Catherine bore Peter in all eleven children, but the heir to the throne was Prince Alexis, son of his first wife. Eudoxia had had two sons. Alexander had died, and Alexis was, when his mother was enclosed in a convent in 1699, entrusted to the egregious care of Menshikoff for education. One of Menshikoff’s first tasks was to teach him to drink brandy, and he acquired a truly Russian capacity for drink. As he matured, he was similarly educated in license of conduct. He was, like his father, nervous and unstable, and he became irritable, moody, and coarse. But there was a singular difference between father and son. Alexis was very pious. Piety, in Russia, was apt to lodge in a special part of the brain, and did not exclude drunken and dissolute habits. Alexis loved Moscow and its churches and rich ritual and legends of the saints. And, naturally, the spreading discontent at Peter’s “reforms” and blasphemies found something in the nature of a focus in the court of Alexis. As he grew up, he intensely disliked his father’s policy.

Peter roughly summoned him to quit Moscow and prepare, by a military education, for the throne. He quailed and protested that he did not want to be a soldier. Peter sent him to Dresden, and, hearing that his lady-friends were too numerous and notorious, married him to Princess Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel: a gentle, religious, pock-marked young lady, who could not compete with the livelier dames. She died in childbirth, and Alexis continued to drink and riot and admire the religious art of Dresden. Peter again sharply scolded him, and gave him the alternative of becoming either a soldier (and Tsar) or a monk, Alexis whined that he would rather be a monk than a rough and bloody soldier; though he shuddered at the ascetic prospect, and, apparently, intended to escape at his father’s death on the ground that he had taken the vows under compulsion. He still dallied.

In 1716, Alexis being now twenty-six years old, the Tsar peremptorily bade him enter the monastery at Tver or join the army. He replied that he was coming to Russia, and he begged to be allowed to bring his latest passion, a young lady named Euphrosyne. After a short delay Peter heard that Alexis and Euphrosyne had fled, and in a terrible rage he sent his agents over Europe in search of his son. They traced him and his lady to an ancient castle in Austria. Alexis had fled to Vienna and hysterically begged the Emperor’s protection, and the Emperor had sent him to the obscure castle until he could bring about a reconciliation. When it was known that Russian spies watched the castle, the Emperor ordered the Prince to leave behind all his Russian comrades, who encouraged him in deep drinking, and fly to Naples; and Alexis, taking only one page for whom he passionately pleaded—it was Euphrosyne, in male dress—fled to the south. Naples was then under the Empire.

The Russian agents at the court of Vienna demanded the surrender of Alexis. Dreading the anger of the Tsar, the Emperor sent them on to Naples, and directed his Viceroy that they must have an interview with the Prince. The doors were thrown open, and the agents persuaded Alexis, by lying representations, that Peter would forgive him. Their last argument was that Euphrosyne would be taken away from him unless he complied, and the girl—a lusty, thick-lipped peasant-girl, like Catherine, it seems—tearfully begged her royal lover to go. The jade had been bribed by Peter’s agents. She was pregnant and was left in Italy, where the price of her treason was quickly spent. Alexis, full of the promise that he had only to ask forgiveness and he could retire to his country-seat and wed his dear Euphrosyne, hurried joyfully to Moscow.

He arrived on the last day of January (1718), and Moscow, ignorant of the arts by which he had been entrapped, beheld him with tragic astonishment. The Tsar was in one of his worst moods. Three days later a court of clerical and lay dignitaries was formed, and father and son met before them. Peter showered invectives on his miserable son, and then, as Alexis flung himself to the ground and asked pardon, promised to forgive him if he would renounce his right to the throne and betray the accomplices of his supposed plot. Every man or woman to whom Alexis had disparaged his father was named, and Peter shuddered with rage. There had been no conspiracy, Alexis said: nothing but vague murmurs. But the torture-chambers soon rang with shrieks, and Russian blood streamed again upon the stones of Moscow.

In his bloodshot fury Peter conceived, or affected, a suspicion that his first wife, Eudoxia, had been in the plot, and a gang of “questioners” went to the convent at Suzdal. Fifty nuns were flogged and questioned, but the innocence of Eudoxia could not be brought under suspicion. Unhappily a curious page of Eudoxia’s conventual life, which had ended years before, was brought to light. She had had a lover in the convent. A noble named Gleboff had befriended her, and from friendship they passed to intimacy. Her impassioned love-letters of eight years before were put before the Tsar, and he saw red. Gleboff was horribly tortured and—wrapped in furs, as it was cold, to preserve his vitality and torture a little longer—impaled. It is said, but of this we cannot be sure, that Eudoxia was scourged, naked, by two monks. She was, at all events, confined more strictly from that time.

Alexis had complied with the conditions, but Peter “the Great” had not done with his son. The vile Euphrosyne was brought to Moscow, and she supplied fresh “evidence.” A new court was convoked, and it shrank from the murder that the Tsar plainly contemplated. Alexis was confronted with his faithless lover: he was knouted: and he held to his simple story that he could not be a soldier, and had done no more than criticise. A third court was set up, and it issued sentence of death; and a few days later the Prince’s body was exposed to the public gaze, with a story that God had spared the father the blood of his son by visiting Alexis with apoplexy. How the Prince really died no man knows, but few, now or then, would believe the story of natural death. . . . It was June 26th; and on June 29th, we read, a new ship was launched, and Peter joined with his usual robustness in the merrymaking.

In 1719 Catherine’s son Peter died, and, on the hereditary principle, the crown should pass to little Peter, son of the dead Alexis and Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel. The Tsar was worried, but took no effective steps to settle the very grave matter of the succession. Catherine, too, was worried, for Peter had a new mistress, a woman of far greater charm than she, and it was well within the sphere of his ingenuity to secure a divorce and wed again. But the romance of Peter Mikhailoff has already, in spite of condensation, run to such length, and the new romance so largely concerns Catherine, that we may open a new chapter and present that lady properly to the reader before describing the last phase.

CHAPTER VIII
CATHERINE THE LITTLE

The whims of monarchs have created more romances in the history of women than the fancy of the novelist has ever invented, and the story of Peter’s wife and successor is one of the most piquant of these real adventures. Although in the years of her prosperity she did not shrink from the mention of her humble origin, the details of her childhood were never confidently known and are a matter of endless speculation. It is generally believed that she was the daughter of a Livonian peasant, but she makes her first certain appearance as maid-of-all-work in the house of a poor German pastor. Profoundly ignorant, plain of feature, coarse in taste, this woman became in time the sole mistress of the Russian Empire.