A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Eudocia, Feodorowna
EUDOCIA, FEODOROWNA,
First wife of Peter the First, Czar of Russia, was daughter of the Boyar Feodor Lapookin. Peter married her in 1689, when he was only seventeen, and Alexis was born in 1690.
Peter had caused it to be proclaimed throughout his empire, that he intended to bestow his crown and his heart on the woman he judged most worthy. A hundred young girls were brought to Moscow, and his choice fell on Eudocia. But her joy was of short duration. Her opposition to Peter's reforms, and her remonstrances against his faithlessness, irritated him; and in 1696 she was divorced, compelled to assume the veil, and confined in a convent at Susdal. There she was said to have entered into a contract of marriage with General Glebof, by exchanging rings with him; but though Glebof was afterwards tortured to the utmost extremity, ho persisted in asserting his own and her innocence; and when the czar came to him and offered him pardon if he would confess, he spit in the czar's face, and told him that "he should disdain to speak to him, if it were not his desire to clear his mistress, who was as virtuous as any woman in the world."
Encouraged by the predictions of the Archbishop of Rostof, who, from a dream, announced to her the death of Peter and her return to court, under the reign of her son Alexis, she re-assumed the secular dress, and was publicly prayed for in the church of the convent, under the name of the Empress Eudocia. Being brought to Moscow in 1718, and examined, she was, by her husband's order, scourged by two nuns, and imprisoned in the convent of Nova Ladoga, and allowed to see no one but the persons who brought her food, which she prepared herself; for she was allowed no servant, and but one cell. From thence she was removed to the fortress at Shlusselburgh. Being released on the accession of her grandson, Peter the Second, she repaired to Moscow, and was present at his coronation, as well as that of the Empress Anne; and expired in the Devitza monastery, where she held her court, in 1731, in the fifty-ninth year of her age.