563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)

What abominable mischief and hedonism did the seventeen year old Peter the Great revel in during his strange and remarkable travels through Europe, before truly stepping into the role of Tsar of all the Russias? Did it serve a secret political purpose? What was the outcome of the first war he chose to wage against the Ottoman Empire? Why did he go on a crucial and possibly dangerous diplomatic mission disguised as a member of his own staff? And, when news reached him from Russia, of a mutiny that directly challenged his rule, what gruesome revenge did he wreak…? Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss in lurid technicolour, Peter the Great’s early life and rule: his flamboyant “gap year” and foreign travels, his early military conquests, his drastic reforms to Russia, and the outbreak of the Great Northern War, which would see Europe transformed forever. The Rest Is History Club: Become a member for exclusive bonus content, early access to full series and live show tickets, ad-free listening, our exclusive newsletter, discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. Just head to therestishistory.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestishistory. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. We obviously love history here. It's always a treat to make a new discovery, especially in unexpected ways.

• 0:12Tom Holland?

  Which is exactly what happens on TikTok. Like, you know coffee? You make it, add milk, drink it. Nothing more, except...

• 0:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Except, when you hop on TikTok, you don't just learn how to make an authentic cappuccino. You can also discover videos about how in the 1700s, people would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it.

• 0:39Tom Holland?

  And suddenly, you're imagining how people lived, drank, socialised. Makes you wonder what will baffle historians about us. And that's the joy of TikTok. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different.

• 0:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok.

• 0:57Tom Holland?

  Visit tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 1:07Tom Holland?

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• 1:19Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 1:45Tom Holland?

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• 1:52Tom Holland?

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• 1:58Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 2:39Tom Holland?

  The Tsar is a man of very hot temper, soon inflamed and very brutal in his passion. He raises his natural heat by drinking much brandy, which he rectified himself with great application. He is subject to convulsive motions all over his body, and his head seems to be afflicted with these. He was desirous to understand our doctrine. He was indeed resolved to encourage learning and to polish his people by sending some of them to travel in other countries and to draw strangers to come and live among them. He seemed apprehensive still of his sister's intrigues.

• 3:20Tom Holland?

  After I had seen him often and had conversed much with him, I could not but adore the depth of the providence of God that had raised up such a furious man to so absolute authority over so great a part of the world.

• 3:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  So there we have Scotsman Dominic. Yeah. You could tell from my magnificent impression of a Scotsman.

• 3:43Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 3:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I call Gilbert Burnett, who met with Peter the Great in London in sixteen ninety eight. But by far the most significant and interesting thing about Gilbert Burnett is that he was the bishop of Salisbury.

• 3:59Tom Holland?

  And how wonderful it is, we are doing this series about Peter the Great, who we left as master of Moscow. He'd crushed his sister Sophia's resistance. He'd secured the loyalty of the Strelsi, these frankly sinister and faintly grotesque soldiers who wear yellow boots and caftans and who have a great fondness for jumping on the body parts of people that they've chopped and sliced into little bits. But here he is in England, he's twitching uncontrollably, he's drinking brandy, he's chatting about Protestant doctrine, and he's doing it with a man from my neck of the woods, from Wiltshire, from Salisbury.

• 4:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  From the Salisbury area?

• 4:42Tom Holland?

  Yes.

• 4:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, it's great to have Wiltshire in the Salisbury area on the show.

• 4:46Tom Holland?

  Dominic, I'll be honest, my worry when you suggested doing Peter the Great was that Salisbury wouldn't get a look in, but how wrong I was.

• 4:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  The weirdest thing is not just that he's chatting about Christian doctrine with people from the Salisbury area, it's the fact that he's doing it under a false name. So he's travelled incognito. I mean, this is such a mad story. The Tsar of all the Russians has basically taken an extended gap year to travel anonymously to Western Europe and to hang around in shipyards and in taverns, interfering with actresses and kind of behaving in ludicrous ways. Wheelbarrow races.

• 5:16Tom Holland?

  We both love a wheelbarrow race.

• 5:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  We've only told that story 20 times on The Rest Is History. And now we're going to tell it again. Brilliant. So shall we get back to where we left off? So the summer of 1689, Peter has deposed Sophia. He's 17 years old. He is now, we haven't actually described him physically. He is a massive bloke. He's six foot seven. He's very kind of angular. He's got long brown hair and he's got a moustache. Interestingly, not a beard.

• 5:43Tom Holland?

  Yeah, not a beard.

• 5:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Now Bishop Burnett mentioned his convulsive motions. So some people say, well, maybe he's just very restless. He's very impatient and stuff. But other people say maybe he's got a kind of a nervous tic, because don't forget when he was 10 years old, he saw his family chopped up and stamped on.

• 6:01Tom Holland?

  That would give you bad mental health, wouldn't it?

• 6:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think BetterHelp or any mental health provider would have had a field day with Peter the Great, to be completely honest with you. But I think it's also possible he's mildly epileptic. There are lots of descriptions of him when he's in Europe, having sort of fits on the left hand side of his face or his arm, his eyes rolling back in his head, all of this sort of stuff. And I think it's also fair to say, Tom, he doesn't have the best and healthiest lifestyle. Because actually, although he's taken supreme power, he then sort of gives it away because he says to his mother, you know, can you run Russia for me, please? Because I just want to hang around with my mates, with my soldiers.

• 6:37Tom Holland?

  And his lathes.

• 6:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  And lathes. And he wants to spend a lot of time. He loves the German suburbs, so this place we talked about last time, which is full of kind of Scotsmen and Dutchmen and things. And they're all smoking pipes outside Protestant churches and talking to women.

• 6:53Tom Holland?

  Which the Orthodox Church doesn't approve of at all.

• 6:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  The Orthodox Church doesn't approve of at all. And his closest friends, or some of them at least, come from the German suburb. So we talked last time, we promised we'd talk about General Gordon. We always like General Gordon on the show. This is a different General Gordon, not the bloke who died in Khartoum.

• 7:09Tom Holland?

  But still a friend of the show.

• 7:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. He's a Scottish mercenary who came from the Highlands. He came from a Catholic family, so he basically left Scotland. And then he had an amazing career, actually. He fought for the Swedes against the Poles. Then he fought for the Poles against the Swedes. Then he fought for the Swedes against the Poles again. And then he fought for the Poles against the Swedes again.

• 7:30Tom Holland?

  And that's fine, isn't it? That's legitimate.

• 7:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 7:32Tom Holland?

  I mean, nobody really minds about that.

• 7:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's how 17th century warfare works. It's basically like being a star footballer. You transfer from team to team. I think you can't fight against your own country, but you can fight for others. And that's completely legitimate. And he ended up serving the Tsars. And this guy, General Gordon, becomes basically Peter's chief military advisor, his tutor, I suppose. And then there's another mercenary who is called Franz Lafoire, who's from Geneva, who basically is a massive drinker and a dancer, charming. His house, we're told, is always full of women. Who, Peter's program for Robert K. Massey describes as rollicking buxom sturdy wenches

• 8:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  who did not take offence at Barak's language or the admiring touch of rough male hands. So that kind of gives you a sense of the general vibe at these occasions, I think it's fair to say.

• 8:26Tom Holland?

  Yes, and just on the topic of rough male hands, Peter's hands are very calloused, aren't they? Because he's been with his lathes and all of that.

• 8:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, because it's been like chopping stones or whatever he's doing.

• 8:35Tom Holland?

  Yeah, and so when he goes on his gap year and he meets with all these, you know, members of royalty and stuff, he's always showing off his calluses.

• 8:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is, he's very proud of them.

