On 5 June 1698, John Evelyn went down to Deptford to look at what was left of his house.
He was seventy-seven years old. He had lived at Sayes Court for forty years, laid out its garden himself, and written some of the most influential books in England there. For the previous three months the property had been occupied by the Tsar of Russia, and Evelyn’s diary records the visit in a single sentence of beautifully controlled fury: he went to see how miserably the czar had left his house after making it his court.
The bill came to £350 9s 6d. The Treasury paid it.
And the man responsible went home and built a navy that broke the greatest military power in northern Europe, which is the part of the story that nobody in Deptford saw coming.
A Sergeant Named Mikhailov
In 1697 the Tsar of All the Russias left his country, which no reigning Russian ruler had ever done, and went to look at Europe.
The Grand Embassy was about two hundred and fifty strong. Officially it was led by three ambassadors and its purpose was to build a coalition of Christian powers against the Ottoman Empire. Travelling among the party as a junior member was a sergeant called Pyotr Mikhailov, who was six foot seven, subject to facial convulsions when angry, and instantly recognisable to every court in Europe as the twenty-five-year-old tsar.
The incognito was not meant to deceive. It meant he could go into a shipyard and be spoken to like a workman, which an anointed sovereign could not.
The Ottoman coalition came to nothing. The Austrians were already negotiating their own peace and the maritime powers were busy with the coming Spanish succession. What Peter got instead was four months at Zaandam and Amsterdam with his hands on Dutch shipbuilding, and then, in January 1698, an invitation from William III to come to England – where, he had been told, the shipwrights worked from drawings and mathematics rather than by eye and habit.
He came for the theory. The Dutch had taught him how to build a ship. He wanted to know how to design one.
In February he moved out to Deptford, because that was where the royal dockyard was, and because a suitable house happened to be available a few hundred yards from its gate.
One Hundred and Five Days
The house was Sayes Court. Evelyn owned it but had not lived there since 1694, having inherited the family seat at Wotton in Surrey. The place was let to a tenant, and it was the tenant who opened the door to a Russian delegation, agreed to hand over his home and all its furniture to a visiting monarch, moved his family out, and subsequently had to petition the Lords of the Treasury in some distress about what had happened next.
What happened next took a hundred and five days.
Sir Christopher Wren went down afterwards as the King’s Surveyor, with the royal gardener, to put a number on it. Three hundred panes of glass broken. A hundred and seventy feet of oak wainscoting torn out. Two hundred and forty feet of fencing gone, probably for firewood. Every floor in the house so thoroughly covered in grease and ink that three of them had to be taken up and relaid. Locks broken, stoves ruined, paintwork destroyed. Paintings damaged in a manner that suggested they had been used as targets. Of fifty chairs in the house, not one remained.
Then there was the garden, which was the real crime.
Evelyn’s holly hedge ran four hundred feet long, stood nine feet high and was five feet thick. He had grown it over twenty years and regarded it, with some justice, as one of the finest things of its kind in England. The Russians discovered that if you put a man in a wheelbarrow and ran at it hard enough, you could get through.
They did this repeatedly. For fun.
There is a much-repeated story that on one occasion the man pushing the barrow was Edmund Halley, who had been sent down to Deptford to talk astronomy with the tsar and ended up drunk in the garden instead. No contemporary source I can find says so. The two men certainly met and certainly drank together, and the story has been told for three hundred years because it deserves to be true, so it is offered here as legend rather than record.
It hardly matters who was pushing. By April the hedge had a hole in it you could drive a cart through, along with the wall.
What He Was Actually Doing
The comedy is genuine, and it has done real damage to the historical record, because it is most of what survives in English memory of a visit that mattered enormously.
He was at the dockyard nearly every day. He watched ships taken from keel to launch, sat with the master shipwrights over their draughts, and made notes. He went to Woolwich to watch gunnery trials, to Portsmouth to see a fleet exercise staged for his benefit, to the Royal Society, to Greenwich, to the Tower.
He went to the Royal Mint more than once, and asked questions about the mechanised coining presses. Within a few years Russian currency had been reformed on the decimal principle and struck by machine.
William III gave him a yacht, the Royal Transport, one of the fastest vessels afloat, and Peter sailed her home.
Most importantly, he went shopping for people. When the embassy left England it took around sixty English specialists under contract – shipwrights, gunners, engineers, surgeons, mathematicians. Henry Farquharson of Aberdeen went to Moscow and founded the School of Mathematics and Navigation in 1701, which supplied the Russian navy with officers for the next hundred years. The engineer John Perry went to build canals and locks. A tsar with money can buy warships from anyone. Peter bought the ability to make his own, and the men who could teach other men to make them, which is a different order of purchase entirely.
He paid for a good deal of it with one of the more cynical transactions of the age. The Marquess of Carmarthen gave him something in the region of £12,000 for a monopoly on importing tobacco into Russia – a country where the Orthodox Church held smoking to be sinful and where men had been flogged and mutilated for it within living memory. Peter took the money, lifted the prohibition, and put it into ships.
The Man Who Wrote the Book About Trees
It is worth pausing on the owner of the ruined garden, because Evelyn deserves better than the role of aggrieved landlord.
He was one of the founding fellows of the Royal Society. In 1661 he published Fumifugium, a pamphlet on the coal smoke of London that identified the problem, described the respiratory damage it caused, and proposed moving the offending industries downwind and planting the city with sweet-smelling trees – three hundred years before anyone did anything about it. During the Dutch wars he served as a Commissioner for the Sick and Wounded, which meant finding beds, surgeons and money for thousands of maimed seamen while the Crown failed to send him funds, and he did it without theatre and at his own expense when he had to.
