ROMANCE UPON ROMANCE
PETER II was a fine, handsome lad of eleven summers, the fruit of the
unhappy union of the miserable Alexis and hardly less miserable
Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel. From such a stock Peter the Great had
expected no good. He disliked to think of the boy, and, careful as he
generally was about education, he allowed the child to pass to the hands
of ignorant and incompetent trainers. Catherine, or Menshikoff, who may
have early conceived his plan of the future, altered this state of
things at the death of Peter the Great. The conscientious German
minister Ostermann was charged with the education of the young prince,
and we perceive by his scheme of lessons, which survives, that he was
prepared even for the duties of a monarch.
Unhappily, the best scheme of education depends for its result upon the
co-operation of the pupil, and Peter was a bad pupil. He liked
Ostermann, but he disliked lessons; and the consciousness that he was
now a monarch did not dispose his lively imagination to submit to prosy
toil. There was a strain of nervous instability in nearly the whole of
the Romanoffs at this stage, Peter liked sport and riding and play. His
sister Natalia, two years older than he, was a good playmate; even
better was Aunt Elizabeth, the younger daughter of the late Empress.
Elizabeth was now a very sprightly and pretty young lady of sixteen, the
exact opposite of what a Russian princess ought to be on the old
standards. She shunned books, but took like a boy to riding and hunting
and fencing. Her lively tongue and merry blue eyes attracted young
officers; and she was the daughter of Catherine and Peter in such
matters.
Menshikoff did not like the intimacy and he carried Peter off to one of
his palaces and put trusted servants and the sober Ostermann about him.
He also introduced the young Tsar to the charm of his own domestic
circle, and he presently announced to the Privy Council that Peter had
honoured him by asking the hand of his daughter Maria. The ceremony of
betrothal was, in fact, publicly celebrated. Inconvenient or critical
people were humanely removed by appointments abroad. Even the Duke of
Holstein was induced to return to his native land and take his Duchess
with him; and they were treated very generously in the matter of
provision. Honours and offices were distributed with such generosity as
was consistent with the supreme power and increasing wealth of the
former premier. Members of old noble families, like the Dolgorukis and
Golitzuins, were promoted.
With the aid of Ostermann for foreign affairs Menshikoff ruled the
country advantageously. There was, fortunately, no stress at home or
abroad, for he had no ability as a statesman, but he passed a number of
measures which promoted trade or tranquillity. The Cossacks were more
than pacified by the concessions he made to them. Eudoxia was liberated
from the rigorous and dismal confinement to which Peter the Great had
condemned her; which greatly pleased the orthodox. The tariff was
lowered. The ghastly poles and spikes on which it had been customary to
fix the heads or limbs of criminals were abolished.
But in the world which the Romanoffs had created, or suffered to
develop, the supreme concern was the fortune of the individual. I do not
mean, of course, that this selfishness was unknown at the court of Louis
XV or of George I, but the sequel will show how far Russia lagged behind
even the primitive morality of those elegant courts. There were few who
did not look with green eyes upon the princely fortune of the
adventurer, and there were some who felt it an outrage upon the
nobility. Russia was prosperous; but could a land prosper indefinitely
when the national genius was mocked by foreign innovations and the
sacred traditions of Moscow were scouted? The nobles gave an idealist
complexion to their discontent, and whispers reached the ear of the
growing prince.
Menshikoff was imprudent in meeting Peter’s first movements of
resentment. One day the young Tsar received what appears to have been a
personal payment of nine thousand ducats, and he sent it to his sister
Natalia. Menshikoff met the messenger and took away the money. Peter, he
said, did not yet understand the value of money. Peter sent for him and
gave him, to his amazement, an imperial scolding. He might have
recognised a bit of his old master in the stamping and raging boy, but
he did not take the lesson. Soon afterwards Peter sent to Natalia a fine
service of plate which had been presented to him, and Menshikoff tried
to make her restore it. The First Minister was then compelled to take to
his bed for some weeks. When he recovered, he found that Peter had gone
to the palace at Peterhof, some miles away, and was wildly enjoying
himself with Natalia and Aunt Elizabeth. Ostermann and the Dolgorukis
also were there. Menshikoff, as an offset, demanded the accounts of the
palace, and discharged a servant for some item he found; and the
boy-Tsar, in a fiery interview, told him to mind his own business.
