51
THE EDUCATION OF AN HEIR
On October 11, 1717, Peter returned to St. Petersburg. “The two princesses, his daughters [Anne and Elizabeth, then nine and eight], waited for him in front of the palace, dressed in Spanish costumes,” Monsieur de La Vie, the French envoy, reported to Paris, “and his son, the young Prince Peter Petrovich, greeted him in his room where he was riding a tiny Icelandic pony.” But his joy at seeing his children quickly faded. While he was away, the government of Russia had functioned badly. Maladministration, jealousies and corruption everywhere had all but swamped the governmental system he had tried to erect; men who were supposed to be the leaders of the state were quarreling like children, frantically accusing one another of political and financial misdeeds. Peter plunged into this confusion and tried to straighten it out. Every morning, at six a.m., he convened the Senate and sat in person to hear the accusations and defenses of the contending parties. Finally, realizing that the complaints were too widespread and the corruption too deep, he created a special court of justice with separate investigating commissions, each consisting of a major, a captain and a lieutenant of the Guards, who were to examine the cases and render judgment according to “common sense and equity.” “And so it came to pass in Russia,” wrote Weber, “that members of the venerable Senate, composed of the heads of the greatest families in the Tsar’s dominions, were obliged to appear before a lieutenant as their judge and be called to account for their conduct.”
But these trials were only a preliminary to something far more serious, something that threatened the whole future of Peter’s Russia. For it was at this time that Peter was forced to make a final decision in the case of his son, the Tsarevich Alexis.
Alexis was born in February 1690, not long after the eighteen-year-old Tsar’s marriage to the meek, sad, reclusive Eudoxia. At Alexis’ birth, Peter was enormously proud, giving court banquets and fireworks displays in honor of the new Prince. Yet, as the years went by, the Tsar saw little of his son. Absorbed by shipbuilding, by Lefort and Anna Mons, by the Azov campaigns and the Great Embassy, Peter left Alexis in the company of Eudoxia. Visiting his son meant seeing the boy’s mother, toward whom he was openly contemptuous, and Peter preferred to avoid them both. Naturally, Alexis sensed the breach between his parents and understood that in his father’s mind he was identified with his mother. Thus, in his earliest, formative years, Alexis saw Peter as disapproving, perhaps even a threat, an enemy. Growing up in his mother’s care, he took her part and adopted her ways.
Then, suddenly, when Alexis was a thin eight-year-old boy with a high forehead and dark, serious eyes, Peter wrenched his little world apart. In 1698, when the Tsar returned from the West to suppress the Streltsy, he sent Eudoxia to a convent. Alexis was installed in his own house in Preobrazhenskoe and confided to the general supervision of his aunt, Peter’s sister Natalya. His education, which until that time had consisted mainly of readings from the Bible and other religious lessons, was placed in the hands of Martin Neugebauer of Danzig, who had been recommended by Augustus of Saxony. Neugebauer had a Germanic character—he was orderly and prompt—and he soon came into conflict with the Russian temperament. There is a story of a meal which the twelve-year-old Tsarevich was sharing with Neugebauer, his earlier teacher Nikifor Viazemsky and Alexis Naryshkin. They were eating chicken, and the Tsarevich having finished his piece, took another. Naryshkin instructed him first to empty his plate by putting his bones back into the serving dish. Neugebauer, shocked, declared that this was ill-bred. Alexis looked at Neugebauer and whispered to Naryshkin; Neugebauer declared that whispering also was ill-bred. The two men began to argue, and Neugebauer exploded: “None of you understand anything! When I get the Tsarevich abroad, then I shall know what to do!” Russians, he shouted, were all barbarians, dogs and pigs, and he would demand the dismissal of all of Alexis’ Russian household. Throwing down his knife and fork, he stormed out of the room. It was Neugebauer, however, who was dismissed. Unable to find any work in Russia, he returned to Germany, became a secretary to King Charles XII of Sweden and functioned for many years as Charles’ advisor and expert on Russian affairs.
