Sex with the Queen

by Eleanor Herman

  Uncomfortable in the limelight and detesting royal receptions, he went incognito for large portions of his journeys to London, Paris, Hanover, Berlin, and Frankfurt. Peter once stayed several months in the Netherlands to become a master shipwright; with this firsthand knowledge he built the first Russian navy. Living in a hut under an assumed name, Peter was furious when Dutch subjects recognized him as the czar—the only loping Russian giant with a wart on his cheek that they had ever heard of. When a stranger on the street cheerfully called the czar by name, he was often rewarded with a bruising blow to the head.

  Having enjoyed the customs of western Europe, Peter returned to Russia and cast a critical eye on his own backward traditions. He ordered the upper classes to attend “assemblies” dressed in Western fashion where they would dance the minuet and play cards and chess. Guests were commanded by imperial decree to cultivate small talk with members of the opposite sex. Men were forbidden to get drunk before nine p.m.; ladies were not permitted to show signs of any inebriation whatsoever. At these assemblies the czar stood sentinel with a cudgel, ready to spring on anyone spitting on the floor, picking his nose, or talking with his mouth full, and beat him senseless.

  In the West a smooth clean-shaven face was a sign of culture and a long ratty beard a sign of barbarity. When Peter returned to Russia, he immediately began grabbing his courtiers by their beards and cutting them off. He once gave a banquet where a clown attacked all the beards in the room with a giant pair of scissors. Though the czar wept with laughter, his subjects wept with shame; beards were the sign of a good Orthodox Christian. Some men safeguarded their shorn beards, instructing relatives to place them in their coffins so they could meet God as one of his faithful flock. Not content with beards, Peter stalked the streets wielding a pair of hedge clippers, ready to cut off the long Oriental sleeves he saw, reminders of an ancient superstitious past.

  For all Peter’s love of Western fashions, he never developed the profound respect for wigs so noticeable at the French and German courts. In the early eighteenth century the best wigs, made of real human hair, stood several inches above the top of the head and tumbled in ringlets down to below the shoulders. A wig was often the single most expensive item of personal adornment, washed, powdered, and curled with great reverence. Peter, however, used his wig as a hat, slapping it on his head when he went outdoors. In the palace, whenever he, wigless, felt cold, he would grab a wig from a servant’s head and plop it on his own. Sometimes when he grew warm, he would snatch the wig off his head and stuff it in his pocket. Whenever he became angry with someone, he would pluck off the offender’s wig and toss it across the room.

  In Paris, Peter received a gift from the king of France—a long ornate wig from the finest court wigmaker, the cost of which could have purchased a small estate. But the czar liked to wear short chin-length wigs, with his own dark straight hair hanging below the white curls. To the horror of his French hosts, the czar attacked his gift with a pair of scissors, cut off the bottom half, and smacked it on his head with a satisfied grin.

  One Western institution Peter did not like was the Roman Catholic Church. Upon his return to Russia he founded the Synod of Fools and Jesters to make fun of the Vatican and appointed his former tutor, a notorious drunk, as the Prince Pope. The Prince Pope was given a palace, a generous salary, and twelve stuttering servants. During his “official” ceremonies the Prince Pope wore a miter of tin, carried a tin scepter, and babbled an incoherent mixture of blessings and obscenities. Tucking his white robes up over his bowed legs, he danced, made obscene gestures, burped and farted. When blessing the faithful, he smacked them on the head with a pig’s bladder. As an icon to kiss, he presented a statue of Bacchus with an enormous erection.

  Initiates into the cult of the Prince Pope were asked not “Do you believe?” but “Do you drink?” After giving an answer in the affirmative, they held their mouths open while vodka was poured down their throats. In the Prince Pope’s processions, the czar, dressed as a Dutch sailor, led the way, beating a drum, while the Prince Pope, with playing cards sewn to his gown, rode astride a barrel pulled by twelve bald men. “Cardinals” waving vodka bottles rode in sleighs pulled by oxen, while “dignitaries” sat on carts pulled by bears, pigs, and dogs. In other processions Peter had a seven-foot-six-inch giant, dressed like a baby, seated in a sleigh pulled by twelve midgets.

