Catherine the Great (55 page)

Though the infirmities of old age had done nothing to dull her mind–in addition to her memoirs, she was still at work on a history of Russia in the last years of her life–they made it harder for Catherine to cope with the stresses of Court ceremonial. The arrival in August 1796 of a 140-strong Swedish delegation was bound to take its toll. Led by the duke of Sudermania, the brother of the late Gustav III, the Swedes had come to secure the betrothal of the empress’s eldest granddaughter, Alexandra, to the uncrowned Gustav IV. All the magnificence of the Russian Court was laid out to impress the young king, but on 11 September, when the ceremony was due to take place, he refused to appear, objecting to Catherine’s insistence on a written guarantee that Alexandra would be allowed to practise the Orthodox faith in Lutheran Sweden. Whether or not the empress suffered the mild
seizure rumoured by one contemporary, she was irritated and exhausted by such a public failure.
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Although she summoned the energy to celebrate the thirty-fourth anniversary of her coronation at a ball in the St George’s Hall of the Winter Palace, the throne room completed by Quarenghi in 1792, public appearances were now infrequent. At lunch in the Diamond Room on Friday 31 October, Arkady Morkov, the negotiator who had struggled in vain to satisfy the Swedes, sat beside companions of much longer standing. Catherine had known Ivan Shuvalov even before he became Elizabeth’s favourite in 1749; the Marshal of her Court, Prince Fëdor Baryatinsky, had guarded her husband at Ropsha on the fateful night in 1762 when Peter III was assassinated; soon afterwards, the faithful Anna Protasova had joined the Court ladies at the behest of Aleksey Orlov (according to Countess Golovina, she was nicknamed ‘la reine’, because she was as dusky as the queen of Tahiti). Later that evening, these intimates were joined at the Hermitage by the empress’s grandsons and granddaughters, as the empress watched a French comedy incognito in the presence of her Court and the whole
generalitet
.
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That, it transpired, was the last entry in the Court journals for Catherine’s reign. The end, when it came, took everyone by surprise. On the morning of Wednesday 5 November, she settled down to her papers after her customary morning coffee. But when the duty chamberlain arrived sometime after nine, he found her palpitating body, barely conscious, on the floor of the neighbouring dressing room. Despite his efforts to revive her, she lapsed into a coma from which she never recovered. Six men were required to lift her into the bedroom, where Dr Rogerson, having diagnosed a stroke, tried in vain to bring her round. Soon Catherine’s confessor was summoned; Metropolitan Gavriil arrived that afternoon. Tended by Protasova and Maria Perekusikhina, their sovereign was vomiting so much blood that it was only when the flow briefly abated that she could be given communion and anointed with holy oil. Count Nikolay Zubov was sent to Gatchina to fetch Grand Duke Paul, who had dreamed the night before of being visited by a mysterious, unknown force. Though he rushed to take charge at the Winter Palace, there was little he could do. Informed at dawn next morning that all hope was lost, he ordered that Catherine be given the last rites. Now he could only watch and wait as his mother’s pulse gradually faded. Not until a quarter to ten on the evening of 6 November 1796 did the most famous woman in Europe finally breathe her last.
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THE AFTERLIFE OF AN EMPRESS

A
fter thirty-four years on the throne, Catherine had become synonymous with Russian rule. Most of her subjects could remember no other monarch. Finding it impossible to imagine anyone else in her place, the Court was stunned by her unexpected demise. ‘No one knew what to do,’ admitted Platon Zubov’s dwarf amanuensis, Ivan Yakubovsky: ‘The mind could not grasp that this time had come.’
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It did not take them long to realise, however, that in an intensely personal monarchy such as the Russian empire, the accession of a new ruler could immediately signal a radical reversal of regime. By the time that shocked courtiers arrived at the Winter Palace on the morning after Catherine’s death, ‘the change was so great that it looked like nothing other than an enemy invasion’.