Meanwhile, to replace Neugebauer, Peter had followed Patkul’s advice and chosen a German doctor of laws, Heinrich von Huyssen, who submitted a plan for the education of a future tsar which Peter approved. Alexis was to study French, German, Latin, mathematics, history and geography. He was to read foreign newspapers and to continue intensive study of the Bible. In his spare time, he was to look at atlases and globes, train with mathematical instruments and exercise by fencing, dancing, riding and playing games involving throwing or kicking balls. Alexis was intelligent and made good progress. In a letter to Leibniz, Huyssen reported,
The Prince lacks neither capacity nor quickness of mind. His ambition is moderated by reason, by sound judgment, and by a great desire to distinguish himself and to gain everything which is fitting for a great prince. He is of a studious and pliant nature, and wishes by assiduity to supply what has been neglected in his education. I notice in him a great inclination to piety, justice, uprightness and purity of morals. He loves mathematics and foreign languages and shows a great desire to visit foreign countries. He wishes to acquire thoroughly the French and German languages and has already begun to receive instruction in dancing and military exercises, which give him great pleasure. The Tsar has allowed him not to be strict in the observance of fasts, for fear of harming his health and bodily development, but out of piety he refuses any indulgence in this respect.
Alexis was also influenced during these adolescent years by Menshikov, who was appointed the official governor to the Tsarevich in 1705. Menshikov’s duties were a general supervision of the education, finances and the overall training of the heir to the throne. To many, the largely illiterate confidant of Peter’s loves and wars seemed a strange trustee for the guidance and preparation of the heir. But it was precisely because of their intimacy that Peter chose his friend. He disliked the results of the years his son had spent with his mother, and he was suspicious of the foreign tutors who still surrounded the boy. He wanted one of his own men, the comrade who was closest to him, who thought as he did and whom he trusted completely, to oversee the training of the boy who would be tsar. But Menshikov, like Peter, was away with the army for most of the years of Alexis’ youth, and the Serene Prince mainly exercised his duties from afar. There were stories of rough treatment when ward and governor met; Pleyer, the Austrian minister, reports an episode (which he did not witness) in which Menshikov dragged Alexis across the ground by the hair while Peter looked on unprotestingly. Whitworth recorded a more dignified scene, with Menshikov giving a dinner for the heir who, the ambassador informed London, was “a tall, handsome prince about sixteen years old who speaks pretty good High Dutch.” Mostly, as we know from Alexis’ letters to Menshikov, it was with a mixture of awe and distaste that the boy regarded the rough figure whom his father had set over him, and later Alexis blamed Menshikov for many of his failings. In his final break with Peter, when he appealed for asylum in Vienna, the Tsarevich claimed that Menshikov had made him a drunkard and was even trying to poison him.
The root of the problem, of course, was not Menshikov but Peter; as always, Menshikov was only reflecting the attitude and will of his master. And Peter’s attitude was strangely inconsistent. A moment of pride in the Tsarevich would be followed by a long period of indifference. Then would come a sudden demand that his son join him immediately to experience some event important for a future tsar. In 1702, when Peter left for Archangel with five battalions of the Guards to defend the port from a rumored Swedish attack, he took Alexis, then twelve, with him. The boy was a thirteen-year-old bombardier in an artillery regiment at the siege of Nyenskans which broke the Swedish grip on the Neva delta. A year later, at fourteen, Alexis was present at the storming of Narva.
Like many a strong father whose strength and qualities have made him respected, successful and admired by the world, Peter was trying to force his son to follow in his footsteps. Unfortunately, a father like Peter with a strong sense of duty or mission, desiring to inculcate the same sense of purpose in his son, may instead become a crushing weight on the fledgling personality.
Alexis’ presence at Archangel, Nyenskans and Narva suggests the extent to which the boy’s education was interrupted by war. Then, in 1705 his tutor Huyssen was sent abroad on diplomatic missions which kept him away from Russia for three years. During this period, when father, governor and tutor were all away, no one took much notice of the Tsarevich.
It was extraordinary that the heir to Peter’s throne was brought up this way. The Tsar was keenly aware of the defects in his own early education and had struggled all his life to catch up, and one would have expected him to devote extra attention to his son’s training in order to make sure that he had groomed a successor who would complete his work. In fact, over the course of Alexis’ youth and young manhood, Peter was primarily interested in schooling his son for war. After taking the young Alexis along to participate in campaigns and sieges, he assigned him independent military tasks to carry out as heir to the throne. At sixteen, in 1706, Alexis was sent for five months to Smolensk with orders to gather provisions and recruits for the army. Returning to Moscow, he was next commanded to see to the defense of the city. The seventeen-year-old Tsarevich was slow and defeatist in carrying out this order. To his confessor, the priest Ignatiev, he expressed his doubt as to the value of fortifying Moscow at all. “If the Tsar’s army cannot hold back the Swedes,” he sighed, “Moscow will not stop them.” Peter heard of the remark and was furious, although when he learned that the defenses actually had been substantially strengthened, his anger subsided.
