by Simon Dixon
Despite Catherine’s claims that the decision to accept this invitation was her own, taken in the face of her Lutheran father’s profound misgivings, the invitation had in reality been engineered by Johanna Elisabeth, who had already learned from Frederick the Great that the empress intended to pay 10,000 roubles for their travel expenses.59 Faced with what amounted to an imperial summons, mother and daughter departed for St Petersburg without delay on 10 January 1744 NS.
* * *
Though Sophie’s feelings as she set out for Russia can only be imagined, excitement was surely tempered by trepidation. Isabella of Parma, who married the future Joseph II of Austria twelve years later, described a predicament shared by many European princesses in the eighteenth century: ‘There she is, condemned to abandon everything, her family, her country—and for whom? For an unknown person, whose character and manner of thinking she does not know.’60 Thanks to her meeting with Peter at Eutin, that was not quite Sophie’s situation. Indeed, as a German prince, born and raised in Kiel, the grand duke might have been expected to offer her a measure of familiar comfort in alien surroundings. Kiel, after all, was almost as insignificant as Zerbst in the eyes of the Russian elite, who scoffed that the whole city was no bigger than St Petersburg’s Summer Garden.61
Neither is it necessary to suppose, as Catherine’s memoirs later implied, that she faced a stark choice between obeying her future husband and overthrowing him. Though it was by no means easy for an intelligent woman to live a fulfilled life as a royal consort in the eighteenth century, it was certainly not impossible. Cultural patronage offered a natural opportunity for uncontroversial activity, eagerly grasped by most European queens. The more determined among them could also play a significant role in government, either as political hostesses or as surrogate rulers behind the scenes. We shall never know how the philosophically minded Isabella would have coped with Joseph II, because death (a constant preoccupation in her prolific writings) snatched her from him not long after their wedding. However, Sophie’s childhood friend, Juliana Maria, overcame both shyness and a stutter to become the effective ruler of Denmark in conjunction with her favourite for twelve years after the coup of 1772.62 And although it was obviously easier for a female consort to dominate a weak king—Elizabeth Farnese, the ambitious second wife of Philip V of Spain, became notorious across Europe for her influence over her depressive husband63—consorts of even the most powerful monarchs could carve out a workable division of labour. Frederick the Great despised Court flummery and spent progressively more of his time in male company at Potsdam to avoid its offensive trappings. But since it was unthinkable for a king entirely to dispense with a Court, the gap was filled by Juliana Maria’s elder sister, Queen Elisabeth Christine, whose summer palace at Schönhausen and regular reception days at Berlin provided a crucial meeting place for diplomats and foreign visitors.64
However uncertain she may have been about her future, Sophie was acutely conscious of how much she was leaving behind, subsequently portraying her journey to Russia in terms of sacrifice rather than opportunity. By convention, Christian August was not invited, though he accompanied his daughter to Berlin, where Frederick looked her over while instructing her mother about her conduct in St Petersburg. Though few of her contemporaries were to play such an important part in Sophie’s life, she never saw the king again. She caught her last glimpse of her father at a tearful parting at Schwedt an der Oder on 17 January, the day after leaving Berlin. ‘The separation was as sad as one could possibly imagine,’ she remembered in 1756.65
After that, she faced an uncomfortable trek across the wastes of Pomerania and East Prussia, so bereft of snow that winter that the journey had to be made in carriages rather than sleighs. Peering through narrow eye-slits in the woolly hats that protected their faces, they left Stargardt (now Szczecinski) in icy conditions on 18 January. From there, it was a tortuous progress eastwards through Keslin, skirting Danzig, and over the Vistula to Marienwerder.66 Although Frederick William I had already attempted to drain the Oder Marshes in the 1730s with the help of Dutch hydraulic engineers, the epic work of transforming the watery landscape east of the Oder still lay in the future in 1744. Over the next thirty years, it would be the king’s son, Frederick the Great, and his colonists who transformed the valleys of the Elbe, the Oder, the Warthe, the Netze and the Vistula into productive agricultural