Catherine the Great (9 page)

Had it been summer, Sophie and her mother would have been greeted by ‘rows of clipped yew-trees, long straight canals’ and what her own generation, fond of less formal layouts, would dismiss as ‘a profusion of preposterous statues’: ‘every little structure was a pantheon; and every grove was haunted by its Apollos and Dianas’.
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For the moment, however, the gardens on which Empress Anna had lavished such careful attention were deep in snow, and the Court was resident not in Rastrelli’s Summer Palace but at the nearby Winter Annenhof (re-christened the Golovin Palace by imperial decree on 29 February) on the other side of the Yauza.
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This ornate wooden structure had been transferred in its entirety from the Kremlin in 1736 before being enlarged and embellished six years later in preparation for Elizabeth’s coronation. Its interiors were brightly painted in green, yellow and blue–all typical colours for Russian palaces in the first half of the eighteenth century.
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Having met the new arrivals at the foot of the ceremonial staircase, Field Marshal the Prince of Hesse-Homburg, a leading member of the pro-Prussian party at Court, offered his arm to Johanna Elisabeth and led them to their apartments. There they were joined by the household of Grand Duke Peter, who apparently burst in on Sophie’s mother as she was loosening her head-dress. A little before 10 p.m., another anti-Austrian schemer, the empress’s surgeon Armand Lestocq, announced that the empress was ready to receive them. Having been presented to the ladies-and gentlemen-in-waiting in the crowded ante-chamber, where Johanna Elisabeth was conscious of being scrutinised ‘from head to toe’, they processed through the state apartments to the audience chamber, where the thirty-five-year-old empress appeared before them on the threshold of her state bedroom.

Sophie would soon come to suspect that Elizabeth’s ‘good looks and natural sloth had significantly spoiled her character’. ‘Her beauty ought to have saved her from the envy and rivalry she exhibited against every woman who wasn’t remotely hideous; but in fact, the anxiety not to be outdone by anyone else was the cause of the extreme jealousy which often threw her into bouts of captiousness unworthy of her majesty.’
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At this first meeting, however, the star-struck girl followed
dutifully as Elizabeth, wearing a huge hooped skirt, embroidered in silver and gold, with a black feather to one side of her head and diamonds in her hair, admitted them to the state bedroom. There they spoke in French for about half an hour before retiring to eat, observed incognito by the empress, who dined separately during the Lenten Fast.
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Next day, Peter’s birthday, Sophie caught her first sight of Aleksey Razumovsky, ‘one of the most handsome men I have seen in my life’.
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He had first been listed among Elizabeth’s servants in 1731, when he was recruited to join the ranks of other talented Ukrainian singers in the Court choir. He soon caught the eye of a princess devoted to Orthodox chant, and even when a throat infection ruined his voice, forcing him instead to take up the
bandura
(a large Ukrainian mandolin), his dashing looks were enough to preserve the spell. Before long, he and the tsarevna were sharing a bed. They may even have married in secret in 1742, though neither this ceremony nor persistent rumours of children have ever been substantiated. Still, there is no doubt that the languid Razumovsky–the most equable of men unless roused by drink–was Elizabeth’s right-hand man until the end of the 1740s. Revelling in the riches she bestowed upon him, including vast estates at Kozelets in his native Chernigov province, he took no active part in either her coup or her subsequent government. But to judge from the number of petitions he received and the fawning attitude of the empress’s ministers, many Russians shared the view of the Saxon envoy that she hung on his every word.
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Even if such judgements depended on a widespread misapprehension that only men were fit to rule, Aleksey was at his mistress’s side on all major Court occasions as Grand Master of the Hunt. Now he was on hand to pass her the insignia of the Order of St Catherine, which she presented to Sophie and her mother ‘in a ritual of sorority that simultaneously welcomed them as “princesses of the blood” and placed them formally under Elizabeth’.
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Since the empress customarily took her annual communion after confession at the end of the first week of the Lenten Fast, Sophie’s first experience of the incense-filled world of the Russian Orthodox Church was one of the most emotional services in the ecclesiastical calendar. In the mocking phrase of a later foreign diplomat, Lent was a time when ‘mushrooms, pickled cucumber, prayers and priests succeed to the active dance, the becoming dress, the genial banquet and the gallant officers’ and when Court ladies were left with nothing ‘to subsist on but faith, hope and meditation–faith in the constancy of their lovers, hope that the same dear delusions may return, and meditation upon pleasures past’.