Unfortunately, try as he would, Peter never succeeded in interesting his son in war. Assigned military tasks, Alexis usually showed himself to be unwilling or incapable. Eventually, discouraged and disgusted, as well as caught up in the ever increasing tempo of the war, Peter turned his attention away from his son, leaving the youth to himself in Moscow and Preobrazhenskoe. This respite delighted the Tsarevich. He loved Moscow. The quiet, religiously passionate youth and the old city with its innumerable cathedrals, churches and monasteries, adorned with gold and jewels and filled with history and legend, perfectly suited each other. In the old capital, now increasingly abandoned in favor of St. Petersburg, Alexis was thrown into the company of those who preferred the old order and feared the reforms and innovations of the Tsar. There were Miloslavskys who still sympathized with their sister Sophia, who had died in her cell in 1704, and their sister Martha, who died in a convent in 1707. There were the Lopukhins, the brothers and family of Alexis’ mother, the repudiated Eudoxia, who regarded Alexis as the vehicle for their eventual return to power. There were the old aristocratic families, indignant that they had been passed over in favor of Westerners and upstart Russians. Most of all, there were members of the old Orthodox clergy, who regarded Peter’s works as those of Antichrist, and saw in Alexis, the heir, the last chance for saving the true religion in Russia.
The leader of this intimate clerical circle around the Tsarevich was Alexis’ confessor, Jacob Ignatiev. Ignatiev came from Suzdal, where the Tsaritsa Eudoxia was incarcerated in a convent. The priest was in contact with the former Tsaritsa, and in 1706, when Alexis was sixteen, he took the boy to see his mother. Peter, learning of this visit from his sister Natalya, was furious with Alexis and warned him never to go there again.
Although Ignatiev encouraged Alexis’ interest in the Orthodox religion, he also encouraged him in different ceremonies as well. For although Alexis was very different from Peter in many ways, he resembled his father in one: He liked to drink. Together with Ignatiev and certain monks and priests and others, the Tsarevich formed a “company” like the intimate circle of Peter’s youth, with different political ideas but the same love of drinking and carousing. Like Peter’s, Alexis’ company was a special society: Each member had a name such as Hell, Benefactor, Satan, Moloch, the Cow, Judas or the Dove. The group even had a secret code for private correspondence.
As the climax of the war approached, the Tsarevich was once more summoned to the army. In the autumn of 1708, Peter ordered his son to recruit five regiments in the Moscow region and bring them to the Ukraine as soon as possible. Alexis complied and delivered the troops to Peter and Sheremetev in mid-January 1709. This was during the fiercest days of the coldest winter within memory and, having completed his mission, the Tsarevich became ill. His condition was serious, and Peter, who had planned to go to Voronezh, remained for ten days until his son was out of danger. When Alexis was better, he joined Peter in Voronezh and then returned to Moscow. He missed the Battle of Poltava, but when news of the great victory was received, Alexis arranged the triumphal program and served as host in the celebrations.
After Poltava, Peter made two decisions regarding his son: The Tsarevich should have a Western education and he should have a Western wife. Both would help pull him away from the old Muscovite orbit into which he had been falling. Earlier, the old Hapsburg Empress, who remembered Peter favorably from his visit to Vienna, had urged that Alexis be sent to her to be educated there; the Tsarevich, she promised, would be treated by the Emperor and herself as one of their own children. This project never materialized, but another early promise did bear fruit. Twelve years before, on Peter’s first meeting with Augustus of Saxony, the Elector had pledged to look after the education of Peter’s heir. Now that Alexis was nineteen, Peter remembered and sent his son to the beautiful Saxon capital Dresden to study under the protection of Augustus’ family.
