Great Catherine

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  The days dragged by, autumn was ending and winter was closing in. Catherine returned to her own apartments, but, following tradition, remained in seclusion, with only her maids of honor to attend her. From time to time Peter paid her a visit, not because he was eager to see his wife but because he had become captivated with the least attractive of her women, the vulgar, pockmarked Elizabeth Vorontzov. Peter's flirtation aroused Catherine's pique, yet the impact of his waywardness was dwarfed by weightier sorrows. She learned that Princess Gagarin, her closest companion in recent years, was to be married and sent away from court. And she was informed that Sergei Saltykov was soon to depart on a mission to Sweden to announce the birth of the heir to the throne. His return could not be expected for many months.

  That which she had dreaded most had come upon her. Sergei, having served his purpose in fathering her child, was to be kept away from her—perhaps indefinitely.

  "I burrowed down further into my bed and curled up with my afflictions. I pled illness, I said that the pain in my leg had gotten worse, and I couldn't get up. But the truth was that I was unable to get up. I was so heartsore that I did not want to see anyone."

  Catherine saw no one—but little Paul received visitors by the score. Everyone wanted to look at the long-awaited baby, lying in his fur-lined cradle. The empress mothered him, prayed over him, worried and fussed around him endlessly.

  "How brown he is!" the courtiers exclaimed slyly, knowing that his father was the dark Sergei Saltykov and not the grand duke, who was as pale as a mushroom. But Elizabeth didn't care. She dismissed all references to Paul's doubtful paternity by muttering that he would not be the first bastard to be born into her family, and made no attempt to silence the stories about Catherine and Sergei. All that mattered was that a male heir had been born to the grand duchess. A child for the empress to love and foster, an assurance of continuity for the dynasty.

  So maternal did the empress appear that a rumor arose at court that Paul was in fact her own child and not Catherine's. Despite her advanced age and multiple infirmities, Elizabeth did not seem utterly incapable of motherhood. Besides, she was known to consort with young and virile lovers. Why couldn't she have given birth to a child late in life?

  The empress did nothing to silence the rumor, and she waited nearly six weeks before allowing Catherine even the most fleeting glimpse of her child. "I thought he was very beautiful," Catherine wrote, "and seeing him made me a bit happier." Yet he was snatched away almost immediately, and she felt more bereft than ever.

  On November 1, the day set aside for Catherine to receive the official congratulations of the courtiers, servants decorated the grand duchess's bedchamber in unaccustomed splendor. Finely wrought couches and tables, rich hangings, elegant paintings and objets d'art were brought in to replace her own furniture, making the room nearly as grand as the empress's own bedchamber. The centerpiece was a magnificent bed, upholstered in rose-colored velvet embroidered in silver.

  On this royal bed Catherine reclined in state, and waited patiently as one by one the members of the imperial government and household, the ambassadors from foreign courts, dignitaries from the city and members of the nobility passed before her, each of them kissing her hand. She was the picture of modest, radiant motherhood, an arrestingly pretty young woman whose delicately tinted white skin had only the faintest of blemishes, whose chestnut brown hair was thick and curly, her figure slim and her hands and arms as finely shaped as those of a classical statue. She spoke to each of her visitors in pleasant tones, and gave each an amiable smile. Only her eyes, large and blue and troubled, revealed what she had endured and was enduring, though she did her best to keep them bright.

  After several exhausting hours the reception finally ended, and Catherine sank back gratefully into the rose velvet cushions. She was not allowed to rest, however. As soon as the last guest left, the empress's servants appeared and whisked away all the splendid furnishings. Every table and chair, every vase and candlestick was carried out, until the room was stripped of its elegance and left in its former condition. Even the great rose-velvet bed, a bed fit for the mother of a future emperor, was dismantled and taken away, its occupant left to stand unsteadily on her sore leg and ponder her fate.

