'Losing My Best Days': Charles Whitworth, First British Ambassador to Russia

'Losing My Best Days': Charles Whitworth, First British Ambassador to Russia

Volume: 50 Issue: 6 | June 2000 | Page 40-46 | Words: 3593 | Author: Hartley, Janet

Janet Hartley describes the trials and tribulations of life for ‘our man’ in Peter the Great’s Moscow.

Janet Hartley is a Senior Lecturer in International History at the London School of Economics. She is author of Alexander I (Longman, 1994) and A Social History of the Russian Empire 1650-1825 (Longman, 1999) and is writing a biography of Whitworth.

A diplomatic career in the early eighteenth century brought neither great material reward nor prestige. Postings at the heart of diplomatic activity – particularly in Paris or The Hague – could be a useful stepping stone for a ministerial career at home; postings to Italian cities such as Venice or Florence could at least bring the benefits of a pleasant climate and the prospects of the congenial company of aristocrats who were making the grand tour. But the more remote and inhospitable cities of Europe were of little attraction. Charles Whitworth (1675-1725), who was offered the post of envoy to Russia in 1704, lacked the patronage to secure a more prestigious post elsewhere and lacked the wealth (he was the eldest of six sons of Richard Whitworth of Staffordshire) to turn the offer down.

Whitworth’s started out as a clerk in the Board of Trade, probably in 1696. His diplomatic career began as English Resident at the Diet of Ratisbon in 1702. This proved a less than gentle introduction to diplomatic life as the town was occupied by Bavarian troops in 1703 and the foreign representatives were held almost as prisoners. After eventually leaving Ratisbon, Whitworth tentatively enquired about an attractive vacancy which had arisen at Venice. Instead, he found himself taking a hazardous journey through war-torn northern Europe to a country that was little known but generally regarded as strange, ‘oriental’ and uncivilised. Whitworth had few illusions; ‘I... beg the continuance of your favourable protection in that barbarous Country’, he wrote to the Duke of Marlborough shortly before his departure.

Whitworth’s embassy was the first formal English mission to Russia since the late 1660s. His main objective was to settle some commercial matters that had been a source of complaint to English merchants for many decades, and, in particular, to address the grievances of a group of tobacco merchants who had won a contract during Peter the Great’s visit to England in 1698 for a monopoly of the sale of tobacco to Russia. Whitworth crossed the Russian frontier in March 1705 and remained there until April 1710 (he returned briefly to Russia in 1712). Superficially, his embassy was a personal triumph. Whitworth was made Ambassador Extraordinary in 1709, and so became the first British Ambassador to Russia. However, his extensive dispatches and personal letters during this period reveal not only his recognition of the limited results of his embassy, both commercial and diplomatic, but also the personal discomfort and frustrations that such an unenviable posting brought.

Diplomats in this period frequently complained about the misery of living abroad and about the poor financial rewards. But in Whitworth’s case these problems were made more acute by the extreme conditions he faced in Russia. It took him four months to get from Vienna to Smolensk, on the Russian border, travelling on poor roads, lodging in ‘wretched Cottages’ and passing through the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which had been ravaged by the passage of troops. It took several more weeks before he reached Moscow, which offered him little in the way of relief or comfort. His accommodation was basic, familiar foodstuffs were hard to come by, and almost the only company available was that of the English merchant community, whose main diversion from the tedium of life and the cold winters was heavy drinking.

As early as July 1705, Whitworth was writing to his brother-in-law that ‘neither the climate, manners nor diversions of the place’ were ‘suiting either my health or temper’. The only pleasures, he went on, were eating and drinking, ‘and yet God knows much worse than ever I found them anywhere else’. Moscow could offer little in the way of cultural diversions – theatrical and musical performances only began to make an appearance in the mid-eighteenth century. It was, furthermore, a dangerous and violent place. The town consisted almost entirely of wooden buildings clustered together in narrow and unplanned streets and was subject to devastating fires. In the summer of 1706 Whitworth had to flee his house as fire took hold and, ‘God be thanked my house stands still, but all the street over against me is burnt down’. Moscow was also notorious for its beggars and thieves. A few years after Whitworth left the city another foreign visitor commented of Moscow that there were ‘so many Excesses and Disorders, that after Sun-set no body ventures abroad without sufficient Company’. One of Whitworth’s Russian servants was attacked in the street and ‘flung into a nasty hole’ from which he was only released by paying bribes to the guards.