The Tsarevich’s marriage was also to have a Saxon connection. Long before, Peter had decided to ally himself with a powerful German family by marrying his son to a German princess, and the one chosen for Alexis, after long negotiations, was Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel. The family was excellently connected, being a branch of the House of Hanover. In addition, Charlotte’s sister Elizabeth was married to the Archduke Charles of Austria, at that moment a claimant to the throne of Spain, but subsequently the Emperor Charles. As Charlotte was living at the Saxon court under the watchful eye of her aunt the Queen of Poland, both projects—Alexis’ education and his marriage—centered on Dresden. Charlotte was sixteen years old, tall and plain but with a fresh, sweet-natured charm, and bred to the manners and customs of a Western court. This was what Peter was seeking for his son. He hoped that by putting Alexis into an intimate relationship with a princess of refinement, he could counteract and rub away the primitive edges of the company the Tsarevich had been keeping.
Alexis was aware that these negotiations were going on and that it was his father’s wish that he marry a foreigner. In the winter of 1710, at Peter’s command, the Tsarevich went to Dresden, then moved on to the spa at Carlsbad, and, in a village nearby, he met for the first time his intended bride, Princess Charlotte. The meeting went well. Both Alexis and Charlotte understood the purpose of their meeting and, given the circumstances of that time of arranged marriages, neither was desperately unhappy with the other. Alexis, in a letter to his confessor Ignatiev soon after the meeting, wrote that Peter had asked his reaction to Charlotte.
So now I know that he wishes to marry me not to a Russian, but to one of these people according to my choice. I wrote to him that if it is his will that I should marry a foreigner, I will marry this princess whom I have seen and who pleases me and who is a good person and better than whom I cannot find. I beg you to pray for me if it is the will of God that this be accomplished; if not, that it be hindered, for my hope is in Him. What He wishes will happen. Write to me how your heart feels about this matter.
Charlotte, for her part, liked the Tsarevich, telling her mother that he seemed intelligent and courteous and that she felt honored that the Tsar had chosen her for his son. In the end, the courtship bore fruit when Alexis went twice to Torgau and the second time formally asked the Queen of Poland for Charlotte’s hand.
The marriage was deferred until Peter could be present. Meanwhile, Alexis passed the time with his studies in Dresden and his education there was as Western as his father could have wished. He took dancing lessons and fencing lessons, he developed a talent for drawing and he improved his German and French. He shopped for books in old bookstalls and bought old engravings and medallions to take back to Russia. The Tsar would have been less happy, however, to know that his son was spending a great deal of time reading books on church history, studying the relationship between temporal and spiritual powers and the history of disputes between the church and state. In fact, throughout this period of Western schooling, despite his Western dance steps and work with the epée, Alexis was deeply concerned that he had no contact with any Orthodox priest. Writing to Ignatiev, he asked his confessor to send him a priest
capable of keeping a secret. He must be young, unmarried, and unknown to everyone. Tell him to come to me in great secrecy, to lay aside all marks of his condition, to shave his beard and his hair, and to wear a wig and German clothes. He should come as a courier and for that he should be able to write. Let him not bring anything incumbent on a priest, or a missal, only a few bits of communion bread. I have all the books necessary. Have pity on my soul and do not let me die without confession. I shall tell no one that he is a priest. He will appear to be one of my servants. Do not let him have any doubt about shaving his beard. It is better to commit a small sin than to ruin my soul without repentance.
Ignatiev found and sent a priest who not only could give the Tsarevich confession but who also joined the royal student and his small Russian circle in drunken evenings. During the course of one of these, Alexis scrawled another letter to Ignatiev:
Most honorable father, salutation to you. I wish you very long life, that we should see each other in joy in a short time. On this letter wine has been poured out, so that after receiving it you may live well and drink strongly and remember us. God grant our desires to meet soon. All the orthodox Christians here have signed this, Alexis the sinner, the priest Ivan Slonsky, and have certified it with cups and glasses. We have kept this festival for your health, not in German wise but in Russian style.
At the end of the letter, Alexis added an almost indecipherable postscript begging Ignatiev’s pardon if the letter was illegible, explaining that when he was writing, everyone, including himself, was drunk.