• 8:44Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  In an age when people would be proud of not having calloused hands, he's quite the reverse. So over time, Peter and this bloke Lefour and their pals, so actually he picks up Lefour's girlfriend, who's called Anna Monks, and she loves a drink and a laugh, and she becomes his mistress. Anyway, Peter and all these pals, they basically, they form something that they call the Jolly Company. I feel, I tend to actually think either of us would have really enjoyed life in the Jolly Company.

• 9:13Tom Holland?

  I'd have hated it.

• 9:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think you might enjoy it for a day. It's basically a stag do, a massive stag do.

• 9:20Tom Holland?

  I hate stag do's.

• 9:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's often about eighty of them, sometimes as many as two hundred. And remember, Peter is the Tsar of Russia, and he's seventeen years old. They will roam the lands, basically turning up at Russian noblemen's houses and saying, you know, put us up. And they'll have these enormous feasts. The feast normally starts at midday. It's actually very much like our working lunches at The Rest Is History, with the production team.

• 9:43Tom Holland?

  Yeah, it is.

• 9:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  The feast starts at midday and it lasts till the next day. They have a pause every now and again to have a smoke or to play bowls or to shoot muskets or let off fireworks.

• 9:53Tom Holland?

  And isn't this kind of shenanigans with bears and bellows and things?

• 9:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, exactly. So there's a lot of beer drinking. It's very like The Rest Is History working lunches. There's a lot of beer drinking and toasts, but there's also pranks. We love a prank. So if there's a fat man there, they'll often strip the fat man and drag him across ice on his bare bottom. They would shove candles into you, insert candles and light them. At least one man is killed by having air blown up him with bellows. So they insert bellows into him and blow you up.

• 10:25Tom Holland?

  That's what I remember, the bellows, jape.

• 10:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Would you burst? Do you think he'd burst? I mean, that's...

• 10:31Tom Holland?

  Well, I don't know, because if they're playing japes on fat people. Presumably, if you blow a fat person up with the bellows, there's more capacity.

• 10:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 10:38Tom Holland?

  I mean, Dominic, I've mentioned it before, but the brilliant evocation of all this, the japes and the pranks.

• 10:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 10:44Tom Holland?

  And the frankly, kind of murderous jollity of the Jolly Company is brilliantly evoked in The Great.

• 10:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, the Catherine the Great series.

• 10:51Tom Holland?

  With Nicholas Holt, who is playing Peter the Great's grandson, but I think he's actually playing Peter the Great in this. Loads of toasts and going, huzzah, all the time.

• 10:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, this is what's happening. Now, there is a slight, you could say there's a slight political side to this. Because we talked last time about how Peter loves to kind of do this role playing and quite subversive role playing. He loves giving people like fake titles and nicknames and stuff. So the Jolly Company have their own sort of what's called a mock czar. A guy who he calls the Prince Caesar, who's a friend of his called Fedor Romadonovsky. And Peter calls him Your Majesty. When Peter writes a letter to him, he always signs himself, you know, I am your slave, I'm your bondsman and stuff. And this guy Romadonovsky has to preside over the meetings of the Jolly Company. He almost pretends to be the czar. But he loves a prank. So his great prank, you would love this, Tom, if you heard that.

• 11:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  When you arrive, especially if you're a kind of a newbie, you have to drink a large cup peppered brandy. That is offered to you by a trained, trained bear. And if you say, oh, it's not for me, I don't like peppered brandy.

• 12:02Tom Holland?

  I don't like trained bears either.

• 12:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  While we're at it. The bear has been trained not just to offer you cups of brandy, but to strip you naked.

• 12:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Imagine being stripped by a bear.

• 12:14Tom Holland?

  That's not the kind of thing that Wojtek got up to, I'm glad to say.

• 12:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, no, our previous bear. We don't know the name of this bear, but it sounds absolutely splendid. So. As time goes on, this becomes more and more formalized and ritualized. So by the 1690s, the Jolly Company has been organized into what Peter calls. The, the all joking, all drunken synod of fools and jesters. This clearly does have a slight political edge because it's a parody of the, of the church. So they have cardinals, they have bishops, they have deacons. Peter is just a deacon.

• 12:43Tom Holland?

  But Dominic, the fact that there are cardinals, which you don't get in the Orthodox Church, but you do get in the Catholic Church, I mean, he can say this is a parody of the heretical, Caesarist Catholic Church, can't he?

• 12:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he can. I think what lies behind this, so actually, he started doing this, the all-drunkened synod, after there was the accession of a new patriarch, who was very anti-Western, very traditionalist, who was called Adrian, and Peter despised Adrian. And I think he clearly wanted the all-drunkened synod to mock the Orthodox Church, but he knew he couldn't do it directly, so the rituals are Catholic, exactly as you say, because it would be far too subversive.

• 13:23Tom Holland?

  Yeah. Just on Peter's attitude to the Orthodox Church, I mean, he is still a devout believer, isn't he?

• 13:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, he is.

• 13:30Tom Holland?

  It's not like he is a kind of Frederick the Great, or someone like that, who is contemptuous of Christianity.

• 13:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, he's not at all. He's very, he is still pious, but he's fascinated by other forms of Christianity, as we'll see when he goes abroad, he wants to find out all about them. He's curious.

• 13:43Tom Holland?

  Yeah, so that's why he's talking to Gilbert Burnett.

• 13:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think it's fair to say he's a very violent man, he's very impatient, but he's not intolerant of other ideas. He's interested in other ideas, I think, which makes him different from a lot of Russian Tsars.

• 13:56Tom Holland?

  But you still wouldn't want to see him coming towards you with a pair of bellows.

• 14:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Pair of bellows and a bear, that's terrifying.

• 14:03Tom Holland?

  No.

• 14:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he has a mock Prince Pope, who is his old tutor, who's a man called Nikita Zotov, who presides over this synod. So on feast days, on religious feast days, to mock the Church, they have their biggest kind of antics and rituals.

• 14:18Tom Holland?

  And the Pope wears gloves made of mice skins.

• 14:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's bonkers. So on Christmas, they ride around on sleighs, a sleigh drawn by 12 bald men. The mock Pope is wearing a tin hat and a costume made of playing cards, which seems bonkers. And the others are all wearing their clothes inside out, as you said, gloves of mice skins.

• 14:40Tom Holland?

  Oh, I thought it was the Pope who wore them. So everyone's wearing it. That's a lot of mice who've had to be killed.

• 14:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, yeah. And their sleighs are pulled by pigs and bears.

• 14:49Tom Holland?

  Such a lot of bears.

• 14:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  I don't believe you could train a bear to pull it. Well, maybe you could. Surely not the same bear who's stripping people naked.

• 14:56Tom Holland?

  Well, I think if you can, you can train a bear to, you know, strip you bare if you don't want a

• 15:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Tom Holland?

  A mug of spiced whiskey, whatever it was.

• 15:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so is Peter doing anything other than sort of blowing people up with bellows and things? Yes, he's doing loads of naval stuff. So he goes up to Archangel. You mentioned Archangel in the previous episode. It's on the White Sea. It's the only Russian outlet to the sea. It's, it's a little bit of a forerunner of St Petersburg, actually, because it has English and Dutch sailors who live there. It has sort of churches, Protestant churches.

• 15:27Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 15:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  When you go to Archangel, this tavern's full of sort of Dutch sea captains smoking pipes and talking about William of Orange. And he loves that. And he goes up there and it's actually at this point that he designs a flag for his sort of navy. Because he's very interested in Holland, he models it on the flag of the Dutch States General, but he reorders the colours. So it's the white, blue and red flag of today's Russian Federation.

• 15:55Tom Holland?

  So it's basically Dutch.

