16

PETER IN ENGLAND

At the time of Peter’s visit, London and Paris were the two most populous cities in Europe. In commercial wealth, London ranked second to Amsterdam, which it was soon to succeed. What made London unique, however, was the degree to which it dominated the nation in which it lay. Like Paris, London was the national capital and seat of government, and, like Amsterdam, it was the country’s greatest port, the center of its commerce, art and culture. In England, however, the size of the city dwarfed all else. London, counting its immediate environs, had 750,000 inhabitants; the next largest city in England, Bristol, had a mere 30,000. Or, to put it differently, one Englishman in ten was a Londoner; only one Frenchman in forty lived in Paris.

London in 1698 lay mainly on the north bank of the Thames, stretching from Tower Hill to the Houses of Parliament. The great boulevard of the city, spanned by a single bridge, London Bridge, was the Thames. The river, 750 feet across, flowed between marshy banks thick with reeds, interspersed with trim gardens and green meadows—its stone embankments came later. The Thames played a key role in the city’s life. Always crowded with ships, it was used as a thoroughfare for getting from one part of the city to another. Hundreds of watermen rowing little boats provided a quicker, cleaner and safer service than could be had by traveling through the crowded streets. In autumn and winter, great mists and fogs swirled up from the Thames to roll through the streets, shrouding everything in a thick, brown, poisonous vapor created by the fog mixing with the smoke pouring from thousands of chimneys.

The London that Peter visited and explored on foot was rich, vital, dirty and dangerous. The narrow streets were piled with garbage and filth which could be dropped freely from any overhanging window. Even the main avenues were dark and airless because greedy builders, anxious to gain more space, had projected upper stories out over the street. Through these Stygian alleys, crowds of Londoners jostled and pushed one another. Traffic congestion was monumental. Lines of carriages and hackney cabs cut deep ruts into the streets, so that passengers inside were tossed about, arriving breathless, nauseated and sometimes bruised. When two coaches met in a narrow street, fearful arguments ensued, with the two coachmen “saluting each other with such diabolical titles and bitter execrations as if every one was striving which should go to the Devil first.” For short distances, to avoid the mud and pushing of the crowds, sedan chairs carried by two strong men were popular. Biggest of all were the overland coaches which rolled into London from the highroads, carrying commercial travelers and visitors from the country. Their destinations were the inns, where weary passengers could dine on cabbage and a pudding, Westphalian ham, chicken, beef, wine, mutton steaks and pigeons, and rise the next morning to a breakfast of ale and toast.

London was a violent city with coarse, cruel pleasures which quickly crushed the unprotected innocent. For women, the age of consent was twelve (it remained twelve in England until 1885). Crimes were common, and in some parts of the city people could not sleep for the cries of “Murder!” rising from the streets. Public floggings were a popular sight, and executions drew vast crowds. On “Hanging Day,” workmen, shopkeepers and apprentices left their jobs to jam the streets, joking and laughing, and hoping to catch a glimpse of the condemned’s face. Wealthy ladies and gentlemen paid for places in windows and balconies overlooking the route from Newgate Prison to Tyburn, where executions took place, or, best of all, in wooden stands especially erected to provide an unobstructed view. The most ghastly execution was the penalty for treason: hanging, drawing and quartering. The condemned man was strung up until he was almost dead from strangulation, then cut down, disemboweled while still alive, beheaded, and his trunk was then chopped into quarters.

Sports were heavily stained with blood. Crowds paid to see bulls and bears set upon by enraged mastiffs; often, the teeth of the bear had been filed down and the cornered beast could only swat with his great paws at the mastiffs that leaped and tore at him. Cockfights attracted gamblers, and large purses were wagered on the specially trained fowl.

But, for all its violence, London was also a city where grace, beauty and civilized life were important. It was during this age that Sir Christopher Wren, the greatest of English architects, erected fifty-two new parish churches in London on sites wiped clean by the Great Fire. Their thin, glittering steeples gave London a breathtakingly distinctive skyline, dominated by Wren’s masterpiece, the gigantic domed structure of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The church was forty-one years in building; on the eve of Peter’s arrival, the choir had just been opened for public worship.

