During the engagement Catherine devised a three-point checklist for her future. In order of importance, her chief aims for her new life would be: to please the grand duke; to please the empress; and to please the nation. But her status grew a bit wobbly when, in November 1744, Peter contracted measles and along with his entire entourage was quarantined from the rest of the court. He emerged from his sickbed taller and physically stronger, but Catherine noticed no other improvement. “His mind was still very immature. He spent his time in his room playing soldiers with his valets, flunkeys, his dwarfs, and his gentlemen-in-waiting,” she observed in her memoirs.
Yet no sooner did Peter rebound from the measles than he contracted smallpox. He recovered by January 1745, but according to Catherine, his entire appearance had been altered by the disease. “He had grown a great deal, but his face was unrecognizable. All his features were coarsened, his face was still all swollen, and one could see that he would no doubt remain badly scarred. As his hair had been cut off, he had an enormous wig which made him look even worse.”
As their wedding day loomed, Peter’s court endeavored to school him in how to manage a wife, filling his head with advice that would surely lead to Catherine’s unhappiness if he heeded it. A clever girl, she decided to adopt a diplomatic tack with him: she would listen to Peter and give him every impression that she was in sync with his views. Her aim was to win him over as a friend, a system she applied to the entire court. “I tried to be as charming as possible to everyone and studied every opportunity to win the affection of those whom I suspected of being in the slightest degree ill-disposed towards me; I showed no preference for any side, never interfered in anything, always looked serene and displayed much attentiveness, affability, and politeness all around.”
Although she was still in her mid-teens, already Catherine had the makings of an empress.
She was not remotely attracted to Peter, yet during the months before the wedding she wept bitterly over his lack of affection toward her. The infrequent time they spent together consisted mainly of Peter putting his future bride through military drills and teaching her how to handle a rifle. Nevertheless, Catherine maintained her spirits by keeping her eye on the prize, and endeavoring to overlook her fiancé’s oddity.
Meanwhile, clueless about the facts of life, she tried to find out from the ladies in her entourage about what went on between the bedsheets, but they were equally naïve. Yet it was not only Catherine who felt unprepared for a conjugal relationship. Court physicians unsuccessfully tried to convince the empress that Peter was physically too immature for marital relations. However, Elizabeth refused to postpone the royal wedding on those grounds.
Finally, the big day came. At five a.m. on August 21, 1745, booming cannons awakened the court. Catherine, wearing a formal dishabille of white and gold, was escorted by her ladies to the empress, who was similarly dressed. A turf war ensued over Catherine’s bridal hairstyle—the coiffeur favored fashionable curls; the empress insisted on a smooth do that would enable the jewels to be properly secured in her hair. Elizabeth “blinked” first and Catherine’s shiny dark tresses were curled and left unpowdered.
The young archduchess then donned her heavy wedding dress, made of cloth of silver and embroidered with silver at the hem and seams. Over it went a cloak of silver lace; two spots of rouge stained her cheeks. Peter’s wedding garments were the masculine equivalent of Catherine’s, accessorized with diamonds and a ceremonial sword.
A resplendent procession made its way to Our Lady of Kazan, where the two teenagers were wed in a lavish ritual. Hundreds of people partook of the wedding feast that ended at eleven p.m., just in time for the ball to commence. By the time the bride and groom were led to their marriage bed and dressed in identical nightclothes, it was well after one in the morning, and Catherine was exhausted.
The marital chamber, lined with red velvet, resembled a cross between a jewel box and a bordello. Ensconced in the double bed, Catherine sat and waited. Her groom had disappeared. She described her wedding night in her memoirs: Everybody left me and I remained alone for more than two hours, not knowing what was expected of me. Should I get up? Should I remain in bed? . . . At last Mme. Krause, my new maid, came in and told me very cheerfully that the Grand Duke was waiting for his supper which would be served shortly. His Imperial Highness came to bed after supper and began to say how amused the servant would be to find us in bed together.
