by Simon Dixon
This astonishing letter was followed by a stream of others scarcely less frank, in which Catherine commented in characteristically ironic fashion on everything from Elizabeth’s failing health to the plans for Russian troop movements. (As her ‘dreams’ revealed, she was friendly with the Russian commander-in-chief, General Apraksin, and attempted to persuade him on Sir Charles’s behalf to oppose the resumption of diplomatic relations with France.) ‘I do not know what I am saying, or what I am doing,’ she confessed on 11 September, ‘I can truly say that it is the first time in my life that this has happened to me.’ Hardly able to believe what he was reading, Sir Charles coaxed her into further indiscretion in terms quite outside the normal diplomatic lexicon:
One word from you is my most sacred law. When I think of you, my duty to my Master [George II] grows less. I am ready to carry out all the orders you can give me, provided they are not dangerous to you; for in that case I shall disobey with a firmness equal to the obedience with which I would carry out all others…I am yours, yours alone, and all yours. I esteem you, I honour you, I adore you. I shall die convinced that there was never a sweetness, a soundness, a face, a heart, a head, to equal yours.
Not to be outdone, the grand duchess replied in kind: ‘My head is splendid, when it has one like yours to think for it.’51
* * *
So long as Elizabeth stubbornly confounded predictions of her demise, there was no opportunity to test the power of such fantasies. Instead, Catherine had to cope with the changed circumstances in which Stanislaw Poniatowski made his long awaited return to St Petersburg in January 1757. In that same month, despite all Sir Charles’s efforts to prevent it, Russia entered the Seven Years’ War against Prussia on the side of France, Austria and Saxony, for whom Stanislaw was charged with securing Russian military aid. Since England was Prussia’s informal ally, it was no longer possible for the young Pole to consort openly with his mentor, who, amid the debris of his failed diplomacy, was already beginning to show signs of the mental derangement that would kill him two years later. Sir Charles was recalled to London in July. By then, however, Stanislaw’s love affair with Catherine had resumed in all its passion. Indeed, she was already four months pregnant with his child.
Following her twenty-eighth birthday in April, Catherine retreated to Oranienbaum, where the seating plans for her dinner parties were distributed by lot to avoid the torture of official precedence regulations. A French diplomat’s account of the procedure suggests that not everything was left to chance:
Just before we ate, pages came in with gilded vases full of little tickets: these were for us to draw the valentins, a custom which overthrows etiquette and removes all the appointed places, even from princes. The seats are numbered 1, 1; 2, 2; etc. The gentleman who has the same number as a lady sits next to her. This put me on the grand duchess’s left and Monsieur de Poniatowsky on her right. On my other side, I had the princess of Georgia, who spoke only Armenian. The grand duchess took pity on my embarrassment, sometimes joining in the conversation.52
Anxious to mollify Peter, who was irritated by her refusal to receive his mistress, Elizabeth Vorontsova, Catherine, knowing her husband’s love for music, commissioned Rinaldi and Araja to stage a lavish outdoor spectacle at Oranienbaum on 17 July, paid for by a further British loan at a cost of between 10,000 and 15,000 roubles.
We sat down at table, and after the first course the curtain that hid the main avenue was raised and we saw in the distance the rolling orchestra, drawn by twenty oxen decorated with garlands and surrounded by all the male and female dancers I could find. The avenue was so brightly lit that we could make out everything in it. When the chariot came to a halt, chance had it that the moon hung directly overhead, which made an admirable impression and greatly astonished the whole company. Moreover, the weather was the finest in the world. Everyone jumped up from the table to enjoy the beauty of the symphony and the spectacle. When it was over, the curtain was lowered and we returned to the table for the second course. At the end of this, we heard trumpets and drums and a barker cried out: ‘Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen, get your free lottery tickets here in my booths!’ On both sides of the large curtain, two smaller ones were raised and we saw two brightly lit booths, one of which distributed free tickets for the porcelain lottery, and the other tickets for flowers, ribbons, fans, combs, purses, gloves, sword knots, and other finery of the kind. Once the booths were empty, we went back for dessert, after which we danced until six in the morning.