For intelligent men, life in London centered on hundreds of coffee houses where the conversation could center on anything under the sun. Gradually, the different houses began to specialize in talk about politics, religion, literature, scientific ideas, business, shipping or agriculture. Choosing the house by the talk he wished to hear, a visitor could step in, sit by the fire, sip coffee and listen to every shade of opinion expressed in brilliant, learned and passionate terms. Good conversationalists could sharpen their wits, writers could share their dilemmas, politicians could arrange compromises, the lonely could find simple warmth. In Lloyd’s coffee house, marine insurance had its beginnings. At Will’s, Addison was to have his chair by the fire in winter and by the window in summer.

This was London in 1698. As for the larger polity, England itself, the seventeenth century was a time of transition from the small, relatively insignificant sixteenth-century island kingdom of Queen Elizabeth I to the great European power and world empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When Elizabeth died in 1603, and with her the Tudor Dynasty, England was free of the ambitions of Spain, having beaten off Philip II and his armada. But England remained a peripheral factor in the affairs of Europe. The dynastic question was settled when King James VI of Scotland, son of Mary Queen of Scots, came down from Edinburgh to take the English throne as James I and begin a century of Stuart rule. During the first half of this century, England was absorbed in its own problems, trying to sort out the tangled strands of religious conscience and the relative power of crown and Parliament. When the debate burst into civil war, the second Stuart, Charles I, lost his head, and for eleven years England was ruled under the stern eye of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. Even when Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, religious tension remained acute. The nation was divided between Catholic and Protestant, and, among the Protestants, between Church of England and Nonconformists.

Yet, England’s power and ambitions were growing. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch dominated the world’s trade routes, but English seamen and merchants were eager to compete, and three naval wars with Holland jarred this Dutch supremacy. Later, during the War of the Spanish Succession, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, won four major victories over the French armies in the field, besieged and captured supposedly invincible fortresses and was on the verge of driving the Sun King out of Versailles itself when victory was snatched from him by a government decision to end the war. England triumphed, nevertheless, not only over France but also over its own ally, Holland. The long war had overstrained even the superbly organized resources of the wealthy Dutch. The Dutch position on the continent was far more vulnerable than that of England, and during the struggle Holland’s vast ocean trade was heavily restricted while that of England flourished and grew. The status of the two powers, nearly equal in the seventeenth century, changed rapidly in the eighteenth. Dutch power waned quickly and Holland slipped to the rank of a lesser state. England emerged from Marlborough’s wars supreme on the oceans, and its maritime power led to world empire with colonies in every corner of the globe.

Peter’s visit to England came at a pivotal moment of this transition to world power. The Treaty of Ryswick ended the first great war against Louis, with the Sun King’s power held in check. The final struggle, the War of the Spanish Succession, was four years off, but already England was bustling with the energy which would fuel Marlborough’s victories on land and make the Royal Navy mistress of the seas. The wealth of England’s commerce still could not compete with the fertile soil of France, but England had an insuperable advantage: it was an island. Its security lay not in the chain of fortresses that Holland maintained in the Spanish Netherlands, but in the waves and its fleet. And although fleets were expensive, they cost less than armies and fortresses. Louis raised dozens of magnificent French armies, but to do so left his people crushed by taxes. In England, the taxes voted by Parliament hurt but did not crush. Europe was amazed by the resilience of the English economy and by the apparent wealth of the English Treasury. It was a system which could not fail to impress a visiting monarch anxious to lift his people up from a simple agrarian economy and into the modern world.

H.M.S. Yorke was the largest warship Peter had yet sailed on, and during his twenty-four-hour trip across the Channel he watched the handling of the ship with interest. Although the weather was stormy, the Tsar remained on deck through the entire voyage, constantly asking questions. The ship was pitching and rolling in the heavy seas, but Peter insisted on going aloft to study the rigging.