As things transpired (or didn’t), Catherine needn’t have spent so many anxious hours fretting over what might happen on her wedding night. Peter was as naïve about sex as she was, and so uninterested in it that he didn’t even make a clumsy attempt to consummate their marriage. Realizing that nothing was going to occur, Catherine rolled over and went to sleep.
Years later, Catherine observed of her days as a newlywed, “I would have been ready to like my new husband had he been capable of affection or willing to show any. But in the very first days of our marriage I came to a sad conclusion. I said to myself ‘If you allow yourself to love that man, you will be the unhappiest creature on this earth.’ ”
The court, surprisingly, seemed to regard their marriage as a success. Of course, they were unaware that Peter and Catherine remained virgins, and every time he became ill, her existence at court hung in the balance. If Catherine failed to produce an heir and Peter died, the empress could send her packing back to Germany or shove her into a convent. Elizabeth could still disinherit Peter if he showed signs of not fulfilling her expectations, and he was certainly not shaping up to be an emperor. Recovering from yet another illness in 1746, the eighteen-year-old grand duke set up a puppet theater in his rooms, inviting members of the court to attend performances.
An exasperated Elizabeth hired a pair of minders for the newlyweds, whose chief assignment was to get the teens to have sex. And she drew up a set of instructions on what constituted acceptable behavior at court, addressing certain examples of Peter’s puerile conduct. Among the guidelines: “The person selected to keep the Grand Duke company will endeavor to reprimand certain unseemly habits of his Imperial Highness. He must not, for instance, when at table pour the contents of his glass over the servants’ heads, nor must he address coarse expressions or improper jokes to those who have the honor to come near him, including foreigners of distinction received at Court; or publicly make grimaces and continually jerk his limbs.”
Catherine was given rules to abide by as well. She was supposed to strictly adhere to Russian Orthodoxy, not to meddle in affairs of state, and not to treat her husband coldly. The fact that she was there solely to produce an heir was baldly restated. After a year had passed during which the young archduchess had still not conceived, Empress Elizabeth unleashed her fury on the hapless Catherine, accusing her of being in love with another man, or else willfully conspiring with her archenemy Frederick of Prussia by deliberately failing to get pregnant. This upbraiding so upset Catherine that she attempted suicide by stabbing herself through her stays with a blunt knife.
Naturally, the longer it took Peter and Catherine to consummate their marriage, the greater the embarrassment for all concerned. It’s possible that Peter suffered from phimosis, the same painful condition shared by Louis XVI of France—an inability to fully retract the foreskin, making an erection excruciatingly painful. But Catherine became convinced that part of the problem was political—that various factions at court were trying to keep them apart by telling her that Peter was infatuated with other women.
Even their official babysitters were at odds with each other. Madame Krause, the German woman in charge of Catherine’s maids, disliked the Choglokovs, the Russian couple assigned to mind the young royals. In 1747, the results of this churlishness turned the marriage bed into a playground. According to Catherine, Madame Krause “procured for the Grand Duke toys, dolls and other childish playthings which he adored. During the day they were hidden inside and underneath my bed; the Grand Duke would be the first to go to bed after supper, and as
soon as we were both in bed, Mme. Krause would lock the door and then the Grand Duke would play until one or two o’clock in the morning. I was obliged willynilly to join in with this delightful entertainment, as was Mme. Krause.”
As Peter’s emotional maturity stagnated, Catherine was becoming a beauty. She wrote, “I was tall and had a magnificent figure but I could have allowed myself a little more weight as I was rather thin. I did not like using powder and my hair was soft brown, very thick and well planted on the forehead. The fashion for leaving one’s hair unpowdered was beginning to wane and that winter I used it now and then.” When the court moved to Moscow that December, Catherine and Peter were lodged near each other, to facilitate connubial relations. But Peter still wasn’t up for it. Instead, Catherine—who had busied herself reading Voltaire and the letters of Mme. de Sevigné—wrote, “At that time the Grand Duke had only two occupations. One was to scrape the violin, the other to train spaniels for hunting. So, from seven o’clock in the morning until late into the night, either the discordant sounds which he drew very forcefully from his violin or the horrible barking and howling of the five or six dogs which he thrashed throughout the rest of the day, continually grated on my ears. I admit that I was driven half-mad and suffered terribly as both these musical performances tore at my ear-drums. . . . After the dogs I was the most miserable creature in the world.”
