Catherine the Great (18 page)

There was scarcely any limit to her ambitions in the summer of 1756, when she was openly prepared to contemplate the consequences of the empress’s demise. Already on 11 August, Catherine’s head was ‘a jumble of intrigues and negotiations’. A week later, she confided to Sir Charles her remarkable ‘dreams’:

This astonishing letter was followed by a stream of others scarcely less frank, in which Catherine commented in characteristically ironic fashion on everything from Elizabeth’s failing health to the plans for Russian troop movements. (As her ‘dreams’ revealed, she was friendly with the Russian commander-in-chief, General Apraksin, and attempted to persuade him on Sir Charles’s behalf to oppose the resumption of diplomatic relations with France.) ‘I do not know what I am saying, or what I am doing,’ she confessed on 11 September, ‘I can truly say that it is the first time in my life that this has happened to me.’ Hardly able to believe what he was reading, Sir Charles coaxed her into further indiscretion in terms quite outside the normal diplomatic lexicon:

Not to be outdone, the grand duchess replied in kind: ‘My head is splendid, when it has one like yours to think for it.’
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So long as Elizabeth stubbornly confounded predictions of her demise, there was no opportunity to test the power of such fantasies. Instead, Catherine had to cope with the changed circumstances in which Stanislaw Poniatowski made his long awaited return to St Petersburg in January 1757. In that same month, despite all Sir Charles’s efforts to prevent it, Russia entered the Seven Years’ War against Prussia on the side of France, Austria and Saxony, for whom Stanislaw was charged with securing Russian military aid. Since England was Prussia’s informal ally, it was no longer possible for the young Pole to consort openly with his mentor, who, amid the debris of his failed diplomacy, was already beginning to show signs of the mental derangement that would kill him two years later. Sir Charles was recalled to London in July. By then, however, Stanislaw’s love affair with Catherine had resumed in all its passion. Indeed, she was already four months pregnant with his child.

Following her twenty-eighth birthday in April, Catherine retreated to Oranienbaum, where the seating plans for her dinner parties were distributed by lot to avoid the torture of official precedence regulations. A French diplomat’s account of the procedure suggests that not everything was left to chance:

Anxious to mollify Peter, who was irritated by her refusal to receive his mistress, Elizabeth Vorontsova, Catherine, knowing her husband’s love for music, commissioned Rinaldi and Araja to stage a lavish outdoor spectacle at Oranienbaum on 17 July, paid for by a further British loan at a cost of between 10,000 and 15,000 roubles.

‘In short,’ as Catherine wrote in her memoirs, ‘on that day people discovered qualities in me that they had not known I possessed, and in this way I disarmed my enemies. That was my aim, but it did not last for long, as we shall see.’
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The most disconcerting part of the celebration at Oranienbaum was a fall Catherine suffered when the horse drawing her carriage reared up as she stepped out to inspect the preparations. Fortunately, her pregnancy was unaffected. When her daughter was born at the end of November, she begged Elizabeth to be allowed to choose a name. Instead, the empress pointedly had the child christened Anna Petrovna, in memory of her older sister, Peter’s mother. Peter himself rejoiced at Anna’s birth, though he was surely not her father. Poniatowski, who
was, made clandestine visits to Catherine, who remained in solitary confinement while her baby was removed, as Paul had been before her, to the care of the empress’s wet nurses. But worse was still to come for the grand duchess when Chancellor Bestuzhev was arrested, along with Vasily Adodurov and other friends of hers, on the night of 14 February 1758.

