VI
I am well, thank God, only life is hard, for I can't use my left hand, so I am obliged to hold the sword and the pen in my right hand alone. And you know how few helpers I have. (Peter to Catherine, 2 August 1712)
Peter and Catherine wed
On 1 January 1712 Peter wrote to the Senate from St Petersburg: ‘And so, praise God, because of this victory [of the Danes over the Swedes at Wismar on 1 December] the year began here with celebrations. I consider it a piece of good fortune that I am able to write these words in my first letter of the year. May God be so kind henceforth.’ Prince-Caesar, addressed as usual as ‘Sire’, received a similar letter.1 The allies' main objective now was to evict the Swedes from their territories in northern Germany, starting with Pomerania, and Peter was as desperate as ever to get down to business. The year began with a flurry of letters to military commanders and diplomats, including orders to place all Swedish prisoners of war in Moscow under armed guard following rumours of an escape plan. His impatience is even more palpable in a list of thirty-seven instructions to the Senate dated 16 January–28 February, some only one or two lines long, others more substantial, all written in Peter's own inelegant hand, on such diverse topics as collective responsibility for desertion and penalties for harbouring fugitives, producing weapons and uniforms, appointing a commissar to distribute wages (to reduce theft), branding recruits, strengthening Ukrainian garrisons, and establishing an engineering school, hospitals and stud farms.2 Negotiations with Turkey over peace terms dragged on. On 23 January Peter wrote to V. L. Dolgoruky: ‘From the Turkish side, praise God, there is no opposition, for this hour Azov is already handed over and, I believe, with God's help, this business will have a good resolution, and although nothing has been heard of the Swedish king or anything else, even so Field Marshal Sheremetev has been left in Kiev with troops for better security.’3
Amidst diplomatic correspondence – to the kings of Denmark, Poland and Prussia – and letters on provisions and ships, he continued to consider more mundane matters. On 27 January he wrote to the military commissar Pankraty Glebovsky:
I have sent you examples of regular tents and a pyramid tent, from which you should make 899 regular tents and 190 pyramids for both regiments. … The canvas for making them should be obtained from the Admiralty department for cash. And make absolutely certain that they are made precisely according to the samples. I want these tents to be sent to Riga this winter, to be exact, by the beginning of March so that they are ready for the troops by spring for we don't have a single tent.4
The tents were duly dispatched from Moscow. Peter also found time to write a few words of comfort to the widow of the British merchant and factory owner Andrew Styles, a friend since his visit to England, whose death in January 1712 he mourned ‘like someone related to me by blood. … But we cannot reverse what is done. Therefore, do not give yourself up to excessive grief … but comfort yourself with the immortal glory which he had and will have.’5
Peter also had some personal business to attend to, although it is barely reflected in his voluminous correspondence for the first month and a half of 1712. On the morning of 19 February he dictated letters to King Augustus of Poland, complaining about violations of the Russo-Polish Treaty of 1686, and to King Frederick of Prussia, congratulating him on the birth of a grandson. Later that day he married Catherine and proceeded to the newly built Winter Palace for his wedding feast.
Judged by the standards of traditional Muscovite royal weddings, this was a strange occasion. There were no official announcements to foreign rulers, no sign of the coronation regalia and gold-spun robes which tsars and tsarevichi usually wore to get married. It is not clear where the marriage service was held. Some sources mention the church of St Isaac of Dalmatia, but Charles Whitworth, who was a guest, states clearly that the wedding was held in Menshikov's private chapel in his palace on Vasil'evsky Island. Indeed, some scholars have concluded that this was not a wedding ceremony at all, but a delayed celebration of a marriage contracted hastily in March 1711 on the eve of Peter's departure for the Turkish war. This would seem to be confirmed by Aleksei Makarov's entry in the court journal for 19 February – ‘the marriage of their majesties was happily concluded’ – and by Peter's remark in a letter to the shipwright G. A. Menshikov that ‘yesterday we concluded our old wedding’.6 All the same, 19 February was celebrated henceforth in the court calendar as their majesties' wedding anniversary.
Some witnesses detected an air of masquerade about the whole proceedings. Peter's choice of dress, the uniform of a rear-admiral of the fleet, emphasised a naval theme, which was reflected in his choice of attendants (so-called ‘fathers’, ‘mothers’, ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’), who included (according to an undated, handwritten list found among his papers) Vice-Admiral Cornelius Cruys and Rear-Admiral I. F. Botsis, Cruys's wife and Tsaritsa Praskovia, the shipwright F. M. Skliaev and chief surveyor of the fleet ‘Baas’ I. M. Golovin, the duchess of Courland and Daria Menshikova and the bride and groom's daughters Anna and Elizabeth as bridesmaids.7 There were many foreign guests (who were excluded from Muscovite weddings), including Charles Whitworth and Just Juel, who both left accounts. Notable by his absence was Tsarevich Alexis, who apparently stormed off to his estate in Ingermanland on the day of the wedding in protest, perhaps disappointed that there were no special celebrations for his birthday on 18 February.
The banquet in the Winter Palace was captured in an engraving by that invaluable chronicler of early St Petersburg, Aleksei Zubov, who provided a view of the palace's great hall, its true perspective and dimensions distorted in order to accommodate the assembled guests. The scene is redolent of the new culture: bewigged and décolleté ladies and foppish gentlemen dine in a baroque setting. Members of the Drunken Assembly sit at their own table in the centre. (There was a table for women members in a separate room and other guests were also accommodated in side rooms, which the engraving cannot show.) It is also possible to see hanging from the ceiling a bone chandelier made by Peter in his turnery and installed for the wedding. Menshikov, with his diamond-studded cane, supervises proceedings. Peter is easily recognisable in the centre background, while in the foreground Catherine, no bashful, pious tsaritsa, casts an almost flirtatious glance towards the viewer over her shoulder. But tradition has not been banished entirely: icons hang in the upper corners of the room and men and women, including the bride and groom, sit on separate sides of the table. The best man was the only male allowed to sit at the women's table on the first day. Toasts and dancing were followed by a firework display, which culminated in tableaux forming the word VIVAT and two entwined columns with the couple's monograms. Peter was represented by Hymen, the god of marriage, with a torch and an eagle at his feet, and the firework bride carried a burning heart and kissing doves. Above was a crown with the device: UNITED IN YOUR LOVE.8 The following day the guests reassembled for fruit and sweets and more dancing.