By 1752, the young royals had been married for seven years, and the exasperated Maria Choglokova finally admitted to Her Imperial Highness that Peter and Catherine were still virginal. Empress Elizabeth was shocked. She instructed Maria to get her nephew tutored in the facts of life, and to see to it that Catherine got pregnant—by anyone. After several days of lobbying, the widow of Elizabeth’s court painter Georg Christian Grooth was persuaded to initiate Peter into the mysteries of sex.
And despite the fact that he had been lucky enough to marry for love not two years earlier, it didn’t take too much encouragement to nudge Peter’s twenty-six-year-old chamberlain Sergei Saltykov in Catherine’s direction. She tried to resist him but “unfortunately I could not help listening to him. He was as handsome as the dawn. There was no one to compete with him in that, not at the Imperial Court, and still less at ours. Nor was he lacking in intelligence or the accomplishments, manners, and graces which are a prerogative of the grand monde, but especially at the Court.”
By this time, the twenty-three-year-old Catherine was also sleeping with her husband, and it’s not clear which man took her virginity. But practically as soon as he made his conquest, Saltykov began to tire of his royal mistress. The empress and Maria Choglokova remained impatient. If Peter couldn’t deliver the goods, and Saltykov was beginning to balk, Maria privately suggested another gentleman of the bedchamber who might make a suitable stud.
Saltykov would be the first of a dozen (known) lovers Catherine would take over the course of her lifetime. Between the winter of 1752-53 and May 1753, the archduchess twice became pregnant and twice miscarried, each time losing the fetus after a couple of months, if not within a few weeks of conceiving. While Catherine recovered, her husband passed the time getting drunk with his servants, his maturity level in his mid-twenties no higher than it had been when he and Catherine first met. For instance, it was at this time that he made an example of a rat that had eaten two of his toy sentinels by submitting it to a public hanging. When Catherine scoffed, Peter grew incensed at her “womanly ignorance of military law.”
Finally, on September 20, 1754, after an exceptionally difficult labor on the birthing couch, Catherine was delivered of a son. The poor archduchess was left all alone in the hot and airless chamber, lying in her amniotic fluids, entirely forgotten and neglected, while the empress removed the infant, saw that he was swaddled, and then summoned her confessor, conferring on the boy the name of Paul without consulting either of his parents. If there was any question as to the boy’s paternity, it would soon become apparent, or at least widely accepted, that Paul Petrovich was most certainly Peter’s son. The child had none of Saltykov’s handsome looks and resembled Peter both physically and temperamentally.
On February 20, 1755, to honor her husband’s twenty-seventh birthday, Catherine made her first public appearance since Paul’s birth. Now that she had borne an heir for Mother Russia—and was not even permitted to raise him herself—the archduchess was forced to recognize that she was otherwise disposable. As a measure of how little she mattered, her husband had begun to pay court to one of her maids of honor, Elizaveta Vorontsova. From that point on, Catherine knew she would have to take her destiny into her own hands.
She was acquiring a reputation as a shrewd, intelligent woman who was a good listener. By 1756 she had quietly amassed a network of spies and informers at court.
Catherine’s status there had never been entirely secure. Nor was her husband’s situation any safer. Although Peter was Elizabeth’s heir, a Russian ruler had the power to “fire” his or her eventual successor and choose a different one for any reason. The empress had always been concerned that Peter might not live up to his potential; legally, she could rescind his inheritance at any time, which would therefore make Catherine a royal nobody. Additionally, there were many at court who thought Peter would be a disastrous emperor and might plan a coup after Elizabeth’s demise. Consequently, acknowledging that she needed to cover all her bases, Catherine intended to insure that she and Peter would take the throne together with the backing and support of the elite Guards officers.