Early the next morning, the little squadron arrived off the Suffolk coast and was saluted by the guns of the coastal forts. At the mouth of the Thames, Peter and Admiral Mitchell transferred from the Yorke onto the smaller yacht Mary. This yacht, escorted by two others, sailed up the Thames and, on the morning of January 11, anchored near London Bridge. Here, Peter transferred onto a royal barge and was rowed upriver to a landing quay on the Strand. He was met by a court chamberlain with a welcome from King William. Peter replied in Dutch, and Admiral Mitchell, who spoke Dutch, acted as translator. Peter admired Mitchell, and his first request to the King was that Mitchell be assigned as his official escort and translator throughout his stay.

Peter spent his first days in London in a house at 21 Norfolk Street. At his request, the building selected was small and simple, with a door opening directly onto the riverbank. Two days after the Tsar’s arrival, the King himself paid an informal visit. Arriving in a small, unmarked carriage, William found the Tsar still in shirt sleeves in the bedroom he shared with four other Russians. The two rulers began to talk, but William soon found the air in the tiny room too warm and heavy for his asthma—on arrival, Peter had closed the window in the fashion of Moscow, where double windows are sealed against the cold from early autumn until late spring. Unable to breathe, William begged that the window be opened, and when it was, he inhaled deeply the fresh, cold air that poured into the room.

On the 23rd, Peter, accompanied by Admiral Mitchell and two Russian companions, drove to Kensington Palace to pay his first visit to William as King of England, and this meeting was longer than the brief conversations in Holland or the short interview in Peter’s stifling room on Norfolk Street. Although the relationship between Peter and William never became intimate—the gap between the exuberant, rough-mannered, autocratic twenty-five-year-old and the lonely, weary, melancholy King being far too wide—William nevertheless was interested in Peter. Apart from being impressed by the Tsar’s energy and curiosity, he could not help being flattered by Peter’s admiration of him and the achievements of his career, and, as a lifelong builder of alliances, he was pleased by the Tsar’s animosity against his own antagonist, Louis XIV. As for Peter, neither William’s age nor his personality made friendship easy, but the Tsar continued to respect his Dutch hero.

After his talk with the King, Peter was introduced to the heir to the throne, the thirty-three-year-old Princess Anne, who would succeed William within four years. At William’s persuasion, the Tsar stayed on to witness a ball, although, to preserve his incognito, he watched through a small window in the wall of the room. He was fascinated by the construction of a wind dial which had been installed in the main gallery of Kensington Palace. Through connecting rods with a weathervane on the roof, the dial indicated which way the wind was blowing. Later, Peter would install an identical device in his own small summer palace by the Neva in St. Petersburg.

It was also at this meeting that William persuaded Peter to sit for a portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller which contemporaries considered a remarkable likeness. Today, the original hangs in the King’s Gallery of Kensington Palace, where its being painted was suggested almost 300 years ago.

Peter’s one visit to Kensington Palace was the full extent of his ceremonial life in London. Stubbornly maintaining his incognito, he went about London as he pleased, frequently on foot even on wintry days. As in Holland, he visited workshops and factories, continually asking to be shown how things worked, even demanding drawings and specifications. He looked in on a watchmaker to buy a pocket watch and stayed to learn to dismantle, repair and reassemble the intricate mechanism. Impressed by the carpentry in English coffins, he ordered one shipped to Moscow to serve as a model. He bought a stuffed crocodile and a stuffed swordfish, outlandish creatures never seen in Russia. He made a single visit to a London theater, but the crowd stared more at him than at the stage and he retreated to hide behind his comrades. He met the man who had designed the yacht Royal Transport, being readied for him by the King, and was astonished to find the designer to be a young, hard-drinking English nobleman, very much a man after his own heart. Peregrine Osborne, Marquis of Carmarthen, was the son of Charles II’s great minister Danby, now the Duke of Leeds. He happened also to be a superb seaman and an original designer as well as a majestic drinker. It was Carmarthen who introduced Peter to his favorite drink, a cup of brandy laced with peppers. Together, the two went so often to a tavern in Great Tower Street that it was renamed the Czar of Muscovy. With Carmarthen, Peter met Laetitia Cross, a leading actress of the day. He took pleasure in her company, and, with the understanding that some reward would come her way, she moved in with him for the duration of his stay in England.

