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 Wolfenbuttel, had asked Peter if the newly weds 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 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. Like most young wives, Charlotee 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 in 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 Wolfenbuttel.
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 edge 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 believe 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 stumbed and failed 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
