THE DAGGER OF BERNIKOFF.
It may now be necessary to afford the reader a little historical
insight as to what it was that hinged on this important dispatch of
the Scottish officer, Balgonie.
When the Emperor Peter II. died of smallpox (just on the eve of his
marriage), closing a short reign of three years of stormy trouble and
dark intrigue, the whole male issue of Peter the Great of Russia
became extinct.
The Duke of Holstein, son of his eldest daughter, was entitled to the
throne; but the Russians, for certain cogent political reasons,
filled that perilous seat with Anne, Duchess of Courland, daughter of
Ivan, Peter's eldest brother. Governed by her favourite Biron, on
whom she bestowed the duchy of Courland, she broke through all the
limits which growing civilisation had imposed upon the power of the
Czars; she engaged in many useless wars, lost vast treasures and more
than a hundred thousand men in strife with the Turks, and closing an
inglorious reign, was succeeded by one who will shortly be introduced
to the reader, Ivan Antonovitch, or John IV., son of her niece, the
Princess of Mechlenburg, an infant only six months old. This
Princess sent Biron, the Regent, to the usual place of Muscovite
seclusion, Siberia, and assumed the administratorship during the
minority of her son.
This state of affairs was but of short duration when Elizabeth,
daughter of Peter the Great, having a strong party, seized the crown,
banished the entire family of Mechlenburg, and deposing the infant
monarch, Ivan IV., confined him for life a prisoner of state in the
great Castle of Schlusselburg, where he had been for twenty-three
years, at the period when our narrative opens.
To mention him in conversation, and still more to possess a coin
bearing his effigy, incurred the guilt and insured the punishment of
treason! More than twenty years after the deposition of this
transitory emperor, a German tradesman, who had worked long as a
cabinet-maker at St. Petersburg, went to Cronstadt, intending then to
embark for his native city, Lubeck. As it was not permitted to carry
out of Russia above a certain quantity of specie, an officer of
customs asked the German "what he had with him?" "Only a few roubles
to pay for my passage," he replied; and on being commanded to show
them, one was discovered having the effigy of Ivan IV! In vain did
the unhappy tradesman protest that he neither knew he had such a
coin, nor from whom he had received it. Death was the penalty; but
his goods were confiscated, and he was condemned to perpetual
imprisonment in the mines of Siberia.
The Empress Elizabeth died the victim of intemperance; and while poor
Prince Ivan, an uncrowned emperor, a prisoner without a crime, was
left to pine in the Castle of Schlusselburg, the sceptre was given to
the feeble and dissipated Peter III., the husband of the beautiful,
voluptuous, and talented Catharine II., daughter of a petty prince,
but descended from the ancient house of Servestan,--a woman whom, in
three short months after their coronation, he contrived to disgust by
his political innovations, and still more by his amatory inconstancy;
so it was resolved to get rid of Peter, who was then in his
thirty-fourth year.
Peter I. had nearly lost Russia by compelling the people to cut off
the tails of their coats; and Peter III. became equally unpopular by
ordering them to trim their vast beards, and by putting his troops in
the Prussian uniform. Crowned heads should leave such matters to
tailors and tonsors; but he certainly abolished the secret tribunal
with its contingent horrors, and recalled many a poor exile from
Siberia.
A party was formed for his dethronement; so one evening in July,
1762, when he was surrounded by his guard of Holsteiners, and amusing
himself with his flower gardens (he was a great botanist), and with
some of his beautiful mistresses at the palace of
Orienbaum,--particularly the Countess of Woronzow, to whose
allurements he had abandoned himself,--the exasperated Empress
prepared to strike a final blow for Russia and for herself.
Putting on a uniform of old Russian Guards belonging to her future
favourite, Captain Vlasfief, with the most coquettish grace, this
young and beautiful, but in some respects terrible, woman borrowed
from the nobles around her all the accessories of a complete military
toilette: of Basil Mierowitz, a hat; of Count Orloff, a scarf; of
Colonel Bernikoff, a belt; of some one else, a sword. Over all, she
wore the blue ribbon of the first order of the Empire, which her
impolitic husband had laid aside for that of Prussia.
The drums beat to arms: in this strange guise she showed herself to
the troops, who were now mustered to the number of twenty thousand
men in the great square of St. Petersburg, where the sight of the
uniform of the old guard, which had been forced to give place to
Peter's cherished Holsteiners, raised bursts of acclamation, quite as
much as the appearance of Catharine, who was then "in the full flower
of her robust beauty, perfectly elegant in figure, and purely
feminine from her shoulders to her feet, which were remarkably
handsome, and of which she was very proud." Her nose was aquiline,
her eyes blue with black lashes, and her hair, a brilliant auburn,
was curling on her shoulders. Thus has an eyewitness described her.
The regiments began to file off against the Emperor, and little
knowing the end of the expedition, among the troops on this night
marched Charlie Balgonie, with the colours of the Regiment of
Smolensko on his shoulder.
Everywhere the rebellious Empress was received with enthusiasm, and
the Great Chancellor Woroslaff, who was sent against her, was among
the first to join her party.
The Emperor, abandoning his flowers and his fair ones, fled to his
yacht or galley, which was rowed to Cronstadt, of which his enemy,
the High Admiral Talizine, had already made himself master. The
imperial galley (relates M. Rulhière in his "Histoire sur la
Révolution de Russie") came under the ramparts in the night, while
the great alarm bells rung, the drums were beaten and scarlet rockets
ascended in showers from the dark mass of the Castle of Kronslot; and
then, all along the line of fortifications, Peter saw two hundred
port-fires shedding their weird unearthly glare through the yawning
embrasures upon the twilight sea and sky--each port-fire beside a
loaded cannon--loaded against himself!
