Continuation of the Travels of Peter the Great.--Conspiracy of baron
Gortz.--Reception of the czar in France.
He plainly saw that his allies were jealous of his power, and found that
there is often more trouble with friends than with enemies.
Mecklenburg was one of the principal subjects of those divisions, which
almost always subsist between neighbouring princes, who share in
conquests. Peter was not willing that the Danes should take possession
of Wismar for themselves, and still less that they should demolish the
fortifications, and yet they did both the one and the other.
He openly protected the duke of Mecklenburg, who had married his niece,
and whom he regarded like a son-in-law, against the nobility of the
country, and the king of England as openly protected these latter. On
the other hand, he was greatly discontented with the king of Poland, or
rather with his minister, count Flemming, who wanted to throw off that
dependance on the czar, which necessity and gratitude had imposed.
The courts of England, Poland, Denmark, Holstein, Mecklenburg, and
Brandenburg, were severally agitated with intrigues and cabals.
Towards the end of the year 1716, and beginning of 1717, Gortz, who, as
Bassewitz tells us in his Memoirs, was weary of having only the title of
counsellor of Holstein, and being only private plenipotentiary to
Charles XII. was the chief promoter of these intrigues, with which he
intended to disturb the peace of all Europe. His design was to bring
Charles XII. and the czar together, not only with a view to finish the
war between them, but to unite them in friendship, to replace Stanislaus
on the crown of Poland, and to wrest Bremen and Verden out of the hands
of George I., king of England, and even to drive that prince from the
English throne, in order to put it out of his power to appropriate to
himself any part of the spoils of Charles XII.
There was at the same time a minister of his own character, who had
formed a design to overturn the two kingdoms of England and France: this
was cardinal Alberoni, who had more power at that time in Spain, than
Gortz had in Sweden, and was of as bold and enterprising a spirit as
himself, but much more powerful, as being at the head of affairs in a
kingdom infinitely more rich, and never paid his creatures and
dependants in copper money.
Gortz, from the borders of the Baltic Sea, soon formed a connexion with
Alberoni in Spain. The cardinal and he both held a correspondence with
all the wandering English who were in the interest of the house of
Stuart. Gortz made visits to every place where he thought he was likely
to find any enemies of king George, and went successively to Germany,
Holland, Flanders, and Lorrain, and at length came to Paris, about the
end of the year 1716. Cardinal Alberoni began, by remitting to him in
Paris a million of French livres, in order (to use the cardinal's
expression) to set fire to the train.
Gortz proposed, that Charles XII. should yield up several places to the
czar, in order to be in a condition to recover all the others from his
enemies, and that he might be at liberty to make a descent in Scotland,
while the partisans of the Stuart family should make an effectual rising
in England: after their former vain attempts to effect these views, it
was necessary to deprive the king of England of his chief support, which
at that time was the regent of France. It was certainly very
extraordinary, to see France in league with England, against the
grandson of Lewis XIV., whom she herself had placed on the throne of
Spain, at the expence of her blood and treasure, notwithstanding the
strong confederacy formed to oppose him; but it must be considered, that
every thing was now out of its natural order, and the interests of the
regent not those of the kingdom. Alberoni, at that time, was carrying on
a confederacy in France against this very regent.[97] And the
foundations of this grand project were laid almost as soon as the plan
itself had been formed. Gortz was the first who was let into the secret,
and was to have made a journey into Italy in disguise, to hold a
conference with the pretender, in the neighbourhood of Rome; from
thence he was to have hastened to the Hague, to have an interview with
the czar, and then to have settled every thing with the king of Sweden.
The author of this History is particularly well informed of every
circumstance here advanced, for baron Gortz proposed to him to accompany
him in these journies; and, notwithstanding he was very young at that
time, he was one of the first witnesses to a great part of these
intrigues.
Gortz returned from Holland in the latter part of 1716, furnished with
bills of exchange from cardinal Alberoni, and letters plenipotentiary
from Charles XII. It is incontestable that the Jacobite party were to
have made a rising in England, while Charles, in his return from Norway,
was to make a descent in the north of Scotland. This prince, who had not
been able to preserve his own dominions on the continent, was now going
to invade and overrun those of his neighbours, and just escaped from his
prison in Turkey, and from amidst the ruins of his own city of
Stralsund, Europe might have beheld him placing the crown of Great
Britain on the head of James III. in London, as he had before done that
of Poland on Stanislaus at Warsaw.
The czar, who was acquainted with a part of Gortz's projects, waited for
the unfolding of the rest, without entering into any of his plans, or
indeed knowing them all. He was as fond of great and extraordinary
enterprises as Charles XII., Gortz, or Alberoni; but then it was as the
founder of a state, a lawgiver, and a sound politician; and perhaps
Alberoni, Gortz, and even Charles himself, were rather men of restless
souls, who sought after great adventures, than persons of solid
understanding, who took their measures with a just precaution; or
perhaps, after all, their ill successes may have subjected them to the
charge of rashness and imprudence.
