Peter the Great

While at Spa, the Tsar sat for the Dutch painter, Karl Moor, and this painting and the one Kneller had done almost two decades before became the Tsar's favorite portraits of himself.

On July 25, Peter began an eight-day boat journey down the Meuse (in Holland, the Maas), and finally, on August 2, he was reunited with Catherine in Amsterdam. He remained in Holland for a month and on September 2, he departed Amsterdam and Holland for the last time, traveling up the Rhine to Nimwegen, Cleves and Wesel and then on to Berlin. Along the way, he left Catherine behind to follow him. They often separated on the road like this, because it was difficult to find enough horses to service both their suites and also simply because she did not like to travel as rapidly as her husband.

Two days after Peter's arrival, Catherine caught up with him in Berlin. It was her first visit to the Prussian capital, and although by now Peter was familiar, his wife was an object of much curiosity. But Catherine was well received and dinners and balls were given in her honor, so that she and Peter departed for Russia in good spirits. By October, the Tsar was back in St. Petersburg. There, Peter had to face the climax of a personal and political tragedy which ran deeper than any other in his reign.

51

THE EDUCATION OF AN HEIR

On October 11, 1717, Peter returned to St. Petersburg. "The two princesses, his daughters [Anne and Elizabeth, then nine and eight], waited for him in front of the palace, dressed in Spanish costumes," Monsieur de La Vie, the French envoy, reported to Paris, "and his son, the young Prince Peter Petrovich, greeted him in his room where he was riding a tiny Icelandic pony." But his joy at seeing his children quickly faded. While he was away, the government of Russia had functioned badly. Maladministration, jealousies and corruption everywhere had all but swamped the governmental system he had tried to erect; men who were supposed to be the leaders of the state were quarreling like children, frantically accusing one another of political and financial misdeeds. Peter plunged into this confusion and tried to straighten it out. Every morning, at six a.m., he convened the Senate and sat in person to hear the accusations and defenses of the contending parties. Finally, realizing that the complaints were too widespread and the corruption too deep, he created a special court of justice with separate investigating commissions, each consisting of a major, a captian and a lieutenant of the Guards, who were to examine the cases and render judgement according to "common sense and equity." "And so it came to pass in Russia," wrote Weber, "that members of the venerable Senate, composed of the heads of the greatest families in the Tsar's dominions, were obliged to appear before a lieutenant as their judge and be called to account for their conduct."

But these trials were only a preliminary to something far more serious, something that threatened the whole future of Peter's Russia. For it was at this time that Peter was forced to make a final decision in the case of his son, the Tsarevich Alexis.

Alexis was born in February 1690, not long after the eighteen-year-old Tsar's marriage to the meek, sad, reclusive Eudoxia. At Alexis' birth, Peter was enormously proud, giving court banquets and fireworks displays in honor of the new Prince. Yet, as the years went by, the Tsar saw little of his son. Absorbed by shipbuilding, by Lefort and Anna Mons, by the Azov campaigns and the Great Embassy, Peter left Alexis in the company of Eudoxia. Visiting his son meant seeing the boy's mother, toward whom he was openly contemptuous, and Peter preferred to avoid them both. Naturally, Alexis sensed the breach between his parents and understood that in his father's mind he was identified with his mother. Thus, in his earliest, formative years, Alexis saw Peter as disapproving, perhaps even a threat, an enemy. Growing up in his mother's care, he took her part and adopted her ways.

Then, suddenly, when Alexis was a thin eight-year-old boy with a high forehead and dark, serious eyes, Peter wrenched his little world apart. In 1698, when the Tsar returned from the West to suppress the Streltsy, he send Eudoxia to a convent. Alexis was installed in his own house in Preobrazhenskoe and confided to the general supervision of his aunt, Peter's sister Natalya. His education, which until that time had consisted mainly of readings from the Bible and other religious lessons, was placed in the hands of Martin Neugebauer of Danzig, who had been recommended by Augustus of Saxony. Neugebauer had a Germanic character—he was orderly and prompt—and he soon came into conflict with the Russian temperament. There is a story of a meal which the twelve-year-old Tsarevich was sharing with Neugebauer, his earlier teacher Nikifor Viazemsky and Alexis Naryshkin. They were eating chicken, and the Tsarevich having finished his piece, took another. Naryshkin instructed him first to empty his plate by putting his bones back into the serving dish. Neugebauer, shocked, declared that this was ill-bred. Alexis looked at Neugebauer and whispered to Naryshkin; Neugebauer declared that whispering also was ill-bred. The two men began to argue, and Neugebauer exploded: "None of you understand anything! When I get the Tsarevich abroad, then I shall know what to do!" Russians, he shouted, were all barbarians, dogs and pigs, and he would demand the dismissal of all of Alexis' Russian household. Throwing down his knife and fork, he stormed out of the room. It was Neugebauer, however, who was dismissed. Unable to find any work in Russia, he returned to Germany, became a secretary to King Charles XII of Sweden and functioned for many years as Charles' advisor and expert on Russian affairs.

Meanwhile, to replace Neugebauer, Peter had followed Patkul's advice and chosen a German doctor of laws, Heinrich von Huyssen, who submitted a plan for the education of a future tsar which Peter approved. Alexis was to study French, German, Latin, mathematics, history and geography. He was to read foreign newspapers and to continue intensive study of the Bible. In his spare time, he was to look at atlases and globes, train with mathematical instruments and exercise by fencing, dancing, riding and playing games involving throwing or kicking balls. Alexis was intelligent and made good progress. In a letter to Leibniz, Huyssen reported,

The Prince lacks neither capacity nor quickness of mind. His ambition is moderated by reason, by sound judgement, and by a great desire to distinguish himself and to gain everything which is fitting for a great prince. He is of a studious and pliant nature, and wishes by assiduity to supply what has been neglected in his education. I notice in him a great inclination to piety, justice, uprightness and purity of morals. He loves mathematics and foreign languages and shows a great desire to visit foreign countries. He wishes to acquire thoroughly the French and German languages and has already begun to receive instruction in dancing and military exercises, which give him great pleasure. The Tsar has allowed him not to be strict in the observance of fasts, for fear of harming his health and bodily development, but out of piety he refuses any indulgence in this respect.

Alexis was also influenced during these adolescent years by Menshikov, who was appointed the official governor to the Tsarevich in 1705. Menshikov's duties were a general supervision of the education, finances and the overall training of the heir to the throne. To many, the largely illiterate confidant of Peter's loves and wars seemed a strange trustee for the guidance and preparation of the heir. But it was precisely because of their intimacy that Peter chose his friend. He disliked the results of the years his son had spent with his mother, and he was suspicious of the foreign tutors who still surrounded the boy. He wanted one of his own men, the comrade who was closest to him, who thought as he did and whom he trusted completely, to oversee the training of the boy who would be tsar. But Menshikov, like Peter, was away with the army for most of the years of Alexis' youth, and the Serene Prince mainly exercised his duties from afar. There were stories of rough treatment when ward and governor met; Pleyer, the Austrian minister, reports an episode (which he did not witness) in which Menshikov dragged Alexis across the ground by the hair while Peter looked on unprotestingly. Whitworth recorded a more dignified scene, with Menshikov giving a dinner for the heir who, the ambassador informed London, was "a tall, handsome prince about sixteen years old who speaks pretty good High Dutch."

Mostly, as we know from Alexis' letters to Menshikov, it was with a mixture of awe and distaste that the boy regarded the rough figure whom his father had set over him, and later Alexis blamed Menshikov for many of his failings. In his final break with Peter, when he appealed for asylum in Vienna, the Tsarevich claimed that Menshikov had made him a drunkard and was even trying to poison him.

The root of the problem, of course, was not Menshikov but Peter; as always, Menshikov was only reflecting the attitude and will of his master. And Peter's attitude was strangely inconsistent. A moment of pride in the Tsarevich would be followed by a long period of indifference. Then would come a sudden demand that his son join him immediately to experience some event important for a future tsar. In 1702, when Peter left for Archangle with five battalions of the Guards to defend the port from a rumored Swedish attack, he took Alexis, then twelve, with him. The boy was a thirteen-year-old bombardier in an artillery regiment at the siege of Nyenskans which broke the Swedish grip on the Neva delta. A year later, at fourteen, Alexis was present at the storming of Narva.

Like many a strong father whose strength and qualities have made him respected, successful and admired by the world, Peter was trying to force his son to follow in his footsteps. Unfortunately, a father like Peter with a strong sense of duty or mission, desiring to inculate the same sense of purpose in his son, may instead become a crushing weight on the fledgling personality.

Alexis' presence at Archangel, Nyenskans and Narva suggests the extent to which the boy's education was interrupted by war. Then, in 1705 his tutor Huyssen was sent abroad on diplomatic missions which kept him away from Russia for three years. During this period, when father, governor and tutor were all away, no one took much notice of the Tsarevich.

It was extraordinary that the heir to Peter's throne was brought up this way. The Tsar was keenly aware of the defects in his own early education and had struggled all his life to catch up, and one would have expected him to devote extra attention to his son's training in order to make sure that he had groomed a successor who would complete his work. In fact, over the course of Alexis' youth and young manhood, Peter was primarily interested in schooling his son for war. After taking the young Alexis along to participate in campaigns and sieges, he assigned him independent military tasks to carry out as heir to the throne. At sixteen, in 1706, Alexis was sent for five months to Smolensk with orders to gather provisions and recruits for the army. Returning to Moscow, he was next commanded to see to the defense of the city. The seventeen-year-old Tsarevich was slow and defeatist in carrying out this order. To his confessor, the priest Ignatiev, he expressed his doubt as to the value of fortifying Moscow at all. "If the Tsar's army cannot hold back the Swedes," he sighed, "Moscow will not stop them." Peter heard of the remark and was furious, although when he learned that the defenses actually had been substantially strengthened, his anger subsided.

Unfortunately, try as he would, Peter never succeeded in interesting his son in war. Assigned military tasks, Alexis usually showed himself to be unwilling or incapable. Eventually, discouraged and disgusted, as well as caught up in the ever increasing tempo of the war, Peter turned his attention away from his son, leaving the youth to himself in Moscow and Preobrazhenskoe. This respite delighted the Tsarevich. He loved Moscow. The quiet, religiously passionate youth and the old city with its innumerable cathedrals, churches and monasteries, adorned with gold and jewels and filled with history and legend, perfectly suited each other. In the old capital, now increasingly abandoned in favor of St. Petersburg, Alexis was thrown into the company of those who preferred the old order and feared the reforms and innovations of the Tsar. There were Miloslavskys who still sympathized with their sister Sophia, who had died in her cell in 1704, and their sister Martha, who died in a convent in 1707. There were the Lopukhins, the brothers and family of Alexis' mother, the repudiated Eudoxia, who regarded Alexis as the vehicle for their eventual return to power. There were the old aristocratic families, indignant that they had been passed over in favor of Westerners and upstart Russians. Most of all, there were members of the old Orthodox clergy, who regarded Peter's works as those of Antichrist, and saw in Alexis, the heir, the last chance for saving the true religion in Russia.

The leader of this intimate clerical circle around the Tsarevich was Alexis' confessor, Jacob Ignatiev. Ignatiev came from Suzdal, where the Tsaritsa Eudoxia was incarcerated in a convent. The priest was in contact with the former Tsaritsa, and in 1706, when Alexis was sixteen, he took the boy to see his mother. Peter, learning of this visit from his sister Natalya, was furious with Alexis and warned him never to go there again.

Although Ignatiev encouraged Alexis' interest in the Orthodox religion, he also encouraged him in different ceremonies as well. For although Alexis was very different from Peter in many ways, he resembled his father in one: He liked to drink. Together with Ignatiev and certain monks and priests and others, the Tsarevich formed a "company" like the intimate circle of Peter's youth, with different political ideas but the same love of drinking and carousing. Like Peter's, Alexis' company was a special society: Each member had a name such as Hell, Benefactor, Satan, Moloch, the Cow, Judas or the Dove. The group even had a secret code for private correspondence.

As the climax of the war approached, the Tsarevich was once more summoned to the army. In the autumn of 1708, Peter ordered his son to recruit five regiments in the Moscow region and bring them to the Ukraine as soon as possible. Alexis complied and delivered the troops to Peter and Sheremetev in mid-January 1709. This was during the fiercest days of the coldest winter within memory and, having completed his mission, the Tsarevich became ill. His condition was serious, and Peter, who had planned to go to Voronezh, remained for ten days until his son was out of danger. When Alexis was better, he joined Peter in Voronezh and then returned to Moscow. He missed the Battle of Poltava, but when news of the great victory was received, Alexis arranged the triumphal program and served as host in the celebrations.

After Poltava, Peter made two decisions regarding his son: The Tsarevich should have a Western education and he should have a Western wife. Both would help pull him away from the old Muscovite orbit into which he had been falling. Earlier, the old Hapsburg Empress, who remembered Peter favorably from his visit to Vienna, had urged that Alexis be sent to her to be educated there; the Tsarevich, she promised, would be treated by the Emperor and herself as one of their own children. This project never materialized, but another early promise did bear fruit. Twelve years before, on Peter's first meeting with Augustus of Saxony, the Elector had pledged to look after the education of Peter's heir. Now that Alexis was nineteen, Peter remembered and sent his son to the beautiful Saxon capital Dresden to study under the protection of Augustus' family.

The Tsarevich's marriage was also to have a Saxon connection. Long before, Peter had decided to ally himself with a powerful German family by marrying his son to a German princess, and the one chosen for Alexis, after long negotiations, was Charlotte of Wolfenbuttel. The family was excellently connected, being a branch of the House of Hanover. In addition, Charlotte's sister Elizabeth was married to the Archduke Charles of Austria, at that moment a claimant to the throne of Spain, but subsequently the Emperor Charles. As Charlotte was living at the Saxon court under the watchful eye of her aunt the Queen of Poland, both projects—Alexis' education and his marriage—centered on Dresden. Charlotte was sixteen years old, tall and plain but with a fresh, sweet-natured charm, and bred to the manners and customs of a Western court. This was what Peter was seeking for his son. He hoped that by putting Alexis into an intimate relationship with a princess of refinement, he could counteract and rub away the primitive edges of the company the Tsarevich had been keeping.

Alexis was aware that these negotiations were going on and that it was his father's wish that he marry a foreigner. In the winter of 1710, at Peter's command, the Tsarevich went to Dresden, then moved to the spa at Carlsbad, and, in a village nearby, he met for the first time his intended bride, Princess Charlotte. The meeting went well. Both Alexis and Charlotte understood the purpose of their meeting and, given the circumstances of that time of arranged marriages, neither was desperately unhappy with the other. Alexis, in a letter to his confessor Ignatiev soon after the meeting, wrote that Peter had asked his reaction to Charlotte.

So now I know that he wishes to marry me not to a Russian, but to one of these people according to my choice. I wrote to him that if it is his will that I should marry a foreigner, I will marry this princess whom I have seen and who pleases me and who is a good person and better than whom I cannot find. I beg you to pray for me if it is the will of God that this be accomplished; if not, that it be hindered, for my hope is in Him. What He wishes will happen. Write to me how your heart feels about this matter.

Charlotte, for her part, liked the Tsarevich, telling her mother that he seemed intelligent and courteous and that she felt honored that the Tsar had chosen her for his son. In the end, the courtship bore fruit when Alexis went twice to Torgau and the second time formally asked the Queen of Poland for Charlotte's hand.

The marriage was deferred until Peter could be present. Meanwhile, Alexis passed the time with his studies in Dresden and his education there was as Western as his father could have wished. He took dancing lessons and fencing lessons, he developed a talent for drawing and he improved his German and French. He shopped for books in old bookstalls and bought old engravings and medallions to take back to Russia. The Tsar would have been less happy, however, to know that his son was spending a great deal of time reading books on church history, studying the relationship between temporal and spiritual powers and the history of disputes between the church and state. In fact, throughout this period of Western schooling, despite his Western dance steps and work with the epee, Alexis was deeply concerned that he had no contact with any Orthodox priest. Writing to Ignatiev, he asked his confessor to send him a priest capable of keeping a secret. He must be young, unmarried, and unknown to everyone. Tell him to come to me in great secrecy, to lay aside all marks of his condition, to shave his beard and his hair, ' and to wear a wig and German clothes. He should come as a courier and for that he should be able to write. Let him not bring anything incumbent on a priest, or a missal, only a few bits of communion bread. I have all the books necessary. Have pity on my soul and do not let me die without confession. I shall tell no one that he is a priest. He will appear to be one of my servants. Do not let him have any doubt about shaving his beard. It is better to commit a small sin than to ruin my soul without repentance.

Ignatiev found and sent a priest who not only could give the Tsarevich confession but who also joined the royal student and his small Russian circle in drunken evenings. During the course of one of these, Alexis scrawled another letter to Ignatiev:

Most honorable father, salutation to you. I wish you very long life, that we should see each other in joy in a short time. On this letter wine has been poured out, so that after receiving it you may live well and drink strongly and remember us. God grant our desires to meet soon. All the orthodox Christians here have signed this, Alexis the sinner, the priest Ivan Slonsky, and have certified it with cups and glasses. We have kept this festival for your health, not in German wise but in Russian style.

At the end of the letter, Alexis added an almost indecipherable postscript begging Ignatiev's pardon if the letter was illegible, explaining that when he was writing, everyone, including himself, was drunk.

Alexis remained in Dresden while his father suffered the disaster of Pruth, but Peter quickly recovered from this blow and moved ahead with all his plans, including his son's marriage on October 14, 1711, to Princess Charlotte. Charlotte's grandfather, the reigning Duke of Wolfenbuttel, had asked Peter if the newly weds might be permitted to pass the winter together in his dukedom, but Peter replied that he now needed his son's services in the war against Sweden. Thus, a brief four days after his wedding, Alexis was ordered to leave Charlotte and go to Thorn to oversee the forwarding of food supplies for the Russian troops who were to winter in Pomerania. On appeal, Peter delayed the departure a few days and then Alexis obediently set out, leaving his new bride alone. Six weeks later, she joined him in Thorn, but it was a dismal place for a honeymoon. Charlotte wrote miserably to her mother of the desolation created by war and winter: "The houses opposite are half-burned and empty. I myself live in a monastery."

She complained about lack of society caused by the local nobility's habit of sticking close to the land and refusing to congregate in the larger towns: "For that reason it is impossible even in the largest towns to find a single person of quality."

During the first six months of marriage, Alexis was devoted to his young wife and Charlotte told everyone that she was happy. But the affairs of the royal household were haphazard, even chaotic. When Menshikov visited in April, he was shocked by Alexis' and Charlotte's penury. He wrote urgently to the Tsar saying that he had found Charlotte in tears because of money, and that to alleviate the situation he had lent her 5,000 roubles from army funds. Peter sent money, and he and Catherine visited the little court after Alexis had left to join the army in Pomerania. Like most young wives, Charlotee was highly sensitive to the relationship between her new husband and his family, and she wrote to her mother of her worry at the way Peter spoke of and treated his son. Once, hoping to help, she pleaded with Catherine to act as an advocate with the Tsar on behalf of Alexis.

In October 1712, at the end of a year of marriage during which her husband had been mostly away in the army, Charlotte was suddenly commanded by Peter to go to St. Petersburg to establish herself and wait for her husband. The seventeen-year-old girl was terrified—she had heard frightening things about Russians and was afraid to go to Russia without her husband to introduce and protect her—and, disobeying Peter's order, she fled home to Wolfenbuttel.

The Tsarevich did not react, but his father did. Peter wrote to Charlotte criticizing her behavior, but adding gently, "We would never have thwarted your wish to see your family if only you had informed us of it beforehand." Charlotte apologized and asked forgiveness. Peter came to see her, gave her his blessing and a sum of money, and she agreed to leave soon after for St. Petersburg. As the old Duke wrote to Leibniz, "The Tsar has been with us this week. . . . He was very kind to the Tsarevna, gave her large presents and begged her to hasten her journey. Next week she is really going to start and to all appearances leave Europe forever."

