Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  By the end of January, Chappe was ready to depart for Siberia, but the Court now found even more entertaining company in the shape of another visitor, King Irakly of Georgia. In a letter to her daughter, Countess Vorontsova listed his gifts with a practised eye for size and value:

  Our Gracious Sovereign was presented with a very pure agate, weighing two zolotniks or more, twenty-three strings of large oriental pearls, and two Persian silver brocades. His Highness [Peter]—a dagger with diamonds and agates; Her Highness [Catherine]—a small mirror with precious stones and two strings of large pearls; and His Highness P[aul] P[etrovich]—a dagger. And he gave Mikhail Larionovich [Vorontsov] a very good dagger, which Shah-Nadir himself had worn, some gilded silver tackle for the horses, and a hookah-pipe with precious stones for smoking tobacco that Pauzié said was worth 2000 roubles. And he gave me a big diamond ring, a string of large pearls and a 15-string pearl bracelet (as big as yours), handmade from Persian silver.17

  Elizabeth felt sufficiently recovered to appear before her Court on Easter Saturday. ‘We were all delighted to see [her] in the great chapel,’ reported her relieved lady-in-waiting, ‘and everyone was pleased that she permitted them to kiss her hand.’ Another important ‘first’ was achieved when Paul made his debut on the dance floor. ‘He is a very handsome child,’ reported the dutiful Sir Robert Keith, ‘and dances wonderfully well for one of his age.’18 The Court was glad to see the little boy dance with his mother at the coronation day ceremony. By then, Catherine’s birthday banquet celebrations had been followed by an opera on 23 April, which the Georgian king much enjoyed. Pleased to have found an exotic potentate to patronise, Vorontsova told her daughter that it was ‘impossible to believe how well he behaves!’19

  On 11 May, Peter and Catherine travelled to Oranienbaum for what was probably their longest single spell of uninterrupted residence. Although they returned to Peterhof for Peter’s name day celebrations at the end of June—and both Catherine and Peter subsequently made separate trips to see their son (in her case for not much more than an hour)—they were to remain ‘in the country’ until they moved back to the Winter Palace on 9 September.20 Perhaps it was during this period of relative leisure that Catherine jotted down (or at any rate added to) a series of miscellaneous notes that give a sense of her developing political ideas and ambitions (though they cannot be dated precisely, the notes were made between February 1758 and February 1762, and the final one quotes a French periodical of March 1761).21 Peace and prosperity were two obvious aims for an empire engaged in an exhausting European war. ‘All I hope, all that I wish is that this country in which God has cast me should prosper. God is my witness to that. The glory of this country is my glory.’ ‘Peace is necessary to this vast empire; we need population, not devastation; we need to populate our great empty spaces as much as possible.’ A passage in Bielfeld’s Cameralist Political Instruction prompted her to reflect on the benefits of enlightened toleration: ‘To do nothing without principle or without reason, not to allow one to be led by prejudice, to respect religion, but not to give it any power in State matters, to banish everything that reeks of fanaticism and to draw the best out of every situation for the public good, is the basis of the Chinese Empire, the most durable of all those known on this earth.’ A strong sense of justice emerges, prompted by the treatment meted out to Bestuzhev: ‘All my life I will remain hostile to the idea of establishing a secret Committee of Inquiry to judge a guilty man. An open trial, the judgement of the Senate, as in France and England, where a peer is tried by his peers, is the only solution.’ There was also a strong note of idealism: ‘It is against justice and the Christian religion to make slaves out of men, born to be free.’22

  By the summer of 1761, Catherine was pregnant again, this time by a new lover, Grigory Orlov, the virile guards officer who was to remain by her side until 1773. Wounded at the battle of Zorndorf, Grigory had returned from the war with a reputation for valour. We do not know when their affair began, but here was a type who would subsequently attract her again and again. Though he could boast none of Poniatowski’s intellectual accomplishments, Grigory seemed willing to learn (he too was interested in astronomy) and keen to listen to her ideas. As her political ambitions developed, she may well have chosen him for his military connections—he and his four brothers, all gallant and popular officers, could support her in good times and bad. And the Orlovs were not the only people Catherine had begun to cultivate. Nikita Panin, a protégé of Bestuzhev who had survived his master’s disgrace and remained on terms with the Vorontsovs during his twelve years as ambassador to Sweden, had returned to St Petersburg in 1760 to take charge of her son’s education and allowed her to see more of him than she had previously been able to do. Another occasional visitor to Oranienbaum was Princess Dashkova, a potential source of intelligence on the whole Vorontsov clan.23