During Gortz's stay at the Hague, the czar did not see him, as it would
have given too much umbrage to his friends the states-general, who were
in close alliance with, and attached to, the party of the king of
England; and even his ministers visited him only in private, and with
great precaution, having orders from their master to hear all he had to
offer, and to flatter him with hopes, without entering into any
engagement, or making use of his (the czar's) name in their conferences.
But, notwithstanding all these precautions, those who understood the
nature of affairs, plainly saw by his inactivity, when he might have
made a descent upon Scania with the joint fleets of Russia and Denmark,
by his visible coolness towards his allies, and the little regard he
paid to their complaints, and lastly, by this journey of his, that there
was a great change in affairs, which would very soon manifest itself.
In the month of January, 1717, a Swedish packet-boat, which was carrying
letters over to Holland, being forced by a storm upon the coast of
Norway, put into harbour there. The letters were seized, and those of
baron de Gortz and some other public ministers being opened, furnished
sufficient evidence of the projected revolution. The court of Denmark
communicated these letters to the English ministry, who gave orders for
arresting the Swedish minister, Gillembourg, then at the court of
London, and seizing his papers; upon examining which they discovered
part of his correspondence with the Jacobites.
Feb. 1717.] King George immediately wrote to the states-general,
requiring them to cause the person of baron Gortz to be arrested,
agreeable to the treaty of union subsisting between England and that
republic for their mutual security. But this minister, who had his
creatures and emissaries in every part, was quickly informed of this
order; upon which he instantly quitted the Hague, and was got as far as
Arnheim, a town on the frontiers, when the officers and guards, who were
in pursuit of him, and who are seldom accustomed to use such diligence
in that country, came up with and took him, together with all his
papers: he was strictly confined and severely treated; the secretary
Stank, the person who had counterfeited the sign manual of the young
duke of Holstein, in the affair of Toningen, experienced still harsher
usage. In fine, the count of Gillembourg, the Swedish envoy to the court
of Great Britain, and the baron de Gortz, minister plenipotentiary from
Charles XII. were examined like criminals, the one at London, and the
other at Arnheim, while all the foreign ministers exclaimed against this
violation of the law of nations.
This privilege, which is much more insisted upon than understood, and
whose limits and extent have never yet been fixed, has, in almost every
age, received violent attacks. Several ministers have been driven from
the courts where they resided in a public character, and even their
persons have been more than once seized upon, but this was the first
instance of foreign ministers being interrogated at the bar of a court
of justice, as if they were natives of the country. The court of London
and the states-general laid aside all rules upon seeing the dangers
which menaced the house of Hanover; but, in fact, this danger, when once
discovered, ceased to be any longer danger, at least at that juncture.
The historian Norberg must have been very ill informed, and have had a
very indifferent knowledge of men and things, or at least have been
strangely blinded by partiality, or under severe restrictions from his
own court, to endeavour to persuade his readers, that the king of Sweden
had not a very great share in this plot.
The affront offered to his ministers fixed Charles more than ever in his
resolution to try every means to dethrone the king of England. But here
he found it necessary, once in his life time, to make use of
dissimulation. He disowned his ministers and their proceedings, both to
the regent of France and the states-general; from the former of whom he
evicted a subsidy, and with the latter it was for his interest to
keep fair. He did not, however, give the king of England so much
satisfaction, and his ministers, Gortz and Gillembourg, were kept six
months in confinement, and this repeated insult animated in him the
desire of revenge.
Peter, in the midst of all these alarms and jealousies, kept himself
quiet, waiting with patience the event of all from time; and having
established such good order throughout his vast dominions, as that he
had nothing to fear, either at home or from abroad, he resolved to make
a journey to France. Unhappily he did not understand the French
language, by which means he was deprived of the greatest advantage he
might have reaped from his journey; but he thought there might be
something there worthy observation, and he had a mind to be a nearer
witness of the terms on which the regent stood with the king of England,
and whether that prince was staunch to his alliance.
Peter the Great was received in France as such a monarch ought to be.