This was in August. Menshikoff, now seriously concerned, thought that
the influence of Ostermann was mischievous, and he got up a violent
quarrel with him and threatened to send him to Siberia. From a loyal
colleague Ostermann became one more enemy of the First Minister, and the
story of his fall ran rapidly. On September 6th Menshikoff went out to
Peterhof to pay respectful homage to the Tsar. Peter not only turned his
back upon him, but drew the attention of his smiling courtiers to the
fact that he did. The minister prepared a festival, and, when the Tsar
scouted his invitation, he nervously begged an interview. The answer was
a troop of soldiers such as he himself had sent to darken many a home,
and he fell to the ground in a swoon.
[IMAGE: img182.jpg Room of the Tsar Mikhailovitch, Moscow]
A few days later the fallen man appeared before the Privy Council and
received sentence. He was fined, for conspiracy against the throne,
375,000 dollars, stripped of all his honours and offices, and ordered to
retire to the dreary waste of the steppes. But his wife Daria--we
remember Peter the Great forcing him to marry that merry lady--appealed
passionately against the brutal sentence, and he was suffered to retire,
instead, to a beautiful estate he had in the Ukraine. Few wept when, one
morning in September, a long caravan bore Menshikoff and his wife and
daughter out of the life of Russia. But his enemies were not satisfied.
The Dolgorukis, who came to power, trumped up a charge of conspiracy in
the following year, and, on the miserable word of tortured witnesses,
which in Russia was still admitted, banished the broken-hearted
adventurer to the frozen shores of the Arctic. There for two years,
until death set him free and ended one of the great romances of that
stirring period, Menshikoff supported by the labour of his own hands his
devoted wife and the unlucky girl who had thought to become an Empress.
Ostermann remained the most important and most useful statesman, but the
Golitzuins, Dolgorukis, and other families of the old nobility now came
to power and they made an effort to drag Russia back to the ruts from
which Peter the Great had violently shifted it. They were of what came
to be called in the nineteenth century the “Russophile school”:
narrow-minded conservatives who railed at all innovation and foreign
influence, and persuaded themselves that the genius of Russia was
different from that of other European nations. St. Petersburg was to
them the hated symbol of the new order, and they induced Peter to return
to Moscow. He was crowned there on February 25th (1728) with all the
archaic ceremonies of Russian tradition, and they took care to impress
him with the contrast between the comparatively bright and healthy air
of Moscow and the dank climate of the northern metropolis. This court
remained at Moscow, and the departments of State were presently
transferred to it.
To complete the transformation from the ideals of Peter the Great to
those of Alexis the aged Eudoxia was appointed Regent, and a court of
the old type gathered about her. Ostermann was alarmed, and the
reactionaries tried to remove him. Peter, fortunately for Russia, would
not hear of the dismissal of his old director, but he allowed the
conservative nobles to act much as they pleased and he was encouraged by
them to spend his time in hunting and laborious idleness. The fleet was
suffered to rot in harbour, and only the steady effect of such internal
reforms as Peter the Great had introduced kept the country in some
degree of prosperity. The old indolence returned. Since there were now
no costly schemes to be realised, and the favourable turn of foreign
relations brought no war, the taxes were not enforced, and the country
enjoyed a fallacious happiness.