  While Catherine kept out of sight in the country, an increasingly breathless Elizabeth was left to cope with the heat of the summer in St Petersburg. After lunch on 26 May, she drove out to watch the fire that blazed all day in Mesh-chanskaya Street.24 June brought the prospect of more pleasurable excursions, as she travelled first to Peter Shuvalov’s estate at Pargolovo and then to Peterhof, reliving the old days by dining in Aleksey Razumovsky’s rooms while hunting horns serenaded them outside. After another excursion a few days later, it was three in the morning before she returned from Monplaisir, the seaside pavilion at Peterhof. Such a regime was bound to alarm the medics. Dr Condoidi, Elizabeth’s Greek physician, himself died of apoplexy the previous August, being replaced by the Scot, James Mounsey, and Dr Schilling. Karl Kruse joined them in June 1761. ‘We are rich in doctors here,’ Countess Vorontsova told her daughter.25

  In mid-July ‘the Empress caused great anxiety to all her Court’ with ‘an attack of the hysterical vapours and convulsions which knocked her unconscious for several hours’.26 It was the beginning of the end. Now that Elizabeth’s horizons were shrinking, there was no great ceremony or banquet at the end of August for the knights of the Order of St Alexander Nevsky. Back in St Petersburg, she took her meals at a round table in a corner room of the Summer Palace, overlooking the Fontanka. She still found the energy for the occasional visit to Ivan Shuvalov, but was always back by 10 p.m. The banquet and ball, hosted by Peter and Catherine on Paul’s birthday, went ahead without her. After the Court’s return to the temporary Winter Palace two days later, the grand ducal couple hosted the Court receptions, too. Elizabeth celebrated with Catherine in the great chapel for the first time that autumn on 26 October to give thanks for the capture of Troppau by Field Marshal Buturlin. On 13 November, they both attended a French comedy. It proved to be the empress’s last appearance in public. Only the grand duchess and her son attended the ball on her name day. It was over by eleven. Though the following day, 25 November, was the empress’s accession day, the greatest day in the Court calendar, Elizabeth remained closeted in her apartments. Despite the customary 101-gun salute, the servants wore only standard livery. Banquet, music and fanfares were all cancelled on her birthday, 18 December, though there was a salute after the end of the morning liturgy attended on the empress’s behalf by Catherine alone.27

  Mikhail Vorontsov tried to forestall rumours in Europe by sending a circular to the Russian ambassadors on 19 December:

  For several days, all Her Imperial Majesty’s faithful subjects have been in a state of general sadness and wild alarm on account of an illness deriving from a fever which at first seemed dangerous because Her Majesty, out of a natural aversion to doctors, was reluctant to see one, and her blood was so inflamed that it caused her to vomit. But as result of two bleedings administered over three days, the fever has so far dropped and the illness so far changed for the better this seventh day of the crisis, that, thank God, the misery into which we were all plunged is now transformed into ravishing transports of joy by the great hope we have that with the aid of Divine Providence, the Empress will soon entirely recover her precious hea
lth.28

  He was hoping against hope. By the time the ambassadors received his message, it was already too late. The Court journal for Elizabeth’s reign falls silent on 24 December. She died the next day.

  In the event, all Catherine’s dreams of seizing the throne came to nothing. Pregnant and politically isolated, she could only stand by as the Shuvalovs and Vorontsovs ensured that all Russia proclaimed the advent of Tsar Peter III—and she became his empress.

