In the meantime Peter the Great had started on a new European tour. Catherine, his wife, accompanied him. He went to Prussia, Denmark, Holland, England and France, and was received everywhere with the greatest honors and distinctions. At Amsterdam the unwelcome news reached him that Alexis had left his convent under a false pretence, saying that he would join the Czar on his travels; but he had proceeded to Vienna and placed himself under the protection of the German Emperor. The Czar immediately despatched two of his most intimate friends with instructions to bring him back, alive or dead. But when the two messengers reached Vienna, the Czarowitz had left that city already, and his whereabouts was unknown. But after a diligent search, it was discovered that he had gone to Naples and had found an asylum at the Castle of St. Angelo. The messengers hurried to Naples and succeeded in getting an interview with the Prince, in which they exhausted their eloquence to induce him to return with them to Russia. They read to him also a letter written by his father, who promised him that, upon his immediate return, his escapade would be forgiven and forgotten. The Prince was not willing to go, and consented only when the Viceroy of Naples joined his own request with the entreaties of the messengers. The Czar had returned already to St. Petersburg when Alexis arrived.
The Prince hoped to be kindly received and to be treated like a repentant son; but in this expectation he found himself badly deceived. He was immediately arrested and subjected to a very severe interrogatory, in the course of which he implicated a number of prominent persons in having planned and assisted him in his flight from Russia. And then a mock trial of the most infamous character was enacted. The young Prince had already renounced all his rights to the crown; but this renunciation did not assuage the vindictive spirit of his father. Those whom Alexis, in his confusion and in the agony of the torture, had implicated in the crime of which he was accused, were tried for high treason, convicted, and beheaded or broken on the wheel. The ex-Empress Eudoxia was transferred to a dungeon in another prison, after having been cruelly chastised by two nuns. Alexis himself, from whom the cruel application of the torture (during which the Czar was present) had extorted the confession of crimes which he had never committed, was convicted of high treason and sentenced to be beheaded. The Czar insisted on a verdict of capital punishment, and the one hundred and eighty-one judges composing the court obeyed the imperial brute; they rendered a unanimous verdict. Peter hypocritically said that he would pardon him. When the decision of the judges and his father’s promise of clemency were communicated to Alexis, he was overcome with terror and excitement, and led back to prison. The next day it was reported that he had died of apoplexy, but that in his last moments an affectionate interview had taken place between him and his father. Another report stated that the Czar had withdrawn his pardon and ordered his son to be beheaded without delay. And still another report, almost too horrid to be true, says that Peter, with his own hands, cut off the head of his son. There is no doubt that the young man was foully murdered. The story of his death by apoplexy was merely invented to whitewash the memory of one of the greatest, but also of one of the most brutal and cruel rulers that ever lived.