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In 1744, however, the conventional routine was broken by a hectic round of
social gatherings as the curious Russian elite scrambled to meet the new arrivals and they in their turn settled into the endless games of cards with which the Court passed the time between Lenten vigil services. Elizabeth herself occasionally called on Sophie and her mother as a sign of her satisfaction with them. Indeed, when the empress set out at the beginning of March on one of her frequent pilgrimages to the Trinity monastery, forty miles north-east of the old capital, all seemed set fair for the future.
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Disaster struck on the following Tuesday when Sophie suffered an attack of pleurisy, the first serious illness she had ever experienced. Convinced that it must be smallpox, Johanna Elisabeth refused to allow doctors to bleed her daughter, alleging that her brother, Karl Friedrich, had perished under similar treatment in Russia in 1727. While the bickering continued, Sophie lapsed into a state of delirium until the Saturday, when Elizabeth returned to take command. With the agitated Johanna Elisabeth in attendance, she held the girl’s head in her arms as a surgeon opened the first vein. Over the following four weeks, while her mother was kept out of the way and the empress offered prayers for her recovery in a variety of Moscow churches, bleedings were repeated with a vengeance, sometimes as often as four times a day. It is hard to be sure of the effects of this treatment. Sophie certainly did not lack for medical expertise. Abraham Boerhaave, Peter’s doctor, was related to the celebrated Dutch specialist, Herman Boerhaave, while the empress’s personal physician, António Sanches (1699–1783), a baptised Portuguese Jew who had studied with Boerhaave at Leiden, was a specialist in venereal disease who later published a treatise on the curative powers of steam baths.
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Yet if her memoir is to be believed, it was not until an abscess on one of her inflamed lungs burst of its own accord that their severely weakened patient began to regain her strength. She managed her first tentative steps around her bedroom at the beginning of April. Though this episode is understandably thought to have bequeathed a lifelong suspicion of doctors, it is worth remembering the tribute she paid to Sanches and Abraham Boerhaave in 1771: ‘I swear by God that it is to their care that I owe my life.’ Soon after she came to the throne, she rewarded Sanches with an annual pension of 1000 roubles.
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To Sophie’s anxious Prussian sponsors, her recovery came as a blessed relief.
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The Russian Court expressed its gratefulness with a series of lavish presents, all duly publicised in the official press. Elizabeth had already rewarded the girl’s bravery after the first bleeding with earrings and a diamond cluster variously estimated at between 25,000 and 60,000 roubles. Now more jewels and a diamond watch from the grand duke helped to compensate for Sophie’s distress at having
to appear in public at the ball in honour of her fifteenth birthday. Heavily rouged, at the empress’s insistence, she was as ‘thin as a skeleton’ and miserably conscious that her scalp had been shaven as smooth as her hand. ‘I thought I looked frighteningly ugly and was unable to recognise my own features.’ The loss of her hair was especially keenly felt at a time when she ‘had the finest hair in the world: it curled naturally without being waved or crinkled in any way’.
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More damaging for the pro-Prussian party at Court was Johanna Elisabeth’s behaviour during Sophie’s illness. Well aware that daughters of eighteenth-century princely houses were little more than saleable breeding stock, she had been enterprising in the search for a match for her firstborn. Dizzy with success on arrival in Russia, she failed to grasp that she was bound to lose control of her prized asset as soon as the deal had been done. Instead, still dreaming of a glorious future for herself, she rashly attempted to help topple the pro-Austrian vice chancellor Bestuzhev. Perhaps she had been lulled into thinking that this would be a simple operation by the pro-Prussian courtiers who had watched over her since that first dinner at the Winter Palace.
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No doubt her pretensions had been further inflated by Frederick the Great’s promise to ‘do everything in the world to bring what we have begun to a happy conclusion’. For the king, struggling against Austria for mastery of Germany in the wake of his invasion of Silesia in 1740, Bestuzhev’s removal seemed ‘a
sine qua non
’: ‘We need a minister at the Russian Court who would compel the empress to do as we wish.’