Many diplomats of this period who, like Whitworth, lacked substantial independent means found that the combination of low pay, the delays in payment of both daily allowances and extraordinary expenses created an almost insurmountable financial burden. Whitworth had to face the additional costs of his journey to Russia, and also what he clearly regarded as the ‘oriental’ displays of ceremonial that were required of a foreign envoy. He was obliged, against his wishes, to make a formal entry into Moscow in 1705, a procedure which involved such a long train of Russian and English coaches and horsemen (including 160 Russian horsemen with drawn swords) that its progress took four hours. His family had to meet these costs and Whitworth confided in his mother that:

I have been tempted more than once to wish I had never engaged in the undertaking having found the honour much too great for my purse and shoulders.

‘My pocket is empty’, he wrote in August 1705, in an impassioned plea to the Treasury to speed up payment of his arrears. Moscow was an expensive place to live and Whitworth soon realised that little could be achieved without generous bribes and presents to the Russian ministers, an expense that also had to be met in the first instance out of his own pocket.

The wretched state of postal communications between England and Russia was a further cause of frustration. It was normal for letters from England to take to take three or four weeks to reach Russia, but it could take far longer and they could arrive in batches. On December 19th, 1708, Whitworth reported that he had just received letters from London dated September 10th, 14th and 24th and October 1st and 5th. Communication was even more difficult, and life even more uncomfortable and expensive when Whitworth was obliged to follow Peter on campaign. In the autumn of 1705 Whitworth travelled with the Tsar and the Russian army through present-day Lithuania and Belarus, uncertain from day to day of his next move and almost completely inaccessible by mail from England. In November he found himself in Grodno, not knowing whether Peter intended to travel to Narva or to St Petersburg. He complained:

In short, I know nothing that travels more or faster than the Tsar, except the Sun, and neither my purse, nor my health enable me to keep Company with such mighty planets

At least this way Whitworth could gain an audience with Peter, even if it were not altogether a pleasant experience (‘I shall not tell you how much bad Wine I drank’, he wrote to Mr Powis from Grodno ‘nor how much I pay for it, but I must acquaint you that one Royal Visit in an afternoon drunk me up all the stock I had laid in for the whole Campaign’). In Moscow, he found that many months could pass without seeing the Tsar (in February 1707 he reported that he had not seen Peter for a year) and that it was therefore all too easy for the Tsar’s ministers to delay addressing his concerns on the grounds that their master was inaccessible or too busy to respond. Whitworth, in fact, came to believe that ministers in both countries had forgotten him, complaining to his patron George Stepney in August 1706 of ‘the disagreableness there is of being in a station so much neglected as that where I am at present: the last letter I have received from Mr Secretary is dated the 25th of December 1705, just six months ago, & to most propositions I make from this Court I never get any answer at all’ and adding that ‘if I stay longer I shall have nothing to do, & my letters not be worth reading’.

Given the circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that Whitworth found it difficult to carry out his instructions. Indeed, the particular problems of communication had the most unfortunate consequences for him. It had been made clear to Whitworth that his first priority was to address the grievances of the tobacco contractors, who complained that they were restricted in the sale of their product and that the market was being swamped by cheap Dutch imports and by home-grown Russian tobacco. The result was that much of the colonial tobacco they had imported under the agreement with the Tsar of 1698 remained unsold. Almost immediately, Whitworth faced another potential problem for the tobacco trade. Two English artisans – Peter Marshall and Francis Peacock, employees of the original contractors whose own concern was that their unsold tobacco should not simply rot in Moscow warehouses – had already set up an enterprise in Moscow to cut and roll tobacco, which employed some two hundred Russian workers. At the same time that Whitworth arrived in Russia, two other Englishmen – Samuel Martin and James Spilman – were setting out to Russia for the same purpose under a separate arrangement made with some Moscow merchants. Whitworth warned the government at home of the proposed activities of Martin and Spilman almost as soon as he arrived in Russia, apprehensive that, when Russians had learnt certain skills from these Englishmen, they would apply them to their home-grown tobacco and harm the English export market.

