Read Catherine the Great Online
Authors: Simon Dixon
On her acceptance into the Russian faith, Princess Sophie Auguste Friderike at last became Yekaterina Alekseyevna, a name chosen by Elizabeth in honour of her own mother, Catherine I. That night, after receiving yet more diamonds from the empress and allowing courtiers to kiss her hand for the first time (a formal ceremony which lasted almost two hours), Catherine and Peter drove incognito across Moscow to the Kremlin in preparation for the following day’s betrothal service on the feast of Sts Peter and Paul.
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After morning prayers in her apartments, they processed through the Palace of Facets and out onto the Red Staircase exactly as she would eighteen years later at her own coronation. Before the liturgy in the Dormition Cathedral began, Elizabeth placed engagement rings on the fingers of her heir and his fiancée. Now Catherine had a new title–grand duchess–as well as a new name. As cannon fired to signal the moment to the expectant crowd, the liturgy began, culminating with a sermon by Metropolitan Arseny of Rostov, the only prelate who protested against her secularisation of the monastic lands twenty years later (he paid the price with lifelong monastic imprisonment). At lunch in the Palace of Facets, Elizabeth sat beneath a canopy at the centre of her customary dais with Peter to her right and Catherine to her left. As always at a Russian banquet, there was a series of elaborate toasts. The empress toasted her heir; he returned the compliment; she toasted his new fiancée before finally raising her glass to all her loyal subjects. More festivities followed in the evening so that it was half past one in the morning before the exhausted couple started the journey back to the Golovin Palace. Elizabeth stayed up even
longer to watch the fireworks on the Ivan the Great bell tower.
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Relieved to hear of the triumphant conclusion of his schemes, Frederick the Great laid on the flattery with a trowel:
I count it among the finest days of my life to have seen the elevation of Your Imperial Highness to this high rank. I am happy to have contributed to it and pleased to have rendered service to my dear ally, the empress of Russia, and all her vast empire by procuring a princess of your abilities, Madame, as a bedfellow for the Grand Duke.
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Though they were not quite yet ready to sleep together, Catherine and Peter seem initially to have got on well enough, and until the Court set out for Kiev at the end of July after celebrating the peace with Sweden, Catherine had seen little of the empress’s irascibility.
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It was only at close quarters on the journey south that cracks in their relationships began to appear. Delayed by inaccurate mileposts, which she insisted must be replaced later that year, Elizabeth was in a foul temper by the time she caught up with the young couple at Razumovsky’s estate at Kozelets, where Johanna Elisabeth had her first serious argument with Peter. They relieved the tension by gambling for high stakes for a fortnight.
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On arrival at Kiev in the last week of August, Catherine had her first taste of the embarrassment caused by over-eager subjects. When they went to see a theatrical performance staged in the grounds of a nearby convent, where they had to pass through the chapel to reach their seats, it became clear that they were in for a long evening:
There were prologues, ballets, a comedy, in which Marcus Aurelius hanged his favourite, a battle in which the Cossacks defeated the Poles, a fishing scene on the Boristhène [the River Dnieper], and choruses without end. The empress kept her patience until almost two in the morning, when she sent someone to ask if it might finish soon. She was told that they were not yet half way through, but that if Her Majesty ordered it, they would stop straightaway.
Stop they did, but only to launch a disastrous firework. The first rockets flew straight into the main marquee, causing pandemonium among the imperial party and a stampede of the horses waiting patiently by the nearby carriages.
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The main reason for visiting Kiev was to pay tribute to the cradle of Orthodoxy in the empire, for it was there that Prince Vladimir had accepted the Christian faith in 988. At the Monastery of the Caves, the pious empress was in her element. Though it would soon be possible, with the aid of a telescope, to see back to Kozelets from the top of the Baroque bell tower which she commissioned, the monastery’s real ‘sights’ lay within its own walls, in the catacombs and in the ancient Cathedral of the Dormition, where the relics of the great men of Kievan Rus were objects of open veneration (the head of Vladimir himself had been returned to the monastery in 1634).