‘In short,’ as Catherine wrote in her memoirs, ‘on that day people discovered qualities in me that they had not known I possessed, and in this way I disarmed my enemies. That was my aim, but it did not last for long, as we shall see.’53
The most disconcerting part of the celebration at Oranienbaum was a fall Catherine suffered when the horse drawing her carriage reared up as she stepped out to inspect the preparations. Fortunately, her pregnancy was unaffected. When her daughter was born at the end of November, she begged Elizabeth to be allowed to choose a name. Instead, the empress pointedly had the child christened Anna Petrovna, in memory of her older sister, Peter’s mother. Peter himself rejoiced at Anna’s birth, though he was surely not her father. Poniatowski, who was, made clandestine visits to Catherine, who remained in solitary confinement while her baby was removed, as Paul had been before her, to the care of the empress’s wet nurses. But worse was still to come for the grand duchess when Chancellor Bestuzhev was arrested, along with Vasily Adodurov and other friends of hers, on the night of 14 February 1758.
When Catherine first arrived in Russia, Bestuzhev had been her greatest enemy. No one had done more to make her life at the Young Court a misery. After the ‘diplomatic revolution’ of 1756, however, as Russia edged ever closer to an improbable alliance with France (her principal continental rival), the Machiavellian chancellor had come to see the grand duchess as a potential counterbalance to his Francophile rivals at Court, the Shuvalovs and the Vorontsovs. Though he was initially horrified to learn from Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams of Catherine’s liaison with Stanislaw Poniatowski, he helped her to conceal it, and it was Bestuzhev, remembered by Stanislaw as a ghoulish figure ‘with a mouth which opened to reveal only four stumps of teeth and a pair of small flashing eyes’, who did most to secure the young Pole’s return to Russia.54 The very chancellor who had prevented her from corresponding with her mother in the 1740s now opened up a channel to Johanna Elisabeth. Meanwhile, the empress’s failing health prompted him to make his own plans for an alternative regime, drafting a manifesto that would place Peter on the throne with Catherine as his co-ruler. She was flattered to discover that the chancellor regarded her ‘as perhaps the only person upon whom at that time the hopes of the public could rest when the empress was no more’.55
Precisely when Bestuzhev showed Catherine his plans remains uncertain, but the issue of the succession was brought into focus more sharply than ever before when Elizabeth collapsed in public outside her favourite Church of the Sign at Tsarskoye Selo on 8 September 1757. (For an index of the panic she created, we need look no further than the Court journals, which are blank for the following week.)56 Faced with the possibility that the pro-Prussian Grand Duke Peter might come to the throne, Russian generals leading the campaign against Frederick the Great were placed in a delicate position. As recently as 19 August, they had scored a famous victory over the king at Gross Jägersdorf, less than a year after Frederick had himself routed the French at Rossbach. In the wake of such a triumph, General Apraksin had been expected to advance on Berlin. Instead, he retreated to Memel. Driven by the fragility of Russia’s supply line (his troops had to wait while the grass grew under their feet to feed their horses),57Apraksin’s decision was taken on 27 August—before the empress’s collapse. But in St Petersburg it could easily be made to seem that he had been motivated by doubts about her health, generated by his treasonable correspondence with Catherine and Bestuzhev. Urged on by the chancellor, Catherine begged Apr
aksin to reverse his retreat. But by then it was too late. In October, he was removed from his command as Bestuzhev’s enemies, profiting from Catherine’s withdrawal from the public gaze in the final months of her pregnancy, steadily poisoned Elizabeth’s mind against him.58
Catherine learned of Bestuzhev’s arrest from Stanislaw Poniatowski on the morning after it occurred. That evening, as the lovers attended a ball pretending that nothing had happened, she felt ‘a dagger in the heart’. While the chancellor fell under a lengthy investigation that was to end in public disgrace and banishment, Catherine faced a crisis more dangerous than the one in 1744, when it could reasonably be claimed that she had been no more than an unwitting accomplice to her mother’s clumsy pro-Prussian machinations. Now her complicity was harder to deny and it was vital to limit the damage. Following the chancellor’s example, she had burned all her papers as soon as the danger arose. Now, according to the account in her memoirs, which comes closer to her mother’s purple prose than her own customarily deadpan style, she prostrated herself in front of Elizabeth on the night of 13 April and pleaded tearfully to be sent back to Zerbst. While her husband berated her as a liar, she stubbornly refused to admit any treasonable intent in her correspondence with Apraksin. Perhaps, as she suggests, her performance was enough to win Elizabeth over. At any rate, she was given a stay of execution until a further audience six weeks later, when she faced more questioning about her letters to the general. Although we cannot know precisely how the matter was resolved—for one thing, her memoirs dramatically break off at this point—Bestuzhev’s enemies probably decided (just as he had before them) that Catherine could still be useful to them. While he was eventually committed to house arrest on his estate on 5 April 1759 in a manifesto that highlighted his vain attempts to corrupt both Catherine and Peter—the manifesto was published at the beginning of Passion Week, creating an inescapable association with sinfulness—the Vorontsovs and the Shuvalovs left the grand duchess in place as a pawn on the chessboard of Court politics and began to treat her well.59
That, as events were to show, was a serious underestimation of her abilities. But there was no sign of a glorious future for Catherine in the spring of 1759. Poniatowski had gone back to Poland in the previous August; Bestuzhev’s disgrace made it impossible for him to return to Russia. The death of her infant daughter on 8 March left her ‘inconsolable’. ‘It was only her virtue and her complete resignation to the decrees of Providence that could bring her out of her state of shock,’ Vorontsov reported to his nephew, enclosing a letter of condolence for Johanna Elisabeth.60 When Catherine’s debt-ridden mother herself died in Paris in May 1760, she was left completely alone. Like everyone else at the Russian Court, all she could do was watch and wait as the ailing empress entered the sixth decade of her life.
