A THRONED BARBARIAN
The dawn of the eighteenth century saw the thrones of France and Russia
occupied by two of the most remarkable sovereigns who ever wore a
crown--Louis XIV., the "Sun-King," whose splendours dazzled Europe, and
whose power held it in awe; and Peter I. of Russia, whose destructive
sword swept Europe from Sweden to the Dardenelles, and whose clever
brain laid sure the foundation of his country's greatness. Each of these
Royal rivals dwarfed all other fellow-monarchs as the sun pales the
stars; and yet it would scarcely have been possible to find two men more
widely different in all save their passion for power and their love of
woman, which alone they had in common.
Of the two, Peter is unquestionably to-day the more arresting,
dominating figure. Although nearly two centuries have gone since he made
his exit from the world, we can still picture him in his pride, towering
a head higher than the tallest of his courtiers, swart of face, "as if
he had been born in Africa," with his black, close-curling hair, his
bold, imperious eyes, his powerful, well-knit frame--"the muscles and
stature of a Goliath"--a kingly figure, with majesty in every movement.
We see him, too, wilfully discarding the kingliness with which nature
had so liberally dowered him--now receiving ambassadors "in a short
dressing-gown, below which his bare legs were exposed, a thick nightcap,
lined with linen, on his head, his stockings dropped down over his
slippers"--now walking through the Copenhagen streets grotesque in a
green cap, a brown overcoat with horn buttons, worsted stockings full of
darns, and dirty, cobbled shoes; and again carousing, red of face and
loud of voice, with his meanest subjects in some low tavern.
As the mood seizes him he plays the rôle of fireman for hours together;
goes carol-singing in his sledge, and reaps his harvest of coppers from
the houses of his subjects; rides a hobby-horse at a village fair, and
shrieks with laughter until he falls off; or plies saw and plane in a
shipbuilding yard, sharing the meals and drinking bouts of his
fellow-workmen.
The French Ambassador, Campredon, wrote of him in 1725:--"It is utterly
impossible at the present moment to approach the Tsar on serious
subjects; he is altogether given up to his amusements, which consist in
going every day to the principal houses in the town with a suite of 200
persons, musicians and so forth, who sing songs on every sort of
subject, and amuse themselves by eating and drinking at the expense of
the persons they visit." "He never passed a single day without being
the worse for drink," Baron Pöllnitz tells us; and his drinking
companions were usually chosen from the most degraded of his subjects,
of both sexes, with whom he consorted on the most familiar terms.
When his muddled brain occasionally awoke to the knowledge that he was a
King, he would bully and hector his boon-comrades like any drunken
trooper. On one occasion, when a young Jewess refused to drain a goblet
of neat brandy which he thrust into her hand, he promptly administered
two resounding boxes on her ears, shouting, "Vile Hebrew spawn! I'll
teach thee to obey."
There was in him, too, a vein of savage cruelty which took remarkable
forms. A favourite pastime was to visit the torture-chamber and gloat
over the sufferings of the victims of the knout and the strappado; or to
attend (and frequently to officiate at) public executions. Once, we are
told, at a banquet, he "amused himself by decapitating twenty Streltsy,
emptying as many glasses of brandy between successive strokes, and
challenging the Prussian envoy to repeat the feat."
Mad? There can be little doubt that Peter had madness in his veins. He
was a degenerate and an epileptic, subject to brain storms which
terrified all who witnessed them. "A sort of convulsion seized him,
which often for hours threw him into a most distressing condition. His
body was violently contorted; his face distorted into horrible grimaces;
and he was further subject to paroxysms of rage, during which it was
almost certain death to approach him." Even in his saner moods, as
Waliszewski tells us, he "joined to the roughness of a Russian _barin_
all the coarseness of a Dutch sailor." Such in brief suggestion was
Peter I. of Russia, half-savage, half-sovereign, the strangest jumble of
contradictions who has ever worn the Imperial purple--"a huge mastodon,
whose moral perceptions were all colossal and monstrous."
It was, perhaps, inevitable that a man so primitive, so little removed
from the animal, should find his chief pleasures in low pursuits and
companionships. During his historic visit to London, after a hard day's
work with adze and saw in the shipbuilding yard, the Tsar would adjourn
with his fellow-workmen to a public-house in Great Tower Street, and
"smoke and drink ale and brandy, almost enough to float the vessel he
had been helping to construct."
And in his own kingdom the favourite companions of his debauches were
common soldiers and servants.
"He chose his friends among the common herd; looked after his household
like any shopkeeper; thrashed his wife like a peasant; and sought his
pleasure where the lower populace generally finds it." His female
companions were chosen rather for their coarseness than their charms,
and pleased him most when they were drunk. It was thus fitting that he
should make an Empress of a scullery-maid, who, as we have seen in an
earlier chapter, had no vestige of beauty to commend her to his favour,
and whose chief attractions in his eyes were that she had a coarse
tongue and was a "first-rate toper."