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Catherine and her fiancé were forbidden entry to the catacombs in case they caught a chill, but she was much taken by the cathedral. ‘I had never been more struck in my life,’ she recalled in 1771, ‘than I was by the extreme magnificence of that church, where all the icons were covered in gold, silver and jewels. The church itself is spacious and built in the Gothic style of architecture that gives churches a much more majestic appearance than the current ones, where the size and transparency of the windows makes them indistinguishable from a ballroom or a [winter]–garden.’
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Back in Moscow for Elizabeth’s name day on 5 September, the Court launched into its customary autumn round of celebrations. Although Catherine took dancing lessons with the ballet master Jean-Baptiste Landé, nothing in her experience had prepared her for the cross-dressing balls that so delighted the empress. Elizabeth enjoyed showing off her excellent legs, but no one else took much pleasure from these so-called metamorphoses, at which the men were forced to stumble about the dance floor in huge hooped skirts.
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They were happier watching the French comedies and German dramas staged at the 5000-seat opera house built near the Golovin Palace for Elizabeth’s coronation in 1742.
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No less important to the life of the Court were its ‘theatres of piety’ in which the imperial family celebrated the major autumn feasts in the Orthodox calendar: the Nativity of the Mother of God on 8 September, the Exaltation of the Honourable and Life-Giving Cross on 14 September, and the Presentation of the Mother of God in the Temple on 21 November.
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Since the reign of Empress Anna, this last had been appropriated as the annual celebration of the Semënovsky Guards, so that the day which began with morning service culminated in a banquet and ball.
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Now there were two new fixtures to add to the list of secular festivities: the birthday of Johanna Elisabeth on 13 October and Catherine’s name day on 24 November. The following day was Elizabeth’s accession day–the most significant event in the Court calendar.
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The sickly Peter missed it all, being
confined to bed by a chest infection in October and by chickenpox in November. Only when he seemed well enough to travel did the Court depart for St Petersburg.
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Begun by Bartolomeo Rastrelli almost as soon as the Court returned from Moscow in January 1732, the Winter Palace he completed three years later was a highly embellished wooden structure incorporating the mansion which had once belonged to Peter the Great’s Admiral Apraksin. Empress Anna’s apartments struck visitors as ‘rather beautiful’ but ‘not very imperial’, because they were small and dark.
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Catherine and Peter were to think better of them during their brief occupation in the winter of 1746. This time, however, there was no room in the palace for either of them. While the lower floor was allocated to the small army of servants, actors, musicians and guards who accompanied the Court, the fun-loving Elizabeth was busy converting the upper rooms formerly occupied by her ladies-in-waiting to make space for a new merry-go-round, complete with expensively saddled wooden horses, to replace the dilapidated machine which stood outside the Summer Palace at the time of Catherine’s arrival in Russia.
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She and Johanna Elisabeth were lodged in a neighbouring house, where for the first time they had separate apartments on either side of the main staircase. Catherine had known of Elizabeth’s orders in advance. For her status-conscious mother, who had not, it came as a shock:
As soon as she saw this arrangement, she lost her temper,
primo
, because she thought that my apartment was laid out better than hers;
secondo
because hers was separated from mine by a shared room. In fact, we each had four rooms, two at the front and two overlooking the courtyard, and the rooms were of equal size, furnished in exactly the same blue and red fabric.
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Squabbles about precedence were the last thing Catherine needed now that her fiancé had again been taken ill on the journey from Moscow. On learning of this new outbreak of pox, accompanied by a high fever, Elizabeth raced back from St Petersburg to join her nephew at Khotilov, a staging post between Novgorod and Tver where they had all celebrated her birthday on 18 December. Cancelling the New Year’s banquet, she stayed with him there until his recovery was assured, having cannon hauled specially from Tver to celebrate Epiphany, though Khotilov was too far from the river to conduct the customary blessing of the waters.
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By 26 January, empress and heir were safely back at Tsarskoye Selo. When they returned to the capital at the beginning of the following month, Catherine and
her mother were taken straight to see Peter in the gloomy great hall of the Winter Palace. Johanna Elisabeth reported to her husband in Zerbst that Providence had granted the youth a miraculous recovery. Catherine remembered the scene differently:
All of his features were distorted; his face was still completely swollen, and one could see that he was bound to be permanently scarred. As his hair had been cut, he wore a huge wig that disfigured him all the more. He came up to me and asked if I found it difficult to recognise him. I stammered my congratulations on his recovery, but in truth he had become hideous.
