hand and said to him, ‘Are you out of your mind! Leaving us alone by ourselves; it is a good thing that Dmitry Fyodorovich [Rayevskiy] has entrusted you.’ At this he calmed down a bit.

The hot tempered nature and conceit of the Englishman soon got the refugees into further trouble. When they stopped for the night in the village of Bolshoye on the estate of I.I. Demidov, they were put up in the same house as the coachmen who had driven the coach train with Demidov’s personal effects on it from Moscow. But

… my Englishman started to turf them out from the table: ‘Do you not have any other place to go, other than to come here, to sit where gentlemen sit?’ They replied ‘But we can sit here.’ Such behaviour is to be expected of simple men at a critical time! He [the Englishman] got very angry and drew his pistol. He frightened us to such an extent that I didn’t know what would happen to us. The peasants jumped up. ‘He’s a Frenchman who escaped from Moscow! If you kill but one man we won’t even let your dead bones lie in peace!’

This small story ultimately ended safely, and the group managed to get to Rayevskiy’s mother’s estate and meet him there. He scolded the Englishman for his thoughtless actions, but did not relieve him of his duties as teacher.

Not all the British managed to leave Moscow in time. Their situation was worse than that of the Russians. This was due to the fact that under the instructions issued by Napoleon in 1806, all British citizens, even children, who happened to be on land occupied by the French, were to be imprisoned. But, worse even than this was the danger of the anger of the common Russian people, who hated all foreigners without exception, whom they took for Frenchman or their accomplices. It was this anger that Rostopchin appealed to in his speeches to the people. As noted in the memoirs of a German merchant in Moscow:

… even before the French had occupied the city, the lowest classes of the Moscow population were already hostile towards all foreigners. By the end of August Moscow had almost completely emptied, and the danger for the small number of foreigners who willingly or out of necessity remained in the city, grew by the hour, as demonstrated by the sharp outbursts of an embittered people on the streets and in private houses.

Those British who remained in Moscow tried hard, therefore, not to be caught in the presence of either French or Russians. For this reason,  they are almost entirely absent from the memoirs and histories of this period. Just two memoirs exist mentioning Britons at this time, possibly  penned by individuals close to the circle of Moscow Britons during 1812. The first is the ‘Notes’ of the housekeeper of C.C. Christiani, married to M.E.F. Gardner, daughter of Francis Gardner who owned a ceramic factory in Verbilki village. The second  is the disjointed and spurious memoir of the adventurer R.M. Maddox, son of the owner and director of the Moscow Petrov Theatre, M.E. Maddox.

A further reference to Britons in the occupied city is found in the magazine Son of the Fatherland . In the spring of 1813, the magazine published a letter from a Muscovite, who recounted the arrival of the French in Moscow, and the destruction of  the city. The author also talked about the fact that, in their search for hidden valuables, Napoleon’s soldiers even opened coffins and graves:

One anecdote demonstrates the superiority of the staunch English mind over the French frivolity. An Englishman who was living in Moscow after long and deliberate thought did not know how to save his property. During the invasion of the French he dug a deep pit, let his chests down into it and covered them with soil, then intentionally leaving a space of two arshins (2 ft 4 in) put the body of a dead French soldier in the pit. The French, noticing that the earth had been freshly dug, started digging only to discover their dead comrade. On seeing him they left their work thinking that there was nothing else there other than the dead man. Thus the Englishman saved his property …

However, the story is probably apocryphal. Similar tales occur in many variations. The point is to highlight the superiority of the British or Russian mind over that of the Frenchman.

A government official and native of Finland called Ivan Nordbury secretly stole into the French-occupied city. He observed that there was virtually no control, and it was possible to walk around

… without suspicion and personal danger. My own research combined with the endorsement of several intelligent and friendly Englishmen upheld my conclusion that the enemy garrison consisted of barely more than 15,000 dirty, weakened troops, feeding themselves at first by pillage, and now by handouts and charity.

The figure contained in this message is surprising because the number of French soldiers in the occupied city was actually much higher. Nevertheless, this record of British involvement bears witness to their desire and readiness to help the Russian authorities.

The French left Moscow in October 1812, and the British began to return. Trade in staple commodities was already thriving and British merchants tried not to miss this opportunity. However, there were many false banknotes left by the French, and traders, particularly foreign traders, were likely to fall under suspicion by the police. This happened to two foreigners (supposedly two Scots), Yermolai and Dementiy Scotiya. False banknotes with a value of 550 roubles were found on the first man and 1,100 roubles on the second. Nevertheless, Rostopchin did not hand them over to be tried because ‘… they could plead that they were hardly known by anyone and that they had received the money in return for goods’ – a decision supporting the suggestion that the two men were British citizens. While Russia was still fighting Napoleon, and hoping for assistance from Great Britain, even the smallest diplomatic fissure could be untimely.