When Charlotte arrived in St. Petersburg that spring of 1713, Alexis had left the capital to join his father on the galley expedition along the coast of Finland. He returned at the end of the summer to the small house in which she was living on the left bank of the Neva. Meeting after a separation of almost a year, the couple was at first affectionate, but things soon went wrong. Alexis began to drink heavily again with his friends, returning home to treat his wife abusively in front of the servants. Once, when drunk, he vowed to be revenged on Chancellor Golovkin, who had negotiated his marriage, by one day cutting off the heads of the Chancellor's sons and setting them up on stakes.

Sometimes, the morning after, Alexis remembered these horrible scenes and tried to atone for them by renewed tenderness. Charlotte would forgive him, but every recurrence deepened the wound. Then, after a winter of heavy drinking, the Tsarevich became ill. His doctors diagnosed tuberculosis and prescribed a cure at Carlsbad. Charlotte, eight months pregnant, was the last to know he was leaving; she learned it only as he walked out the door to take his seat in a carriage, saying, "Goodbye. I am going to Carlsbad." During the six months of his absence, she heard nothing from him—not a single letter. On July 12, 1714, five weeks after his departure, she gave birth to a daughter, Natalya, but Alexis failed to respond to this news. In November, the. desperate nineteen-year-old mother wrote to her parents: "The Tsarevich has not yet come back. No one knows where he is, whether he is dead or alive. I am in frightful uneasiness. All the letters that I have written to him in the last six or eight weeks have been sent back to me from Dresden and Berlin because no one knows where he is."

In the middle of December 1714, Alexis returned to St. Petersburg from Germany. At first, he behaved decently to Charlotte and was delighted with his daughter. Later, however, Charlotte wrote to her parents that her husband had reverted to his former conduct except that she rarely saw him any more. The reason was Afrosina, a Finnish girl captured during the war, who had been taken into the household of his teacher, Viazemsky. Blindly infatuated with her, Alexis took her openly into a wing of his own house, where he lived with her as his mistress.

Alexis' treatment of Charlotte grew progressively worse. He took no interest in her. In public, he never spoke to her, but went out of his way to avoid her, moving to the opposite edge of the room. Although they shared their house, he had his apartment in the right wing, where Afrosina lived with him; Charlotte and her child lived in the left wing. He saw her once a week, coming grimly to make love in hopes of fathering a son to secure his own succession to the throne. The rest of the time, he was invisible to her. He left her without money. He cared so little about her welfare that the house was in terrible repair, and rain fell through the roof into Charlotte's bedroom. When this news reached Peter, the Tsar, angry and disgusted, upbraided his son for his neglect of his wife. Although it was not Charlotte who had told Peter, Alexis believe that it was, and the Tsarevich angrily accused his wife of maligning him to his father. Through all these episodes, through increasingly horrendous bouts of drunkenness and flaunting of Afrosina, Charlotte lived in silence and resignation, weeping in her bedroom, with no friends other than the single German lady-in-waiting who had come with her.

As time passed, Alexis' health deteriorated. He was almost constantly drunk. In April 1715, he was carried unconscious from a church, so sick that no one dared to bring him across the Neva to his home and he had to spend the night in a foreigner's house. Charlotte went to him and later wrote pitifully, "I ascribe his illness to the fast and to the great quantity of brandy which he drinks daily, for he is usually drunk."

Nevertheless, there were occasional moments of happiness. Alexis was fond of his daughter, and every mark of love he showed the child warmed the heart of the mother. On October 12, 1715, the determined love-making bore fruit: A second child was born, this time a son, whom Charlotte named Peter in fulfillment of a promise to her father-in-law. But this birth, thus apparently securing her husband's right to the throne, was the last service performed for Russia and her husband by this unhappy German Princess. Weakened by pregnancy and grief, she had stumbed and failed before her delivery. Four days after her son was born, she came down with fever. Charlotte realized that she was dying and asked to see the Tsar. Catherine could not come, but Peter, although sick, came in a wheelchair.

Weber describes Charlotte's death:

The Tsar being arrived, the Princess took her leave of him in the most moving expressions and recommended her two children and servants to his care and protection. Whereupon, she embraced her two children in the most tender manner imaginable, almost melting away in tears, and delivered them to the Tsarevich, who took them in his arms and carried them to his apartments, but never returned afterward. Then she sent for her servants, who lay prostrate on the ground in the antechamber, praying and calling to heaven to assist their dying mistress in her last minutes. She comforted them, gave them several admonitions and, at her last blessing, desired to be left alone with the minister. The physicians were trying to persuade her to take some medicines, but she flung the vials behind the bed, saying with some emotion, "Do not torment me any more but let me die in quiet, for I will live no longer." At length, on October 21, having continued all that day in fervent devotion until eleven at night, she departed an unfortunate life, after having endured for the last five days the most acute pains, in the twenty-first year of her age, having been married four years and six days. Her corpse was, according to her desire, interred without being embalmed in the great church of the fortress, whither it was carried with a funeral pomp becoming her birth.

Charlotte was not long moumed. The day following her funeral, the Tsaritsa Chatherine gave birth to a son. Thus, within a week, Peter had acquired two potential heirs, both named Peter— a grandson, Peter Alexeevich, and his own son, Peter Petrovich. At the birth of this second little Peter, the Tsar's joy and pride immediately washed away any grief for the wife of his heir. He wrote exuberantly to Sheremetev, "God has sent me a new recruit," and he began a round of celebrations that lasted eight days. On November 6, the new Prince was baptized, his godfathers being the Kings of Denmark and Prussia. The celebrations, according to Weber, included a dinner at which "a pie was served up on the table of the gentlemen, which being opened, a well-shaped woman dwarf stepped out of it being stark naked except for her headdress and some ornaments of red ribbons. She made a well-set speech to the company, filled some glasses of wine which she had with her in the pie, and drank several healths." On the ladies' table, a man dwarf was served up in similar manner. In the dusk of the evening, the company broke up and went to the islands, where magnificent fireworks were set off in honor of the young Prince.

In all this merriment, the death of Princess Charlotte and the birth of her son were largely ignored. In the long run, however, the quiet German Princess had a kind of recompense. The much-hailed and adored Peter Petrovich, child of Peter and Catherine, lived only to be three and a half, whereas Peter Alexeevich, Charlotte's son, became Peter II, Emperor of Russia.

52

A PATERNAL ULTIMATUM

In the autumn of 1715, when his son was bom and his wife died, the Tsarevich Alexis was no longer a youth. He was twenty-five years old and physically a lesser man than his father. The Prince was six feet tall, an unusual height for that time, but Peter at six feet seven inches towered over him as he did over everyone else. Peter Bruce, a foreign officer in Russian service, described Alexis in three years as being "very slovenly in his dress, tall, well made, of a brown complexion, black hair and eyes, of a stem countenance and strong voice." His eyes, closer together than Peter's, often flickered with anxiety and fear.

The two were wholly opposite. Alexis grew up a man of considerable intellectual background and capacity. He was intelligent, fond of reading, curious about theological questions and had an ease with foreign languages. Physically lazy, he loved a quiet, contemplative life and had little inclination to go out into the world and use his education in a practical way. All this was directly contrary to Peter's character and training. The Tsar had had only limited formal education. At the age of when Alexis was reading and reflecting over works like The Divine Manna, The Wonders of God and Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ, Peter was drilling soldiers, building boats and firing skyrockets. Most of all, Alexis lacked altogether the titanic energy, the burning curiosity and the compulsive drive which were the sources of Peter's greatness. He was bookish rather than active, cautious rather than bold, preferred the old to the new. It seemed almost as if the son were of an older generation than the father. As the offspring of another tsar—say, his own grandfather Tsar Alexis, or his uncle Tsar Fedor—Alexis' character might have been more appropriate and the story of his life might have been different. Whatever he might have been, however, he was spectacularly ill-suited to be the son—and the heir—of Peter the Great.

Although the differences between father and son were always tacit (the Tsarevich never publicly raised his voice to oppose the Tsar), they were always there, and both men felt them keenly. In his younger years, he tried desperately to please Peter, but a sense of inferiority weakened all his efforts. The more Peter upbraided him, the more incompetent he became and the more he grew to loathe and fear his father, his father's friends and his father's ways. He retreated and evaded, and the more Peter was enraged by this, the more reticent and frightened Alexis became. There seemed to be no solution.

To overcome his fears and weakness, Alexis drank more heavily. To avoid the responsibilities that he could not face, he pretended that he was sick. When Alexis returned from Germany in 1713, after his year of study in Dresden, Peter asked what he had learned in geometry and fortifications. The question frightened Alexis; he was afraid that his father would ask him to execute a drawing before his eyes and that he would be unable to do it. Returning to his house, the Tsarevich took a pistol and tried to maim himself by firing the ball through his right hand. His hands were shaking and he missed, but the powder flash burned his right hand badly. When Peter asked what happened, Alexis said that it had been an accident.

This was not an isolated episode. Having no interest in soldiers or ships, new buildings, docks, canals or any of Peter's projects or reforms, he sometimes took medicines to make himself ill so that he might avoid public appearances or duties. Once when required to be present at the launching of a ship, he said to a friend, "I would rather be a galley slave or have a burning fever than be obliged to go there." To another, he said, "I am not a stupid fool, but I cannot work." As his mother-in-law, the Princess of Wolfenbuttel, said, "It is quite useless for his father to force him to attend military matters, as he would rather have a rosary than a pistol in his hand."

As Alexis' dread of his father deepened, he found that he was scarcely able to face the Tsar. Once, he admitted to his confessor that he had frequently wished for his father's death. Ignatiev replied, "God will forgive you. We all wish for his death because the people have to bear such a heavy burden."

Involuntarily, but also inevitably, Alexis became the focus of serious opposition to the Tsar. All who opposed Peter looked to Alexis as the hope of the future. The clergy prayed that Alexis as tsar would restore the church to its former power and majesty. The people believed that he would lighten their burdens of labor, service and taxation. The old nobility hoped that when he sat on the throne, Alexis would restore their former privileges and dismiss the upstart newcomers like Meshikov and Shafirov. Even many of the noblemen whom Peter trusted showed their sympathy for the Tsarevich privately. The Golitsyns, the Dolgorukys, Prince Boris Kurakin and even Field Marshal Boris Sheremetev were among these. Senator Prince Jacob Dolgoruky warned Alexis, "Do not say any more, they are watching us." Prince Vasily Dolgoruky told Alexis, "You are wiser than you father. Your father is wise, but he has no knowledge of men. You will have more knowledge of men."

Despite these sentiments and a general current of discontent at Peter's rule, there was no conspiracy. The only policy of Alexi's adherents was to wait until the son succeeded the father, which, given the precarious state of Peter's health, seemed unlikely to be long. One of Alexis' closest advisors, Alexander Kikin—one of Peter's new men, who had accompanied the Tsar on the Great Embassy and been promoted to head of the Admiralty—secretly counseled the Tsarevich to think of leaving Russia, or, if he happened to be in a foreign country, to remain there. "After your recovery [in Carlsbad]," Kikin had told Alexis before he left, "write to your father that you will be obliged to take medicines again in the spring, and in the meantime you may go to Holland, and afterward to Italy, after the cure in the spring. At this rate, you may make your absence last two or three years."

As for Peter, his feelings for his son were a blend of frustration and anger. Years before, when he had ignored his infant son, it was because Alexis was Eudoxia's child and because he himself was scarcely more than an adolescent. Then, as the boy grew older and the flaws in his character became more evident, Peter tried to strengthen him by treating him roughly, with almost Spartan harshness, rather than with warmth and understanding. Repeatedly, through the governorship of Menshikov, through his own letters and talks with his son, and by employing him on various public assignments and governmental missions, Peter tried to instill in Alexis a sense of duty to the state and participation in the reforms he was forcing on Russia. By sending him to the West for schooling, by marrying him to a German princess, Peter hoped to change his son. On Alexis' return to St. Petersburg in 1713, Peter waited hopefully to observe the results of the Tsarevich's foreign travel and study. But when the Tsar asked Alexis for a demonstration of his new knowledge, his reward was that the Tsarevich tried to shoot himself in the hand.

More and more, as Peter saw it, his son rejected all the responsibilities of being heir to the throne, preferring to hang back and turn away from every challenge. Rather than taking up his natural role in Peter's work, Alexis surrounded himself with people who opposed everything Peter stood for. To certain parts of his son's personal life, Peter did not object: He did not mind Alexis' drinking, or his charades with his own little "Exotic Company" or his taking Finnish serf as a mistress—all these traits had parallels in Peter's own life. What the Tsar could not accept was his son's continual rejection of what he saw as the Tsarevich's duty. Peter was willing to be tolerant of all those who tried to carry out his orders, but he was furious when he met resistance. How else could he react when his own son, who at twenty-five should have been the leading exemplar of the Tsar's concepts of duty and service, refused any part in Peter's life work except when he was driven to it? In the winter of 1715-1716, Peter decided that he must get things in order; the passive, lazy and frightened man who had no interest in military affairs or ships and the sea, no sympathy for reforms and no wish to build on the foundations laid by his father, must change himself once and for all. What Peter was demanding was a complete re-creation of personality. Unfortunately, the time for this had passed; the son, like the father, now was set in his temperament for life.

* * *

On the day of Princess Charlotte's funeral, the Tsarevich was handed a letter which Peter had written sixteen days earlier, before Charlotte's death and the births of the two male infants named Peter. This letter reveals the hopes Peter had for Alexis, how desperately he wished the Tsarevich to pick up the mantle and prepare himself, and his growing dismay that Alexis was unable or unwillinging to do this:

A Declaration to My Son:

You cannot be ignorant of what is known to all the world, to what degree our people groaned under the oppression of the Swedes before the beginning of the present war.

By the usurpation of so many maritime places so necessary to our state, they had cut us off from all commerce with the rest of the world. . . . You know what it has cost us in the beginning of this war (in which God alone has led us, as it were, by the hand, and still guides us) to make ourselves experienced in the art of war and to put a stop to those advantages which our implacable enemies obtained over us.

We submitted to this with a resignation to the will of God, making no doubt that it was He who put us to that trial till He might lead us into the right way and we might render ourselves worthy to experience that the same enemy who at first made others tremble, now in his turn trembles before us, perhaps in a much greater degree. These are the fruits which, next to the assistance of God, we owe to our own toil and to the labor of our faithful and affectionate children, our Russian subjects.

But at the time that I am viewing the prosperity which God has heaped on our native country, if I cast an eye upon the posterity that is to succeed me, my heart is much more penetrated with grief on account of what is to happen, seeing that you, my son, reject all means of making yourself capable of governing well after me. I say your incapacity is voluntary because you cannot excuse yourself with want of natural parts and strength of body, as if God had not given you a sufficient share of either; and though your constitution is none of the strongest, yet it cannot be said that it is altogether weak.

But you even will not so much as hear warlike exercises mentioned; though it is by them that we broke through that obscurity in which we were involved, and that we made ourselves known to nations whose esteem we share at present.

I do not exhort you to make war without lawful reasons; I only desire you to apply yourself to leam the art of it. For it is impossible to govern well without knowing the rules and disciplines of it, be it for no other end than for the defense of the country.

I could place before your eyes many instances of what I am proposing to you. I will only mention to you the Greeks [the Byzantine Empire, whose capital, Constantinople, fell to the Turks in 1453], with whom we are united by the same profession of faith.

What occasioned their decay but that they neglected arms? Idleness and repose weakened them, made them submit to tyrants and brought them to that slavery to which they are now so long since reduced. You mistake if you think it is enough for a prince to have good generals to act under his orders. Everyone looks upon the head; they study his inclinations and conform themselves to them. All the world knows this. My brother [Fedor] during his reign loved magnificence in dress and great equipages of horses. The nation was not much inclined that way, but the Prince's delight soon became that of his subjects, for they are inclined to imitate him in liking a thing or disliking it.

If the people so easily break themselves of things which only concern pleasure, will they not forget in time, or will they not more easily give over the practice of arms, the exericse of which is the more painful to them the less they are kept to it?

You have no inclination to learn war. you do not apply yourself to it and consequently you will never leam it. And how then can you command others, and judge of the reward which those deserve who do their duty, or punish others who fail of it? You will do nothing, nor judge of anything, but by the eyes and help of others, like a young bird that holds up his bill to be fed.

You say that the weak state of your health will not permit you to undergo the fatigues of war. This is an excuse which is no better than the rest. I desire no fatigues but only inclination, which even sickness itself cannot hinder. Ask those who remember the time of my brother. He was of a constitution weaker by far than yours. He was not able to manage a horse of the least mettle, nor could he hardly mount it. Yet he loved horses, hence it came that there never was, nor is there actually now in the nation, a finer stable than his was.

By this you see that good success does not always depend on pains, but on the will.

If you think there are some [monarchs] whose affairs are successful though they do not go to war themselves, it is true. But if they do not go themselves, yet they have an inclination for it and understand it.

For instance, the late King of France [Louis XIV] did not always take the field in person, but it is known to what degree he loved war and what glorious exploits he performed in it, which made his campaigns to be called the theater and school of the world. His inclinations were not confirmed solely to military affairs, he also loved mechanics, manufactures and other establishments, which rendered his kingdom more flourishing than any other whatsoever.

After having made to you all those remonstrances, 1 return to my former subject which regards you.

I am a man and, consequently, I must die. To whom shall I leave after me to finish what I have partly recovered? To a man who like the slothful servant hides his talent in the earth—that is to say, who neglects making the best of what God has entrusted to him?

Remember your obstinacy and ill-nature, how often I reproached you for it and for how many years I almost have not spoken to you. But all this has availed nothing, has effected nothing. It was but losing my time, it was striking the air. You do not make the least endeavors, and all your pleasure seems to consist in staying idle and lazy at home. Things of which you ought to be ashamed (forasmuch as they make you miserable) seem to make up your dearest delight, nor do you forsee the dangerous consequences of it for yourself and for the whole state. St. Paul has left us a great truth when he wrote: "If a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?"

After having considered all those great inconveniences and reflected upon them, and seeing I cannot bring you to good by any inducement, I have thought fit to give you in writing this act of my last will and this resolution, however: to wait still a little longer before I put it in execution to see if you will mend. If not, I will have you know that I will deprive you of the succession, as one may cut off a useless member.

Do not fancy that, because I have no other child but you, I only write this to terrify you. I will certainly put it in execution if it please God; for whereas I do not spare my own life for my country and the welfare of my people, why should I spare you who do not render yourself worthy of either? I would rather choose to transmit them to a worthy stranger than to my own unworthy son.

Peter

Alexis' reaction to this letter was the opposite of that his father had hoped for. Terrified by Peter's summons, he rushed to his most intimate confidants and begged for advice. Kikin advised him to renounce his rights to the throne on the ground of ill-health. "You will at last be able to rest if you cut yourself off from everything. I know that otherwise, with your weakness, you cannot hold out. But it is a pity you did not stay away when you were [in Germany]." Viazemsky, his first teacher, concurred that he should declare himself unfit to bear the heavy burden of the crown. Alexis spoke also to Prince Yury Trubetskoy, who told him, "You do well not to aspire to the succession. You are not proper for it." The Tsarevich then pleaded with Prince Vasily Dolgoruky to persuade the Tsar to let him resign the succession peacefully and live the rest of his life on an estate in the country. Dolgoruky promised to speak to Peter.

Meanwhile, three days after he received his father's declaration, Alexis wrote his reply:

Most Clement Lord and Father:

I have read the paper Your Majesty gave me on the 16th of October 1715 after the funeral of my late consort.

I have nothing to reply to it but that if Your Majesty will deprive 694 me of the succession to the crown of Russia by reason of my incapacity, your will be done. I even most urgently beg it of you because I do not think myself fit for government. My memory is very much weakened and yet it is necessary in affairs. The strength of my mind and of my body is much decayed by sicknesses which I have undergone and which have rendered me incapable of governing so many nations. This requires a more vigorous man than I am.