  Peter’s diplomatic gatherings were no better than his papal ceremonies. A Hanoverian diplomat, invited to the palace for a reception, found himself locked in a room for three days with two large barrels set before him; one contained the alcohol he would have to drink before he was permitted to go home, and the other was to hold bodily wastes. On another occasion Peter ordered all his dead-drunk diplomatic guests to go into the forest and cut down trees. The ambassadors swung wildly and fell down amid gales of laughter; by some miracle no one was hurt. Many diplomats urgently wrote their governments begging to be recalled from Russia and sent to a country less deleterious to their health.

  Foreign diplomats and native Russians alike were panic-stricken when Peter learned the art of tooth pulling. With a pair of pliers always in his pocket, the czar requested those he encountered to open their mouths for inspection, and if he found a rotten tooth he would immediately yank it out. Proud of this accomplishment, he kept the teeth he pulled in a little leather pouch, which is now in the Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg. It was just a short step to learn the executioner’s art, and Peter executed at least five condemned men himself, proud of how cleanly he sliced through bone and sinew.

  This, then, was Catherine’s husband. Surely no other woman in the world could have lasted as long or kept Peter as happy. Cheerful, helpful Catherine never once complained about his sexual escapades or violent temper tantrums. Putting aside every desire of her own, she devoted herself to calming her mad giant. After a decade together, he married her in 1712, their two daughters aged five and two skipping along as bridesmaids. The very proper English envoy was speechless when Peter told him that the marriage was “guaranteed to be fruitful,” since he already had five children by his bride.3

  In 1716 Peter had his detested son and heir, Alexis, Eudoxia’s child, tortured to death in prison. Seven years later his young sons with Catherine were all dead, and his once large brood of children had dwindled down to their two daughters. To protect their future he decided to crown his wife as his successor and empress in her own right. Peter had to threaten his subjects with death if they uttered “foolish and drunken rumors” about Catherine.4 But he could not threaten foreign courts, which had a good hearty laugh at a former laundress and camp follower ascending the double-eagled throne of imperial Russia.

  For her coronation the empress wore a purple mantle embroidered with golden eagles costing four thousand rubles, and her crown was made of four pounds of precious stones. Peter crowned her himself as she wept and babbled in a most undignified manner, throwing her arms around her husband’s knees. He raised her up and placed in her hands the orb, symbol of sovereignty. But she wasn’t getting her hands on his scepter, symbol of power. That he kept for himself.

  At the age of forty Catherine was exhausted from spending twenty years of her life pacifying her volatile, sadistic husband. Though she pasted a professional smile on her face whenever she heard of Peter’s orgies, she must have been deeply hurt. She had grown corpulent from bearing ten children and taking out her unexpressed frustrations at the table. Life as empress of all the Russias was, perhaps, not as good as life as a laundress.

  And then William Mons began to flirt with her. Peter’s handsome chamberlain Mons was blond, elegant, and foppish, a complete contrast to his master. He sent her romantic verses confiding his deep love for her. Some reported that Catherine’s passion for William was “so violent that everyone perceived it.”5 Everyone except Peter, who was eventually informed by an anonymous letter. In November 1724 the czar found the two in a rendezvous in a palace garden and angrily told Mons to leave. No sooner was Mon
s back in his room lighting a pipe than the secret police came. Enraged that the servant girl he had raised to empress was unfaithful, Peter had several courtiers interrogated and tortured, and their letters seized.

  Catherine’s female accomplice had been, as tradition decreed, her lady-in-waiting. Matriona Balk, the sister of William Mons, had arranged the secret meetings and taken letters back and forth. But most of the other ladies-in-waiting had either been involved or at least known about the affair.

  William Mons was condemned to be beheaded, but not for having sex with the empress. It was a gentlemen’s agreement that he would suffer his penalty under the name of another crime, stealing from state coffers. It would preserve Peter’s pride. Mons spent his last hours writing romantic verses:

  It is love which brings about my downfall

  There is a fire burns in my breast

  From which I know that I must die.