Alexis remained in Dresden while his father suffered the disaster of Pruth, but Peter quickly recovered from this blow and moved ahead with all his plans, including his son’s marriage on October 14, 1711, to Princess Charlotte. Charlotte’s grandfather, the reigning Duke of Wolfenbüttel, had asked Peter if the newlyweds might be permitted to pass the winter together in his dukedom, but Peter replied that he now needed his son’s services in the war against Sweden. Thus, a brief four days after his wedding, Alexis was ordered to leave Charlotte and go to Thorn to oversee the forwarding of food supplies for the Russian troops who were to winter in Pomerania. On appeal, Peter delayed the departure a few days and then Alexis obediently set out, leaving his new bride alone. Six weeks later, she joined him in Thorn, but it was a dismal place for a honeymoon. Charlotte wrote miserably to her mother of the desolation created by war and winter: “The houses opposite are half-burned and empty. I myself live in a monastery.” She complained about the lack of society caused by the local nobility’s habit of sticking close to the land and refusing to congregate in the larger towns: “For that reason it is impossible even in the largest towns to find a single person of quality.”
During the first six months of marriage, Alexis was devoted to his young wife and Charlotte told everyone that she was happy. But the affairs of the royal household were haphazard, even chaotic. When Menshikov visited in April, he was shocked by Alexis’ and Charlotte’s penury. He wrote urgently to the Tsar saying that he had found Charlotte in tears because of money, and that to alleviate the situation he had lent her 5,000 roubles from army funds. Peter sent money, and he and Catherine visited the little court after Alexis had left to join the army in Pomerania. Likemost young wives, Charlotte was highly sensitive to the relationship between her new husband and his family, and she wrote to her mother of her worry at the way Peter spoke of and treated his son. Once, hoping to help, she pleaded with Catherine to act as an advocate with the Tsar on behalf of Alexis.
In October 1712, at the end of a year of marriage during which her husband had been mostly away with the army, Charlotte was suddenly commanded by Peter to go to St. Petersburg to establish herself and wait for her husband. The seventeen-year-old girl was terrified—she had heard frightening things about Russians and was afraid to go to Russia without her husband to introduce and protect her—and, disobeying Peter’s order, she fled home to Wolfenbüttel.
The Tsarevich did not react, but his father did. Peter wrote to Charlotte criticizing her behavior, but adding gently, “We would never have thwarted your wish to see your family if only you had informed us of it beforehand.” Charlotte apologized and asked forgiveness. Peter came to see her, gave her his blessing and a sum of money, and she agreed to leave soon after for St. Petersburg. As the old Duke wrote to Leibniz, “The Tsar has been with us this week.… He was very kind to the Tsarevna, gave her large presents and begged her to hasten her journey. Next week she is really going to start and to all appearances leave Europe forever.”
When Charlotte arrived in St. Petersburg that spring of 1713, Alexis had left the capital to join his father on the galley expedition along the coast of Finland. He returned at the end of the summer to the small house in which she was living on the left bank of the Neva. Meeting after a separation of almost a year, the couple was at first affectionate, but things soon went wrong. Alexis began to drink heavily again with his friends, returning home to treat his wife abusively in front of the servants. Once, when drunk, he vowed to be revenged on Chancellor Golovkin, who had negotiated his marriage, by one day cutting off the heads of the Chancellor’s sons and setting them up on stakes.
Sometimes, the morning after, Alexis remembered these horrible scenes and tried to atone for them by renewed tenderness. Charlotte would forgive him, but every recurrence deepened the wound. Then, after a winter of heavy drinking, the Tsarevich became ill. His doctors diagnosed tuberculosis and prescribed a cure at Carlsbad. Charlotte, eight months pregnant, was the last to know he was leaving; she learned it only as he walked out the door to take his seat in a carriage, saying, “Goodbye. I am going to Carlsbad.” During the six months of his absence, she heard nothing from him—not a single letter. On July 12, 1714, five weeks after his departure, she gave birth to a daughter, Natalya, but Alexis failed to respond to this news. In November, the desperate nineteen-year-old mother wrote to her parents: “The Tsarevich has not yet come back. No one knows where he is, whether he is dead or alive. I am in frightful uneasiness. All the letters that I have written to him in the last six or eight weeks have been sent back to me from Dresden and Berlin because no one knows where he is.”
In the middle of December 1714, Alexis returned to St. Petersburg from Germany. At first, he behaved decently to Charlotte and was delighted with his daughter. Later, however, Charlotte wrote to her parents that her husband had reverted to his former conduct except that she rarely saw him any more. The reason was Afrosina, a Finnish girl captured during the war, who had been taken into the household of his teacher, Viazemsky. Blindly infatuated with her, Alexis took her openly into a wing of his own house, where he lived with her as his mistress.
