Favourite succeeded favourite at court. Nastchokin and the Miloslavskis gave way to a new and remarkable noble named Artaman Matveeff. Nikon had, as I said, disposed the Tsar in favour of progress, of a kind, and Matveeff was for still larger and more comprehensive progress. The industrious and gifted son of a small official, he had become one of the most accomplished and refined of the progressive party. His wife was a Scottish woman of the Hamilton family. Like so many other foreigners, many of the Scots who were driven from their country by Cromwell found their way to Moscow and settled in trade there. The foreign colony outside the walls grew, and its comparative refinement and culture impressed the imagination of many of the Russians. Matveeff married the refugee, and his home had a western complexion. The Scottish lady would not be confined behind curtains. The furniture was of the more elegant western kind. A library, and even a chemical laboratory, formed part of the establishment.

Matveeff seems to have won the attention of the Tsar in the course of some employment about the court, and he went on to secure his friendship. He was promoted to the office of chief minister, and the Tsar liked to visit him in his stimulating home. We may presume that it was in the foreign quarter, where the neat brick villas, surrounded by flower-gardens and shrubs, were in vivid contrast to the dull and slovenly aspect of the clusters of wooden Russian houses. A new romance of the court was born of this intercourse.

Matveeff adopted a beautiful orphan girl named Natalia Naryshkin, whose father had been a captain of the militia. The Tsar, whose wife had died in 1667, without (as we shall see) leaving a very promising heir to the throne amongst her numerous children, was much struck with the charm of Natalia, as she waited at table. Legend says that he at once offered to “find her a husband.” He at all events decided to marry her, and told Matveeff. But the courtier was too prudent to provide a wife for the Tsar in this personal fashion. He persuaded Alexis to issue the customary summons to a competition of health and beauty, and some hundreds were lodged in the palace and gravely inspected. There seems to have been some danger of Natalia losing her fortune, or else the comedy was carried out very thoroughly. Another maiden was selected, and the opponents of Matveeff pressed her charms. But it was decided that her hands were too thin for a model of Russian beauty, and the intrigue was defeated. The Tsar duly discovered the grace and gifts of the pretty brunette Natalia—which he was not supposed to have seen in any respectable Russian house—and in January, 1671, she was raised to the throne.

The young girl had no conception of the opposition which her entrance into the court would cause. Not only were the brother and other relatives of the late Tsarina entrenched in lucrative positions, but several of her children survived, and a grim silent struggle for the succession grew up about the ageing monarch. Every act of the new mistress was invidiously discussed. She declined to be secluded in women’s quarters; she refused to have closed curtains to her litter when she went abroad; she despised paint and the tawdry display which Russian women usually made. A Russian envoy who had visited Italy brought news of a magical form of entertainment known as a theatre, in which painted scenes of castles and landscapes were put together and disappeared, and life was remarkably imitated. Natalia and Matveeff set up a theatre, and, although they did not venture beyond biblical plays, the monks and reactionaries and envious made a great outcry. She brought into the world, on May 20th, 1672, a wonderfully vigorous boy—the future Peter the Great—and malicious tongues whispered that such a child was assuredly not the son of Tsar Alexis, whose earlier sons had been feeble. Two daughters followed in the next three years, and the silent struggle became more tragic. Which of the two families—that of the first or the second Tsarina—would secure the succession? The Tsar himself brooded over the difficult problem; and in the midst of his brooding, in 1676, he died, and left the settlement to the court.

Maria Miloslavski had had thirteen children, and of these two sons and six daughters were alive when the Tsar died. The younger son, Ivan, was a weak-witted boy whom none could seriously regard as a future ruler of Russia. The two eldest sons had died. There remained Prince Feodor, and the Miloslavskis had little trouble in securing his accession. A charge of magic and other evil practices was trumped up against Matveeff, and he was flogged and sent to Siberia. Natalia and her three children were still at court, and she made a spirited stand against the grown-up daughters of her predecessor and the three aunts who lived at court with them. Her brother Ivan was banished, and she seemed to be in danger of losing all hope, when a fresh court-revolution modified and complicated the struggle.

The young Tsar, Feodor, was an invalid. Few expected him to live long, and the prospect gave edge to the keen rivalry for power. But a former tutor of Feodor’s elder brother now crept into favour and cut out the Miloslavskis. This man and his brother were admirers of Poland, and, in order to prepare the way for Polish influence, they induced the sickly Tsar to wed a young and undistinguished woman of Polish extraction named Agatha Grouchstska. Polish nobles and officers flocked to the court, and an entirely new prospect was opened when, in July, 1681, a child was born. Natalia and her children were now living in a village not far from Moscow. The Miloslavskis had been disposed to make a nun of her, but they were now fighting desperately for their own power. Agatha, to their relief, died in childbirth, and the baby died a few weeks later. The resolute friends of Poland made a last effort. They induced the dying Tsar to wed a relative of his dead wife. But death made an end of the mockery. Feodor died, in his twenty-first year, a few weeks after his marriage, and the intriguing Poles were swept out of court.

Before the Miloslavskis had time to marshal their forces, the friends and relatives of Natalia, the Naryshkin, got together the boyars and persuaded them that the boy Peter was now the only possible heir to the throne. The elder prince, Ivan, son of the first wife of Alexis, was, as I said, an obvious imbecile. Peter, on the other hand, was a sturdy and intelligent boy who promised to become a vigorous man. Before the day was out on which Feodor died Natalia was summoned to Moscow by the news that her son was Tsar, and she herself soon rejoiced in the titles of Tsaritsa and Regent. Her brother was recalled, and a speedy messenger was sent to bring back her friend and patron, Matveeff, from Siberia. It was on April 27th, 1682, that Feodor died and Natalia returned to power. On May 11th Matveeff arrived from Siberia, and received the respect of the troops. The new regime seemed to be solidly established. And four days later Moscow was shaken by one of the most sanguinary revolutions that we find in its chronicles, and the Miloslavskis returned to power. The story of that revolution introduces us to one of the strangest princesses of the Romanoff house, who was to rule Russia for the next seven years.

CHAPTER VI
A ROMANOFF PRINCESS

The surviving family of Maria Miloslavski and Tsar Alexis consisted of six sturdy daughters and one purblind, weak-pated boy. On the approved principles of Russian, especially imperial, education, these daughters ought to have been reconciled to the modest position to which the inferiority of their sex condemned them, and, as their brother was plainly incapable of ruling, they ought to have passed into convents or been distributed amongst the households of wealthy courtiers. But there was at least one daughter, Sophia, who had not the least intention of submitting to the priestly theory. If her fifteen-year old brother could make no effort for the throne, she would make it for him. She would fight the hated Anastasia.

Visitors to the court have left us very different impressions of this remarkable princess, but we have little difficulty in removing the thick coat of flattery and obtaining a satisfactory glimpse of her. She was twenty-five years old at the death of Feodor: a short, very stout, and very vigorous young woman, her face covered to some extent with a fine hair which gave her an even more masculine appearance. Probably she had led the usual enclosed life during her father’s reign, but in the time of her invalid brother she had had more freedom. She especially made the acquaintance of Vassili Gallitzin, a very clever and accomplished prince, of European culture, who overlooked her entire lack of personal charm and—either then or at a later date—became her lover. In her apartments she formed a literary circle, and through her visitors she got into touch with remote elements of Moscow society.