  I know the reason for my downfall:

  That I have loved

  Where I should only honor.6

  On November 16 the handsome William Mons climbed up the scaffold, heard his sentence read out, bowed, took off his cloak and jacket, and asking the headsman to be quick, placed his head on the block. He was quick. Mons’s head was placed on a stake, his body tied to a wheel. Matriona Balk and the other guilty ladies-in-waiting were whipped on their bare backs, also allegedly for corruption. Matriona was exiled to Siberia.

  Throughout all this, Catherine showed a calm serenity, knowing that any sign of agitation would inflame Peter, who might send her to the scaffold as well. The day of her lover’s execution, the empress calmly attended her daughters’ dancing lesson. The French envoy reported, “Although the Empress hides her grief as much as possible, it is painted on her face, so that everyone is wondering what may happen to her.”7 The next day Peter issued orders that no one was to obey any command given by the empress. Catherine was immediately cut off from all funds and had to borrow money from those ladies-in-waiting who had not been whipped and exiled. Perhaps she wondered if she would be sent to a convent like his first wife, Eudoxia, or murdered in prison like his son, Alexis.

  The day after Mons’s execution, Peter drove her in an open sleigh to see the grisly remains of her lover. She betrayed no emotion, not even when the edge of her gown rubbed against a black and stiffened leg projecting from the wheel. After they returned to the palace Peter stomped up carrying a priceless Venetian vase. “Do you see this?” he asked. “It’s made from the simplest materials. Artistry has made it fit to decorate a palace, but I can return it to its former valueless condition.” He smashed it on the floor.

  “Of course you can,” she replied with characteristic practicality, “but do you think that you made the palace any more beautiful by breaking that vase?”8

  Peter, furious that Catherine showed no emotion despite his threats, decided the situation called for something more. That evening when Catherine returned to her room she found William Mons’s gaping head staring at her in a bottle of alcohol on her table. She ignored it. After several days, realizing he would get no reaction from her, Peter had the head removed.

  The Saxon envoy wrote his master, “They almost never talk to each other. They no longer eat together, they no longer sleep together.”9 Peter muttered ominously about Henry VIII’s effective manner of dealing with Anne Boleyn. But in the meantime, he was angling to marry his two daughters to Western rulers, and slicing off their mother’s head for adultery would not help his case. He already was encountering problems disposing of the girls because they were illegitimate, born to the czar’s washerwoman mistress before he had married her.

  In December 1724 Peter was stricken with a urinary tract infection which became rapidly worse. By January he was suffering from kidney stones and a relapse of the venereal disease he had picked up in his youth. A physician perforated his swollen bladder and removed four pounds of urine. But the bladder was already gangrenous.

  When Peter died on January 28, 1725, Catherine was proclaimed empress. Dazed, she blindly signed documents placed before her, wandered around Peter’s workrooms, and handled his beloved tools. She never gripped the reins of power but handed them to her numerous lovers.

  A mere figurehead, Catherine loved pomp and ceremony, especially banquets where she overate and drank herself senseless. She took different men into her bed every night and ordered new carriages and daring gowns. But it made no difference. For nothing could fill the huge gap where Peter had stood, all six feet eight inches of him. He had so completely dominated her life that when he was torn out of it, the space would remain forever vacant. She tried to pack the emptiness full with food and drink and sex, with games and pageants and midnight wanderings. But still the void remained.

  Worn out by excess, Catherine died in 1727 after two years as empress. She was forty-four years old.

  EMPRESS ELIZABETH AND THE NIGHT EMPEROR

  Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great and Empress Catherine I, did not succeed directly to the imperial throne. At her mother’s death the nobles proclaimed as czar Peter II, the thirteen-year-old son of her murdered half brother, Alexis. When the sickly boy died after three years, Elizabeth’s waspish cousin Anna was chosen as empress by nobles who hoped to find the disappointed, neglected woman putty in their hands. Widowed six weeks after her marriage at the age of seventeen, she had not been permitted to remarry and had lived in lonely exile for two decades. Surely she would be grateful to those who put her on the throne. They were mistaken.