In December Natalia died of consumption. Through her Ostermann had at
times got a warning word to the ear of his pupil, and the levity of the
Tsar now increased. He spent his days with Elizabeth, and the Dolgorukis
feared that what Ostermann had once recommended--the marriage of the
aunt and nephew--would come to pass. As it was their aim, in spite of
all the warnings of Russian history, to marry him to a girl of their own
family, Elizabeth must go; and the frivolity of that precocious lady
gave them ample opportunities. She was scarcely out of her teens, yet
her amours were notorious, and her lovers were not of noble rank. A word
was whispered to Peter, who was a sober and strict-living youth, and
Aunt Elizabeth ceased to be his constant companion.
Austria, Russia’s ally, looked with concern upon this reaction and
indolence, and its representatives joined with Ostermann in pressing
Peter to return to St. Petersburg and attend to his military resources.
A tense, if more or less veiled, struggle for the guidance of the Tsar
set in. For the moment the ambitious Dolgorukis won. They carried Peter
a hundred miles away for a grand and prolonged hunt and series of
entertainments. The entire family surrounded him and kept him for weeks
in a state of febrile exhilaration. When they returned to Moscow, Alexis
Dolgoruki announced that the Tsar was to wed his daughter Catherine, and
the ceremony of betrothal was pompously conducted. The Dolgorukis now
closed round the youthful Tsar, kept their angry rivals away, and began
a premature plunder of the court and treasury as confidently as if such
things had never before left their awful monuments in Russian history.
The wedding was fixed for January 30th, 1730. Peter would then be only
fourteen years old, but the Dolgorukis were anxious. Already the Tsar
was peevish and moody, and he gave at times alarmingly sharp replies.
One day as the favoured family gathered round him and amused him with a
game of forfeits, it fell to him, as a forfeit, to kiss his betrothed.
To their consternation he walked out of the room. About the middle of
the month a worse cloud than ever came over their hour of sunshine.
Peter fell ill and--it was whispered among the pale-faced
family--the malady was the dreaded small-pox. Frantic conferences
were held, and some of the family, in their sordid greed and
selfishness, actually proposed to wed the semi-conscious boy and put the
girl abed with him. But Ostermann guarded the chamber, and on January
30th, the day appointed for the wedding, Peter II ended his brief reign.
The succession to the throne was now so open that Moscow teemed with
melodramatic conspiracies. The young bloods of the Dolgoruki party are
said to have forged a will in which Peter left the crown to his
betrothed, but the older men ridiculed the proposal, and the document
does not seem to have been produced. On the other hand, the physician of
the Tsarevna Elizabeth, a born conspirator, roused that young lady from
her sleep and urged her to seize the throne. Elizabeth fluttered over
the romantic proposal, then turned over in bed and deferred it to the
morrow. On the morrow it was too late, for the Privy Council had held
an all-night sitting and come to a singular decision.
Prince Demetrius Golitzuin, one of the older nobles who had never
enjoyed what he regarded as his full share of wealth and power, felt
that it was his turn to make a monarch and enjoy the reward. He decked
his plan with a plausible air of reform. This recent concentration of
power in the hands of an autocrat was the root of all evil, since one
monarch usually meant one favourite. Let them choose a ruler who would
promise in advance--promise on paper--to resign the power to the Privy
Council. He drew up a scheme in which the future sovereign pledged
himself or herself to take no important action--to declare war, or levy
taxes, or punish a noble, or marry, and so on--without their consent.
What candidate would be likely to sign and respect such a promise?
Elizabeth could not be relied upon; in fact, Golitzuin, a proud and
arrogant noble of the old school, detested Peter the Great and regarded
his marriage as void and his daughters as illegitimate. But Peter’s
elder brother, the weak-minded Ivan V, had left three daughters, and the
second of these, Anne, Duchess of Courland, would, it was thought, agree
to almost any conditions if she were offered the crown.
Anne, who was then thirty-seven years old, had had a dull and vexatious
life. Peter had made her and her mother, Prascovia, move to St.