Marshal Tessé was sent to meet him, with a number of the principal
lords of the court, a company of guards and the king's coaches; but he,
according to his usual custom, travelled with such expedition, that he
was at Gournay when the equipages arrived at Elbeuf. Entertainments were
made for him in every place on the road where he chose to partake of
them. On his arrival he was received in the Louvre, where the royal
apartments were prepared for him, and others for the princes Kourakin
and Dolgorouki, the vice-chancellor Shaffiroff, the ambassador Tolstoy,
the same who had suffered in his person that notorious violation of the
laws of nations in Turkey, and for the rest of his retinue. Orders were
given for lodging and entertaining him in the most splendid and
sumptuous manner: but Peter, who was come only to see what might be of
use to him, and not to suffer these ceremonious triflings, which were a
restraint upon his natural plainness, and consumed a time that was
precious to him, went the same night to take up his lodgings at the
other end of the city in the hotel of Lesdiguiére, belonging to marshal
Villeroi, where he was entertained at the king's expense in the same
manner as he would have been at the Louvre. The next day (May 8, 1717.)
the regent of France went to make him a visit in the before mentioned
hotel, and the day afterwards the young king, then an infant, was sent
to him under the care of his governor, the marshal de Villeroi, whose
father had been governor to Lewis XIV. On this occasion, they, by a
polite artifice, spared the czar the troublesome restraint of returning
this visit immediately after receiving it, by allowing an interview of
two days for him to receive the respects of the several corporations of
the city; the second night he went to visit the king: the household were
all under arms, and they brought the young king quite to the door of
the czar's coach. Peter, surprised and uneasy at the prodigious
concourse of people assembled about the infant monarch, took him in his
arms, and carried him in that manner for some time.
Certain ministers, of more cunning than understanding, have pretended in
their writings, that marshal de Villeroi wanted to make the young king
of France take the upper hand on this occasion, and that the czar made
use of this stratagem to overturn the ceremonial under the appearance of
good nature and tenderness; but this notion is equally false and absurd.
The natural good breeding of the French court, and the respect due to
the person of Peter the Great, would not permit a thought of turning the
honours intended him into an affront. The ceremonial consisted in doing
every thing for a great monarch and a great man, that he himself could
have desired, if he had given any attention to matters of this kind. The
journeys of the emperor Charles IV. Sigismund, and Charles V. to France,
were by no means comparable, in point of splendour, to this of Peter the
Great. They visited this kingdom only from motives of political
interest, and at a time when the arts and sciences, as yet in their
infancy, could not render the era of their journey so memorable: but
when Peter the Great, on his going to dine with the duke d'Antin, in the
palace of Petitbourg, about three leagues out of Paris, saw his own
picture, which had been drawn for the occasion, brought on a sudden, and
placed in a room where he was, he then found that no people in the world
knew so well how to receive such a guest as the French.
He was still more surprised, when, on going to see them strike the
medals in the long gallery of the Louvre, where all the king's artists
are so handsomely lodged; a medal, which they were then striking,
happening to fall to the ground, the czar stooped hastily down to take
it up, when he beheld his own head engraved thereon, and on the reverse
a Fame standing with one foot upon a globe, and underneath these words
from Virgil--'Vires acquirit eundo;' an allusion equally delicate and
noble, and elegantly adapted to his travels and his fame. Several of
these medals in gold were presented to him, and to all those who
attended him. Wherever he went to view the works of any artists, they
laid the master-pieces of their performances at his feet, which they
besought him to accept. In a word, when he visited the manufactories of
the Gobelins, the workshop of the king's statuaries, painters,
goldsmiths, jewellers, or mathematical instrument-makers, whatever
seemed to strike his attention at any of those places, were always
offered him in the king's name.
Peter, who was a mechanic, an artist, and a geometrician, went to visit
the academy of sciences, who received him with an exhibition of every
thing they had most valuable and curious; but they had nothing so
curious as himself. He corrected, with his own hand, several
geographical errors in the charts of his own dominions, and especially
in those of the Caspian Sea. Lastly, he condescended to become one of
the members of that academy, and afterwards continued a correspondence
in experiments and discoveries with those among whom he had enrolled
himself as a simple brother. If we would find examples of such
travellers as Peter, we must go back to the times of a Pythagoras and an
Anacharsis, and even they did not quit the command of a mighty empire,
to go in search of instruction.
And here we cannot forbear recalling to the mind of the reader the
transport with which Peter the Great was seized on viewing the monument
of cardinal Richelieu. Regardless of the beauties of the sculpture,
which is a master-piece of its kind, he only admired the image of a
minister who had rendered himself so famous throughout Europe by
disturbing its peace, and restored to France that glory which she had
lost after the death of Henry IV. It is well known, that, embracing the
statue with rapture, he burst forth into this exclamation--'Great man! I
would have bestowed one half of my empire on thee, to have taught me to
govern the other.' And now, before he quitted France, he was desirous to
see the famous madame de Maintenon, whom he knew to be, in fact, the
widow of Lewis XIV. and who was now drawing very near her end; and his
curiosity was the more excited by the kind of conformity he found
between his own marriage and that of Lewis; though with this difference
between the king of France and him, that he had publickly married an
heroine, whereas Lewis XIV. had only privately enjoyed an amiable wife.
The czarina did not accompany her husband in this journey: he was
apprehensive that the excess of ceremony would be troublesome to her, as
well as the curiosity of a court little capable of distinguishing the
true merit of a woman, who had braved death by the side of her husband
both by sea and land, from the banks of the Pruth to the coast of
Finland.