In 1671, walking near Deptford, he looked through a cottage window and saw an unknown young man carving a crucifix in wood. He brought him to the notice of Wren and of Charles II. The young man was Grinling Gibbons.
And in 1664 he published Sylva, at the request of the Navy Board, which was worried that England was running out of oak. It is a book about planting trees, and it is one of the most consequential books of the century. Evelyn’s argument was that timber is not a commodity you buy when you need it but a crop you plant for your grandchildren, and that a country which fails to plant will one day find it cannot put a fleet to sea. It went through edition after edition. Landowners planted millions of trees because of it. The ships that fought at Trafalgar grew, in part, out of Evelyn’s pamphleteering.
So the garden that Peter’s men drove wheelbarrows through belonged to the Englishman who understood better than anyone alive that sea power comes out of the ground and takes a century to grow.
Evelyn never mentions the irony. He was too busy counting the chairs.
Narva to Nystad
Peter left England in April 1698. Two years later he went to war with Sweden, and the next twenty-one years justified every hour he had spent in the Deptford yard.
Sweden in 1700 was the dominant military power of northern Europe, holding Finland, Estonia, Livonia, Ingria and territory in Germany, with an army of unmatched reputation and a king of eighteen. Peter joined Denmark and Saxony-Poland in attacking him, on the assumption that a boy could be dealt with quickly.
At Narva in November 1700, in a snowstorm, eight thousand Swedes broke a Russian army several times their size and took its artillery. It was a humiliation so complete that Charles XII concluded Russia was finished as a serious opponent, turned south into Poland, and spent the next six years there.
Those six years were the making of Peter. He rebuilt the army from nothing, melting down church bells for guns. He took the Swedish forts at the mouth of the Neva in 1702 and 1703, and on the captured marsh he founded St Petersburg in May 1703 – a naval base and a window on the Baltic, built on piles driven into swamp by conscripted labour at a cost in lives nobody bothered to count. The Admiralty shipyard was laid out there almost immediately. The men who ran it had been trained on principles learned in Amsterdam and Deptford.
When Charles finally turned east in 1708 he marched into a country that had learned how to fight him. Peter refused battle, burned the ground, cut the supply columns at Lesnaya, and let the winter – the worst in living memory – do the work. At Poltava, in the summer of 1709, the Swedish army was destroyed in a morning. Charles escaped to Ottoman territory with a few hundred men and stayed there for five years, and the balance of power in northern Europe changed permanently on that field.
The sea took longer. Peter’s first attempt at a Baltic fleet was galleys, and the great naval powers thought them a joke. At Gangut in July 1714, in the flat calm that leaves sailing ships helpless, Russian galleys rowed into a Swedish squadron and captured it entire. Peter regarded that day as the equal of Poltava, and had himself painted as its victor, and he was not wrong to: it was the first time Russian ships had beaten a first-class European navy, and everyone who mattered noticed.
By the time the war ended, the Russian Baltic fleet numbered around thirty ships of the line, built in Russian yards to English and Dutch draughts by Russian shipwrights taught by foreigners on contract.
The Treaty of Nystad in 1721 gave Russia Livonia, Estonia, Ingria and part of Karelia. Sweden ceased to be a great power that year and has never been one since. In October, the Senate gave Peter the title of Emperor.
Twenty-three years earlier he had been a large young man in a Deptford shipyard asking why the English drew their hulls on paper first.
Beards and Gallows
The embassy ended early because the streltsy rose in Moscow, and this is the part of the story that must not be left out of a piece that opens with a wheelbarrow.
Peter came home at speed and the reprisals went on for months. Well over a thousand men were tortured and executed. Bodies were left hanging outside the city through the winter as an instruction. There are accounts, impossible to verify and entirely in character, of the tsar taking a turn with the axe himself.
He also began cutting off his courtiers’ beards, personally, with shears, and taxed the ones who insisted on keeping them.
The man who was pushed through a holly hedge for a joke in April was hanging men in rows by October. It was the same appetite in both cases – for doing the thing himself, at once, with his own hands, and for finding out what would happen if he did. Nothing about him is safely comic.
Going to Look at It
Sayes Court is gone. The house came down in stages across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and what is left of the estate is a small public park off Sayes Court Street, a few minutes’ walk from Deptford station, with a fragment of old garden wall and a mulberry tree that local tradition says Peter planted himself. He almost certainly did not. People still go and look at it, which tells you something about how history actually survives.
Archaeologists have found the foundations. They lie within the Convoys Wharf site, the vast former dockyard ground that has been the subject of one of the longest-running development arguments in south London, and a campaign has run for years to bring the garden back in some form.
On Glaisher Street, by Deptford Creek, there is a monument to Peter given by Russia in 2001 – a strange, deliberately grotesque bronze by Mihail Chemiakin, with the tsar seated stiffly on a throne, tiny head on an enormous body, a dwarf beside him holding his chair. It is not a flattering object and it was never meant to be.
Then walk to St Nicholas Deptford, the dockyard’s parish church, and look at the skulls on the churchyard gateposts.
Evelyn got his £350 and repaired what could be repaired. He died in 1706 at eighty-five, still gardening, still writing, having outlived nearly everyone and having seen the hedge come back in part.
He never knew what the visit had been for. He went to his grave regarding it as three months of vandalism by a barbarian, which it also was, and had no way of knowing that the man in the wheelbarrow had been taking notes, or that the notes would end with a Russian fleet in the Baltic and a new empire on the map of Europe.