Petersburg, and he had compelled Anne, in her eighteenth year, to marry
the Duke of Courland, for political reasons. The Duke, however, had
found Russian hospitality so overpowering that he had died on the way
home, and the young princess, childless and isolated, had been compelled
to continue the journey and settle at Mitau, the capital of the Duchy.
To control her purse and administer her affairs Peter had sent Count
Besthuzeff, and he laughed heartily when he heard that Anne had made a
lover of him. Presently there came along the familiar type of handsome
and unscrupulous adventurer. The grandson of a groom of an earlier Duke,
named Biren, had a sister in a modest office at court. She was, however,
also a mistress of the Count, and she got a place for her brother. Biren
was clever and ambitious, and it was not long before he supplanted
Besthuzeff in the affection of the Duchess and got him dismissed. Biren
married after a time, and it is claimed that Anne’s very intimate
relations to him after his marriage were purely Platonic. In any case he
remained master of her court, and he would no doubt be consulted on the
strange new problem that confronted her. She had costly tastes and
little money, and glittering Moscow suddenly and unexpectedly rose on
her horizon.
The Privy Councillors had decided that Anne was the most likely of the
surviving Romanoffs--Peter was the last male of the family--to
accept the crown at a reduced price. They had sent a deputation to
Mitau, and a courier presently came hack with the news that she had
signed the conditions. Yaguzhinsky, the drunken and turbulent general
who had often given trouble, had tried a little intrigue of his own. He
had sent a disguised messenger to Mitau to warn Anne, but his messenger
had been caught by Golitzuin’s watchful servants on the return
journey. A general meeting of the great officials and nobles was called,
and the Privy Councillors announced to them that Anne had accepted, and
resigned all power to the Council. It is quaint to read, in letters of
the time, that the once democratic Russians now trembled with anger at
this surrender of the sacred autocracy. The announcement was received in
ominous silence. Golitzuin turned fiercely upon Yaguzhinsky and forced
him to avow his plot; and the general and his associates were arrested
and disgraced. The malcontents were cowed, and Anne came to Moscow.
There can be very little doubt that Anne, who was intelligent, perfectly
understood the situation and was ready, on any pretext, to disavow her
oath. Although Golitzuin set a close guard of servants and soldiers
about her, she soon learned that there was a powerful party in
opposition to the Privy Council, and she entered into correspondence
with it. Count Biren’s baby was her godchild, and she insisted
that it be brought to her chamber every morning to be fondled. A baby
and nurse could do little harm, the sentries thought; but there were
notes from the conspirators pinned underneath the baby’s bib.
Letters were smuggled in presents to the sovereign. Another of the older
nobles, Prince Tcherkasky, was aiming at power, on the approved lines of
Russian tradition (the invariable ghastly ends of which no one seemed to
study), and was organising the conspiracy.
On the morning of May 8th, ten weeks after Anne’s arrival, about
eight hundred of the nobles and gentry assembled in the courtyard of the
Kreml, and, with a select body of officers of the guard, trooped to
Anne’s apartments and asked a hearing. The comedy was gravely
enacted. Anne, surrounded by her court, graciously received the
petitioners, and heard with astonishment that there was dissatisfaction
at her surrender of the autocracy. The Privy Councillors were summoned,
and Tcherkasky and Dolgoruki fought for the lead. Anne hesitated, but
her elder sister, the Duchess of Mecklenburg, turned the scale against
the Privy Council. She would reconsider her act. In the afternoon the
parties returned, and Anne turned severely upon the Councillors.
“Were not those articles you submitted to me framed with the
consent of my subjects?” she asked. It was boisterously affirmed
by the crowd that they were not. “Then you lied,” she said
to the great nobles; and the autocracy was restored, and the roll of
drums and roar of guns and clangour of bells announced with what joy
Moscow took the yoke on its shoulders once more.
For a time it seemed as if the new ruler was too humane to exact the
usual penalties. The Privy Council was abolished, but the Senate was
reorganised and the Golitzuins and Dolgorukis were, to their surprise,
included in the new body. Their wives were welcomed at court, their
relatives promoted. But either Anne awaited the advice of Biren, who had
remained at Mitau for a time, or she prudently ascertained her strength.