By 1712 the newly-weds were already like an old married couple, with two children living and three dead. The first fruit of their official union, Maria, appeared just over a year later, on 3 March 1713, and died in May 1715, an addition to the sad list of Peter's children who died in infancy. Peter joked in a letter to Menshikov that he had heard from his wife that she had given birth to a son (sic !) called Maria, but his letters do not elaborate on his disappointment at the birth of yet another girl.9 As for Catherine, the inner circle had little choice but to accept her as Peter's consort. Her birthday (5 April) and name day (24 November) were included in the official court calendar; but the wedding did not protect her from hostile public opinion. Many refused to accept the legality of Peter's divorce from Evdokia, and Catherine's first husband Johann seems to have died only in 1718. By and large, protests surfaced when they were uttered under torture in the Preobrazhensky office or some other government department or picked up by foreigners. In Russia there were no legal outlets for the expression of public opinion about the tsar and his family.
German affairs
Peter spent the first part of 1712 in the vicinity of St Petersburg and the Baltic, awaiting the outcome of talks with his allies for their joint campaign in north Germany. As he wrote to Augustus, the enemy may have been cleared out of Poland thanks to the battle of Poltava, but the war with the king of Sweden was not over yet and Poland was still in danger from an attack launched from Pomerania, to which end Poland must provision Russian troops, ‘not for our own interest but especially to protect you … and the Polish republic from enemy attack … as we have no claims on the enemy territory ourselves’.10 The request for provisions was repeated many times, including an appeal to the Polish senators. Menshikov, now a field marshal, was duly dispatched to Pomerania, together with Tsarevich Alexis, while Peter held the fort in St Petersburg. In March 1712 he issued charters to Estonia, one to the town of Reval, the other to the nobility, ‘confirming all their previous privileges, rights of legal proceedings, law codes and customs which they have enjoyed of old’.11 Most of his letters were concerned with the war. He asked Menshikov and others to keep an eye on the Danes (were they seeking a separate peace?), wrote to the king of Prussia requesting safe conduct for Russian troops through his territories and to Augustus complaining about the unsatisfactory provisioning of Russian troops. Occasionally matters further afield claimed his attention; for example, he informed the Senate that a man from Ustiug had reported that he knew of a much quicker and more convenient route to get to China, and asked them to investigate further.12 He sent to Prince Kurakin an order for lime trees, to be temporarily planted in sand and shipped to St Petersburg.13 In April he sailed to Viborg to collect provisions.
In June Peter set off westwards again, towards Stettin in Pomerania which was under siege by allied troops. 1 July found him in Mitau, the end of the month in Gribswald, where he wrote to the king of Denmark to express his consternation that, having made a long and fatiguing journey for their common interests, ‘not sparing my health’, and despite having sent three times the number of troops agreed, he had found the men idle for lack of artillery, which awaited the king's orders, while Frederick was besieging Bremen.14 He found time to write to Catherine on 14 August, telling her he missed her and joking about the difference in their ages: if only he could be twenty-seven again: but she probably has no wish to be forty-two. (He was actually forty at the time.) A few days later he urged her to hurry and join him, and to bring the Prince-Pope with her, thanking her for the beer she had sent.15 He also corresponded with his shipwright friend Fedor Skliaev, sending sketches of small boats. ‘You can work out how to build them from the sketch – it's not a job requiring much skill, but very necessary to get them made by spring.’16 In general, after a good start, the military situation advanced little in 1712. Lack of Danish naval support prevented the capture of the island of Rügen opposite Stralsund (‘What can you do when you have allies like these?’ Peter wrote to Menshikov in August) and allied efforts to counter the incursion of Swedish troops into Mecklenburg resulted in a heavy defeat for a Saxon-Danish force at Gadenbusch.17 At the end of September Peter set off for the mineral springs at Carlsbad, visiting the king of Prussia in Berlin on the way. On 2 October he sent Catherine some oysters, with an apology that he couldn't find more as there were import restrictions as a result of plague. A few days later he reported that he had bought the dress which she asked for, but no more oysters. From Carlsbad on 11 October he wrote that he had begun to drink the waters ‘in this hole’, told her not to expect any news from ‘the back of beyond’ and sent greetings on the anniversary of the capture of Schlüsselburg, the ‘start of our good luck’.18
Peter was far from home, but news reached him from all over his troublesome empire. In January 1713 Aleksei Kurbatov, the vice-governor of Archangel, wrote to complain about problems in his province, including the fact that people of all ranks were wearing old-style dress and not shaving, and, ‘as I hear, previous governors have not used compulsion … and so the laws which are passed are not kept; and people who come to the markets from other provinces nearly all wear Russian dress and beards, even young people. Truly, lord, such boorishness much be stopped and these heathen customs of dress rooted out.’ Peter advised Kurbatov to ‘try to correct this problem by degrees’.19 At times the goals he set himself must have seemed as far as ever from being attained.
Finland
At the beginning of 1713 Peter sent Menshikov and Boris Kurakin to attend a peace congress in Brunswick. Menshikov's instructions specified that the lands which Sweden had ‘unlawfully’ annexed in the last century (i.e. Ingria and Karelia) must under no circumstances be ceded; Estonia with Reval must be retained as compensation for loss of revenue from the aforementioned and part of Finland ceded to Russia for compensation for the present war. If Livonia, except for the Dorpat district, could not be secured, it was to go to the king of Poland, a concession which Peter later withdrew. In April the Russians launched a campaign in Finland. The galley fleet, with Peter as rearadmiral, landed with 16,000 troops at Helsingfors in early May and took the town without a battle. In July Peter wrote to Menshikov: ‘With God's help we hope that all the Finnish lands will be in our hands by the end of this campaign.’20 During the campaign Peter was promoted to the rank of full general, some eighteen years after he first saw active service at Azov. He wrote to congratulate Catherine on becoming a general's wife, adding, ‘like the rank of rear-admiral, this one was also awarded under strange circumstances, for I was made a naval commander while I was on the steppe and a general while at sea’.21 On 30 August he entered Abo (Turku) on the west coast of Finland and by late October, in numerous dispatches home, he was able to report that the Swedes had been driven out of Finland.