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To achieve this aim, which he regarded as the essential precondition for a triple alliance between Prussia, Russia and Sweden, Frederick was prepared to trust even such an inexperienced agent as Johanna Elisabeth. He was amply repaid for his folly. At the beginning of June, when the king was contemplating a desperate attempt to bribe the vice chancellor to switch sides, Bestuzhev presented the empress with more than seventy decoded dispatches revealing Johanna Elisabeth’s unguarded conversations with his other main enemy, the former French ambassador, the Marquis de la Chétardie. The consequences could hardly have been more embarrassing. Bestuzhev was promoted Chancellor; Chétardie was arrested and escorted to the border; Johanna Elisabeth’s reputation was permanently blackened. Reduced to tears by the empress’s ‘terrible wrath’, she, too, would soon be obliged to return home.
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The sole consolation for the pro-Prussian party was their success in persuading Elizabeth not to cancel plans for Sophie’s wedding. Though Lestocq had feared the worst when the scandal broke, the empress had invested too much political capital to send the girl packing now. The sooner she married, the sooner
Russia could be rid of her meddlesome mother, and the sooner the succession could be secured. Since the couple were not yet formally engaged, and a crucial precondition of their betrothal was Sophie’s conversion to Orthodoxy, it was all the more pressing to complete her induction to the Russian faith. Frederick, who feared that her stubbornness in matters of religion would be the greatest stumbling block to the whole project, was confident that she could be brought round by careful persuasion. To make the task as painless as possible, her conversion was entrusted to Archimandrite Simon (Todorsky), a monk who had studied in Halle, the nerve centre of the Pietist religion in which she had been raised. Only 29 of his 800 books were in Russian, the overwhelming majority being in German, Latin and Greek.
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At a time when Orthodox theologians depended so heavily on Western scholarship, it was not so difficult to argue that the two faiths were separated more by external rituals than by essential doctrine. Simon assuaged any anxieties on the former score by ascribing the Russian Church’s famously flamboyant rites to popular superstition. He probably did not have to work very hard. Sophie’s acceptance of Orthodoxy is the first clear sign of her lifelong grasp of the realities of power. Since there was plainly no alternative, she wrote coolly to her father at the beginning of May that because she could detect ‘hardly any difference’ between Orthodoxy and Lutheranism, she had already resolved to convert.
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Following her first visit to the Trinity monastery later that month, she settled down to prepare for her baptism. Like the great majority of the Orthodox episcopate until the 1760s, Simon was a Ukrainian whose pronunciation proved controversial when she came to learn the creed. (The poet and versifier Alexander Sumarokov later blamed the ‘shameful’ influence of Ukrainian bishops for the ‘incorrect and provincial dialect’ allegedly adopted by the Russian clergy as a whole.)
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Sophie, who was given a German translation to ensure that she grasped the meaning, eventually opted to recite the Slavonic text ‘parrot-fashion’ in the Russian diction recommended by her language tutor, Vasily Adodurov, a likeable writer and grammarian twenty years her senior who was to become a valued friend and confidant. ‘Otherwise you will make everyone laugh with your Ukrainian pronunciation,’ Peter warned.
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On the appointed day, Thursday 28 June, Elizabeth had the girl dressed in scarlet and silver to match her own costume and led her in solemn procession through packed antechambers to the chapel of the Summer Annenhof. Sophie was left kneeling at the door while the empress went in search of the abbess of the Novodevichy convent, chosen as the new convert’s baptismal sponsor in the face of fierce competition among the Court ladies. (Having already
performed this function for her nephew, Elizabeth was unable to repeat the honour for Sophie since by Orthodox tradition those who have the same baptismal witness are unable to marry.) When the ritual finally began, the girl knelt on a red cushion to receive the blessing of Amvrosy (Iushkevich), who had less than a month to live as archbishop of Novgorod. (This was the same ‘bigoted or corrupt prelate’ to whom Frederick the Great’s ambassador, Baron Mardefeld, had offered a bribe of 2000 roubles to overcome the Holy Synod’s scruples about a match between two such close relatives, with a promise to ‘triple the dose’ when the deed was done.)
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Then Sophie stood to declaim the confession of faith in words that she did not yet understand before reciting the creed from memory to a tearful congregation. If critics detected any failings in her confident performance, then they kept their opinions to themselves. Those who had most to lose were keenest to praise her achievements. Sophie was ‘a heroine’, Mardefeld declared. Johanna Elisabeth was predictably emotional: ‘I was already so overcome in advance that I burst out crying before she had reached the end of the first word.’
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