The sight in London that most attracted Peter, of course, was the forest of masts belonging to the ships moored in rows in the great merchant-fleet anchorage known as the Pool of London. In the Pool alone, Daniel Defoe one day counted no less than 2,000 ships. But Peter, anxious to begin his course in shipbuilding amidst the docks and shipyards of the lower Thames, was temporarily frustrated by ice on the river. As it happened, the winter of 1698 was exceptionally cold. The upper Thames was partly frozen, and people were able to walk from Southwark across to London. Piemen, jugglers and small boys plied their wares and played games on the ice, but it made travel by water impossible and delayed Peter’s project.

For greater convenience and to escape the crowds that were now beginning to dog his excursions, he moved his lodgings to Deptford, staying at Sayes Court, a large, elegantly furnished house provided for him by the English government. The house belonged to John Evelyn, the celebrated essayist and diarist, and it was Evelyn’s pride; he had spent forty-five years laying out its gardens, its bowling green, its gravel paths and groves of trees. To make room for Peter and his comrades, another tenant, Admiral Benbow, had been moved out, and the house had been especially redecorated. For Peter, its attractions were its size (it was large enough to hold his entire suite), the garden in which he could relax in privacy, and the door at the foot of the garden which opened directly onto the dockyard and the river.

Unfortunately for Evelyn, the Russians cared little for his reputation or for his lifelong effort to create beauty. They vandalized his house. Even while they were still there, Evelyn’s horrified steward wrote to his master:

There is a house full of people and right nasty. The Tsar lies next to the library and dines in the parlour next your study. He dines at ten o’clock and six at night, is very seldom at home a whole day, very often in the King’s yard [the shipyard], or by water, dressed in several dresses. The King is expected here this day; the best parlour is pretty clean for him to be entertained in. The King pays for all he [the Tsar] has.

But it was not until the Russians had left at the end of their three-month stay and Evelyn came to see his once-beautiful home that the full extent of the damage became apparent. Appalled, Evelyn hurried off to the Royal Surveyor, Sir Christopher Wren, and the Royal Gardener, Mr. London, to ask them to estimate the cost of the repairs. They found floors and carpets so stained and smeared with ink and grease that new floors had to be installed. Tiles had been pulled from the Dutch stoves and brass door locks pried open. The paintwork was battered and filthy. Windows were broken, and more than fifty chairs—every one in the house—had simply disappeared, probably into the stoves. Featherbeds, sheets and canopies were ripped and torn as if by wild animals. Twenty pictures and portraits were torn, probably used for target practice. Outside, the garden was ruined. The lawn was trampled into mud and dust, “as if a regiment of soldiers in iron shoes had drilled on it.” The magnificent holly hedge, 400 feet long, 9 feet high and 5 feet thick, had been flattened by wheelbarrows rammed through it. The bowling green, the gravel paths, the bushes and trees, all were ravaged. Neighbors reported that the Russians had found three wheelbarrows, unknown in Russia, and had developed a game with one man, sometimes the Tsar, inside the wheelbarrow and another racing him into the hedges. Wren and his companions noted all this and made a recommendation which resulted in a recompense to Evelyn of 350 pounds and ninepence, an enormous sum for that day.

Not surprisingly in an age of religious struggle, the Protestant missionary spirit was awakened by the presence of the curious young monarch who meant to import Western technology into his backward kingdom. If shipbuilding techniques, why not religion? Rumors that Peter was not devoted to traditional Orthodoxy and was interested in other faiths opened broad visions in the heads of aggressive Protestants. Would it be possible to convert the young monarch and, through him, his primitive people? Could there at least be a union of the Anglican and Orthodox churches? The Archbishop of Canterbury was inspired by the prospect, and even King William lent an ear. On the command of the King and the Archbishop, an eminent English churchman, Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, was instructed to call upon the Tsar “and to offer him such information of our religion and constitution as he was willing to receive.”