CHAPTER FIVE
Assassination
1759–1762
Modern historians of medicine have stressed that ‘virtually no important doctor in the first half of the eighteenth century placed the root of hysteria in the uterus’ and that ‘all forms of hysteria tended to be seen as the physical manifestations of a specifically mental derangement’.1 Told that Elizabeth’s symptoms had first manifested themselves when colic seemed to threaten the life of the baby Grand Duke Paul, François Poissonnier, the French specialist summoned to examine her at Peterhof in August 1759, declared it ‘easy to understand’ that fear had unsettled ‘all her nerves, and particularly those of the uterus’. Though he could find little wrong with her ‘excellent constitution’, Elizabeth’s lifestyle left much to be desired. The collapse at Tsarskoye Selo had been made the more serious by her refusal to follow her doctors’ advice. Observing that with age ‘the humours become slower in their circulation’, Poissonnier prescribed a purgative intended to induce two or three evacuations every day for a month. To sweeten the pill, the doctor suggested that his tablets should be dipped in marmalade and swallowed with an infusion of lime-blossom tea. He also prescribed coffee at bedtime, flavoured with liqueur d’Hofmann mixed with sweetened water or diluted lemonade. ‘This liqueur, which resembles nothing one might call a remedy because it is very pleasant, has the singular property of strengthening the nerves without inflaming them.’ While he particularly recommended peony, ‘whose taste is as good as its effects are salutary’, his main aim was to steer Elizabeth away from dairy foods and pastries. ‘I realise that Her Imperial Majesty has been accustomed to them since childhood, but when circumstances change, it is equally necessary to alter one’s habits.’ By the same token, her preference for lettuce, chicory, spinach, sorrel and watercress, cooked in meat juices, was bound to give her constipation. If she persisted with such a damaging diet, then she must accept the enemas he prescribed in return. Her best option, however, was regular exercise. Poissonnier advised her firmly against ‘too sedentary a lifestyle, which seems opposed to the vivacity of her character and to the continuous activity in which she engaged until the age of forty-five’.2
Whether or not it owed anything to her doctor’s prescriptions, Elizabeth’s health seemed briefly to improve. In 1758, perhaps haunted by the memory of her collapse in the previous autumn, she had avoided Tsarskoye Selo altogether. Two brief visits are recorded from 1759, and the rhythm of her visits to the summer palaces began to pick up in 1760—a sure sign that she was feeling stronger. Even so, in these final years of her life she largely withdrew from public life, leaving much of the work of her government in the hands of her sophisticated favourite, Ivan Shuvalov. In retrospect, the continuities between Russian cultural policies of the late 1750s and those of Catherine’s own reign are obvious. It was largely thanks to Shuvalov, for example, that the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts was founded in St Petersburg in 1757 (Catherine was later to set it on firmer foundations), and he corresponded with Voltaire.3 But this burst of activity took place without the grand duchess’s involvement. In the wake of Bestuzhev’s disgrace, she had little option but to keep a low profile.