  Tart, sour, and yellow-faced as a lemon, Anna set about wreaking revenge on those who had wronged her. And Elizabeth, by virtue of her impudent youth and blond beauty, wronged the empress on a daily basis. Elizabeth had inherited her commanding height from her father and stood taller than most men. She had a ravishing figure, a dazzling complexion, and gorgeous wide blue eyes. When New Year’s fireworks ushering in the year 1737 shattered a window, cutting Elizabeth’s face, Anna was delighted. She was less pleased when the wounds healed perfectly, leaving no trace of a scar.

  Worse than the sin of her beauty was the fact that Elizabeth was politically inconvenient. Many discontented factions at court hoped that the statuesque daughter of Peter the Great would stage a coup and proclaim herself empress. Anna, well aware of these hopes, debated whether she should imprison the girl, murder her, or send her to a convent.

  Elizabeth’s behavior proclaimed that she lived for love, not for politics. Reckless and extravagant, she took into her bed pages, peasants, ambassadors, doctors, and soldiers. The duque de Liria, who served as Spain’s ambassador to St. Petersburg, reported, “The behavior of the Princess Elizabeth gets worse and worse each day. She does things without shame, things that would make even the humble blush.”10

  She was described as “content only when she was in love,” and refused to hide her passions under a veil of false modesty.11 Her lack of restraint possibly kept her alive, for the ruling powers saw her as a person of no political significance, a woman who lived for sex and dancing.

  Yet Elizabeth’s flighty persona was a concoction to help her survive in a scorpions’ nest. While vaunting her numerous love affairs, she carefully concealed her political acumen. The British envoy’s wife reported, “In public she has an unaffected gaiety, and a certain air of giddiness that seems entirely to possess her whole mind….In private I have heard her talk with such a strain of good sense and steady reasoning that I am persuaded the other behavior is a feint.”12

  Sensing the cold hand of death upon her, Empress Anna arranged for her niece’s son, the infant Ivan, to succeed her. This would serve the twin purpose of disinheriting Elizabeth and allowing Anna’s lover of thirty years, Ernest Biron, to rule as regent. But in 1741, after only a year, Biron was chased out of power by an opposing faction and Anna Leopoldovna, Ivan’s mother, became regent.

  Anna Leopoldovna was not a very good regent. Though married to a German prince, she spent most of her time rolling in bed with her lover, the Saxon ambassado
r. To the great amusement of courtiers, the regent’s husband was often seen banging angrily on her bedroom door.

  Numerous powerful families tried to persuade Elizabeth to stage a coup and proclaim herself empress. Afraid of bloodshed, Elizabeth hesitated until she heard rumors that Anna Leopoldovna was planning on claiming the imperial crown for herself and having her inconvenient cousin shut up in a convent. Elizabeth shuddered at the thought of religious life because, as one contemporary wrote, there was “not an ounce of nun’s flesh about her.”13

  On November 25, 1741, hours before she was to be arrested, Elizabeth rallied loyal troops and invaded the palace. The coup was ridiculously easy; the people wanted the daughter of Peter the Great to rule. Anna was imprisoned in one fortress and her infant son in another. Elizabeth was gentle with her former enemies who now swarmed to proclaim their loyalty. She swore never to sentence anyone to death for political crimes. She outlawed the torture of children under seventeen and the cutting off of women’s noses. Even the humblest subjects were encouraged to hand Elizabeth petitions for redressing injustice.

  Unlike her three female predecessors—her mother, Catherine I; Empress Anna; and the regent Anna Leopoldovna—Elizabeth took her governmental responsibilities quite seriously, working most of the day, reading reports, presiding over meetings, forcing rival ministers to make peace. Mercurial and temperamental, Elizabeth had an arsenal of tactics to get her way—flashing a brilliant smile, stamping her foot in impatience, swearing like a fishwife, complimenting and cajoling.

  Not only had Russian politics declined in recent years, so had Russian court manners. Forty years earlier Elizabeth’s father had beaten French courtesy into his unruly courtiers. Now Elizabeth was forced to issue an edict that courtiers were to appear in “good and not in verminous dress.”14