The Prince hoped to be kindly received and to be treated like a repentant son; but in this expectation he found himself badly deceived. He was immediately arrested and subjected to a very severe interrogatory, in the course of which he implicated a number of prominent persons in having planned and assisted him in his flight from Russia. And then a mock trial of the most infamous character was enacted. The young Prince had already renounced all his rights to the crown; but this renunciation did not assuage the vindictive spirit of his father. Those whom Alexis, in his confusion and in the agony of the torture, had implicated in the crime of which he was accused, were tried for high treason, convicted, and beheaded or broken on the wheel. The ex-Empress Eudoxia was transferred to a dungeon in another prison, after having been cruelly chastised by two nuns. Alexis himself, from whom the cruel application of the torture (during which the Czar was present) had extorted the confession of crimes which he had never committed, was convicted of high treason and sentenced to be beheaded. The Czar insisted on a verdict of capital punishment, and the one hundred and eighty-one judges composing the court obeyed the imperial brute; they rendered a unanimous verdict. Peter hypocritically said that he would pardon him. When the decision of the judges and his father’s promise of clemency were communicated to Alexis, he was overcome with terror and excitement, and led back to prison. The next day it was reported that he had died of apoplexy, but that in his last moments an affectionate interview had taken place between him and his father. Another report stated that the Czar had withdrawn his pardon and ordered his son to be beheaded without delay. And still another report, almost too horrid to be true, says that Peter, with his own hands, cut off the head of his son. There is no doubt that the young man was foully murdered. The story of his death by apoplexy was merely invented to whitewash the memory of one of the greatest, but also of one of the most brutal and cruel rulers that ever lived.
CHAPTER XVI
PETER THE THIRD OF RUSSIA
CHAPTER XVI
ASSASSINATION OF PETER THE THIRD OF RUSSIA
(July 17, 1762)
IN a previous chapter we have told the story, full of horror and crime, of the life of Ivan the Terrible of Russia. It was not one famous assassination which placed that life-story in this series of historical murders; it was an uninterrupted, long-continued succession of butcheries and assassinations which entitled it to this place. In the long line of historical characters extending through the ages there is not one who so fully deserves the designation of a wholesale assassin as Ivan the Terrible, the demon of the North. But strange to say, the Russians, who during his lifetime execrated him and fled from him as from contagion, to-day seem to have forgotten his iniquities, and place him among their great rulers. Let Karamsin, one of the few great historians Russia has produced, explain this seeming anomaly: “Such was the Czar! Such were his subjects! Their patience was boundless, for they regarded the commands of the Czar as the commands of God, and they considered every act of disobedience to the Czar’s will as a rebellion against the will of God. They perished, but they saved for us, the Russians of the nineteenth century, the greatness and the power of Russia, for the strength of an empire rests in the willingness of an empire to obey.” Words like these make us comprehend—what otherwise would be utterly incomprehensible to us—that a monster like Ivan the Terrible was permitted to continue his career of crime and murder until it was terminated by death brought on by disease and not by violence.