Menshikov was busy, too. In June 1713 he besieged the Swedish general Magnus Stenbock in Tönningen fortress in Jutland and forced him to surrender with all his men. On 13 September Stettin capitulated to Menshikov and was placed under Prussian control.22 Menshikov's rise seemed inexorable. A laudatory ode, ‘The Laurel or Crown of Immortal Glory’ (1714), likened him to the sun and to Alexander the Great (no longer just to Alexander's loyal assistant) and Alexander Nevsky, referring to his ‘noble’ origins in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and describing his father as ‘a glorious warrior of the guards’.23 Peter was aware of the dangers of Menshikov's growing power, but could not do without his friend, even if the old terms of endearment had disappeared from Peter's letters, which get straight down to business, usually without any intimate greeting to the ‘child of my heart’ or any accompanying gifts.
Through all the diplomatic ups and downs – in April 1713 the Peace of Utrecht ended the War of the Spanish Succession, thus giving Britain and France more leisure to interfere in northern affairs – Peter continued to hope for peace. But the Swedes still had the power to resist, particularly by deploying their fleet. Peter expressed sorrow that his ‘good proposals’ to end a destructive war had been unsuccessful and that Charles continued to ‘demand the impossible’.24 Consolidating the Russian navy seemed to be the key. In September 1713 Peter wrote to Kurakin in Holland: ‘I ask you to make every effort to buy ships, for our whole war is now centred around them.’25 Between 1712 and 1716, before the St Petersburg yards were in full production, Russia actively bought warships from the Dutch and the British, acquiring vessels with such names as Lansdowne, Oxford, Randolph, Arundel, London and Britannia, despite protests from the Swedes. By 1716 the British, too, were beginning to doubt the wisdom of allowing these purchases.
At home in Russia the strain of war manifested itself in numerous ways. In January 1714 Peter ordered the Senate immediately to carry out an interrogation of the provincial governors (one by one) and call them to account for arrears in payments for the army and navy. They must be forced to hand over any ready cash and give a clear account of any shortfalls. No ‘vague excuses’ were to be tolerated. Any governor who prevaricated was to be placed under arrest immediately and ‘to be given no quarter’.26 But Peter's world of make-believe continued to exist alongside the realities of waging war and raising revenues. At the beginning of 1714 Peter Mikhailov and a small group of fellow shipbuilders wrote to Ivan Golovin, the mock chief surveyor of the fleet:
Your Honour Mr Ba[a]s, our highly esteemed teacher!
We the below-mentioned could not omit to send Your Honour greetings for the beginning of this New Year, to congratulate you and to wish you every happiness and success in your most wise enterprise [i.e. shipbuilding], in the hope that by your great efforts it will increase and grow to your immortal glory, as its leader [initiator] in Russia or our second Noah by calling; and most of all we hope that you will be so good as not to forget us and that you will pay us a visit….
The following greet you, Your Excellency's pupils and servants. Peter. Richard Browne. Richard Cozens, Joseph Noye. Fedor Saltykov.27
Various contemporary witnesses attest that Peter was very fond of Ivan Golovin, whom he sent to Venice to study shipbuilding and to learn about the construction of galleys. On his return,
the monarch, wishing to know what he had learned, accompanied him to the Admiralty, led him to the shipyard and the workshops and asked him various questions. The answers showed that Golovin knew nothing. Finally Peter asked: ‘Did you at least learn some Italian?’ Golovin admitted that he didn't know much of that, either. ‘So, what did you do?’ the tsar asked. ‘Most gracious sovereign,’ Golovin replied, ‘I hardly ever left my house.’ Hot-tempered though the tsar was, he was so pleased with this candid and honest confession, that he celebrated Golovin's laziness by conferring on him the title ‘Prince Baas’ … Peter loved him for his directness, his loyalty and his native talents. In conversations where the tsar was, there was Golovin, too, and among his friends he was jokingly known as a learned man and an expert on the art of shipbuilding, or [from the Dutch] Baas.28
All witnesses agree that Golovin was chief surveyor of the fleet precisely because he was no good at building ships. We can thus place him within a network of mock appointments, which were linked with Peter's own use of disguises and pseudonyms, in this case the name Peter Mikhailov, which he first used as a trainee shipbuilder during the Grand Embassy. He even introduced a new toast: ‘For the health of the family (or sons) of Ivan Mikhailovich’, i.e. the ships of the Russian fleet. All the mock post holders were absolutely loyal, all close to the tsar. This was essential, because Peter made himself vulnerable by posing as their humble subject or pupil and had to be confident that none of them would take advantage of his assumed ‘weakness’. On the contrary, the mock post holders were expected to demonstrate their loyalty by enduring insults and indignities without a murmur. As for the fleet, Peter took it extremely seriously and it was soon to come into its own.
Victory at Hangö
In July 1714 an impressive demonstration of Russian naval power ended in a victory over the Swedish fleet off Cape Hangö in Finland, where Russian ships surrounded a Swedish squadron and boarded it with infantry. The Swedish seagoing fleet was superior, but less manoeuvrable in Finnish coastal waters. The Russians deployed shallow-draught galleys and the strategic landing of troops along the coast. Peter was immensely proud of this, Russia's first significant victory at sea, which he dubbed the ‘naval Poltava’. He wrote to Prince Mikhail Golitsyn:
We beg to report the manner in which the Almighty Lord God was pleased to glorify Russia. For, after granting us many victories on land, now we have been crowned with victory at sea, for on the 27th day of this month by Hangö near the harbour of Rilax-Figl we captured the Swedish rear-admiral Nilsson Ehrenskiöld with one frigate, six galleys and two sloops, after much fighting and very fierce gunfire. It is true that till now in this war, as with our allies in the war with France, many generals and even field marshals have been taken, but not one senior naval officer. And so we send our congratulations on this our unprecedented victory.29
He ordered Prince-Caesar Fedor Romodanovsky, always the first to receive news of victories, to go to St Petersburg and set up wooden triumphal gates, ‘however small’, on the main square in time for the return of the fleet.30 In St Petersburg in September the victory celebrations revolved around an escort of captured Swedish ships from Kronstadt and a parade of prisoners through triumphal gates on the quay, all presided over by Romodanovsky. Engravings by Zubov and Picart commemorated the occasion. As Peter reported to Fedor Apraksin, his superior in the Admiralty: ‘I arrived here with the captured ships on the 9th of this month and on the same day we were all received by His Majesty [Prince-Caesar], where I handed over your letter. His Majesty deigned to ask after your health and praised your loyal service, whereupon he awarded me the rank of vice-admiral, for which I thank your honour for recommending me. Peter.’31 Friedrich Weber was there to witness how they ‘unanimously declared [Peter] Vice-Admiral of Russia in consideration of the faithful Service he had done to his native Country, of which Proclamation being made, the whole Room resounded with Sdrastwi Vice-Admiral, Health to the Vice-Admiral (which is the Russian Vivat.)’.32 Catherine missed most of the fun. On 8 September she gave birth to another daughter, Margarita, who died less than a year later.
