Boris Tirnovski, heir to the throne of Bulgaria, was christened in the Roman Catholic faith, according to the terms of the wedding contract, which had necessitated an amendment of the Bulgarian Constitution. But the ceremony gave a fresh offence to Russia, the nation which is champion of the Orthodox Church, and which was at that time the Power from which Ferdinand had most to hope.

Even when this christening took place he had in his mind an act which would be even a more effective conciliation to Russia than the original christening of his heir in the Orthodox faith would have been. He determined to make the child renounce the faith of his fathers, and embrace the official religion of Bulgaria.

The way to this apostasy was smoothed by a mission to Petrograd, undertaken by the ex-Metropolitan Clement, whom Stambuloff put in gaol for refusing allegiance to Ferdinand. That Catholic Prince gave the rebellious prelate strong encouragement in his mission, and received him on his return with the honours usually accorded to a victorious general. Then followed the important step of re-amending the Constitution.

In a letter to the Czar Ferdinand announced his intention of re-baptizing little Boris in the Orthodox faith, and the Czar, having negotiated the matter through Clement, graciously consented to be the godfather of the infant apostate. “For the Czar’s condescension the Prince will submit to any humiliation,” said Stambuloff once, and this event proved how rightly he had estimated the Prince whom he had created.

In a proclamation to the Bulgarian people, that is terrible in its terms of slavery, he announced that the Czar had not only graciously consented to become the godfather to the heir, but that he had “manifested his goodwill to our nation by renewing with it the political relations that had been interrupted.” Then he organized a great national raree-show at Tirnovo, the ancient capital of Bulgaria, where the re-christening took place on February 26.

Tirnovo was crowded with Russians of all degrees for the occasion, and for their benefit were organized the throngs of Bulgarian peasants in national costume who paraded the streets singing the old Bulgarian folk-songs, and displaying the entwined banners of the two countries. These good folk danced the old Bulgarian dances, which they had just learned with an immensity of labour, in the market-place of the ancient city, and then sang the Russian National Anthem in conjunction with their own.

The ceremony in Tirnovo Cathedral was a pitiful business. The poor little heir to the throne, not yet three years of age, was torn from the arms of his mother, who protested with all the force of which her character was capable, and dressed all in white for the baptism. He stood all alone at the altar, a pathetic, uncomprehending little figure, and was made to renounce the faith in which he had been christened.

So Ferdinand committed apostasy by proxy. The official representative of the Czar-godfather, who was accorded royal honours in Tirnovo that day, afterwards described the ceremony as “a blasphemous mockery and an exhibition of political legerdemain.” But Ferdinand cared little for what was said of him. The Sobranje voted to the heir to the throne a sum of £20,000, and the old accusation that he was leading the nation from Orthodoxy to Catholicism was for ever stilled.

Having appeased Russia and confirmed the ancient religion of his subjects in the person of the heir to the throne, Ferdinand was to reap the benefit of his perjury by receiving the long-awaited recognition of his sovereign Lord Abdul the Damned. The Red Sultan issued a firman, recognizing him as Prince of Bulgaria, with the title of Royal Highness, and as Governor-General of Eastern Rumelia.

Meantime the young mother had fled, taking her second son with her. She made her way, almost dead with grief, to her ancestral home, where she claimed the protection of her father. Enraged by Ferdinand’s open violation of the wedding contract, the Duke of Parma espoused her cause with all the vigour of which he was capable, and received the full support of the Church.

Ferdinand was most anxious to end the scandal, and to coax the Princess back to Sofia. With that end in view he obeyed a summons issued by Pope Leo XIII, which, as a good Catholic, he would have had some difficulty in ignoring. Strong in the virtue of his princely rank, and in the dignity of a recent interview with the Sultan of Turkey, a Pagan potentate, in which Ferdinand sported the red fez of vassaldom, Ferdinand made his way to Rome with a quiet confidence in his own rectitude and his mother’s influence.

He entered the Vatican for his interview with every appearance of smirking self-satisfaction. The interview was but a short one; it lasted only a few minutes, but much can happen in a few minutes. No other man was present, and there is no record of what took place at the meeting.

But when Ferdinand sneaked out of the presence, abashed and humiliated, and fled from Rome with no word; when months passed before he entirely recovered the jauntiness of his demeanour, it needs no great quality of imagination to guess that he received a notable rebuke. For some years he endured the stern displeasure of Rome, and the ban, almost amounting to excommunication was only lifted many years later at the strongly expressed wish of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, whose assassination was the signal for the great world conflict in which we are still engaged.

The Princess never recovered from that blow. In course of time she was induced to return to her husband, bringing with her the child Cyril. But now she was a drooping flower, with no hope of ever reviving. She walked through the weary round of her Court duties, and bore two daughters to the father who had made of his son and heir an apostate. She only lived one day after the birth of the second girl, when this gentle woman died of her wrongs.

But Ferdinand was satisfied. He had made his peace with Russia, and the Red Sultan called him Royal Highness. He was now on the side of the clerical plotters of his kingdom, and wore the hall-mark of Bulgarian ecclesiasticism. He even talked of giving his own open adherence to the Orthodox Church, though this has never been done.

In the meantime he had provided an Orthodox heir to the throne, and by the act had mitigated the dread of assassination that had for so long hag-ridden him. For assassination was ever the terror that haunted Ferdinand’s mind. He lived for ever with the dread spectre at his elbow, and he had reason for his dread. For, as we shall now see, assassination was a familiar political weapon in Bulgaria before the arrival of Ferdinand, who can claim credit for remarkable improvements upon the crude methods in vogue before his era of subsidized slaughter.