Alexis’ treatment of Charlotte grew progressively worse. He took no interest in her. In public, he never spoke to her, but went out of his way to avoid her, moving to the opposite side of the room. Although they shared their house, he had his apartment in the right wing, where Afrosina lived with him; Charlotte and her child lived in the left wing. He saw her once a week, coming grimly to make love in hopes of fathering a son to secure his own succession to the throne. The rest of the time, he was invisible to her. He left her without money. He cared so little about her welfare that the house was in terrible repair, and rain fell through the roof into Charlotte’s bedroom. When this news reached Peter, the Tsar, angry and disgusted, upbraided his son for his neglect of his wife. Although it was not Charlotte who had told Peter, Alexis believed that it was, and the Tsarevich angrily accused his wife of maligning him to his father. Through all these episodes, through increasingly horrendous bouts of drunkenness and flaunting of Afrosina, Charlotte lived in silence and resignation, weeping in her bedroom, with no friends other than the single German lady-in-waiting who had come with her.
As time passed, Alexis’ health deteriorated. He was almost constantly drunk. In April 1715, he was carried unconscious from a church, so sick that no one dared to bring him across the Neva to his home and he had to spend the night in a foreigner’s house. Charlotte went to him and later wrote pitifully, “I ascribe his illness to the fast and to the great quantity of brandy which he drinks daily, for he is usually drunk.”
Nevertheless, there were occasional moments of happiness. Alexis was fond of his daughter, and every mark of love he showed the child warmed the heart of the mother. On October 12, 1715, the determined love-making bore fruit: A second child was born, this time a son, whom Charlotte named Peter in fulfillment of a promise to her father-in-law. But this birth, thus apparently securing her husband’s right to the throne, was the last service performed for Russia and her husband by this unhappy German Princess. Weakened by pregnancy and grief, she had stumbled and fallen before her delivery. Four days after her son was born, she came down with fever. Charlotte realized that she was dying and asked to see the Tsar. Catherine could not come, but Peter, although sick, came in a wheelchair.
Weber describes Charlotte’s death:
The Tsar being arrived, the Princess took her leave of him in the most moving expressions and recommended her two children and servants to his care and protection. Whereupon, she embraced her two children in the most tender manner imaginable, almost melting away in tears, and delivered them to the Tsarevich, who took them in his arms and carried them to his apartments, but never returned afterward. Then she sent for her servants, who lay prostrate on the ground in the antechamber, praying and calling to heaven to assist their dying mistress in her last minutes. She comforted them, gave them several admonitions and, at her last blessing, desired to be left alone with the minister. The physicians were trying to persuade her to take some medicines, but she flung the vials behind the bed, saying with some emotion, “Do not torment me any more but let me die in quiet, for I will live no longer.” At length, on October 21, having continued all that day in fervent devotion until eleven at night, she departed an unfortunate life, after having endured for the last five days the most acute pains, in the twenty-first year of her age, having been married four years and six days. Her corpse was, according to her desire, interred without being embalmed in the great church of the fortress, whither it was carried with a funeral pomp becoming her birth.
Charlotte was not long mourned. The day following her funeral, the Tsaritsa Catherine gave birth to a son. Thus, within a week, Peter had acquired two potential heirs, both named Peter—a grandson, Peter Alexeevich, and his own new son, Peter Petrovich. At the birth of this second little Peter, the Tsar’s joy and pride immediately washed away any grief for the wife of his heir. He wrote exuberantly to Sheremetev, “God has sent me a new recruit,” and he began a round of celebrations that lasted eight days. On November 6, the new Prince was baptized, his godfathers being the Kings of Denmark and Prussia. The celebrations, according to Weber, included a dinner at which “a pie was served up on the table of the gentlemen, which being opened, a well-shaped woman dwarf stepped out of it being stark naked except for her headdress and some ornaments of red ribbons. She made a well-set speech to the company, filled some glasses of wine which she had with her in the pie, and drank several healths.” On the ladies’ table, a man dwarf was served up in similar manner. In the dusk of the evening, the company broke up and went to the islands, where magnificent fireworks were set off in honor of the young Prince.
In all this merriment, the death of Princess Charlotte and the birth of her son were largely ignored. In the long run, however, the quiet German Princess had a kind of recompense. The much-hailed and adored Peter Petrovich, child of Peter and Catherine, lived only to be three and a half, whereas Peter Alexeevich, Charlotte’s son, became Peter II, Emperor of Russia.