Peter the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  The truth is that none of these suggested causes—beheading, bleeding, smothering or even apoplexy—is required to explain Alexis' death. The simplest explanation is the most likely: Forty strokes of the knout were sufficent to kill a robust, healthy man; Alexis was not robust, and the shock and wounds caused by forty lashes across his thin back could easily have killed him.

  No matter exactly how Alexis died, Peter's contemporaries held the Tsar responsible. And although many were shocked, there was also a widespread belief that Alexis' death was the most satisfactory solution to Peter's problem. As Monsieur de la Vie reported to Versailles, "The death of the Prince leaves no reason to doubt that all seeds of rebellion and conspiracy are totally extinguished. A death never occurred more opportunely in the reestablishment of public tranquility and in dissipating our fear of the ominous events that threatened us." A few days later, the Frenchman added, "It is impossible to praise the conduct of the Tsar too highly."

  Peter did not evade the charge against him. Although he said that it was God who ultimately had taken Alexis' life, he never denied that it was he who had brought his son to a trial which had led to a sentence of death. He had not signed his approval of the sentence, but he was fully in accord with the verdict of the judges. Nor did he bother afterward to make a false display of grief. The day after the Tsarevich's death was the anniversary of the Battle of Poltava, and nothing was postponed or muted because of the tragedy. Peter celebrated a Te Deum for the victory and attended a banquet and a ball in the evening. Two day later, on the 29th, a ninety-four-gun ship, the Lesnaya, built according to Peter's own design, was launched at the Admiralty. Peter was present with all his ministers, and afterward, says one account, "there was great merrymaking."

  Nevertheless, the ceremonies surrounding the Tsarevich's body reflected Peter's conflicting emotions. Although Alexis had died a condemned criminal, the services of mourning were conducted according to his rank. It was almost as if, now that Alexis was no longer there to threaten his father, Peter wanted him treated as properly befitted a tsarevich. On the morning after Alexis' death, his body was carried from the cell in which he died to the house of the governor of the fortress, where it was laid in a coffin and covered with black velvet and a pall of rich gold tissue. Attended by Golovkin and other high officials of state, it was carried to the Church of the Holy Trinity, where it lay in state, with the face and right hand uncovered in normal Orthodox fashion so that all who wished could kiss the hand or forehead in farewell. On June 30, the funeral and burial took place. In keeping with Peter's instructions, none of the gentlemen present wore mourning clothes, although some ladies were dressed in black. Foreign ambassadors were not invited to this strange royal funeral and were advised not to wear mourning, as the sovereign's son had died a criminal. Nevertheless, the preacher chose for his text the words of David, "O Absalom, my son, my son!" and some of those attending declared that Peter wept. Afterward, the coffin was borne from Trinity Church back to the fortess, with Peter and Catherine and all the high officers of state (most of whom had voted to condemn Alexis) following in procession carrying lighted candles. In the fortress cathedral, the coffin was placed in a new vault of the Tsar's family, resting beside the coffin of the Tsarevich's wife, Charlotte.

  At the end of the year, Peter had a medal struck, almost as if he were commemorating a victory. On the medal, clouds have parted and a mountaintop is bathed in rays of sunlight. Beneath the scene is the inscription: "The horizon has cleared."

  Ultimately, what can one say about this tragedy? Was it simply a family matter, a clash of personalities, the awful, bestriding father relentlessly tormenting and eventually killing the pitiable, helpless son?

  Peter's relationship with his son was an inseparable blend of personal feelings and political realities. Alexis' character helped stimulate the antagonism between father and son, but at the root of the trouble lay the issue of sovereign power. There were two sovereigns—the sovereign on the throne and the sovereign in waiting—with different dreams and different goals for the state. In achieving those dreams, however, each faced a gnawing frustration. As long as the reigning monarch was on the throne, the son had to wait, and yet the sovereign knew that, once he had departed, his dreams could be undone, his goals overturned. Power lay only in the crown.