On February 15, Peter received Burnet and a formal delegation of Anglican churchmen. Peter liked Burnet and they met several times for dialogues lasting several hours, but Burnet, who had come to instruct and persuade, found the chances of conversion to be nil; Peter was only the first of many Russians whose interest in importing Western technology was mistaken by naïve Westerners for an opportunity also to export Western philosophy and ideas. His interest in Protestantism was purely clinical. Skeptical of all religions, including Orthodoxy, he was seeking, amidst the forms and doctrines of each, that which could be useful to him and his state. After their conversations, Burnet took the Tsar to visit the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace. Invited to attend services at St. Paul’s, Peter refused because of the large crowds, but he did take Anglican communion in the Archbishop’s private chapel before a breakfast at which the two had a lengthy discussion.

Long after the Tsar had returned to Russia, Burnet set down his impressions of the tall young Russian sovereign with whom he had talked so earnestly:

I waited often on him, and was ordered both by the King and the archbishop and bishops to attend upon him. I had good interpreters, so I had much free discourse with him. He is a man of very hot temper, soon inflamed, and very brutal in his passion; he raises his natural heat by drinking much brandy, which he rectified himself with great application. He is subject to convulsive motions all over his body, and his head seems to be affected with these. He wants not capacity, and has a larger measure of knowledge than might be expected from his education, which was very indifferent; a want of judgment with an instability of temper, appear in him too often and too evidently. He is mechanically turned, and seems designed by nature rather to be a ship-carpenter than a great prince. This was his chief study and exercise while he stayed here. He wrought much with his own hands, and made all about him work at the models of ships. He told me how he designed a great fleet at Azov, and with it to attack the Turkish empire; but he did not seem capable of conducting so great a design, though his conduct in his wars since this has discovered a greater genius in him than appeared at that time. He was desirous to understand our doctrine, but he did not seem disposed to mend matters in Moscovy; he was, indeed, resolved to encourage learning, and to polish his people by sending some of them to travel in other countries, and to draw strangers to come and live among them. He seemed apprehensive still of his sister’s intrigues. There is a mixture both of passion and severity in his temper. He is resolute but understands little of war, and seems not at all inquisitive that way. After I had seen him often, and had conversed much with him, I could not but adore the depth of the providence of God, that had raised up such a furious man to so absolute authority over so great a part of the world.

Peter’s interest in church affairs extended beyond the established Church of England. Tales of his curiosity about Protestantism inspired all kinds of sects, fanatical and otherwise, to hope that they might gain a convert or supporter. Reformers, extremists, philanthropists and simple quacks approached the Tsar, hoping to use him as a means of introducing their particular beliefs into Peter’s far-off country. Most of these Peter ignored. But he was fascinated by the Quakers. He went to several Quaker meetings and eventually met William Penn, to whom the huge proprietary colony of Pennsylvania had been granted by Charles II in exchange for cancellation of an enormous loan to the crown. Penn had actually spent only two years in his “holy experiment,” a territory devoted to religious toleration in the New World, and new, during Peter’s visit, he was preparing to depart again. Hearing that Peter had already attended a Quaker service, Penn went to Deptford to see the Tsar on April 3. They talked in Dutch, which Penn spoke, and Penn presented Peter with a number of his writings in that language. After Penn’s visit, Peter continued to go to Quaker meetings in Deptford. Following the service as best he could, standing up, sitting down, observing long periods of silence, he constantly looked about to see what others were doing. The experience stayed with him. Sixteen years later, in the North German province of Holstein, he found a Quaker meetinghouse and attended with Menshikov, Dolgoruky and others. The Russians, except for Peter, understood nothing of the words being spoken, but they sat in silence and occasionally the Tsar leaned over and interpreted. When the service was over, Peter declared to his followers that “whoever could live according to such a doctrine would be happy.”

