Читать книгу The Secret Dispatch; or, The Adventures of Captain Balgonie - James Grant - Страница 7

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It may now be necessary to afford the reader a little historical insight as to what it was that hinged on this important dispatch of the Scottish officer, Balgonie.

When the Emperor Peter II. died of smallpox (just on the eve of his marriage), closing a short reign of three years of stormy trouble and dark intrigue, the whole male issue of Peter the Great of Russia became extinct.

The Duke of Holstein, son of his eldest daughter, was entitled to the throne; but the Russians, for certain cogent political reasons, filled that perilous seat with Anne, Duchess of Courland, daughter of Ivan, Peter's eldest brother. Governed by her favourite Biron, on whom she bestowed the duchy of Courland, she broke through all the limits which growing civilisation had imposed upon the power of the Czars; she engaged in many useless wars, lost vast treasures and more than a hundred thousand men in strife with the Turks, and closing an inglorious reign, was succeeded by one who will shortly be introduced to the reader, Ivan Antonovitch, or John IV., son of her niece, the Princess of Mechlenburg, an infant only six months old. This Princess sent Biron, the Regent, to the usual place of Muscovite seclusion, Siberia, and assumed the administratorship during the minority of her son.

This state of affairs was but of short duration when Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, having a strong party, seized the crown, banished the entire family of Mechlenburg, and deposing the infant monarch, Ivan IV., confined him for life a prisoner of state in the great Castle of Schlusselburg, where he had been for twenty-three years, at the period when our narrative opens.

To mention him in conversation, and still more to possess a coin bearing his effigy, incurred the guilt and insured the punishment of treason! More than twenty years after the deposition of this transitory emperor, a German tradesman, who had worked long as a cabinet-maker at St. Petersburg, went to Cronstadt, intending then to embark for his native city, Lubeck. As it was not permitted to carry out of Russia above a certain quantity of specie, an officer of customs asked the German "what he had with him?" "Only a few roubles to pay for my passage," he replied; and on being commanded to show them, one was discovered having the effigy of Ivan IV! In vain did the unhappy tradesman protest that he neither knew he had such a coin, nor from whom he had received it. Death was the penalty; but his goods were confiscated, and he was condemned to perpetual imprisonment in the mines of Siberia.

The Empress Elizabeth died the victim of intemperance; and while poor Prince Ivan, an uncrowned emperor, a prisoner without a crime, was left to pine in the Castle of Schlusselburg, the sceptre was given to the feeble and dissipated Peter III., the husband of the beautiful, voluptuous, and talented Catharine II., daughter of a petty prince, but descended from the ancient house of Servestan,—a woman whom, in three short months after their coronation, he contrived to disgust by his political innovations, and still more by his amatory inconstancy; so it was resolved to get rid of Peter, who was then in his thirty-fourth year.

Peter I. had nearly lost Russia by compelling the people to cut off the tails of their coats; and Peter III. became equally unpopular by ordering them to trim their vast beards, and by putting his troops in the Prussian uniform. Crowned heads should leave such matters to tailors and tonsors; but he certainly abolished the secret tribunal with its contingent horrors, and recalled many a poor exile from Siberia.

A party was formed for his dethronement; so one evening in July, 1762, when he was surrounded by his guard of Holsteiners, and amusing himself with his flower gardens (he was a great botanist), and with some of his beautiful mistresses at the palace of Orienbaum,—particularly the Countess of Woronzow, to whose allurements he had abandoned himself,—the exasperated Empress prepared to strike a final blow for Russia and for herself.

Putting on a uniform of old Russian Guards belonging to her future favourite, Captain Vlasfief, with the most coquettish grace, this young and beautiful, but in some respects terrible, woman borrowed from the nobles around her all the accessories of a complete military toilette: of Basil Mierowitz, a hat; of Count Orloff, a scarf; of Colonel Bernikoff, a belt; of some one else, a sword. Over all, she wore the blue ribbon of the first order of the Empire, which her impolitic husband had laid aside for that of Prussia.

The drums beat to arms: in this strange guise she showed herself to the troops, who were now mustered to the number of twenty thousand men in the great square of St. Petersburg, where the sight of the uniform of the old guard, which had been forced to give place to Peter's cherished Holsteiners, raised bursts of acclamation, quite as much as the appearance of Catharine, who was then "in the full flower of her robust beauty, perfectly elegant in figure, and purely feminine from her shoulders to her feet, which were remarkably handsome, and of which she was very proud." Her nose was aquiline, her eyes blue with black lashes, and her hair, a brilliant auburn, was curling on her shoulders. Thus has an eyewitness described her.

The regiments began to file off against the Emperor, and little knowing the end of the expedition, among the troops on this night marched Charlie Balgonie, with the colours of the Regiment of Smolensko on his shoulder.

Everywhere the rebellious Empress was received with enthusiasm, and the Great Chancellor Woroslaff, who was sent against her, was among the first to join her party.

The Emperor, abandoning his flowers and his fair ones, fled to his yacht or galley, which was rowed to Cronstadt, of which his enemy, the High Admiral Talizine, had already made himself master. The imperial galley (relates M. Rulhière in his "Histoire sur la Révolution de Russie") came under the ramparts in the night, while the great alarm bells rung, the drums were beaten and scarlet rockets ascended in showers from the dark mass of the Castle of Kronslot; and then, all along the line of fortifications, Peter saw two hundred port-fires shedding their weird unearthly glare through the yawning embrasures upon the twilight sea and sky—each port-fire beside a loaded cannon—loaded against himself!

