Alexis, the oldest son of Peter, had ever been a bad boy, and he had now grown up into an exceedingly dissolute and vicious young man.  Indolent, licentious, bacchanalian in his habits, and overbearing, his father had often threatened to deprive him of his right of succession, and to shave his crown and consign him to a convent.  Hoping to improve his character, he urged his marriage, and selected for him a beautiful princess of Wolfenbuttle, as the possessions of the dukes of Brunswick were then called.  The old ducal castle still stands on the banks of the Oka about forty miles south-east of Hanover.  The princess of Wolfenbuttle, who was but eighteen years of age, was sister to the Empress of Germany, consort of Charles VI.  The young Russian prince was dragged very reluctantly to this marriage, for he wished to be shackled by no such ties.  He was the son of Peter’s first wife, not of the Empress Catharine, whom the tzar had now acknowledged.  Peter and Catharine attended these untoward nuptials, which were celebrated in the palace of the Queen of Poland, in which a princess as lovely in character as in person was sacrificed to one who made the few remaining months of her life a continued martyrdom.  But little more than a year had passed after their marriage ere she was brought to bed of a son.  Her heart was already broken, and she was quite unprepared for the anguish of such an hour.  Though the sweetness of her disposition and the gentleness of her manners had endeared her to all her household, her husband treated her with the most brutal neglect and cruelty.  Unblushingly he introduced into the palace his mistresses, and the saloons ever resounded with the uproar of his drunken companions.  The woe-stricken princess, then but twenty years of age, covered her face with the bed clothes, and, weeping bitterly, refused to take any nourishment, and begged the physicians to permit her to die in peace.  Intelligence was immediately sent to the tzar of the confinement of his daughter in-law, and of her dangerous situation.  He hastened to her chamber.  The interview was short, but so affecting that the tzar, losing all self-control, burst into an agony of grief and wept like a child.  The dying princess commended to his care her babe and her servants, and, as the clock struck the hour of midnight, her spirit departed, we trust to that world “where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.”  The orphan babe was baptized as Peter Alexis, and subsequently, on the death of the Empress Catharine, became Emperor of Russia.

On the 20th of February, 1712, Peter, who had previously acknowledged his private marriage with Catharine, had the marriage publicly solemnized at St. Petersburg with the utmost pomp.  Soon after this, to the inexpressible joy of both parents, Catharine gave birth to a son.  The war with Sweden still continued, notwithstanding Charles XII. was a fugitive in Turkey unable to return to his own country.  Finland,