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All the empress’s ‘brilliance’ seemed to have vanished into thin air as her successor staged the first of the military parades that were to dominate life at his Court. Not for nothing did the poet Derzhavin refer to Tsar Paul’s accession as an act of conquest: armed soldiers were everywhere. ‘The ease and tranquillity of the late Reign are lost with Her from whom they deriv’d,’ the British ambassador reported barely a fortnight after Catherine’s death. ‘A most severe and exact discipline is introduced into every department both civil and military, and this with such a degree of rigour, as has even absolutely chang’d the face of society.’
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The Russian succession in 1796 was in practice no more controversial than it had been in December 1761 on the death of Elizabeth. In accordance with Peter the Great’s succession law of 1722, Catherine had nominated her Russian-born son as her heir immediately after her coup. Although her growing dissatisfaction
with Paul prompted her to investigate the history of the regulations governing the succession when she returned from the Crimea in 1787, and rumours circulated after 1791 that she intended to disinherit him in favour of her grandson Alexander, it seems unlikely that she would ever have taken such a fateful step. Alexander’s Swiss tutor claimed to have suffered ‘the two most unpleasant hours’ of his life at an audience in 1793, in which the empress, without raising the subject directly, apparently tried to persuade him to broach the idea with his pupil. Paul certainly lived in trepidation that his mother might disinherit him, and some historians believe that he found and destroyed a draft law of succession on the night of 6 November. Yet the circumstances of Catherine’s own accession surely ruled out any open discussion of the subject while she was alive. To issue a law of succession would have been to advertise her status as a usurper.
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In any case, no prominent actor at the Court of St Petersburg seriously doubted that Paul would inherit the throne. The only uncertainty lay in what he would do once he finally had power within his grasp. It was obvious to all that his natural impatience had been intensified by years of waiting in the wings. While the grand duke remained isolated at Gatchina, endlessly parading his troops, the cream of Russian society had been anxious for some time about what lay in store for them. After Potëmkin’s death threw into question the future of his extensive network of clients, John Parkinson was told in 1792 that Paul’s accession was to be ‘feared’ because he was ‘anxious to make alterations and regulations which would make it more difficult to commit abuses’. The following year, Parkinson was again warned that ‘all may not go well, perhaps’ at the empress’s death.
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No one, however, had fully anticipated the speed and determination with which the new tsar would reject everything his mother had stood for. ‘The most important practices of the Court were changed,’ recalled Countess Varvara Golovina, ‘and with the wave of a baton he destroyed what had taken a glorious reign of thirty-four years to consolidate.’
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Appalled by the paltry burial that Catherine had given to Peter III, whom he always regarded as his father, Paul initially intended to consign the empress to an equally anonymous grave in the cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky monastery. There would have been no clearer way of declaring that his mother had no right to rule. Only when he was persuaded that this was politically impossible did he consent to funeral arrangements that followed the pattern established for Russia’s rulers since the death of Peter the Great.
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Catherine’s corpse was embalmed on 8 November and carried on 15 November from her bedroom to the audience chamber of the Winter Palace. It was an emotional scene for the courtiers who
had been closest to her. According to Countess Golovina, who recalled the ceremony in openly sentimental terms, the occasion was stage-managed by the new empress, Maria Fëdorovna, whose officious approach to the proceedings ‘cut me to the heart’. The countess herself claimed more in common with the melancholy scene she observed through the door of the Chevaliers Gardes’ Room, which was draped from floor to ceiling in swathes of black silk and lit only by the flickering flames in the hearth. ‘A mournful silence reigned in the apartment, interrupted only by sobs and sighs,’ as the Chevaliers, dressed in their red capes and silver helmets, stood listlessly about, ‘some leaning on their carbines, others lying on chairs’. Only the sound of the approaching funeral chant roused the countess from the ‘depression’ into which this ‘mournful sight’ had plunged her:

Six gentlemen of the bedchamber carried the train while ten chamberlains bore the corpse to a raised bed covered with red velvet fringed with gold. At the end of the ceremony, the whole imperial family ‘prostrated themselves in turn in front of the body and kissed the hand of her deceased Majesty’. Once they had withdrawn, a priest began to read from the Bible, while six Chevaliers Gardes formed a guard of honour around the bed. The countess returned home ‘after being in attendance twenty-four hours, exhausted both in mind and body’.