The fleet had apparently justified the expense lavished upon it, as well as providing Peter with essential scenery and props for his favourite roles. In the 1710s court life was increasingingly embellished with symbols and ceremonies connected with the fleet, from references to Neptune in engravings and medals to naval festivals. There are few images of St Petersburg which do not include ships, often dwarfing everything else. In Aleksei Zubov's 1714 view of Vasil'evsky Island ships captured at Hangö occupy the foreground. In his city panorama of 1716 the buildings are confined to a narrow strip in the middle ground and the foreground is filled with ships. The complex imagery of the fleet included giving favourite ships family names (Natalia, Ekaterina and so on), the creation of ships' ‘biographies’ (starting with the anniversary of a ship's launch) and descriptions of the peculiarities of an individual ship's ‘behaviour’, thus turning each vessel almost into a living person. ‘Naval baroque’ was a vital element in Petrine culture, another phenomenon which gives the lie to the easy assumption that Peter's was a ‘utilitarian’ reign. His near obsession – even his favourite snuffbox was in the form of a ship – transformed the fleet into something greater than the sum of its parts. At the same time, abroad the fleet was regarded as a real threat to the balance of power in Europe. ‘This savage, cruel, and barbrous people design to become masters of the Baltic,’ wrote Count Gyllenborg, the Swedish ambassador in London, in 1714. ‘The Tsar's fleet will soon outnumber the Swedish and the Danish put together … and will be the master of the Baltick. We shall wonder then at our blindness that we did not suspect his great designs.’33
The Prince-Pope's wedding
Even official accounts of the battle of Hangö, for example, in The Book of Mars, maintained Peter's incognito, referring to him not as His Majesty but as ‘Mr Rear-Admiral’. Peter himself underlined his ‘commoner’ credentials by his choice of companions for the Finnish campaign: they included the ‘black-amoor’ Abraham Hannibal, his chaplain Bitka (who doubled as his chess partner), Peter Buturlin of the Drunken Assembly and various orderlies. As always, the worlds of business, play and make-believe intertwined, for in the midst of the Hangö celebrations Vice-Admiral Peter was planning more bizarre rituals. In October 1713 he had warned Prince-Pope Nikita Zotov of his plans to marry him off to the widow Anna Pashkova, a woman many years his junior.34 In January 1715 this scheme came to fruition. Guests were instructed to appear in groups of three in matching costumes and to register their choice of fancy dress in order to avoid duplication. Peter inspected the lists and made the final choice. Among the masks were Menshikov as a Hamburg burgher, Gavrila Golovkin as a Chinaman, Ivan Musin-Pushkin as a Venetian and Peter Tolstoy as a Turk. Each matching group was assigned musical instruments.
Witnesses describe the wedding, which took place in St Petersburg, as a ‘world turned upside down’. The ‘young’ groom was in his seventies, invitations to guests were delivered by stammerers, the bridesmen were cripples, the runners were fat men with gout, the priest was allegedly almost a hundred years old. The mock-tsar Romodanovsky, impersonating King David, was carried in a sled drawn by bears.35 This event has been seen as a variation on the Western charivari or shaming ceremonies, intended to show how the tsar had the power to transform his subjects' lives. Instead of being allowed the ‘seemly’ and traditional option of retiring to a monastery in old age, which he had requested in 1713, the Prince-Pope (whose real-life equivalents, popes and patriarchs, were celibate) found himself married off to a bride made even more unsuitable by the fact that her father was a well-known Old Believer. Furthermore, the ill-matched couple were to be joined together in Peter's ‘New Jerusalem’, St Petersburg, Prince-Caesar Romodanovsky's antics as King David mimicking David's ‘prancing’ and the jubilation of the Israelites during the transfer of the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem (II Samuel 6: 15–16, 20–23). It seemed appropriate that the wedding took place in the wake of the naval victories of 1713–14, which set the seal on the new, maritime capital, already recognised as such by the transfer there of government departments (notably the Senate) and parts of the royal household in 1712–13.
The intended recipients of this somewhat oblique message about the new political order were the élite, who were left in no doubt about Russia's new cultural orientation. The year 1714 saw several significant landmarks in the state's interference in the lives of the nobility or ‘upper service class’: for example, Peter ordered a thousand families to relocate to St Petersburg. In February nobles were notified that their sons would be assigned to regiments from the age of thirteen and when called up would have to serve in the ranks before being considered for a commission. (Peter had demonstrated this principle in his own promotions.) All nobles were required to receive some form of education before they entered the services. In a decree of 1714 Peter ordered that ‘in all the provinces children of the nobility and chancellery rank, of secretaries and clerks … aged from ten to fifteen are to study numbers and some part of geometry’. After completing their studies they were to receive a diploma, without which they would not be allowed to marry or to give pledges of betrothal.36 In fact, there were never enough teachers (graduates were drawn mainly from the Mathematical school) fully to implement this programme of so-called ‘cipher’ schools and the nobles themselves were hostile. Richer nobles prefered to educate their sons at home, while poorer ones either resorted to the village priest or failed to provide schooling altogether. By 1726 nobles accounted for less than 3 per cent of the 2,000 students in twelve surviving cipher schools.
Perhaps most unsettling for the Russian élite was Peter's Law on Single Inheritance, issued on 23 March 1714, which outlawed the ancient custom of partible inheritance (dividing landed estates among all sons), stipulating that ‘immovable property’ (real estate) was to be left to one heir only, normally the first-born son, but a parent could nominate someone else if the eldest son was deemed unworthy. In the absence of sons, daughters could inherit. ‘Moveable’ property – money, goods, livestock – could still be divided among all the children.37 The main aim of the measure was to avoid the wasteful fragmentation of estates (said to put an added burden on the peasants) and there was also the hope that those who did not inherit would rely on state service for their living. The futility of resistance to various unwelcome developments was underlined by Zotov's wedding, at which the cream of Russian society donned fancy dress and played joke instruments at the tsar's bidding. Peter's subjects were left in no doubt that there would be no return to ‘ancient barbaric customs’, such as Muscovite arranged marriages, permanent residence in Moscow and division of property among all the heirs. Instead, the tsar was free to devise new barbaric customs of his own.