  Chapter Twelve

  NEGLECTED AND ABANDONED, DENIED NOT ONLY THE comfort but the very sight of her baby son, Catherine turned inward, to the resources of her keen and ever-hungry mind. Where another woman might have gone mad or succumbed to illness or depression, Catherine retired to a small, ill-lit chamber—the only refuge she could find from the freezing wind off the river—and began to read.

  She devoured Voltaire's Universal History (Voltaire was becoming her favorite writer) and a history of Germany, a thick pile of books in Russian, including two immense volumes of church history translated into Russian from the Latin of the erudite sixteenth-century historian Cardinal Baronius, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws with its acute and eloquent analysis of the origins and forms of governmental power, and Tacitus's Annals.

  Voltaire amused her, Baronius filled her head with information, Montesquieu intrigued her, but it was Tacitus who fired her imagination and broadened her understanding. The Annals told the history of Rome during the unsettled years of the early Empire, a time of decadence and cynicism when the heirs of Augustus battled for preeminence. Republican ideals had crumbled, moral niceties were forgotten; palace intrigues and the brute force of the Praetorian Guard made and unmade emperors with bewildering frequency. Bewildering, that is, to the uninitiated, the naive outsiders who inevitably became the victims of all the perfidy and treachery. The insiders, those who had learned not only to watch their backs and protect themselves but to go on the offensive and hobble their enemies before they could be destroyed by them, succeeded in steering events to their own advantage.

  Catherine, smarting from the effects of years of ill-use and insults, brimming with resentment and, despite her recent misfortunes, bursting with ambition, read Tacitus and envisioned her revenge. She would no longer be a victim. She would adopt the tactics of the victors of Tacitus's Rome, and so protect her interests in Elizabeth's Russia. Her eyes had been opened, she would never again be the eager young girl, desiring above all to please others. From henceforth others would be made to please her.

  Reading Tacitus, Catherine wrote afterward in her memoirs, "made a singular revolution in my head, to which, perhaps, the sad disposition of my spirit at that time contributed more than a little. I began to see things in a black hue, and to search for deeper causes."

  Winter closed in. The river was frozen, the pale, watery sun rose late and swam along the horizon, a yellow-gray blur, for only a few twilit hours. Catherine remained closeted in her pocket-sized room, napping on a chaise longue, reading at a small desk, her injured leg propped on cushions. Though she did her best to shield herself from frigid draughts, she caught cold again and again, and with the colds came fever. After two months of isolation she left her room to attend the long Christmas services, but was assailed by chills and pains and a very high fever, which sent her back to bed for days.

  All winter long she nursed her revenge, ruminating on the play of faction and petty conspiracy at court in the light of her newfound understanding of the ways of the world—and the world of the court in particular. She was determined to remake herself. "I gathered my forces," she later wrote. "I made a firm resolution not to leave my room until I had regained enough strength to overcome my hypochondria." While the courtiers spent themselves in celebrating the birth of Paul at balls and masquerades, with illuminations and fireworks, while Peter and his entourage of guardsmen and hangers-on drank and reveled noisily amid clouds of reeking tobacco smoke, Catherine stayed in her ascetic retreat, growing stronger and more sure of herself. By the time Carnival season was over, she had forged a new persona.

  The first test of her newfound resolve was painful. Sergei Saltykov returned to Russia from his long sojourn at the Swedish court, and was in no hurry to see Ca
therine. She knew, for Bestuzhev had kept her informed, that while in Sweden Sergei had resumed his flirtatious habits. This combined with his reluctance to resume their affair was telling; in her heart of hearts Catherine knew that he would be glad not to have to go on with their torturous liaison. Yet she had her pride—and her desire—to contend with. A clandestine meeting was arranged, but though Catherine waited in some anxiety until three in the morning for Sergei to arrive, he never came. She felt the snub keenly, and saw clearly that she had suffered a great deal over a man who was unworthy of her sacrifice. She had given birth to his child, she had been deprived of his presence for many months—months spent in much agony of spirit. Yet he cared nothing for her suffering, and could not even be bothered to keep a rendezvous with her.

