Catherine the Great (12 page)

The eccentric accommodation decreed by the empress made married life no easier. Peter undressed in his apartments, but in order to reach Catherine’s, where the couple slept together, he had first to pass through rooms where his tutors were themselves preparing for bed, and then cross a vestibule at the top of a draughty staircase. Catherine suspected that these nocturnal peregrinations might have been the reason why her husband caught another fever in the spring of 1746, when he was ill for two months, causing renewed anxieties about the succession. Drawing on all her reserves of ‘natural sensitivity’, she apparently tried to broach the issue with the empress. She trod carefully all the same: ‘It always seemed to me that both of them were likely to turn on you, and I was wary of compromising myself with them.’
¹⁰⁹

The truth was that the more they got to know one another, the less compatible Catherine and her husband seemed. While she was intelligent, bookish and eager to learn, sustained thought proved beyond Peter’s grasp. Modern historians have gone to great lengths to show that, as a young boy in Holstein being groomed for the Swedish throne, he was exposed to an ambitious and unrelenting curriculum: French, Theology and Latin for three hours in the morning (when Latin, which
he hated, eventually gave way to geometry and the study of artillery); dancing, history and geography or jurisprudence for three hours in the late afternoon.
¹¹⁰
Nevertheless, Rulhière (the French diplomat who wrote a controversial account of Catherine’s coup) judged right in remarking that Peter’s tutors made ‘a great mistake in attempting to form their pupil after the grandest models, attending rather to his fortune than to his capacity’.
¹¹¹
Catherine apparently decided much the same when she first met him at Eutin in 1739: by coercing this ‘thin, delicate’ child ‘to perform as an adult’, his entourage had ‘inculcated the duplicity in his character’.
¹¹²
Though nothing she says about her husband can be taken at face value, and each version of her memoirs presents a slightly different portrait, she was right about the coercion.
¹¹³
As he later told his Russian tutor, Jacob Stählin, Peter had been forced to kneel on dried peas (which made it almost impossible for him to walk next day), and public floggings of up to forty strokes of the birch were inflicted with dread ceremony by a masked soldier to the beat of a drum at eight o’clock on a Saturday evening.
¹¹⁴
By tempting him with images from historic coins and medals, Stählin managed to teach Peter to count out the names of the tsars on his fingers. Even so, the grand duke’s attention span remained dangerously short. The only academic exercises that excited his interest were those relating to military affairs. For these he had a genuine talent, based on a prodigious memory.
¹¹⁵
But it was not enough to bring him close to Catherine. Deprived of her husband’s affections and further isolated by her debt-ridden mother’s departure on 28 September, barely a month after her wedding, she faced an uncertain future in the hostile environment of a foreign Court.

H
aving been raised as an adult from a comparatively tender age, Catherine now found herself treated as a child just as she was blossoming into maturity. For nine lonely years between her wedding and the birth of her son Paul, she had to negotiate the hazards of a Court shot through with intrigue while coping with an unpredictable empress irritated by her failure to produce a male heir. It was all a far cry from the carefree life she had led at the Court of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.

Though Catherine had been provided with young female companions on her arrival in Moscow, it was only after her betrothal that a formal establishment was settled upon her. Peter’s household was also expanded on the occasion of the celebration of the peace with Sweden in 1744. Count Zakhar Chernyshëv, one of three gentlemen of the bedchamber appointed to the Young Court (the small entourage settled on the grand duke and duchess), was still among Catherine’s closest advisers on his death in 1785. Another, Field Marshal Alexander Golitsyn, was to lead her troops against the Turks in 1768. But if these proved to be early examples of her capacity for lifelong trust, the immediate prospects for lasting friendships looked bleak. Zakhar was soon removed when Johanna Elisabeth feared that he might be pressing his attentions on her daughter and the level of supervision over the Young Court was sharply intensified when Countess Rumyantseva was replaced as Catherine’s leading lady-in-waiting by the empress’s cousin, Maria Choglokova.
¹

