214 DISPUTES BETWEEN DENMARK AND HOLSTEIN. [BOOK V. pretence of the war, he contemplated introducing Saxon troops into Poland, and by reducing the party opposed to him in that kingdom, to make himself absolute, and render the crown hereditary in his family. To conciliate the leading Poles to his views, Cardinal Radziejowski, the primate of Poland, who enjoyed extensive influence, was bribed with 100,000 rix-dollars, which Patkul offered to him in the name of the nobles of Livonia; and a kind of capitulation was drawn up and signed by Augustus, August 24th 1699, for the future government and constitution of that province.2 As the King of Poland could not hope by himself successfully to oppose the power of Sweden, he determined to form alliances with such neighbouring princes as, like himself, were jealous of the Swedish might and ambition, or desirous of recovering some of the provinces which had been wrested from them by the Swedish arms. He first applied to the King of Denmark, the natural rival of Sweden, and now further embittered against that Power by the part which the Swedish King had taken against him in his quarrels with the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. Fresh disputes had arisen in 1694 between Christian V. and Frederick, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. The Danish Court having raised some difficulties about their common subjects doing homage to Frederick, the latter, with the aid of Swedish soldiers, constructed some new forts. In 1696 he formed an alliance with the Duke of Brunswick Lüneburg, in which Sweden was included; and subsequently he entered into treaties with Great Britain and the States-General; which Powers, in consideration of his furnishing a certain number of men for the war against France, guaranteed him from any attempt at coercion on the part of Denmark. The Emperor now interposed, and in August 1696, a conference was opened at Pinneberg, in which the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg acted as mediators between the King of Denmark and the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. The debates were, however, protracted, and while the conference was still going on Charles XI. of Sweden died (April 5th 1697). His successor, Charles XII., was the intimate friend of the Duke of Holstein, with whom he had been educated. In 1698 Charles gave the Duke his sister in marriage, and promised to support him in his quarrels with Denmark; while Christian V. on his side concluded a secret defensive alliance with the Elector of Saxony, who, as already related, had been elected to the Polish crown in June 1697, with the title of Augustus II. In the year 1699, Christian, having forcibly demo Schmauss, Einleitung zu der Staatswissenschaft, B. ii. S. 253. Dumont, t. vii. pt. ii. P. 366. lished the fortifications erected by the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, the latter sought the aid of his brother-in-law, Charles XII.; and, having been made generalissimo of the Swedish forces stationed in Germany, he entered his duchy with a body of Swedes and reconstructed his forts. In the midst of these events Christian V. died, August 25th 1699. Frederick IV., his successor on the Danish throne, resolved to extend the alliance already entered into with Augustus II., and to make it an offensive one; and a treaty for that purpose was signed at Dresden, September 25th 1699. It was arranged that Augustus should invade Livonia, while Frederick should divert the Swedish forces by an attack upon Holstein. In order, however, to insure the success of these measures, Augustus resolved to obtain the assistance of the Czar Peter, with whom a treaty was concluded, November 21st. This prince was now to play a remarkable part in the affairs of Europe, and it will therefore be proper to give a short account of his career. The infirmities of Ivan, the next brother of Feodor, rendered him totally incapable to reign. Besides being weak of mind, he was almost blind and dumb; and in consequence of these disqualifications he solemnly renounced the crown in favour of his young step-brother Peter, in presence of the clergy, magistrates, soldiers, and citizens, who had assembled at the Kremlin, immediately after the death of Feodor, in April 1682. Peter now received the usual homage; but, as he was only in his tenth year, his mother, the Czarina Natalia Kirillowna, was declared Regent during his minority. Sophia, however, the third sister of Feodor, an ambitious and enterprising princess, having formed a party in her favour, and gained over the Strelitzes, a