In December 1812 Alexander I ordered the St Petersburg-based architect William Hastie, another Scot, to Moscow, where the Tsar placed him in charge of the reconstruction of the city. Hastie arrived in Moscow on February 9th, 1813, but as all maps of the city had been destroyed during the fires, it took until June to draw up a new plan. In his new vision for the city Hastie suggested freeing the Cathedral of St Basil the Blessed and Red Square from the ancient trade rows, which had already been reconstructed and in which trade was once again thriving. Hastie also proposed wide squares around the remains of the Petrov Theatre (which had burned down in 1805). The Tsar forbade the demolition of St Basil the Blessed’s Cathedral but approved the plan. Rostopchin, however, expressed dissatisfaction, arguing that ‘… if one is to follow Mr Hastie’s plan, then hundreds of big stone buildings would be destroyed and it would cost the treasury several million just to create straight lines.’ The government had set aside significant amounts of money to rebuild the city, but inflation meant that this was still not enough. Nevertheless, most of Hastie’s proposal was eventually  realised.

News of the fall of Moscow had astonished Europeans, and a number of British citizens wanted to travel to the scene of the tragedy themselves. The first of these visited the ruins of the city in the winter of 1812. I.A. Yakubovskiy wrote that one day in an inn owned by an Italian on Kuznetskiy Most he saw ‘… six Englishmen who had only just arrived from London to sketch Moscow and the situation it was in’. This inn was visited by Russian inhabitants and French prisoners of war, who were granted freedom of movement on their word of honour. Yakubovskiy described how:

One day an argument started at a table: the Russians began to say that the French had set alight to Moscow, but the French replied, ‘It wasn’t us, but you yourselves.’ The Russians took offence, ‘You even dare tell us so!’ They jumped up from behind their table and wanted to grab him [the officer who contradicted them], but a policeman came in and led the Frenchmen out, and ordered them not to return. The Englishmen didn’t say anything and sat quietly next to us for an hour.

In July 1813 Rostopchin informed Balashov that ‘among the number of people here [in Moscow] those who out of curiosity wanted to witness the famous achievement of Napoleon were, General Fanshawe (whose family had long connections with the Russian military), the Earl of Dumfries and Colonel Scott.’

British travellers arrived in Moscow from the north, through Petersburg and from the south from Persia. A French writer, the Marquis de Custine, described how such travellers were greeted in the winter of 1812-13 by the gentry of Tula. A former soldier of the Napoleonic army, an Italian called Grassini, who was captured and stayed on in Russia for several years, had told him in Milan in 1842 that

… if any Englishman passed through Tula, then in all the houses where he was due to be received, all was turned upside down. Tallow candles on the mantle pieces were replaced with beeswax ones, rooms were cleaned, they even tried dressing up their servants; in a word they changed all of their everyday habits.

As a result, any British citizen who travelled around Russia in the next two decades, considered it his duty to visit Moscow. For example, Robert Johnston visited two years after the fire and published his impressions  in Travels through Part of the Russian Empire (1817). Here he described how:

We have looked around this place [Moscow] in great detail. What changes have taken place! Humility and scorn have been spread everywhere now, these destroyed towers, falling down and falling into decay, these wonderful symbols, ripped off the burning walls and the wind-scattered smithereens and fragments thereof, these cathedrals, blown up, these broken down gates, these ransacked houses, and these streets that have turned into waste lands. A dreadful and mournful picture of dereliction unfolded in front of one: no matter where the traveller cast his tired gaze, everywhere it was the same, he saw also, as a demon of destruction travelled everywhere in all his devastating power, and created piles of debris in the places where the proud Eagle of the north sat; he could see the aggrieved inhabitant, saddened by the ruins of his city, touching the warm ash of his holy chapels where not long ago he paid tribute to his ancestors and his saints.

The tragic downfall of an ancient fairytale city of riches, the one-time capital of the Tsars, who were often portrayed in the West as oriental tyrants, was seized on by the British press and by British writers and poets. A number of essays, dedicated to the war in 1812 and the great fire of Moscow, appeared. British authors, on the whole, admired the Russians’ heroic fight against the ‘Corsican monster’ and sympathetically described the terrible destruction and poverty wrought by the French on the Russian people. Robert Johnston called the Napoleonic soldiers ‘an unlawful band of bandits’. He described Petrovsky Palace as the place from where Napoleon:

… issued his mindless decrees which were revealed as lies in all the rude aspects and at the time when his cowardly soul was plagued with fear and baseness due to the dangers that surrounded him.