In April a flash of the brutal Romanoff temper lit Moscow once more.
Alexis Dolgoruki and his family were arrested and convicted of causing
the death of the late Tsar. The aged father went to Siberia, the younger
men were knouted and exiled, and the young Catherine, the betrothed of
Peter II, was, with a refinement of cruelty, sent to the very spot in
the frozen north where Menshikoff’s daughter, the earlier aspirant to
the crown, had lamented her bitter disappointment. The great proud
family was shattered to atoms.
And the power that their fellow-nobles had snatched from them now passed
mainly to foreigners. Biren established himself in the palace, close
to Anne’s apartments, and became the real autocrat. Anne was too
intelligent to part with the old and experienced ministers. Indeed an
inner cabinet, consisting of Ostermann, Tcherkasky, and Golovkin, was
formed, and the affairs of the State were conscientiously administered.
But the bulk of the lucrative offices fell to Germans and Courlanders.
Russians grumbled, and were snubbed. The fiery Yaguzhinsky was
dissatisfied with his promotion and, in his cups, he spoke freely about
the foreigners. One day, at table, he insulted and drew his sword upon
Biren. He was appointed minister at Berlin. Other nobles were punished
for criticising, and Count Biren settled down to his reign.
The external fortune of the country may be briefly sketched. In the
eternal rise and fall of nations Poland had now sunk to almost its
lowest depth; Sweden was sinking; France was at its zenith, and was in
deadly antagonism to Austria; Prussia was watching and preparing
astutely, and snatching every advantage it could from the quarrels of
its neighbours. The obvious policy of Russia was to remain on good terms
with the nearer of the great Powers, Austria, and it was just as
obviously the policy of France to detach Russia and weaken Austria. The
diplomatic battle rose to a furious pitch over the succession to the
throne of Poland, which Augustus II would soon quit. He naturally wished
to leave the crown to his son, and the French king wished to secure it
for his Polish father-in-law, Lesczynski. Both sides offered bribes to
Biren, and he looked lovingly at the magnificent French offer of half a
million ducats and the Duchy of Courland, but so violent and dangerous a
change of Russian policy was not to be contemplated.
Augustus died, and the Poles were induced to accept Lesczynski. Poland
was now “the sick man of Europe,” as every aspirant to its throne was
ready to barter away some portion of its territory to the greedy Powers.
But Russia would not endure the French candidate, and in the summer of
1733 a Russian army invaded and subdued the Poles. The French retorted,
in the manner of the time, by spurring the Swedes and the Turks to draw
off the Russians, and a long war (1736-1739) with Turkey followed. Azoff
was retaken, and the Russian generals had a hope of annexing the
northern coast of the Black Sea. Anne, however, watched the progress of
the long and costly operations with feminine emotion, and the withdrawal
of Austria from the war gave her and her Council an opportunity to end
it. It had cost the lives of a hundred thousand men and had strained the
Russian treasury; and all that the grumbling country gained was the city
of Azoff and a small area of the surrounding region. It should be added,
however, that, cumbrous as the Russian army was, its prestige rose in
the mind of Europe. Its German commanders and engineers counted for
something.
To the people at large, when the last fireworks had been discharged, the
burden of the war was a new grievance. Anne was not without shrewdness.
She contrived to wring from the impoverished people even the arrears of
taxes, which the frivolity of the late administration had allowed to
accumulate, without ever confronting a serious threat to her rule. But
her careful and generally intelligent government was guilty of one
extravagance which further angered the people. She loved pomp and
display, and she gradually impressed upon her court and aristocracy a
standard of living, especially of dressing, which threatened many with
ruin.
