Andrey Osterman - Downfall

Downfall

It now became evident to La Chetardie that only a revolution would overthrow Osterman, and this he proposed to promote by elevating to the throne the tsesarevna Elizabeth, who hated the vice-chancellor because, though he owed everything to her father, he had systematically neglected her. Osterman was therefore the first and the most illustrious victim of the coup d'état of December 6, 1741. Accused, among other things, of contributing to the elevation of the empress Anne by his cabals and of suppressing a supposed will of Catherine I made in favour of her daughter Elizabeth of Russia, he threw himself on the clemency of the new empress. He was condemned first to be broken on the wheel and then beheaded; but, reprieved on the scaffold, his sentence was commuted to lifelong banishment, with his whole family, to Berezov in Siberia, where he died six years later, in 1747.

Osterman's children returned to the court during the reign of Catherine the Great. His elder son, count Feodor Andreevich (1723–1804), was the senator and governor of Moscow (1773). Another son, Ivan Andreevich (1725–1811), was the Russian ambassador in Stockholm and then, for 16 years, the Chancellor of the Russian Empire (1781–97). After his death the Osterman titles and estates passed to his nephew, Alexander Ivanovich Tolstoy, chancellor of the Russian military orders.