When Catherine first arrived in Russia, Bestuzhev had been her greatest enemy. No one had done more to make her life at the Young Court a misery. After the ‘diplomatic revolution’ of 1756, however, as Russia edged ever closer to an improbable alliance with France (her principal continental rival), the Machiavellian chancellor had come to see the grand duchess as a potential counterbalance to his Francophile rivals at Court, the Shuvalovs and the Vorontsovs. Though he was initially horrified to learn from Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams of Catherine’s liaison with Stanislaw Poniatowski, he helped her to conceal it, and it was Bestuzhev, remembered by Stanislaw as a ghoulish figure ‘with a mouth which opened to reveal only four stumps of teeth and a pair of small flashing eyes’, who did most to secure the young Pole’s return to Russia.
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The very chancellor who had prevented her from corresponding with her mother in the 1740s now opened up a channel to Johanna Elisabeth. Meanwhile, the empress’s failing health prompted him to make his own plans for an alternative regime, drafting a manifesto that would place Peter on the throne with Catherine as his co-ruler. She was flattered to discover that the chancellor regarded her ‘as perhaps the only person upon whom at that time the hopes of the public could rest when the empress was no more’.
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Precisely when Bestuzhev showed Catherine his plans remains uncertain, but the issue of the succession was brought into focus more sharply than ever before when Elizabeth collapsed in public outside her favourite Church of the Sign at Tsarskoye Selo on 8 September 1757. (For an index of the panic she created, we need look no further than the Court journals, which are blank for the following week.)
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Faced with the possibility that the pro-Prussian Grand Duke Peter might come to the throne, Russian generals leading the campaign against Frederick the Great were placed in a delicate position. As recently as 19 August, they had scored a famous victory over the king at Gross Jägersdorf, less than a year after Frederick had himself routed the French at Rossbach. In the wake of such a triumph, General Apraksin had been expected to advance on Berlin. Instead, he retreated to Memel. Driven by the fragility of Russia’s supply line (his troops had to wait while the grass grew under their feet to feed their horses),
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Apraksin’s decision was taken on 27 August–before the empress’s collapse. But in St
Petersburg it could easily be made to seem that he had been motivated by doubts about her health, generated by his treasonable correspondence with Catherine and Bestuzhev. Urged on by the chancellor, Catherine begged Apraksin to reverse his retreat. But by then it was too late. In October, he was removed from his command as Bestuzhev’s enemies, profiting from Catherine’s withdrawal from the public gaze in the final months of her pregnancy, steadily poisoned Elizabeth’s mind against him.
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Catherine learned of Bestuzhev’s arrest from Stanislaw Poniatowski on the morning after it occurred. That evening, as the lovers attended a ball pretending that nothing had happened, she felt ‘a dagger in the heart’. While the chancellor fell under a lengthy investigation that was to end in public disgrace and banishment, Catherine faced a crisis more dangerous than the one in 1744, when it could reasonably be claimed that she had been no more than an unwitting accomplice to her mother’s clumsy pro-Prussian machinations. Now her complicity was harder to deny and it was vital to limit the damage. Following the chancellor’s example, she had burned all her papers as soon as the danger arose. Now, according to the account in her memoirs, which comes closer to her mother’s purple prose than her own customarily deadpan style, she prostrated herself in front of Elizabeth on the night of 13 April and pleaded tearfully to be sent back to Zerbst. While her husband berated her as a liar, she stubbornly refused to admit any treasonable intent in her correspondence with Apraksin. Perhaps, as she suggests, her performance was enough to win Elizabeth over. At any rate, she was given a stay of execution until a further audience six weeks later, when she faced more questioning about her letters to the general. Although we cannot know precisely how the matter was resolved–for one thing, her memoirs dramatically break off at this point–Bestuzhev’s enemies probably decided (just as he had before them) that Catherine could still be useful to them. While he was eventually committed to house arrest on his estate on 5 April 1759 in a manifesto that highlighted his vain attempts to corrupt both Catherine and Peter–the manifesto was published at the beginning of Passion Week, creating an inescapable association with sinfulness–the Vorontsovs and the Shuvalovs left the grand duchess in place as a pawn on the chessboard of Court politics and began to treat her well.
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That, as events were to show, was a serious underestimation of her abilities. But there was no sign of a glorious future for Catherine in the spring of 1759. Poniatowski had gone back to Poland in the previous August; Bestuzhev’s disgrace made it impossible for him to return to Russia. The death of her infant daughter on 8 March left her ‘inconsolable’. ‘It was only her virtue and her
complete resignation to the decrees of Providence that could bring her out of her state of shock,’ Vorontsov reported to his nephew, enclosing a letter of condolence for Johanna Elisabeth.
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When Catherine’s debt-ridden mother herself died in Paris in May 1760, she was left completely alone. Like everyone else at the Russian Court, all she could do was watch and wait as the ailing empress entered the sixth decade of her life.

M
odern historians of medicine have stressed that ‘virtually no important doctor in the first half of the eighteenth century placed the root of hysteria in the uterus’ and that ‘all forms of hysteria tended to be seen as the physical manifestations of a specifically mental derangement’.
¹
Told that Elizabeth’s symptoms had first manifested themselves when colic seemed to threaten the life of the baby Grand Duke Paul, François Poissonnier, the French specialist summoned to examine her at Peterhof in August 1759, declared it ‘easy to understand’ that fear had unsettled ‘all her nerves, and particularly those of the uterus’. Though he could find little wrong with her ‘excellent constitution’, Elizabeth’s lifestyle left much to be desired. The collapse at Tsarskoye Selo had been made the more serious by her refusal to follow her doctors’ advice. Observing that with age ‘the humours become slower in their circulation’, Poissonnier prescribed a purgative intended to induce two or three evacuations every day for a month. To sweeten the pill, the doctor suggested that his tablets should be dipped in marmalade and swallowed with an infusion of lime-blossom tea. He also prescribed coffee at bedtime, flavoured with
liqueur d’Hofmann
mixed with sweetened water or diluted lemonade. ‘This liqueur, which resembles nothing one might call a remedy because it is very pleasant, has the singular property of strengthening the nerves without inflaming them.’ While he particularly recommended peony, ‘whose taste is as good as its effects are salutary’, his main aim was to steer Elizabeth away from dairy foods and pastries. ‘I realise that Her Imperial Majesty has been accustomed to them since childhood, but when circumstances change, it is equally necessary to alter one’s habits.’ By the same token, her preference for
lettuce, chicory, spinach, sorrel and watercress, cooked in meat juices, was bound to give her constipation. If she persisted with such a damaging diet, then she must accept the enemas he prescribed in return. Her best option, however, was regular exercise. Poissonnier advised her firmly against ‘too sedentary a lifestyle, which seems opposed to the vivacity of her character and to the continuous activity in which she engaged until the age of forty-five’.
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Whether or not it owed anything to her doctor’s prescriptions, Elizabeth’s health seemed briefly to improve. In 1758, perhaps haunted by the memory of her collapse in the previous autumn, she had avoided Tsarskoye Selo altogether. Two brief visits are recorded from 1759, and the rhythm of her visits to the summer palaces began to pick up in 1760–a sure sign that she was feeling stronger. Even so, in these final years of her life she largely withdrew from public life, leaving much of the work of her government in the hands of her sophisticated favourite, Ivan Shuvalov. In retrospect, the continuities between Russian cultural policies of the late 1750s and those of Catherine’s own reign are obvious. It was largely thanks to Shuvalov, for example, that the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts was founded in St Petersburg in 1757 (Catherine was later to set it on firmer foundations), and he corresponded with Voltaire.
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But this burst of activity took place without the grand duchess’s involvement. In the wake of Bestuzhev’s disgrace, she had little option but to keep a low profile.