The court returned in 1732 to St. Petersburg, and Biren and she
attempted to give it the elegance and splendour of the first courts of
Europe. Neither had at first much refinement of taste, and foreign
visitors described with amused disdain the veneer of display on the
lingering barbarism of Russia. New uniforms of the most gaudy character
were supplied to the guard and the servants of the court. The nobles
were compelled to spend what seemed to Russians colossal sums in
bringing themselves up to the new standard, and a bewigged and
bepowdered crowd, in dazzling blue or green or pink silks and satins,
replaced the sober-clad boyars of earlier years. Banquets and balls
followed each other in rapid succession, and new dresses must adorn each
occasion; while it is said that the demand for the services of the
elaborate hair-dressers was such that ladies had at times to have their
hair dressed two or three days in advance and carefully preserve the
structure until the evening of the ball.
In her later years Anne, perhaps taught by the pungent criticisms of
foreign guests, developed a sober taste. She was a very tall woman, of
large and not ungraceful build, with grave dark blue eyes and black
hair. In her later years she exchanged her bright blues and greens for
gold brocade or brown silk, her diamonds for pearls; and her officers
had black and yellow liveries, embroidered with silver braid. She did
much to raise the taste of Russia. Although champagne was now introduced
into Russia, she frowned upon the ancient daily habit of intoxication.
Only on one day of the year--the anniversary of her coronation--did she
tolerate heavy drinking. She introduced also a certain lightness and
elegance into open-air feasts, which had in Peter’s day been orgies of
drink and roughness, and she insisted on better manners at table. It was
not long since, at a Russian dinner, one plate had had to serve a guest
through the long and varied series of courses--the punctilious man
wiped his plate with his finger or napkin, or poured the gravy on to the
floor--and a servant had torn scraps of linen or calico off a roll
for the use of those who desired napkins. Into the state of such rooms
when the doors were locked for many hours, as they often were, the
polite modern must not inquire too closely. A good deal of this
grossness lingered in Russia, and Anne set her face against it.
She--the earlier lover of Besthuzeff and Biren--was not less warmly
opposed to laxity of morals. Moderate gambling she herself introduced
and encouraged, but the young folk whom she liked to have about her had
to be careful. When Elizabeth did not reform her free ways, after a few
lovers had been sent to Siberia, she was threatened with a convent.
Anne’s favourite was a niece. Princess Anne of Mecklenburg, an insipid,
good-natured girl whom she was preparing for the throne. The Saxon
envoy, Count Lynar, was discovered in too close a relation to this young
lady, and was sent back to Saxony; whence we shall find him return as
soon as the Tsarina is dead and his lover is on the throne.
In other respects the character of Anne was at the lowest Romanoff
level. She not only delighted in the dwarfs and buffoons, and the rough
knock-about comedies, which had always been popular at the court, but
she found pleasure in refinements of cruelty which Peter would have
thought unchivalrous. She would rock with laughter when her dwarfs got
to bloody noses in their cock-fights, and she sank to the depth of
compelling noble men and women who incurred her anger to enter these
vulgar troops and provide the most puerile amusement. A noble of merit
was condemned to this disgraceful service because Anne hated his wife;
another because he joined the Roman Church. But the most curious and
brutal of all her whims was her treatment of a noble of the great
Golitzuin family.
The man had travelled in Italy and married a Roman Catholic. He was
forty years old and of high birth, yet he was compelled to enter the
company of Anne’s pages and buffoons. When his wife at length
died, Anne said that she would choose a second for him, and she selected
a coarse and ugly Kalmuck woman from the uncivilised fringe of her
Empire. The wedding must be not merely public, but of a nature to
attract the attention of the whole of Russia to his disgrace, and
specimens of all the backward peoples of the Empire were summoned to it.
A long procession of Finns, Lapps, Samoyedes, etc., riding in carts
drawn by pigs or reindeer or other unusual animals, preceded the
miserable groom and his bride, who rode on an elephant, to the church.