By the winter of 1760–61, the Russian Court was once again wreathed in gloom. On 7 January 1761, mourning was imposed for six weeks in memory of Britain’s George II.4 Elizabeth had not been seen in public since the St Andrew’s Day banquet at the end of November, where she sat between Peter and Paul.5 She did not appear again until Easter. At first, the British ambassador reported, it was ‘an attack of the tooth-ache which occasioned a swelling in her face’; after Christmas, Ivan Shuvalov told of lengthy nosebleeds.6 ‘Apart from bouts of hysteria, and gradual symptoms of blood loss, and another local disease,’ wrote a well-informed French diplomat in the spring, she had been ‘suffering for the whole of the current winter with sores in her legs’. Stubbornly refusing to seek a cure, the empress remained ‘locked up completely alone’, subject to ‘frequent attacks of melancholy’, and with only Paul and her young Kalmyk servants for company. ‘When she admitted society, she could bear the presence of only the most restricted number of courtiers.’7
Behind closed doors, however, Elizabeth seemed determined to keep up appearances. A sense of her routine emerges from letters sent by her lady-in-waiting, Countess Anna Vorontsova, to her daughter, who was travelling abroad with her husband (‘I am sending you your favourite food, flabby fish: I don’t think it will go off’).8 When a favourite chorister married in January, the empress threw a party followed by dancing until four in the morning. While she was too ill to attend the theatre, the theatre came to her. A French comedy was performed in her apartments at Candlemas and, later that week, Sumarokov’s Russian players gave her his tragedy Sinav and Truvor (they had been fetched back from Moscow at short notice, prompting tantrums from the notoriously volatile playwright, who resigned shortly afterwards).9 On 9 February, Elizabeth felt well enough to sit for her portrait.10 Following Peter Shuvalov’s marriage eleven days later, she hosted a banquet in her own apartments. (Further weddings were put off until the autumn: ‘Think of the poor couples!’) This time there was no dancing, but Shuvalov threw a ball of his own, where Cathe
rine joined Peter on 23 February, the last day of the carnival.11
At that time, the Court was enjoying a visit from the French astronomer, the abbé Chappe d’Auteroche, en route to Siberia to see the transit of Venus across the sun. As Vasily Sukhodolsky’s attractive genre painting Astronomy suggests, this was a subject that interested courtiers of both sexes—indeed, one of the most extravagant purchases made by Peter’s mistress Elizabeth Vorontsova from the Court jeweller was a telescope with various figures mounted in gold and set with diamonds at a cost of 1200 roubles.12 On his return to France, Chappe repaid his hosts for their hospitality with a caustic account of his experiences in which Catherine is portrayed as the victim of a corrupt, despotic regime:
To all external appearances, the court of Russia seemed more tranquil than it had been for some time: but, on the inside, envy, jealousy, and mistrust swept through this vast palace. The grand duke no longer lived with his wife. The princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, born in a free country and brought up among the muses and the arts, was in no way brought down by this disgrace. Her natural talent and acquired knowledge furnished her with the greatest possible resources. She found tranquillity in the middle of the tumults of this court. Not wishing to remain ignorant of anything, she spent her moments of leisure in cultivating literature, the arts, and the sciences.13
In fact, Catherine kept up her duties at Court, attending both the theatre and the chapel in place of the fading empress. She and Peter hosted the Sunday reception days, sometimes together, sometimes separately. Looking back on their customary winter week at Oranienbaum in mid-January, Dashkova contrasted the ‘wit, good taste and decorum’ that prevailed in Catherine’s part of the palace with the cruder entertainments that Peter enjoyed with his Holsteiners at camp or in the Grüne Salle (Green Room), whose walls were draped with pine and fir branches.14 There, in the company of dancers and singers from his opera troupe, he liked to set off table fireworks in the form of intricately decorated desserts, ‘not without inconvenience from the smoke and sulphurous vapours’, as Jacob Stählin remarked.15 A less combative picture of the visit emerges from the account by the Piedmontese Misere. Downstairs, a military band played while the men smoked their pipes. The weather stayed fine until after midnight, but after lunch on the following day, undeterred by snow and wind, Peter and his guests—Count Hendrikov and his wife, the Shafirov family and Prince Dashkov—set out for Catherine’s dacha in twelve small sledges. There was ‘much pleasure and a lot of laughter’ as they tumbled in the snow. The grand duchess herself served Italian liqueurs ‘in her beautiful round house at the top of the hill’, as they all ‘drank coffee and milk from the farm, with black bread and butter’.16