Unwittingly Whitworth found himself embroiled in bitter squabbles between the different factions of colonial tobacco merchants, some of whom were furious that they had been excluded from the original 1698 contract. One group of Virginia traders attacked the activities of Marshall and Peacock. As Whitworth waited for instructions in Moscow the various parties put their cases to the Board of Trade and the Houses of Parliament. The Virginia traders were initially successful and Whitworth received a letter written on June 1st, 1705, from the minister in London containing what must have seemed very clear instructions to ‘destroy those materials that are brought from hence [England] to Moscow for the carrying on the manufacture’. The letter also informed Whitworth that a privy seal would be sent for the recall of Marshall and Peacock. Whitworth did not receive the letter until July, by which time the tide had turned against the Virginia traders and the original contractors were arguing a case in the House of Lords for Marshall and Peacock to be allowed to complete their work (under Whitworth’s supervision no less) before returning home. On June 22nd, Erasmus Lewis, secretary of Robert Harley, who was Secretary of the Northern Department, had warned Whitworth that the privy seal for the recall of the artisans might be delayed and hinted that there might be a change in policy but by the time his letter reached Whitworth it was too late.

Having received nothing contrary to the instruction of June 1st, and realising that he had to act quickly before leaving Moscow to join Peter’s forces on campaign, Whitworth undertook in late July what can only be regarded as a rather undignified act of industrial sabotage. Confident that he had done his duty, he reported home that he had:

...spent the best part of the night in destroying the severall instruments and materials, some whereof were so strong, that they oblidg’d us to make a great noise in pulling them to pieces... destroy’d five parcells of ingredients... I likewise broke the great spinning wheel, and above three score reels for rowling; I then destroy’d three Engines ready set up for cutting Tobacco... several large Engines for pressing the Tobacco into form have been pulled to pieces, their screws split, the wooden moles broke, the coper carried away, and about 20 fine sieves cut to pieces, nor is the least thing left standing...

Whitworth then left Moscow and it was only when letters from London began to reach him in the late summer that he began to realise that he had acted rashly. Indeed, he came to think that this was not just a case of misfortune brought about by inadequate communications, but that he had been deliberately put in this situation so that the ministers in London could shift the blame on to him and so protect themselves from the wrath of the various tobacco factions, many of whom were wealthy and influential figures in the city and some of whom were members of parliament.

Not surprisingly, this incident did little to improve commercial relations or to make Whitworth’s task easier. The Moscow merchants were furious that the indirect result of Whitworth’s actions was that Martin and Spilman failed to keep to their arrangement. In revenge, the Moscow authorities sealed up the warehouses of the tobacco contractors, which happened to contain some of Whitworth’s private posses-sions that he had left behind in Moscow. The Tsar was particularly concerned that this action was a prelude to the recall of all English specialists in Russian service (although this did not materialise, at least during the period of Whitworth’s embassy).

In the course of his stay in Russia, Whitworth did manage a few limited commercial successes – he reached an agreement for the purchase of the unsold tobacco exported by the tobacco contractors, partly opened up the Russian tar trade to English merchants, and achieved some satisfaction on the level of charges and the provision of facilities at the port of Archangel – but the main disputes were unresolved. Whitworth himself acknowledged his failure in early 1707: ‘my best applications in behalf of the Merchants are often ineffectual, allways dilatory’.

By the beginning of 1708, the combination of frustration over commercial negotiations and the unpleasantness of life in Russia had made Whitworth desperate to return home and to be given a posting somewhere less remote. He was, in his words, losing his ‘best days’ in pointless negotiations, had ‘little opportunity of improving’ his ‘time or manners for want of suitable conversation’ and, in the process, was losing ‘the knowledge of Courts and Connexion of business’. But just at the point, when he was feeling that his recall must be imminent, a diplomatic crisis broke which required him to remain in Russia for far longer than he had hoped.

On the evening of July 21st, 1708, Andrei Matveev, the Russian ambassador to England, was forced out of his coach in London by bailiffs acting on behalf of some fifty creditors who hoped to be paid before the ambassador left England for Holland. His footmen were attacked and Matveev was unceremoniously removed to a debtors’ prison where he spent several uncomfortable hours before being released. The incident caused an immediate storm as the foreign diplomatic community rallied around Matveev. Although the question of diplomatic immunity from civil and criminal proceedings lacked clarity at the time, such treatment was beyond the norms of acceptable behaviour. Whitworth was given the unenviable task of trying to sort out the matter in Moscow with the minimum of fuss.

