The most singular coronation which has ever been performed was probably that which followed the death of Catharine and preceded the consecration of her son and successor. Catharine died in 1797 after a reign of thirty-five years. But before she could be buried there was a ceremony to be performed, the like of which had never been seen.
Her son Paul, a taciturn individual who seems never to have forgotten his father's miserable death, performed an expiatory coronation in his honor, seeing that that ceremony had been neglected in Peter's life. For this purpose the body of the long-dead Czar was disinterred and was dressed in the Imperial robes. The ornaments of the coronation which had been fetched expressly from Moscow for the purpose were then disposed about the mouldering figure. It must have been a grisly sight—the crowned skeleton of the murdered Peter lying beside his wife's body with Orloff's diamond banefully glittering on his bony hand. Nor was this all. With a genius for grim appropriateness the new Czar summoned the two surviving murderers of his father to attend as chief mourners. These were Prince Baratinsky and Alexèy Orloff. The former overcome by the horror of his recollections fainted away many times; but Orloff, with iron indifference, stood four hours bearing the pall of the man he had strangled with his own hands thirty-five years before. After performing this public penance both men were banished from Russia.
The coronation of a sovereign is always a stately ceremony; but the installation of the Czars of Russia is elaborate almost beyond description. The ceremonial invariably followed is that used at the coronation of Peter the Great and his Empress. The ritual is largely religious, as the Czar is Head of the Church as well as Emperor. The sceptre of course plays an important part and is taken up and put down a bewildering number of times. The following extract from a work entirely devoted to the explanation of the many comings and goings and uprisings and downsittings will give a slight idea of what a performance the coronation is:
"The Metropolitan having received the Sceptre from the hands of the noble bearer carries it to the Emperor who takes it in his right hand. The Metropolitan says, 'Most pious, most powerful, and very great Emperor of all the Russias, whom God has crowned, upon whom God has shed His gifts and His Grace, receive the Sceptre and the Globe. They are the symbols of the supreme power which the Most High has given thee over thy peoples, that thou mayest govern them and obtain for them all the happiness they desire.' And the Emperor takes the Sceptre and sits upon the throne."
But this is not nearly all. The sceptre, which is graphically if somewhat grotesquely called the Triumph-stick, is held only for a brief time. The Emperor at the end of the prayer, lays it upon a velvet cushion and upon another he places the globe or Empire-apple as it is termed. Then he calls to himself the Czarina and crowns her with his own imperial diadem. But the consort is not invested with any imperial power, therefore she does not receive either the sceptre or the globe. After having crowned his wife, the Czar again seats himself upon his throne holding his Stick and his Apple in either hand. Cannons roar, bells clang and multitudes shout "Long live the Father!" while all present bow low before the monarch in adoration. Then the new Czar and Czarina receive the communion with more stately movings about from place to place. Finally the Te Deum is sung, the crowned Emperor, sceptre in hand, walks forth, and the intricate ceremonial is thus brought to a close, having been in continuance some four or five hours.
The Regalia, which includes seven or eight crowns, is kept in the Kremlin in an upper room "where," says a traveller, "they [the crowns, etc.] look very fine on velvet cushions under glass cases." The Czars are always crowned in Moscow, the ancient capital of Russia.
Paul, having performed the weird ceremony already described, then had himself duly and solemnly crowned. His reign was a short one however, and in 1801 he gave place to his successor Alexander, in the orthodox Russian manner—that is to say he was strangled.
In 1812 the Orloff and its magnificent companions had to fly from Moscow. In the beginning of September in that terrible year, finding that the mountains of slain on the bloody field of Borodino could not stop Napoleon, the Russians sullenly retired before him. On the third of the month the Regalia was carried out of Moscow and lodged in a place of safety in the interior. This flight was followed by that of everybody and everything that was portable. When Napoleon entered on the fourteenth it was to find an absolute desert in Moscow, only a few stragglers, prisoners and beggars having been left.
Alexander I., strange to say, died peacefully in 1826, leaving the throne to his brother Nicholas. Nicholas has been aptly called "the Iron Czar." He was the third son of his father, but his elder brother, Constantine, having no taste for the perilous glory of a crown renounced his rights in favor of Nicholas. There was some delay in crowning the new Czar owing, says the Court Circular with decorous gravity, to the illness and death of the late Emperor's widow who survived her husband but five months. In reality, however, the delay was caused by events more serious to the peace of mind of the new sovereign. A revolution, which seems an indispensable accompaniment to a change of rulers in Russia, exploded after the accession of Nicholas and came near to costing him his life. This event seems to have further hardened a nature that was already sufficiently severe, and when Nicholas went to Moscow in August, 1826, his coronation progress was not meant to gladden the people but to make them quake. When the Czar left the Cathedral of the Assumption, his crown upon his head and his sceptre in his hand, "his face looked as hard as Siberian ice." So wrote of him an eye-witness, who further says the people were too frightened to cheer—they dropped on their knees with their faces in the dust. It was a gloomy coronation notwithstanding all the diamonds and glitter of the pageant. There was but one redeeming incident that spoke of human kindliness and affection. When the Czar had been crowned his mother, the widow of the murdered Paul, advanced to do homage to him as her sovereign, but the Czar knelt before his mother and implored her blessing. After the Empress Mother came Constantine, the elder brother, who had waived his rights to the crown, and he was in turn affectionately embraced by Nicholas. This exhibition of fraternal affection in Russia, where brothers had been known to strangle each other in order to grasp the much-coveted sceptre, was considered as something quite unprecedented. The Court Chronicler of the day speaks of it with emotion as a sight to move the hearts of gods and men.
Nicholas died in the middle of the Crimean War and Alexander II. reigned in his stead. The extraordinary pomp of his coronation has never been surpassed. He in his turn held in his hand Orloff's great diamond as the symbol of absolute power. Yet he, who could deal as he chose with the lives of all his subjects, had not power to save his own from the hand of the assassin. The murder of Alexander II. by Nihilists in March, 1881, is fresh in memory as also the succession of the present Czar. The Orloff was then once more taken from its repose in the sumptuous privacy of the Kremlin to enhance the splendors of an Imperial Coronation. Within a short time the Orloff has served to grace yet another splendid ceremony. On the occasion of the recent installation of the Czarevitch as Hetman of the Don Cossacks, the sceptre as well as the crown and globe, were exhibited to the admiring multitudes of Novo Tcherkask.