All St. Petersburg turned out to see it. In the evening a large banquet
was served to the guests, and the wedded pair then went to the house
which had been made for them. It was the month of February, and a house
had been cut out of solid ice. Cannons of ice exploded at the door, all
the furniture was of ice, and the unfortunate noble and his hideous
companion were enclosed for the night in a room, and upon a bed, of
naked ice. This was in the very year of the Empress’s death.
Anne was scarcely less to blame for the conduct of her favourite. While
Russia groaned under her taxes, his wealth grew to a colossal fortune.
His wife’s diamonds alone were valued at three million rubles. His
stables, his plate, his palaces, were amongst the most superb in Europe.
This wealth was notoriously amassed by corruption and protected by a
system of spies and bullies. In his Duchy of Courland, which he obtained
in 1737 by bribing the electors, his name spelt terror to the poor folk
from whom he had sprung. In Russia itself he ruled by the knout and the
executioner. In 1739 he felt that the Dolgorukis were not quite beyond
the power of making mischief, if the Empress died, and he dragged them
from their exiles and had a fresh trial. One was broken on the wheel,
two were beheaded, and others were imprisoned for life. In the following
year he was insulted in the Council by a certain Voluinsky, whom he had
adopted, but who had turned against him. The man must be broken or he
would himself leave the country, he told the Empress. She sadly
consented, and the man was taken to a scaffold which bore instruments so
horrible that his robust nerve gave way. At the last moment the Empress
benevolently commuted his sentence; he merely lost his right hand and
his head. His companions lost their heads or their tongues, or joined
the melancholy colony in Siberia.
In the summer of 1740 the Princess Anne, who had married Prince Anthony
of Brunswick-Bevern, bore a son, and, as Anne’s health failed, the
feverish dispute about the succession reopened. It was understood that
this infant was to be nominated Tsar, and the natural course would be to
make his parents the Regents. Biren, however, took care to have himself
nominated for the Regency, and he pressed the Empress, whose end was in
sight, to endorse the arrangement. She refused for some days, but on
October 26th she signed the document, and two days later she died.
Another, and still stranger romance, was now to be added to the weird
chronicle of the court of the Romanoffs. Anne of Mecklenburg was the
daughter of the late Empress’s elder sister, who had, we saw, been a
daughter of Peter the Great’s elder brother. She seems to have been very
unlike the other members of the family, though her mother had been a
quiet and temperate princess. Anne herself was a blonde, good-natured
nonentity; a pawn in the game played by her elders. Prince Anthony, who
had even less intelligence and character than she, had been brought
young from Austria, and trained for his marital and royal duties under
the eye of the late Empress. His wife disdained him, and Biren, seeing
her dislike before they were married, suggested that she should marry
instead his fifteen-year-old son. This proposal she rejected even more
vehemently, and in the summer of 1739 she had coldly given her hand to
Anthony.
Biren perceived the delicacy of his position, and he tried, by
concessions to the troops and a reduction of the extravagance which the
late Empress had imposed, to conciliate the country. But from the first
day of his Regency a sullen murmur rose about him and gathered volume.
Prince Anthony was the first to rebel. It was, he said, infamous to
exclude him from the Regency when his son was Tsar; but when Biren
brought him before an assembly of the nobles he saw the shadow of the
scaffold and broke into hysterical tears. He was relieved of his
appointments and ordered to confine himself to his wife’s apartments.
Anne herself then murmured, and Biren threatened to retain the babe, and
send her and her husband to Mecklenburg.
In the group of dignitaries was a German military engineer, Münnich,
who had never yet gambled in the intrigue of making a ruler of the
Russian Empire, and chance and spite now offered him an opportunity. On
November 19th, a few weeks after the death of the late Empress, he had
some business at the chamber of the Princess Anne, and the young mother
tearfully confided to him her humiliations. She and her husband, she
sobbed, would take their child and quit Russia for ever. Münnich was
sympathetic: as she may have been forewarned. Biren had not given him
the post of Commander in Chief, which he coveted. He told Anne to
confide entirely in him, and went off to dine, jovially enough, with
Biren. He was back afterwards at Anne’s chamber, telling her to be
ready for action at three the next morning; and, in order the better to
mask his intrigue, he returned to sup and crack a bottle with the
Regent.