Therefore I do not aspire after you (whom God preserve many years) to the succession of the Russian crown, even if I had no brother as I have one at present whom I pray God preserve. Neither will I pretend for the future of that succession, of which I take God to witness and sear it upon my soul, in testimony whereof I write and sign this present with my own hand.

1 put my children into your hands, and as for myself, I desire nothing of you but a bare maintenance during my life, leaving the whole to your consideration and to your will.

Your most humble servant and son, Alexis.

After Peter had received Alexis' letter, he saw Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, who relayed to Peter his own conversation with Alexis. Peter seemed agreeable, and Dolgoruky told Alexis, "I have spoken to your father about you. I believe he will deprive you of the succession, and he seems content with your letter. I have saved you from the block by speaking to your father." If Alexis was reassured by the sum of this message, he cannot have been cheerful to hear that there had been talk of the scaffold.

In fact, Peter was far from content. His warning to the Tsarevich had provoked the wrong reaction, and Alexis' letter of submission and renunication seemed far too prompt and sweeping. How could a serious man lay aside a throne so easily? Was the renunication sincere? And even if it were, how could the heir to a great throne simply retire and live in the country? As a farmer or a country squire, would he not remain—perhaps even involuntarily—a rallying point for opposition to his father?

For a month, Peter pondered these questions and did nothing. Then, fate intervened and almost settled the matter. Attending a drinking party at Admiral Apraxin's, the Tsar suffered a violent convulsion and became dangerously ill. For two days and nights, his chief ministers and the members of the Senate remained in a room just outside his bedchamber, and on December 2 his condition became so critical that the Last Rites were administered. Then Peter rallied and began very slowly to improve. For three weeks, he remained in bed or in his house and finally was able to go to church on Christmas Day, where people saw that he was very thin and pale. During the illness, Alexis remained silent and

visited his father only once. Perhaps this was because Kikin had warned Alexis to beware a trick: Peter, he suggested, might be only pretending to be sick, or at least exaggerating his illness by receiving the Last Rites, in order to see how everyone around him—and especially Alexis—would react to his imminent death.

As he recovered, Peter was pondering his next step. Alexis had sworn before God and "seared it on his soul" that he would never seek the succession, but Peter feared the influence on him of "great beards"—that is, the priests—once he himself was gone. Further, Peter still earnestly desired the active help of a son playing a full role as heir to the throne. Thus he decided: Alexis must join him or renounce the world completely by entering a monastery. On January 19, 1716, the Tsarevich received a second letter from his father with a demand for an immediate reply:

My Son:

My last sickness had hindered me until now from explaining myself to you about the resolution I have taken upon your letter which you wrote to me in answer to my first. At present I answer that 1 observe you talk of nothing in it but of the succession, just as if I needed your consent to do in that affair what in fact depends solely on my will. But whence comes it that in your letter you say nothing of that incapacity wherein you voluntarily put yourself and of that aversion you have for state affairs, which I touched on in mine, and instead stress only the ill state of your health? I also remonstrated with you about the dissatification your .conduct has given me for so many years, and you pass all that over in silence, though I strongly insisted upon it. Thence I judge that those paternal exhortations have no weight with you. I have therefore taken a resolution to write to you once more by this letter, which shall be the last. If you reject the advice I give you in my lifetime, how will you value it after my death?

Can one rely on your oaths when one sees you have a hardened heart? King David said, "All men are liars." But supposing you have at present the intention of being true to your promises, those great beards may turn you as they please and make you break them.

Because at present their debauches and sloth keep them out of posts of honor, they are in hopes that one day or other their condition will mend by you who already show much inclination for them.

I do not see that you are sensible of the obligations you have to your father, to whom you owe your very being. Do you assist him in his cares and pains since you have attained the years of maturity? Certainly in nothing; all the world knows it. Quite contrary, you blame and abhor all the good I do at the hazard and expense of my own health for the sake of my people and for their welfare. And I have all the reasons in the world to believe that you will be the destroyer of it, if you outlive me. And so I cannot resolve to let you live on according to your own free will, like an amphibious creature, neither fish nor flesh. Change therefore your conduct and either strive to render yourself worthy of the succession or turn monk. I cannot be easy on your account, especially now that my health begins to decay. On sight therefore of this letter, answer me upon it, either in writing or by word of mouth. If you fail to do it, 1 will treat you as a criminal.

Peter

This ultimatum fell on the Tsarevich like a thunderbolt: Transform himself into the son Peter demanded or become a monk! Alexis could not do the former; he had tried for twenty-five years and failed. But to become a monk? It meant giving up everything of the world, including Afrosina. At this point, Kikin stepped in with some cynical advice. "Remember that they do not nail the cowl to a man's head. One can always slip it off again and throw it away." Alexis eagerly accepted this solution. "Most Clement Lord and Father," he wrote to Peter, "I received this morning your letter of the 19th. My indisposition hinders me from writing to you more at length. I will embrace the monastical state and desire your gracious consent to it. Your servant and unworthy son, Alexis."

Once again, Peter was taken aback by the suddenness and totality of Alexis' submission. Besides, the Tsar was on the point of leaving Russia on the long journey to the West and the time before his departure was too short to resolve an issue of this importance and complexity. Two days before he left, Peter visited Alexis at the Tsarevich's house, where he found his son shivering in bed. Again, Peter asked Alexis what he had chosen to do. Alexis swore before God that he wished to become a monk. But at this, Peter stepped back, deciding that perhaps his ultimatum had been too harsh and that he should give his son more time to think. "Becoming a monk is not easy for a young man," he said gently. "Think about it a little more. Do not hurry. Then write to me what you have decided. It would be better to follow the straight road than to become a monk. Anyway, I will wait another six months." As soon as Peter left the house, an overjoyed Alexis threw off his bedclothes, got up and went to a party.

When Peter departed St. Petersburg for Danzig and the West, Alexis was enormously relieved—his father was gone and the great shadow over his life had receded. He remained heir to the throne and for six months need not think of any other choice. Six months seemed an eternity. In that time, with a man as mercurial or as subject to illness as his father, everything might change. Meanwhile, the Tsarevich could enjoy himself.

Six months can flash by when one is postponing an unpleasant choice. So it was with Alexis during the spring and summer of 1716. As autumn approached, Peter's six-month deadline had passed and the Tsarevich still procrastinated. He had written to his father, but his letters mentioned only his health and daily routine. Then, early in October came the letter from Peter which Alexis dreaded. It was written on August 26 from Copenhagen, where preparations for the allied invasion of Scania were reaching a climax. The letter was the final ultimatum from father to son; the Tsarevich was to return his answer by the same courier.

My Son:

I have received your letter of the 29th of June and the other of the 30th of July. Seeing that you talk of nothing in it but only of the state of your health, I write to you now to tell you that I demanded your resolution concerning the succession when I bade you farewell. You answered me then as usually, that you did not judge yourself capable of it by reason of your infirmity and that you had rather retire into a convent. I tell you to think once more seriously upon it, and afterward to write to me what resolution you have taken. I have expected it this seven months past, and you send me no word at all about it; therefore upon the receipt of my letter, choose one or the other. In case you determine for the first, which is to apply yourself in order to be capable of the succession, do not delay above a week to repair hither, where you may arrive in time enough to be present at the operations of the campaign. But if you resolve on the other side, let me know where, what time and even the day you will execute your resolution, that my mind may be at rest and that I may know what I am to expect from you. Send your final answer back to me by the same courier who is to deliver you this letter.

In the first case, mark to me the day when you intend to set out from Petersburg, and in the second when you will put it in execution. I repeat it to you that I absolutely will have you resolve on something, for otherwise I must judge that you only seek to gain time to pass it in your usual idleness.

Peter

Holding this letter in his hand, Alexis at last made up his mind. His decision was to take neither of the two courses Peter offered, but to flee, to find some place where the towering figure of his father could not reach him. Only two months earlier, as Kikin departed to escort Alexis' aunt the Tsarevna Maria to Carlsbad, he had whispered to the Tsarevich, "I am going to look for some place for you to hide." Kikin had not returned, and Alexis did not know where to go, but in his mind there burned only a single, overwhelming idea: to escape the iron hand which now reached out for him.

Alexis acted swiftly and with subterfuge. He went immediately to Menshikov in St. Petersburg, declared that he was leaving for Copenhagen to join his father and needed 1,000 ducats to pay for his trip. He visited the Senate, asked his friends there to remain faithful to his interests and received a further 2,000 roubles for his expenses. In Riga, he borrowed 5,000 gold roubles and 2,000 roubles in other coins. When Menshikov asked him what he was going to do about Afrosina while he was gone, Alexis replied that he would take her with him as far as Riga and then send her back to Petersburg. "You will do better to take her with you all the way," suggested Menshikov.

Before leaving St. Petersburg, Alexis confided his real intentions only to his manservant Afanasiev. But along the road, a few miles outside Libau, he met the carriage of his aunt Tsarevna Maria Alexeevna returning from her cure at Carlsbad. Although sympathetic to Alexis and the old ways, she was too frightened of Peter to offer any spoken opposition. Alexis sat in her carriage, telling her first that he was obeying his father's command and was on his way to join the Tsar. "Good," replied the Tsarevna, "it is necessary to obey him. That is pleasing to God." But then Alexis broke into tears and weepingly told his aunt that he wished to find some place to hide from Peter. "Where could you go?" asked the horrified Tsarevna. "Your father would find you no matter where." Her advice was to endure, hoping that in the end God would solve his problems. Meanwhile, she said, "Kikin was in Libau and perhaps he could give better advice.

In Libau, Kikin advised that Vienna might be safe, as the Emperor was Alexis' brother-in-law. Alexis seized the suggestion and he continued in his own coach as far as Danzig. There, dressed as a Russian officer and taking the name Kokhansky, accompanied by Afrosina disguised as a boy page, and with three Russian servants, he set off by way of Breslau and Prague for Vienna. Before he left, Kikin had given him urgent parting advice: "Remember, if your father sends somebody to persuade you to return, do not do it. He will have your publicly beheaded."

53

FLIGHT OF THE TSAREVICH

On the evening of November 10, 1716, Count Schonborn, Vice Chancellor of the Imperial court in Vienna, was already in bed when a servant entered his chamber to announce that the heir to the Russian throne, the son of Tsar Peter of Russia, was in an anteroom demanding to see him. The astonished Schonborn immediately began to dress, but before he could finish, the Tsarevich burst into the room. In a state of near-hysteria, pacing rapidly from one side of the room to the other, Alexis poured out his appeal to the amazed Austrian. He had come, he said, to beg the Emperor to save his life. The Tsar, Menshikov and Catherine wished to deprive him of the throne, send him to a monastery and perhaps even to kill him. "I am weak," he said, "but I have sense enough to rule. Besides," he added, "God, not man, gives kingdoms and appoints heirs to a throne."

Schonborn stared at the frantic young man, who was looking from left to right almost as if he expected his tormentors to pursue him right into the room. Raising his hand for calm, the Vice Chancellor offered a chair. Alexis swallowed hard, sank into the chair and asked for beer. Schonbom had no beer, but he offered his visitor a glass of Moselle wine and then, in a friendly and reassuring way, began asking questions to convince himself that this really was the Tsarevich.

When this was done, Schonborn explained to the sobbing Prince that the Emperor could not be roused that night, but would be informed the following morning. Meanwhile, it would be best for the Tsarevich to return to his inn and remain in concealment until it had been decided what to do. Alexis agreed and, after expressing his gratitude with another gush of tears, he left.

Alexis' arrival put Emperor Charles VI in a delicate position. To step between father and son was risky. If there was rebellion or civil war in Russia, no one could tell who would win, and if Austria had backed the loser, who could say what form the winner's revenge might take? In the end, it was decided expedient not to receive Alexis officially or take public notice of his presence

in imperial territory. On the other hand, Alexis' appeal to his brother-in-law would not be totally rejected. Retaining his incognito, the Tsarevich would be hidden within the empire until he effected a reconciliation with his father or some further development occurred.

Two days later, in great secrecy, Alexis and his small party (including Afrosina, whose disguise as a boy had not been penetrated) were escorted to the castle of Ehrenberg in the remote Tyrolean valley of the Lech River, where they lived under conditions of highest security. The commandant was not told the identity of his guest and believed him to be an important Polish or Hungarian nobleman. The soldiers of the garrison were restricted to the castle for the entire length of the Tsarevich's stay; none was to go on leave and none was to be replaced. The visitor was to be treated as a guest of the Imperial court, served respectfully, and his table furnished with a lavish allowance of 300 florins a month. All mail coming to or from the guest was to be intercepted and forwarded to the Imperial Chancery in Vienna. Most important, no strangers were to be allowed anywhere near the castle. Anyone coming near the gate or attempting to speak to the guards was to be arrested immediately.

Enclosed by thick walls, lost in the high mountains and deep snows of the Alps, Alexis at last felt safe. Afrosina was with him, along with four Russian servants and many books. His only need was an Orthodox priest—an impossibility while he maintained his incognito, but he implored Schonborn to send one should he become ill or reach the point of death. During these five months, his contact with' the world was through Count Schonborn and the Imperial Chancery in Vienna. From time to time, the Count would send him news. "People are beginning to say that the Tsarevich has perished," ran one communication from Schonborn. "According to some, he has run away from the severity of his father; according to others, he has been put to death by his father's orders. Others say that, while traveling, he was assassinated by robbers. Nobody knows exactly where he is. I enclose as a matter of curiosity what has been written from St. Petersburg. The Tsarevich is advised in his interest to keep himself well concealed, because active search will be made for him as soon as the Tsar's return from Amsterdam."

On the Russian side, awareness of the Tsarevich's disappearance came more gradually than one would suppose. The Tsar's family was dispersed: Peter was in Amsterdam, Catherine was in Mecklenburg, and travel in that time was slow and uncertain. Alexis supposedly was making his way over winter roads from St. Petersburg down the Baltic to join the army which was in winter quarters in Mecklenburg; travel conditions alone could explain a delay of weeks. Nevertheless, in time, people began to worry. Twice, Catherine wrote to Menshikov asking about Alexis. One of the Tsarevich's servants, sent by Kikin to follow his master, lost the trail in North Germany and came to Catherine in Mecklenburg to report that he had traced Alexis as far as Danzig, where the Tsarevich appeared to have vanished. It was during these early weeks that Count Schonborn sent to the fugitive hidden in the Tyrol a letter written in January from St. Petersburg by the Austrian representative, Pleyer:

As no one up to this time had shown special attention to the Crown Prince, no one thought much about his departure. But when old Princess Maria [to whom Alexis had admitted his desire to flee] returned from the baths [Carlsbad] and visited the house of the Crown Prince and began to cry, "Poor orphans, who are without father and mother, how sorry 1 am for you!" and besides this, news was received that the Tsarevich had gone no further than Danzig, everyone began to inquire about him. Many high personages secretly sent to me and to other foreigners to ask if we had not received in our letters some news of him. Two of his servants came to me also with questions. They wept bitterly and said that the Tsarevich had taken here a thousand ducats for his journey and in Danzig two thousand more and had sent them an order to secretly sell his furniture and pay the drafts, and since then they had no news of him. Meanwhile, they say in whispers that he was seized near Danzig by the Tsar's people and carried off to a distant monastery, but it is not known whether he is alive or dead. According to others, he has gone to Hungary or some other land of the Emperor.

Then Pleyer, who hated Peter, began to exaggerate. "Everything here is ripe for rebellion," he told Vienna. He wrote of a plot which rumor said would kill Peter, imprison Catherine, free Eudoxia and set Alexis on the throne. He went on to catalogue the complaints of the nobility, to whom he had obviously been talking. "High and low talk of nothing else except the contempt shown to them and their children who are obliged to be sailors and shipbuilders, although they have been abroad to learn languages and have spent so much money; of the ruin of their property by taxes and by their serfs being carried off to build fortresses and harbors." Pleyer's letter, which Alexis gave to Afrosina to keep with her belongings, and which later turned up in the hands of his inquisitors in Moscow, was to do the Tsarevich great harm.

For Peter, spending the winter in Amsterdam before his visit to Paris, the rumors that his son had disappeared were alarming, and when they turned to fact, the Tsar was overcome with anger and shame. The flight alone was bad enough for Peter's pride; worse was the fact that the defiance of the heir would stimulate and encourage all those dissident elements who hoped one day to overturn the Tsar's reforms. It was imperative, therefore, to find the Tsarevich. In December, General Weide, commanding the Russian army in Mecklenburg, was ordered to search throughout North Germany. On the chance that the fugitive might be in the Hapsburg Emperor's dominions, Abraham Veselovsky, the Tsar's resident in Vienna, was summoned to meet Peter in Amsterdam. There, Peter ordered him to begin a discreet search within the imperial territories and handed him a letter addressed to Charles VI, requesting that if the Tsarevich did appear either openly or secretly in the Emperor's lands, Charles would send Alexis back to his father under armed escort. Humiliated by having to write such a letter, Peter told Veselovsky not to give it to the Emperor until evidence developed that Alexis actually was in imperial territory.

Grimly accepting the role of sleuth, Veselovsky went from Amsterdam to Danzig to pick up the Tsarevich's trail. From Danzig, it led down the road to Vienna, and Veselovsky discovered that a man named Kokhansky, fitting the Tsarevich's description, had passed that way from posthouse to posthouse several months before. In Vienna, the trail faded, and in interviews with Count Schonborn, with Prince Eugene and even with the Emperor himself, the detective could learn nothing. Reinforcement arrived in the person of Captain of the Guards Rumyantsov, a giant of a man, almost as big as Peter himself, who was a personal aide to the Tsar. Rumyantsov's orders were to assist Veselovsky in seizing Alexis by force if necessary to bring him home.

By the end of March 1717, the efforts of Veselovsky and Rumyantsov began to produce results. A bribed clerk in the Imperial Chancery indicated that a search in the Tyrol might prove fruitful. Rumyantsov traveled there and learned that a mysterious stranger was rumored to be hidden in the castle of Ehrenberg. He prowled as close to the castle as he could, returned repeatedly and eventually caught a glimpse of a man who he was sure was the Tsarevich. Armed with this information, Veselovsky returned to Vienna and delivered the Tsar's letter from Amsterdam to the Emperor. Alexis had been positively identified at Ehrenberg, Veselovsky declared, and it was obvious that he was living there with the knowledge of the Imperial government. His Imperial Majesty was respectfully requested to deal frankly with the Tsar's request concerning his son. Charles VI hesitated, still uncertain how to deal with this unwanted entanglement. He told Veselovsky that he doubted the accuracy of his information from the Tyrol, but would investigate. He then sent an imperial secretary straight to the Tsarevich to tell him what had happened, show him Peter's letter and ask whether he was now prepared to go back to his father. Alexis' response was to break into hysterics. Running from room to room, weeping, wringing his hands, wailing aloud in Russian, he made it plain to the secretary that he would rather do anything than return. The secretary then announced the Emperor's decision: that, as his present hiding place had been discovered and the Tsar's demands could not be summarily rejected, the Tsarevich would be transferred to another place of refuge within the empire: the city of Naples, which had come to the Imperial crown four years earlier through the Treaty of Utrecht.

Alexis gratefully agreed. In great secrecy, he was conducted through Innsbruck and Florence to southern Italy, taking with him his "page" Afrosina and his servants, who called attention to themselves by getting drunk. Writing to Count Schonborn, the imperial secretary noted that "as far as Trento suspicious people followed us; all was well, however. I used all possible means to hold our company from frequent and excessive drunkenness, but in vain." Early in May, the fugitive party arrived in Naples, and after a dinner at the Trattoria of the Three Kings, the Tsarevich's coach rolled into the courtyard of Castle St. Elmo. The massive brown walls and towers of this fortress looking out over the blue Bay of Naples toward Mount Vesuvius were to be Alexis' home for the next five months. He settled down in the warm sunshine and began writing letters to Russia, telling the clergy and the Senate that he was still alive and explaining his reasons for flight. With the passage of time, Afrosina's swelling body made plain the sex of the "page." As Count Schonborn joked in a letter to Prince Eugene: "Our little page has at last been acknowledged as a female. She is declared to be a mistress and indispensably necessary."