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At best this was a disconcerting turn of events. Yet there was nothing to be done about it now. While Lent kept her pock-marked fiancé out of the public eye between his birthday and hers, preparations for their marriage continued in earnest.
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Since Princess Charlotte of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, the consort of Peter the Great’s ill-fated tsarevich, had been permitted to retain her Lutheran faith, Elizabeth instructed Count Santi, her Master of Ceremonies, to model Catherine’s wedding on the marriage of her own elder sister, Anna Petrovna, to Karl Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp in 1725. On discovering that no records of that occasion survived, Santi had to work partly on oral tradition but above all on the basis of his own researches into the practice of rival European Courts.
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The plan he presented to the College of Foreign Affairs on 22 March 1745 left plenty for the empress to decide. The seating arrangements for Johanna Elisabeth and her brother, Prince Adolf Friedrich, were a particularly sensitive matter. Unbeknownst to either Catherine or her mother, her uncle had been invited to Russia by Chancellor Bestuzhev, and his arrival on 5 February, motivated by his desire to gain control over the affairs of the duchy of Holstein, caused nothing but trouble.
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(‘His appearance alone did him no favours,’ Catherine later commented. ‘He was very small and badly proportioned, not at all intelligent, hot tempered, and furthermore governed by his entourage.’) Santi, however, had already resolved to dispense with the idea of seating the bride under a canopy so that she could offer wine to the guests who came to congratulate her. Such an ‘Oriental’ custom might be appropriate for the ‘middling sort’, declared the haughty
Piedmontese, who had spent the whole of Anna’s reign in exile in Siberia, but it was scarcely compatible with ‘good practice in the courts of Sovereigns’.
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When it came to opulence, there was no question which of these Courts had set the standard. It can hardly have been a coincidence that the official press chose the eve of the announcement of Catherine’s nuptials to report on the festivities at Versailles following the Dauphin’s marriage to the Spanish Infanta.
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‘Never has finer magnificence been witnessed than during those three days,’ insisted the
St Petersburg News
on 15 March. ‘Diamonds worth 250 million were on display, not counting the crown, which is estimated at 70 million. The attire of the Dauphin and his wife alone stretched to 45 million.’
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To allow them to prepare in suitable style, the leading Russian statesmen (known collectively as the
generalitet
because they ranked with army generals on the top four ranks of Peter the Great’s Table) were advanced a full year’s salary, normally paid in instalments every four months. Elizabeth issued a personal decree urging each of them to spend the money on ‘worthy costumes, as rich as possible, open landaus and other carriages, decorated where possible in silver and gold’. Since the celebrations were to continue for several days, more than one new outfit was permitted for each person, and courtiers were allowed separate carriages for their wives.
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Catherine took no pleasure from the prospect. From the moment her marriage was announced, she was barely able to speak of it. Indeed, it is in describing that moment that the final version of her memoirs first mentions the word ‘melancholy’, or what we might now think of as depression. An earlier version, hinting at much the same symptoms, says that the closer the event approached, the sadder she became, and she ‘often burst into tears without really knowing why’.
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Even if we discount the calculated note of martyrdom, it seems likely that a sense of foreboding took the edge off her first summer in St Petersburg, a romantic time when the river was alive with a flotilla of small craft, and the ‘white nights’ hummed to the melancholy sound of boatmen’s lullabies. The Court enjoyed its cruises too. Resident from 9 May at the new wooden Summer Palace on the Fontanka–one of Rastrelli’s most attractive creations, demolished by Tsar Paul to make way for the Mikhailovsky Palace–Catherine and her fiancé sailed by barge to the Peter-Paul Fortress to celebrate his name day on 29 June.
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The day after the banquet for the Order of the Polish Eagle on 25 July, where she sat between the empress and Adolf Friedrich, they all boarded sloops to Aptekarsky Island in the delta of the Neva.
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Earlier that week, they had joined Elizabeth and a large group of courtiers on board the Dutch vessel
St Petersburg
to inspect the luxury goods it had brought to Russia.
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