  She wrote Sergei an angry letter, condemning him for his treatment of her, and this brought him immediately to her apartments. Once in his presence she softened momentarily, and let her old infatuation rule her, but she soon steeled herself against him and all the others who had misused her. She resolved to let no one hurt her again with impunity, and when Sergei persuaded her to end her long isolation and make an appearance in public she made a formidable impression on all who saw her.

  Peter's birthday was approaching, and the court gathered to commemorate the occasion. Catherine had her dressmakers make her a superb gown of blue velvet embroidered in gold, and in this she swept into the assemblage, tall, slim, and pink-cheeked, looking every inch the wife of the heir to the throne, and the mother of a future emperor. She drew stares. Worried glances and whispers followed her as she moved adroitly around the room, turning her back on the Shuvalovs and their confederates and showering their enemies with special attention and favor.

  There was no mistaking the change in Catherine. Her assurance, her bold and entirely unexpected assault on the empress's favorite Ivan Shuvalov and his cousins Alexander and Peter startled all observers. Her bright laughter and pleasant voice carried throughout the room, making wicked fun of the Shuvalovs, ridiculing their stupidity and foolishness, exposing their malice. Her sarcasm was her best weapon; she was skilled at inventing quips and jibes and retailing stories that caught the imagination of the courtiers and were endlessly repeated.

  "I stiffened my backbone, I walked with my head held high," Catherine wrote afterwards. 'The Shuvalovs didn't know which foot to dance on." They huddled together in alarm, aware that Catherine posed an unforeseen threat to their dominance.

  Catherine had thrown down the gauntlet to the most powerful faction at court. Alexander Shuvalov was not only head of the Secret Chancery and a preeminent voice in the royal council but head of the Grand Duke Peter's household. Alexander's brother Peter held the reins of finance and had enriched the country through his encouragement of commerce and factory-building, besides playing the key role in expanding Russia's army and holding the post of Master General of the Artillery. And the handsome, cultivated Ivan Shuvalov, nominally a chamberlain in the royal household, was the most influential of all, the empress's lover and intimate, a lover too of all things French who encouraged Elizabeth to adopt French styles in dress, manners and culture and to speak only French among her courtiers.

  In opposing the Shuvalovs Catherine was aligning herself not only with those, such as Chancellor Bestuzhev, who were their personal enemies but with a political policy of opposition to France and affinity with the German states and with England. This was a natural orientation for the Young Court, given Catherine's origins, Peter's fixation with Holstein and his idealization of Frederick II of Prussia, but there was a danger in it. Russians remembered with bitterness the reign of the German Empress Anna, Elizabeth's predecessor but one, who during her ten years in power had abused her subjects and burdened them with such heavy taxation that they all but starved. Nature itself seemed to rise up against Russia under the rule of the cruel Anne and her German minions, afflicting the people with huge storms and widespread famines, plagues and voracious fires that destroyed what little the empress left them with.

  Beyond this, Empress Elizabeth had an abiding hatred of Frederick of Prussia, and Prussia's commanding military might and continual aggression were an ongoing threat not only to Russian sovereignty but to the political stability of Europe.

  Catherine began to take a more aggressive role in court politics and foreign policy just at the time when Europe's precarious stability was threatening to collapse. Once again the expansionist ambitions of Frederick II were making war seem unavoidable, and Russia's treaties with her western European allies made it impossible for her to avoid becoming involved—though the empress was loath to go to war.

  In June 1755 a new British ambassador arrived at Petersburg. He was Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams, a veteran diplomat albeit a less than distinguished one, a stout, ruddy Englishman in his forties with literary tastes and a quick wit. His mission was delicate: to persuade the empress and her ministers to commit Russian troops to the defense of Hanover in the event of a Prussian attack. (The English King, George II, was also Elector of Hanover; he was passionately devoted to the smaller of his two domains and, as he had no army of his own to speak of, he had to rely on foreign arms to defend his German territory.)

