As soon as Alexis arrived at Moscow, which was in February, 1718, a council was called, at which he was publicly disinherited; and after a long private conference with the czar, the particulars of which never transpired, Alexis was arraigned as a criminal, and tried for conspiring against his father’s life and throne by a body of ‘ministers and senators, estates military and civil.’ Peter was so accustomed to make his own will the law, that in this array of judges there is clear evidence that he wished in some measure to throw the responsibility from his own shoulders, or rather to seem to do so; for no doubt the judges only strove to decide in the manner which should best please their master. After all, the condemnation chiefly rested upon the confession of Alexis himself, and the acknowledgments of his mistress, his companions, and his confessor; and the words of these were wrung from them on the rack. Certainly Alexis made himself out to be much more guilty than any other evidence proved; and yet the czar’s only excuse for revoking his pardon was, that it had been promised ‘on condition that he confessed everything.’
There can be no doubt that this weak and vicious young man had been quite ready to lend himself to any plot; or, according to his own words, ‘If the rebels had asked me to join them in your lifetime, I should most likely have done so—if they had been strong enough.’ And in answer to another question, he said that he ‘had accused himself in confession of wishing the death of his father;’ but that the priest had replied that God would pardon it, as they all wished it as much.
At last he is found guilty. A council of clergy, who are among those referred to for a sentence, quote from the Bible, and especially Absalom’s case, and recommend mercy. But further transgressions are said to have come to light, and the ministers, senators, and generals unanimously condemned him to death, without stating the manner or time of the same, and of course well knowing that the breath of the czar could revoke their edict.
Whether Peter intended to save his son, or really to permit his execution, is among those secrets which history can never pierce. The sentence alone literally terrified Alexis to death! On hearing it read, he fell into a fit, from the effects of which he never recovered, although he regained his senses sufficiently to implore the presence of his father. An interview was granted, at which it is said both father and son shed tears; and finally, after receiving the pardon of the czar, and the consolations of religion, the miserable Alexis breathed his last in prison on the 7th of July.
The most absurd stories were current for a long time, and repeated from mouth to mouth, and copied by one biographer after another. They are still to be found in many otherwise grave authorities. The very number and variety of these tales falsify them all. The czar was accused of poisoning his son (sending openly one messenger after another for the poison); other accounts say that he knouted him to death with his own hands; others, that he cut off his head himself, and had it privately stitched on again. The best argument against such fables is, that if Peter really wished his son’s death, he had only to let the so-called ‘course of justice’ have its way. Besides, the circumstance of his receiving extreme unction, when on the point of death, is a fact authenticated and established.
As may be imagined, Catherine did not escape her share of these accusations; but all the evidence which remains tends to prove that, so far from meriting them, she endeavored to incline her husband to the side of mercy.
We are drawing near the close of the active and eventful life of Peter the Great. We need not dwell upon his Persian campaign, in which, after having found a pretext for a quarrel, because he wanted one, he acquired those sunny provinces to the south of the Caspian, which compensated for the loss of Azoph. ‘It is not land I want, but water,’ was his frequent exclamation, when studying the requirements of his vast empire. The ruler who had first evinced his love of maritime affairs by paddling a skiff upon the Yausa, and who had inherited only a wild and barbarous inland country, was now the master of a respectable navy, the lord of the sunny Caspian and of the icy Baltic.
After his return from Persia in 1722, we find him, as usual after any lengthened absence, instituting examinations for mal-administration. The vice-chancellor Schaffiroff, one of his favorites, was condemned to death; but on the scaffold his punishment was commuted to banishment. Menzikoff was sentenced to pay 200,000 rubles into the exchequer, and was deprived of a great part of his income, and flogged by the emperor’s own hand. For the infliction of this punishment Peter used his dubina—a cane of thick Spanish reed. Several others were disgraced, flogged, or heavily fined—thus at once showing the czar’s impartiality, and proving how well he knew the impossibility of reforming the masses while corruption existed in high places.
In July 1724, Peter again conducted a fleet against Sweden, to enforce his claims on Sweden and Denmark in behalf of the duke of Holstein. Having effected this purpose, he returned to Cronstadt, where he celebrated, by a splendid parade, the creation of his navy, which now consisted of forty-one ships of war, with 2106 cannon, and 14,960 seamen. It was on this occasion that he caused the little skiff we have mentioned to be brought from Moscow, and to be consecrated by the name of the Little Grandsire—the father of the Russian navy. This little shallop is still preserved at St. Petersburg with almost religious veneration.
The last years of this great monarch’s life were employed in providing against the inundations to which his new capital was exposed in the autumn, in continuing the Ladoga canal, and in the erection of an academy of sciences. He turned his attention next to the examination and punishment of state criminals; to the promotion of the labors of the legislative body; and the establishment of the order of ‘Alexander Newsky;’ the improvement of the condition of the monks; the banishment of the Capuchins from Russia; and a new commercial treaty with Sweden. He also betrothed his favorite daughter Anna to the duke of Holstein in 1724, having already placed the crown, with great pomp, upon the head of his wife Catherine on the 18th of the preceding May, in token of his love and gratitude. He likewise provided that an education should be given to the surviving son of the unhappy Alexis, such as would become a future emperor of Russia—his only son by Catherine having died, as before mentioned, when a child, in 1717.