“I shall either perish or reign,” the archduchess declared. However, she knew that Peter’s rule might be a dicey sell: Russia and Prussia were archenemies and the German-born archduke was “Prussian to the death.” It was “engrained in his disposition,” according to Catherine. Her husband, who so desired to emulate his hero, Frederick the Great, refused to accept the fact that the man was Russia’s greatest threat.
In March of 1757, Catherine confirmed that she was pregnant again, but this time her husband most vociferously doubted that he was the father. In the presence of several members of his household Peter exclaimed, “Heaven alone knows how it is that my wife becomes pregnant. I have no idea whether this child is mine and whether I ought to recognize it as such.”
Catherine learned about this remark from a gentleman of the bedchamber. So, she instructed him to return to Peter and ask him to swear upon his honor that he had not slept with her—and if Peter was prepared to so swear, Catherine would take that oath straight to the empress’s Head of the Secret Chancery.
She had called his bluff. Naturally, Peter wasn’t about to do any such thing. For him to baldly confess to Elizabeth’s ministers that he was no longer having relations with his wife would have been an enormous embarrassment, tantamount to hanging the royal couple’s dirty linen in the public square.
Catherine gave birth to a daughter, Anna Petrovna, on November 29, 1757, but the girl never lived to see her second birthday, dying on March 9, 1759. By 1758, if not considerably earlier, both spouses had resumed their extramarital affairs—Peter with Elizaveta Vorontsova, and Catherine with her man of the moment. Often the royals would socialize as a foursome, playing cards and talking late into the night. And when it was bedtime, the royal spouses retired with their respective lovers rather than with each other.
After several years of declining health, the fifty-two-year-old empress finally died at three p.m. on December 25, 1761. Peter instructed his wife to remain by Elizabeth’s body until he sent for her. When Catherine was summoned to the palace chapel, her husband took the oath as Emperor Peter II. There was no mention in the liturgy of Catherine, or of their son, Paul.
Catherine had managed to conceal thus far that she was five months pregnant. Her marriage had eroded to the extent that it would have been all but impossible for the child to be Peter’s. It was a near certainty that paternity could be claimed by Catherine’s lover, who at that time was the burly and formidable Lieutenant Grigory Orlov of the elite Izmailovsky Guards, the handsomest
of five strapping Orlov brothers.
At the burial ceremony of Empress Elizabeth on January 25, 1762, the new emperor, nearly thirty-four years old, gave his subjects a sharp taste of his unsuitability to rule. Rather than walk somberly and respectfully behind his aunt’s coffin, Peter made a game out of continually letting the funeral cortege pull ahead of him some thirty feet, then dashing madly to catch up with it.
As emperor, Peter had a tendency to spring things on people without taking the time for study and reflection. Consequently, many of his reforms were ill conceived. For example, on February 18, 1762, barely two months into his reign, Peter issued a manifesto absolving nobles from service to the state during peacetime. But the decree precariously tipped the balance of Russia’s class system. Serfs served the nobles who served the state. If the upper crust’s public service commitment was eliminated to a large degree, the serfs would be the only ones working.
Peter also abolished the secret police—a nice idea, but the dissolution prevented him from discovering the coup that would topple him in just a few months’ time. And he alienated many of his subjects by westernizing the Russian Orthodox Church, compelling the clergy to shave their beards and ridding the churches of their icons, except for those representing Jesus Christ. Additionally, Peter angered the members of his armed forces by calling a halt to the war with Prussia just as his army was about to crush that of his idol, Frederick the Great.
Eleven days before her thirty-third birthday, on April 10, 1762, Catherine gave birth to Grigory Orlov’s son. As it would have been politically imprudent to bring up her obvious bastard in the palace beside her legitimate son, she immediately placed the infant with her valet and his wife, who would raise the boy as their own.
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 27