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Ten days later, Catherine was laid to rest in a coffin done out in gold fabric decorated with Russian imperial crests and taken to a chamber of mourning in the palace’s Grand Gallery. Familiar to the Court as the site of its glittering balls and masquerades, the gallery had been transformed by the erection of an elaborate chamber of sorrows designed by Antonio Rinaldi. This dome-shaped structure, supported by classical pillars and topped by a bronze statue of the imperial eagle, enclosed the coffin on a raised platform beneath a canopy draped in black velvet with silver fringes. The corpse was dressed in a robe of silver brocade. A gold brocade mantle trimmed with ermine and silver tassels was placed at its feet. As leading courtiers stood in vigil over their late sovereign, and bishops and archimandrites chanted requiem services around the clock, only badly dressed
peasants were refused admission to the lying-in-state as the public flocked in to pay their respects with a final kissing of hands.
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Paul agreed to such pomp and ceremony only in order to undermine it by extraordinary means. Three days after his mother’s death, the tsar announced plans for a joint funeral at the Peter-Paul Cathedral, in which Peter III, rather than Catherine, was bound to be the focal point of attention. The point, he sardonically remarked, was merely to remedy her ‘oversight’ in failing to accord her husband a proper burial: ‘My mother, having been called to the throne by the voice of the people, was too busy to arrange for my father’s last rites.’
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On 10 November, after paying their respects to Catherine’s corpse, the imperial family were ordered to attend a requiem service for Peter III in Rastrelli’s Winter Palace chapel. On 19 November, Peter’s remains were exhumed from their anonymous grave and opened in the tsar’s presence at the Cathedral of the Annunciation at the Alexander Nevsky monastery. Since the corpse had never been embalmed, the remains were severely corrupted. Paul nevertheless insisted on kissing them, and returned to the monastery on 25 November to place a crown on top of a new golden coffin, in posthumous compensation for the coronation that his father had never staged. The casket was transferred to the Winter Palace on a hearse drawn by eight horses on the morning of 2 December. The procession, which lasted two and a half hours and was followed by the whole Court, was described by the Swedish ambassador as ‘the most august, melancholy, and in every respect compelling ceremony I have ever experienced’.
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Officials permitted it to proceed only provided that the temperature did not drop ‘below 15 degrees of frost’.
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In a particularly macabre gesture, the tsar humiliated the eighty-year-old Aleksey Orlov, the last surviving participant in the dreadful events at Ropsha in 1762, by ordering him to carry the large crown in the procession. (An allegorical engraving of the exhumation by Nicolas Ancelin portrayed Orlov alone reacting in horror.) One memoirist favourable to Paul recalled that Orlov broke down in the cathedral and took the crown with trembling hands. Two more surviving conspirators from 1762–Peter Passek, the Governor General of Belorussia, and Prince Fëdor Baryatinsky, the recently dismissed Marshal of the Court–were forced to do penance by carrying the corners of the pall-cloth.
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On arrival at the Winter Palace, Peter’s coffin was placed alongside Catherine’s in Rinaldi’s chamber of mourning. But there was no sense that the two were to be seen as equals. To make the point that Paul ruled by right as Peter’s son, the large crown was placed on Peter’s casket; Catherine’s bore only the small crown as a symbol of her posthumous dethronement. Their funeral was held on 5
December, following the customary procession across the ice to the cathedral, where the two coffins were placed side by side on a catafalque designed by Vincenzo Brenna.
