Many an autocrat of Russia has shown a truly sovereign contempt for convention in the choice of his or her favourites, the “playthings of an hour”; and at least three of them have carried this contempt to the altar itself.

Peter, the first, as we have seen, offered a crown to Martha Skovronski, a Livonian scullery-maid, who succeeded him on the throne; the second Catherine gave her hand as well as her heart to Patiomkin, the gigantic, ill-favoured ex-sergeant of cavalry; and Elizabeth, daughter of Peter and his kitchen-Queen, proved herself worthy of her parentage when she made Alexis Razoum, a peasant’s son, husband of the Empress of Russia. You will search history in vain for a story so strange and romantic as this of the great Empress and the lowly shepherd’s son, whom her love raised from a hovel to a palace, and on whom one of the most amorous and fickle of sovereign ladies lavished honours and riches and an unwavering devotion, until her eyes, speaking their love to the last, were closed in death.

It was in the humblest hovel of the village of Lemesh that Alexis Razoum drew his first breath one day in 1709. His father, Gregory Razoum, was a shepherd, who spent his pitiful earnings in drink a man of violent temper who, in his drunken rages, was the terror not only of his home but of the entire village. His wife and children cowered at his approach; and on more than one occasion only accident (or Providence) saved him from the crime of murder. On one such occasion, we are told, the child Alexis, who from his earliest years had a passion for reading, was absorbed in a book, when his father, in ungovernable fury, seized a hatchet and hurled it at the boy’s head. Luckily, the missile missed its mark, and Alexis escaped, to find refuge in the house of a friendly priest, who not only gave him shelter and protection, but taught him to write, and, above all, to sing little dreaming that he was thus paving the way which was to lead the drunken shepherd’s lad to the dizziest heights in Russia. For the boy had a beautiful voice. When he joined the choir of his village church, people flocked from far and near to listen to the sweet notes that soared, pure and liquid as a nightingale’s song, above the rest. “It was,” all declared, “the voice of an angel and the face of an angel,” for Alexis was as beautiful in those days as any child of picture or of dreams.

One day a splendidly dressed stranger chanced to enter the Lemesh church during Mass none other than Colonel Vishnevsky, a great Court official, who was on his way back to Moscow from a diplomatic mission; and he listened entranced to a voice sweeter than any he had ever heard. The service over, he made the acquaintance of the young chorister, interviewed his guardian, the “good Samaritan” priest, and persuaded him to allow the boy to accompany him to the capital. Thus the shepherd’s son took weeping farewell of the good priest, of his mother, and of his brothers and sisters; and a few weeks later the Empress and her ladies were listening enchanted to his voice in the Imperial choir at Moscow but none with more delight than the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, to whom Alexis’ beauty appealed even more strongly than his sweet singing.

Elizabeth, true daughter of her father, had already, young as she was, counted her lovers by the score lovers chosen indiscriminately, from Royal princes to grooms and common soldiers. She was already sated with the licence of the most dissolute Court of Europe, and to her the young Cossack of the beautiful face and voice, and rustic innocence, opened a new and seductive vista of pleasure. She lost her heart to him, had him transferred to her own Court as her favourite singer, and, within a few years, gave him charge of her purse and her properties.

The shepherd’s son was now not only lover-elect, but principal “minister” to the daughter of an Emperor, who was herself to wear the Imperial crown. And while Alexis was thus luxuriating amid the splendour of a Court, he by no means forgot the humble relatives he had left behind in his native village. His father was dead; his mother was reduced for a time to such a depth of destitution that she had to beg her bread from door to door. His sisters had found husbands for themselves in their own rank; and the favourite of an Imperial Princess had for brothers-in-law a tailor, a weaver, and a shepherd. When news came to Alexis of his mother’s destitution he had sent her a sum of money sufficient to install her in comfort as an innkeeper: the first of many kindnesses which were to work a startling transformation in the fortunes of the Razoum family.

Events now hurried quickly. The Empress Anna died, and was succeeded on the throne by the infant Ivan, her grand-nephew, who had been Emperor but a few months when, in 1741, a coup d’etat gave the crown to Elizabeth, mistress of the Lemesh peasant. Alexis was now husband in all but name of the Empress of all the Russias; honours and riches were showered on him; he was General, Grandmaster of the Hounds, Chief Gentleman of the Bedchamber, and lord of large estates yielding regal revenues.

