Catherine the Great, Page 4

  Despite the public attention Frederick paid to Sophia, the king’s private business was with her mother. It was Frederick’s plan that in St. Petersburg Johanna should become an unofficial Prussian diplomatic agent. Thus, quite apart from the long-term advantage of marrying Sophia to the heir to the Russian throne, Johanna, being close to the Russian empress, would be able to exercise an influence on Prussia’s behalf. He explained to her about Bestuzhev and his policies. He emphasized that as a sworn enemy of Prussia, the vice-chancellor would do everything in his power to prevent Sophia’s marriage. If for no other reason than this, the king insisted, it was in Johanna’s interest to do everything she could to undermine Bestuzhev’s position.

  It was not difficult for Frederick to fire Johanna’s enthusiasm. The secret mission entrusted to her delighted her. She was no longer traveling to Russia as a secondary personage, her daughter’s chaperone, but as the central figure of a great diplomatic enterprise: the toppling of an imperial chancellor. Carried away, Johanna lost her bearings. She forgot her oft-proclaimed gratitude and devotion to Elizabeth; forgot the advice of her earnest, provincial husband that she take no part in politics; and forgot that the real purpose of her journey was to escort her daughter to Russia.

  On Friday, January 16, Sophia left Berlin with her mother and father in a little procession of four coaches. In accordance with Brümmer’s instructions, the small group going to Russia was limited in number: the two princesses, one officer, a lady-in-waiting, two maids, a valet, and a cook. As arranged, Johanna was traveling under the assumed name Countess Reinbeck. Fifty miles east of Berlin, at Schwest on the Oder River, Prince Christian Augustus said goodbye to his daughter. Both wept on parting; they were not aware that they would never see each other again. Sophia’s feelings about her father, although formally expressed, shine through a letter she wrote two weeks later from Königsberg. She makes a promise that she knows will please him: that she will try to fulfill his wish that she remain a Lutheran.

  My Lord: I beg you to assure yourself that your advice and exhortation will remain forever engraved on my heart, as the seeds of the holy faith will in my soul, to which I pray God to lend all the strength it will need to sustain me through the temptations to which I expect to be exposed.… I hope to have the consolation of being worthy of it, and likewise of continuing to receive good news of my dear Papa, and I am, as long as I live, and in an inviolable respect, my lord, your Highness’s most humble, most obedient, and faithful daughter and servant, Sophia.

  Traveling toward an unknown country, propelled by an empress’s sentimentality, a mother’s ambition, and the intrigues of the king of Prussia, an adolescent girl was launched on a great adventure. And once the sadness of parting with her father had passed, Sophia was filled with excitement. She had no fear of the long journey or the complications of marrying a boy whom she had met only briefly four years before. If her future husband was considered ignorant and willful, if his health was delicate, if he was miserable in Russia, none of this mattered to Sophia. Peter Ulrich was not the reason she was traveling to Russia. The reason was Russia itself and proximity to the throne of Peter the Great.

  In summer, the road from Berlin to St. Petersburg was so primitive that most travelers chose to go by sea; in winter, no one used the road except diplomatic and postal couriers on urgent errands. Johanna, spurred by the empress’s demand for haste, had no choice. Although it was already mid-January, no snow had fallen, and sledges designed to glide across a packed surface could not be used. Instead, the travelers lumbered along day after day in heavy carriages, lurching and jolting over frozen ruts while freezing wind sweeping down from the Baltic whistled through cracks in the floor and sides. Inside one carriage, mother and daughter huddled together, muffled in heavy coats, with wool masks pulled over their cheeks and noses. Often, Sophia’s feet were so numbed by cold that she had to be carried from the carriage when they stopped to rest.

  Frederick had instructed that everything possible be done to ease the journey of “Countess Reinbeck” and her daughter, and in the Germanic towns of Danzig and Königsberg, his orders produced considerable comfort. After a day of creaking wheels and whips cracking on the horses’ backs, the travelers were met with warm rooms, pitchers of hot chocolate, and suppers of roasted fowl. Farther east along the frozen road, they found only crude postal stations, each with a single giant stove in its central common room. “The bedchambers were unheated and icy,” Johanna reported to her husband, “and we had to take refuge in the postmaster’s own room which was little different from a pigsty.… He, his wife, the watchdog, and a few children, all lay on top of each other like cabbages and turnips.… I had a bench brought for myself and lay down in the middle of the room.” Where Sophia slept, Johanna did not report.

