This revolution was accepted by the people with the loudest demonstrations of joy.  The memory of Peter the Great was enshrined in every heart, and all exulted in placing the crown upon his daughter’s brow.  The next morning, at the head of the royal guards and all the other troops of the metropolis, Elizabeth was proclaimed Empress of Russia.  In one week from this time, the deposed infant emperor, Ivan, who was then thirteen months old, was sent, with his parents, from Petersburg to Riga, where they were for a long time detained in a castle as prisoners.  Two efforts which they made for escape were frustrated.

This conspiracy, which was carried to so successful a result, was mainly founded in the hostility with which the Russians regarded the foreigners who had been so freely introduced to the empire by Peter the Great, and who occupied so many of the most important posts in the State.  Thus the succession of Elizabeth was, in fact, a counter revolution, arresting the progress of reform and moving Russia back again toward the ancient barbarism.  But Elizabeth soon expended her paroxysm of energy, and surrendered herself to luxury and to sensual indulgence unsurpassed by any debauchee who ever occupied a throne.  Jealous of sharing her power, she refused to take a husband, though many guilty favorites were received to her utmost intimacy.

The doom of the deposed Ivan and his parents was sad, indeed.  They were removed for safe keeping to an island in the White Sea, fifty miles beyond Archangel, a region as desolate as the imagination can well conceive.  Here, after a year of captivity, the infant Ivan was torn from his mother and removed to the monastery of Oranienburg, where he was brought up in the utmost seclusion, not being allowed to learn either to read or write.  The bereaved mother, Anne, lingered a couple of years until she wept away her life, and found the repose of the grave in 1746.  Her husband survived thirty years longer, and died in prison in 1775.  It was an awful doom for one who had committed no crime.  The whole course of history proves that in this life we see but the commencement of a divine government, and that “after death cometh the judgment.”

A humane monk, taking pity upon the unfortunate little Ivan, attempted to escape with him.  He had reached Smolensk, when he was arrested.  The unhappy prince was then conveyed to the castle of Schlusselburg, where he was immersed in a dungeon which no ray of the sun could ever penetrate.  A single lamp burning in his cell only revealed its horrors.  The prince could not distinguish day from night, and had no means of computing the passage of the hours.  Food was left in his cell, and the attendants, who occasionally entered, were prohibited from holding any conversation with the child.  This treatment, absolutely infernal, soon reduced the innocent prince to a state almost of idiocy.