But all his grandeur was powerless to spoil the man, who still remained the simple peasant who, so many years earlier, had left his low-born mother with streaming eyes. His great ambition now was to share his good-fortune with her. She must exchange her village inn for the luxuries and splendours of a palace. And thus it was that one day a splendid carriage, with gay-liveried postillions, dashed up to the door of the Lemesh inn and carried off the simple peasant woman, her youngest son, Cyril, and one of her daughters, to the open-mouthed amazement of the villagers. At the entrance to the capital she was received by a magnificently attired gentleman, in whom she failed to recognise her son Alexis, until he showed her a birthmark on his body.

Picture now the peasant-woman sumptuously lodged in the Moscow palace, decked in all the finery of silks and laces and jewels, receiving the respectful homage of high Court officials, caressed and petted by an Empress, while her splendid son looks smilingly on, as proud of his cottage-mother as if she were a Princess of the Blood Royal. That the innkeeper was not happy in her gilded cage, that her thoughts often wandered longingly to her cronies and the simple life of the village, is not to be wondered at.

It was all very well for such a fine gentleman as her son, Alexis; but for a poor, simple-minded woman like herself well, she was too old for such a transplanting. And we can imagine her relief when, on the removal of the Court to St Petersburg, she was allowed to bring her visit to an end and to return to her inn with wonderful stories of all she had seen. Her son and daughter, however, elected to remain. As for Cyril, a handsome youth, almost young enough to be his brother’s son, he was quick to win his way into the favour of the Empress. Before he had been many months at Court he was made a Count and Gentleman of the Bedchamber. He was given for bride a grand-niece of Elizabeth; and at twenty-two he was Viceroy of the Ukraine, virtual sovereign of a kingdom of his own, with his peasant-mother, who declined to share his palace, comfortably installed in a modest house near his gates.

Cyril, in fact, was to his last day as unspoiled by his unaccustomed grandeur as his brother Alexis. Each was ready at any moment to turn from the obsequious homage of nobles to hobnob with a peasant friend or relative. How utterly devoid of false pride Alexis was is proved by the following anecdote. One day when, in company with the Empress, he was paying a visit to Count Loewenwolde, he rushed from Elizabeth’s side to fling his arms round the neck of one of his host’s footmen. “Are you mad, Alexis?” exclaimed the Empress, in her astonishment. “What do you mean by such senseless behaviour?” “I am not mad at all,” answered the favourite. “He is an old friend of mine.”

But although no man ever deposed the shepherd from the first place in Elizabeth’s favour, it must not be imagined that he was her only lover. The daughter of the hot-blooded Peter and the lusty scullery wench had always as great a passion for men as the second Catherine, who had almost as many favourites in her boudoir as gowns in her wardrobes. She had her lovers before she was emancipated from the schoolroom; and not the least favoured of them, it is said, was her own nephew, Peter the Second, whom she would no doubt have married if it had been possible.

She turned her back on one great alliance after another, preferring her freedom to a wedding-ring that brought no love with it; and she found her pleasure alike among the gentlemen of the Court and among her own servants. In the long list of her favourites we find a General succeeded by a Sergeant; Boutourlin, the handsome courtier, giving place to Lialin, the sailor; and Count Shouvalov retiring in favour of Voytshinsky, the coachman. Thus one liaison succeeded another from girlhood to middle-age indeed long after she had passed the altar. But through all these varying attachments her heart remained constant to her shepherd-lover, to whom she was ever the devoted wife, and, when he was ill, the tenderest of nurses. To please him, she even accompanied him on a visit to his native village, smiling graciously on his humble friends of other days, and partaking of the hospitality of the poorest cottagers; while on all who had befriended him in the days of his obscurity she lavished her favours.

Of one man who had been thus kind she made a General on the spot; the friendly priest was given a highly paid post at Court; high rank in the army was given to many of his humble relatives; and a husband was found for a favourite niece in Count Ryoumin, the Chancellor’s son.

As for Alexis himself, nothing was too good for him. Although he had probably never handled a gun in his life she made him Field-Marshal and head of her army; and, at her request, Charles VII. dubbed him Count of the Holy Roman Empire, a distinction which Gregory Orloff in later years prized more than all the honours Catherine II. showered on him; while the estates of which she made him lord were a small kingdom in themselves. Alexis, the shepherd’s son, was now, beyond any question, the most powerful man in Russia. If he would, he might easily have taken the sceptre from the yielding hands of the Empress and played the autocrat, as Patiomkin played it under similar circumstances in later years. But Alexis cared as little for power as for rank and wealth. He smiled at his honours. “Fancy,” he said, with his hearty laugh, “a peasant’s son, a Count; and a man who ought to be tending sheep, a Field-Marshal!”