• 15:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's Dutch, exactly.

• 15:57Tom Holland?

  So the Russian navy is English and the flag is Dutch.

• 16:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Tom Holland?

  Putin keeps quiet about that, doesn't he?

• 16:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he doesn't play that up as much as he could. So his first war is he thinks I'll have a little crack at the Ottomans because they'd still got this deal with the Polish, the way in Commonwealth and Co, they're meant to be fighting the Ottomans. So he decides he wants to capture Azov on the Black Sea. The first go at it in 1695 doesn't work, but in 1696, he goes down the river Don with loads of Cossacks. And he captures Azov from the Ottomans. And this is the first Russian victory for 20 years. So it's a great moment. And he has his outlet now. It's not quite on the Black Sea. It's on the, on the Sea of Azov. So he needs to go a little bit further to get into the Black Sea. However, it's a start. He has a triumph in Moscow. And here again, you see his kind of westernising ambitions.

• 16:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because previously, when Russian Tsars had triumphs, they were very orthodox occasions. There's lots of chanting and waving around of icons.

• 16:54Tom Holland?

  So very Second Rome.

• 16:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, but Peter's is really Very First Rome. He has statues of Hercules and of Mars. They put Julius Caesar's "I came, I saw, I conquered" on classical gates. As always, Peter, his role-playing, his performative humility is on display. So he gets this bloke who was the Prince Pope, who presumably is not now dressed in playing cards with my skin gloves, to lead the procession. And he walks with the captains of his galleys, wearing an ordinary German captain's uniform.

• 17:29Tom Holland?

  And he'd performed very bravely, hadn't he, in the campaign against Azov as an artillery man?

• 17:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  He had, he'd done well, he'd done very well. And then, just weeks after this victory, comes an unbelievable announcement from the Foreign Ministry. Peter is sending a great embassy to Europe, to England, to Denmark, to the Dutch States, to Brandenburg, to Venice. This embassy is going to be led by his mate, the Franz La four, and they're going to recruit officers and shipwrights and sailors to come back to Russia and to build a fleet. And they're going to learn from the advanced nations of the West. Now, this is an extraordinary thing for a Tsar to do, to send some of his closest mates. But then, a rumor goes around Moscow, Peter's actually going to go with them. And he's not going to go with them as the Tsar.

• 18:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's going to go as a member of the diplomatic staff in disguise. So this is his business about pretending he's not the Tsar, which he loves to do.

• 18:25Tom Holland?

  Even though he's by miles the tallest member of the embassy?

• 18:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's the tallest person. So there are multiple reasons why he wants to do this, because this is an extraordinary thing. No Russian Tsar has ever travelled outside Russia, except when they're fighting, before. It's unprecedented.

• 18:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Now, one reason is he wants to get allies to strengthen the alliance against the Ottomans because he's very keen on this Black Sea kind of breakthrough. But the more obvious kind of personal reason is that he is just absolutely fascinated with the West, with Holland and England in particular. He wants to go to their dockyards. He wants to study their shipbuilding techniques. And he clearly knows, I think, as so many Russians know, that the gap between Russia and the West has never been greater, that in the West, this is the age of Newton, of Leibniz, of the financial and scientific revolutions, of stock exchanges and newspapers and things. And Russia is in danger of falling centuries behind. And he has a seal made that has the inscription, "I am a student and I'm looking for teachers."

• 19:27Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 19:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, so he's pretty explicit about it.

• 19:29Tom Holland?

  Why would the Dutch or the English or whoever be willing to teach a potential rival about the reasons for their lead? I mean, if you have a technological lead, why would you share it with somebody who is potentially quite a major threat?

• 19:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  A fairly obvious reason, I would have thought, is that he's orthodox and he's not Catholic. So if you're a Protestant power, he could conceivably be an ally against Louis XIV, right?

• 19:59Tom Holland?

  Who is the great figure of the age, isn't he?

• 20:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. He doesn't go to France in this trip. He goes to the two great Protestant adversaries of France. I think they're flattered, England and the Dutch Republic, by Peter's attentions.

• 20:10Tom Holland?

  And maybe they're hoping to, well, Gilbert Burnett, I mean, he's clearly trying to win.

• 20:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:17Tom Holland?

  Peter for Anglicanism.

• 20:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  For Anglicanism, as we will see, as we will see, people in England thought, this is brilliant, we could basically get an ally in Russia, we could have an Anglican ally. Exactly. I know that sounds bonkers, but is it any more bonkers than the Tsar of Russia going in disguise on a massive gap year to the West? I don't think it is.

• 20:34Tom Holland?

  I suppose not.

• 20:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he decides he's going to set off. His mother, by the way, is dead at this point, and actually his brother Ivan has died as well. So he leaves his mate Romadanovsky, the guy who has the bear.

• 20:45Tom Holland?

  So the Prince Caesar.

• 20:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  The Prince Caesar, as he's called. He says, you're commanding the troops. You have basically command of law and order while I'm gone. As he leaves, he has a farewell banquet, and he hears that there's been some bitching among the Streltsi about him. They've been saying, oh, he's going off to the west, you know, he's going to betray us all to foreigners. And he has this Streltsi colonel and two noblemen executed. He has their limbs cut off with an axe, and then they're beheaded. And then he gets the coffin of Sophia's uncle, so one of the Miloslavsky family. He gets this coffin dragged by pigs into Red Square.

• 21:22Tom Holland?

  What is it with pigs? There's obviously a whole kind of stables full of pigs who are trained to drag things.

• 21:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. And the coffin is opened beneath the chopping block where these guys have been executed, so that the blood will spatter the face of Sophia's dead uncle. I mean, this is by no means the most sadistic thing that Peter will do. He loves a really, really horrendous kind of sadistic jape, and there are a lot of them to come. So after he's done this, he sets off. He's travelling as Peter Mikhailov. There's 250 people, lots of noblemen, musicians, coachmen, priests, secretaries, four dwarfs.

• 22:02Tom Holland?

  Of course.

• 22:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course. He's Peter Mikhailov. If you tell anybody who he is, he will kill you. But he wants people to kind of recognise him and be polite to him at the same time. So he's using the incognito thing, basically as a way to get out of formalities.

• 22:17Tom Holland?

  Yeah, all the boring stuff.

• 22:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  But he still wants to see fireworks displays in his honour, and for people to present him with enormous goblets of wine.

• 22:24Tom Holland?

  He's a cakeist.

• 22:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he's a total cakeist. He wants to have his cake and eat it. So they set off, they cross the frontier into what's then called Livonia, which is kind of Estonia, Latvia, which is part of the Swedish Empire. And they arrive in Riga. Peter does not like Riga at all, and he hates the Swedes because the Swedes take the incognito thing very seriously and they say they don't have a banquet for him. You know, the Swedes respond exactly as you would expect the Swedes to.

• 22:55Tom Holland?

  Very sober.

• 22:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very sober. They say, well, if you're, if you're not Peter the Great, great, no fireworks. By the way, you have to pay for your own board and lodging. This he's really offended by. The Swedish lack of hospitality. He's shocked at this, but also he's fascinated by kind of fortifications and things. So he goes off to inspect the defences of Riga, but because he's incognito, a Swedish sentry spots him and threatens to shoot him.

• 23:16Tom Holland?

  Yeah, but also Dominic, I mean, even if they did, this is a fortress next to a potential enemy. And then the leader of that enemy is sketching your fortress.

• 23:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, exactly.

• 23:29Tom Holland?

  I mean, the Russians, they don't tend to like, you know, foreigners turning up and making sketches of their nuclear refineries or their.

