It was an unequal struggle: a powerful autocrat attempting to force a proud, stubborn people from the habits they had been taught to revere, from practices that had made their city great and beautiful. The more successful Peter became the greater was the opposition. His courtiers wore wigs at court, as commanded, but even in the throne room removed them immediately Peter was out of sight. After ten years Peter knew that he could not conquer the Muscovites though he might kill them. As late as 1722, when he had ordered all ladies above ten years of age to appear at a reception, only seventy of the hundreds qualified did as commanded. At St Petersburg it was different. There, no feeling of shame, no loss of dignity followed the, to Moscow citizens, most ridiculous behaviour of westerns. Peter's son Alexis, the Tsarevich, preferred Moscow and Muscovite customs: in him Moscow trusted, and for this Peter hated him. His friends wished him to enter a monastery until his father's death and then "as they cannot nail the cowl to one's head," throw it off and assume the crown. He did not, and his boast to forsake St Petersburg and reinstate Moscow enraged Peter who, from that time, never ceased to search for conspiracies, prompted by, or on behalf of Alexis, and persecuted his son unmercifully. As all knew the young man was lured to St Petersburg by his mistress, who was lavishly rewarded for her perfidy by Peter, and that there he was repeatedly put to the torture, more than once with Peter himself as executioner, and that he died mysteriously one day after being "put to the question," _i.e._ tortured, earlier in the day by a party of whom his father was one. [Illustration: ST NICHOLAS "STYLITE"]