225 



ANNA BOLEYN. 



ANNA IWANOWNA. 



. 



a death of torture. He wag ordered to be exposed to the people on 

 three successive days in the streets of Stockholm, with the pistols 

 and dagger suspended over his head, together with the inscription 

 " Konungs Mordar " (" Murderer of the King ") ; to be beaten on each 

 day with rods ; and on the fourth day to be beheaded, his right hand 

 being first cut off; to be then quartered, and his head and quarters 

 set on wheels, according to the Swedish custom, in the chief places of 

 the capital. The other conspirators were sentenced to various punish- 

 ments. Counts de Horn and Ribbing, and Colonel Lilienhorn, the writer 

 of the anonymous letter, were condemned to suffer imprisonment for 

 life. Another conspirator, Baron Bjelke, had committed suicide before 

 he could be taken. 



Ankarstrom suffered with undaunted courage, having continued 

 to declare his satisfaction in having "rid his country of a tyrant" to 

 the last. Though his crime was held in detestation by the common 

 people, many of the nobles regarded it with admiration. 



There are numberless versions in books of the period, and of later 

 date, of the motives of Ankarstrbm in committing this murder, em- 

 bracing almost every imaginable variety ; but none appear to rest upon 

 much better authority than mere conjecture. It is hardly necessary 

 to search further for the exciting cause than the revolutionary spirit 

 of the period, especially when the assassination is viewed in connection 

 with the events which speedily followed in other countries. 



(Biographical Dictionary of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful 

 Knowledge.) 



ANNA BOLEYN. [BOLEYN.] 



ANNA COMNE'NA, the daughter of Alexius Comnenus I., empe- 

 ror of Constantinople, born December 1, 10S3, best known as the 

 author of the 'Alexiad,' a work written in Greek, containing the 

 history of her father's life. She was the favourite child of Alexius, 

 and her talents were sedulously cultivated by an education compre- 

 hending the study of eloquence, poetry, mathematics, natural science, 

 and the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (see her preface to the 

 ' Alexiad '). She married Nicephorus Bryennius, a man of high birth, 

 and of high literary attainments. Presuming on parental partiality, 

 she solicited Alexius to name her husband for his successor, to the 

 exclusion of her brothers, John and Isaac ; and in this attempt she 

 was assisted by her mother, the Empress Irene. Pressed on this subject, 

 the dying emperor uttered some allusion to the vanities of the world, 

 which drew from Irene the unfeeling speech, " You die, as you have 

 lived, a hypocrite." Alexius died August 15, 1118, and John Comnenus, 

 the lawful heir, possessed himself of the royal signet, and became 

 master of the palace, and of the empire. Disappointed ambition drove 

 Anna to conspire against her brother's life. All was prepared, but fear 

 or remorse induced Bryennius to absent himself at the moment of 

 action ; and in her passionate disappointment the princess exclaimed, 

 " that nature had mistaken the two sexes, and endowed Bryeunius 

 with the soul of a woman." On the discovery of the meditated treason, 

 the life and fortune of Anna became justly forfeited. Her life was 

 spared by the clemency of John, and the guilty princess escaped with 

 no further punishment than a forced retirement from the world, and 

 exclusion from the splendour and intrigues of a court. Thus thrown 

 on herself, she relieved the heaviness of her solitary hours by composing 

 the 'Alexiad,' a history of her father's life and reign in 15 books, 

 from 1069, twelve years before he ascended the throne, to his death 

 in 1113. She completed it in 1148, and died in the same year. The 

 'Alexiad' is distinguished by an air of filial piety both as regards the 

 person and the fame of Alexius. The book is overloaded by rhetorical 

 display, and by the affectation and misplaced obtrusion of science. 

 Individuality of character is lost in indiscriminate panegyric, and the 

 likeness is rendered suspicious by the barefaced flattery of the portrait. 

 The most curious and important part of Anna's history, as of her 

 father's reign, is that which relates to the first crusade. It is often at 

 variance with the Latin authorities, and on no point more so than on 

 the character of Alexius. 



The ' Alexiad ' forms a part of the collection of Byzantine historians. 

 The first complete edition of it was published at Paris, 1651, by the 

 Jesuit Poiusiueg, with a Latin translation and glossary. A series of 

 valuable notes on it, by the learned Du Fresne, will be found at the 

 end of the ' Historic ' of John Cinnamus, containing an account of the 

 reigns of John and Manuel Comnenus. 



ANNA IWANOWNA, empress of Russia, was the second daughter 

 of the Czar Iwan or John I., the elder brother of Peter the Great, and 

 for some time his associate on the throne. She was born on the 8th 

 of February (O.S.), 1694. In 1710 she was married to Frederic William, 

 duke of Courland, who died in 1711. On the death, without issue, of 

 the Emperor Peter II., on the 29th of January, 1730, after an attempt 

 by the family of the 1 Dolgorukyi to elevate the princess Catherine of 

 that house, who had been betrothed by the late king, to the throne, 

 and a second attempt by a party of the nobles to limit her authority, 

 the conditions of which she had signed, but declared to be null as 

 fraudulently obtained, and the authors of which were dismissed from 

 her councils, she began to reign with all the privileges and authority 

 of her ancestors. 