• 23:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, right, exactly. If Vladimir Putin turned up at a British submarine base in disguise, clearly obviously Vladimir Putin, and then was offended when people challenged him. Yeah, but he hated this. He hated Riga. And 13 years later, when his army was attacking Riga, he insisted on firing the first shells into the city.

• 23:54Tom Holland?

  I do like a man who bears a grudge.

• 23:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  He said, I thank God for allowing me to see the beginning of our revenge on this accursed place.

• 24:00Tom Holland?

  I mean, you really wouldn't want him as an enemy, would you?

• 24:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  You wouldn't want him as a friend either, frankly, if he comes at you with some bellows.

• 24:05Tom Holland?

  No.

• 24:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  He goes into a place called Kurland, which is now kind of Lithuania. He goes to Koenigsberg, now Kaliningrad. He meets the Elector of Brandenburg, who is the future Frederick the First of Prussia. They have a great time. They go hunting. They have the fireworks display. They watch bears fighting. They stage a bear fight.

• 24:22Tom Holland?

  Do you know, I mean, I had no idea that bear action played such a part in royal embassies and entertainment in the 18th century.

• 24:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  When we get on to Augustus the Strong, all kinds of activities with animals there.

• 24:34Tom Holland?

  Well, foxes.

• 24:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he meets Sophia of Hanover, who is the mother of George the First.

• 24:39Tom Holland?

  So she's going to be Queen Anne's heir to maintain the Protestant succession.

• 24:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. And this is a very funny scene because he'd never met aristocratic Western women before, and he's shown in to see. Them, he's very embarrassed. He doesn't know what to say. He literally covered his face with his hands in embarrassment and he sort of muttered from behind his hands. I don't know what to say. And Sophia and her daughter are very nice to him. They say, oh, come on, it's fine. They have some music. They bring in some Hanoverian children, including the future George the Second. And he loves George the Second. He hugs him and kisses him and sort of puts him on his lap and stuff. I mean, George Second is fourteen. He probably doesn't want to be kissed and hugged by a massive great blade with a hairy moustache.

• 25:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  And also he dances, doesn't he, with German women and is startled to discover that they're wearing these strange contraptions called corsets. Because no Russian woman wears a corset. No. So he's very taken with that. He cries out, these German women have devilish hard bones. And there's all much laughing. There's a lot of laughing and actually they are quite fond of him. They were worried that he would get very drunk. And he, he always restrains himself in the presence of aristocratic women, but then the people that he's traveling with, so all his mates and hangers on, all the lads. Jolly company. They get massively drunk and they make up for it. And this is definitely a theme of the trip. So eventually he gets to Holland and he is so excited about this. It's actually quite sweet.

• 26:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  He goes on ahead of the rest of his party because he just can't wait. And his destination is a place called Zandam, which is a great kind of shipyard. And they claim in this place that they're the best shipyard in Holland. There are fifty different companies and they make more than three hundred ships a year. So this is like, for Peter, this is Disneyland. Ship heaven. It is. It absolutely is. So he arrives on a Sunday. And immediately he bumps into a bloke who'd once worked for him in Moscow, a blacksmith called Gerret Kist. And Peter hugs him, like kisses him and stuff. And Kiss says, come and stay in the, the house next door.

• 26:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, Kiss just can't believe it. It's just mind boggling to him that the Tsar of Russia has turned up in his town and says, I'll, I'll move in next door to you. Which is what happens. And the next day is a Monday morning. Peter gets up, he's obviously got some money. He goes off and he buys a lot of tools. And then he goes to a shipyard run by a man called Lindstrøm and he signs up to work in the shipyard. Under the name Peter Mikhailov. I mean, can you imagine Donald Trump doing this? You know, signing up to work in a call center? No.

• 27:16Tom Holland?

  He worked in McDonald's, didn't he?

• 27:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  He did work.

• 27:19Tom Holland?

  Yeah, for like an hour or something.

• 27:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  But the thing is, of course, Peter is very conspicuous because he's so tall. And also he's got a very strong Russian accent. So crowds gather to watch him, you know, as he's walking to the shipyard. And this happens within days and he gets very upset. And he's particularly upset because the youth of the town rather let Holland down, don't they? Because the boys pelt him with mud.

• 27:45Tom Holland?

  Well, but you could say that that's that's an affirmation of their rugged republican character.

• 27:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Maybe it is. So he has to hide in an inn. And the town's burgomaster has to issue an order banning people from harassing, and I quote distinguished persons who wish to remain unknown.

• 28:00Tom Holland?

  That's nicely phrased.

• 28:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is. However, it doesn't really work because by the end of the week, he's only been there a week. And it's absolutely ludicrous scenes because by now, hundreds of people have come from Amsterdam to watch him working. When he gets up in the morning, he opens his front door and there are people sitting on the roofs of the neighboring houses, kind of, you know, with picnics, waiting to see him. Everywhere he goes, there are people basically mobbing him and stuff. By Sunday, he's become a prisoner in his own cottage. And he's very upset about this. And eventually he says, right, enough. I've given up on Zandam. I'm going to go to Amsterdam. So he moves to Amsterdam with his entourage. And they stay there for four months.

• 28:38Tom Holland?

  He can work in a place that's kind of closed off, isn't it? So nobody, people can't spy him.

• 28:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  The Dutch East India Company.

• 28:45Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 28:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he would be cancelled today for his associations with the Dutch East. Well, not just the beheading.

• 28:50Tom Holland?

  I mean, I think there are other things as well. He'd be cancelled.

• 28:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, the bellows.

• 28:53Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 28:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the Dutch East India Company is is is closed off. The shipyard is barred to the public by these big high walls. And they say to him, look, come and work for us. We'll have a new frigate laid down specially so you can work on it. And you can observe our shipbuilding techniques from start to finish. He shares a house with other Russians who say they'll come work at the yard with him. He arrives at work every day like a normal shipbuilder with his tools. He says to everybody, call me carpenter Peter, don't call me, you know, the czar or anything like that.

• 29:24Tom Holland?

  And he works hard. It's not just kind of, you know, Marie Antoinette-ing.

• 29:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, no, no, not at all, not at all. So when he's not at the shipyard, he goes and meets one of his great heroes, William of Orange, William the Third.

• 29:37Tom Holland?

  Who by this point is also the King of England.

• 29:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Also the King of England. Peter has grown up listening to stories about William of Orange fighting the French and he loves all these stories. He goes to see factories, he goes to laboratories, he goes to museums, he goes to botanical gardens. He's basically absorbing everything that he can. He particularly is very keen on anatomy.

• 29:57Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 29:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  He makes all his mates go with him to watch a corpse being dissected. And one of many great lines in the Robert K. Massey book, to the horror of the Dutch, he ordered his comrades to approach the cadaver, bend down and bite off the muscle of the corpse with their teeth.

• 30:14Tom Holland?

  Oh my god.

• 30:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's all fun and games with Peter the Great.

• 30:17Tom Holland?

  And the other thing he's very keen on is the techniques that are being developed in by Dutch anatomists to preserve corpses.

• 30:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he loves all that.

• 30:28Tom Holland?

  So presumably it's not formaldehyde, but yeah, a kind of whatever, an 18th century equivalent of that, 17th century equivalent of that.

• 30:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, as we will see, he loves a cabinet of curiosities, doesn't he?

• 30:37Tom Holland?

  He does. And so this is very important for later developments in St Petersburg.

• 30:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So anyway, he finally builds his frigate. The Dutch say, we will give this to you as a gift. You can have it shipped to Archangel. They're gonna call it the Amsterdam, which is all very nice. However, he's a bit disappointed by his time in Holland because the Dutch, when they build a ship, they sort of do it intuitively. They don't have blueprints, they just know what they're doing. They're not big fans of the process, I think it's fair to say.

