Elizabeth insisted that there should be no bloodshed, but what happened may give the true measure of such advance as this indicated. Little Ivan and his parents must, she said, receive a pension and go back to Germany. Anne and Anthony, glad to escape so lightly, started for the frontier, but a courier reached them before they had left Russia, and they were imprisoned at Riga. After a time they were transferred, still prisoners, to Oranienbaum. Whether Elizabeth was struggling with her own glimmer of a conscience or with less humane counsellors it would be difficult to say. She consulted everybody. Was her life really in danger, or might she follow her impulse of humanity and let the weak-minded couple depart? Humanity was a new and rare thing in Russia. In 1744, when Anne expected a third baby, the deposed couple were, at the instigation of Frederick of Prussia, confined in the fortress of Schlüsselburg, and four months later they were put upon sledges and driven north. They were to be imprisoned in a monastery on an island near Archangel. When, however, they reached Kholnagory, on the coast, the state of the ice would not allow the guards to take them to the island and they were left in the village. There, on the bleak shore of the Arctic, father and mother and five children--Anne added two to the family before she sickened and died three years later--lived and slept together in a common Russian hut. The children grew up feebler in mind and body even than their parents, but Russia would have it that the pale-faced Ivan was still the nucleus of a conspiracy. He was in 1756, in his thirteenth year, removed to a remote dungeon, to await his murder under the reign of Catherine. Prince Anthony was weak-minded enough to survive the horrors for thirty years, and his children were at length released by Catherine and sent to live on a small pension in Denmark.