Only six years older than her new charge, Choglokova was appointed in May 1746 when Elizabeth, alarmed that Catherine had failed to conceive in the early
months of her marriage, ordered Bestuzhev to draw up a formal instruction for the Young Court which made ‘marital relationships between both Imperial Highnesses’ a matter of state significance, second only to the formulaic acknowledgement of Catherine’s ‘true zeal’ in the Orthodox faith.
²
It was widely assumed that the attractive new governess, who had grown up as a maid of honour in Elizabeth’s household in the 1730s, had been chosen in the hope that her affection for her equally uxorious spouse might serve as a model for the royal couple.
³
At first, however, Catherine regarded her as ‘the most disagreeable and most capricious woman at Court’. Not that her husband was any better. However adorable he may have seemed to Maria, Nikolay Choglokov, who assumed charge of Peter’s household, struck the young grand duchess as ‘far from loveable’. ‘No man in the world was more puffed up with
amour propre
.’ ‘Fat, stupid, arrogant and contemptuous,’ Choglokov was ‘at least as unpleasant as his wife, which was saying something.’ Faced with the prospect of life under the surveillance of such a ghastly couple, Catherine spent much of the Court’s visit to Reval (now Tallinn) in tears and continued to be plagued by headaches and low mood on her return at the end of July.
⁴

It would be wrong to paint a picture of unrelieved misery. Over the winter of 1746–7, she and Peter enjoyed living in the ‘very comfortable’ Winter Palace apartments occupied by Empress Anna in the 1730s and were thrilled by the twice-weekly productions in the large theatre opposite the Kazan Church. ‘In a word, that winter was one of the happiest and best arranged that I have spent in my life. We did nothing but laugh and romp about all day long.’
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Yet the pleasure was shattered in March 1747 by news from Zerbst of the death of Prince Christian August. Catherine had her first taste of the Romanovs’ dynastic pretensions when her grieving was cut short by the instruction that ‘it was not fitting for a grand duchess to mourn any longer for a father who was not a king’.
⁶
More misery was to follow when Andrey Chernyshëv was packed off to Orenburg with his cousins Zathar and Ivan at the end of May. So persistent were the whispers of an attraction between him and Catherine that even her confessor was prevailed upon to ask her about it. Although she continued to write to Andrey in exile, smuggling letters out with the help of her faithful ‘oracle’, the valet Timofey Yevreinov, her friend’s departure left Catherine feeling lonelier than ever. As if to emphasise her sense of isolation, she had to undergo the indignity of a visit from the empress herself. It was the first time they had been alone together and Elizabeth took the opportunity to express her disappointment in no uncertain terms, accusing the eighteen-year-old of unfaithfulness, a charge she vehemently denied.
⁷

Over the following autumn, the Choglokovs sought to limit the potential for temptation by restricting access to Peter and Catherine so severely that it seemed they were virtually under house arrest. Yet such crude attempts to drive the young couple into each other’s arms merely succeeded in feeding their mutual resentments. Far from producing the universally desired heir, Catherine and her husband already seemed to be leading separate lives. During the pilgrimage to the Trinity monastery while the Court was in Moscow in summer 1749, they rarely met except at table and in bed–and ‘he came there after I had fallen asleep and went out before I woke up’.
⁸

Seeking solace in private reading, Catherine was often to be found with her head in a book. Shortly before the Court returned to St Petersburg at the end of 1744, Count Henning Adolf Gyllenborg, a Swedish nobleman whom she had first met in Hamburg, had flatteringly suggested that she might draft an autobiographical ‘character-sketch of a fifteen-year-old
philosophe
’. As models, he recommended Plutarch’s
Lives
, which she tracked down only later, and the life of Cicero, of which she apparently read no more than a couple of pages in German translation. Neither did she finish Montesquieu’s short treatise
On the Causes of the Grandeur and Decline of the Roman Republic
(1734): ‘it made me yawn’.
⁹
Even for one so self-consciously ‘studious’, such works were too demanding. Voltaire’s fiction, which she discovered in 1746, was more immediately attractive. Two years later, she had graduated to Brantôme’s lubricious memoirs of the sixteenth-century French Court and Péréfixe’s life of its most celebrated monarch, Henri IV, who was to remain one of her lifelong heroes. Soon more difficult books came within her range. Before tackling Montesquieu’s
The Spirit of the Laws
(1748), the greatest work of political philosophy of the age on which she would later base her own Instruction to the Legislative Commission, she started in 1751 to read Pierre Bayle’s
Historical and Critical Dictionary
, a fundamental work of the early Enlightenment. ‘Every six months I finished a volume, and from this, one can imagine in what solitude I spent my life.’
¹⁰