Unfortunately for the lovers, their belief that their hiding place remained secret was false. The "suspicious people" spotted by the secretary as they traveled south were none other than Rumyantsov and his men, who followed the Tsarevich through Italy and entered Naples on his heels. As soon as they were certain that the fugitives were settling into Castle St. Elmo for an extended stay, a courier hurried north to inform Tsar Peter. The messenger found him at Spa, where he was resting and taking the waters after his Paris visit.

When Peter heard the news, he was extremely angry. Nine months had passed since the Tsarevich's flight, and throughout that time, as the Tsar passed through foreign territories and visited Western courts, he had borne the humiliation of his son's defection. Now, in addition, he knew that not only had the Emperor lied to him about Alexis' presence within his dominions, but that, as indicated by the move to a new asylum in Naples, Austria did not mean to give the Tsarevich up. Grimly, Peter wrote again to the Emperor, this time demanding the return of his renegade son.

To carry this ultimatum to Vienna, Peter had selected the most skillful diplomat in his sevice. Peter Tolstoy. The clever old fox, with his bushy black eyebrows and cold, impressive face, was now seventy-two. He had survived his original support of the Tsarevna Sophia in the struggle between brother and sister years before. He had survived twelve years as Russian ambassador in Constantinople and numerous incarcerations in the Seven Towers. Now, returning with Peter from Paris, Tolstoy was chosen for a final mission: He was to go to Vienna and inquire of the Emperor why a disobedient son had been given refuge. He was to hint to Charles VI the possible consequences of this unfriendly action. Further, if he could gain access to the Tsarevich, he was to present to Alexis a letter written by Peter, promising the son his father's forgiveness if he returned. Meanwhile, locked in his own breast, Tolstoy carried Peter's real orders: The Tsarevich was to be brought back to Russia, no matter what the means.

Tolstoy arrived in Vienna and immediately went with Veselovsky and Rumyantsov to an audience with the Emperor. There, he presented the Tsar's letter, which declared that he knew exactly where Alexis was and that both as a father and as an autocratic sovereign he had a complete right to the restitution of his son. Charles listened and said little, but promised a quick reply. Tolstoy next went to the Princess of Wolfenbuttel, Alexis' mother-in-law, who happened to be in Vienna visiting her daughter, the Empress. He begged her, in the interest of her grandchildren, the son and daughter of the Tsarevich, to exert her influence on behalf of the refugee's return. She agreed, for she was well aware that if the Tsarevich did not submit to the Tsar, little Peter Alexeevich might be removed from the line of succession.

On August 18, the Imperial Council met to consider the dilemma. Alexis could not be summarily dispatched back to Peter; if the Tsar's protestations of mercy later proved false, Austria would then be accused of having played a part in Alexis' death. On the other hand, a large Russian army was stationed in Poland and North Germany. Such was Peter's character, it was believed,

that if thwarted he might divert his troops from the war against Charles XII to march on Silesia and Bohemia. The solution eventually reached was to reply to Peter's letter that the Emperor had actually been performing a service for the Tsar by attempting to preserve the affection between father and son and by not allowing Alexis to fall into the hands of a hostile nation. The Emperor insisted to Tolstoy that Alexis was not a prisoner in Naples: He was and always had been free.to go where he liked. Meanwhile, the Emperor instructed his viceroy in Naples that the Tsarevich was not to be forced into anything and that precautions were to be taken to make sure the Russian did not assassinate the fugitive.

On September 26, 1717, Alexis was invited to the Viceroy's palace in Naples. Led into a chamber, he saw, to his horror, Tolstoy and Rumyantsov standing beside the Viceroy. The Tsarevich trembled; the Viceroy, Count Daun, had not told him of their presence, suspecting that if he had known, he would not have come. Alexis, aware that the giant Rumyantsov was an intimate of his father's, expected the sudden flash of a sword blade. Gradually, Tolstoy, speaking in his most reassuring tones, persuaded the young man that they had come only to deliver a letter from Peter, to listen to his thoughts and to wait for his reply. Still trembling, the Tsarevich took the letter and read it.

My Son:

Your disobedience and the contempt you have shown for my orders are known to all the world. Neither my words nor my corrections have been able to bring you to follow my instructions, and last of all, having deceived me when I bade you farewell and in defiance of the oaths you made, you have carried your disobedience to the highest pitch by your flight and by putting yourself like a traitor under a foreign protection. This'is a thing hitherto unheard of, not only in our family, but among our subjects of any consideration. What wrong and what grief have you thereby occasioned to your father, and what shame have your drawn upon your country!

I write to you for the last time to tell you that you are to do what Messrs. Tolstoy and Rumyantsov will tell you and declare to be my will. If you are afraid of me, I assure you and I promise to God and His judgement that I will not punish you. If you submit to my will by obeying me and if you return, I will love you better than ever. But if you refuse, then I as a father, by virtue of the power I have received from God, give you my everlasting curse; and as your sovereign, I declare you traitor and I assure you I will find the means to use you as such, in which I hope God will assist me and take my just cause into His hands.

As for what remains, remember I forced you to do nothing. What need had I to give you a free choice? If I had wished to force you, was it not in my power to do it? I had but to command and I would have been obeyed.

Peter

Finishing the letter, Alexis told the two envoys that he had put himself under the Emperor's protection because his father had decided to deprive him of the crown and put him in a monastery. Now that his father had promised parden, he said, he would reflect and reconsider; he could not answer immediately. Two days later, when Tolstoy and Rumyantsov returned, Alexis told them that he was still afraid to go back to his father and would continue to ask the hospitality of the Emperor. Hearing this, Tolstoy put on a different face. Roaring with anger, storming about the room, he threatened that Peter would make war on the empire, that the Tsar eventually would take his son dead or alive as a traitor, that wherever he might flee, there would be no escape because Tolstoy and Rumyantsov had orders to remain close by until they took him.

His eyes staring with fright, Alexis grasped the Viceroy by the hand, pulled him into an adjoining room and begged Count Daun to guarantee the Emperor's protection. Daun, whose orders were to facilitate the interviews while at the same time preventing violence, suspected his master's dilemma. Believing that if he could help persuade the Tsarevich to return voluntarily he would be doing a service to all parties, he calmed Alexis. But he began to work with Tolstoy.

Meanwhile, Tolstoy turned his fertile mind to other intrigues worthy of his years in Constantinople. With 160 ducats, he bribed the Viceroy's secretary to whisper in the Tsarevich's ear that he had heard that the Emperor had decided to return the son to the angry father. Next, speaking again to Alexis himself, Tolstoy lied, saying that he had received a new letter from Peter announcing that he was coming to seize his son by force and that the Russian army soon would be marching toward Silesia. The Tsar himself meant to come to Italy, Tolstoy went on. "And when he is here, who can prevent him from seeing you?" he asked. At the thought, Alexis turned pale.

Finally, Tolstoy's relentless mind located the key to Alexis' decision: It was Afrosina. Observing the Tsarevich's almost desperate need for the serf, he told the Viceroy that she was a major cause of the rift between father and son. Further, he suggested, Afrosina was still encouraging Alexis not to return home because there her own status would be questionable. At Tolstoy's urging, Count Daun issued orders to remove the girl from Castle St. Elmo. When Alexis heard this, his defenses crumbled. He wrote to Tolstoy, begging him to come alone to the castle so that they might work out an agreement. His battle almost won, Tolstoy then persuaded Afrosina, with promises and gifts, to urge her lover to return home. She did as she was asked, begging her lover in tears to give up his last desperate idea: a flight to the Papal States to put himself under the protection of the Pope.

Alexis was now emotionally and psychologically battered to the point of submission. His choice lay between returning to Russia in the company of his mistress to receive his father's pardon, or the removal of Afrosina and of the Emperor's protection, leaving him at the mercy of Tolstoy and Rumyantsov or, worse, Peter himself. The choice was obvious, and when Tolstoy arrived, the Tsarevich quickly capitulated. Although hesitant and filled with fear and misgiving, he told the Ambassador: "I will go to my father on two conditions: that I may be allowed to live quietly in a country house and that Afrosina will not be taken away from me." Tolstoy, mindful of Peter's command to get the Tsarevich back to Russia by any means, instantly agreed; indeed, he promised Alexis that he would write personally to the Tsar asking permission for the Tsarevich to marry Afrosina immediately. Cynically, Tolstoy explained in his letter to Peter that this marriage would demonstrate that Alexis had fled not for serious political reasons but simply for frivolous love of a peasant girl. This in turn, Tolstoy added, would strip away any last sympathy the Emperor might have for his erstwhile brother-in-law.

Alexis wrote begging the Tsar's forgiveness and entreating that the two conditions to which Tolstoy had agreed might be carried out. On November 17, Peter replied: "You ask for pardon. It has already been promised to you orally and in writing by Messrs. Tolstoy and Rumyantsov, and I now confirm it, of which you can be fully assured. As regards certain other wishes expressed by you [marriage to Afrosina], they will be allowed to you here." To Tolstoy, Peter explained that he would permit the marriage if Alexis still wished it on his return, but that it must take place either on Russian soil or in one of the newly conquered Baltic territories. Peter also promised to grant Alexis' wish to live in peace in a country house. "Perhaps he may doubt whether he will be allowed to do this," the Tsar wrote to Tolstoy, "but let him reason thus: when I have pardoned such a great crime, why should I not allow this little matter?"

Once Alexis had agreed to return and had written this to the Emperor in Vienna, there could be no question of detention by the imperial authorities. The Tsarevich left Castle St. Elmo with Tolstoy and Rumyantsov, and, traveling slowly and feeling more relaxed, he made a pilgrimage to Bari to visit the shrine of St. Nicholas, the miracle worker. From there, he went to Rome, where he visited the holy shrines in a Vatican carriage and was received by the Pope. In a cheerful mood, he reached Venice, where he was persuaded to leave Afrosina behind so that she would not have to cross the Alps in winter in her delicate state.

For the Tsarevich's wary escorts, Tolstoy and Rumyantsov, and for Veselovsky, who was waiting for them near Vienna, the passage through the Imperial capital posed something of a gauntlet to be run. Alexis was asking that the party halt in Vienna so that he could call on the Emperor and thank him for his hospitality. Tolstoy, however, was afraid that one or both of the brothers-in-law might have a change of mind which would upset the success of his mission. Accordingly, he arranged for Veselovsky to spirit the little party through Vienna in a single night. By the time the Emperor heard about it, the Tsarevich and his escorts were already north of the city in the town of Brunn in the imperial province of Moravia.

Charles was alarmed and indignant. He had suffered needles of conscience over what he had permitted to take place in Naples. To reassure himself, he had resolved to interview his brother-in-law in Vienna to make sure that the Tsarevich truly was returning to Russia voluntarily. The Emperor hoped, of course, that this was so; repatriation of the embarrassing guest would remove a large thorn from his own foot. But honor required that Alexis consent; the imperial dignity could not permit the Tsarevich to be dragged away by force. Thus, a meeting of the Council was hastily convened and a messenger dispatched to Count Colloredo, Governor of Moravia, commanding him to detain the Russian party until Alexis had personally assured the Governor that he was traveling freely at his own wish.

Tolstoy, finding his inn surrounded by soldiers, denied that the Tsarevich was in the party. He threatened to use his sword to prevent anyone from entering Alexis' room, and promised that the episode would summon the vengeance of Tsar Peter. The Governor, taken aback, sent to Vienna for new instructions, and again he was ordered not to permit Tolstoy's party to leave Briinn until he had seen and talked with the Tsarevich; if necessary, he was to use force to achieve this. This time, Tolstoy backed down. The interview was permitted, although the Govern's request to speak to Alexis alone was ignored; Tolstoy and Rumyantsov remained in the room. Under the circumstances, Alexis spoke only in monosyllables, saying that he was anxious to return to his father and that he had not stopped to call on the Emperor because he lacked court clothes and a suitable carriage. The game was over. The forms of propriety and diplomatic etiquette had been observed. The Governor and, through him, the Emperor had discharged their obligations; permission to depart was granted. Within a few hours, Tolstoy had secured new horses and the Russian party was gone. It reached Riga in Russian-occupied territory on January 21, 1718. From there, Alexis was taken to Tver near Moscow, to await his father's summons.

Afrosina remained in Venice, intending to travel in better weather and at a more leisurely pace. As he journeyed farther from her, Alexis wrote to her constantly, expressing his love and concern: "Do not trouble yourself. Take care of yourself on the road. Go slowly because the road in the Tyrol is stony, as you know. Stop where you want as many days as you like. Do not consider the money expense. Even if you spend much, your health is dearer to me than anything." He counseled her on places to buy medicines in Venice and Bologna. From Innsbruck, he wrote, "Buy either here or somewhere else a comfortable carriage." To one of her servants, he pleaded, "Do all you can to amuse Afrosina so that she will not be unhappy." Arriving in Russia, his first concern was to send her some women servants and an Orthodox priest. His last letter, written from Tver, where he was waiting his father's summons, was optimistic: "Thank God, all is well. I expect to be rid of everything so as to live with you, if God allow, in the country, where we will not have trouble about anything."

While Alexis was pouring his heart out to her, his beloved Afrosina was enjoying her new status as the favorite of both the son and—through her aid to Tolstoy—the father. She amused herself in Venice, riding in a gondola and buying cloth of gold for 167 ducats, a cross, earrings and a ruby ring. Most of her letters lack the urgency and passion displayed by her lover; indeed, they were written by a secretary, with the uneducated mistress usually adding a few lines in her large, ill-formed scrawl, begging Alexis to send her some cavier, smoked fish or kasha by the next courier.

In Russia, news of the Tsarevich's return stirred mixed feelings. No one knew quite how to receive him: Was it the heir to the throne or a traitor to Russia who now waited outside Moscow to see his father? De la Vie, the French commercial agent, expressed this strange, uneasy mood: "The arrival of the Tsarevich caused as much joy to some as grief to others. Those who took his part were glad before his return in hope that some revolution would take place. Now all is changed. Policy takes the place of discontent and everything is quiet while waiting for the result of the affair. His return is generally disapproved, for it is believed that he will have the same fate as his mother." Some observers, especially those who had hoped that the heir would oudast and succeed his father, were angry and disgusted. Said Ivan Naryshkin: "That Judas of a Peter, Tolstoy, has delivered the Tsarevich." Said Prince Vasily Dolgoruky to Prince Gagarin: "Have you heard that that fool of a Tsarevich is coming here because his father has allowed him to marry Afrosina? He will have a coffin instead of a wedding!"

54

THE FUTURE ON TRIAL

On winter mornings in Moscow, a pale sun emerges to cast a hazy light on the snow-covered rooftops of the ancient city. At nine o'clock on such a morning, February 3, 1718, the great men of Russia were assembled in solemn conclave in the Great Audience Hall of the Kremlin. Ministers and other officials of the government, the highest dignitaries of the clergy and the leading members of the nobility had gathered to witness a historic act: the disinheritance of a Tsarevich and the proclamation of a new heir to the throne of Russia. To underscore the drama and its potential dangers, three battalions of the Preobrazhensky Regiment had been brought into the Kremlin and stationed around the palace with muskets loaded.

Peter arrived first and took his place upon the throne. Then Alexis was escorted in by Tolstoy. The status of the Tsarevich was clear to everyone: He lacked his sword and therefore came as a prisoner. Alexis confirmed this instantly by going straight to his father, falling on his knees, acknowledging his guilt and begging pardon for his crimes. Peter ordered his son to rise while a written confession was read aloud:

Most Clement Lord and Father. I confess once more at present that I have swerved from the duties of a child and of a subject in evading and putting myself under the Emperor's protection and by applying to him for support. I implore your gracious pardon and your clemency. The most humble and incapable servant, unworthy to call himself son, Alexis.

The Tsar then denounced his son formally, condemning him for repeatedly ignoring his father's commands, for his neglect of his wife, for his relations with Afrosina, for his desertion from the army and, finally, for his dishonorable flight to a foreign country. Speaking loudly, Peter announced that the Tsarevich begged only for his life and was ready to renounce the inheritance. Out of mercy, Peter continued, he had assured Alexis of his pardon, but only on condition that the whole truth of his past conduct and the names of all who had been his accomplices be revealed. Alexis agreed and followed Peter into a small nearby chamber, where he swore that only Alexander Kikin and Ivan Afanasiev, the Tsarevich's valet, had known that he planned to flee. Father and son then returned to the Audience Hall, where Vice Chancellor ShafirOv read a printed manifesto listing the offenses of the Tsarevich, declaring that he had been both pardoned and disinherited, and proclaiming that Catherine's son, the two-year-old Tsarevich Peter Petrovich, was now the heir to the throne. From the palace, the entire assembly walked across the Kremlin courtyard to the Assumption Cathedral, where Alexis, kissing the Gospel and a cross, swore before the holy relics that when his father died, he would bear faithful allegiance to his little half-brother and never attempt to regain the succession for himself. Everyone present took the same oath. That night, the manifesto was published, and over the next three days all citizens of Moscow were invited to visit the cathedral and swear the new oath of allegiance to Peter Petrovich as heir to the throne to the whole of the garrison, the nobility, the townspeople and the peasants.

The two public ceremonies in Moscow and St. Petersburg seemed to bring the affair to an end. Alexis had resigned his claim to the throne; a new heir had been proclaimed. What more was necessary? A great deal more, as it turned out. For the terrible drama was only beginning.

Peter's decree in the Kremlin ceremony, making his pardon conditional on Alexis' revealing the names of all his advisors and confidants, introduced a new element into the affair between father and son. This was, in fact, a betrayal by the Tsar of the promise given the Tsarevich by Tolstoy at Castle St. Elmo. There, Alexis had been promised an unconditional pardon if he would return to Russia. Now, it was demanded that he name all his "accomplices" and not conceal even the slightest of the "conspiracy."

The reason, of course, was Peter's gnawing curiosity to know how far the threat to the throne and perhaps his life had gone, and his growing determination to know who among his subjects—and perhaps even among his advisors and intimates—had secretly sided with his son. He could not believe that Alexis would have fled without assistance and without some conspiratorial purpose.

Thus, as Peter saw it, this was no longer merely a family drama, but a political confrontation involving the permanence of the achievements of his reign. He had settled the succession on another son, but Alexis remained alive and free. How could Peter be sure that, after his own death, the same nobles who had so speedily signed the oath to two-year-old Peter Petrovich would not equally hastily overturn their vows and rush to support Alexis? Above all, how could he continue to surround himself with familiar faces, now knowing which among them had been false?

Tormented by these questions, Peter decided to get to the bottom of what had happened. The first investigation began immediately at Preobrazhenskoe. Holding Alexis to his promise to reveal everything, Peter drew up in his own hand a list of seven questions which Tolstoy presented to the Tsarevich, along with the Tsar's warning that a single omission or evasion in his answers could cost him his pardon. In reply, Alexis wrote a long, rambling narrative of the events of his life during the preceding four years. Although he insisted that only Kikin and Afanasiev had possessed foreknowledge of his flight, he also mentioned a number of other people with whom he had spoken about himself and his relations with his father. Among those named were Peter's half-sister, the Tsarevna Maria Alexeevna; Abraham Lopukhin, who was the brother of Peter's first wife, Eudoxia, and thereby Alexis' uncle; Senator Peter Apraxin, brother of the General-Admiral; Senator Samarin; Semyon Naryshkin; Prince Vasily Dolgoruky; Prince Yury Trubetskoy; the Prince of Siberia; the Tsarevich's tutor, Viazemsky; and his confessor, Ignatiev.