When courtly genealogists spread before him an elaborate family-tree, proving that he sprang from the princely stock of Bogdan, with many a Grand Duke of Lithuania among his lineal ancestors, he laughed loud and long at them for their pains. “Don’t be so ridiculous,” he said. “You know as well as I that my parents were simple peasants, honest enough, but people of the soil and nothing else. If I am Count and Field-Marshal and Viceroy, I owe it all to the good heart of your Empress and mine, whose humble servant I am. Take it away, and let me hear no more of such foolery.”

Such to the last was the unspoiled, child-like nature of the man who so soon was to be not merely the first favourite but husband of an Empress. Probably Alexis would have lived and died Elizabeth’s unlicensed lover had it not been for the cunning of the cleverest of her Chancellors, Bestyouzhev, who saw in his mistress’s infatuation for her peasant the means of making his own position more secure. Elizabeth was still a young and attractive woman, who might pick and choose among some of the most eligible suitors in Europe for a sharer of her throne; for there were many who would gladly have played consort to the good-looking autocrat of Russia.

Such a husband, especially if he were a strong man, might seriously imperil the Chancellor’s position; might even dispense with him altogether. On the other hand, he was high in the favour of the shepherd’s son, who had such a contempt for power, and who thus would be a puppet in his hands. Why not make him husband in name as well as in fact? It was, after all, an easy task the Chancellor thus set himself. Elizabeth was by no means unwilling to wear a wedding-ring for the man who had loved her so loyally and so long; and any difficulties she might raise were quickly disposed of by her father-confessor, who was Bestyouzhev’s tool. Thus it came to pass that one day Elizabeth and Alexis stood side by side before the village altar of Perovo; and the words were spoken which made the shepherd’s son husband of the Empress. The secrecy with which the ceremony was performed was but a fiction. All the world knew that Alexis Gregorovitch was Emperor by right of wedlock, and flocked to pay homage to him in his new and exalted character.

He now had sumptuous apartments next to those of his wife; he sat at her right hand on all State occasions; he was her shadow everywhere; and during his frequent attacks of gout the Empress ministered to him night and day in his own rooms with the tender devotion of a mother to a child. Two children were born to them, a son and a daughter, the latter of whom, after a life of strange romance and vicissitude, ended her days in a loathsome dungeon of the fortress of Saints Peter and Paul, the victim of Catherine II.’s vengeance miserably drowned, so one story goes, by an inundation of her cell.

On Elizabeth’s death, in the year 1762, her husband was glad to retire from the Court in which he had for so long played so splendid a part. “None but myself,” he said, “can know with what pleasure I leave a sphere to which I was not born, and to which only my love for my dear mistress made me resigned. I should have been happier far with her in some small cottage far removed from the gilded slavery of Court life.” He was happy enough now leading the peaceful life of a country gentleman on one of his many estates.

Catherine II. had mounted the throne of Russia the Empress who, according to Masson, had but two passions, which she carried to the grave “her love of man, which degenerated into libertinage; and her love of glory, which degenerated into vanity.” A woman with the brain of a man and the heart of a courtesan, Catherine’s fickle affection had flitted from one lover to another, until now it had settled on Gregory Orloff, the handsomest man in her dominions, whom she was more than half disposed to make her husband.

This was a scheme which commended itself strongly to her Chancellor, Vorontsov. There was a most useful precedent to lend support to it the alliance of the Empress Elizabeth with a man of immeasurably lower rank than Catherine’s favourite; but it was important that this precedent should be established beyond dispute. Thus it was that one day, when Count Alexis was poring over his Bible by his country fireside, Chancellor Vorontsov made his appearance with ingratiating words and promises. Her Majesty, he informed the Count, was willing to confer Imperial rank on him in return for one small favour the possession of the documents which proved his marriage to her predecessor, Elizabeth.

On hearing the request, the ex-shepherd rose, and, with words of quiet scorn, refused both the request and the proffered honour. “Am not I,” he said, “a Count, a Field-Marshal, a man of wealth? all of which I owe to the kindness of my dear, dead mistress. Are not such honours enough for the peasant’s son whom she raised from the mire to sit by her side, that I should purchase another bauble by an act of treachery to her memory?

“But wait one moment,” he continued; and, leaving the room, he returned carrying a small bundle of papers, which he proceeded to examine one by one. Then, collecting them, he placed the bundle in the heart of the fire, to the horror of the onlooking Chancellor; and, as the flames were reducing the precious documents to ashes, he said, “Go now and tell those who sent you, that I never was more than the slave of my august benefactress, the Empress Elizabeth, who could never so far have forgotten her position as to marry a subject.”

Thus with a lie on his lips the last crowning evidence of loyalty to his beloved Queen and wife Alexis Razoum makes his exit from the stage on which he played so strangely romantic a part. A few years later his days ended in peace at his St Petersburg palace, with the name he loved best, “Elizabeth,” on his lips.