Withdrawal was only one of Catherine’s strategies for survival. In public she embarked on a concerted campaign to please Elizabeth and her Court, though it was by no means simple to retain the approval of such a volatile monarch. It was particularly fruitless to try to share her developing literary interests with an empress who had inherited her father’s volcanic temper with none of
his intellectual curiosity. Although the library at St Petersburg’s Summer Palace contained almost 600 volumes in French, including classic works by Bayle, Michel Montaigne and Hugo Grotius, Elizabeth had them removed to the Academy of Sciences in 1745, when diplomatic relations between St Petersburg and Versailles were damaged by the disgrace of the French ambassador, the Marquis de Chétardie, and their return five years later seems unlikely to have been connected with her personal tastes in reading.
¹¹
Indeed, as Catherine soon discovered, ‘there was a whole raft of subjects that she did not like at all. So, for example, one must not speak of the king of Prussia, nor of Voltaire, illness, the dead, beautiful women, French manners or the sciences; all these subjects displeased her.’
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There is no need to accept this verdict on Elizabeth’s philistinism at face value. Monarchs are famously difficult to talk to–‘I would rather let people interpret my silence than my words,’ remarked the taciturn Louis XVI
¹³
–and Catherine was understandably cautious about offending the woman whose permission was required every time she wanted to set foot outside the palace. Though there seems little reason to credit the empress with bookish interests, her attitude to death, mocked by Catherine as fearful superstition, was by no means incompatible with rational Enlightened thinking. Nauseated by the smell of corpses on her way to the suburban palace at Yekaterinhof, she ordered more earth to be piled on the graves she could see from her carriage and insisted that future burials be carried out further from the centre of St Petersburg. Still more drastic steps were taken in advance of the Court’s visit to Moscow in 1749, when not only were burials banned at churches between the Kremlin and the Golovin Palace, but existing graves were razed to the ground, the tombstones being donated for new church buildings.
¹⁴
These were measures which owed something to a growing concern with public hygiene. Meanwhile, Elizabeth had done everything in her power to limit the ‘great and useless expense’ that her leading subjects insisted on lavishing on their funerals.
¹⁵
Whereas Russian nobles continued to regard an elaborate funeral as the ultimate status symbol, their monarch’s attitude was more in tune with changing sentiments in Western Europe, where ‘grief was becoming more introverted and intense, more private, separated from the formal observances of the corporate hierarchical society’.
¹⁶

Elusive though it remained, privacy was highly prized by Elizabeth, who had a metal grille put up around her box at the opera house in St Petersburg. One of the best-known episodes in Catherine’s memoirs describes the empress’s splenetic outburst on discovering that Peter had drilled holes through a door so that
he could spy on her meals with Aleksey Razumovsky.
¹⁷
It was this incident which prompted the reorganisation of the Young Court in 1746. Usually interpreted as evidence of her husband’s incurable infantilism (or, at any rate, of Catherine’s anxiety to highlight it), it tells us just as much about the empress’s yearning to escape the relentless public eye at a Court where the monarch was permanently on display.

Hunting offers another revealing example. Had they known that Louis XV and his entourage had shot more than 1700 partridges on the plain of Saint-Denis on a single day in September 1738, readers of the
St Petersburg News
might have been less impressed to learn that in the six weeks between 10 July and 26 August 1740, Empress Anna had bagged a total of 488 items: 9 stags, each with between 14 and 24 antlers, 16 wild goats, 4 wild boar, a wolf, 374 hares, 68 wild duck and 16 large seabirds.
¹⁸
Nevertheless, lists of such achievements were routinely published since success in the field was understood everywhere in Europe as a sign of imperial prowess and international prestige. In September 1751, Elizabeth staged an extravagant hunt at Krasnoye Selo for the Austrian ambassador, who was given one of the best horses from the imperial stables and led by grooms wearing costumes designed expressly for the event at a cost of 20,000 roubles. This hunt took place in the full glare of publicity. Yet when the official press drew attention to the empress’s personal passion for hawking later that autumn, she promptly banned all articles referring to the imperial family without her prior approval.
¹⁹