body of troops that resembled, by their privileges and influence, as well as by their unruly conduct, the Turkish Janissaries, succeeded in seizing the reins of government; when she caused Ivan to be proclaimed Czar jointly with Peter, and herself to be invested with the Regency. She even pretended to the title of Autocrat, and, with her paramour Golizyn, ruled everything at her pleasure. Sophia was in person a monster of deformity; very short, enormously fat, with a head as big as a bushel measure, and a face covered with hair; but under this repulsive exterior was concealed a mind of extraordinary acuteness, although capable of committing the greatest crimes for the attainment of power." She had formed the design of espousing Golizyn, by whom she had children, after he should Hojer, Leben Friderichs IV., B. i. S. 21. 216 PETER THE GREAT. [Book V. have succeeded in shutting up his wife in a convent; they were then to set aside at a favourable opportunity the claims of Peter, and virtually to rule the state in the name of the incapable Ivan. But these plans were defeated by the courage and conduct of Peter. The marriage of the young Czar, in January 1689, with Eudoxia Feodorowna, a young lady belonging to the rich and ancient family of the Lapuchin, served very much to increase his power and influence; and he soon took an opportunity to assert himself. In the following June, on the occasion of a public solemnity at Moscow, he insisted that his sister should appear, not as Regent and Autocrat, but only as Grand Princess; and, on her refusing to comply, he banished her from the city. Sophia now formed a conspiracy to take Peter's life, in which she engaged some of the Strelitzes. But Peter, having received timely notice of the plot, escaped by flight the sword of the assassins; turned all Sophia's arts against her; accused her and her paramour of high treason; caused Golizyn and several other nobles to be banished, and Sophia to be shut up in a convent which she had herself erected at a little distance from Moscow (September 7th). Two days after, Peter entered the capital on horseback, mustered the now obedient Strelitzes to the number of 18,000, and conducted his wife and his mother in state to the Kremlin, amid the enthusiastic shouts of the people. Thus did Peter, at the age of seventeen, become sole ruler of the Russian Empire. He displayed, however, the greatest affection for his unfortunate brother, Ivan; and, till the death of that prince in 1697, allowed his name to appear at the head of all the Imperial Ukases. Peter now applied himself to reform the State, and particularly the army, in which cares he was assisted by General Patrick Gordon and Le Fort, a Genevese. He also directed his attention to commercial affairs and to the navy. In order to extend the Russian trade he was desirous of getting a footing both on the Baltic and the Black Sea, and to possess a navy that might protect the commerce thus created. He invited shipbuilders from Holland, whom he employed in building small vessels on the Russian lakes; and, in company with these men, whom he treated as his familiar friends, he speedily acquired the Dutch language. Dissatisfied, however, with such small efforts, Peter journeyed, in the summer of 1693 and following year, to Archangel, the only part of his dominions where he could obtain any practical knowledge of the sea and maritime affairs. Here he assumed the dress and exterior of a Dutch skipper, made small voyages in his yacht, and sometimes appeared on the exchange and made contracts with the merchants. It was during Peter's abode at Archangel that the keel of the first Russian merchant-vessel was laid down. It left that port in 1695 to carry, for the first time, the Russian flag into foreign harbours. In that and the following year Russia was engaged in the war in the Crimea, as already related. After the capture of Azof, in 1696, Peter relinquished the conduct of the war to his generals, in order that he might carry out a plan that he had formed for acquiring knowledge by travelling into foreign countries. Before he set out, his life was again exposed to extreme danger through a conspiracy which his sister Sophia had hatched against him on the occasion of the death of their brother Ivan, in January 1697; for Peter's reforms had excited great discontent among certain classes. But, having discovered and frustrated this design, and punished the ringleaders, the young Czar set out on his travels early in March." His first journey was to Riga, whither he proceeded, under the name of Peter Michailoff, in the