land. (‘Making domain lands cultivable interests me more than murdering people,’ Frederick remarked in a characteristic jibe against his brutal father.)67 At the time of Sophie’s departure for Russia, the whole area remained a patchwork quilt of stagnant pools and marsh, punctuated by areas of thick, waterlogged brush—an unregulated paradise for outlaws and bandits, offensive in itself to the standardising instincts of Frederick’s Enlightened administration. Like much of the rest of Europe, such a landscape was barely passable in spring and autumn, when flooding washed away the tracks that snaked across the marshes. In winter, it was a perilous wilderness. Sophie and her mother avoided the worst dangers by keeping close to the coast. ‘Our journey was long, very boring, and very painful,’ she later remembered of their odyssey between primitive roadside inns. ‘My feet were so swollen that I had to be lifted in and out of the carriage.’68
During a rare day of rest at Königsberg, where another product of Pietism, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, was already a twenty-year-old student at the university, Sophie wrote to her father (in French). Mindful of the instructions he had signed at Zerbst on 3 January that no one must persuade her to renege on her religious beliefs, she adopted her most dutiful tone:
Monseigneur,
I have received with all imaginable respect and joy the letter in which Your Highness does me the honour of reassuring me about his health, about his remembrance of me, and his good wishes. I beg to reassure him that his exhortations and his counsel will remain eternally engraved in my heart, just as the seeds of our holy religion will be in my soul, for which I ask God to lend all the strength that I shall require to resist the temptations to which I am preparing to expose myself.69
Before she faced those temptations, however, there was still almost two-thirds of the journey to go. Passing north-eastwards into Courland—‘at all times a desert country’, as a British diplomat had been warned by the canny purveyors of Königsberg four years earlier—she saw the ‘terrible’ comet first observed from Sweden and the Netherlands at the end of November 1743.70 At its brightest in the following March, it displayed as many as twelve fanning rays in the manner of a peacock’s tail. ‘I have never seen a bigger one,’ the mature empress declared; ‘it seemed very near to the earth.’71 She was not alone in her fascination. Though clouds obscured the comet from much of the continent until the New Year, news of it spread rapidly in the European press. ‘The Comet this Evening appeared exceeding bright and distinct,’ recorded an Oxford astronomer on 23 January, ‘and the Diameter of its Nucleus nearly equal to that of Jupiter’s; its Tail, extending above 16 Degrees from its Body, pointed towards Andromeda; and was in Length (supposing the Sun’s Parallax 10″) above 23 Millions of Miles; but cloudy Weather succeeding, we lost this agreeable Sight till Feb. 5th.’72 That must have been roughly when Sophie saw it. Since comets had until recently been regarded as portents of disaster, she might have been forgiven for wondering what such an apparition beheld for her in a distant foreign land. 73 But she would mock Empress Elizabeth for holding such superstitious views in 1756, when popular scientific accounts of comets were about to appear in Russian journals.74 And twenty-one years after her experiences on her journey to St Petersburg, Grigory Orlov, a keen amateur astronomer, would read aloud from one such treatise while Catherine amused the rest of the company by fantasising about what might happen if a comet carried them away and turned them all to glass.75
It was a very different Russian nobleman who met Princess Sophie just beyond Mitau (now Jelgava in Latvia) and guided her over the frozen River Dvina into the Russian empire. Johanna Elisabeth and her daughter had first en
countered the thirty-three-year-old Semën Naryshkin in Hamburg on his return from London. As a youthful ambassador to the Court of St James, he had gained ample practice in the diplomatic niceties that would serve him well as a future Marshal of Elizabeth’s Court. Now Master of the Hunt, no one was better equipped than this most flamboyant of courtiers to flatter Sophie’s mother, who assumed he must be a prince and exposed her delusions of grandeur with a gushing travel account that placed her at the centre of events. Since it had proved impossible to heat the imperial apartments at Riga, where they gained eleven days by reverting to the Julian calendar, she and Sophie were given tastefully furnished rooms at the house of a wealthy merchant, not unlike the one in which her daughter had been born. In every other respect, theirs was a royal progress, intended to overwhelm them with a sense of Russia’s imperial power and prestige as they drove through crowded streets to fanfares of trumpets and drums. ‘It feels as though I am part of the entourage of Her Imperial Majesty or some great princess,’ wrote the disingenuous Johanna Elisabeth: ‘It never enters my head that all this is for poor me.’76