During the same weeks that Peter was in conversation with English church leaders, he also consummated a business deal which, as he well knew, would sadden the hearts of his own Orthodox churchmen. Traditionally, the Orthodox Church forbade the use of that “ungodly herb,” tobacco. In 1634, Peter’s grandfather Tsar Michael had forbidden smoking or any other use of tobacco on pain of death; subsequently, the penalty was reduced and Russians caught smoking merely had their nostrils slit. Nevertheless, the influx of foreigners into Russia had spread the habit, and punishment was rare; Tsar Alexis had even licensed tobacco for a short period, making its sale a state monopoly. But the church and all conservative Russians still deeply disapproved. Peter, of course, ignored this disapproval; as a youth, he had been introduced to tobacco and was seen nightly smoking a long clay pipe with his Dutch and German friends in the German Suburb. Before departing Russia with the Great Embassy, Peter had issued a decree authorizing both the sale and the smoking of tobacco.

In England, whose colonies included the great tobacco-growing plantations of Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, this sudden potential of opening a vast new market for tobacco caused great excitement. Already, tobacco merchants had petitioned the King to intercede with the Tsar on their behalf. As it happened, no one was more interested in this matter, or better positioned to do something about it, than Carmarthen, Peter’s new comrade. When Carmarthen brought to him a proposal from a group of English merchants for a tobacco monopoly in Russia, Peter was instantly attracted. Not only did he see smoking as a Western habit whose wider use would help to loosen the iron grip of the Orthodox Church. There was an even greater immediate attraction: money. By this time, Peter and his Embassy desperately needed funds. The costs of supporting 250 Russians abroad, even with the subsidies received from the host countries, were enormous. In addition, Peter’s agents in Holland were recruiting seamen, ships’ officers, shipwrights and other personnel. They had to pay initial subscription fees, down payments of salaries and travel expenses. The agents were busy buying so many articles, instruments, machines and models that ten ships had to be chartered to carry this cargo along with the recruits back to Russia. The treasury of the Embassy was repeatedly drained, and Moscow was repeatedly called upon to send huge sums. But there was never enough.

This situation made Carmarthen’s proposal irresistible. He offered to pay 28,000 English pounds in return for permission to import a million and a half pounds of tobacco into Russia free of customs duties and to sell it on the Russian market free of all restrictions. Most important from Peter’s point of view, Carmarthen was prepared to pay cash in advance to Peter in London. The contract was signed on April 16, 1698. Peter’s pleasure can be measured in Lefort’s reply to the Tsar’s jubilant announcement: “On your orders, we [in Holland] did not open your letter until we had drained three goblets, and after we read it we drank three more.… In truth, I believe it’s a fine stroke of business.”

When not working at the dockyards, Peter hurried about London and its vicinity trying to see all the interesting places. He visited the Greenwich Naval Hospital, designed by Christopher Wren and called “one of the most sublime sights English architecture affords.” Peter approved of William III’s simple style of living in the red-brick, oak-paneled palace at Kensington, but the majestic hospital with its twin colonnades facing the Thames had an effect on him. Going to dine with the King after his visit to Greenwich, the Tsar could not help saying, “If I were to advise Your Majesty, it would be to move your court to the hospital and bring the patients to your palace.” Peter saw the tombs of England’s monarchs (and also the apple and oyster sellers) inside Westminster Abbey. He visited Windsor Castle and Hampton Court, but royal palaces were less interesting to him than functioning scientific or military institutions. At the Greenwich Observatory, he discussed mathematics with the Royal Astronomer. At the Woolwich Arsenal, England’s main cannon foundry, Peter discovered in Master of the Ordnance Romney a fellow spirit with whom he could share his delight in artillery and fireworks. The Tower of London at that time served as arsenal, zoo, museum and site of the Royal Mint. Touring the museum of medieval armor, Peter was not shown the axe which, fifty years earlier, had beheaded Charles I. His hosts remembered that Peter’s father, Tsar Alexis, hearing that the English people had beheaded their sovereign, had furiously stripped English merchants in Russia of all their privileges. Thus, the axe was kept hidden from Peter, “as it was feared that he would throw it into the Thames.” For Peter, the most interesting part of the Tower was the mint. Struck by the excellence of English coinage, and the technique by which the coins were made, he went back repeatedly. (Unfortunately, the Warden of the Royal Mint, Sir Isaac Newton, lived and worked at Trinity College, Cambridge.) Peter was impressed by the reform of English coinage instituted by Newton and John Locke. To prevent the constant degrading of the coinage by people snipping little bits of silver off the edges, English coins had milled edges. Two years later, when Peter began to reform Russia’s badly irregular coinage, the English system served as a model.