The birth of two Peters
Peter's relations with his son did not improve after Alexis's wedding or his own, although Catherine did her best to reconcile her husband and her stepson. As far as Peter was concerned, his son's marriage was just one in a series of duties for Alexis. In 1713 Alexis returned to Russia, where he was required to undergo a test of the knowledge he had acquired abroad and deliberately injured his hand in order to avoid an examination in drawing. He set up home in a palace on the left bank of the Neva between the residences of his aunt Natalia and Tsaritsa Martha. There are frequent references in Alexis's letters to his poor health, which was hardly helped by the St Petersburg climate, a topic which aroused Peter's annoyance rather than sympathy. Even his physical debility was to be used against him; later, in 1718, Peter compared his son unfavourably with his brother Tsar Ivan, who could not manage a rough horse and was hardly even able to mount one, but loved horses; in other words, moral fibre could compensate for physical weakness. The implication was that Alexis was deficient in both physical and moral strength. In 1714 Alexis went to Carlsbad to take the waters. According to Weber, Peter ordered him to return to St Petersburg promptly: ‘It was said, he shewed but little Inclination upon the Receipt of the Letter, and in his Answer; and that he resented his being still continued a Serjeant.’ Weber, incidentally, contributed to Alexis's bad reputation by alleging that through keeping ‘vicious Company’ he contracted ‘such corrupt Habits, as could not fail producing as Aversion to him in all honest Minds’.38 The birth of Peter's first grandchild, Natalia, in July 1714 did nothing to repair the growing rift. The naval victory at Hangö may have put Peter in a good mood, but this did not extend to his son. In January 1715 Peter wrote to Alexis:
Have you assisted [me] since you came to Maturity of Years in [my] Labours and Pains? No, certainly, the World knows you have not. On the other Hand you blame and abhor whatever Good I have been able to do, at the Expense of my Health, for the Love I have bore to my People, and for their Advantage; and I have all imaginable Reason to believe, that you will destroy it all, in case you should Survive me.39
What precipitated this outburst? Partly it was disapproval of Alexis's bad treatment of the wife whom Peter had provided for him. Not long after the birth of Natalia, Alexis installed his mistress Afrosinia in the palace. When Peter heard of ‘irregularities’ in his son's household, he responded by appointing Daria Rzhevskaia, ‘abbess’ of the Drunken Assembly, to supervise his daughter-in-law. But Alexis's relations with his wife were not entirely curtailed. In 1715 Charlotte was pregnant again, as was Catherine; both were due to give birth in the autumn.
On 11 October 1715, in what he referred to as a ‘last testament’, Peter wrote again to Alexis, setting out the enormous efforts he and ‘other true sons of Russia’ had expended since the outbreak of the war to overcome the disadvantages which had hampered Russia's progress. He was aggrieved when he saw his unworthy heir's indifference to military affairs, rejecting Alexis's excuses about ill health and despairing that all his efforts to reform his son had been in vain. He would cut him off ‘like a gangrenous limb’. ‘I have not spared and do not spare my own life for my country and my people, so why should I spare you who are so unworthy? Better a worthy stranger than my own unworthy son.’40 Here again was the principle of inheritance by the fittest, as set out in the 1714 Law of Single Inheritance and in legislation on state service, transferred to the battleground of Peter's personal life.
The next few weeks saw a series of events of crucial significance for the dynasty. On 12 October Charlotte gave birth to a healthy son, who was named Peter. Nine days later she succumbed to postnatal complications and died, apparently unmourned by her husband. On 29 October, Peter's own son, also named Peter, was born. This sudden abundance of male heirs and his wife's death, provides the background for Alexis's reply, on 31 October, to his father's letter of 11 October. He expressed his willingness to relinquish his claim to the throne, in view of the fact that he was ‘unqualified and unfit for the task’, his memory was gone and his health undermined ‘by many illnesses’.41 This was clearly not the reply that Peter had hoped for. On the one hand, he seemed determined to exclude Alexis from the succession; on the other hand, it went against the grain to allow his son to escape lightly by retiring to a monastery. Peter, as we know, generally regarded the monastic life as ‘shirking’, an option only for the aged and disabled and a few high-flyers bound for posts in the church hierarchy. The matter remained unresolved. Some writers believe that a ‘party’ was forming around Alexis, a sort of moral opposition to Peter's despotism and the burdens imposed upon the people.
A new grand tour of Europe
In February 1716 Peter set off to attend the wedding of his niece Ekaterina Ivanovna to Duke Karl Leopold of Mecklenburg, which was scheduled for 8 April in Danzig. His departure from St Petersburg marked the beginning of a lengthy European tour, from which he was not to return until October 1717. The match between his favourite niece and the recently divorced duke, described as ‘the coarse, uneducated, wilful and highly eccentric owner of a scrap of German soil’,42 was prompted by Peter's eagerness to acquire a base in north Germany and better security for Russian garrisons in the region. The marriage contract, which brought with it the right of Russian merchants to reside and trade in Mecklenburg, free passage to Russian troops and the tsar's pledge to support the duke against his enemies, was signed before the couple met for the first time in March 1716. It constituted a virtual Russian protectorate over Mecklenburg, which especially alarmed George of Hanover, who as George I of Great Britain had reason to be wary of Russia's growing naval power.
While he was in Germany Peter issued his Military Statute, one of the clearest expressions of the ethos of the Petrine armed services and the impulses behind his reforms. The text was a compilation of earlier edicts and manuals, drawing heavily on Swedish and Austrian codes. In the preface, Peter is more generous than some of his own biographers in giving credit to his predecessors. He notes his own father's publication of a military manual (The Training and Art of Infantry, a translation of Jacobi's Kriegs-Kunst zu Fuss, 1647) and praises his achievements in training regular troops and beating the Poles:
But thereafter [under Fedor and Sophia] this enterprise was not increased in the growing light of knowledge but was virtually abandoned. What ensued next is still fresh in the memory, how we were unable to withstand not only against nations with regular armies but even against barbarians (shameful to recall). We pass over in silence what happened at Chigirin [in 1676] and on the Crimean campaigns [of 1687 and 1689], not only then but much more recently against the Turks at Azov or at Narva at the start of this war.