Until they entered Russian territory, Sophie’s mother had been travelling incognito as Countess Rheinbeck, accompanied by only the most modest of suites: her chamberlain, her lady-in-waiting, four chambermaids, a valet, a handful of lackeys and a cook. Now, wrapped in the priceless sables presented to them by Naryshkin, they continued their journey under cavalry escort in long imperial sleighs drawn by ten horses. As Catherine later recalled, it was quite an art even to climb into these elaborate vehicles, in which passengers lay recumbent on bulky feather mattresses, lined with silk and covered with satin cushions.77 Still, there was little enough to see as they traversed a snowy landscape razed by the Russians in the first decade of the century when it seemed that the invading Swedish army might triumph in the Great Northern War. Not until the 1770s did Russia’s Baltic provinces recover their pre-war population levels after a campaign in which as many as 70 per cent of the population of Livland and Estland may have perished. At Dorpat (now Tartu in Estonia), which the Russians had taken from the Swedes in 1704, the signs of the bombardment were still visible.78 Their final calling point was Narva, where 11,000 Swedish troops had humiliated Peter the Great’s 40,000-strong army in November 1700, prompting far-reaching military reforms that helped to underpin tsarist imperial expansion for the remainder of the century. From there, it was a relatively short distance along the southern shores of the gulf of Finland to the Russian capital, where they arrived on the afternoon of 3 February towards the end of the carnival season.
CHAPTER TWO
Betrothal and Marriage
1744–1745
Though unaware of it at the time, Sophie had arrived in St Petersburg at a pivotal period in the city’s short history. Its origins are shrouded in mystery. Legend has it that on 16 May 1703, Peter the Great landed with a group of military companions on Hare Island, digging two turves with a bayonet and laying them crosswise as he pronounced: ‘Here a city is to be!’ But since there are no records of the occasion in the Court journals, and no first-hand accounts have survived, it is not even certain where Peter was on the date in question.1 There can be no doubt, however, of the importance of the new capital which began to emerge after the tsar’s victory over the Swedes at the battle of Poltava in 1709. Whereas Turin and Madrid had grown by having a Court imposed upon them, St Petersburg was the ultimate Residenzstadt: a city expressly developed as the site of the imperial Court. ‘Petersburg is just the Court,’ the philosophe Denis Diderot would remark following his visit to Catherine in 1774: ‘a confused mass of palaces and hovels, of grands seigneurs surrounded by peasants and purveyors.’2 For the first twenty years of its existence, the city was little more than a building site. While Russian noblemen grumbled about being forced to settle in such inhospitable surroundings, visitors were astonished by the sheer speed of construction. By the early 1720s, the new capital was consuming almost 5 per cent of the Russian empire’s total revenue: between 10,000 and 30,000 labourers worked there every year; thousands more were conscripted to replace those who sacrificed their lives in the effort to sink reliable foundations into the bog.3 Struck by such awesome ambition and progress, the Hanoverian envoy duly ranked St Petersburg as ‘a wonder of the world, was it only in consideration of the few years that have been employed in the raising of it’.4
Foreign verdicts such as this helped to generate the city’s lasting reputation as a fantastic place where nothing is quite as it seems.5 Tsar Peter and his image-makers did their best to enhance the illusion by investing the place he called his ‘paradise’ with layer upon layer of symbolic significance, designed to transform it at once into a New Amsterdam (a symbol of trade and prosperity), a New Rome and New Constantinople (symbols of power and kingship), and not least a New Jerusalem, a symbol of piety and devotion ‘coming down out of heaven from God’ and bisected by a ‘river of water of life’ (Revelation 21: 2; 22: 1).6 These were probably not comparisons that entered the minds of most of St Petersburg’s 70,000 inhabitants at the time of Sophie’s arrival in 1744. She herself claimed fifty years later that only three of the city’s streets had then been built in stone: Millionnaya (Millionnaires’ Row, a street of grand mansion houses which still runs parallel to the Neva to the south-east of the Winter Palace); Lugovaya (Meadow Street, which ran westwards towards the Admiralty); and the elegant row of merchants’ houses along the river to the west of St Isaac’s Square (known as the English Line or Quay by the time of Catherine’s reign, and subsequently as the English Embankment). These three thoroughfares formed ‘a curtain, so to speak’ around rows of ‘wooden barracks as unpleasant as it is possible to imagine’.7