• 31:05Tom Holland?

  So Peter is, is in the situation of the Romans in the First Punic War.

• 31:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 31:10Tom Holland?

  Who have to learn shipbuilding from scratch and like a kind of Ikea kit, that's what he wants.

• 31:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. He says, come on, do you not have blueprints? And they say, no, we don't, that's not how we do it. They say maybe the English, the English are more blueprint people. And so he says to William, can I go and visit your other kingdom, please? And William says, I'd love nothing better. And so on the eighth of January, 1698, Peter sets sail for God's own country, for England.

• 31:37Tom Holland?

  Lucky man. And we will be back after the break to find out how he gets on in London.

• 31:46Tom Holland?

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 31:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realises, or rather, everybody else realises, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So you know, Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?

• 32:28Tom Holland?

  So they asked over a hundred thousand people. And what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.

• 32:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Ask yours at claude.ai slash rest is history and keep thinking.

• 32:51Tom Holland?

  This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history.

• 33:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required, $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot, capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

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• 34:02Tom Holland?

  Hello, everyone. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Peter the Great is sailing across the channel, up the Thames Estuary. And on the morning of the 11th of January 1698, he arrives in London. And Dominic, he is rowed ashore to a landing key on the Strand, joining the City of London to Westminster. And there, the court chamberlain of William III, who is also, of course, back in the Dutch Republic, the Prince of Orange, is waiting to greet him and does so in Dutch, which Peter speaks.

• 34:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it's a great scene, Peter arriving in London. London is a big city at this point, 750,000 people. It's a really interesting moment in London's history, actually, this. I think it's, if you're going to go back to London at any point in time, this is as good as any, because it's still a very raucous, disputatious city, a city of public flogging and cockfighting and stuff. But we're at the point in history where the Bank of England has been created, where party politics is starting, where England is becoming a maritime commercial empire. So it's interesting. There's coffee houses and newspapers.

• 35:11Tom Holland?

  And a scientific power as well. Isaac Newton and Royal Society and all of that.

• 35:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. There's Christopher Wren churches being built. There's all of this stuff. And Peter, when he arrives, he stays in a place called Norfolk Street, which doesn't exist, I think, anymore, which is just off the Strand. And basically, it's like a student house. He moves in with all his mates into the student house. There's a wonderful historian, a Peter the Great biographer, called Lindsay Hughes, and she describes how the Prince of Denmark heard that he was in town and went to visit him, and was horrified when he arrived at Peter's house to find Peter still in bed and four other people in the room as well. And, and I quote, "They had to open all the windows to clear the terrible stench."

• 35:53Tom Holland?

  They're very student digs.

• 35:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very student digs. He goes around London, he meets the future Queen Anne at Kensington Palace. William III, William of Orange, introduces him. The Thames is frozen, there's a great frost, so he can't get into shipbuilding straight away. So he goes shopping, he goes to a watchmaker to see how watches work and to get watches. He's very impressed by English coffins.

• 36:15Tom Holland?

  That's good to know.

• 36:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  He says, "This is brilliant. I never imagined people could make coffins like this." He has a coffin shipped specially to Moscow. He buys a swordfish, a stuffed swordfish, and a stuffed crocodile. He wants to send them to Moscow as well.

• 36:27Tom Holland?

  So that's testimony to the, the fact that the English are becoming a polite and commercial people, isn't it? That they have shops where you can buy a stuffed crocodile.

• 36:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. Our taxidermist is second to none, I think that's what I say. He becomes friends with a bloke called the Marquess of Carmarthen, and he goes to the pub with this bloke so often that the pub is renamed the Tsar of Russia. And Carmarthen says, "Oh, I know who you'd like to meet." And he introduces him to an actress called Letitia Cross, who becomes his mistress while he's in England, and moves in with him in the student house.

• 36:55Tom Holland?

  And what language do they speak? Is it the language of love?

• 36:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  The language of love, Tom. They speak the language of love.

• 37:00Tom Holland?

  Great.

• 37:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Anyway, he's off the Strand, so he's very central, and there's more trouble with crowds. And so William III's government say, "Look, we'll find you a house across the river." And this is where we come to-

• 37:12Tom Holland?

  A single favourite episode in all of history.

• 37:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So the essayist and kind of diarist and whatnot, John Evelyn, has this house in Deptford.

• 37:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Charles the Second had given John Evelyn a lease on this house. And Evelyn had owned it for forty five years. And he had set out what was regarded as arguably the greatest garden in England.

• 37:33Tom Holland?

  His pride and joy.

• 37:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  It had a bowling green, it had a terrace walk, it had kitchen gardens, it had a wall garden. Now, when it was first mentioned to John Evelyn that Peter the Great might move in, he said brilliant because he's actually been renting it to a man called Admiral Benbow.

• 37:47Tom Holland?

  The pub in Treasure Island.

• 37:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  As in the pub. Admiral Benbow had not been a good tenant. They'd been a little bit of wear and tear and he hadn't looked after the garden properly. So John even said, oh, well, great. I mean, these Russians, they can't be any worse than Admiral Benbow. And we will find out later in the episode exactly what went on. But it's very clear something has gone wrong when John Evelyn Stuart, after a few days, says, the house is full of people and right nasty.

• 38:12Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 38:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  But how nasty, we will discover. Anyway, while he's not smashing up the house, we mentioned Bishop Burnett from Wiltshire and the Salisbury area. He's been trying to convert Peter to Anglicanism. But the people that Peter really loves meeting are very much friends of the show. Richard Nixon's favourite people, the Quakers.

• 38:36Tom Holland?

  Always good to have a Quaker on the rest of history.

• 38:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Peter can't get enough of the Quakers. He goes to prayer meetings, they're quaking and doing what they do, being very sober and quaking. He says, this is absolutely amazing. I love this. He meets William Penn of Pennsylvania.

• 38:53Tom Holland?

  Well, presumably if they're quaking and Peter is given to convulsions, he'd feel quite at home, wouldn't he?

• 38:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he fits in. For once, his twitching is not noticed. So William Penn of Pennsylvania fame, he is in between trips to Pennsylvania. He goes to the house at Deptford to talk to Peter and they have a great chat in Dutch about Quakerism. And afterwards, Peter says to his Russian friends, whoever could live according to such a doctrine would be truly happy.

• 39:17Tom Holland?

  I mean, it's amazing, isn't it? Because foreign visitors to London are impressed by the Quakers. Because Voltaire, when he goes to London, will be similarly kind of wowed by them. It's kind of interesting. It's clearly. Something about London that foreigners find interesting.

• 39:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but not in a sort of freak show way, right?

• 39:33Tom Holland?

  No, they're impressed by them.

• 39:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  They're impressed by it. He takes it really seriously. He does loads of fun tourist things.

• 39:38Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 39:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  He basically follows the itinerary that you would follow if you came to London on a holiday now. He goes to Greenwich, he goes to the Tower of London.

• 39:46Tom Holland?

  And they hide the axe with which a chance at first have been decapitated, don't they? Because they're worried that if he finds it, he'll be so outraged, he'll fling it in the Thames.

• 39:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, and my favourite tourist thing that he does, he goes to Parliament and he says, I'd love to see it. And he doesn't want to draw attention to himself, so he climbs up to the roof and he watches through a kind of upper gallery sort of skylight style window in the roof as William III is giving assent to tax bills in the House of Lords. And he says afterwards to his friends and whatnot, he says, well, we obviously couldn't do this in Russia. Because, you know, we have the absolute power of the Tsar in Russia, we couldn't have any limitations. However, and I quote, "It is good to hear subjects speaking truthfully and openly to their king. This is what we must learn from the English." Now, there's a lesson here for Vladimir Putin, isn't there?