The only person whom Alexis attempted to exempt from all blame was Afrosina. "She carried [my] letters in a box, but she had not the least knowledge of them," he declared. As to advance knowledge of his flight, he explained, "I carried her along with me by a strategem when I had taken the resolution to fly. I told her that I would only take her as far as Riga, and from thence I carried her further, making her as well as those of my retinue believe that I had orders to go to Vienna to make an alliance against the Ottoman Porte and that I was obliged to travel in private that the Turks might not get notice of it. That is all [she and] my servants knew of it."

With the names supplied by Alexis before him, Peter wrote urgent orders to Menshikov in St. Petersburg, where most of the accused lived. As soon as the couriers arrived, the city gates were closed and no one was allowed to leave for any reason. Peasants bringing food into market were searched on leaving to prevent anyone from escaping concealed in a simple sledge. Apothecaries were forbidden to sell arsenic or other poisons lest some of the accused attempt that form of escape.

Once the city was sealed off, Peter's agents struck. At midnight, Kikin's house was quietly surrounded by fifty soldiers of the Guards. An officer entered, found him in bed, took him in his dressing gown and slippers, fettered him in chains and an iron collar and carried him away before he could say more than a word to his beautiful wife. In fact, Kikin had almost escaped. Realizing that he was in danger, he had bribed one of Peter's confidential orderlies to warn him of any move the Tsar might make against him. When Peter was writing his orders to Menshikov, the orderly was standing behind the Tsar and read the message over Peter's shoulder. The orderly left the house immediately and sent a messenger riding to Kikin in St. Petersburg. His message arrived only minutes after Kikin had been arrested.

Menshikov also received orders to arrest Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, a lieutenant general, a Knight of the Danish Order of the Elephant and the director general of the commission established by Peter to look into the mismanagement of state revenues. Supposedly, he was still high in Peter's favor, for he had only just returned with the Tsar from Peter's eighteen-month journey to Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Paris. Menshikov surrounded Dolgoruky's house with soldiers, then entered and announced his orders to the Prince. Dolgoruky handed over his sword, declaring, "I have a good conscience but one head to lose." He was fettered and taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress. That same evening, Menshikov visited and arrested Senator Peter Apraxin, Abraham Lopukhin, Senator Michael Samarin and the Prince of Siberia. In addition, all of Alexis' servants and nine others were chained and made ready to travel as prisoners to Moscow.

Through February, the net continued to widen. Both in Moscow and St. Petersburg, new persons were arrested daily. Dositheus, the Bishop of Rostov, one of the most famous and powerful churchmen in Russia, was arrested and accused of having publicly prayed in his church for Eudoxia and of having prophesied the death of Peter. Eudoxia herself and Peter's only surviving half-sister, Maria, were arrested and brought to Moscow for questioning. Peter was deeply suspicious of his former wife. She had been in communication with Alexis, and she had much to gain if her son were to sit on the throne. On the day Alexis was removed from the succession, Peter sent Guards Captain Gregory Pisarev to the convent in Suzdal where Eudoxia had been living for nineteen years. Arriving there, Pisarev found that Eudoxia had long before laid aside the veil of a nun and put on the robes of a royal lady. He found on the convent altar a tablet which contained "A Prayer for the Tsar and Tsaritsa," citing the names of Peter and Eudoxia as if the Tsar had not divorced his wife. Finally, Pisarev discovered that the former wife and former nun had taken a lover. Major Stephen Glebov, the captain of her guards.

Eudoxia, now forty-four years old, trembled to imagine how the giant man who had been her husband would react to all this. As she was being taken to Moscow, she wrote a letter and sent it ahead so that it should reach Peter before she did. "Most Gracious Soverign," she pleaded,

Many years ago, which year I do not remember, I went to Suzdal Convent, taking the vows as I had promised, and was given the name of Helen. After becoming a nun, I wore monastic dress for half a year. But not greatly desiring to be a nun, I gave it up and abandoned the dress, staying on quietly at the convent as a lay person in disguise. My secret has been revealed by Gregory Pisarev. Now I rely on the humane generosity of Your Majesty. Falling at your feet, I beg mercy for my crime, and forgiveness, that I may not die a useless death. And I promise to go back to the life of a nun and remain in it till my death, and will pray to God for you, Sovereign. Your most humble slave, your past wife, Eudoxia.

Although the original charge against Eudoxia seemed to have little weight—communications between Alexis and his mother were rare and harmless—Peter was now aroused by his former wife's behavior and determined to ferret out the details of the situation in Suzdal. Glebov was arrested, along with Father Andrew, the chief priest of the convent, and a number of nuns. It was difficult to believe that Eudoxia's way of life had gone completely unnoticed and unreported to Moscow for twenty years, of that Peter's anger now directed solely at the offense against his honor. Rather, what stimulated his rage was his belief that a conspiracy existed, and the possibility that its threads ran through the convent in Suzdal.

As prisoners flowed into Moscow from St. Petersburg, Suzdal and other parts of the country, huge crowds stood at the Kremlin gates to see what they could and to catch the latest rumor. The heads of the clergy, the members of Peter's court, his generals and administrative officers and most of the nobility of Russia had been summoned, and the daily processions of coaches carrying great noblemen and churchmen accompanied by their servants made a rich spectacle.

The churchmen were there to attend the trial of their colleague Dositheus, Bishop of Rostov. Judged guilty, he was stripped of his ecclesiastical robes and delivered to the secular authorities for interrogation under torture. While being disrobed, he turned and shouted to his fellow bishops who had judged him, "Am I then the only one guilty in this matter? Look into your own hearts, all of you. What do you find there? Go to the people. Listen to them.

What do they say? Whose name do you hear? Put to torture, Dositheus admitted nothing except a general sympathy for Alexis and Eudoxia; no act of defiance or rebellious words could be extracted or proved. And yet, just as with the Streltsy two decades before, the very vagueness of these replies tended to anger Peter and spur his determination to dig deeper.

The dominant figure in the inquisition was Peter himself, dashing from the palace through the city, accompanied only by two or three servants. Contrary to the custom of all previous Muscovite tsars, he appeared not only as judge, dressed in jewels and ancestral robes, seated in honor and wisdom on his throne, but as chief prosecutor, in Western dress—breeches, frockcoat, stockings and buckled shoes—demanding judgment from the dignitaries of the realm, temporal and spiritual. Standing in the Great Kremlin Hall, lifting his voice in anger, he argued the danger to which his government had been exposed and the horrors of the crime of treason against the state. It was Peter who presented the case against Dositheus, and when the Tsar was finished, the Bishop of Rostov was doomed.

Late in March, the Moscow phase of the inquisition came to an end when the Council of Ministers, sitting as a temporal High Court of Justice, handed down its verdict. Kikin, Glebov and the Bishop of Rostov were condemned to die a lingering, painful death; others were condemned to die more simply. Many more were publicly knouted and sent into exile. The lesser of the women, including some nuns of the Suzdal convent, were publicly whipped and transferred to convents on the White Sea. The Tsaritsa Eudoxia was not touched physically, but she was moved to a remote convent on Lake Ladoga, where she remained under strick supervision for ten years until the accession of her grandson, Peter II. She then returned to court and lived there until 1731, when she died in the time of Empress Anne. The Tsarevna Maria, Peter's half-sister, was judged to have encouraged opposition to the Tsar and was imprisoned in Schlusselburg fortress for three years. In 1721, she was released and returned to St. Petersburg, where she died in 1723.

A number of the accused were completely exonerated or dealt with mildly. The Prince of Siberia was exiled to Archangel; Senator Samarin was acquitted. The charge against Senator Peter Apraxin was that he had advanced 3,000 roubles to the Tsarevich upon his departure from St. Petersburg for Germany. When it developed in the investigation that Apraxin had assumed Alexis was going to join the Tsar and had had no means of knowing that the Tsarevich intended to flee, he was completely exonerated.

Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, who admitted sympathy for the Tsarevich, was saved from execution by the pleas of his relatives, especially his older brother, Prince Jacob, who reminded the Tsar of the Dolgoruky family's long record of faithful service. Nevertheless, Vasily was stripped of his rank of general, his Danish Order of the Elephant was sent back to Copenhagen, and he was exiled to Kazan. Leaving St. Petersburg with a long beard and a shabby black coat, he obtained permission to say goodbye to the Tsaritsa Catherine. Once in her presence, he delivered a long speech justifying his behavior and at the same time complaining that he possessed nothing in the world except the clothes on his back. Catherine, soft-hearted as usual, sent him a present of 200 ducats.

The executions of those condemned to a cruel death took place on March 26 in Red Square under the Kremlin walls before a huge crowd of spectators which foreigners estimated at 200,000 to 300,000. The Bishop of Rostov and three others were broken with hammers and left to die slowly on the wheel. A worse fate was reserved for Glebov, Eudoxia's lover. He was first beaten with the knout and burned with red-hot irons and glowing coals. Then he was stretched on a plank with spikes puncturing his flesh and left there for three days. Still he refused to confess treason. Finally, he was impaled. There is a story that as he suffered his excruciating final agonies with the sharp wooden stake in his rectum slowly gouging him to death, Peter approached. If Glebov would confess, the Tsar offered to release him from this torture and have him killed at once. Glebov, according to the story, spat in Peter's face, and the Tsar coolly walked away.

Similarly, Kikin, who had admitted advising the Tsarevich to seek refuge with the Emperor, was slowly tortured to death, being revived and rested at intervals so that he might suffer more. On the second day of his agony, Peter came up to him also. Kikin, still alive on the wheel, begged the Tsar to pardon him and allow him to become a monk. Peter refused that, but with a kind of mercy, ordered him beheaded at once.

Nine months later, the second phase of this grim retribution took place in Red Square. Prince Shcherbatov, who had been friendly to the Tsarevich, was publicly knouted and then his tongue was cut out and his nose sliced off. Three others were knouted, including a Pole who had served as Alexis' interpreter. Unlike the Russians, who submitted to their fate with great resignation, the Pole underwent his punishment with great reluctance, refusing to undress and face the knout; his clothes were pulled off him by force. These men all lived, but then five more were brought forward to die. They were Abraham Lopukhin, Eudoxia's brother; Ignatiev, Alexis' confessor; Afanasiev, his valet; and two men of Alexis' household. All were condemned to be broken on the wheel, but at the last minute the sentence was mitigated to simple beheading. The priest died first, then Lopukhin, then the others, with the last being obliged to lay their heads on the block in the blood of those who had died before.

While all this blood was flowing, Peter waited, still unconvinced that all the opposition had been identified, but certain that what he had done so far was right and necessary. Congratulated by a foreign diplomat on having discovered a conspiracy and beaten down his enemies, the Tsar nodded in agreement. "If a fire meets with straw and other light stuff, it soon spreads," he said. "But if it finds iron and stone in its way, it is extinguished of itself."

After the trials and the bloody executions in Moscow, it was generally hoped that the affair of the Tsarevich was over. The major threads of the conspiracy, if such there may have been, had now been identified and rooted out. When Peter left Moscow for St. Petersburg in March 1718, he took Alexis with him. Traveling together, father and son led observers to believe that the breach between them was repaired. Yet, Peter's mind still seethed with suspicions and fears and the nation sensed his irresolution. "The more I consider the confused state of affairs in Russia," de la Vie wrote to Paris, "the less I see how these disorders will be brought to an end." Most people, he continued, "still wait and hope only for the end of his [Peter's] life to plunge into the slough of sloth and ignorance." The Tsar's immediate dilemma was that no real conspiracy had been found, but neither had the Tsarevich been proved a faithful son, nor had all those close to the throne revealed themselves as loyal subjects. Above all, nothing had been done to solve the problem that troubled Peter most. A dispatch from Weber enlarged on this dilemma:

Now comes the question: What shall be done further with the Tsarevich? It is said that he is going to be sent to a very distant monastery. This does not seem probable to me, for the further the Tsar removes him, the greater opportunity does he give to the restless mob for liberating him. I think that he will be brought here again and kept in the neighborhood of St. Petersburg. I will not decide here whether the Tsar is right or wrong to exclude him from the succession and give him his paternal curse. This is sure: the clergy, the nobility, and the common people respect the Tsarevich like a god.

Weber's guess was accurate. Although nominally free, Alexis was required to live in a house next to Catherine's palace and scarcely allowed out of Peter's sight. The Tsarevich, meanwhile, was cowed and seemingly uncaring. Without protesting, he had watched his mother, his tutor, his confessor and all his friends and adherents arrested. As they were interrogated, tortured, exiled, flogged and executed, he meekly stood by, greatful that he himself was not being punished. His only thought seemed to be to marry Afrosina. At the Easter service, Alexis formally congratulated Catherine in the traditional manner, then fell on his knees before her and begged her to influence his father to allow him to marry Afrosina soon.

The young woman arrived in St. Petersburg on April 15, but instead of being received into the waiting arms of her impatient lover, she was immediately arrested and taken to the Fortress of Peter and Paul.* Among her belongings were found drafts of two letters from Naples written in Alexis' hand, one to the Russian Senate, the other to the archbishops of the Russian Orthodox Church. To the Senate, he had written:

Gentlemen Most Excellent Senators:

I believe you will be no less surprised than all the world at my going out of the country and at my residing in a place unknown at present. The continued ill-usage and the disorders have obliged me to quit my dear native country. They designed to shut me up in a convent in the beginning of the year 1716. though I had committed nothing that had deserved it. None of you can be ignorant of it. But God, full of mercy, saved me by presenting to me last autumn an opportunity of absenting myself from my dear country and you, whom I could not have resolved to leave had I not been in the case where I found myself.

At present I am well and in good health, under the protection of a certain High Person [the Emperor], till the time when God who preserved me shall call me to return to my dear native country.

I desire you not to forsake me then, and as for the present, to give no credit to the news that may be spread of my death, or otherwise out of the desire they have to blot me out of the memory of mankind, for God keeps me in His guard and my benefactors will not forsake me. They have promised me not to forsake me, even not for the future, in case of need. I am alive and 1 shall always be full of good wishes for Your Excellencies and for the whole country.

The letter to the archbishops was very similar, except that Alexis added that the idea of shutting him up in a convent

*The fate of her child by the Tsarevich is unknown. According to some accounts, the child was born in Riga as Afrosina traveled home. Other stories say that she delivered the infant in the fortress. In any case, the child disappeared from history.

"proceeded from the same persons who used my mother in like manner."

Four weeks passed before the next act of drama took place. In the middle of May, Peter decided to question the two lovers separately and then confront them with each other. He took Alexis with him to Peterhof, and two days later Afrosina was brought across the gulf from the fortress in an enclosed boat. In Mon Plaisir, Peter questioned them both, first the girl, then his son.

And here at Peterhof, Afrosina betrayed and doomed Alexis. Without torture, she confessed, responding to her royal lover's passion for her, his attempt to protect her, his willingness to give up a throne in order to marry and live quietly with her, by fatally incriminating him. She described the intimate details of their daily life during the time they were abroad. Through her mouth, all of the Tsarevich's fears and bitterness about his father came pouring out. Alexis, said Afrosina, had written several times to the Emperor complaining about his father. When he read in Pleyer's letter rumors of mutiny among the troops in Mecklenburg, and that there had been a rebellion in the towns near Moscow, he said to her happily, "Now, you see how God acts in His own way." When he read in a newspaper that the Tsarevich Peter Petrovich was ill, he rejoiced. He spoke to her constantly about the succession to the throne. When he became tsar, he told her, he would abandon St. Petersburg and all of Peter's foreign conquests and make Moscow his capital. He would dismiss Peter's courtiers and appoint his own. He would ignore the navy and allow the ships to rot. He would reduce the army to a few regiments. There would be no more wars with anyone, and he would content himself with Russia's old frontiers. The ancient rights of the church would be restored and respected.

Afrosina also recast her own role; only because of her continual urging, she said, had Alexis agreed to return to Russia. Further, she declared that she had accompanied him on his flight only because he had drawn a knife and threatened to kill her if she refused. Even when she slept with him, she declared, it had been the result of threats and force.

Afrosina's testimony strengthened many of Peter's suspicions. Writing later to the Regent of France, Peter declared that his son had "admitted nothing of his designs" until he was confronted with the letters found in the hands of his mistress. "By these letters, we have known clearly about the rebellious designs of a conspiracy against us, all the circumstances of which the said mistress has publicly, voluntarily, confessed without much examination."

Peter's next move was to summon Alexis and confront him with his lover's accusations. The scene at Mon Plaisir is portrayed in the famous nineteenth century painting by Nikolai Ge: The Tsar, wearing boots which are still in the Kremlin, is seated at a table on the black-and-white-tiled floor of the main hall, His face is stern, yet an eyebrow is raised; he has asked a question and is waiting for an answer. Alexis stands before him, tall, thin-faced, dressed in black like his father. He is worried, sullen and resentful. He looks not at his father but down to the floor while his hand, resting on the table, gives him support. It is a moment of decision.

Under his father's gaze, Alexis struggled to get free of the coils slowly crushing him: He had written to the Emperor complaining of his father, he admitted, but he had not sent the letter. He also admitted writing to the Senate and the archbishops, but declared that he had been forced to do so by the Austrian authorities on threat of expulsion from their protection. Peter then brought in Afrosina, and, to the Tsarevich's face, she repeated her accusations.* As his world crumbled around him, Alexis' explanations became feebler. It was true, he admitted, that the letter to the Emperor had been sent. He had spoken ill of his father, but he had been drunk. He had spoken about the succession and about returning to Russia, but only after his father's natural death. This he explained at length: "I believed my father's death was near when I heard that he had had a sort of epilepsy. As they said that older people who have had it can hardly live long, I believed he would die in two years at the furthest. I thought that after his death I might go out of the Emperor's dominions to Poland and from Poland into the Ukraine, where I did not question but everyone would declare for me. And I believed that at Moscow the Tsarevna Maria and the greater part of the archbishops would do the same. And as for the common people, I heard many persons say that they loved me.

"As for what remains, I was resolved absolutely not to return in my father's lifetime, except in the case I did; that is, when he recalled me."

Peter was not satisfied. He remembered that Afrosina had told him that Alexis had rejoiced when he heard rumors of a Russian army revolt in Mecklenburg. This suggests, the Tsar went on, that if the troops in Mecklenburg really had revolted, "you would have declared for the rebels even in my lifetime."

Alexis* answer to this question was disconnected but honest, and it did enormous damage: "If this news had been true and if they had called me, I would have joined the malcontents, but I had

*Afrosina was released, pardoned, and Peter allowed her to keep an assortment of his son's possessions. She lived her remaining thirty years in St. Petersburg, where she eventually married an officer of the Guards.

no formed design whether I should go and join them or not untill I was called. On the contrary, if they had not sent for me, I should have been afraid of going thither. But if they had, I would have gone.

"I believed they would not call for me but when you were no more, because they designed to take away your life, and I did not believe that they would dethrone you and let you live. But if they had called me, even in your lifetime, probably I should have gone, if they had been strong enough."

A few days later, a further piece of damning evidence was laid before the Tsar. Peter had written to Veselovsky, his ambassador in Vienna, to demand of the Emperor why his son had been forced to write to the Senate and the archbishops. On May 28, Veselovsky's answer came. There had been a major uproar at the Austrian court. The Vice Chancellor, Count Schonborn, had been examined about the matter in the presence of the entire ministry, after which Prince Eugene of Savoy had reported to Veselovsky that neither the Emperor nor Count Schonborn had ever ordered the Tsarevich to write the letters. The truth was that Alexis had written them himself and sent them to Count Schonborn for forwarding to Russia. Schonborn, in his discretion, had not forwarded the letters, and they remained in Vienna. In sum, the Tsarevich had lied and in this lie had involved the Imperial court.

