This confession Peter intended to publish later in a manifesto.
The Tsaritsa further confessed:—
“I cast off the nun’s garb because the Bishop Dositheus prophesied, he spoke of voices coming from icons and of many visions, that God’s wrath would come upon us, and trouble spread among the people; how the Tsar would soon die, and that I, the Tsaritsa, would reign henceforth with my son.”
Dositheus was arrested, and degraded in the council from his office of Bishop; he was named “Demid the unfrocked.”
“I alone have been punished,” Dositheus addressed the council, “look and see what is in all hearts; carry your ears into the midst of the people, hear what is said.”
He was impaled and questioned in the torture chamber.
“Why did you desire his Majesty’s death?”
“I wished for it in order that Tsarevitch Alexis might come to the throne; that people might breathe more freely, and that Petersburg might disappear,” answered Demid.
He denounced the Tsaritsa’s brother, Abraham Lopoukhin: the latter was also arrested and tortured at the same time with Demid. Lopoukhin received fifteen, Demid nineteen blows with the knout; both confessed that they wished for the Tsar’s death and the accession of Alexis. Demid also denounced Tsarevna Marya, the Tsar’s sister.
“The Tsarevna was wont to say, ‘After the Tsar’s death I will gladly help the Tsarevitch with all my strength to serve the people, and govern the country.’ She too it was who said, ‘How can you bishops tolerate the Tsar’s having married again during the lifetime of his first wife; he ought to take back the former Tsaritsa and live with her, or else he ought to die!’ When he, Demid, came to see her after having sworn his oath of allegiance to the young Peter in the Church, she said to him, ‘It is wrong of the Tsar to put aside his eldest son and carry everything over to his youngest son, who is only two years old, while the other is a grown man.’”