• 40:33Tom Holland?

  Well, just on the topic of Vladimir Putin and London and Peter the Great.

• 40:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:39Tom Holland?

  I don't know if you've seen, there's a statue of Peter the Great at Deptford.

• 40:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 40:43Tom Holland?

  Very weird, done by this sculptor who also did one that was put up in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg. The sculptor is very keen on portraying Peter with very long elongated fingers and limbs. So he looks very peculiar.

• 40:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  And a small head.

• 40:58Tom Holland?

  Yes, so both those statues. And the statue in Deptford was set up at the beginning of the 21st century. And Putin, when he came to London, went to visit it and he was escorted by Prince Andrew.

• 41:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  What? Wow.

• 41:14Tom Holland?

  There's a, there's a couple.

• 41:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's an interesting episode from history.

• 41:18Tom Holland?

  Yeah, so I looked up what it actually said on the, on the statue and it said, "This monument is erected near the Royal Shipyard, where Peter the Great studied the English science of shipbuilding. The monument is a gift from the Russian people and commemorates the visit of Peter the Great to this country in search of knowledge and experience."

• 41:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh.

• 41:34Tom Holland?

  So that's nice.

• 41:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, Peter did get knowledge and experience, to be fair. I'll tell you one thing he picked up was smoking. Smoking previously banned in Russia, except in the German suburb. He signs a deal with this bloke Kamarthen that he goes drinking with, so that Kamarthen can import tobacco to Russia. And also, he does manage to get about 60 mathematicians, shipwrights, engineers.

• 41:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he persuades them to come back with him to Russia as well as to Barbers.

• 42:00Tom Holland?

  Right. So his westernising brain is ticking over.

• 42:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. So, second of May, he says, um, look, I've been here for ages. It's time to go on. He loved England. We're used to the Russians being incredibly disobliging about our beloved country, aren't we?

• 42:18Tom Holland?

  Well, I don't know. I mean, wealthy Russians, they tend to like London. They like our football clubs.

• 42:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's true.

• 42:23Tom Holland?

  They like our bijou West End houses.

• 42:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Nationalist commentators were always going on Russian state television, aren't they? And sort of, um, doing mockups of how Britain would be annihilated by a nuclear weapon.

• 42:34Tom Holland?

  Or a tsunami.

• 42:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Or tsunami, exactly. But Peter the Great would not have approved of that because he told a captain later, he said it would be a much happier life to be an admiral in England than a czar in Russia. I mean, I'm so happy to be quoting this. He said, England is the best, the most beautiful and the happiest place on earth.

• 42:53Tom Holland?

  So although he's a brutal and murderous autocrat, he's clearly not all bad.

• 42:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, he's a man of tremendous taste. Now, sadly, not all Englishmen are as keen on Peter the Great as he is on them. Because as soon as he's left, John Evelyn goes to see what's happened to his house.

• 43:11Tom Holland?

  And it is most nasty.

• 43:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  And it was very nasty. He's so appalled, he then goes straight to the royal surveyor, Sir Christopher Wren, and the royal gardener, who's a man called Mr. London. And he says, come to my house immediately. Yeah, the government's going to have to compensate me for this. And when they get there, they find it has been utterly trashed. Ink everywhere, grease everywhere, all the doorknobs and locks have been pried off, the windows have been smashed, the chairs have all been smashed up and used as firewood, the pictures have been ripped up, and the garden, Evelyn's pride and joy, the greatest garden in England, absolutely destroyed. The claim is, I think there's some dispute among sort of scholars about whether this is invented or not, that they'd been having wheelbarrow races. Through the hedges.

• 43:57Tom Holland?

  So to quote, "The lawn was trampled into mud and dust as if a regiment of soldiers in iron shoes had drilled on it." And who knows? I mean, Peter loves, you know, a fake army. So maybe they'd done that. The magnificent Hollyhedge had been flattened by wheelbarrows rammed through it. So presumably that's where that story comes from.

• 44:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, exactly. And the government ended up paying John Evelyn more than £350 in compensation, which if you use the calculators at the website, Measuring Worth, which is the one I always use because it's the most sophisticated, that's basically in earnings terms, more than a million pounds today that Evelyn was given as compensation. That tells you just how much damage there was. So Peter, now by now is long gone. He goes to Dresden, he goes to Vienna.

• 44:37Tom Holland?

  And Dominic in Dresden, crucially, he sees the Kunstkammer Museum, doesn't he?

• 44:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 44:43Tom Holland?

  Which is a cabinet of curiosities. And so we talked about how in the Netherlands, Peter had seen ways to preserve corpses. And now he's seen a cabinet of curiosities. And this is setting up, again, all kinds of ideas in his fertile and faintly dark brain.

• 45:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, exactly. So he has a nice time in Vienna. And then he's preparing to move on to Venice in July, when bombshell news. He has a letter from Moscow from his mate, Romanoffsky. Terrible things have been happening in Russia. Four regiments of Streltsi were being transferred from the Sea of Azov to the Polish frontier. And they have mutinited. They are now marching on Moscow, and they are only 60 miles away. And of course, this letter has taken a long time to reach Peter. Peter can't believe it. So what this means is that while he's been messing around with cabinets of curiosities in Dresden and dancing at balls in Vienna, the Streltsi may well have taken Moscow. He may have been deposed

• 45:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  and proclaimed a traitor. He says, oh, my God. So he scraps his plan. The gap year is over, and he rushes east. And he's riding through Poland, day and night, stopping only to change horses. And then he gets to Krakow, and another messenger comes riding up from the east. And Peter sort of rips open the message. A massive sigh of relief. Romaninowski reports that their troops have intercepted and defeated the Strelsi rebels. Although he's going to carry on going home, he can slow down a bit. And he heads to meet somebody who will play a big part in this story, who is Augustus the Strong.

• 46:22Tom Holland?

  And you love him, don't you?

• 46:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  I love Augustus the Strong.

• 46:25Tom Holland?

  He's one of your favourite characters from all of history.

• 46:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is. So he was the elector of Saxony, Augustus, and he'd been elected king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania in 1698. And we said we'd get into the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. It's this great sort of ramshackle state of eight million people, vast, culturally fascinating, a real mix of Catholics, Jews and whatnot, fascinating kind of mosaic.

• 46:54Tom Holland?

  Even Muslims.

• 46:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Even Muslims, exactly.

• 46:56Tom Holland?

  Because there are Muslims who've been settled there.

• 46:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Sort of heretics of various kinds go there because it's so tolerant. It's sort of an experiment in multiculturalism in some ways, but it's beginning to fall apart a bit. And it's got a bonkers political system.

• 47:08Tom Holland?

  Because diversity is not necessarily its strength.

• 47:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's not its strength, I think it's fair to say. Now, Augustus has been elected to rule this this kingdom. He's a gigantic man like Peter, he looks like a bear. His party trick, well, he has multiple party tricks. He likes to amuse his courtiers by snapping horseshoes with one hand. I don't know how you do that, but he does it anyway.

• 47:27Tom Holland?

  Presumably with fingers, it's reflective on the strength of his fingers, I guess.

• 47:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  As fingers, you could just snap your fingers and snap a horseshoe, maybe, yeah.

• 47:35Tom Holland?

  I guess, if you're just doing it with one hand.

• 47:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  He loves collecting porcelain. He has dozens of mistresses. He fathered 354 illegitimate children, which I think is a lot. Wow. He collected lions, hyenas, monkeys and meerkats.

• 47:52Tom Holland?

  Meerkats?

• 47:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, meerkats.