Though this was plainly an attempt to advertise her own glorious achievements in the field of urban reconstruction, there was no disguising the squalor of much of the early eighteenth-century city. Even its palaces were wooden. So were most churches apart from Trezzini’s Peter-Paul Cathedral. By the early 1740s, many of St Petersburg’s leading buildings had already gone the way of the derelict Holy Trinity, where Tsar Peter had worshipped almost every day when resident in his new capital.8 Far from admiring the city, foreign visitors were now more likely to highlight the consequences of shoddy construction on marshy soil. According to Carl Reinhold Berch, a Swedish official resident in St Petersburg in 1735–6, careless building methods condemned the city’s brick walls to remain damp for years, while the timber in widespread use for roofs, gutters, staircases and vestibules was ‘notoriously and readily combustible’. ‘Many handsome houses,’ Berch complained, ‘cannot be reached by even a single carriage, so that one must enter via the back gates or through a breach in the wall on the first floor, in which case the passageway is as high as any triumphal arch: both these methods are utterly disgraceful.’9 Critics of tsarist despotism had a field day. Following his visit to Russia in 1739, the Venetian savant Francesco Algarotti snidely remarked that:
If the ground were a little higher and less marshy, if the plans had not been changed so many times, if a Palladio had been the architect and the building materials had been of a better quality and better assembled and, furthermore, if it were inhabited by people who try to live there pleasantly and comfortably, St Petersburg would be surely one of the finest towns in the world.10
As it was, he found the Russian capital characterised by ‘a kind of bastard architecture’ in which Dutch influences predominated over those from Italy and France, and believed that the poor quality of the city’s construction reflected the fact that its palaces had been ‘built out of obedience rather than choice’: ‘Their walls are all cracked, quite out of perpendicular, and ready to fall.’ Ruins generally formed themselves, Algarotti famously quipped, but at St Petersburg they were built from scratch.11
For more than a decade after Peter the Great’s death in 1725, the city’s growth had indeed lacked direction. The initial impetus was lost when the Court returned to Moscow in 1728, and even when Empress Anna brough
t it back to St Petersburg four years later, her advisers hesitated to take decisive action for fear of disturbing a volatile populace. Only when fire destroyed hundreds of wooden shacks in the area around the Admiralty in August 1736 did the government contemplate the opportunity for wholesale change, though not before taking instant retribution against three alleged arsonists. John Cook, a visiting Scottish doctor, saw the two men chained to the top of tall masts:
They stood upon small scaffolds and many thousand billets of wood were built from the ground, so as to form a pyramid round each mast. These pyramids were so high as to reach within two or three fathoms of the little stages on which the men stood in their shirts, and their drawers. They were condemned in this manner to be burnt to powder. But before the pyramids were set on fire, the woman was brought betwixt these masts, and a declaration of their villainy, and the order for their execution, read…No sooner was the woman’s head chopped off, than a link was put to the wooden pyramids, and as the timber was very dry, it formed in an instant a very terrible fire. The men would soon have died had not the wind frequently blown the flames from them; however, they both expired in less than three quarters of an hour, in great torment.12
A second fire on Millionnaya and the palace embankment in June 1737 hastened plans for longer-term reconstruction.. Led by the first Russian architects to make a serious impact on the new capital—Peter Yeropkin, Mikhail Zemtsov and Ivan Korobov—the Commission for the Construction of St Petersburg, established shortly afterwards, definitively shifted the centre of the city to the south.13