The Road to Moscow

Abstract

In the last week of January 1705 — or 1704/5, as it was called at that time, when the year ended on 31 March — a lengthy procession of carriages, baggage wagons and open well-laden sledges crossed from Prussia into Poland, on the road from Königsberg to Vilna. It was the equipage of Charles Whitworth, on its way to Russia.¹ He had been appointed by Queen Anne nine months before as Envoy Extraordinary to the Court of Peter I, Tsar of Muscovy. His friend at the Treasury had told him in July that they had ordered the preparation of his credentials on vellum, with ‘the flourishing of His Czarish Majesty’s Titles, for the Czar and the Eastern Princes delight in gilt letters’: but it was only at the beginning of October that the document, together with his own instructions and a sum of money, had been dispatched in a tin box, ‘not to be spoiled in the post’.