Elizabeth had grown up at the hunting lodge at Tsarskoye Selo and consistently sought to preserve it as a private space. Though it was later to become Catherine’s favourite summer residence, she and Peter were invited there a mere eight times before 1762. Only in 1748 were they in residence with the empress herself, to celebrate Bartolomeo Rastrelli’s first reconstruction of the palace, and even then Elizabeth often dined alone.
²⁰
For the most part, she preferred private jaunts with Razumovsky and her friends, during which she could most readily resume her father’s role as ‘the leader of revelry’.
²¹
For one such bacchanalian expedition, the cellarer at Monplaisir brought out 11 half-flasks of ‘Her Majesty’s sweet wine’ (Hungarian Tokay), 21 bottles of her favourite English beer, 12 bottles of fortified wine, 1 bottle of the ‘new sweet wine’, 17 bottles of Burgundy, 16 bottles of champagne, 53 bottles of Rhine wine, 6 flasks of Gdansk vodka, 2 flasks of aniseed-flavour vodka, half a flask of lemon vodka and 2 phials of mustard.
²²

While the governors of the Young Court held Peter and Catherine to a
clockwork routine, Elizabeth’s life was famously irregular. Visitors to Russia in the 1730s had recognised in the attractive young tsarevna a free spirit ill-suited to the constraints of formal ritual. ‘She dances better than anyone I have ever seen,’ one acknowledged, ‘but hates the ceremony of a court.’
²³
Even after her accession, she shunned formal society, preferring the earthier company of her far from blue-blooded relatives, the Hendrikovs and the Skavronskys (Maria Choglokova’s family). Surrounded by the guards who had brought her to the throne, Elizabeth gave special licence to the new Life Company (her personal bodyguard), the majority of them peasants by origin, who ‘committed all imaginable disorders’ in the early months of the reign as ‘the new noble lieutenants ran through all the dirtiest public-houses, got drunk, and wallowed in the streets. They entered into the houses of the greatest noblemen, demanding money with threats, and took away, without ceremony, whatever they liked.’
²⁴
It was a pardonable exaggeration on the part of the Austrian ambassador. Fourteen men were discharged following disorders at Elizabeth’s coronation, and the regimental archives from her reign are peppered with the records of fights, broken windows, and a rich variety of derelictions of duty caused by severe inebriation. One wretched drunk was so hungover that he turned out on guard in his slippers.
²⁵

Hawking and hunting with hounds were pleasures generally reserved for the period between lunch and dinner; grouse shooting, in autumn and winter, lasted from five or six in the morning until midday. These, however, were almost the only fixed points in Elizabeth’s daily regime. Mealtimes were unstable (and often the occasion for the empress to dictate haphazard personal edicts); theatrical performances regularly began late and continued into the small hours so that, until the empress condescended to provide carriages for her musicians late in her reign, they could be seen lumbering through the streets with their bulky instruments in the middle of the night.
²⁶
It was entirely characteristic for Elizabeth to finish the carnival season in 1748 ‘with a magnificent bal masqué and a supper of a hundred and fifty covers in the opera house, which she honoured with her presence, till three o’clock in the morning’.
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On less formal occasions, she might retire to bed only as dawn was breaking. Such irregular habits have long been ascribed to Elizabeth’s fear of assassination.
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Yet although the anxieties of a usurper are not to be underestimated, it seems more plausible to interpret her erratic daily timetable as an extreme example of the ‘nocturnalisation’ of Court life–a move traceable in most European Courts in the century after 1650 away from a dawn-to-dusk regimen towards one in which mealtimes, balls and masquerades moved
ever further into the night, when fireworks and Baroque theatrical spectacles acquired even greater powers of illusion under cover of darkness.
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