It rapidly became clear to the English envoy that Peter and his ministers had no intention of letting the incident drop quietly. Once again, poor communications put Whitworth at a disadvantage from the start as the Russian ministers knew about the incident before he did and had already decided that they were going to take an uncompromising position (indeed, Peter had instructed the Ambassadorial Chancellery to keep an eye on Whitworth and make sure he did not leave Moscow before the latter had any inkling of the controversy). Peter inflamed the situation by making impossible demands for satisfaction, namely that the bailiffs and their servants should be condemned to death, and that the creditors should also be punished for their impertinence. In fact, the Tsar welcomed the opportunity he had been given to embarrass a power that had not treated Russia as a diplomatic equal. The incident in the tobacco factory had served to prove that England saw Russia mainly as a convenient export market, even as a dumping ground, for colonial products rather than as a serious player on the international scene. Whitworth had recognised this and during his first year in Russia warned of Peter’s resentment that England ‘has great occasion for their Trade, but little value for their Prince or people’. The Matveev incident forced England to recognise the affront to Russian dignity and to make appropriate amends.

Negotiations over the Matveev affair dragged on in Moscow for over a year. Whitworth tried every tactic: he apologised and assured the Russians that redress was under way; he pressed the English government to take more action to satisfy the Russians; he turned to the attack, reminding Russian ministers of a not dissimilar incident involving his own servant and putting at least some of the blame on Matveev for his irresponsible behaviour; he offered bribes. In the end, the British government went a long way to appease Peter in the face of Russian inflexibility. The incident led directly to an Act of Parliament which formally established the diplomatic immunity of foreign diplomats in Britain. The government also agreed to send ‘a person of quality’ to Peter to present a formal apology from Queen Anne. Conscious of the time and expense involved in sending someone on the long journey to Russia for this purpose, it was decided that Whitworth should undertake the task himself and should be made Ambassador Extraordinary for the occasion. This unexpected advancement left the ever-practical Whitworth less than enthusiastic and mostly concerned at the impact this might have on his meagre financial resources. As he wrote to his friend George Tilson, Under-Secretary at the Northern Department:

...I own I am surprised at your [sic] Character of Ambassador Extraordinary: I hope it won’t be expected that I should make any particular appearance on this occasion at my own Expense, which perhaps this Court may look for, since Sound and Show are to be their satisfaction...

Whitworth was right to be concerned. In the event, he had to participate in an elaborate ceremony involving a long procession through Moscow. In 1711 he was still owed some £3,839 by the Treasury in unpaid ordinaries and extraordinary expenses, some of which had been incurred in staging this presentation. After presenting the formal apology Whitworth was at last rewarded with the prospect of a visit home. But he had to postpone his journey until spring 1710 when the ice had melted on the rivers so that on several occasions he had great difficulty in getting his carts across the swollen rivers. The journey took just over three months (partly accounted for by a fortnight’s stay in Berlin and an unexpected delay in Holland) and it was particularly harrowing across the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth where Whitworth witnessed the physical destruction caused by the passage of armies and the prevalence of famine and plague. In the ‘partly desolate’ town of Bobr, for example, he found ‘the poor inhabitants ready to starve’ so that they ‘eat garbage & offals flung away’. Whitworth distributed twenty loaves of bread to the townspeople. In other towns he found ‘the Inhabitants dying of famine’.

By mid-June, however, he was in Holland, meeting members of the diplomatic community, browsing in bookshops and enjoying conversations in the English coffee house. He might have thought that his trials were over but fate decided otherwise. Uncomfortable days at sea were followed by miserable lodgings on the Dutch coast. Whitworth had been thwarted firstly by the attentions of a French privateer which forced his ship to return to shore, and then by stormy weather which would not allow any ships to leave port. Despite being chased by another French privateer, he finally reached Harwich safely. Four days later, probably exhausted from his journey, Whitworth at last received some recognition for his labours:

I had the honour to kiss the Queens hand at Kensington about eight in the evening, I was introduced by Mr Secretary Boyle up the back stairs, & found Her Majesty all alone in her private withdrawing room, she received me very graciously, & thanked me for the service I had done her.

For Further Reading:

M.S. Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy 1450-1919 (Longman, 1993); D.B. Horn, The British Diplomatic Service 1689-1789 (Oxford UP, 1961); T. Lane ‘The Diplomatic Service under William III’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series, vol. 10 (1927). Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (Yale UP, 1998), Anthony Cross, By the Banks of the Neva: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge UP, 1997), S. Dixon et al (eds), Britain and Russia in the Age of Peter the Great: Historical Documents (School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1998); Lindsey Hughes (ed), Peter the Great and the West: New Perspectives (Macmillan, forthcoming). Whitworth wrote an account of Russia: Charles Whitworth, An Account of Russia as it was in the Year 1710 (Strawberry Hill, 1758).

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