• 47:54Tom Holland?

  Is he the first European royal to collect a meerkat?

• 47:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think he probably is. They were always shipping animals to him and they'd open the box and the animal would be dead. That was the usual scenario. It's pretty tough on the animals and he's not one of history's great animal lovers because his real, you know, his real party piece, his specialism, the thing for which he goes down in history is he's probably history's most proficient fox tosser. So if you're interested in tossing a fox, Augustus the Strong is the absolute model.

• 48:26Tom Holland?

  Right.

• 48:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  So once, when he was receiving the king of Prussia.

• 48:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  To greet the King of Russia, he tossed 200 foxes, six wild cats, two badgers and two beavers. And when I say tossed, he

• 48:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  he tossed them to their deaths. That's what he does.

• 48:48Tom Holland?

  Oh my God.

• 48:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  So basically, his servants will line up with these beavers and badgers.

• 48:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  He just grabs them, throws them up in the air.

• 49:00Tom Holland?

  Throws them in the air.

• 49:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  So high that they come crashing down to earth and die. It's like brilliant.

• 49:06Tom Holland?

  So he doesn't catch them?

• 49:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  No.

• 49:08Tom Holland?

  They splattered over the ceiling?

• 49:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Surely he does this outdoors.

• 49:11Tom Holland?

  Oh, right. Okay.

• 49:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  So you go into the garden, there's a menagerie there all lined up. And everyone applauds politely.

• 49:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's just throwing foxes around. I mean, it seems bonkers.

• 49:24Tom Holland?

  Hurrah for your majesty. Yeah.

• 49:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  The late 17th, early 18th century, this is very high class entertainment. So don't knock it. And actually, to be fair, let's not knock it until we've done it. Cause we've never tried it or seen it. Peter loves this. Of course he does.

• 49:36Tom Holland?

  Very much his thing, isn't it?

• 49:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Augustus the Strong will throw a beaver to his death. And then Peter will embrace him and kiss him and say, oh, you're brilliant. I love this. I love you.

• 49:47Tom Holland?

  Does Peter have a go at fox tossing?

• 49:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  I don't know that he does, actually. Maybe he would just bellows or something.

• 49:53Tom Holland?

  I mean, it seems very much his kind of sport.

• 49:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'd like to think he tried his hand at it, wouldn't you? Yeah, he'd try to toss a bear, probably knowing him. Peter said to his nobleman, I prize Augustus more than the whole of you put together. Not because he's a king, but merely because I like him. Which is, which is quite sweet. And actually, in between killing all these animals, Augustus takes the opportunity to pitch an idea to Peter that will have massive, massive, long-term political consequences. Because both of them hate and fear their northern neighbours, the Swedes. They can't stand the Swedes. The Swedes, the most formidable and modern military power in northern Europe. And Augustus says, listen, the Swedish king has died.

• 50:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  And his successor, who's a bloke called Charles the 12th, he's a total nobody. He's only 15. He's a teenager. Let's join forces against the Swedes and divide up their Baltic Empire between us. And Peter, who we know loves Augustus the Strong, says, do you know, that sounds brilliant. Because actually, my war against the Ottomans is a complete non-event, total damp squib. I'm never going to beat the Ottomans. Forget the Back Sea and we'll move on to the Baltic. Let's keep working on this idea and one day let's do it. Now, in the meantime, he has to go back to Moscow, which he does. He goes back to Moscow with all his kind of shipwrights and whatnot. And all his sort of, he's fired with enthusiasm for his westernising project. He goes to his estate at Praia Brujanskaya.

• 51:21Tom Holland?

  Very good.

• 51:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  I was looking forward to that. I could see it looming in the notes. I thought, okay, I've just got to go for it.

• 51:29Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 51:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he arrives on the night of the 4th of September, 1698. And the next day, the 5th, all his noblemen say, oh brilliant, you're back. They come to go and greet him. He embraces them, he kisses them. And then out of his back pocket, he pulls out a razor. And then just starts shaving them, cutting off their beards. They are so stunned, they don't know how to react. And he's like, very violently forcibly shaving them. Now, the thing is, we did a whole episode, didn't we, about beards and about this business? And for people who missed it, to very briefly explain, to Orthodox Russians, the beard was a gift from God. And to shave it was a sin. Ivan the Terrible had specifically said, it's a sin that the blood of all the martyrs cannot cleanse

• 52:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  because it is to deface the image of man created by God. And Peter says, no, this is nonsense. A beard is backwards. And he makes everybody shave off their beards. And in the long run, if you want to have a beard, you have to pay a special tax. And you get a medallion with a picture of a beard on it.

• 52:32Tom Holland?

  I love that.

• 52:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then you're allowed to have a beard. And this is just one of a host of changes. So basically, up to this point, Russian noblemen had worn these kaftans, floppy coloured boots, very exotic garb.

• 52:45Tom Holland?

  But also appropriate to the cold weather.

• 52:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 52:48Tom Holland?

  I mean, it does keep you warm, right?

• 52:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Also layers, they believe in layers. Peter does not believe in that. He says this is backwards. Again, it's Asiatic, it's not right. He cuts the sleeves of people's robes off. Like you turn up to a state reception or something, Peter the Great will come at you with a razor and a pair of scissors, probably Dutch or English scissors, and will be cutting off bits of your clothing. He says, I want people to wear what they call French or German style coats. He says, I want to see waistcoats. I want to see breeches. I want women to wear bonnets and skirts. All of this kind of thing.

• 53:21Tom Holland?

  What about corsets?

• 53:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  If you go to Moscow, they hang up models of the approved costumes. And Peter says, when people are coming into the city, the guards have to have pairs of scissors as well. And if people are wearing long kaftans, the guards will cut them.

• 53:35Tom Holland?

  Snip, snip.

• 53:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Snip, snip, exactly. So it obviously didn't work among the great mass of the population at all. But among the elite, it did because foreign ambassadors say that by the mid, the middle of the sort of first decade of the 18th century, at balls and at banquets and things, people will be dressing in the German manner.

• 53:55Tom Holland?

  It must have been so cold, though. Imagine, you know, your stockings and your breeches and the icy wind from the Urals.

• 54:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but that's fine. But I mean, would you rather do that or would you rather take your chances with Peter the Great, a razor, scissors?

• 54:09Tom Holland?

  No, I wouldn't. I mean, it's an invidious choice.

• 54:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's not the only thing he changes. He changes the calendar. So up till this point, the Russians have dated time from the creation of the world. And Peter says, well, that's rubbish. Let's do it from Jesus's birth like everybody else does in Europe. So they adopt the Julian calendar. They don't really have very good coinage. They were just using bits of other people's coins they'd kind of cut up. And he says, come on. He loves the English coinage.

• 54:34Tom Holland?

  Because he'd studied the Mint, hadn't he, in the Tower of London?

• 54:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  He'd been to the Mint, exactly. He says, you must have coinage just like the English do. Now, for him personally, there's a big change as well. And all the time he'd been gone, 18 months, he had not written once to his wife, Eudokia. So people may remember from the last episode.

• 54:51Tom Holland?

  She's pink.

• 54:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, pink, hopeless and helpless, I think, was the description.

• 54:55Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 54:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  He sees her as the embodiment of conservatism and orthodoxy. And while he's been away, he's obviously thought to himself, I can't stand her. She's got to go. So he basically summons her. She's like, oh, great, you're home. And he says, well, I am. You've got to go, I'm afraid. You're off to a nunnery. And he takes his son Alexis from her and gives him to his sister. And this, as we will see in our final episode of this series, is a very traumatic moment for young Alexis. And their relationship will be difficult, I think it's fair to say.

• 55:28Tom Holland?