This was at ten o'clock; but ere the great oars of the galley were laid in, or the anchor dropped, a sentinel challenged:

"Who comes there?"

"His Imperial Majesty the Emperor," replied the Captain of the galley, who was standing on its gilded prow.

"There is no longer any Emperor!" was the stern reply of some one on the ramparts.

"'Tis false! I am here—I, Peter Antonovitch," said the Emperor, growing pale at these daring and terrible words, as he stood up and threw back his cloak to show himself and his well-known Prussian star, by the clear, lingering twilight of the northern evening.

"Sheer off," shouted the Admiral Talizine, "or, by our Lady of Kazan, I will fire on you!"

"We are going—give us but time," cried the Captain hopelessly, through his speaking-trumpet.

At that moment a thousand voices on the ramparts shouted on the still twilight air—

"Long live the Empress Catharine II.!"

On hearing this, Peter burst into tears, and fell back into the arms of his attendants, saying—

"The conspiracy is general—from the first days of my short reign I have seen it coming!"

He was soon after abandoned by all, even by his obnoxious Holstein Guards, who surrendered to the Regiments of Smolensko and Valikolutz; and then he was committed by his wife, prisoner of state, to the Castle of Robsch, in a solitary place, eighteen miles from St. Petersburg. Six days afterwards had only elapsed, when it was suggested that though young Ivan was still lingering a captive at Schlusselburg, and some were not without hopes of replacing him on the throne, tranquillity could not be perfectly restored while Peter lived, though lonely and abandoned now.

His wife's lovers and favourites came to this decision speedily; so late one afternoon, three horsemen arrived at the residence of the fallen Emperor. They were Count Orloff, who had in his breast a laced handkerchief of the Empress, the grim Colonel Bernikoff, and a Hospodeen or gentleman, who announced that they had come to sup with him; and, according to the Russian fashion, glasses of brandy were served round before they sat down.

In that given to the Emperor was poison.

Whether, adds the historian we quote, they were in haste to carry back their dark tidings, or whether the horror of the deed made them anxious to finish it, none can know; but to hasten their terrible work, they insisted on giving him another glass.

Already the subtle poison was diffusing itself through the vitals of the unhappy Emperor; and now, struck by the pallor of their faces and the ferocious expression of their eyes, he started back, refused the proffered glass, and despairingly summoned assistance.

They then flung themselves upon him, and Count Orloff, pulling from his breast the handkerchief he had concealed there, threw it over the mouth of Peter, to gag him and stifle his cries. He was dashed again and again to the floor, where he defended himself against his assassins with all the fury that terror of death and despair could inspire.

Two young officers of the guard now rushed in, and, as the orders of all were to slay Peter without a wound, they knotted the handkerchief round his neck to strangle him, while the Count pressed his knees upon his breast.

Still the dying Emperor struggled so fearfully that the ferocious Bernikoff, losing all patience, plunged a dagger into his throat; and thus, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled, he expired without further resistance.

A few hours after this, pale, dishevelled, and covered with blood, dust, and perspiration, with torn garments and disturbed bearing, Count Orloff appeared before the Empress. "She arose in silence," says M. Rulhière, "and passed into an inner room, whither he followed her. Some minutes after, she called Count Panin, who was already named her minister, and informed him that the Emperor was dead, and consulted with him upon the mode of announcing his demise to the people."

It was given out that he had died a natural death.

The wound inflicted by Bernikoff's dagger was carefully sewed up; the orifice was neatly covered by a piece of gold-beater's skin; and the body, in an old green regimental coat, with four wax candles as a funeral state, was exposed for three days to the people. The Russians were permitted to wear their beards; the Empress poured out her afflictions in a ukase, and offered up her prayers, as became a widow, in the church of our holy Lady of Kazan.

And it was in the service of this charming people,

"——this new and polished nation,

Whose names want nothing but pronounciation,"

—a people, who, in the arts of peace, were little better than the Scots when James I. was butchered in the Black Friary at Perth, or the men of "Merry England" when her crook-backed Dick was smothering the royal babies in the Tower—that, by an adverse fate, our hero found himself a soldier of fortune, when, as before stated, old George III. was King of the British Isles, and "the first gentleman in Europe" was a sinless infant on his mother's knee.

After Peter was laid in his grave, and Catharine was firmly seated on his throne, her conduct was cautious and judicious, and, as even her enemies admitted, at times magnanimous; yet frightful atrocities were committed during her reign when she degenerated into ferocity and debauchery.

The captivity of the young and innocent Ivan in Schlusselburg, in charge of the unscrupulous Bernikoff, Captain Vlasfief, and a Lieutenant named Tschekin—three officers in whom Catharine had implicit reliance—seemed more hopeless now than ever when the sceptre was in her firm grasp.

Now that Peter was disposed of, her only dread consisted in the chance of Ivan's escape; so his guards were doubled, and her orders to Bernikoff concerning him were to ensure his detention even by death if necessary: and it was concerning this very dread that Captain Charles Balgonie was proceeding with a dispatch from Novgorod, where Catharine, with some of her favourites and courtiers, was residing for a time in the ancient palace of the Czars.