Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

348APPENDIX.

his sworn faith, together with all the laws of nature, and the laws that he had himself given to his empire, саше to tortur< the timid mind of this unfortunate prince, by a political inquisition erµial in insidious atrocity to the inquisition of religion. He tormented him with all the terrors of heaven and of earth, md forced him to denounce his friends and relations, including even his own mother.

" This protracted crime lasted for five months. The two first saw the exile of numerous nobles, the disinherison of a son, the imprisonment of a sister, the disgrace -and flagellation of a wife, and the execution of a brother-in-law. Nor was this sufficient. In one single day Gleboff, a Russian general, said to have been the lover of the repudiated Czarina, was impaled in the midst of a scaffold, the four corners of which were graced by the heads of a bishop, a boyard, and two other dignitaries, who, before decapitation, had been broken on the wheel. This horrible scaffold was again surrounded by a circle of stumps of trees, on which more than fifty priests and other citizens had been beheaded. * * * The emperor promenaded coolly in the midst of the scene. It is even said that, instigated by a restless ferocity, he mounted the scaffold to assure himself of the agony of Gleboff; and that the latter, making him a sign to approach, spit in his face. * * *

" Meanwhile the principal victim remained trembling and isolated. Peter caused him to be carried from the prisons of Moscow to those of Petersburg.

" It was there that he continued to torture the mind of his son by extorting from him the smallest recollections of irritation, indocility, and rebellion ; congratulating himself at each confession; noting them down day by day with fiendish precision, and labouring upon them, until he thought that, by means of certain constructions, he had succeeded in making out a case of capital crime.

" He then called together his creatures in order to submit to them, as he said, ' the long list of unheard-of crimes of which his son had been guilty against a father and a sovereign. He alone had the right to judge him, nevertheless he sought their aid ; for he feared eternal death, as he had promised his son pardon, and had sworn it to him by the judgment of God. If was therefore for them to do justice, without consideration of