  * * *

  By the time of her husband’s accession, he and Catherine had long been leading separate lives. In that sense, little now changed. The thirty-four-year-old tsar rose at seven and gave his first orders of the day while dressing. By eight, he was in his study to hear the Procurator-General, Alexander Glebov, deliver his reports. Occasionally Peter visited government offices unannounced to keep negligent officials on their toes. Regularly at eleven, he inspected the parade in the square outside the palace. Although he called on his new empress most mornings, they rarely dined together.29 While she ate with senior courtiers, he preferred to eat with Elizabeth Vorontsova and carouse in the company of Prince Georg Ludwig, the very same uncle who had courted Catherine twenty years earlier and was greeted with great pomp on his arrival at the military encampment Krasnoye Selo on 23 January and later lodged at Ivan Shuvalov’s palace.30 Even on ceremonial occasions, the imperial couple played roles that kept them apart. At the Blessing of the Waters at Epiphany—a ritual revived in all its splendour at the beginning of the new reign—Catherine followed the icon procession to the Jordan on the Moika while the tsar emulated his hero Peter the Great by riding at the head of his troops.31 Though they were unavoidably brought together for the funeral procession of Peter Shuvalov, which they watched from the balcony of the Stroganov Palace on 21 January, the tsar arrived late and there was little contact between them.32

  Though Shuvalov’s funeral was exactly the sort of elaborate ritual that Elizabeth despised, the most extravagant obsequies were reserved for the late empress herself. The day after her death, the tsar allocated 100,000 roubles to the newly appointed funeral commission which met daily at the mansion of the disgraced Chancellor Bestuzhev. The commission established after Anna’s death in 1740 offered the most recent precedent, though it was not to be emulated in every respect. Almost 45,000 roubles of its total budget of 65,000 had been spent on velvet, taffeta and other fabrics, to the neglect of the corpse itself: ‘She had lain in state for a month,’ a British visitor remarked, ‘but not having been rightly embalmed was almost fallen to pieces before her burial.’ 33 Now, while work went ahead ‘day and night’ on Jacob Stählin’s designs for an allegorical chamber of mourning in the wooden Winter Palace and an elaborate catafalque in the Peter-Paul Cathedral, leading courtiers gathered on the evening of Monday 14 January to convey the corpse to the stateroom where it was first displayed to the Court. Dressed in her favourite virginal white, the late empress was laid out on a lit de parade on a dais covered in white cloth under a canopy trimmed with gold. The walls of the room were also draped in white cloth edged with gold braid.34

  On Friday 25 January, Elizabeth’s corpse was transferred to lie in state in a second chamber of sorrows, where Stählin had gone to elaborate lengths to represent the Russian realm weeping at the tomb of its beloved ruler.35 At two in the afternoon, the Captains of the Guard formed a new guard of honour in this much darker chamber, draped in black and adorned with festoons of silver brocade. Twelve Chevaliers Gardes placed the coffin, covered with a pall of gold cloth trimmed with Spanish lace, on a raised catafalque beneath a canopy emblazoned with the imperial crown. By its side stood four ladies-in-waiting, dressed in deep mourning, and entirely covered with crepe veils. Two officers, in full dress uniform, stood guard on the first step, while two archimandrites, standing at the foot of the coffin, took it in turn to read aloud from the Bible throughout the day and night.36

  Yakov Shakhovskoy—a far from sentimental bureaucrat whose memoirs mention his wedding only as a temporary interruption to his work—was overcome with emotion at the sight of his late sovereign.37 Bowing twice on approaching the corpse, which was now dressed in a silver gown, trimmed with lace sleeves, he joined the procession of Russians who prostrated themselves before it, or rather ‘threw themselves face down on the ground in front of the bed’ so violently that at least one foreign observer ‘feared that they must fracture their skulls’.38 ‘There is a multiplicity of such customs,’ the supercilious French ambassador reported, ‘full of superstitions at which [Catherine] naturally laughs, but the clergy and the people have faith in her deep grieving over the deceased and rate her feelings very highly.’39