It was thus a strange and unhappy caprice of fate that united Peter,
while still a youth, to his first Empress, the refined and sensitive
Eudoxia, a woman as remote from her husband as the stars. Never was
there a more incongruous bride than this delicately nurtured girl
provided by the Empress Nathalie for her coarse-grained son. From the
hour at which they stood together at the altar the union was doomed to
tragic failure; before the honeymoon waned Peter had terrified his bride
by his brutality and disgusted her by the open attentions he paid to his
favourites of the hour, the daughters of Botticher, the goldsmith, and
Mons, the wine-merchant.
For five years husband and wife saw little of each other; and when, in
1694, Nathalie's death removed the one influence which gave the union at
least the outward form of substance, Peter lost no time in exhibiting
his true colours. He dismissed all Eudoxia's relatives from the Court,
and sent her father into exile. One brother he caused to be whipped in
public; another was put to the torture, which had its horrible climax
when Peter himself saturated his victim's clothes with spirits of wine,
and then set them on fire. For Eudoxia a different fate was reserved.
Not only had he long grown weary of her insipid beauty and of her
refinement and gentleness, which were a constant mute reproach to his
own low tastes and hectoring manners--he had grown to hate the very
sight of her, and determined that she should no longer stand between him
and the unbridled indulgence of his pleasure.
During his visit to England he never once wrote to her, and on his
return to Moscow his first words were a brutal announcement of his
intention to be rid of her. In vain she pleaded and wept. To her tearful
inquiries, "What have I done to offend you? What fault have you to find
with me?" he turned a deaf ear. "I never want to see you again," were
his last inexorable words. A few days later a hackney coach drove up to
the palace doors; the unhappy Tsarina was bundled unceremoniously into
it, and she was carried away to the nunnery of the "Intercession of the
Blessed Virgin," whose doors were closed on her for a score of years.
Pitiful years they were for the young Empress, consigned by her husband
to a life that was worse than death--robbed of her rank, her splendours,
and luxuries, her very name--she was now only Helen, the nun, faring
worse than the meanest of her sister-nuns; for while they at least had
plenty to eat, the Tsarina seems many a time to have known the pangs of
hunger. The letters she wrote to one of her brothers are pathetic
evidence of the straits to which she was reduced. "For pity's sake," she
wrote, "give me food and drink. Give clothes to the beggar. There is
nothing here. I do not need a great deal; still I must eat."
It is not to be wondered at, that, in her misery, she should turn
anywhere for succour and sympathy; and both came to her at last in the
guise of Major Glebof, an officer in the district, whose heart was
touched by the sadness of her fate. He sent her food and wine to restore
her strength, and warm furs to protect her from the iciness of her cell.
In response to her letters of thanks, he visited her again and again,
bringing sunshine into her darkened life with his presence, and soothing
her with words of sympathy and encouragement, until gratitude to the
"good Samaritan" grew into love for the man.
When she learned that the man who had so befriended her was himself
poor, actually in money difficulties, she insisted on giving him every
rouble she could wring, by any abject appeal, out of her friends and
relatives. She became his very slave, grovelling at his feet. "Where thy
heart is, dearest one," she wrote to him, "there is mine also; where thy
tongue is, there is my head; thy will is also mine." She loved him with
a passion which broke down all barriers of modesty and prudence,
reckless of the fact that he had a wife, as she had a husband.
When Major Glebof's visits and letters grew more and more infrequent,
she suffered tortures of anxiety and despair. "My light, my soul, my
joy," she wrote in one distracted letter, "has the cruel hour of
separation come already? O, my light! how can I live apart from thee?
How can I endure existence? Rather would I see my soul parted from my
body. God alone knows how dear thou art to me. Why do I love thee so
much, my adored one, that without thee life is so worthless? Why art
thou angry with me? Why, my _batioushka_, dost thou not come to see me?
Have pity on me, O my lord, and come to see me to-morrow. O, my world,
my dearest and best, answer me; do not let me die of grief."
Thus one distracted, incoherent letter followed another, heart-breaking
in their grief, pitiful in their appeal. "Come to me," she cried;
"without thee I shall die. Why dost thou cause me such anguish? Have I
been guilty without knowing it? Better far to have struck me, to have
punished me in any way, for this fault I have innocently committed." And
again: "Why am I not dead? Oh, that thou hadst buried me with thy own
hands! Forgive me, O my soul! Do not let me die.... Send me but a crust
of bread thou hast bitten with thy teeth, or the waistcoat thou hast
often worn, that I may have something to bring thee near to me."
What answers, if any, the Major vouchsafed to these pathetic letters we
know not. The probability is that they received no answer--that the
"good Samaritan" had either wearied of or grown alarmed at a passion
which he could not return, and which was fraught with danger. It was
accident only that revealed to the world the story of this strange and
tragic infatuation.
When the Tsarevitch, Alexis, was brought to trial in 1718 on a charge of
conspiracy against his father, Peter, suspecting that Eudoxia had had a
hand in the rebellion, ordered a descent on the nunnery and an inquiry.