But when (with the Almighty's help) the army was brought to order, then what great progress was made with the Almighty's help against glorious and regular nations. Anyone can see that this occurred for no other reason than the establishment of good order, for all disorderly barbarian practices are worthy of ridicule and no good can come of them.
On 10 April 1716 Peter sent an advance copy of the statute to the Senate from Danzig, with the handwritten instruction: ‘Lord senators, I am sending you the book of the Military Statute (which was begun in St Petersburg and finished here), which I command you to have printed in a large number, no less than a thousand copies … and although it lays down the basis for military men, it also applies to all civil administrators, as you will see when you read it. Therefore when it is printed send a quantity to all the corps of our army and also to the governors and chancelleries, so that no one can make the excuse that he was ignorant of it.’43
Peter regarded military order as a model for other reforms. In the Spiritual Regulation (1721) the section on schools begins: ‘It is known to all the world how inadequate and weak was the Russian army when it did not have proper training and how incomparably its numbers increased and how it became great and formidable beyond expectation when Our Most Powerful Monarch, His Tsarist Majesty, Peter I, instructed it with most excellent regulations. The same is to be appreciated as regards architecture, medicine, political government and all other affairs.’ In a later section students are described as proceeding to their lessons ‘like soldiers upon a drumbeat’.44 Even so, Peter was aware of the dangers of doing everything ‘by the book’. A supplement to the statute issued in 1722 reminded officers to do their best for the soldiers under their command and not burden them with unnecessary ceremonial guard duties. They should not cling to the Military Statute, ‘like a blind man clings to a wall’.45
In May 1716 Peter met the king of Prussia in Stettin and the king of Denmark in Altona. The decision was taken to move Russian troops in preparation for a landing in Sweden, and in the meantime Peter and his companions went to Piermont to take the waters. The doctors banned consumption of alcohol, which meant that Peter's birthday had to be celebrated without the usual banquet. They passed the time shopping (Peter bought a child's bagpipes and a little paintbox) and playing chess and lotto. Peter was greatly saddened to hear of the death, on 18 June, of his sister Natalia, to whom he had been close since childhood. Natalia was in many respects a model for Peter's ‘new women’, one of the first to relocate permanently to St Petersburg. The inventory of her possessions showed that her home was furnished in Western taste and her wardrobes stuffed with the latest Western fashions, together with costumes and properties from her private theatre. But on the walls icons outnumbered portraits and her personal library comprised devotional works and saints' lives. The traditional image of the pious tsarevma was not so easily abandoned.
Early August witnessed a highlight of Peter's naval career when he assumed command of four fleets – the Danish, Dutch, British and Russian – off Copenhagen, as the allies prepared for their invasion of Sweden. Peter enjoyed this event, which was commemorated on a medal featuring Neptune riding the waves on sea-horses, even though the landing in Sweden was abandoned as a result of Russo-Danish disagreements and the deflection of the Danish fleet by Charles XII's operations in Norway. In Copenhagen Peter was reminded of disagreeable business. On 26 August he sent an ultimatum to Alexis, summoning him to join him. Alexis panicked. He turned south at Danzig (sending a letter misleadingly postmarked Königsberg to put his father off the scent) and headed for Vienna, in the expectation of getting help from his late wife's brother-in-law, Emperor Charles VI. The emperor offered Alexis a refuge, but the Viennese court was reluctant to get too involved and hopes of further aid were dashed when in July 1717 Austria clashed with Spain over Sardinia, which, incidentally, meant that the maritime powers and also France would ‘have their hands too tied to interfere in affairs in the north,’ as Boris Kurakin wrote to Peter early in 1718.46 Alexis's defection still caused embarrassment and complications for Peter, who was only too willing to believe in a plot spearheaded by his son with the backing of foreign aid.
In October 1716 Peter arrived in Amsterdam, where he spent most of the winter. The now famous victor of Poltava quickly reverted to his Dutch shipwright's identity as ‘Pieter Baas’. One of many anecdotes from this period relates how Peter objected when some Dutch merchants addressed him as ‘Your Majesty’ during dinner. ‘Come, brothers, let us converse like plain and honest ships-carpenters,’ he asked and demanded the jug rather than a glass when a servant poured him some beer.47 He revisited his old haunts in Zaandam, looking round the little house and even doing a spot of work with bellows and hammer in the blacksmith's shop. He also visited the home of the celebrated collector and illustrator Meri Sibilla Merian on the day she died and bought two volumes of illustrations of plants and insects.
On 2 January 1717, at Wesel in the Netherlands, Catherine, who was on her way to join Peter, gave birth to a boy, who was named Paul. Peter wrote to her on 4 January, rejoicing at the birth of ‘another recruit’ and the following day dispatched letters to foreign rulers, including the king of France and the emperor of Austria. To Prince Mikhail Golitsyn he wrote: ‘I inform you that on the second day of this month in Wesel my good lady gave birth to little soldier Paul. … Please inform the officers and men. I recommend him to the officers to be under their command and to the men as their comrade. Give all of them regards from me and the newborn.’48 To his daughters Anna and Elizabeth Peter wrote: ‘Congratulations on the birth of a second brother; give the first one a kiss from me and his [new] brother’,49 and to his newly married niece Ekaterina he boasted: ‘You are probably envious that we old folk are more productive than you young ones.’50 (Ekaterina's daughter, Anna, was born in December 1718. Anna's baby son was to occupy the Russian throne for just a year in 1740–41 as Ivan VI.)
Sadly, as Peter was composing his celebratory letters his new son was already dead. As Catherine wrote to Boris Kurakin on 8 January: ‘It is with deep sorrow that I inform you that Almighty God saw fit to transport our newborn son Tsarevich Paul from this world four hours after his birth. Truly, this sadness is very painful, but what's done is done and so we bow to the will of God.’ In a letter of 11 January Peter wrote of ‘the sudden turn of events which changed joy to sorrow, but all I can do is to respond like Job, that man of many sorrows, that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away’.51 One can imagine that the death of a newborn son when his eldest son had betrayed him was especially painful, but Peter did not allow personal grief to intrude for long. From Amsterdam he proceeded to The Hague, Leiden, Rotterdam, Antwerp and Dunkirk. Easter 1717 found him in Calais, where a special wooden chapel was built for him to celebrate the liturgy. On 26 April he reached Paris, where he remained until the second week of June.