Peter needed to hear no more. The Tsarevich was arrested and placed in the Trubetskoy Bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Two high courts of justice, one ecclesiastical, the other secular, were convoked to consider what should be done with the prisoner. The ecclesiastical court was to consist of all the leaders of the Russian church, the secular court of all ministers, senators, governors, generals and many officers of the Guards. Before the two courts began their sessions, says Weber, Peter spent several hours a day, for a period of eight days, on his knees praying to God to instruct him what his honor and the welfare of the nation required. Then, on June 14, the proceedings began in the Senate Hall in St. Petersburg. Peter arrived accompanied by the ecclesiastical and secular judges, and a solemn religious service was held, asking for divine guidance. The whole assembly took places at a row of tables, and the doors and windows were flung open. The public was invited to enter; Peter wanted the affair to be heard by everyone. The Tsarevich was brought in under guard of four young officers, and the proceedings against him commenced.

Peter reminded his listeners that over the years he had never sought to deny the succession to his son; on the contrary, he had tried "by powerful exhortations to force [Alexis] to lay claim to it by endeavoring to make himself worthy of it." But the Tsarevich, turning his back on his father's efforts, had "made his escape and fled to the Emperor for refuge, claiming his assistance and protection in succoring and assisting him even with armed force ... [to gain] the crown of Russia." Alexis, said Peter, had admitted that if rebellious troops in Mecklenburg had summoned him to be their leader, he would have gone to them even in his father's lifetime. "So that one may judge by all those circumstances that he had a mind for the succession, not in the manner his father- would leave it to him, but in his own way, by foreign assistance or by the strength of rebels, even in his father's lifetime." Further, throughout the investigations Alexis had continually lied and evaded telling the whole truth. As the pardon promised by the father had been conditional on total and honest confession, this pardon was now invalid. At the end of Peter's denunciation, Alexis "confessed to his father and his lord, in the presence of the whole assembly of the states ecclesiastical and secular, that he was guilty of everything described."

Peter asked the ecclesiastical court—three metropolitans, five bishops, four archimandrites and other high churchmen—to advice him what a royal father ought to do with this modem Absalom. Desperately, the churchmen tried to avoid giving a direct answer. The case, they argued, was inappropriate for an ecclesiastical court. Pressed by Peter for a more substantial answer, they proceeded to show that if the Tsar desired to punish his son, he had the authority of the Old Testament to do so (Leviticus XX: "Everyone that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death," and Deuteronomy xxi: "If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son which will not obey the voice of his father . . . then shall his father ... lay hold on him and bring him out unto the elders of his city. . . . And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die.") On the other hand, the churchmen said, if the Tsar wished to be merciful, there were many examples in the teachings of Christ, most notably the parable of the Prodigal Son.

Still not content with this pallid verdict, Peter turned to the 127 members of the secular court. He ordered them to judge his son fairly and objectively, "without flattering us, or being apprehensive. Do not be moved by the fact that you are to judge the son of your sovereign. For we swear to you by the Great God and His judgments that you have absolutely nothing to fear." On June 16, Peter specifically passed to the court the power to proceed against Alexis as it would against any other subject accused of treason, "in the form required and with the necessary examination"—i.e., torture.

Given these commands and assurances, the court summoned the Tsarevich to the Senate Hall and announced to him that "though they were much grieved by his past conduct," yet they were obliged to obey their orders and, without regard for"his person and his being the son of their most clement sovereign, interrogate him." First came examination under torture. On June 19, Alexis received twenty-five blows of the knout. No new confession was wrung from him by this pain, and on June 24 torture was applied again. With fifteen more strokes of the knout tearing the flesh off his back in bloody ribbons, Alexis admitted that he had told his confessor, "I wish for my father's death!" In that abject state, ready to admit anything, he told his interrogator, Tolstoy, that he would even have been willing to pay the Emperor to supply him with foreign troops to use in seizing the Russian throne from his father.

This was sufficent. That same evening, June 24, the high court, unanimously and without discussion, "with afflicted hearts and eyes full of tears," pronounced sentence. Alexis was to die for the "design of rebellion, the like of which was hardly ever heard of in the world, joined to that of a horrid double patricide, first against the Father of his country and next against his Father by nature." The signatures that followed constituted an almost complete roster of Peter's lieutenants: Menshikov's name came first, followed by General-Admiral Fedor Apraxin, Chancellor Golovkin, Privy Councilors Jacob Dolgoruky, Ivan Musin-Pushkin and Tikhon Streshnev, Senator Peter Apraxin, Vice Chancellor Shafirov, Peter Tolstoy, Senator Dmitry Golitsyn, Generals Adam Weide and Ivan Buturlin, Senator Michael Samarin, Ivan Romodanovsky, Alexis Saltykov, Prince Matthew Gagarin, Governor of Siberia, and Kyril Naryshkin, Governor of Moscow.

The sentence now lay in Peter's hands; it could not be carried out without his approval and signature. Peter hesitated to sign, but very soon thereafter events were lifted beyond his control. An account of the final day is given by Weber

The next day being Thursday, the 26th of June, early in the moming, the news was brought to the Tsar that the violent passions of the mind and the terrors of death had thrown the Tsarevich into an apoplectic fit. About noon, another messenger brought advice that the Prince was in great danger of his life, whereupon the Tsar sent for the principal men of his court, and caused them to stay with him until he was informed by a third messenger that the Prince, being past hopes, could not outlive the evening, and that he longed to see his father.

Then the Tsar, attended by the aforesaid company, went to see his dying son, who, at the sight of his father, burst into tears, and with his hands folded spoke to him to this effect: That he had grievously and heinously offended the Majesty of God Almighty and of the Tsar, that he hoped he would die of this sickness, and that even if he lived, he was unworthy of life, therefore he begged his father only to take from him the curse he laid upon him at Moscow; to forgive him all his heavy crimes, to give him his paternal blessing, and to cause prayers to be said for his soul.

During these moving words, the Tsar and the whole company almost melted away in tears; His Majesty returned a pathetic answer, and represented to him in a few words all the offenses he had committed against him, and then gave him his forgiveness and blessings, after which they parted with an abundance of tears and lamentations on both sides.

At five in the evening came a fourth messenger, a major of the Guards, to tell the Tsar that the Tsarevich was extremely desirous once more to see his father. The Tsar at first was unwilling to comply with his son's request, but was at last persuaded by the company, who represented to His Majesty how hard it would be to deny that comfort to a son who, being on the point of death, might probably be tortured by stings of guilty conscience. But when His Majesty had just stepped into his sloop to go over to the Fortress, a fifth messenger brought the news that the Prince had already expired.

How, in fact, did Alexis die? No one knew, and no one knows today. The death of the Tsarevich provoked rumor and controversy first in St. Petersburg, then across Russia and Europe. Peter, concerned about the unfavorable impression which this mysterious demise would create abroad, ordered a lengthy official explanation sent to all the courts of Europe. Especially worried about the court of France, which he had so recently visited, he sent a courier to Paris with a letter addressed to his ambassador, Baron de Schleinitz, for delivery to the King and the Regent. After giving a history of the affair and the trial, he concluded:

The secular court, according to all the laws divine and human, were obliged to condemn him [Alexis] to death, with the restriction that it depended on our sovereign power and our paternal clemency whether to pardon him his crimes or to execute the sentence. And of this we notified the Prince, our son.

Nevertheless, we were still undecided, and did not know how to determine an affair of such great importance. On one side paternal tenderness inclined us mostly to pardon him his crimes, on the other we considered the evils into which we would replunge our state and the misfortunes which could arrive if we gave grace to our son.

In the midst of uncertain and distressing agitation, it pleased Almighty God, whose Holy Judgments are always just, to deliver by His divine grace our person and all our empire from all fear and danger and to end the days of our son Alexis who died yesterday. As soon as he had convinced himself of the great crimes he had committed against us and all our empire, and had received the sentence of death, he was struck with a kind of apoplexy. When he recovered from this attack, having still his spirit and free word, he begged us to come to see him, which we did, accompanied by our ministers and senators, in spite of all the wrong he had done us. We found him with his eyes bathed in tears and marking a sincere repentance: He told us that he knew that the hand of God was on him and that he was at the point of accounting for all the actions of his life, and that he did not believe he would be able to be reconciled with God if he was not reconciled with his Sovereign Lord and father. After that he entered into new details of all that had passed, feeling himself guilty, confessed, received the Holy Sacraments, demanded our benediction and begged us to pardon all his crimes. We pardoned him as our paternal duty and the Christian religion obliged us to do.

This unexpected, sudden death has caused us a great sadness. However, we have found solace in believing that Divine Providence has wished to deliver us from all anxiety and to calm our empire. Thus we have found ourselves obliged to render thanks to God and to comport ourselves with all Christian humility in this sad circumstance.

We have judged it wise to give you knowledge of everything that has happened by express courier so that you will be sufficiently informed of it and that you will communicate it in the accustomed manner to His Most Christian Majesty [King Louis XV] and to his Royal Highness the Duke of Orleans, Regent of the Kingdom.

In case also that anyone wished to publish this event in an odious manner, you will have in hand what is necessary to destroy and solidly refute any unjust and unfounded tales.

Weber and De la Vie accepted the offical explanation and reported to their capitals that the Tsarevich had died from a stroke of apoplexy. But other foreigners were dubious, and a number of lurid accounts began to circulate. Pleyer first reported that Alexis had died of apoplexy, but three days later he informed his government that the Tsarevich had been beheaded with a sword or an axe (one account, many years later, depicted Peter himself beheading his son); a woman from Narva was said to have been brought into the fortress to sew the head back onto the body so that it could lie in state. The Dutch resident, De Bie, reported that Alexis had been bled to death by the opening of his veins with a lancet. Later, there were rumors that Alexis had been smothered with pillows by four Guards officers, including Rumyantsov.

The daily log of the St. Petersburg garrison states that at about eight a.m. on June 26, the Tsar, Menshikov, and eight others gathered in the fortress to attend a new interrogation at which torture was administered—on whom is not specified. "By eleven a.m. they had all departed," the log continued. "The same day at six o'clock in the evening, the Tsarevich Alexis Petrovich, who was under guard in the Trubetskoy Bastion, died." Menshikov's diary says that on that morning he went to the fortress, where he met the Tsar, then went to the Tsarevich Alexis, who was very ill, and remained there for half an hour. "The day was clear and bright with a light wind. On that day the Tsarevich Alexis Petrovich passed from his world into eternal life."

The truth is that none of these suggested causes—beheading, bleeding, smothering or even apoplexy—is required to explain Alexis' death. The simplest explanation is the most likely: Forty strokes of the knout were sufficent to kill a robust, healthy man; Alexis was not robust, and the shock and wounds caused by forty lashes across his thin back could easily have killed him.

No matter exactly how Alexis died, Peter's contemporaries held the Tsar responsible. And although many were shocked, there was also a widespread belief that Alexis' death was the most satisfactory solution to Peter's problem. As Monsieur de la Vie reported to Versailles, "The death of the Prince leaves no reason to doubt that all seeds of rebellion and conspiracy are totally extinguished. A death never occurred more opportunely in the reestablishment of public tranquility and in dissipating our fear of the ominous events that threatened us." A few days later, the Frenchman added, "It is impossible to praise the conduct of the Tsar too highly."

Peter did not evade the charge against him. Although he said that it was God who ultimately had taken Alexis' life, he never denied that it was he who had brought his son to a trial which had led to a sentence of death. He had not signed his approval of the sentence, but he was fully in accord with the verdict of the judges. Nor did he bother afterward to make a false display of grief. The day after the Tsarevich's death was the anniversary of the Battle of Poltava, and nothing was postponed or muted because of the tragedy. Peter celebrated a Te Deum for the victory and attended a banquet and a ball in the evening. Two day later, on the 29th, a ninety-four-gun ship, the Lesnaya, built according to Peter's own design, was launched at the Admiralty. Peter was present with all his ministers, and afterward, says one account, "there was great merrymaking."

Nevertheless, the ceremonies surrounding the Tsarevich's body reflected Peter's conflicting emotions. Although Alexis had died a condemned criminal, the services of mourning were conducted according to his rank. It was almost as if, now that Alexis was no longer there to threaten his father, Peter wanted him treated as properly befitted a tsarevich. On the morning after Alexis' death, his body was carried from the cell in which he died to the house of the governor of the fortress, where it was laid in a coffin and covered with black velvet and a pall of rich gold tissue. Attended by Golovkin and other high officials of state, it was carried to the Church of the Holy Trinity, where it lay in state, with the face and right hand uncovered in normal Orthodox fashion so that all who wished could kiss the hand or forehead in farewell. On June 30, the funeral and burial took place. In keeping with Peter's instructions, none of the gentlemen present wore mourning clothes, although some ladies were dressed in black. Foreign ambassadors were not invited to this strange royal funeral and were advised not to wear mourning, as the sovereign's son had died a criminal. Nevertheless, the preacher chose for his text the words of David, "O Absalom, my son, my son!" and some of those attending declared that Peter wept. Afterward, the coffin was borne from Trinity Church back to the fortess, with Peter and Catherine and all the high officers of state (most of whom had voted to condemn Alexis) following in procession carrying lighted candles. In the fortress cathedral, the coffin was placed in a new vault of the Tsar's family, resting beside the coffin of the Tsarevich's wife, Charlotte.

At the end of the year, Peter had a medal struck, almost as if he were commemorating a victory. On the medal, clouds have parted and a mountaintop is bathed in rays of sunlight. Beneath the scene is the inscription: "The horizon has cleared."

Ultimately, what can one say about this tragedy? Was it simply a family matter, a clash of personalities, the awful, bestriding father relentlessly tormenting and eventually killing the pitiable, helpless son?

Peter's relationship with his son was an inseparable blend of personal feelings and political realities. Alexis' character helped stimulate the antagonism between father and son, but at the root of the trouble lay the issue of sovereign power. There were two sovereigns—the sovereign on the throne and the sovereign in waiting—with different dreams and different goals for the state. In achieving those dreams, however, each faced a gnawing frustration. As long as the reigning monarch was on the throne, the son had to wait, and yet the sovereign knew that, once he had departed, his dreams could be undone, his goals overturned. Power lay only in the crown.

There is, of" course, a long history of dissension in royal families, of clashing temperaments, suspicion and maneuvering of power between generations, of the impatience of the young for the older generation to die and yield power. There are also many stories of kings and princes condemning thier own kin for opposition to the crown, or, on the losing side, fleeing their homelands to seek refuge at a foreign court. In Peter's time,

Princess Mary, daughter of King James II of England, helped to drive her father from the throne. James fled to France to wait for better times; when he died, his son twice landed in Britain attempting to claim his father's throne. Who here was the traitor? Invariably, history bequeaths this title to the loser.

In earlier times, the path to royal thrones was deeply stained with family blood. Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, Capetians, Valois and Bourbons all killed royal kinsmen for reasons of state. The fabled Gloriana, Elizabeth I of England, kept her cousin Mary Queen of Scots in prison for twenty-seven years while life and beauty wasted away and then, still unable to accept the fact that Mary would succeed her on the throne, had the prisoner beheaded. Amidst all this, Mary's son, King James VI of Scotland, gladly accepted his mother's death; her removal cleared his own path as Elizabeth's chosen heir.

Killing one's own royal children is a rarer crime. One must search back to the Greeks, whose tragedies revolve around dim figures, half myth, half god, or to imperial Rome, where naked personal ambition and court depravity made anything acceptable. In Russia, Ivan the Terrible killed his son with his iron staff, but Ivan was raging and half mad. To us, the most unsettling thing about Alexis' death is that it came as a result of a cool, supposedly objective judicial proceeding. That a father could stand by and permit his son to be tortured seems to us an incredible blot, the most brutal of all the violent episodes of Peter's life.

To Peter, however, the judicial proceeding was the final, legal step required in his legitimate defense of the state and his life work. That it was prompted by political necessity rather than personal rancor he felt was obvious. In Peter's eyes, he had overindulged his son. No other subject would have received letter after letter, plea after plea, urging him to accept his responsibilities and the sovereign's will. This was his concession to the personal relationship between them.

The trials had revealed treasonable words and widespread hope for Peter's death. Many had been punished; was it possible to condemn these peripheral figures and leave the central figure untouched? This was the choice Peter faced and which he put to the judicial tribunal. Peter himself, torn between paternal feeling and preserving his life work, chose the latter. Alexis was condemned for reasons of state. As with Elizabeth I of England, it was a grim decision by a monarch determined to preserve the nation which he or she had spent a lifetime to create.

Did Alexis actually pose a threat to Peter while the father lived? Given the character of the two men, any real danger seems remote. The Tsarevich had neither the energy nor the desire to put himself at the head of a revolt. Ture, he wanted to succeed to the throne and he wished for Peter's death, but his only program was to wait, believing that he was popular far and wide in Russia— "and of the simple people I have heard that many loved me." And if Alexis had succeeded Peter, would all that Peter feared have taken place? This, too, seems unlikely. Alexis would not have carried through all of Peter's reforms, and some things would have slipped backward. But, overall, not much would have changed. For one thing, Alexis was not a medieval Muscovite prince. He had been raised by Western tutors, he had studied and traveled often in the West, he had married a Western Princess, his brother-in-law was the Holy Roman Emperor. Russia would not have hurtled back to the caftans, the beards and the term. History may slow its pace, but it does not move backward.

Finally, it seems that at the end Alexis himself accepted the judgment of the court and of his father. He confessed and asked for pardon. His feeble, almost involuntary challenge to the towering Tsar had failed, his beloved Afrosina had betrayed and deserted him, he had been weakened by torture. Perhaps he simply withdrew from life as he had wished to withdraw from government into the country, too weary to continue, unable to go on with an existence dominated by this overwhelming man who was his father.

55

CHARLES' LAST OFFENSIVE

When Peter called off the allied invasion of Sweden in September 1716, Charles XII could not know whether the landing had been permanently canceled or merely postponed until spring. Accordingly, he remained through the winter in the southernmost tip of Sweden, at Lund near Malmo, just across the sound from Copenhagen. The house in which he stayed belonged to a professor; to suit the King's taste, some of the rooms were enlarged and painted in the Swedish colors of blue and yellow. In the spring, a new well was dug, fresh vegetables were planted and two pools were created to be filled with fish fresh for Charles' table.

In this house, Charles was to live and work for almost two years. In the summer, his day began at three a.m., when the sun was already up and the sky filled with light. Until seven, he worked with his secretaries or received visitors. Then, whatever the weather, the King mounted his horse and rode until two, visting and inspecting the numerous regiments stationed along the southern coast. Dinner, in mid-afternoon, was short and simple. Homemade marmalade was Charles' only delicacy, and this was regularly supplied by his younger sister, Ulrika, who made most of it herself. The table service was pewter, the silver service having long before been sold to raise money for the war. At nine p.m., the King lay down to sleep on a straw mattress.

During these quiet months, Charles had time to indulge his peaceful interests and curiosities. He attended lectures and enjoyed discussions with professors of mathematics and theology at the University of Lund. With his court architect, Tessin, he planned new places and public buildings to be constructed in the capital once peace had come. He designed new flags and uniforms for some of his regiments, prohibiting the color green—perhaps because that was the color worn by Peter's Russian soldiers. People found the King enormously changed from the headstrong, impetuous youth who had scandalized Sweden with his adolescent escapades; this was a gentler, more serene man who, at thirty-four, showed a wide tolerance of human faults and weaknesses. And yet, in one overwhelmingly important matter, the King had not changed: Charles XII remained determined to continue the war.

Because of this, many Swedes found the King's return an unfortunate blessing. When Stralsund and Wismar fell, they were almost relieved, believing that the loss of these last fragments of empire meant that at last the war would end. Their desire for glory and even commercial profit had long since given way to an overpowering desire for peace. The King, aware of these feelings, explained his plans to Ulrika, herself torn between a desire for peace and loyalty to her brother "This does not mean that I am against peace. I am in favor of a peace that is defensible in the eye of posterity. Most states are willing to see Sweden weaker than she was. We must rely on ourselves first and foremost." More war meant more men and more money, yet Sweden was devastated. Half the farmland was out of cultivation because there were no laborers. Fisheries were abandoned. Foreign trade was ruined by the blockade of the allied fleets; the number of Swedish merchant ships fell from 775 in 1697 to 209 in 1718.

