Perhaps no chapter in the social history of royalty has given us a more vivid insight into the merry doings of the sovereigns of the past, in our own and other countries, than that which deals with their drinking and revelry. Indeed, moralists, at one time or another, have been more or less severe in their strictures on what they regarded as the undue freedom displayed at Court festivities, when not infrequently king as well as courtiers were in a state of deplorable incapacity. The orgies, for instance, in which Peter the Great revelled were, it is said, as reckless and abandoned as those of his contemporary the Regent d’Orleans; but probably no one save Peter would have employed them to ascertain the hidden thoughts of his courtiers. According to De Villebois,[11] he was in the habit of inviting men whom he secretly disliked, in order that he might carefully note down the words which escaped them when drunk, and sometimes even for the purpose of getting rid of them by inducing them to drink themselves to death. The immediate cause of his own death was the aggravation of a loathsome disease, under which he had long been labouring, by a debauch at one of his conclaves--those travesties of the election of a Pope which, “amidst the most outrageous drunkenness and the grossest buffoonery, he held yearly, partly in order to keep up the contempt of his subjects for the Latin Church, and partly also to ridicule the office of Patriarch, which he had abolished.”[12] And, similarly, Frederick William I. of Prussia, who himself was a hard drinker, loved to make his guests drunk; his daughter even states that he did so to her bridegroom, the hereditary Prince of Bayreuth, on his wedding-day. Carlyle has fully described the royal tap-rooms which were established in Berlin, at Potsdam, and during summer at Wusterhausen, as a source of recreation at the Court of Frederick William I. That at Berlin, furnished in the Dutch fashion, has been kept unaltered, with the large silver beer can from which the malt liquor was drawn by means of a tap into the jugs and tankards. The visitor is shown, too, the strangers’ book, in which the autographs of Frederick the Great and the Czar Peter are preserved. But perhaps one of the most drunken and dissolute monarchs that ever disgraced a throne was one of Peter’s predecessors, Ivan IV., of whom it has been said that he was “ever exemplarily devout when he was most stupidly drunk.” His habitual intemperance, however, made him cruel, prompting him to commit all kinds of diabolical crimes--his indulgence in strong drink eventually rendering him hopelessly insane; for what other excuse could be made for his conduct as exemplified in his smiting his own son dead by blows from an iron bar in a fit of fury.