The government of the empress for the first three years of her reign 

 was mild and popular. The council of state, most of the members 

 of which anticipated death as the consequence of their failure, was 

 abolished, three of tho four Dolgorukys were banished to distant parts 



BIOO. DIV. vor. r. 



of the empire, and these were the only punishments inflicted fo\^ 

 attempt at revolution. The administration was entrusted to ti. 

 departments of the senate, controlled after the second year of Auna v 

 by a cabinet, which had nearly the same powers as the former council 

 of state. The army underwent a complete reformation under Marshal 

 Munnich; the emoluments of Russian officers were equalised with 

 those of foreigners, which had hitherto been double those of natives, 

 and the obligation of serving in it was lightened. The gentry were 

 allowed a greater freedom in the sale and disposal of their estates, 

 arrears of taxes were remitted to the merchants, and the poll-tax was 

 considerably diminished for the serfs. The empress established peace 

 with Denmark by relinquishing the interests of the Prince of Holstein. 

 the widower of Anna Petrovna, and with Persia, by giving up to Nadir 

 Shah, then reigning, the provinces which Peter the Great had conquered, 

 but from which the Russian nation then derived more disadvantage 

 than benefit. After this prosperous period of three years everything 

 altered for the worse, not through any change in the empress's charac- 

 ter, or any reverse in fortune, but through the influence of Biren, who, 

 from passing his time in indolence and luxury, took it into his head 

 to manage the affairs of state, and was allowed by the weakness of his 

 mistress to gratify his cruelty, ambition, and avarice to their full 

 extent. This Biren (or Biron, as he called himself) was the grandson 

 of a groom; he had been her acknowledged favourite at the court 

 of Courland, and had followed her to Moscow very soon after her 

 accession. On the death of Augustus II., king of Poland and elector 

 of Saxony, in 1733, the empress declared against the election of his 

 son as king of Poland, and in favour of the elevation of a native Pole 

 to the dignity ; but on the promise of the new elector to second her 

 views in Courland, where she had the project of inducing the states 

 to raise Bireu to the dukedom, she at once espoused his cause. In 

 consequence of the indignation of the Poles at her conduct, they unani- 

 mously elected Stanislas Leszczynski, the old enemy of Russia, who had 

 once before been placed on the throne by Charles II., and who was 

 now the father-in-law of the king of France, Louis XV. The Russians, 

 under the command of Marshal Munnich, entered Poland ; Stanislas 

 was besieged in Danzig, from which he hardly escaped with his life ; 

 and the elector of Saxony, Augustus III., was seated on the throne. 

 The Russian arms were equally successful in a war against the Turks 

 and Tartars, begun in 1736, and conducted by Marshal Munnich, who 

 conquered Moldavia, and took Azof and Ochakof or Oczakov. The 

 ill success of the arms of Austria, however, the ally of Russia, obliged 

 the empress, who found the whole power of Turkey on the point of 

 being directed against her, to relinquish her conquests. At the sugges- 

 tion of Biren, she sent full powers to the marquis of Villeneuve, the 

 French ambassador to the Porte, to settle a peace with Turkey, which 

 was accordingly concluded at Belgrade in 1739. 



It was in the interior arrangements of the empire however that the 

 influence of Biren was most pernicious. His tyranny was carried to a 

 height which diffused universal terror throughout the empire. To 

 gratify his revenge, which still brooded over the project of the Dolgo- 

 rukys to exclude him from following the empress to Moscow, that 

 unfortunate family was recalled from banishment to perish on the 

 scaffold. They wore accused of forging a will of Peter II. in favour of 

 Catherine Dolgoruky ; some were beheaded : Vasily Lukich and Ivan 

 were broken on the wheel. Even after this, one of the cabinet ministers, 

 of tho name of Boluinsky, ventured, in 1740, at a council in which 

 Biren took the part of the Poles, to throw out a sarcasm, that as ho 

 was not a vassal of Poland, he did not think himself obliged to defend 

 the cause of the enemies of Russia. Biren felt the sarcasm was directed 

 against himself as holding from Poland the fief of Courland, tho 

 dukedom of which his mistress had procured for him. He trumped 

 up a set of charges against Boluinsky, one of which was that he had 

 dared to present a Russian translation of Macchiavelli's ' Prince ' to 

 the empress, and tho minister was condemned to death. The empress 

 long refused to confirm his death warrant, and burst into tears when 

 it was repeatedly brought for her signature. Biren at last demanded 

 it with a threat, in case of refusal, to leave Russia for ever, and 

 Boluinskv perished. It is easy to suppose that after this Biren met 

 with little opposition in the cabinet. While he loaded his coffers with 

 treasure, the revenues of the state were insufficient to support the 

 expenditure, and the taxes were collected by the most violent means. 

 Soldiers were directed, in place of receiving pay, to live at free quarters. 

 " Whole villages," says Ustrialov, " were laid waste, many were burned, 

 the inhabitants were sent to Siberia." Twenty thousand persons were 

 driven into this species of exile by Biren. But during his time of 

 power exile was almost to be considered a slight punishment : "many," 

 says Ustrialov, " were knouted, many had their tongues cut out, many 

 perished beneath the axe of the executioner, and not a few were broken 

 on the wheel." The number of persons who lost their lives through 

 Biren's tyranny is computed at eleven thousand. The conscience of the 

 empress was touched by the death of Boluinsky, whom she knew so 

 well and knew to be innocent, and it is supposed by many that remorse 

 on that account brought her to the grave. She died at St. Petersburg 

 on the 29th of Octdber, 1740, in the forty-seventh year of her age, and 

 left the crown to Joann Antonovich, the grandson of her elder sister, 

 Catherine, from whom, according to her own doctrine of hereditary 

 right, she had usurped it. As guardian of the prince, and regent 

 during his minority, she nominated Biren. 



q 