In these circumstances, Charles XII's plans for a new military offensive sent men fleeing into the woods to avoid military service. They were dragged from church in the middle of services, brought up from the mines, carried off from public taverns. University students, even schoolboys, were conscripted. Some cut off a finger or shot themselves in a foot to avoid service, but a new edict decreed that they should be given thirty lashes and forced to serve anyway. (If they succeeded in disabling themselves beyond use as soldiers, they were given sixty lashes and assigned to compulsory labor as convicts.) As a result, a Dutch traveler in Sweden in 1719 found himself driven only by gray-haired men, women, or boys under twelve. "In the whole of Sweden, I have not seen a man between twenty and forty," he said. Old taxes were increased and new taxes were created. The tax on land was doubled and trebled, the tax on the post was increased and the tax on all luxuries—tea, coffee, chocolate, lace, silk, gold and silver ornaments, fur robes, smart hats and carriages—made them almost nonexistent.

It seemed impossible that even a king like Charles could extract the fresh reserves of money and manpower he was demanding from his exhausted and sullen country. That Charles was able to, was due to the appearance at his side of an extraordinary man who served him both as administrator at home and as diplomat overseas, the brilliant, unscrupulous, much maligned and eventually ill-fated Baron Georg Heinrich von Goertz, an audacious international adventurer without real ties of nationality but with a taste for power and a passion for intrigue. He had a complex, versatile intellect which allowed him to work on several divergent, even contradictory schemes simultaneously. It has been said of him that "he achieved twenty times as much as Talleyrand or Metternich while working with less than one twentieth of their resources."

For four years—from 1714 to 1718—Goertz, armed with the power of the king, loomed over Sweden. In person, he was a dramatic figure, tall, handsome (in spite of an artificial eye, made of enamel, which replaced one lost in a student duel), charming and a brilliant conversationalist. Born in South Germany into a noble Franconian family, he studied at the University of Jena and then, seeking a situation in which his adventurous spirit could flower, he attached himself to the court of the young Duke Frederick IV of Holstein-Gottorp who had been Charles' madcap companion and had married Charles' sister, Hedwig Sophia. Shortly before the Duke went off to war at Charles' side, Hedwig Sophia produced a son, Charles Frederick. In 1702 at the Battle of Klissow, still at Charles' side, the Duke was killed, leaving his two-year-old son as his successor and Georg Heinrich von Goertz as the real ruler of Holstein-Gottorp. More important, until

Charles XII married and produced a child, the infant Charles Frederick was the male heir to the throne of Sweden.

Goertz conducted all the duchy's affairs. He toured Europe, calling on the Tsar, Queen Anne, the King of Prussia and the. Elector of Hanover. In 1713, he proposed to strengthen the duchy's position by a Russian alliance, the seal to be a marriage between the twelve-year-old Duke and Peter's oldest daughter, five-year-old Anne. Goertz once proposed to Menshikov the idea of cutting a ship canal through Holstein at the base of the Danish peninsula, thus giving Russian ships an exit from the Baltic into the North Sea without having to pass through the sound and subject themselves to Danish tolls or cannon.* It was Goertz who arranged for Magnus Stenbock's Swedish army, victorious at Gadebusch but being pursued by larger Saxon, Danish and Russian forces, to be admitted into the Holstein fortress of Tonning. And it was also Goertz who, five months later, when the besieged army could hold out no longer, arranged the terms of its surrender.

Successful though he was, in time Goertz came to feel that the little duchy of Holstein-Gottorp was too narrow an arena for his abilities. He had long admired Charles XII, the legendary uncle of his own young master, and when Charles appeared at Stralsund in November 1714, after his ride across Europe, Goertz hurried to meet him. In a single long conversation, he won Charles' favor and emerged an unofficial advisor. Before much more time had passed, Charles relied on him totally. He admired Goertz' energy, his breadth of vision, his analytical capacity and his willingness to attempt, like Charles himself, vast, grand-scale schemes and radical solutions even with limited resources. As Charles saw it, Goertz applied in administration and diplomacy the same dash and reckless bravado which the King employed in war.

Thereafter, until Charles' death, Goertz was indispensable to him. He took absolute control of Sweden's finances and all the great domestic departments of state. He became the King's voice, if not his brain, in Swedish diplomacy. By February 1716, he was describing himself as Director of the Finances and Commerce of Sweden. In effect, he became Charles' prime minister, although he held no actual rank or title in Sweden and was still nominally the servant of Charles' nephew, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp.

Goertz knew how to deal with the King. As a condition for accepting service, he had won Charles' promise that all communications should be between themselves and not through intermediaries. He knew it was best not to bother Charles with details

* One hundred and seventy-four years later, in 1887, the Kiel Canal was built.

in areas in which the King was not interested. He found that if the King did not agree with him when presented with an oral argument, he could put his views in writing in his clear, incisive style and usually get his way.

As Sweden felt the resourceful, ruthless hand of Baron von Goertz, hatred of the King's foreign advisor spread through every class. Bureaucrats hated him because he exercised power outside the normal channels of administration. The Hessian party, formed around Charles' sister, Ulrika, and her husband, Frederick of Hesse, hated him because they imagined him working to ensure the succession for his young Holstein master, to their own exclusion. And Swedes everywhere hated him for the enthusiasm and ingenuity with which he set to work to wring more men and money from the exhausted nation to continue the war. He issued paper currency. He raised taxes higher and then higher still. He was accused of lining his own pockets, but these accusations were untrue—in money matters, Goertz was totally honest. He even spent his own small income in an effort to achieve more efficiency in mobilizing Swedish resources for the new war effort. In his commanding role, Goertz was called by furious Swedes "the Grand Vizier." Although he was known to be only a creature of the King, he was clothed in the King's power. For as long as Charles stood behind him, Goertz was invincible.

Although it was Goertz' domestic policies which infuriated the average Swede, he was even more useful to the King as a diplomat. He was a master of this subtle art, and Charles gave him a free hand to perform his juggling tricks all over Europe. This was Goertz' analysis of Sweden's situation: As Sweden could not possibly defeat all her enemies, she must make peace, and perhaps even an alliance, with one in order to fight the others. Either Charles could make peace with Russia and concentrate his efforts against Denmark, Prussia and Hanover, or he could make peace with Denmark, Prussia and Hanover and renew his attack on the Tsar in the upper Baltic. Goertz preferred the first alternative— peace with Russia. It meant sacrificing the provinces of Ingra, Karelia, Estonia, Livonia and possibly Finland, as well as acquiescence in a major Russian naval and commercial presence on the Baltic, but it would free Charles to win back the lost German provinces of Pomerania, Bremen and Verden and allow him perhaps to seize Mecklenburg and Norway as well. Goertz' preference may have been partly due to the fact that a reassertion of Swedish power in North Germany would be useful to his youthful master in Holstein-Gottorp, but Goertz was also now inclined to rate Peter's power and resolve as much greater than those of Russia's allies. Peter had demonstrated his tenacious determination to hold and expand his window on the Baltic. The growth of his fleet, the far-flung operations of his army and the Tsar's implacable will combined to suggest that even an enormous Swedish effort would not easily dislodge the Russians from their entrenched position on the Baltic coast.

Most leading Swedes, however, disagreed with Goertz. They were not unhappy to see the former German possessions go; they had always believed Sweden's position in the empire to be a source of weakness. If there had to be continued war, they preferred to make peace in Germany and to regain the Baltic provinces. The rich farmland of Livonia, called "the com barn of Sweden," and the great port of Riga with its rich customs tolls from the Russia trade were assets which could be used directly to make up the great losses of wealth which Sweden had suffered in the war.

No matter which direction the Swedish offensive eventually took, the important thing was that Simply by raising the idea of separate peace treaties and new alliances Goertz had placed the balance of power in the Baltic back in Charles' hands. As the months progressed, Goertz skillfully exploited this hew situation, making it clear that from then on anything might be expected of Sweden in the way of new alignments and combinations. He negotiated with every one of Sweden's enemies except Denmark, for ultimately the Holsteiner meant to make Denmark pay the bill. It was a virtuoso performance. Overnight, his diplomacy transformed Sweden from a victim about to be overpowered by a grand coalition of powers into the initiator of events, able to choose which of the allies it would favor with peace and which would become the targets of its renewed offensive. Not since Poltava had Sweden held such power in Europe.

Already Goertz had tested the bonds of the anti-Swedish alliance and found them remarkably weak. All of Peter's allies were apprehensive about Russia's growing strength, but the weakest xpoint in the coalition lay in the personal antagonism between Peter and King George I of England, who was also Elector of Hanover. Knowing this, Goertz began negotiating simultaneously with both, aware that when one monarch heard he was treating with the other, it would automatically improve Goertz' hand with both. He went first to Peter, meeting the Tsar in Holland in June 1716. Peter respected him, although when Goertz was directing only the affairs of tiny Holstein, his dreams of turning kingdoms and empires around his finger made the Tsar laugh; to the Holstein envoy Bassewitz, Peter once said, "Your court, directed by the vast schemes of Goertz, seems to me like a skiff carrying the mast of a man-of-war—the least side-wind will upset it." But the same man managing the diplomacy of Sweden was a different matter. At their meeting, Peter and Goertz discussed the idea of a new balance in Northern Europe based on an alliance between Sweden and Russia, to be guaranteed by France. In the peace, Russia would restore Finland to Sweden but keep all her other conquests, while Sweden would be free to regain whatever she could from Denmark and Hanover. Goertz knew that Charles would never cede as much territory as Peter demanded; nevertheless, he was pleased by the Tsar's willingness to negotiate at all, and before their conference ended, they had agreed that a formal peace conference should be convened as soon as possible in the Aland Islands in the Gulf of Bothnia, islands being thought more inaccessible to spies.

News of this interview was diligently spread by Goertz's agents through Europe. Both George I of England and Frederick IV of Denmark were alarmed, although George claimed that Peter would never make peace without keeping Riga and he thought it impossible that Charles XII would agree to give it up. Nevertheless, as Goertz had foreseen, all of Sweden's enemies were now eager to come to terms. George I dispatched an envoy to Charles at Lund declaring that if Sweden would cede Bremen and Verden to Hanover, he would help Charles drive the Russians out of the Baltic. Charles refused.

The proposed invasion of Scania suspended the idea of direct negotiations between Russia and Sweden, but once the invasion had itself been suspended, Goertz proceeded with his plan. He discussed it with Prince Kurakin in Holland in the summer of 1717, and the Russian confirmed the Tsar's willingness to go ahead. In fact, Peter wanted the negotiations to begin as soon as possible, although during the winter and spring of 1718 the most dangerous and important problem facing Peter was not the negotiations with Sweden but his relationship with his son, a drama which deeply overshadowed the effort to bring the war to an end. Partly for this reason, it was not until May that the two sides faced each other across a table.

The Aland Islands, a group of 6,500 red-granite islets in the middle of the Gulf, of Bothnia, are carpeted with pine forests and grassy meadows. On Lofo, two large barns were built to house the two delegations. Originally, Peter had suggested that the negotiations be conducted informally, with no ceremonies and modest accommodations; he even suggested that the two sides live in a single house, each side having a room but with no wall between them so that they could work efficiently. This was not at all what the Swedes had in mind, and Goertz arrived in Lofo with a suite of gentlemen, secretaries, servants and soldiers and a table service and silver borrowed from the Duke of Holstein.

The Swedish delegation was led by Goertz and Count Gyllen-borg, the Swedish ambassador in London. Across the table, the Russians were led by General James Bruce, a Scot who had proved himself in the Finnish campaign and by the Councilor for Foreign Affairs, Andrew Osterman. Osterman, a Westphalian brought to Russia by Vice Admiral Cruys, was one of the ablest of all the foreigners who made their careers in Russia during Peter's reign. He spoke German, Dutch, French, Italian and Latin as well as Russian; he had accompanied Shafirov and Peter on the Pruth expedition and assisted in the negotiations with the Grand Vizier; in 1714, he had journeyed to Berlin to help persuade the Prussians to join the alliance against Sweden.

Now it was a major test of his skill to be pittied against Goertz (although Bruce was nominally the leader of the Russia delegation, Osterman provided the real diplomatic skills). In a sense, it was ironic: Here were two Germans—Osterman born in Westphalia and Goertz born in Franconia—sitting across a table bargaining on behalf of Russia and Sweden. Goertz, at fifty-one, was the older and more experienced, but he represented the waning power of Sweden, whereas Osterman, thirty-two but no less skillful, represented the waxing power of Russia.

The basis of the negotiations as understood by both sides was that Goertz would seek a peace with Russia which would enable Sweden to regain some of its territories lost to Peter while freeing it to act against its adversaries in North Germany. Peter was generally agreeable; he had seized more Swedish territory than he needed or desired and was willing to give some of it back in return for a peace treaty which would confirm his right to keep the rest. Despite this general agreement, the specific proposals and instructions from their monarchs which the two negotiating teams carried in their pockets were so far apart that, unless a diplomatic miracle occurred, there could be no treaty. Thus, as a preliminary condition for negotiations Bruce and Osterman demanded Swedish cession of Karelia, Estonia, Ingria and Livonia; only Finland west of Vyborg was negotiable. Goertz had heard these conditions the previous summer from Kurakin in Holland, but, knowing what Charles' reaction would be, he had never dared present them to the King; his tactic, instead, was to persuade Charles first to agree to negotiations and then lead him gradually into whatever concessions were necessary. In fact, when he arrived at Lofo, Goertz brought signed instructions from Charles XII which, had he laid them on the table, would have terminated the peace conference immediately. For Charles demanded that Russia not only restore all conquered provinces to Sweden in exactly the state in which they had been before the war began, but also pay to Sweden an indemnity for having begun an "unjust war."

In these opening sessions, Goertz played his weak hand brilliantly. By the princely pomp with which he surrounded himself, by the nonchalance with which he affected to listen to Russian proposals as if Charles rather than Peter were the victor, he established a strong psychological base from which to present his case. Further, he skillfully exploited the fact that Sweden was now the crux of all diplomacy in the North. Bruce and Osterman knew that, concurrently with the negotiations in the Aland Islands, Charles was also negotiating with George I. Goertz insinuated that those negotiations, which could only have an anti-Russian outcome, were rapidly approaching a favorable conclusion. Under this kind of pressure, the Russian negotiators backed away from their own preconditions and Osterman offered a modified settlement in which Russia would restore all of Livonia and Finland, being allowed to keep only Ingria, Karelia and Estonia. At the end of this first round of talks, the dispute had narrowed to the issue of the port of Reval (Tallinn); the Swedes insisted it be returned as necessary to control Finland, and the Russians equally firmly refused to return it, saying that without this port which commanded the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, the Tsar's fleet and merchant trade would be at Sweden's mercy.

In the middle of June, as Goertz was returning to Sweden to consult with Charles, Osterman, on Peter's instructions, privately promised Goertz that if a treaty was worked out which the Tsar could sign, Peter's gratitude would take the form of the finest sable cloak anyone had ever seen plus 100,000 thalers. Goertz reported to Charles, who, as he expected, rejected the terms as much too favorable to Russia and sent him back to Lofo to reopen negotiations.

Goertz returned in mid-July bearing a set of new and astonishing proposals which, it turned out, came only from Goertz, not from Charles. As he explained his scheme privately to Osterman, Sweden would cede Ingria and Livonia to Russia and Karelia and Estonia would be discussed later. The other ingredient of the plan was a new Swedish-Russian military alliance in which the Tsar should help the King to conquer Norway, Mecklenberg, Bremen, Verden and even parts of Hanover. For Peter, this would mean war with Denmark and Hanover. Osterman's initial reaction was that the Tsar would not fight as an open ally of Sweden; however, in return for Swedish territorial concessions, he might provide 20,000 men and eight men-of-war to Charles as "auxiliaries." Interestingly, Osterman added that should such a plan be agreed on, Peter would want a special clause inserted in the treaty by which Charles bound himself not to expose his person to danger in military campaigns, as the success of the plan obviously depended on the Swedish King being able to command.

Goertz went jubilantly back to Charles, while Osterman returned to St. Petersburg to consult with the Tsar. But Goertz' triumph was brief. Charles serenely rejected all that Goertz and Osterman had tentatively agreed to, on the grounds that the Baltic provinces could not be ceded for such uncertain and illusory gains in Germany. At last, making a slight concession to Goertz, the King declared that while he might permit the Tsar to keep Karelia and Ingria, which had once belonged to Russia, Peter must "naturally give up Livonia, Estonia and Finland, which had been conquered in an unjust war." "Good," said Goertz in a bitter aside to another Swedish minister, "but there is one little difficulty—that the Tsar will never give them back." Once again, Charles sent Goertz back to negotiate, with almost nothing to offer. "My mission," he said as he departed, "is to fool the Russians if they are big enough fools to be fooled."

Goertz' position was becoming increasingly vulnerable. His plan had been based on the assumption of a speedy and acceptable peace with either Russia or Hanover or both, which the majority of Swedes would accept; otherwise, as he well knew, he personally would be blamed for the resumption of the war. Returning to Lofo, Goertz heard Peter's reply to his own earlier offer: The Tsar would not change any of his earlier territorial demands, and he refused to join Sweden in any alliance against Frederick IV of Denmark or Frederick William of Prussia. He would be willing to supply Charles with 20,000 Russian soldiers and eight men-of-war to serve under Swedish colors in the campaign against Hanover. Finally, Osterman told Goertz that the Tsar was wearying of Swedish procrastination and had declared that if a treaty were not arranged during the month of December, the peace conference would be terminated. Goertz, pledging his word of honor that he would return within four weeks, went again to consult with Charles, who by this time was with his army in Norway.

Four weeks, passed, but Goertz did not reappear. In the final days of December, a courier arrived from Stockholm with news that plunged the Swedish delegation into confusion and dismay: Goertz had been arrested; all ships in Stockholm harbor were forbidden to leave, and all correspondence abroad was being held. Ten days passed without further news. Then, on January 3, a Swedish captain arrived, and the following morning the Swedish delegates informed Osterman and Bruce that while besieging a town in Norway, King Charles XII had been killed.

* * *

From Lofo, Osterman had written to Peter, putting his finger on a major potential flaw in the negotiations: the possibility that Charles might not be there to sign any treaty. The King, Osterman feared, "through his foolhardy actions some time or other will either be killed or break his neck riding at a gallop." Osterman's worries were well grounded. The truth was that during the summer of 1718, even as Goertz shuttled back and forth to the Aland Islands bearing offers and counter-offers to the Russians, making peace with Peter was far from Charles' mind. As always, the King relied on his sword far more than on the diplomatic intrigues of Goertz to break out of the impasse in which he found himself. For Charles, therefore, the Aland talks were valuable primarily as a device for gaining time; by conducting negotiations, Charles made sure that the Russians would not attack his coast that summer and drain away the strength of his new army in efforts to repulse these raids.

In planning his strategy, Charles accepted the fact that, for the moment, Russia was too strong—no frontal attack on the Russian Baltic could dislodge the Tsar from these conquered territories. The first opponent would be Denmark. He would begin with a campaign to seize southern Norway, then cross to Zealand and Jutland to knock Denmark out of the war. From there, his army would pass south to reconquer Bremen and Verden and his 50,000 Swedes would be joined by 16,000 Hessians, supplied by his brother-in-law, Frederick of Hesse. At the head of this force, he would either impose a peace on, or invade, Hanover, Prussia and Saxony, according to the preference of their rulers. Finally, with the Swedish position in Germany once more secure, he could march again on Russia—unless, of course, the Tsar desired to give back the lands he had unjustly taken. All of this* Charles said, might take "forty years of war," but "it would be much more harmful to Sweden to agree to a hard and insecure general peace than to accept a long war conducted outside the frontiers of Sweden proper."