  There is, of" course, a long history of dissension in royal families, of clashing temperaments, suspicion and maneuvering of power between generations, of the impatience of the young for the older generation to die and yield power. There are also many stories of kings and princes condemning thier own kin for opposition to the crown, or, on the losing side, fleeing their homelands to seek refuge at a foreign court. In Peter's time,

  Princess Mary, daughter of King James II of England, helped to drive her father from the throne. James fled to France to wait for better times; when he died, his son twice landed in Britain attempting to claim his father's throne. Who here was the traitor? Invariably, history bequeaths this title to the loser.

  In earlier times, the path to royal thrones was deeply stained with family blood. Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, Capetians, Valois and Bourbons all killed royal kinsmen for reasons of state. The fabled Gloriana, Elizabeth I of England, kept her cousin Mary Queen of Scots in prison for twenty-seven years while life and beauty wasted away and then, still unable to accept the fact that Mary would succeed her on the throne, had the prisoner beheaded. Amidst all this, Mary's son, King James VI of Scotland, gladly accepted his mother's death; her removal cleared his own path as Elizabeth's chosen heir.

  Killing one's own royal children is a rarer crime. One must search back to the Greeks, whose tragedies revolve around dim figures, half myth, half god, or to imperial Rome, where naked personal ambition and court depravity made anything acceptable. In Russia, Ivan the Terrible killed his son with his iron staff, but Ivan was raging and half mad. To us, the most unsettling thing about Alexis' death is that it came as a result of a cool, supposedly objective judicial proceeding. That a father could stand by and permit his son to be tortured seems to us an incredible blot, the most brutal of all the violent episodes of Peter's life.

  To Peter, however, the judicial proceeding was the final, legal step required in his legitimate defense of the state and his life work. That it was prompted by political necessity rather than personal rancor he felt was obvious. In Peter's eyes, he had overindulged his son. No other subject would have received letter after letter, plea after plea, urging him to accept his responsibilities and the sovereign's will. This was his concession to the personal relationship between them.

  The trials had revealed treasonable words and widespread hope for Peter's death. Many had been punished; was it possible to condemn these peripheral figures and leave the central figure untouched? This was the choice Peter faced and which he put to the judicial tribunal. Peter himself, torn between paternal feeling and preserving his life work, chose the latter. Alexis was condemned for reasons of state. As with Elizabeth I of England, it was a grim decision by a monarch determined to preserve the nation which he or she had spent a lifetime to create.

  Did Alexis actually pose a threat to Peter while the father lived? Given the character of the two men, any real danger seems remote. The Tsarevich had neither the energy nor the desire to put himself at the head of a revolt. Ture, he wanted to succeed to the throne and he wished for Peter's death, but his only program was to wait, believing that he was popular far and wide in Russia— "and of the simple people I have heard that many loved me." And if Alexis had succeeded Peter, would all that Peter feared have taken place? This, too, seems unlikely. Alexis would not have carried through all of Peter's reforms, and some things would have slipped backward. But, overall, not much would have changed. For one thing, Alexis was not a medieval Muscovite prince. He had been raised by Western tutors, he had studied and traveled often in the West, he had married a Western Princess, his brother-in-law was the Holy Roman Emperor. Russia would not have hurtled back to the caftans, the bear
ds and the term. History may slow its pace, but it does not move backward.

  Finally, it seems that at the end Alexis himself accepted the judgment of the court and of his father. He confessed and asked for pardon. His feeble, almost involuntary challenge to the towering Tsar had failed, his beloved Afrosina had betrayed and deserted him, he had been weakened by torture. Perhaps he simply withdrew from life as he had wished to withdraw from government into the country, too weary to continue, unable to go on with an existence dominated by this overwhelming man who was his father.

  55

  CHARLES' LAST OFFENSIVE

  When Peter called off the allied invasion of Sweden in September 1716, Charles XII could not know whether the landing had been permanently canceled or merely postponed until spring. Accordingly, he remained through the winter in the southernmost tip of Sweden, at Lund near Malmo, just across the sound from Copenhagen. The house in which he stayed belonged to a professor; to suit the King's taste, some of the rooms were enlarged and painted in the Swedish colors of blue and yellow. In the spring, a new well was dug, fresh vegetables were planted and two pools were created to be filled with fish fresh for Charles' table.