  But it's so interesting, isn't it? We've had so many series recently where unwanted women get packed off to nunnery. So it happened in our series on the Franks, happened in our series on the Road to 1066. Yeah, we've also had Japanese women going off and becoming nuns. So very much a theme.

• 55:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is, and poor Odidokia, she was forced into a carriage and sent to a convent in Suzdal and her head was shaved.

• 55:50Tom Holland?

  So like the Japanese.

• 55:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. And she was renamed Helen and she had to become a nun with the name of Helen. Now, of course, he has come home because he's heard about this mutiny among the Strelsi. The people who had, you know, carried out that horrendous massacre in front of him when he was 10 years old. And he is clearly determined that he will use this as a pretext to finish them off forever. There's a really a paranoid side, I think, to Peter. He reminds me of Henry VIII, you know, in insecurity. In Henry VIII's case, I guess it's because, you know, his father won the throne at Bosworth on the battlefield. And he's always worried about the dynasty. And Peter's case is because he had to fight.

• 56:30Tom Holland?

  Right. I mean, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get you.

• 56:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  No. And he is determined to make a massive example of the mutineers and to show that it was. He believes that this is part of a massive conspiracy orchestrated by his sister Sophia, who's of course in a nunnery herself. And so he has all the mutineers brought to his estate at Preia Brzanskaya. There you go, Tom.

• 56:55Tom Holland?

  So good.

• 56:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Loving it. I'm just going to do it unnecessarily now, even when it's not relevant. I'm probably not even pronouncing it correctly, to be honest. And at his estate, this is the dark side of Peter. He commissions his men to build 14 special torture chambers. So they bring the mutineers. And every week, for six days a week, the Streltse mutineers are interrogated. They are beaten with sticks, they're roasted over open fires, and above all, they are lashed with a thing called the knout, which is this massive leather whip. Twenty-five strokes of the knout will kill you, and it literally kind of rips the skin from your back. And it's kind of like an assembly line, and Peter and his friends and his cronies and

• 57:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  his jolly company are the people doing the torturing.

• 57:44Tom Holland?

  So not so jolly now?

• 57:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Not jolly now, and he will absolutely join in, and he will be beating these people with an ivory-handled cane. And it's so violent that the patriarch actually says to Peter, this is too much, stop. And Peter is livid about this, and he says to the patriarch, no, Russian society is infected with the disease, and I am burning it out. And actually, what he gets out of the Streltse, they confess and they say, we'd planned to storm the capital, we were going to burn down the German suburb, we were going to get rid of the foreigners, and we were going to get Sophia to rule over us again.

• 58:17Tom Holland?

  But is there any truth to this? Because I mean, I guess they're just saying whatever.

• 58:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, they're saying what he wants to.

• 58:23Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 58:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Sophia almost certainly didn't know about this, right? It's not that she had instigated the plot, but Peter has never forgiven her. He goes and interrogates her personally at her convent. He says, her head must be shaved, she must take religious vows and become a nun, and she basically is locked away and is never seen again. She dies when she's forty-seven, seventeen oh four. She had previously, of course, been in the nunnery, but had been relatively well-treated, and now she's effectively a political prisoner. And that's not the end of it. So Peter is determined, and here I think you see, you know, loads of countries have a violent history or a history of they have show trials or whatever. I mean, we've done a series on the French Revolution and whatnot, but there's a definite theme, I think, in Russian history.

• 59:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of a kind of a fear of enemies within and a conspiracy and a foreign influence and a belief in show trials and public punishment.

• 59:14Tom Holland?

  Yeah, well, show executions as well.

• 59:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Show executions. So he says, well, the Strelsi, you know, they've got to go. And hundreds of them are arrested, brought in in carts to his estate at Praia Brugge and Square, and they are hanged on a special gibbet in front of a crowd. Others are beheaded over an open trench.

• 59:36Tom Holland?

  Quite a few are broken on the wheel, aren't they, which is a hideous death.

• 59:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  In Red Square.

• 59:39Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 59:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  And actually, a really sort of chilling thing. About 200 of them are taken to the convent, Novo de Vici convent, where Sophia is locked up. And Peter has the most prominent members hanged and strung up outside her window, and they are dangling there. One of them is holding a piece of paper, and that's meant to symbolize their petition that they were going to issue, asking her to rule over them. And they are left to hang there outside her window all winter, kind of just dangling, kind of swaying in the wind. And whenever she looks out the window, there they are. I mean, you can only imagine how horrific the sight stench or whatever that must have been for her. I mean, actually, that isn't the most shocking thing, because the most shocking thing is, he says, he insists that

• 1:00:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  all his friends take part in the executions. So there's an Austrian diplomat who actually describes Peter himself wielding the axe, beheading five people, you know, in in public so that everybody can see. I mean, an incredibly gruesome scene.

• 1:00:40Tom Holland?

  So he did it, Dominate, but was he right to do it?

• 1:00:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, Robert K. Massey, his biographer, he doesn't say he was, but he says, this was a public demonstration of Peter's seriousness about his project. He eliminated the one great obstacle to his modernizing mission, which was the Strelsi. And effectively, yeah, he was right to do it. That it's a terrible thing, but he was right to do it. I mean, I personally don't think publicly beheading people is is the way forward.

• 1:01:08Tom Holland?

  And leaving corpses dangling outside the cell in which you've imprisoned your sister.

• 1:01:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, I wouldn't do that. So he ends up disbanding the Strelsi completely the year later in 1699. That leaves him really in a position of absolute power. And at first, how does he spend that political capital? He actually just has endless parties and feasts. Yeah, so there's a lot of like mad costumes, mocking religious rituals. They'll do the sign of the cross with two pipes.

• 1:01:36Tom Holland?

  It's a bear action.

• 1:01:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Lots of bears.

• 1:01:39Tom Holland?

  Bellows.

• 1:01:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Dwarfs, jumping out of pies, all of this kind of thing. And Peter often, he'll get incredibly drunk and then he'll have a massive fight with his friends. I mean, there's stories of him kind of drawing his sword and attacking his friends. He's very, very hot tempered.

• 1:01:52Tom Holland?

  I do urge people to watch The Great if they want to see this on a television screen.

• 1:01:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. But what's on his mind clearly the whole time is this idea that Augustus the Strong had suggested. You know, why don't we have a crack at the Swedes? Why don't we try to carve up the Baltic between us? Now, the thing is, he's still nominally fighting the Ottomans, so he's got to finish that off first. And in July seventeen hundred, he agrees a thirty year truce with the Ottomans. Peter will keep his conquest at Azov that we talked about at the beginning of this episode, but he will give up all hope of access to the Black Sea.

• 1:02:30Tom Holland?

  Because now his eye is on the Baltic.

• 1:02:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. So the news of the treaty reaches Moscow on the eighteenth of August seventeen hundred, and they have a massive fireworks display in celebration. And the very next day, the nineteenth of August seventeen hundred, Peter declares war on Sweden. And with that, the Great Northern War begins. And for Peter, for Russia, and for the whole of Northern and Eastern Europe, the world will never be the same again.

• 1:02:59Tom Holland?

  And that is an epic story written on a massive scale. And it will be beginning next week. And if you want to hear all of the episodes detailing the Great Northern War and its aftermath, then you can sign up at therestishistory.com if you're not already a member of the club. And if you don't want to do that, then that's fine. The episodes will be coming out in due course. In the meanwhile, Dominic, thanks so much. Some wonderful stories in all that. Beards, corsets, wheelbarrows, it's all been kicking off.

• 1:03:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34Tom Holland?

  And as we say, next week, the Great Northern War. So bye bye.

• 1:03:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Goodbye.

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