The fury of the Tsar was terrible. The insult to his Church, which he loved, and the affront to himself, were enhanced by the source from which they came. He had a special horror of all revolutions, pursued to his dying day by the nightmare of the conspiracy of December, 1825, the tragedy which had inaugurated his reign. The revolutions of France were odious to him. Never would he, in the fullest sense, accept either Louis Philippe or Louis Napoleon as sovereigns equal with himself. Neither of them would he address as “Monsieur mon frère.” And now behold an upstart who was buffeting and opposing him in what he looked upon as the most sacred of his Imperial duties as head of the Church! The spiritual ambitions of the Tsars were hereditary. His father, the Emperor Paul, had been anxious even to don the priestly robes and celebrate the mass; but his wise and brave friend Rostopchin stopped him with a clever conceit. “Sire,” said he, “you have no rights as priest. A priest must only marry once; you have been twice married—you cannot be a priest.” The mad Emperor was convinced and refrained. On another occasion the Metropolitan boldly stopped him when he tried to enter the Holy of Holies. Although not a priest, the Russian Tsar is head of his Church, much as the English King is the head of ours, and Nicholas took the position very seriously. It was, moreover, intolerable to him that the firmans which had been wrung from the Porte in favour of the Orthodox monks should be set aside as mere scraps of paper, on account of the more binding powers of a treaty, musty with age, extorted more than a century previously by French chicane from an unwilling or callous Sultan. He was determined to resist, and Prince Mentschikoff was sent on a special embassy to Constantinople to demand compliance with the Russian claims on behalf of the Greek Church.