Throughout his stay in England, Peter was always on the lookout for qualified men for service in Russia. Aided in his recruiting by Carmarthen, he interviewed scores and finally persuaded about sixty Englishmen to follow him. Among them were Major Leonard van der Stamm, the master shipwright at Deptford; Captain John Perry, a hydraulic engineer to whom Peter assigned responsibility for building the Volga-Don canal; and Professor Henry Farquharson, a mathematician from the University of Aberdeen who was to open a School of Mathematics and Navigation in Moscow. Peter also wrote to a friend in Russia that he had recruited two barbers “for purposes of future demands,” a hint that had ominous portents for those in Moscow whose pride lay in the length of their beards.

Peter’s feeling for William and his gratitude to the King grew even greater when the regal gift of the yacht Royal Transport was handed over to him on March 2. He sailed in her the following day and as often thereafter as he could. In addition, William ordered that Peter be shown everything he wished to see of the English fleet. The climax came when the Tsar was invited to a special review of the fleet and a mock engagement off Spithead near the Isle of Wight. A naval squadron consisting of the Royal William, the Victory and the Association took Peter and his suite on board in Portsmouth and carried them into The Solent off the Isle of Wight. There, Peter transferred to Admiral Mitchell’s flagship, Humber. On exercise day, the fleet weighed anchor; the great ships set their sails and formed opposing lines of battle. Broadsides roared out, shrouding the fleets in smoke and flame just as they would in a real battle, but on this day no cannonballs flew. Nevertheless, as the great ships maneuvered through the smoke, turning in unison to attack each other, Peter was jubilant. He tried to see and note down everything: the scurrying of the seamen to dress the sails, the orders to the helmsmen, the number and caliber and serving of the guns, the signals from the flagship to her sisters in the line. It was a momentous day for a young man who, scarcely ten years before, had first seen a sailboat and learned to tack it back and forth on the narrow Yauza. When the ships returned at night to their anchorage, their guns thundered a twenty-one-gun salute and the seamen roared out cheers for the youthful monarch who dreamed of the day he would fly his own banner in the van of a Russian fleet.

William invited him to the Houses of Parliament. Not wishing to be stared at, Peter chose as his vantage point a window outside an upper gallery, and from there the Tsar observed the King on his throne surrounded by the English peerage on benches. This episode led to the remark by an anonymous observer which went around London, “Today, I have seen the rarest thing in the world: one monarch on the throne and another on the roof.” Peter listened to the debate with an interpreter and then, to the Russians who were with him, declared that, while he could not accept the limitation by parliaments of the power of kings, still “it is good to hear subjects speaking truthfully and openly to their king. This is what we must learn from the English!” While Peter was there, William gave his formal assent to a number of bills, including a land tax which it was estimated would produce 1.5 million pounds in revenue. When Peter expressed surprise that Parliament could raise so much by passage of a single bill, he was told that, the year before, Parliament had passed a bill which had collected three times as much.

As Peter’s visit neared its end, his presence in London came to be accepted as almost normal. The imperial ambassador Hoffman wrote to his master in Vienna:

The court here is well contented with [Peter], for he now is not so afraid of people as he was at first. They accuse him of a certain stinginess only, for he has been in no way lavish. All the time here he went about in sailor’s clothing. We shall see in what dress he presents himself to Your Imperial Majesty. He saw the King very rarely, as he did not wish to change his manner of life, dining at eleven o’clock in the morning, supping at seven in the evening, going to bed early, and getting up at four o’clock, which very much astonishes those Englishmen who kept company with him. They say that he intends to civilize his subjects in the manner of other nations. But from his acts here, one cannot find any other intention than to make them sailors.