By the winter of 1760–61, the Russian Court was once again wreathed in gloom. On 7 January 1761, mourning was imposed for six weeks in memory of Britain’s George II.
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Elizabeth had not been seen in public since the St Andrew’s Day banquet at the end of November, where she sat between Peter and Paul.
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She did not appear again until Easter. At first, the British ambassador reported, it was ‘an attack of the tooth-ache which occasioned a swelling in her face’; after Christmas, Ivan Shuvalov told of lengthy nosebleeds.
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‘Apart from bouts of hysteria, and gradual symptoms of blood loss, and another local disease,’ wrote a well-informed French diplomat in the spring, she had been ‘suffering for the whole of the current winter with sores in her legs’. Stubbornly refusing to seek a cure, the empress remained ‘locked up completely alone’, subject to ‘frequent attacks of melancholy’, and with only Paul and her young Kalmyk servants for company. ‘When she admitted society, she could bear the presence of only the most restricted number of courtiers.’
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Behind closed doors, however, Elizabeth seemed determined to keep up appearances. A sense of her routine emerges from letters sent by her lady-in-waiting, Countess Anna Vorontsova, to her daughter, who was travelling abroad
with her husband (‘I am sending you your favourite food, flabby fish: I don’t think it will go off’).
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When a favourite chorister married in January, the empress threw a party followed by dancing until four in the morning. While she was too ill to attend the theatre, the theatre came to her. A French comedy was performed in her apartments at Candlemas and, later that week, Sumarokov’s Russian players gave her his tragedy
Sinav and Truvor
(they had been fetched back from Moscow at short notice, prompting tantrums from the notoriously volatile playwright, who resigned shortly afterwards).
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On 9 February, Elizabeth felt well enough to sit for her portrait.
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Following Peter Shuvalov’s marriage eleven days later, she hosted a banquet in her own apartments. (Further weddings were put off until the autumn: ‘Think of the poor couples!’) This time there was no dancing, but Shuvalov threw a ball of his own, where Catherine joined Peter on 23 February, the last day of the carnival.
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At that time, the Court was enjoying a visit from the French astronomer, the abbé Chappe d’Auteroche, en route to Siberia to see the transit of Venus across the sun. As Vasily Sukhodolsky’s attractive genre painting
Astronomy
suggests, this was a subject that interested courtiers of both sexes–indeed, one of the most extravagant purchases made by Peter’s mistress Elizabeth Vorontsova from the Court jeweller was a telescope with various figures mounted in gold and set with diamonds at a cost of 1200 roubles.
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On his return to France, Chappe repaid his hosts for their hospitality with a caustic account of his experiences in which Catherine is portrayed as the victim of a corrupt, despotic regime:

In fact, Catherine kept up her duties at Court, attending both the theatre and the chapel in place of the fading empress. She and Peter hosted the Sunday reception days, sometimes together, sometimes separately. Looking back on their customary winter week at Oranienbaum in mid-January, Dashkova contrasted the
‘wit, good taste and decorum’ that prevailed in Catherine’s part of the palace with the cruder entertainments that Peter enjoyed with his Holsteiners at camp or in the Grüne Salle (Green Room), whose walls were draped with pine and fir branches.
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There, in the company of dancers and singers from his opera troupe, he liked to set off table fireworks in the form of intricately decorated desserts, ‘not without inconvenience from the smoke and sulphurous vapours’, as Jacob Stählin remarked.
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A less combative picture of the visit emerges from the account by the Piedmontese Misere. Downstairs, a military band played while the men smoked their pipes. The weather stayed fine until after midnight, but after lunch on the following day, undeterred by snow and wind, Peter and his guests–Count Hendrikov and his wife, the Shafirov family and Prince Dashkov–set out for Catherine’s dacha in twelve small sledges. There was ‘much pleasure and a lot of laughter’ as they tumbled in the snow. The grand duchess herself served Italian liqueurs ‘in her beautiful round house at the top of the hill’, as they all ‘drank coffee and milk from the farm, with black bread and butter’.
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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:

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.’
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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!’
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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.
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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).
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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