The British were inclined to interpret in a favourable light for the Russians even the rumour that Moscow had been set alight by its own inhabitants, or at the command of Rostopchin. The poet Lord Byron was very sceptical about Russia in general, and wrote about Alexander I in a  caustic manner and Napoleon in a sympathetic way; yet, in his poem ‘The Age of Bronze’, there are lines that express a pure sympathy and understanding of the fate of Moscow:

The half barbaric Moscow’s minarets
Gleam in the sun, but 'tis a sun that sets!
Moscow!  thou limit of his long career,
For which rude Charles had wept his frozen tear
To see in vain --- he saw thee --- how? with spire
And palace fuel to one common fire. To this the soldier lent his kindling match
To this the peasant gave his cottage thatch,
To this the merchant flung his  hoarded store,
The prince his hall --- and Moscow was no more!
Sublimest of volcanos! Etna’s flame Pales before thine, and quenchless Hecla’s tame;
Vesuvius shows his blaze, and usual sight
For gaping tourists, from his hackney’d height:
Thou stand’st alone unrivall’d, till the fire
To come, in which all empires shall expire!

The French could never come to terms with the fact that their nation  could be accused of playing such a role in the destruction of the ancient Russian capital. J.F. Ancelot, a member of the French embassy at the coronation of Nicholas I in 1826, published the following year a book Six Months in Russia . In this Ancelot expressed the view that Britain was indirectly partly to blame for the burning of Moscow. Ancelot argued that had Napoleon and Alexander I been able to reach a successful peace agreement, it would have ended British opposition to Napoleon:

For this reason it is not imprudent to think that Rostopchin did actually give the order to do such a terrible thing, that became the fall of the French, although very painful for Russia, and that the fateful torch was thrust into the hands of the leader of the Russian cabinet by a mysterious force, which cherished the dream of our ruin and was spread from square to square, strewing gold everywhere, and convoking all the blame on our heads. Is it not England who is behind all France’s misfortune?

This idea upset Russian authors. Yakov N. Tolstoy, living in Paris as the agent of the Russian government, responded with his own publication Six Mois Suffisent-ils Pour Connaître un Pays? (Are Six Months Sufficient in order to Fully Understand a Country?) in 1827. Here he argued that Russians themselves did not want to make peace with Napoleon, and consequently Britain had no purpose in wasting its gold to invoke mutual hatred. In the same year Prince P.A. Vyazemskiy responded to Ancelot’s book in the Moscow Telegraph . Admitting that the identity of the guilty party behind the Moscow fire ‘has remained even until the present time a historical secret’, Vyazemskiy asserted that ‘… Count Rostopchin in this instance could not ever be considered as the blind weapon of an English ministry. Small fry French politicians seem to see English gold and the St James’s Machiavellianism everywhere.’

The basis of Ancelot’s argument, beyond rumour and prejudice, is unclear. However, it is possible that one of his sources was the protocol of the French military commission, who from September 12th to the 24th, 1812, heard several cases against ‘Russian arsonists’. The documents relating to these cases confirm that three months previously the Russian government had made preparations for the destruction of the city. To assist in this contingency plan in May 1812 the government had invited to Moscow:

... an English doctor called Smith, although he himself said he was a German, a practising mechanic and engineer, who … made his lodging in the Vorontsov dacha (Château de Voronzow) about 6 versts from the city on the Kaluga road ... A brigade of 160 troops and 12 dragoons were sent to guarantee the secrecy of the activities of Smith and to prevent any inquisitive people from finding him.

This is a good example of the mistaken French belief that Britain was giving Russia more effective aid than happened in reality. ‘Smith’ was in fact neither an Englishman nor a German but a Dutchman called Franz Leppich (in Russia he called himself Schmidt). Perhaps the Russians, who with the help of Polish translators interrogated the French military investigators, assumed that any skilled worker would be an Briton. The French believed this because they wanted to believe it. Their conviction about the existence of a British plan to destroy Moscow only increased when they learned, once again from a prisoner at the bar, that the mechanic worked at the Vorontsov dacha. They took this to refer to the country house of Count S.R. Vorontsov, who had the reputation of being an anglophile and an enemy of the French. Thus, a conglomeration of fears and mistaken beliefs sprouted the conviction that the British government was secretly plotting to sabotage any peace agreements between France and Russia.

The subject of the British in Moscow in 1812 is still very much open to debate and research. It is possible that in Russian or British archives the memoirs of other Britons who lived through the occupation will be found. If so, these will, in turn, help us to discuss problems such as the mutual perception of Russians and Britons at one of the most critical points in the existence of the Russian empire.

For Further Reading:

Anthony Brett-James, (ed.) 1812: Eyewitness Accounts of Napoleon’s Defeat in Russia (London, 1966); A.G. Cross, By the banks of the Neva: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge, 1997);  N.Dubrovin,  Letters of Important Servants in the reign of Emperor Alexander I  (St Petersburg, 1883); A.A. Orlov ‘British sailors in the War of 1812’ Noyaya i noveishaya istoriya 2,1997; Alan Palmer,  Napoleon in Russia (London, 1972).

Alexander Orlov is an assistant professor of history at the Moscow State University.