  In fact, Sophia, healthy and curious, saw everything as part of her great adventure. While passing through Courland (now in Latvia), Sophia watched the giant comet of 1744 blaze across the dark night sky. “I had never seen anything so grand,” she wrote in her Memoirs. “It seemed very close to earth.” During one part of the journey, she made herself sick. “In these last days I had a little indigestion because I had drunk all the beer I could find,” she wrote her father. “Dear mama has put a stop to that and I am well again.”

  The cold grew worse but still it did not snow. From dawn to darkness, they rattled over the frozen ruts. Beyond Memel, there were no more postal stops, and relays of horses had to be hired from peasants. On February 6, they reached Mitau, on the frontier between Polish Lithuania and the Russian empire. Here, they were greeted by a Russian colonel, the commander of the frontier garrison. Farther down the road, they were met by Prince Semyon Naryshkin, a court chamberlain and the former Russian ambassador to London, who welcomed them officially in the name of the empress. He handed Johanna a letter from Brümmer, who reminded her not to forget, when she was presented to the empress, to show “extraordinary respect” by kissing the sovereign’s hand. On the bank of the frozen Dvina River across from the city of Riga, the city’s vice-governor and a civic delegation awaited them, along with a handsome state coach for the travelers’ use. Inside, reported Johanna, “I found ready to wrap us two splendid sables covered with gold brocade … two collars of the same fur, and a coverlet of another fur, quite as beautiful.” Mother and daughter then rode across the ice into the city while the guns of the fortress roared in salute; this was the moment at which the unknown Countess Reinbeck was transformed into Princess Johanna of Anhalt-Zerbst, mother of the wife-to-be of the future emperor of Russia.

  In Riga, the travelers moved their calendar back eleven days because Russia used the Julian calendar, which followed eleven days behind the Gregorian calendar employed in western Europe. In Riga, too, the snow finally began to fall. On January 29 (February 9 in Berlin and Zerbst), the two princesses left Riga for St. Petersburg. They traveled now in a magnificent imperial sledge—actually a wooden hut on runners, pulled by ten horses—hung inside with scarlet draperies trimmed with gold and silver braid and so roomy that it was possible for passengers to completely stretch out on quilted feather beds with silk and satin cushions. In this comfortable vehicle, with a squadron of cavalry galloping alongside, they proceeded to St. Petersburg. They reached the Winter Palace at noon on February 3. Their approach was signaled by the thunder of the guns of the Peter and Paul Fortress facing the icebound Neva River. Outside the palace, a guard of honor presented arms; inside, a crowd of people in bright-colored uniforms and silks and velvet smiled and bowed.

  Empress Elizabeth was not there; she had gone ahead to Moscow two weeks earlier, but many in the court and diplomatic corps remained behind, and Elizabeth had commanded that the visitors be given an imperial welcome. Johanna wrote to her husband:

  Here everything goes on in such magnificent and respectful style that it seemed to me … as if it all were only a dream.… I dine alone with the ladies and gentlemen whom Her Imperial Majesty has given me; I am served like a queen.… When I go i
n to dinner, the trumpets inside the house, and the drums of the guard outside sound a salute.… It does not seem real that all this can happen to poor me, for whom at only a few places a drum was ever stirred.

  It was not all for “poor me,” of course, but while her mother draped herself in these honors, Sophia stood by and watched. The truth was that she was more interested in the antics of fourteen elephants, presented to the empress by the Shah of Persia, performing tricks in the Winter Palace courtyard.

  To Frederick in Berlin, Johanna wrote in a different tone, presenting herself as his dutiful subject, working on his behalf. While the German princesses were being fitted with Russian wardrobes before proceeding to Moscow, Johanna had conversations with the two men in Russia whom Frederick had assigned to guide her. One was his own ambassador, Baron Mardefeld, the other the French minister, the Marquis de La Chétardie. The ambassadors reiterated that Vice-Chancellor Bestuzhev was fiercely opposed to the choice of Sophia as the bride of the heir. For this reason, they emphasized, he must be removed, and they counted on her assistance. Meanwhile, to put herself on the most amiable possible terms with the empress, they urged that she and her daughter hurry to Moscow in time to celebrate the new grand duke Peter’s sixteenth birthday on February 10.