  In this house, Charles was to live and work for almost two years. In the summer, his day began at three a.m., when the sun was already up and the sky filled with light. Until seven, he worked with his secretaries or received visitors. Then, whatever the weather, the King mounted his horse and rode until two, visting and inspecting the numerous regiments stationed along the southern coast. Dinner, in mid-afternoon, was short and simple. Homemade marmalade was Charles' only delicacy, and this was regularly supplied by his younger sister, Ulrika, who made most of it herself. The table service was pewter, the silver service having long before been sold to raise money for the war. At nine p.m., the King lay down to sleep on a straw mattress.

  During these quiet months, Charles had time to indulge his peaceful interests and curiosities. He attended lectures and enjoyed discussions with professors of mathematics and theology at the University of Lund. With his court architect, Tessin, he planned new places and public buildings to be constructed in the capital once peace had come. He designed new flags and uniforms for some of his regiments, prohibiting the color green—perhaps because that was the color worn by Peter's Russian soldiers. People found the King enormously changed from the headstrong, impetuous youth who had scandalized Sweden with his adolescent escapades; this was a gentler, more serene man who, at thirty-four, showed a wide tolerance of human faults and weaknesses. And yet, in one overwhelmingly important matter, the King had not changed: Charles XII remained determined to continue the war.

  Because of this, many Swedes found the King's return an unfortunate blessing. When Stralsund and Wismar fell, they were almost relieved, believing that the loss of these last fragments of empire meant that at last the war would end. Their desire for glory and even commercial profit had long since given way to an overpowering desire for peace. The King, aware of these feelings, explained his plans to Ulrika, herself torn between a desire for peace and loyalty to her brother "This does not mean that I am against peace. I am in favor of a peace that is defensible in the eye of posterity. Most states are willing to see Sweden weaker than she was. We must rely on ourselves first and foremost." More war meant more men and more money, yet Sweden was devastated. Half the farmland was out of cultivation because there were no laborers. Fisheries were abandoned. Foreign trade was ruined by the blockade of the allied fleets; the number of Swedish merchant ships fell from 775 in 1697 to 209 in 1718.

  In these circumstances, Charles XII's plans for a new military offensive sent men fleeing into the woods to avoid military service. They were dragged from church in the middle of services, brought up from the mines, carried off from public taverns. University students, even schoolboys, were conscripted. Some cut off a finger or shot themselves in a foot to avoid service, but a new edict decreed that they should be given thirty lashes and forced to serve anyway. (If they succeeded in disabling themselves beyond use as soldiers, they were given sixty lashes and assigned to compulsory labor as convicts.) As a result, a Dutch traveler in Sweden in 1719 found himself driven only by gray-haired men, women, or boys under twelve. "In the whole of Sweden, I have not seen a man between twenty and forty," he said. Old taxes were increased and new taxes were created. The tax on land was doubled and trebled, the tax on the post was increased and the tax on all luxuries—tea, coffee, chocolate, lace, silk, gold and silver ornaments, fur robes, smart hats and carriages—made them almost nonexistent.

  It seemed impossible that even a king like Charles could extract the fresh reserves of money and manpower he was demanding from his exhausted and sullen country. That Charles was able to, was due to the appearance at his side of an extraordinary man who served him both as administrator at home and as diplomat overseas, the brilliant, unscrupulous, much maligned and eventually ill-fated Baron Georg Heinrich von Goertz, an audacious international adventurer without real ties of nationality but with a taste for power and a passion for intrigue. He had a complex, versatile intellect which allowed him to work on several divergent, even contradictory schemes simultaneously. It has been said of him that "he achieved twenty times as much as Talleyrand or Metternich while working with less than one twentieth of their resources."

