Patrick Gordon: Tutor to Peter the Great
May 2009
by Paul Dukes
Born at Auchleuchries near Ellon in 1635, Patrick Gordon died in Moscow in 1699. As a self-styled ‘soldier of fortune’, he had risen through the ranks to become a general and right-hand man of Peter the Great. The story goes that the tsar wept beside Gordon’s deathbed and closed the eyes of his faithful servant. Throughout much of his life, Patrick kept a diary, six volumes of which are kept in a Moscow archive. At long last, after translation into German and Russian and partial publication in the original 150 years ago, the diary is now being published as written in full.
It begins with a brief description of Gordon’s childhood, including his learning elementary Latin at several schools before he himself gives his reasons for leaving Scotland in 1651: his Roman Catholicism made it difficult to continue his education at university; he wanted ‘to dissolve the bonds of a youthfull affection’; he sought freedom from ‘the carefull inspection of my loveing parents’; and, ‘most of all, my patrimony being but small, as being the yonger son of a yonger brother of a yonger house; I resolved, I say, to go to some forreigne countrey, not careing much on what pretence, or to which countrey I should go, seing I had no knowne ffriend in any forreigne place.’
Gordon sailed via Elsinore in Denmark to Danzig, now Gdansk, in Poland. He at first enrolled in a Jesuit college in what is now Braniewo, Poland. But his restless temperament soon took him away. He tried to go back home, but did not make it: instead, after a series of adventures, he fell in with couthy company including a recruitmaster who claimed to be a kinsman, and who, ‘calling for a glasse of wine, began to be very merry, remembring all friends in Scotland, and then, falling to particular healths, in a short tyme wee were all pretty well warmed. All along both he and the other officers were a battering downe my resolution for Scotland, telling me that I would be laught at when I should come home, and that they would tell me I had been over sea to see what aclock it was, and returned as wise as I went out; and what comfort or content could any man of spirit, who had nothing to care for, have to stay at home, when the countrey was enthralled by an imperious insulting enemy [Cromwell], and no way of redresse left. The only way for those who bore honourable minds was to passe the tyme abroad and better their judgments by purchaseing experience at least. But what needed many perswasions, it being a course to the which I was naturally enclined? So that, without any further circumstances, I gave my promise to go along….’This was just one of many occasions in which meetings with fellow Scots influenced Gordon’s career.
After serving his military apprenticeship in Sweden and Poland, Gordon transferred to Russia in 1661, along with the Aberdonian Paul Menzies and other Scottish officers. His first impression was far from favourable, and he wanted to ask to return to Poland, but he was advised to bite his lip ‘because the Russe would presume that comeing from such a countrey with which they were in open warr, and being a Roman Catholick, I was come to spy out their countrey only and then returne; and that if I mentioned any such thing, they would send me to Siberia or some remote place, and that they would never trust me thereafter.’ So, with great reluctance, he decided to stay on, but soon started to show his outstanding qualities.
He was sent to London on two occasions as unofficial ambassador, first to Charles I, then to James VII and II. In 1686, he was able to visit Aberdeen. On 7 July, the Diary records, ‘I went and see the Colledge in the Old Towne, and was very well received, and showed all worth the seeing there. I went to the Linkes afterwards.’ On 8 July, ‘I was invited to a collation by the Lord provost and Magistrates, where, with my ffriends, I was heartily entertained, and all my relations who were there made burgesses. My sister and sisters in law being come into the towne to see me, wee made very merry with good musick.’
Gordon travelled to his estate at Auchleuchries, too, and called on the Earl of Aberdeen at Haddo, as well as meeting George Keith, the eighth Earl Marischal and others in the city.
Campaigns against the Turks at Azov
Back in Moscow, Patrick Gordon had frequent meetings with the future Peter the Great, whose first tutor had almost certainly been Paul Menzies. Gordon continued Peter’s education in matters military and naval, and lent him books and mechanical instruments. He served as rear-admiral during a training voyage from Archangel on the White Sea, as well as general in campaigns against the Turks at Azov on the Black Sea. When Tsar Peter went on his famous Great Embassy to the West from 1697 to 1698, the loyal Scot played a leading part in suppressing a rebellion.
To the end, he remained faithful to the Jacobite cause, trying to persuade Tsar Peter to support it, and to Roman Catholicism, achieving permission for the construction of its first chapel in Moscow. Altogether, the Diary is an outstanding historical source.
The story of its publication is almost as remarkable as its author’s exploits. There was a project in London in the early nineteenth century. Sending an excuse for his delay in the submission of the fourth canto of Childe Harold from Venice in the summer of 1818, another émigré from North-East Scotland, Lord Byron, wrote to his publisher Mr John Murray:
Then you’ve General Gordon
Who ‘girded his sword on’
To serve with a Muscovite Master,
And help him to polish
A nation so owlish
They thought shaving their beards a disaster.
In Russia, the great writer Alexander Pushkin and Tsar Nicholas I were among those wanting to see the Diary in print. But surprisingly, its first full public appearance was in German translation in mid-century. There were two Scottish notices. The Earl of Ellesmere wrote of ‘the most stormy vicissitudes of a life of military service, which in many particulars might have been suggested to Schiller the Dragoon of the Prologue to Wallenstein, or to Scott that equally felicitous and more finished creation of genius – the inimitable Dalgetty.’
Gordon’s diary versus Pepys’s puppy
The second, anonymous reviewer suggested that ‘Gordon’s is the diary of a man of great talent and sound sense, Pepys’s the diary of a puppy and a courtier’, adding, ‘It would be a graceful acknowledgement of the important services rendered by this remarkable officer to the imperial dynasty of Russia, if the Russian government would now publish this Diary or autobiography in its original Scottish dialect or Aberdeenshire brogue.’
In fact, the the diary has very little of dialect or brogue in it, although Gordon’s citation of the proverb ‘Burn’d bairns fire dread’ puzzled the translators so much that they left a blank.
In 1859, incomplete Passages from the Diary were published by the Spalding Club, an institution devoted to publication of historical documents pertaining to NE Scotland and perhaps due for revival. Meanwhile, after forty years frustration in dealings with archives and publishers, and following an excellent translation into Russian by Dr Dmitry Fedosov, the Diary is to be brought out in the original in its full six volumes by the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen.
To almost the very end, Gordon hoped to return to NE Scotland. Poignantly, he wrote to his son John in 1691 about ‘a clay barren place lying betwixt the two stripes as you go to Westertowne’ which he wanted ‘for a retireing dwelling & burial.’ Sadly, it was not to be, and he breathed his last in Moscow on 29 November 1699. But is it too fanciful to suggest that, with the publication of his Diary in his native land, he has at last come home?
Emeritus Professor Paul Dukes retired from teaching nearly 10 years ago, but still enjoys reading and writing history.
This is an article from the May 2009 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.