  Guided by this advice, the two travelers left for Moscow on the night of February 5 in a cavalcade of thirty sledges. This time, they traveled smoothly and swiftly over four hundred miles of hard-packed snow on the best-maintained road in Russia, the winter highway used by the empress. When they stopped to change horses, village people stared and told each other, “It is the bride of the grand duke.”

  At four o’clock on the fourth day—it was the afternoon of February 9, 1744—the cavalcade reached a rest house forty-five miles from Moscow. There they found a message from the empress requesting that they delay their entrance into Moscow until after dark. While waiting, they drank fish soup and coffee and dressed for their presentation to the monarch; Sophia put on a rose-colored silk gown trimmed with silver. Meanwhile, to increase the speed of their sledge, sixteen fresh horses replaced the relays of ten that had brought them this far. Back in their sledge, they hurtled forward, reaching the walls of Moscow before eight. The city was dark until they reached the Golovin Palace, whose courtyard was lit by flaring torches. The journey was over. Now, at the foot of a wide staircase in the entrance hall, stood Otto Brümmer, the writer of the empress’s summons, to welcome them. They had only a little time to speak, to remove their furs and smooth their gowns. Within a few minutes, fourteen-year-old Sophia would stand before the empress Elizabeth and her nephew, Grand Duke Peter, the two people who, for the next eighteen years, would dominate her life.

  4

  Empress Elizabeth

  ELIZABETH HAD A FLAIR for the dramatic. On December 18, 1709, her father, Peter the Great, was just setting out through snowy streets of Moscow at the head of a parade celebrating his astonishing victory at Poltava the previous summer over his formidable enemy Charles XII of Sweden. Behind the tsar marched the regiments of the Russian Imperial Guard, followed by other Russian soldiers dragging three hundred captured Swedish battle flags through the snow, a file of defeated Swedish generals, and finally, by a long column of more than seventeen thousand Swedish prisoners, the remnants of the formerly invincible army that had invaded Russia two years before.

  Suddenly, an officer rode up to the tsar and delivered a message. Peter’s hand went up. The parade halted. The tsar spoke a few words, then galloped away. Soon after, Peter reined his frothing horse before the great wooden Kolomenskoe Palace outside Moscow and burst through the door. In a room, he found his wife just emerging from childbirth. Beside her in the bed lay an infant baby girl. Her name was to be Elizabeth and, thirty-two years later, she would become empress of Russia.

  Elizabeth was the fifth child born to Peter and the peasant who became his wife—the fifth of twelve, six boys and six girls, only two of whom lived beyond the age of seven. The other survivor was Elizabeth’s sister Anne, one year older. As far as the world knew, Elizabeth and Anne were both illegitimate; their father said that he had “not found the time” to publicly marry her mother, the buxom Livonian peasant Martha Skavronskya, renamed Catherine. In fact, in November 1707, Peter had married Catherine in private, but the secret was kept for reasons of state. Peter had already been married as a very young man, and his first wife, Eudoxia, to whom he was grievously ill-suited, had been divorced and placed in a convent. In 1707, with the Swedish army on the march, many traditional Russians would have found it shocking for the tsar to choose that moment to marry an illiterate foreign peasant. Five years later, with the victory at Poltava accomplished, Peter felt differently. On February 9, 1712, he married Catherine again, this time with public fanfare. At the second wedding, the two little girls, Anne and Elizabeth, then four and two, wearing jewels in their hair, served as their mother’s bridesmaids.

  Peter always said that he “loved both his girls like his own soul.” On January 28, 1722, when he declared thirteen-year-old Elizabeth to be of age, she was fair-haired, blue-eyed, brimming with energy and health. She delighted everyone with her laughter and high spirits; this in contrast to her more sedate older sister, Anne, whom she worshipped. Both Anne and Elizabeth received the education of European princesses: languages, manners, and dancing. They learned French as well as Russian, and Anne, the better pupil, also learned some Italian and Swedish. Many years later, the empress Elizabeth recalled the keen interest her father had taken in his daughters’ education. He came frequently to their rooms to see them and often asked what they had learned in the course of the day. When he was satisfied, he praised them, kissed them, and sometimes gave each a present. Elizabeth also remembered how greatly Peter regretted the neglect of his own formal education. “My father often repeated,” she said, “that he would have given one of his fingers if his education had not been neglected. Not a day passed in which he did not feel this deficiency.”