  For four years—from 1714 to 1718—Goertz, armed with the power of the king, loomed over Sweden. In person, he was a dramatic figure, tall, handsome (in spite of an artificial eye, made of enamel, which replaced one lost in a student duel), charming and a brilliant conversationalist. Born in South Germany into a noble Franconian family, he studied at the University of Jena and then, seeking a situation in which his adventurous spirit could flower, he attached himself to the court of the young Duke Frederick IV of Holstein-Gottorp who had been Charles' madcap companion and had married Charles' sister, Hedwig Sophia. Shortly before the Duke went off to war at Charles' side, Hedwig Sophia produced a son, Charles Frederick. In 1702 at the Battle of Klissow, still at Charles' side, the Duke was killed, leaving his two-year-old son as his successor and Georg Heinrich von Goertz as the real ruler of Holstein-Gottorp. More important, until

  Charles XII married and produced a child, the infant Charles Frederick was the male heir to the throne of Sweden.

  Goertz conducted all the duchy's affairs. He toured Europe, calling on the Tsar, Queen Anne, the King of Prussia and the. Elector of Hanover. In 1713, he proposed to strengthen the duchy's position by a Russian alliance, the seal to be a marriage between the twelve-year-old Duke and Peter's oldest daughter, five-year-old Anne. Goertz once proposed to Menshikov the idea of cutting a ship canal through Holstein at the base of the Danish peninsula, thus giving Russian ships an exit from the Baltic into the North Sea without having to pass through the sound and subject themselves to Danish tolls or cannon.* It was Goertz who arranged for Magnus Stenbock's Swedish army, victorious at Gadebusch but being pursued by larger Saxon, Danish and Russian forces, to be admitted into the Holstein fortress of Tonning. And it was also Goertz who, five months later, when the besieged army could hold out no longer, arranged the terms of its surrender.

  Successful though he was, in time Goertz came to feel that the little duchy of Holstein-Gottorp was too narrow an arena for his abilities. He had long admired Charles XII, the legendary uncle of his own young master, and when Charles appeared at Stralsund in November 1714, after his ride across Europe, Goertz hurried to meet him. In a single long conversation, he won Charles' favor and emerged an unofficial advisor. Before much more time had passed, Charles relied on him totally. He admired Goertz' energy, his breadth of vision, his analytical capacity and his willingness to attempt, like Charles himself, vast, grand-scale schemes and radical solutions even with limited resources. As Charles saw it, Goertz applied in administration and diplomacy the same dash and reckless bravado which the King employed in war.

  Thereafter, until Charles' death, Goertz was indispensable to him. He took absolute control of Swed
en's finances and all the great domestic departments of state. He became the King's voice, if not his brain, in Swedish diplomacy. By February 1716, he was describing himself as Director of the Finances and Commerce of Sweden. In effect, he became Charles' prime minister, although he held no actual rank or title in Sweden and was still nominally the servant of Charles' nephew, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp.

  Goertz knew how to deal with the King. As a condition for accepting service, he had won Charles' promise that all communications should be between themselves and not through intermediaries. He knew it was best not to bother Charles with details

  * One hundred and seventy-four years later, in 1887, the Kiel Canal was built.

  in areas in which the King was not interested. He found that if the King did not agree with him when presented with an oral argument, he could put his views in writing in his clear, incisive style and usually get his way.

  As Sweden felt the resourceful, ruthless hand of Baron von Goertz, hatred of the King's foreign advisor spread through every class. Bureaucrats hated him because he exercised power outside the normal channels of administration. The Hessian party, formed around Charles' sister, Ulrika, and her husband, Frederick of Hesse, hated him because they imagined him working to ensure the succession for his young Holstein master, to their own exclusion. And Swedes everywhere hated him for the enthusiasm and ingenuity with which he set to work to wring more men and money from the exhausted nation to continue the war. He issued paper currency. He raised taxes higher and then higher still. He was accused of lining his own pockets, but these accusations were untrue—in money matters, Goertz was totally honest. He even spent his own small income in an effort to achieve more efficiency in mobilizing Swedish resources for the new war effort. In his commanding role, Goertz was called by furious Swedes "the Grand Vizier." Although he was known to be only a creature of the King, he was clothed in the King's power. For as long as Charles stood behind him, Goertz was invincible.