CATHEDRAL OF ST. PETER AND PAUL IN THE FORTRESS.
“By thy letter I see, oh! oh! that thou hast been mightily grieved, and why? Why dost thou trouble thyself about me? Thou hast deigned to write that thou hast given me into the care of the Virgin. When thou hast such a guardian for me, why dost thou grieve?”
While at Archangel, besides the time which Peter gave to the study of commerce and ship-building, he found leisure for inspecting various industries and for practising both at the forge and at the lathe. A chandelier made of walrus teeth, turned by him, hangs now over his tomb in the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, at St. Petersburg; and carved work in bone and wood, and iron bars forged by him at this time, are still preserved. Besides the balls and dinners which he attended at Archangel, to which he had also been much given at Moscow, he frequently attended a neighboring church, where he himself read the Epistle, sang with the choir, and made great friends with the archbishop. In 1694 his mother Natalia died, and soon he repudiated his wife Eudoxia and shut her up in a convent, where he kept her confined all the rest of her life. Peter had only married this wife to please his mother and his nobles, and having never loved her, soon tired of her. She had been brought up in the old-fashioned Russian way, and was very ignorant; but as she appeared to love him devotedly, his treatment of her was wicked and cruel, and in his after domestic life there is much to condemn. Although he did much for the advancement of Russia, and his public enterprise and achievements are greatly to be admired, in character he was brutal and selfish, and his tastes were low and vicious. He was fond of drunken carousals, and sank the dignity of his rank in his associations with inferior and profligate companions. As a man, there is little to admire in him, but as a public benefactor of his country, he is greatly to be commended. As an artisan, statesman, and general, he introduced wise and good reforms into his realms, and raised his people from semi-barbarism to rank with the other civilized nations of Europe.
Though he was not a scholar, he encouraged learning. There was, about this time, a second attempt made to assassinate the Czar. As Peter was often accustomed to attend conflagrations in Moscow, these conspirators formed the plan of setting fire to some building near the royal palace, and when the emperor, as was his wont, should come out to help extinguish the flames, he was to be assassinated. They then determined to go to the convent where Sophia was confined, release her, and proclaim her empress. This plot was, however, revealed to the Czar, and he thereupon ordered a small body of men to attend him, and he went at once to the houses of the various conspirators and arrested them. They were afterwards executed in a most barbarous manner. The criminals were brought out one by one. First their arms were cut off, then their legs, and finally their heads. The amputated limbs and heads were then hung upon a column in the market-place in Moscow, where they were left as a bloody warning to others, as long as the weather remained cold enough to keep them frozen. Thus ended the second conspiracy against the life of Peter the Great. In 1695 the Czar, in conjunction with other European powers, declared war again against the Turks and Tartars. Peter acquired great renown throughout Europe for his successful siege against Azof, to obtain which was one of the chief objects of the campaign. This success also increased Peter’s interest in the building of ships. He determined to establish a large fleet on the Black Sea, and in order to ascertain the best modes of ship-building, Peter resolved to make a journey to Western Europe.
That he might not be burdened by fêtes and ceremonies, he adopted a disguise. Macaulay said of this journey, “It is an epoch in the history, not only of his own country, but of ours and of the world.”
Various reasons have been given by different writers for this step of the Czar. Pleyer, the secret Austrian agent, wrote to the Emperor Leopold that the whole embassy was “merely a cloak for the freedom sought by the Czar, to get out of his own country and divert himself a little.” A document in the archives at Vienna states that the “cause of the journey was a vow made by Peter, when in danger on the White Sea, to make a pilgrimage to the tombs of the apostles St. Peter and St. Paul at Rome.” Voltaire said, “He resolved to absent himself for some years from his dominions, in order to learn how better to govern them.” Napoleon said, “He left his country to deliver himself for a while from the crown, so as to learn ordinary life, and remount by degrees to greatness.” But later writers say, “Peter went abroad, not to fulfil a vow, not to amuse himself, not to become more civilized, not to learn the art of government, but simply to become a good shipwright.”
His mind was filled with the idea of creating a navy on the Black Sea, and his tastes had always been mechanical. In order to give the Czar greater freedom of action, the purpose of his journey was concealed by means of a great embassy, which should visit the chief countries of western Europe. In the suite of the ambassadors were twenty nobles and thirty-five called volunteers, who were going for the study of ship-building. Among these was the Czar himself. These volunteers were chiefly young men who had been comrades of Peter in his play-regiments and boat-building. During the absence of the Czar the government was intrusted to a regency of three persons, the uncle of the Czar and two princes. We have not space to describe this journey in full, and can only mention certain incidents. The Czar is thus described by the electress of Hannover and her daughter, whom Peter met at Koppenbrügge:—
“My mother and I began to pay him our compliments, but he made Mr. Le Fort reply for him, for he seemed shy, hid his face in his hands, and said, ‘Ich kann nicht sprechen.’ But we tamed him a little, and then he sat down at the table between my mother and myself, and each of us talked to him in turn. Sometimes he replied with promptitude, at others, he made two interpreters talk, and assuredly he said nothing that was not to the point on all subjects that were suggested. As to his grimaces, I imagined them worse than I found them, and some are not in his power to correct. One can see also that he has had no one to teach him how to eat properly, but he has a natural unconstrained air which pleases me.”