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428 his son Alexis. This unhappy prince had incurred the displeasure of his father by giving way to dissolute habits. Then he had followed the not uncommon example of an heir-apparent, and sided with the opposition. He had even done much worse. He had intrigued with Sweden against his father's government, though as he believed in the true interest of his country. In his opposition to the new methods of government he was aided by his mother Eudoxia, Peter's first wife, whom the tsar had treated with heartless brutality and sent to a convent. She had converted the convent into a court, where she welcomed the disaffected, for Eudoxia was the patroness of the priests' party. Alexis is reported to have said, "I will whisper a word to the bishops. They will pass it on to the priests; who will repeat it to the people, and everything will be as it was before."

The treason was intolerable and unpardonable. Eudoxia was sent to another convent, where she was kept in strict confinement, and the tsarevitch was tried, condemned, flogged, and executed—probably by the knout. Peter was certainly responsible for the torture and death of his son Alexis. It was an act of deliberate policy. As such it is not comparable with Ivan the Terrible's dreadful deed when he struck his son dead with his own hand in a fit of mad rage. But the whole story is a mournful tragedy. Weak and dissolute as he was, Alexis was led to believe that his father's policy was ruinous to the State and impious with regard to the Church. On the other hand, Peter saw in his son, the heir to his throne, a wretched opponent of the reforms to which he was devoting his titanic energies. The great tsar believed in those reforms with all his heart as necessary for the well-being of his country. Then how could he permit them to be thus traitorously checked and thwarted, with the certainty that when he died they would all be swept away? We may pity Peter as much as we pity poor Alexia.