The peace was followed by an exchange of prisoners, and in the summer of 1619 the Archbishop Philaret hastened to secure the power which awaited him. It happened that the patriarchal throne of Moscow was vacant, and Philaret occupied it. That he was a priest _malgré lui_, and enjoyed the more luxurious and comforting tastes of a profane layman, did not much matter in that world. Far more religious prelates than Philaret drank heavily and habitually. The patriarchate was the highest power he could nominally and legally hold, and he was not wanting either in energy or ambition. For a patriarch, however, to have a wife about the court was scarcely seemly, and he “persuaded” Marfa to return to her convent. He felt also that it was expedient to remove some of her friends, and in order to do this with a show of justice he reopened a very curious case that had been settled in his absence. In the year 1616 Michael had decided to wed a young woman of obscure family named Maria Ivanovna Khlopoff. Her name was, in accordance with custom, changed to Anastasia; her espousals were celebrated; the day of the sacred ceremony which would make her Tsarina was within her delighted view. Then the luckless Maria fell ill, which no bride of a Tsar must dare to do. The doctors examined her and pronounced her “unfit to serve the delight of the Tsar,” and the unhappy maiden and her relatives were suddenly dispatched to Siberia. Philaret, who knew with what anxiety the existing favourites at a Russian court regarded the coming of a crowd of relatives with a Tsar’s bride, and how frequently the chosen maid met with accidents before the wedding-day, looked into the affair when he returned. Her confessor admitted that she was innocent--it now transpired that a certain indiscretion in eating fruit was the full extent of her fault--and she was recalled from Siberia and permitted to settle, with a small pension, at Nijni-Novgorod. It appears that Philaret had hope of securing a more distinguished Tsarina. During the next few years he approached the courts of Denmark and Sweden, but without success. The king of Denmark bluntly remarked that the air of Moscow was not good for the chosen brides of Tsars. So Philaret returned to the affair of Maria Khlopoff, and was now convinced that the jealous Saltykoffs (Marfa’s people) had fabricated the charge. He fell upon them with great severity, and drove several into exile. Marfa, however, succeeded in saving the remainder of the family, and also in preventing the return to court of Maria. To cut the story short, yet fitly introduce the next generation of palace-squabblers, we may say that in 1624 Michael married Princess Maria Dolgoruki; and, as she died soon afterwards, he married a woman of undistinguished family, Eudoxia Strecknieff. The new Tsarina provided a son, Alexis, and the precious dynasty of the Romanoffs was saved from a premature extinction.