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Only after two further weeks of vigil and requiem masses were they lowered side by side into the vault. The tsar even prevented Metropolitan Amvrosy (Podobedov) from reading a graveside oration in memory of his mother. Amvrosy, who had lauded Catherine for the ‘security, peace and glory’ she had brought to Russia as recently as the anniversary of her coronation in September 1796, was not to mention her name in public again until the thanksgiving service for the peace with Sweden in 1809.
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Everything Paul did seemed to signal his contempt for his mother’s claims to immortality. He converted her treasured Tauride Palace into stables and had Charles Cameron’s unfinished Temple of Memory at Tsarskoye Selo, built to celebrate her victory over the Turks in 1792, pulled to the ground five years later.
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Although Catherine had ensured that Paul received an Enlightened education from Nikita Panin and Father Platon, her son unaccountably developed an obsession with medieval chivalry. The tsar was elected Grand Master of the Knights of Jerusalem in 1798. Metropolitan Platon was horrified to learn that he even contemplated extending the Russian orders of chivalry to the Orthodox episcopate. In a welter of legislation–by one estimate, Paul issued 48,000 orders in the first year of his reign alone–he reversed Catherine’s trend towards civilian government, imposing an overwhelmingly military ethos modelled on the regimes of Peter III and Frederick the Great. In such a hostile climate, prudent admirers of the late empress understandably thought discretion the better part of valour. Some may have contemplated symbolic ways to commemorate her, as Prince Nikolay Lvov seems to have done in designing a statue of Minerva for Bezborodko’s Moscow estate in 1797, but it was not until the accession of Alexander I in 1801 that the prospects for a public revival of her reputation improved.
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In the event, Paul’s reign lasted less than five years. In his anxiety to discipline his subjects, he went too far too fast, alienating the elite with a series of measures that undermined the privileges Catherine had granted to them in the Charter to the Nobility–not content with limiting their freedom of expression and freeing their serfs from Sunday labour, the tsar himself lashed out at nobles with his cane. On 1 February 1801, the imperial family moved into the new Mikhailovsky Palace, a fortress built on the site of Rastrelli’s wooden Summer Palace, which Paul had ordered to be demolished. Less than six weeks later, he enjoyed his last meal in the company of nineteen relations and courtiers. Many of them would have been familiar to his mother. Alexander and Constantine were both present
with their wives; so were Alexander Stroganov, Alexander Naryshkin and Nikolay Yusupov. Later that night, 11 March 1801, he was strangled in his apartments by a group of disaffected officers coordinated by St Petersburg’s Governor General, General Count Peter von der Pahlen. With fitting symmetry, Paul’s brief reign ended, like that of Peter III, in cold-blooded assassination. However his successor might rule, he could never openly imitate Paul’s example.
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Instead, the new tsar, Alexander I, promised in his accession manifesto that he would rule according to his grandmother’s ‘heart and laws’.
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Delighted by the prospect, Princess Dashkova anticipated an opportunity to bask in Catherine’s reflected glory. Although their tempestuous relationship had ended in tears–as early as 1792, John Parkinson found that ‘her conversation evidently savoured of disaffection to the empress’–the princess was never less than effusive after Catherine’s death, relishing the opportunity to regale visitors such as Martha and Catherine Wilmot with tales of ‘the wonderful scenes of the revolution in which she acted
so
wonderful a part at the age of 18’.
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Noting that Dashkova always pronounced Catherine’s name ‘with rapture’, one of her Russian acquaintances suggested that her oratory was so mesmerising that her ‘audience unwittingly submitted to her attractive eloquence’.
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That was stretching the truth. Catherine Wilmot felt uncomfortable in the face of the princess’s stories: ‘These subjects as ripping up a life that is almost past gives [
sic
] a powerful sort of agitated animation to her Countenance, & I long till it is over.’
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But Dashkova was undeterred. Apparently oblivious to such reactions, she sought a wider readership by sending anecdotes about Catherine to the new journals that sprang up under Alexander I, and in 1806 published a volume of anecdotes of her own, praising the empress’s ‘most kind and affectionate love for humanity, a love that rarely dwells in the hearts of rulers’.
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