Münnich was Lieutenant-Colonel of the Guard, and at two in the morning
he told his plan to the awakened officers, and they led a picked body of
troops to the Summer Palace. Bluffing the guards with a statement that
he was conducting the Princess Anne to see Biren on some important
business, he took his men to the room in which Biren and his wife slept.
One glance at the massed uniforms behind the Colonel told the amazing
adventurer that his hour had come. He fought like a madman, but was
overpowered and carried off in a quilt. Before the day broke his
brothers and reliable supporters were under arrest, and St. Petersburg
awoke to find that another revolution had been successfully accomplished
at the palace. The hated Courlander was stripped of all his possessions,
and he took that dreary route to Siberia that had been trodden by
thousands of his victims.
But this last romance--of this particular series--had only begun with
the pretty adventure of the German engineer. Münnich inherited Biren’s
vanity and corruption, as well as his power and wealth, but not his
astuteness. In two months he is said to have heaped up a fortune hardly
less than that of Biren, and it was at the grave cost of the State. The
War of the Austrian Succession had opened, and Frederick of Prussia
heavily bribed Münnich to put Russia on his side instead of that of
Maria Theresa. This was too much for the sagacious Ostermann, who
secured a redistribution of power and responsibility. His conceited
fellow-countryman, overestimating the stupidity of the Regents, tendered
his resignation, and it was accepted. Ostermann now resumed the control
of foreign policy, but such matters concern us little here. It is enough
to say that Sweden was spurred by France to a new attack upon Russia,
and was defeated.
In the meantime the new romance was rapidly developing in the court. A
young German woman named Julia Mengden secured, not merely the favours,
but the passionate attachment, of the Regent Anne, and the court was
filled afresh with disgust. Anne, an idle and insipid creature, would
spend almost the whole day playing cards with Julia. She was often too
lazy or too listless to dress, and courtiers found her scantily draped
in Julia’s room at all hours. Other Mengdens were attracted from
the depths of Germany. A new brood of thick-tongued foreigners swarmed
about the court.
Then Count Lynar, the Saxon envoy whom the late Empress had thought it
prudent to remove, returned to St. Petersburg, and to the palace. Julia
married him, but there seems no room for doubt that she was chiefly
concerned to mask her royal friend’s _liaison_ with the Count. Anne had
a second legitimate child, but within a few weeks Julia was holding her
door while Lynar was within. As Anne had no redeeming charm or grace of
character, the court looked on with disdain. Lynar, it was feared, would
succeed to the place of Münnich, Biren, and Menshikoff, and few had a
word for Anne. To her court she presented always a dull and bored look,
and her husband she openly despised.
In the circumstances a fresh intrigue was almost inevitable, and the
only other surviving Romanoff was the Princess Elizabeth. There was,
moreover, a French envoy at St. Petersburg who had the romantic
imagination in its liveliest form, and who concluded that Elizabeth was
precisely the ruler who would best suit the interests of his country. To
obtain power she would, he thought, desert St. Petersburg for Moscow and
surrender the Baltic provinces to the Swedes. He got into touch with
Elizabeth and proposed that she should do this, if he arranged,
simultaneously, a rising in St. Petersburg and an invasion by the
Swedes. Elizabeth refused to yield territory, but she continued the
negotiations. In December Anne detected her correspondence and warmly
scolded her, but the quarrel ended in embraces. That was on December
4th; and in the early morning of December 6th, as Anne slept with her
beloved Julia, a troop of grenadiers, with Princess Elizabeth at their
head, entered the room and made an end of the reign of little Ivan VI
and the Regency of his parents. How that was done belongs to the romance
of the romantic Empress Elizabeth.