  According to Pauzié, the Court jeweller, it was Catherine rather than the tsar who summoned him to this ‘large room, lit by six thousand candles’, where he helped her to place a gold crown on the swollen skull of the deceased. Since Pauzié had ‘taken the precaution of placing several screws in the band that gripped the forehead’, he was able to use his tweezers to make the crown big enough to fit. But it was not a pleasant operation. ‘Despite all the incense and fragrance, the smell of the corpse was so strong that I could hardly stand near it. However, the empress bore all this with amazing fortitude and in this way completely won over the hearts of her subjects.’40

  Peter made no secret of his impatience with such rituals and visibly chafed against them. Courtiers had been shocked to discover that deep mourning was not immediately prescribed when the empress died.41 Scarcely had the corpse been transferred to its second chamber of rest than Peter ordered them to abandon mourning dress altogether on future Sundays and feast days. That night, 27 January, he and Catherine dined with Prince Trubetskoy, returning to the palace at three and two in the morning respectively.42 On Monday 4 February, the tsar was taken incognito to inspect the final preparations at the Peter-Paul Cathedral, promising further funds to ensure that the spectacle lacked nothing in magnificence. (The funeral commission’s outstanding expenses of 74,000 roubles were ultimately paid by Catherine shortly after her own accession.) While he spent the evening drinking with Prince Georg until three in the morning, his wife, now six months pregnant with Orlov’s child, remained in her apartments in order to be at her most demure for the next day’s funeral.43

  Following a pattern established after her father’s death in 1725, Elizabeth’s coffin was borne with great pomp to its burial place on the far side of the frozen Neva, where, between the cathedral’s four main pillars, Stählin had created a Temple of Sorrow and Remembrance with a life-size half-length portrait of the late empress.44 The capital’s bells began to toll at ten as troops lined the route of the procession. Three hundred guardsmen led the way, followed by an even larger number of priests, processing two by two and chanting hymns. Behind them, in single file, came the gentlemen of the Court, wearing the uniforms of the various orders of chivalry, and each attended by a chamberlain. A single cavalier, armed from head to toe, rode ahead of the coffin on a stately charger held by two equerries. Released from captivity in the fortress by the pro-Prussian Tsar Peter, Count Hård was there to observe the scene:

  The coffin, placed on a sort of chariot, drawn by eight horses and adorned with black velvet festoons, was covered with a black cloth pall richly trimmed with Spanish silver-point lace. A canopy made from the same materials was carried by Generals and Senators, accompanied by several officers of the guards. The Emperor followed immediately behind the coffin, wearing a large black cloak carried by twelve chamberlains, each holding a wax taper in his hand. Prince Georg of Holstein followed the Emperor as his nearest relation; then came the Prince of Holstein-Beck. The Empress followed also on foot, holding a burning taper and clad in a robe carried by all her maids of honour. Three hundred grenadiers brought up the rear of the procession.45

  Nothing could sound more solemn. Yet, according to Catherine, the tsar behaved in typically unseemly fashion. Irrepressibly cheerful throughout, he indulged in childish games, first lagging behind the hearse and then c
harging across the ice to catch it up, much to the embarrassment of the courtiers deputed to carry his train. When Count Sheremetev could no longer keep hold of it, it blew about in the wind to Peter’s intense amusement.46

  ‘Everyone dined privately that day,’ Hård recalled, ‘and spent the evening in privacy, as if their grief and affliction had been real. But from the following day, no more was said or thought of Elizabeth, than if she had never existed. Such is ever the fate of things in this world: every thing passes; everything is forgotten.’47 As if to prove his point, the Court travelled to Tsarskoye Selo a mere three days after the funeral to celebrate the tsar’s thirty-fourth birthday in style. Before the first dinner in the Picture Gallery, he invested Anna Vorontsova with the Order of St Catherine and announced that Yelena Naryshkina was to take her place as senior lady-in-waiting. In the ensuing banquets, he sat next to Princess Golitsyna and Countess Bruce. Catherine, having travelled separately from St Petersburg, remained in her apartments throughout the weekend, apparently oblivious as the first fireworks to be set off since Elizabeth’s death exploded all around her.48