Peter the Great in England

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 447, 19 February 1890, Page 6

Peter the Great in England

These were the last transactions of the English Governmeut in 1697; but there was at this moment a person residing in England who was destined to produce greater changes in the face of Europe, and its relations, than anyone who had gone before him. This was Peter the Czar of Muscovy, who was .at this time residing at Sayes Court, a house of the celebrated John Evelyn at Deptford, and studying the fleet and shipbuilding of England, in order to create a naval Power for himself. He was only a youth of flve-and-twenty, and was the monarch of a country then sunken in barbarism, which was unrepresented at the Courts of Europe, was little heard of by the rest of. the Continent, and whose merchants were forbidden, on pain of death, to trade with other countries. Yet already Peter had raised a regular army and something of a navy, putting them under the management of Scottish, and French officers. By means of these, in 1696, he had besieged and taken Azov. He had put himself through all the ranks of the army, beginning as a common soldier; and he then determined to see personally the chief maritime-,, nations, Holland and England, and lfl&rft fi >yhat;ikhiejj CftuldqiDfo the arts that made them -so - powerful. He set out with only twelve attendants, amongst whom were his two chief princes, Menschikoff, who had been originally a pieman, and Galitzin. These were to act as ambassadors to the Courts of Holland and England, he himself remaining incognito. He first settled at Zaandam, in Holland, where he lived in a small lodging, dressed and worked with his attendants as ship-carpenters, learning to forge the ironwork of ships, as well as to prepare their woodwork. He had a, yacht on the Zuyder Zee, and practised its management, and studied ropemaking and sailmaking. He found himself too much crowded about and stared at on his removal to London, where he spent his time chiefly in the dockyards of Deptford, Woolwich, and Chatham. William used to go and see him at Sayes Court, and sent the Marquis of Caermarthen to attenduponhim, where they are said to have drunk brandy and pepper together during the long winter evenings. In the ensuing April, disturbances at home called him away, but not before he had destroyed Evelyn’s fine holly hedges by driving over them in the deep snows in liis sledge, to Evelyn’s great mortification. —From • Cassell’s Illustrated History of England.’