“We remain,
“Your Imperial Majesty’s faithful brother,
“Peter.”
At the same time it was intimated to the Emperor, that if he refused to deliver Alexis up of his own goodwill, the Tsar would seek his son out like a traitor, with armed force.
Each piece of new information that reached the Tsar was a fresh insult to him. Under the feigned sympathy of Europe lurked a secret enmity. “A certain major-general, on his return from Hanover,” Vesselóvsky reported, “meeting me at court, spoke with me in the presence of the Ambassador of Mecklenburg; he sympathized with your Majesty’s illness, which he presumed had been caused by grief, from the fact that your Crown Prince ‘had become invisible,’ using the French phrase, ‘Il est éclipsé.’ I asked him where he got this false information from. He answered me that this information was true and authentic, and he had it from the Hanoverian ministers. To which I replied that it was a calumny, owing its existence to the ill-will of the Hanoverian Court.”
“The Emperor has good reason to support the Crown Prince,” reported Vesselóvsky, as an opinion which is current at the foreign court, “because the aforesaid Crown Prince is in the right as against his father, and had cause for escaping from his father’s dominions. Quite in the beginning, soon after the birth of the Tsarevitch Peter, your Majesty is supposed to have forced Alexis to abdicate the throne and to retire for the rest of his life to a hermitage. And when your Majesty was in Pomerania, seeing that the Crown Prince did not attempt to retire, you were supposed to have devised a new plan. This, was to lure him to Holland and, under the pretext of instruction, to place him on one of your war vessels, give the Captain orders to engage in a fight with a Swedish vessel, which it was arranged should stand close by, and thus cause the Tsarevitch to be killed. This was the reason for his flight.”
The Tsar was informed at the same time about the secret negotiations between the Emperor and King George the First of England. “The Emperor, prompted by ties of relationship, as well as by compassion for the sufferings of the Tsarevitch, and by the generosity of the imperial house towards all innocently persecuted persons, had granted shelter and protection to the Tsar’s son. He asked the King of England whether he, too, felt disposed as an Elector and relative of the house of Braunschweig, to protect the Tsarevitch. Attention was called to his miserable condition—‘Miseranda conditio’—the father’s evident and unrelenting tyranny—‘clara et continua paterna tyrannidas’—also suspicion of poisoning and such like Russian ‘galanterien.’”
The son became a judge, an accuser of the father.
And what more might happen? The Tsarevitch might become a weapon in the enemy’s hand—might kindle an insurrection in the heart of Russia, entangle the whole of Europe in the war, and God alone knows how this would end. “To kill him were too little!” mused the maddened Tsar.