Paris
Relations between Russia and France had taken a turn for the better after reaching a low point in the late 1680s, when Russian ambassadors had been virtually expelled after a series of misunderstandings. France played little part in the Northern War as long as the War of the Spanish Succession tied its hands and Russian action was concentrated in the eastern Baltic. But France was interested in what happened in north Germany and anxious to maintain a Swedish presence there, as a counterweight to the Holy Roman Empire. Peter, too, had an eye on the wider diplomatic picture. In January 1717 a triple alliance was formed between Britain, France and the Dutch Republic (joined in August 1718 by Austria). During his visit to Paris Peter sought a friendship treaty with France in order to minimise the danger of this alliance interfering in the Northern War. He hoped, more ambitiously, to detach France from its traditional Swedish connection and to form an anti-Austrian alliance, but France resisted Russian overtures and restricted itself to reducing its subsidy to Sweden.
Peter presented an odd spectacle to Parisian eyes. As usual, he rejected the splendidly appointed apartments which had been prepared for him in the Louvre, a building of overwhelming size, and sampled only some bread and radishes, six sorts of wine and two glasses of beer from the spread which was laid out, then headed for a private house where he immediately went to bed in a small room intended for the servants. Peter wrote to Menshikov on 2 May: ‘I arrived here safely on 26 April. … Travelling along the road into Paris I saw quite a bit of poverty among the ordinary people. The king is a real grown up and quite old in years, to be precise, seven: he has visited me and I him.’ The boy king Louis XV, who succeeded his father in 1715, had only just begun his education. On 29 April he visited Peter in his apartments, when Peter met him at his carriage, kissed him and carried him up the steps. The next day Peter visited the king in the Tuileries.52
In Paris Peter was taken round the places which catered for the magnificence of the French court – the tapestry manufactures of Gobelins, the studios and workshops of painters, sculptors and jewellers, the Mint (where a medal was cast in his honour). He attended an opera in the regent's box, and the regent served him with a glass of beer in person. By and large, Peter was not much impressed by the subtleties of French cuisine, although he amazed his hosts by the quantities of wine he could knock back. His cook apparently prepared enough food and drink each day for Peter alone to feed eight people. One of his French minders reported that he enjoyed sharp sauces, brown bread, green peas, and fruit (oranges, apples and pears) washed down with beer and wine. His companions in Paris included Pavel Iaguzhinsky, M. D. Olsuf'ev, his secretary Makarov, his physician Dr Robert Erskine and the priest Bitka. French commentators noted that Iaguzhinsky and Bitka were his regular drinking companions and that Bitka was a glutton, who could consume twelve to fifteen bottles of champagne at dinner and was finely dressed for a priest. Numerous references to purchases of clothing for him survive in Cabinet accounts. He also performed the role of purse keeper, paying the cab fare for Peter's visit to Versailles, for example.
In Paris Peter visited the Botanical Gardens, Tuileries, the Arsenal, Observatory, Academy of Sciences (which later made him a member), Les Invalides (where he served the old soldiers with bread and soup and drank to their health), and the Sorbonne. He observed an eye operation performed by the English surgeon Wallace. He was greatly impressed by the gardens at Saint-Cloud, with their huge fountains which shot 135 feet into the air, and at Versailles on 14 May he inspected the gardens and fountains on the first of several visits. He spent the night in Madam de Maintenon's rooms in the Trianon, where her old servant was horrified by the Russians' bad behaviour. On 30 May he was back at Versailles for his birthday, when fireworks and illuminations were organised at Marly and torches and lamps were brought from Paris to light up the Agrippina fountain, his favourite. These visits and twelve albums of engravings of Versailles which he received as a gift from the royal library provided ample material for extending his own palaces at Peterhof and Strel'na, which he visited with new enthusiasm after the trip to Paris.
The best-known image linked with Peter's visit to France is attributed to the renowned court painter Jean-Marc Nattier which now hangs in the Hermitage. The painter emphasised military symbols – Peter is clad in shining armour, with his right hand holding a baton and resting on a medieval helmet complete with extravagant red plume, his left lightly holding a sheathed sword. He wears the Order of St Andrew. Peter's pose, his head half turned to gaze somewhat soulfully at the viewer, is static, but the thick of battle is suggested in the far distance on the right of the canvas. Nattier painted Peter in Paris, but went to the Hague to do a companion piece of Catherine. Peter did not take her to France, for fear, apparently, that her lowly origins would not command respect. Nattier got the message. His Catherine is thoroughly regal. Wearing a fashionably low-cut jewel-studded gown in a gold-spun fabric with fine lace trimmings, an extravagant stole of royal ermine, an elegant hair decoration and the red ribbon of the Order of St Catherine, she is set against velvet draperies dotted with crowns and double eagles, a crown and sceptre on a ledge behind and a columned backdrop suggesting a royal palace. Here was a consort fit for a tsar.
Return to St Petersburg. The Colleges
The couple's return to St Petersburg in October 1717 was marked with special pomp and ceremony, orchestrated by Menshikov. Keen to be the first to greet the tsar, Menshikov spent the morning of 9 October looking through his telescope from the gallery of his grand palace on the Finnish gulf at Oranienbaum. When he saw the tsar's ship approaching he went out to meet it in a boat and he and Peter entered Kronstadt harbour together, to the sound of gun salutes, and celebrated at Menshikov's Kronstadt residence. The next day Menshikov set off for St Petersburg in advance of the tsar to co-ordinate a reception in the freshly decorated Winter Palace, where Peter would be reunited with his children (who had been in Menshikov's care), each of whom had a little party piece prepared. Two-year old Peter Petrovich, seated on a miniature horse, presented his father with a text (‘ghost-written’ by Feofan Prokopovich, who since 1716 had been resident in St Petersburg) expatiating on the theme of ‘the common good of the whole state’, and apologising that Nature ‘has not yet had time to supply me with the corporal organs with which to voice my heartfelt enthusiasm’.53 Menshikov's three-year-old son Alexander delivered a speech in French, a reference to Peter's recent travels which also demonstrated the accomplishments of the new generation at home in Russia. Prokopovich himself had composed a sermon extolling the mind-broadening virtues of foreign travel. After the speeches Peter went straight to the Admiralty to inspect work on ships. On 12 October he and Menshikov visited the Summer Gardens, where considerable landscaping had been completed. As governor of St Petersburg, Menshikov was anxious to show off how much had been achieved during Peter's absence.
