Their memory is preserved in a foreign land, and their names are perpetuated on a marble plaque in a chapel of an ancient church
By Nadia Knudsen, International Press Centre, Denmark
Once, when visiting the Danish town of Horsens, the birthplace of the famous navigator and explorer Vitus Bering, I went into a Gothic church.
«And chance – the God of all inventions…» (Alexander Pushkin). Under the magnificent vaulting of the medieval church of the monastery of Grey Friars (monks of the Franciscan order) there was an inscription in Latin in golden letters on a marble plaque reading that Russian princes and princesses were buried under the floor of the chapel. These are brothers and sisters of the overthrown Emperor Ivan VI.
The monastery, built in 1261 by the wealthy Danish knight Nils Manerup, was given to poor monks who wore coarse sack robes (for which they were called Grey Friars) in this small provincial town in the east of Jutland Peninsula. The Franciscan order, founded in 1208 in Italy by the Catholic Saint Francis of Assisi, soon spread to Scandinavia. There were thirty-five Franciscan friaries in Denmark alone, two of which still exist in the Faroe Islands and in the town of Nakskov.
The monks of this Roman Catholic order left Denmark in 1535 with the advent of the Reformation in the Kingdom. The friary in Horsens has long since gone, but its church remains, and the story of how the Russian princesses and princes ended up here aroused my interest. What brought them here? Though not a Godforsaken place, it is still the backwoods of Europe.
Fortunately, in the town archives and in the royal archives of the Danish capital I managed to find documents that unraveled amazing facts about the destiny of these four royal prisoners, whom Elizabeth Petrovna, who ascended the throne in 1741, confined in a fortress, and thirty-five years later another Russian Empress, Catherine II the Great, sent them far from Russia forever.
In 1780 the former royal prisoners, Grand Princess Catherine (1741-1807), Grand Princess Elizabeth (1743-1782), Grand Prince Peter (1745-1798) and Grand Prince Alexei (1746-1787), arrived in the provincial town of Horsens, far from the intrigues of the royal court. They were all children of Ivan V’s granddaughter Anna Leopoldovna (1718-1746) and her husband Anton Ulrich von Brunswick (1714-1774). And interestingly, they all had the surname Braunschweig Lüneburg-Wolfenbüttel.
Anna Leopoldovna’s eldest son Ivan VI (1740-1764) was proclaimed Emperor when he was just two months old, and therefore his mother, the twenty-two-year-old Anna Leopoldovna, nee Princess von Mecklenburg-Schwerin, was the regent and nominally ruled the State from 9 November 1740 to 25 November 1741.
However, the Russian nobility was dissatisfied with her rule: she was too young and inexperienced in the affairs of being a sovereign, and besides, she was German.
It is known that there was the dominance of Germans in the Russian royal court at that time. By the way, it was Peter I’s fault, because it was he who changed the order of succession to the throne, issuing in 1722 the Law of the Will of the Monarch, according to which the sovereign had the right to declare whomever he wanted as his successor. It marked the beginning of the series of palace revolutions and coups that followed after him. There were as many as five of them in less than forty years until Catherine II, having assuming the power, stopped this endless chain of Peters and Annas on the throne.
But back to the royal prisoners… On the night of 25 November 1741 as a result of a palace revolution Ivan VI was overthrown by Elizabeth Petrovna, Peter I and Catherine I’s daughter. Anna Leopoldovna with her husband and children were quickly and imperceptibly removed from the capital because of the supposed threat to the holder of royal power and the crown of the Russian Empire.
First the Brunswick family was sent to the Riga Castle in Latvia, then to the Dünamünde Castle near Riga, and in 1744 they were transported to the Ranenburg Fortress in the Ryazan province. Eventually they ended up in Kholmogory in the lower reaches of the Northern Dvina River of the White Sea, where they were held in confinement for many years.
Two younger princes, Peter and Alexei, were born there, and their parents died there: Anton Ulrich passed away in 1774, and Anna Leopoldovna – in 1746 from puerperal fever.
But you may argue that there should have been five royal prisoners. Yes, but there’s an interesting historical detail. Elizabeth I, a worthy daughter of her father, remembered how Peter I had brutally dealt with his son and heir to the throne Alexei, born in his first marriage with Evdokia Lopukhina.
Having overthrown the infant Emperor Ivan VI, Empress Elizabeth I not only decided to get rid of the ex-Tsar, but also to erase all mention of him. The Russian historian Professor I.V. Kurukin writes in his book, The Daily Life of the Secret Chancellery: «She issued a decree according to which all coins bearing the name of the former Emperor had to be withdrawn from circulation, and keeping such coins was regarded as a political crime. Documents and any other evidence of Ivan Antonovich’s existence were seized or destroyed, including even an ode in his honour written by Mikhail Lomonosov. This decree had no precedent in Russian history. Of course, Elizabeth I resolved to take such a step only because the young Emperor had ruled for only about a year.»
Ivan VI was held in confinement away from his family from the age of four and, as is known, later became a secret prisoner of the Schlisselburg Fortress, where he was killed by its guards in 1764 at the age of twenty-three during an attempt by some army officers to free him.