The first objective was Norway, and 43,000 troops were designated for this campaign. An invasion force thrust toward Trondheim in August 1718, and the King marched on Kristiania (Oslo) in October. Moving through the hilly, sparsely populated country west of the Swedish border, the army waded or swarm the rivers and stormed the hastily erected defenses thrown up by the Norwegians in the mountain passes. By November 5, the main army had arrived before Frederiksten, a strongly held fortress on the road to Kristiania. Charles brought up his heavy cannon, and a classical siege operation began.

From the beginning of the campaign, Charles was aware that this was his last army and he spared nothing, least of all his own comfort or personal safety, to inspire in his men a courageous fatalism and a willingness to obey any command that was given. Charles resolved to ask nothing of his officers and men which he was not willing to do himself; if the King was seen taking dire risks, every man would follow. Thus, on November 27, the King himself led 200 grenadiers up storm ladders to capture Gyldenlove, an outwork of the Frederiksten fortress. Thereafter, he remained with the front-line troops. Although the main headquarters of the Swedish army was at Tistedal, Charles ate and slept in a small wooden hut near Gyldenlove, just behind the first the first trenches.

On the afternoon of November 30, Charles rode to army headquarters. Staff officers at Tistedal noticed that he seemed preoccupied and sad, and that he burned some of the papers he sorted. He put on fresh linen, a clean uniform, boots and gloves, and at four p.m. swung back into the saddle, waved his hat in farewell and returned to the front. His servant Hultman brought his supper, and Charles seemed relaxed. "Your food is so good, I'll promote you to Master Cook," he bantered. The easy relationship between the two permitted the cook to say, "I'll have that in writing, Sire."

After Supper, Charles returned to the front-line trench to observe the digging of further assault trenches which was going on steadily every night, using darkness to shield the diggers from the enemy. A party of 400 soldiers had begun at dusk, working with spades and picks, and carrying bundles of twigs for protection. The Norwegians hung out wreaths of burning pitch on the fortress ramparts and shot fire bombs from their cannon to light the surrounding landscape. By this illumination, sharpshooters on the fortress walls kept up a steady fire at the Swedish soldiers toiling before the trenches, well within musket range. Their fire was accurate; between six o'clock and ten o'clock they killed seven Swedish soldiers and wounded fifteen.

At about nine-thirty p.m. Charles, who was in the deep frontline trench with some of his officers, decided to climb up the side to see what was happening. He kicked two footholds into the earth of the side of the trench and climbed up until his arms rested on the parapet. His head and shoulders were above the breastwork, exposed to the musket balls whistling about. His aides, standing below in the trench, their heads on a level with the King's knees, were worried. "It is not a fit place for Your Majesty," said one, urging him to come down. But those who knew him best hushed the others, saying, "Let him be. The more you warn him, the more he will expose himself."

The night was thick and cloudy, but the flares burning on the fortress walls and the frequent Norwegian fire bombs gave some light. Charles, leaning on the top of the trench, his shoulders wrapped in his cloak, his head supported by his left hand on his cheek, was clearly visible to the Swedish working party out in front of the trench. He remained in this position a long time while his officers debated how to get him down. But the King was in a good mood. "Don't be frightened," he said and stayed where he was, looking out over the top of the trench.

Suddenly, the men below heard a special sound, as if "a stone had been thrown with great force into mud," or "the sound one hears when one slaps two fingers sharply against the palm of one's hand." Afterward, there was no movement from Charles except that his hand fell from his left cheek. He remained above them, supported by the breastwork. Then, an officer below realized that something had happened. "Lord Jesus," he cried, "the King is shot!" Charles was lowered into the trench, where the horrified officers found that a musket ball had pierced the King's left temple, traveled through the skull and exited from the right side of his head. He had died instantly.

To give themselves time to think, the officers posted guards at the entrances to the trench. A stretcher was brought and the body placed on it with two cloaks spread over the corpse to hide its identity. Twelve guardsmen, unaware of the importance of their burden, carried the King out of the trench and down a road to the rear, but one of the guardsmen stumbled, the stretcher tipped and the cloak over the upper part of the body fell off. Just at that moment, the clouds parted overhead and the moon shone through onto the dead face. The horrified soldiers instantly recognized their King.

Charles' death had an immediate, decisive effect not only on the siege, but on the entire war plan of which the Norwegian campaign was to have been only a prologue. Even the Norwegian defenders of Frederiksten realized that something had happened. "Immediately everything became so quiet not only the whole night through, but even the next day," said one. In fact, once the stunned Swedish commanders met at Tistedal headquarters later that night, there seemed nothing to do; without Charles, his leadership and inspiration, even the war seemed meaningless. Two days later, the generals solemnly abandoned the Norwegian campaign. The soldiers were withdrawn from the trenches, and the supply wagons, one carrying the King's body, rumbled back across the hills into Sweden. After an absence of eighteen years, Charles XII finally returned to Stockholm. The body was embalmed and lay in state at the Carlberg Palace.

He had been away so long and was responsible for so many burdens of war that the general population did not mourn. But those who knew him were brokenhearted. His nephew, Duke Charles Frederick of Holstein, wrote to the Council in Stockholm, "This nearly unbearabe sorrow touches my heart [so deeply that] I can write no more." The King's tutor and comrade-in-arms, Field Marshal Rehnskjold, recently returned to Sweden in an exchange of officers, described "this inimitable king" filled with wisdom, courage, grace and gentleness, who had died so young. "We shall miss him when success comes," said Rehnskjold. "To see him lie dead before our eyes is grief indeed."

The funeral was held in Storkyrkan, the cathedral in which Charles had been crowned, and then the body was transferred to the Riddarhom Church, the burial place of Swedish kings and queens. He lies there now in a black marble sarcophagus covered with a bronze lion's skin and surmounted by a crown and a scepter. Opposite Charles, on the other side of the church, is the Italian marble sarcophagus of Sweden's other legendary military hero, Gustavus Adolphus. Over their heads, the church is hung with hundreds of military standards and banners captured in their wars, now faded and slowly crumbling into dust.

56

KING GEORGE ENTERS THE BALTIC

Peter was standing with a group of officers when he heard the news of the death of his great antagonist. His eyes filled with tears; wiping them away, he said, "My dear Charles, how much I pity you," and ordered the Russian court into mourning for a week. In Sweden, the succession was quickly resolved. Had she lived, the King's older sister, Hedwig, Duchess of Holstein, would have succeeded him, but Hedwig had died in 1708 and her claim had passed to her son, the young Duke Charles Frederick, who was eighteen at his uncle's death. The other claimant was Charles' younger sister, Ulrika Eleonora, now thirty years old and married to Frederick, Duke of Hesse. For several years, as young Charles Frederick grew older, the two parties had been antagonistic, each trying to position itself favorably in case anything should happen to the King.

As long as he lived, the King had steadfastly refused to choose between his nephew and his sister and proclaim an heir. He may have believed, of course, that one day he would marry and beget an heir. Meanwhile, he wished to have the affection and support of both Ulrika and Charles Frederick. He kept the young Duke at his side and took special care to train him in the military arts. He wrote regularly to Ulrika and designated her husband as one of his principal advisors and commanders. Time enough in the future to make a choice which would painfully alienate one of these beloved kinsmen.

Frederick of Hesse, Ulrika's husband, was more realistic. Before the Norwegian campaign, he had given his wife a list of the actions she was to take if the King should suddenly die: Ulrika was to proclaim herself queen, have herself crowned and ruthlessly arrest any who opposed her. And so it happened. Charles Frederick, like Frederick of Hesse, was with the King in Norway when the fatal bullet struck, and Ulrika mounted the throne unopposed. At first, young Charles Frederick was too brokenhearted to resist or even to greatly care and when he awoke to consider the situation, events had passed him by. Thereafter, the older and more experienced Frederick of Hesse easily convinced him that his duty lay in allegiance to his Aunt Ulrika, now Queen of Sweden.

The figure most abruptly and drastically affected by the King's death was Goertz. The morning after Charles fell, Frederick of Hesse dispatched two officers to arrest Goertz "in the King's name." Goertz, who had the same day returned from the Aland Islands with news of his latest negotiations with the Russians, was astonished, asking, "Does the King still live?" His papers and money were seized and, for fear that he might attempt suicide, he was not allowed a knife and fork. He passed the night reading and wrote a short letter to his relatives declaring his innocence.

For six weeks, with Goertz imprisoned, articles of impeachment were carefully drawn to make sure there was no possibility of escape. His captors feared that if he were tried for treason before the regular high court of justice, he might win acquittal by arguing that the court had no jurisdiction as he was not a Swedish subject. Further, Goertz could argue truthfully that as a servant of the King, not of the state, he had acted by the absolute authority of Charles himself. He could also argue that nothing he had done had been on his own behalf; he had not enriched himself by so much as a penny.

Nevertheless, Sweden was determined to destroy him. A special extrajudicial commission was appointed to try him. He was charged with a crime new in Swedish law: "having alienated the late King's affection from his people." He was accused of misusing the King's confidence by suggesting to Charles measures harmful to Sweden, such as continuing the war. From the beginning, Goertz was doomed; in vain, he protested the lack of jurisdiction of the special commission. His claim that he was an alein and untouchable was rejected. His petition to have legal counsel was refused as unnecessary. He was not allowed to call his own witnesses or to confront hostile witnesses. He was not allowed to develop his defense in writing or to bring notes into the courtroom. He was given only a day and a half to prepare his reply, which permitted him time to read only one fifth of the evidence presented against him. Inevitably, he was found guilty, and unanimously he was condemned to be beheaded and his body buried under the scaffold, a mark of special contempt. He received the sentence with composure, but petitioned that his body might be spared this final disgrace. Grimly, Ulrika ordered the entire sentence carried out. Goertz mounted the scaffold with courage and dignity and said, "You bloodthirsty Swedes, take then the head you have thirsted for so long." As he laid his head on the block, his last words were, "Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit." His head fell at the first blow, and his body was buried on the spot.*

With the sudden, violent elimination of both Charles XII and Goertz from the helm of the Swedish state, many in Sweden and elsewhere quite naturally expected a radical change. It was true that the King's death had led to a swift termination of the Norwegian campaign, and presumably to the vast continental enterprises of which Charles XII had dreamed. But, strangely, as the weeks and months went by, the end of the Great Northern War seemed no closer. On ascending the throne, the new Queen, Ulrika Eleonora, wrote to Peter that she desired peace. The Tsar replied that although he would not give up his earlier demand to keep Livonia, he was now prepared to pay a million roubles to Sweden in return for cession of the province. Ulrika rejected this offer and presented new demands. On this note, the negotiations foundered, and Bruce and Osterman withdrew from the Aland Islands conference.

Behind this continued reticence in the Swedish monarchy

*ln life, Goertz shared many qualities with the other great international adventurer of the age, Patkul. Both came from obsecure backgrounds, possessed enormous talents and were willing to take great risks. As a result, each played a distinctive role in the history of their time. Their allegiances were different: Patkul was the adroit and hated enemy of Charles XII; Goertz was the King's devoted minister and servant. But they shared the same end: Both died in degradation under a Swedish axe.

overmaking peace lay a rising hope that Sweden might win back by diplomacy some of what she had lost in war. In the shadows, only dimly perceived from St. Petersburg, which had deliberately been kept uninformed, a whole new structure of Baltic alliances was taking shape. Goertz had participated in these negotiations and Charles XII had approved them. Now, both the warrior and the diplomat were dead, but the diplomatic game continued. And the chief player was the hard-headed, obstinate German, King George I of England—brave, shy, some said stupid, but a man who, when he had fixed on an object, would go to any lengths to achieve it. Peter had met him twenty years before during his Great Embassy and several times in the years that followed, and did not much like him, but he could never ignore him. For during the final years of the Great Northern War, the key to ending the struggle lay—or at least seemed to lie—in George's pudgy hands.

The fog on the Thames was so thick on the morning of September 29, 1714, that the new King of England could not sail up the river and step ashore in his new capital. Instead, his ship, flanked by English and Dutch men-of-war, anchored below Greenwich, and George was rowed ashore through the blinding, wet mist. There, standing before the colonnade of Wren's magnificent Royal Naval Hospital, the noble personages of England, Whig and Tory alike, waited for him in their best velvet and satin. The King stepped from the boat and greeted his new subjects, a ceremony complicated by the fact that the new monarch spoke no English and few of his subjects spoke German. To the Duke of Marlborough, humiliated by Queen Anne and her Tory ministers, the King made a special effort to be gracious. "My dear Duke," he said in French, which Marlborough also spoke, "I hope now you have seen the end of your troubles."

The arrival of a foreign prince to mount the throne was becoming almost routine in England. Three times it had happened in scarcely more than a century as James I, William III and now George I had been imported to preserve the Protestant religion.* George Louis' claim to the English throne traced back through his mother, a granddaughter of James I, but the truth is that he came reluctantly. As Elector of Hanover, he governed one of the principal German states of the Holy Roman Empire, rich in agriculture and minor industry. Hanover was only one tenth as large as Great Britain both in area and in population. Its army had been hardened in eleven years of war against the French, and the

*"England," said Viscount Bolingbroke, "would as soon have a Turk as a Roman Catholic for its king."

Elector had served with Marlborough and Prince Eugene as one of the principal allied commanders. In the scales of European power, Hanover weighted about as much as Denmark, Prussia or Saxony. It was a thriving, pleasant, proud little state.

George Louis accepted the English throne for much the same reason that the Prince of Orange had accepted it twenty-six years before: to ensure English support for his own continental ambitions. As Elector of Hanover, George Louis was a significant personage in Europe, but as King of England, he would be one of Europe's overlords, more powerful than his nominal master, the Hapsburg Emperor.

Two days after his landing at Greenwich, when George I made his public entry into London, the people of England got a look at their new King. He was a short man, fifty-four years old, with the white skin and the bulging blue eyes which were to mark many of his royal descendants over the next two centuries. Bred a soldier, a brave and competent if not brilliant commander, his habits were those of the army, his tastes simple and homey. He disliked his new subjects. Unlike the docile Germans, the English were proud, touchy, argumentative and held stubbornly to the belief that their monarchs must share power with Parliament. As often as he could, George left England for Hanover, and once there, to the distress of his English ministers, he stayed for months at a time. Deliberately, he showed his disdain for his new subjects by never troubling to learn their language. The English, for their part, disliked George, complaining about his dullness, his coldness, his German ministers and his ugly mistresses. Only his religion appealed to them, and even here he was Lutheran, not Anglican.

In London, the King avoided ceremony whenever possible. He lived in two rooms, where he was looked after by two Turkish servants whom he had captured in his campaigns as an imperial general. His favorite companions were his two German mistresses, one tall, thin and bony, the other so corpulent that the London crowd dubbed them. "The Elephant and Castle." He was fond of cards and often went to the house of a friend where he could play in private with his few cronies. He loved music and was an enthusiastic admirer of George Frederick Handel, who emigrated from Germany to England largely at the urging of this royal patron.

He hated his son. The King's eyes blazed with fury and his face turned purple whenever the Prince of Wales appeared. By every possible means, he directed snubs toward his heir. Such treatment reduced the Prince to paroxysms of rage, but all he could do was to wait. Meanwhile, the King seized his son's children and forbade him to appear at court. The go-between for these two irreconcilable men was the King's daughter-in-law, Caroline of Anspach, Princess of Wales, a blue-eyed, flaxen-haired beauty with a superb and ample figure, great intelligence and earthy wit. She was the kind of woman whom the King most admired, and the fact that she was married to his hated son only deepened his antipathy toward the younger man.

Upon ascending the English throne, George I had every intention of using the great power of England to serve the purposes of Hanover. He had long looked with envy at the Swedish-held duchies of Bremen and Verden, which commanded the estuaries of the Elbe and Weser rivers and thus cut his Hanoverian dominions off from the North Sea. Now, with the Swedish empire seeming on the verge of collapse, he wanted to be present when the spoils were divided. Thus it was that in 1715, Hanover—but not England—entered the anti-Swedish alliance. As Vasily Dolgoruky, Peter's ambassador in Copenhagen, explained this confusing situation to the Tsar: "Although the English King has declared war on Sweden, it is only as Elector of Hanover, and the English fleet has sailed [to the Baltic] only to protect its merchants. If the Swedish fleet attacks the Russian fleet of Your Majesty, it is not to be thought that the English will engage the Swedes."

Despite this qualification, Peter, whose policy for years had been to bring both Hanover and England into the war against Sweden, was delighted. And when he heard that the British Admiral Sir John Norris had arrived in the Baltic commanding eighteen ships-of-the-line escorting 106 merchantment, the Tsar was overjoyed. On Norris' first call at Reval, the Tsar was at Kronstadt, but, hearing of the British visit and the Norris would be back, Peter hurried to Reval with a Russian squadron. When the British Admiral returned, he found Peter there with nineteen Russian ships-of-the-line. Norris remained for three weeks while the admirals and officers of the two fleets entertained each other with gala festivities. Catherine and most of Peter's court were also present and dined with Norris aboard his flagship. During the visit, Peter examined the British ships from keel to topmast and Norris was allowed to freely inspect the Russian vessels. He saw three new sixty-gun ships built in St. Petersburg which he described as "in every way equal to the best of that rank in our country and more handsomely furnished." At the end of the visit, Peter enthusiastically offered Norris command of the Russian navy, and although the Admiral declined, the Tsar gave his visitor his royal protrait set in diamonds.

Every summer thereafter until the death of Charles XII (in all, the summers of 1715, 1716, 1717 and 1718), Norris returned to the Baltic with a British squadron and the same orders: not to engage the Swedes unless British ships were attacked, in 1716, Norris' squadron was part of the combined allied fleet assembled to cover the invasion of Scania, and if the Swedish fleet had appeared, British cannon would have opened fire. But the Swedish fleet remained in port, and in September Peter postponed the invasion.

As seen from London, Charles' death in November 1718 created an entirely new situation in the Baltic. Until then, George I's interest had been permanent Hanoverian possession of Bremen and Verden, and the British Cabinet had been concerned about protection of British merchant trade and an assured flow of naval supplies from the Baltic. Both parties had also worried about the possibility of Charles XII offering support to a Jacobite uprising in England against the Hanoverian King. But Charles' death eliminate these fears and enabled the King and his ministers to reassess the underlying change which was taking place in the North: the decline of the Swedish empire and its replacement in the Baltic by the growing power of Russia.

King George I conceived a plan which, if successful, would profit both England and Hanover; the Baltic would be made safe for British trade and the continued, unmolested flow of naval stores and also the possession of Bremen and Verden would be guaranteed to Hanover not just by right of conquest but by formal cession from the Swedish crown. George's goal was the preservation of sufficient Swedish power "so that the Tsar should not grow too powerful in the Baltic." His means was to be a complete reversal of the alliance system in the Baltic. Sweden in 1718 stood alone against a powerful assembly of states: Russia, Poland, Denmark, Hanover and Prussia. This alignment would now be reversed. First, Sweden would be induced to make peace with all of her enemies in the lower Baltic, then a general league of Germanic powers would together march on the Tsar and drive them away from the northern sea. Initially, the peace would be expensive for Sweden: All of its German possessions would be divided among Hanover, Prussia, Denmark and Poland. In return, however, these states would become Sweden's allies, helping it to recover all it had lost to the Tsar. Sweden was to receive back Livonia, Estonia and Finland, giving up only St. Petersburg, Narva and Kronstadt. If Peter refused these terms, still harsher ones would be imposed: He would be deprived of all his conquests and, in addition, forced to cede Smolensk and Kiev to Poland. In sum, Russia, until then the apparent victor in the war, having gained the most territory, would now become the loser and would pay for the peace. Hanover and Prussia, which had entered the war late and done almost no fighting, would become the real victors.