There was also less welcome news. On 21 October Peter wrote to Ivan Fedorovich Romodanovsky: ‘I received your letter of 21 September upon arrival in which you inform me of the death of your father, for which I offer deepest condolences that he did not lose his life as a result of old age but from an attack of gangrene, still there goes everyone one way or another by God's will, bear this in mind and don't give in to grief. And please don't imagine that I have abandoned you, or forgotten your father's good deeds.’54 ‘Tsarevich’ Ivan replaced his father in his dual offices of Prince-Caesar (‘Sire’) and head of the Preobrazhensky office, but it is doubtful whether he ever replaced Fedor Iur'evich in Peter's affections. To quote Boris Kurakin, the elder Romodanovsky may have had ‘the appearance of a monster and the character of a wicked tyrant’ and have been ‘the greatest of ill-wishers, drunk day in day out; but he was more faithful to His Majesty than anyone’.55 Peter missed him.
Throughout 1717 Peter had received peace proposals and offers of mediation. In December 1717 the Swedes agreed to a peace congress, which was scheduled to open the following May. With hostilities now in a low key, Peter entered on a bout of domestic reforms, on 11 and 15 December 1717 issuing edicts on the establishment of new government departments or collegiate boards known as kollegii, the idea for which was first mentioned in a note to the Senate in March 1715. The nine colleges were Foreign Affairs; State Revenues; Justice; State Accounting; Military; Admiralty; Commerce; State Expenses; and Mines and Manufacture. Their Russian names – Kamer-Kollegiia, Revision-Kollegiia and so on – were borrowed from the Swedish. They were to be run on the principle that decisions were reached by a board which operated ‘collegiately’ on a majority decision, supported by a hierarchy of professional officials, who in turn were serviced by a team of chancellery clerks and copyists, assorted domestics and doormen. Voting members consisted of a president and vice-president (initially the former was a Russian, the latter a foreigner), four or five councillors and four assessors.
The nuts and bolts of the new system were borrowed from Sweden, and Austrian, Danish, Prussian and British procedures were also consulted, but an order of 28 April 1718 warned against slavish imitation: ‘Any points which are inconvenient in the Swedish statute or incompatible with the situation of this country are to be included only if appropriate.’56 A systematic explanation of the function and duties of college staff was set out in the General Regulation of 1720. One of the principles behind the interlocking institutions of central and local government devised in 1717–20 was the notion that the new system should work like a well-oiled machine without any need for the intervention of its inventor. In the words of an anonymous memorandum, usually ascribed to Leibniz, ‘God, as a God of order, rules everything wisely and in an orderly manner with his invisible hand. The Gods of this world, or the likeness of God's power (I am thinking of the absolutist monarchs), have to establish their forms of government in accordance with this order if they wish to enjoy the sweet fruits of a flourishing state for their great efforts.’57 But the notion that justice could be obtained only by bypassing officials and official bodies and reaching the great sovereign was difficult to eradicate. An edict issued by Peter in December 1718 reminded petitioners who ‘pestered’ the tsar ‘what a multitude there is of them, whereas it is one person they petition, and he is surrounded by so much military business and other burdensome work … and even if he did not have such a lot of work, how would it be possible for one man to look after so many? In truth it is impossible either for a man or even for an angel. …’58 Four years later petitioners were directed to the newly created ‘maitre de revuêtes’ (reketmeister) instead of bothering the emperor, ‘giving him no peace’.59 In fact, Peter himself did little to alter old views about royal power. The proportion of legislation issued as a personal (imennoi) decree of the tsar, sometimes written by him alone, increased rather than diminished after the installation of the new machinery of government.
Peter's image underwent a number of changes in the decade after Poltava. If in 1709–10 pictures of a man of action, a warrior on horseback, dominated, by 1717 artists were beginning to take a more rounded view of Peter, now in his mid-forties, presenting him as statesman, patron of arts and sciences (a member of the French Academy, no less), even a philosopher. Peter's favourite portrait of himself is said to have been the half-length study attributed to the Dutch artist Karl (Carel) Moor for whom Peter posed in Amsterdam in 1717; it was much copied thereafter, notably in Antwerp (in 1724–25) by Andrei Matveev, one of several promising Russian artists whom Peter sent abroad to train. Portrayed against a darkish background of sky and trees, Peter, dressed in a tunic with the blue sash of the Order of St Andrew across his shoulder, stares calmly and thoughtfully at the viewer. A glimpse of cuirass at the neck suggests that the tsar is, nevertheless, ready for war. The overall impression is one of balance between soldier and statesman. In Jacobus Houbraken's famous engraving of the portrait, the military theme is more to the fore, with oval medallions depicting cannons and anchors at its base.
There was a side of Peter which remained unrecorded by painters of the era. In December 1717 Prince-Pope Nikita Zotov died, thus necessitating the election of a successor. In contrast to 1700, when Peter made no attempt to replace the late Patriarch Adrian, now he wasted no time in asking permission of the new Prince-Caesar to fill the post: ‘Our All-Mad Assembly has been left without a head; therefore we beg Your Majesty to see to the election of a Bacchus-like father for the vacant throne.’60 Peter himself devised the details of the ceremonies:
Having gathered in the old court of the pope each archpriest is to begin to sing the song of Bacchus, then the Prince Great Orator will climb onto a high place and read a sermon exhorting them to appeal to Bacchus fervently and not to repent … but with zealous hearts to carry out their election and then they are all to go to the stone house to the conclave in the order set out in the register.
The election involved a ballot using eggs. The new pontiff was the former ‘Metropolitan of St Petersburg’ Peter Ivanovich Buturlin (d. 1723), who was consecrated on 10 January 1718, ‘by the will of the universal Prince-Caesar and the whole of the All-Jesting Assembly’.61 Peter continued to play the modest role of deacon, although in reality he personally devised all the Assembly's activities.