  When she reached fifteen, Elizabeth was not as tall and stately as her sister Anne, yet there were many who preferred the radiance of the lively blonde to the grace and majesty of the statuesque brunette. The Duke of Liria, the Spanish ambassador, described Elizabeth in superlatives: “She is a beauty the like of which I have never seen. An amazing complexion, glowing eyes, a perfect mouth, a throat and bosom of rare whiteness. She is tall and her temperament is lively. She is always with one foot in the air. One senses in her a great deal of intelligence and affability, but also a certain ambition.” The Saxon minister, Lefort, praised her large and brilliant blue eyes and he found irresistible her high spirits and her lighthearted sense of fun.

  At fifteen, she was considered ready for marriage. From the time of Peter the Great’s visit to Paris in 1717, the great tsar had hoped to marry Elizabeth to Louis XV, who was two months younger than she. Elizabeth had been schooled with this marriage in mind. She was taught the French language and court manners along with French history and literature. Campredon, the French ambassador to St. Petersburg, wholeheartedly endorsed the tsar’s plan: “There is nothing but what is agreeable in the person of the Princess Elizabeth,” he wrote to Paris. “It may be said that she is a beauty in her figure, her complexion, her eyes and her hands. Her defects, if she has any, are on the side of education and manners, but I am assured that she is so intelligent that it will be easy to rectify what is lacking by the care of some skillful and experienced person who should be placed near her if the affair should be concluded.” Yet despite this recommendation and the girl’s manifest charms, at Versailles her credentials were tarnished: her mother was a peasant, and the daughter may have been born out of wedlock. France did not want a bastard on or near the throne.

  Peter’s hope for Elizabeth was thwarted, but one of his two daughters was to marry. In 1721, when Elizabeth was not quite twelve and Anne was thirteen, Duke Charles Frederick of Holstein, the only nephew of Peter the Great’s legendary adversary Charles XII of Sweden, had come to St. P
etersburg. When King Charles had died, the duke had been displaced in Stockholm as heir to his dead uncle’s throne.

  In Russia, Peter welcomed the young man with a pension and a place of honor. To further advance his own cause, the duke began to pay court to Elizabeth’s sister Anne. Four years later, when Anne was seventeen—and despite Anne’s lack of enthusiasm for this suitor—the couple were betrothed in a service in which the emperor himself took rings from each partner and exchanged them with the other. Then, suddenly, on January 25, 1725, Peter the Great, fifty-two years old, died. Anne’s wedding was postponed while her mother assumed the throne as Empress Catherine I. On May 21, four months after her father’s death, Anna married Charles Frederick. Her fifteen-year-old sister, Elizabeth, was her bridesmaid.

  The death of Peter the Great and the marriage of his daughter Anne plunged the already complicated Russian succession into greater confusion. In a decree in February 1722, Peter had denounced as a dangerous practice, unfounded in scripture, the rule of male primogeniture, the ancient, time-honored sequence by which the grand dukes of Muscovy and later the Russian tsars had passed down the throne from father to eldest son. Henceforth, Peter declared, every reigning sovereign would have the power to designate his or her successor. Following his proclamation, Peter placed a crown on Catherine’s head and declared her empress.

  Her father’s early death profoundly affected Elizabeth’s future. The prospect of a brilliant match for Elizabeth became remote. Her mother still hoped for a French marriage, but Louis XV had married a Polish princess. At this point in St. Petersburg, Elizabeth’s new brother-in-law, Duke Charles Frederick of Holstein, began praising the merits of his twenty-year-old cousin, Prince Charles Augustus of Holstein (who happened to be a brother of Princess Johanna of Anhalt-Zerbst). Catherine I, who was fond of her son-in-law, agreed to invite this second young Holstein nobleman to Russia.