character of a military officer and one of the members of a splendid embassy consisting of 270 persons. The Czar's reception here by Count Dahlberg, the Swedish commandant, was afterwards made one of the pretences for his war with Sweden. From Riga Peter made his way through Königsberg and Berlin to Saardam in Holland. Here he hired from a poor widow an apartment, consisting of two rooms, in a back-dwelling, and putting on the dress of a common labourer, obtained employment in one of the dockyards as a shipbuilder. It must be confessed that he was more in his element here than among the beau monde, such as it then was, of Riga and Berlin, whom he at once amused and shocked by a strange mixture of barbarism, vivacity, and bashfulness. Thus, at a supper given by the Elector, alarmed by the fall of some earthenware on the marble floor, he sprang up from table, drew his sword and put himself upon his guard; and when he was at last satisfied that it was an accident, he demanded that the waiter who had caused it should be severely punished. On another occasion he snatched a smart new-fashioned peruke from the head of a master of the ceremonies, and, after examining it minutely, flung it away with a loud laugh. Peter seems to have been more at 7 • In a letter written this year the person of the Czar is thus described: "C'est un prince d'une fort grande taille, puissant, robuste, beau de visage; et quoiqu'il ait l'oeil vif, noir, et perçant, quand il parle avec action, il a pourtant la physionomie très douce. Il est très affable et souhaite même qu'on l'entretienne de tout ce qui est curieux." See Brand, Relation du Voyage de Mr. Evert Isbrand, Envoyé de sa M. C. à l'Empereur de la Chine, p. 233. (Amst. 1699.) For these and other anecdotes of his travels see Bergmann, Peter der Grosse, B. i. S. 251 ff. Descriptions of the Czar's manners will also be found in the 218 THE CZAR PETER, A DAY LABOURER. [BOOK V. home when drinking a glass of Geneva with the mothers or wives of his adopted fellow-workmen, or throwing plums from his hat to the boys in the streets of Saardam. When the Russian embassy entered Amsterdam with great splendour, Peter took his place in one of the last coaches, amid the noblemen who filled it; and while his representatives were living in state and luxury in houses rented for 100,000 guilders, he himself occupied a small lodging on the quay, boiled his own pot, and lived in every respect like a common labourer, under the name of Master Peter, or Carpenter Peter of Saardam. Our space will not allow us to dwell on all the adventures and pursuits of this extraordinary man while in Holland; his interviews with William III., his studies in natural history under Leeuwenhoek, of botany and anatomy under Boerhaave. His natural curiosity even prompted him to learn the art of toothdrawing, his newly acquired skill in which he exercised without need on the jaws of his unlucky retinue. Early in 1698 Peter went over to England, where he preferred to Somerset House, which had been assigned to him as a residence, the house of Evelyn, near Deptford Dockyard. In England, as in Holland, his time was chiefly spent with workpeople and mechanicians of all descriptions. On his departure early in May, King William made him a present of a handsome frigate of twenty-four guns, which had been prepared for the King's own use. Peter was so pleased with his visit to this country that he used often to tell his nobles that "it was a happier thing to be an English admiral than Czar of Russia." In June, Peter returned to his dominions by way of Dresden and Vienna. In his progress through Holland he had hired between 600 and 700 workmen, chiefly shipwrights, who were sent to Archangel; and at Vienna he took into his service nine Venetian sea-captains. The Czar was diverted from his intended journey into Italy by a fresh insurrection of the Strelitzes, which caused him to return to Moscow. At Rawa, a small place not far from Lemberg in Poland, he met by appointment Augustus II.; and it was here, during entertainments which lasted three days, that the two monarchs formed the plan of an attack upon Sweden, for which, in the following year, they entered into a definite treaty. Patkul and General Von Carlowitz accompanied the Czar to Moscow to arrange the details. When Peter arrived in his capital (August 25th), he found that the Strelitzes had been already reduced to letters of Sophia Charlotte in Erman's Mém. pour servir à l'histoire de Sophie Charlotte, p. 116 sqq. Der jetzige Staat von Russland, von Johann Perry, Capitain. Leipsig, 1717, 8vo. S. 258. |