  That Russia was predisposed to oppose the armies of Frederick II was not in doubt. What was in dispute was the price Britain would have to pay to gain the Russian assistance. It was over this point that negotiations had broken down during the ambassadorial tenure of Hanbury-Williams's immediate predecessor, with the British convinced that the Russians were venal and the Russians skeptical of Britain's good faith.

  Hanbury-Williams was a seasoned diplomat, but not an altogether tactful one; he had quarreled with Kaunitz, Maria Theresa's chief minister, had embroiled himself with Frederick of Prussia and his officials and showed a perverse talent for offending the great and the near-great with his outspokenness and lack of finesse. His wit was often cutting, and he lacked the discipline to hold his tongue. But he was a perceptive observer, and his government—which was not being entirely candid with him—relied on him to be Britain's eyes and ears in Russia at a crucial time.

  In this they were not disappointed, for Hanbury-Williams's letters and dispatches during his mission to Russia offer a discerning glimpse of Elizabeth's court and its personalities.

  He took up residence in a grand house on the Neva, which he rented and furnished at his own expense (heretofore the court had undertaken to provide the British ambassador with a furnished house), even sending to Britain for live goldfish to swim in the mansion's chilly ponds. He brought several dozen servants with him, and hired dozens more Russians to keep the stoves stoked and the kitchen provisioned. He was expected to hire Russian bodyguards, at a considerable expense, and complained of having to pay £60 a year to be guarded "against nobody," as he put it, by sixteen men and a sergeant who moved into his house and made a nuisance of themselves.

  Hanbury-Williams was accustomed to foreign courts, having been in the diplomatic service for many years, but the Russian court amazed him. He had never seen anything like its extravagant luxury, the thick encrustings of gold and showers of gems with which the empress surrounded herself. Elizabeth's magnificent palaces, with their enormous salons and banks of sparkling crystal chandeliers, light glinting from a thousand facets, their intricately inlaid floors and tall mirrors reflecting every gleaming gem and spangle, their rich woven hangings and furnishings of polished wood and porcelain and marble were far costlier and more ostentatious than any royal dwellings the Englishman had ever seen. Even the renowned splendor of Versailles was not to be compared to the grandeur of the Russian palaces, where the smallest and humblest rooms were ornamented in solid gold and guests were served fine champagne in golden goblets and slices of pineapple on golden plates.

  "The accidental expenses of this court are very high," the diplomat wrote to his superiors, hoping for an additional subsidy. He lacked the finery to make a decent appearance among the empress's opulent courtiers, and had to order new
clothes at great personal expense. Even so, his velvets and brocades and flowing lace were shabby compared to the dazzling costumes of the great nobles.

  Alexei Razumovsky, the village shepherd from Tchemer, launched a fashion for wearing diamond shoe buckles and diamond belts; on his broad shoulders blazed diamond epaulets from which hung the twinkling Orders his sovereign had granted him. The other prominent men around the empress were equally prodigal with their wealth. If Razumovsky ordered a carriage from Paris worth three thousand rubles, his rivals had to have carriages worth four thousand and more. Alexander Shuvalov dressed his footmen and even the meanest of his pages in liveries of cloth of gold, and was said to order his own superb costumes from his tailor not singly but in tens. General Apraxin, another of the gilded elite, never traveled without his collection of jeweled snuff boxes (he had one for each day of the year) and liked to round out his dinner parties by standing on the balcony of his Moscow mansion and tossing handfuls of gold coins and valuable trinkets to the beggars in the courtyard below.

  The women of the court were no less gorgeously arrayed. Their wide silken gowns whispered across the parquet, their throats and wrists were thickly encircled with gems, from their hair gleamed diamond aigrettes and diamond-studded ribbons. Every woman wanted to be judged handsome enough to have her portrait hung in the empress's Cabinet of Modes and Graces at Peterhof, where some three hundred beauties smiled down from the walls. The empress could no longer pretend that she was the reigning belle of her court; age and illness had stolen her preeminence. So the women competed more openly than in the past for admiration, and Hanbury-Williams was astounded by the quantities of silver lace and gold embroidery, waving plumes and flashing jewels with which they adorned their gowns.