The ambassador’s report was intended as a last-minute briefing for the Emperor, as Peter was expected to depart any day for Holland, and the next stop on his tour was Vienna. But the Tsar’s departure was repeatedly postponed. He had come for only a short visit, but had found so much to see and do, not only at the Deptford shipyard but also at Woolwich and the mint, that he constantly delayed. This stirred anxiety in those members of the Embassy left behind in Amsterdam. They not only worried about the Tsar’s whereabouts and intentions, but they had received news from Vienna that the Emperor was about to make a separate peace with their common enemy, the Turks. The ostensible purpose of the Great Embassy being to strengthen the alliance, news of its impending disintegration did not make the Russians happy. As these messages arrived and the pressures on him grew, Peter reluctantly decided that he must leave.

On April 18, Peter paid his farewell visit to the King. Relations between the two had chilled somewhat when Peter learned that William had had a hand in the forthcoming peace between the Emperor and the Sultan. For William, of course, it was essential to help disengage the Hapsburg empire from its war in the Balkans and turn it around to prepare against the only enemy William cared about: France. Nevertheless, the final meeting at Kensington Palace was amicable. The Tsar distributed 120 guineas among the King’s servants who had waited on him, which, according to one observer, “was more than they deserved, they being very rude to him.” To Admiral Mitchell, his escort and translator, he gave forty sables and six pieces of damask, a handsome gift. It was on this occasion, too, that Peter supposedly took from his pocket a small object wrapped in brown paper which he gave to the King as a token of friendship and appreciation. William unwrapped it, the story goes, and found a magnificent uncut diamond. Another account says that it was a huge, rough ruby fit to be “set upon the top of the Imperial Crown of England.”

On May 2, Peter reluctantly left London. He paid a final visit to the Tower and the mint on the day of his departure while his companions were waiting for him aboard the Royal Transport, and when the yacht moved down the river, Peter stopped and anchored at Woolwich so that he could go ashore and say goodbye to Romney at the arsenal. Under way once again, the Royal Transport reached Gravesend at dusk, where the Tsar anchored again. In the morning, accompanied by Carmarthen sailing in his own yacht, Peregrine, Peter made for Chatham, the naval harbor. There he transferred to the Peregrine and cruised through the port, admiring the giant, three-decked ships-of-the-line lying at anchor. With Carmarthen, he boarded three men-of-war, the Britannia, the Triumph and the Association, and then was rowed ashore to visit the naval-stores depot.

The following morning, the Royal Transport weighed anchor and made for Margate, where the Thames estuary meets the sea. There, he found an English naval squadron, again commanded by Admiral Mitchell, waiting to escort him back to Holland. The crossing was stormy and exciting, more so than most of the Russians on board could have wished, but Peter relished the waves seething over the decks.^*

Although he never returned to England, Peter had enjoyed his taste of English life. He found there much that he liked: informality, a practical, efficient monarch and government, good drinking and good talk about ships, gunnery and fireworks. Although he was not intimate with William, the King had opened every door, he had given Peter access to his shipyards, mint and gun foundries, he had displayed his fleet, he had allowed the Russians to talk with everyone and make notes. Peter was grateful and carried away the highest respect not only for English ship design and workmanship, but for the island as a whole. In Russia, he once said to Perry that “if he had not come to England he had certainly been a bungler.” Further, continued Perry, “His Majesty has often declared to his lords, when he has been a little merry, that he thinks it a much happier life to bean admiral in England than a tsar in Russia.” “The English island,” Peter said, “is the best and most beautiful in the world.”

* Sadly, Peter never sailed again on his splendid English yacht. She was loaded at Amsterdam with Peter’s own collection of instruments and curiosities bought during his tour, and sent back to Archangel. There, on Peter’s orders, she was met by Franz Timmerman, who was commanded to bring her through the network of rivers and lakes in northern Russia to Yaroslavl and thence down the Volga. One day, when his Volga-Don canal was finished, Peter hoped to bring her down the Don to Azov and sail her on the Black Sea. But the Royal Transport drew eight feet and Timmerman could not bring her even as far as the Volga. She returned to Archangel, where she remained for fifteen years. In 1715, when Russia had become a Baltic naval power, Peter ordered her refitted and sailed around the North Cape to join him in the Baltic. She entered the Baltic and was lost in a storm off the coast of Sweden.