Nothing was found to connect her with her son's ill-fated venture; but
the inquiry revealed the whole story of her relations with the too
friendly officer. The evidence of the nuns and servants alone--evidence
of frequent and long meetings by day and night, of embraces
exchanged--was sufficiently conclusive, without the incriminating
letters which were discovered in the Major's bureau, labelled "Letters
from the Tsarina," or Eudoxia's confession which was extorted from her.
This was an opportunity of vengeance such as exceeded all the Tsar's
hopes. Glebof was arrested and put on his trial. Evidence was forced
from the nuns by the lashing of the knout, so severe that some of them
died under it. Glebof, subjected to such frightful tortures that in his
agony he confessed much more than the truth, was sentenced to death by
impalement. In order to prolong his suffering to the last possible
moment, he was warmly wrapped in furs, to protect him from the bitter
cold, and for twenty-eight hours he suffered indescribable agony, until
at last death came to his release.
As for Eudoxia, her punishment was a public flogging and consignment to
a nunnery still more isolated and miserable than that in which she had
dragged out twenty years of her broken life. Here she remained for seven
years, until, on the Tsar's death, an even worse fate befell her. She
was then, by Catherine's orders, taken from the convent, and flung into
the most loathsome, rat-infested dungeon of the fortress of
Schlussenberg, where she remained for two years of unspeakable horror.
Then at last, after nearly thirty years of life that was worse than
death, the sun shone again for her. One day her dungeon door flew open,
and to the bowing of obsequious courtiers, the prisoner was conducted to
a sumptuous apartment. "The walls were hung with splendid stuffs; the
table was covered with gold-plate; ten thousand roubles awaited her in
a casket. Courtiers stood in her ante-chamber; carriages and horses
were at her orders."
Catherine, the "scullery-Empress," was dead; Eudoxia's grandson, Peter
II., now wore the crown of Russia; and Eudoxia found herself
transported, as by the touch of a magic wand, from her loathsome
prison-cell to the old-time splendours of palaces--the greatest lady in
all Russia, to whom Princesses, ambassadors, and courtiers were all
proud to pay respectful homage. But the transformation had come too
late; her life was crushed beyond restoration; and after a few months of
her new glory she was glad to find an asylum once more within convent
walls, until Death, the great healer of broken hearts, took her to
where, "beyond these voices, there is peace."
* * * * *
While Eudoxia was eating her heart out in her convent cell, her husband
was finding ample compensation for her absence in Bacchanalian orgies
and the company of his galaxies of favourites, from tradesmen's
daughters to servant-maids of buxom charms, such as the Livonian
peasant-girl, in whom he found his second Empress.
Of the almost countless women who thus fell under his baneful influence
one stands out from the rest by reason of the tragedy which surrounds
her memory. Mary Hamilton was no low-born maid, such as Peter especially
chose to honour with his attentions. She had in her veins the blood of
the ducal Hamiltons of Scotland, and of many a noble family of Russia,
from which her more immediate ancestors had taken their wives; and it
was an ill fate that took her, when little more than a child, to the
most debased Court of Europe to play the part of maid-of-honour, and
thus to cross the path of the most unprincipled lover in Europe.
Peter's infatuation for the pretty young "Scotswoman," however, was but
short-lived. She had none of the vulgar attractions that could win him
to any kind of constancy; and he quickly abandoned her for the more
agreeable company of his _dienshtchiks_, leaving her to find consolation
in the affection of more courtly, if less exalted, lovers--notably the
young Count Orloff, who proved as faithless as his master.
Such was Mary's infatuation for the worthless Count that, under his
influence, she stooped to various kinds of crime, from stealing the
Tsarina's jewels to fill her lover's purse, to infanticide. The climax
came when an important document was missing from the Tsar's cabinet.
Suspicion pointed to Orloff as the thief; he was arrested, and, when
brought into Peter's presence, not only confessed to the thefts and to
his share in making away with the undesirable infants, but betrayed the
partner of his guilt.
There was short shrift for poor Mary Hamilton when she was put on her
trial on these grave charges. She made full confession of her crimes;
but no torture could wring from her the name of the man for love of whom
she had committed them, and of whose treachery to her she was ignorant.
She was sentenced to death; and one March day, in the year 1719, she
was led to the scaffold "in a white silk gown trimmed with black
ribbons."
Then followed one of the grimmest scenes recorded in history. Peter, the
man who had been the first to betray her, and who had refused her pardon
even when her cause was pleaded by his wife, was a keenly interested
spectator of her execution. At the foot of the scaffold he embraced her,
and exhorted her to pray, before stepping aside to give place to the
headsman. When the axe had done its deadly work, he again stepped
forward, picked up the lifeless and still beautiful head which had
rolled into the mud, and calmly proceeded to give a lecture on anatomy
to the assembled crowd, "drawing attention to the number and nature of
the organs severed by the axe." His lecture concluded, he kissed the
pale, dead lips, crossed himself, and walked away with a smile of
satisfaction on his face.