This was at ten o'clock; but ere the great oars of the galley were
laid in, or the anchor dropped, a sentinel challenged:
"Who comes there?"
"His Imperial Majesty the Emperor," replied the Captain of the
galley, who was standing on its gilded prow.
"There is no longer any Emperor!" was the stern reply of some one on
the ramparts.
"'Tis false! I am here--I, Peter Antonovitch," said the Emperor,
growing pale at these daring and terrible words, as he stood up and
threw back his cloak to show himself and his well-known Prussian
star, by the clear, lingering twilight of the northern evening.
"Sheer off," shouted the Admiral Talizine, "or, by our Lady of Kazan,
I will fire on you!"
"We are going--give us but time," cried the Captain hopelessly,
through his speaking-trumpet.
At that moment a thousand voices on the ramparts shouted on the still
twilight air--
"Long live the Empress Catharine II.!"
On hearing this, Peter burst into tears, and fell back into the arms
of his attendants, saying--
"The conspiracy is general--from the first days of my short reign I
have seen it coming!"
He was soon after abandoned by all, even by his obnoxious Holstein
Guards, who surrendered to the Regiments of Smolensko and Valikolutz;
and then he was committed by his wife, prisoner of state, to the
Castle of Robsch, in a solitary place, eighteen miles from St.
Petersburg. Six days afterwards had only elapsed, when it was
suggested that though young Ivan was still lingering a captive at
Schlusselburg, and some were not without hopes of replacing him on
the throne, tranquillity could not be perfectly restored while Peter
lived, though lonely and abandoned now.
His wife's lovers and favourites came to this decision speedily; so
late one afternoon, three horsemen arrived at the residence of the
fallen Emperor. They were Count Orloff, who had in his breast a
laced handkerchief of the Empress, the grim Colonel Bernikoff, and a
Hospodeen or gentleman, who announced that they had come to sup with
him; and, according to the Russian fashion, glasses of brandy were
served round before they sat down.
In that given to the Emperor was poison.
Whether, adds the historian we quote, they were in haste to carry
back their dark tidings, or whether the horror of the deed made them
anxious to finish it, none can know; but to hasten their terrible
work, they insisted on giving him another glass.
Already the subtle poison was diffusing itself through the vitals of
the unhappy Emperor; and now, struck by the pallor of their faces and
the ferocious expression of their eyes, he started back, refused the
proffered glass, and despairingly summoned assistance.
They then flung themselves upon him, and Count Orloff, pulling from
his breast the handkerchief he had concealed there, threw it over the
mouth of Peter, to gag him and stifle his cries. He was dashed again
and again to the floor, where he defended himself against his
assassins with all the fury that terror of death and despair could
inspire.
Two young officers of the guard now rushed in, and, as the orders of
all were to slay Peter without a wound, they knotted the handkerchief
round his neck to strangle him, while the Count pressed his knees
upon his breast.
Still the dying Emperor struggled so fearfully that the ferocious
Bernikoff, losing all patience, plunged a dagger into his throat; and
thus, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled, he expired without further
resistance.
A few hours after this, pale, dishevelled, and covered with blood,
dust, and perspiration, with torn garments and disturbed bearing,
Count Orloff appeared before the Empress. "She arose in silence,"
says M. Rulhière, "and passed into an inner room, whither he followed
her. Some minutes after, she called Count Panin, who was already
named her minister, and informed him that the Emperor was dead, and
consulted with him upon the mode of announcing his demise to the
people."
It was given out that he had died a natural death.
The wound inflicted by Bernikoff's dagger was carefully sewed up; the
orifice was neatly covered by a piece of gold-beater's skin; and the
body, in an old green regimental coat, with four wax candles as a
funeral state, was exposed for three days to the people. The
Russians were permitted to wear their beards; the Empress poured out
her afflictions in a ukase, and offered up her prayers, as became a
widow, in the church of our holy Lady of Kazan.
And it was in the service of this charming people,
"----this new and polished nation,
Whose names want nothing but pronounciation,"
--a people, who, in the arts of peace, were little better than the
Scots when James I. was butchered in the Black Friary at Perth, or
the men of "Merry England" when her crook-backed Dick was smothering
the royal babies in the Tower--that, by an adverse fate, our hero
found himself a soldier of fortune, when, as before stated, old
George III. was King of the British Isles, and "the first gentleman
in Europe" was a sinless infant on his mother's knee.
After Peter was laid in his grave, and Catharine was firmly seated on
his throne, her conduct was cautious and judicious, and, as even her
enemies admitted, at times magnanimous; yet frightful atrocities were
committed during her reign when she degenerated into ferocity and
debauchery.
The captivity of the young and innocent Ivan in Schlusselburg, in
charge of the unscrupulous Bernikoff, Captain Vlasfief, and a
Lieutenant named Tschekin--three officers in whom Catharine had
implicit reliance--seemed more hopeless now than ever when the
sceptre was in her firm grasp.
Now that Peter was disposed of, her only dread consisted in the
chance of Ivan's escape; so his guards were doubled, and her orders
to Bernikoff concerning him were to ensure his detention even by
death if necessary: and it was concerning this very dread that
Captain Charles Balgonie was proceeding with a dispatch from
Novgorod, where Catharine, with some of her favourites and courtiers,
was residing for a time in the ancient palace of the Czars.