It was only after eighteen years of her reign that Catherine the Great remembered the royal prisoners and, realising that after thirty-five years of imprisonment they no longer posed any threat to the throne, in 1780 decided to send them all from the Russian Empire to lifelong exile in Denmark, where their paternal aunt, Queen Dowager Juliane Marie (1729-1796), lived and ruled at the Danish royal court at that time. She was Anton Ulrich von Brunswick’s sister. A German-born princess, from 1752 she was the second wife of King Frederick V of Denmark, who ruled the Kingdom from 1746 to 1766.
The King of Denmark, a free liver and a womanizer, loved wine and died early. And though his son from his first marriage ascended the throne, becoming King Christian VII, the real power was in the hands of Queen Dowager Juliane Marie.
By the way, it was she who in 1782 founded the first factory of the royal porcelain (now famous all over the world) where, on her orders, they created a unique beautiful set called Flora Danica as a gift to the Russian Empress Catherine II, apparently for supporting the four royal prisoners, the children of Anton Ulrich, Juliane Marie’s brother. After all, the burden of paying for their sustenance was assumed by the Russian royal court and borne dutifully till 1808, as long as the last of the prisoners was alive (even after Catherine II and Juliane Marie both died in 1796).
When the question arose as to where to put the former royal prisoners, a magnificent Dutch Baroque palace was built for them in Horsens. The court architect Caspar Frederik Harsdorf and the architect Anders Kruse were invited to build it.
The documents of the town archives of that time say: «The palace was richly decorated with expensive and elegant furniture, the floors were covered with luxurious Persian carpets, paintings by famous artists adorned the walls of its numerous rooms, and crystal chandeliers hung from the ceilings. Over forty-six people served at the palace apart from the royal prisoners’ own retinue, which included, in addition to guards, ladies-in-waiting, maids of honour and maid servants, an Orthodox priest and two deacons. Orthodox services were celebrated at a specially built small chapel.»
In 1780 the caring aunt Juliane Marie sent a Danish royal ship for her brother’s children to transport them secretly first to Bergen, and then, transferring them to a Danish frigate, they were transported under the royal flag to the port of the town of Fladstrand (today Frederikshavn) in the north of Jutland Peninsula. And then they were taken with their belongings and retinue to Horsens in royal horse-drawn coaches and carriages.
The royal aunt tried her best to spoil her Russian nephews and nieces. The freshest food, the best wines, exotic fruit and vegetables from the East and Africa were delivered to them. She also spoiled them with the finest lace imported from Holland, silks and luxurious brocade from France and expensive furs from Germany.
The servants tried to provide them with all comfort and luxury so that their life would resemble the established order in Russia. However, judging by the archival documents of that era, the royal orphans led a very closed lifestyle and avoided social life.
And there was a reason for that. They often went somewhere secretly in carriages in the company of their aunt Juliane Marie and her retinue, or spent time with their ladies-in-waiting and aides. Because they had too many illnesses, acquired during the time they had spent in the fortress of Kholmogory.
The eldest Princess Catherine was thirty-nine at the time she moved to live with her aunt in Denmark. She had serious hearing problems, spoke poorly and inarticulately, and usually used gestures to explain her desires. She died in 1807 at the age of sixty-six, but she lived the longest of all the former royal prisoners.
Princess Elizabeth passed away in 1782, two years after her arrival in Denmark. She was thirty-nine. She had suffered from terrible headaches since she fell down the stairs as a child and hit her head on a stone step.
Prince Peter, the elder brother, was stooped and bow-legged from birth due to a childhood injury. He was timid and extremely shy, and he didn’t talk much. He passed away in 1798 at the age of fifty-two.
The younger one, Prince Alexei, passed away in 1787 at the age of forty-one.
In 1808 all the luxurious furnishings of the Horsens Palace – furniture, paintings and carpets – went under the hammer at auctions.
And for two years the palace stood quiet and deserted until in 1810 the unfaithful wife of King Christian VIII of Denmark moved there after their divorce. She lived here in exile for almost thirty years, forgotten by the world and her family, till her last breath, but in the comfort and luxury of the palace, according to her status. After her demise the palace became uninhabited again and later, in 1915, it was demolished.
But fate has preserved the medieval church of Franciscan monks: it is active and stands on the territory of the former friary, attracting passers-by with its grandeur under its Gothic vaulting. So that you can marvel at the beauty of its interior and bow before the ashes of the four Russian royal prisoners – Catherine, Elizabeth, Peter and Alexei – the grand princes and princesses who were brought by fate to the faraway Danish lands during the hard times. Their memory is preserved in a foreign land, and their names are perpetuated on a marble plaque in the chapel of the ancient church in Horsens.
Incidentally, the town residents together with the Russian priest, Father Sergei Bondarev and Orthodox parishioners who know the story of the royal prisoners, come to this medieval church every year to pay tribute to the royal descendants and lay flowers. After the service they talk about Russian and Danish history, the vicissitudes of life, and kindness that still helps people in such difficult times and saves the world.
