Read Catherine the Great Online
Authors: Simon Dixon
Behind the scenes, ministers had been preoccupied since April with a particularly expensive and controversial measure: the first census of the male tax-paying population since 1719–23. Because this had raised many of the most awkward problems confronting the Russian government in the eighteenth century–tax evasion by peasants who tried to conceal children born since the previous census; fugitive serfs and soldiers; vagrant clergy, and so on–it is perhaps not surprising that the wedding seems to have been postponed more than once.
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Peter’s doctors had urged that the event be delayed for at least a year to allow him to recover from the pox. By the end of July, however, all eyes were focused on the impending nuptials. ‘This Court is at present so busy in preparing for the Great Duke’s marriage,’ the British ambassador complained, ‘that every thing else is at a stand.’
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When Elizabeth finally gave her formal assent to Santi’s plans on 3 August, the ceremony was scheduled for the 18th. The annual celebrations in honour of St Alexander Nevsky, established in the Court calendar the year before, were duly brought forward from 30 August to 17 August, when Catherine made her first visit to the monastery with Peter and the empress.
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However, when the appointed day passed with only the customary Court reception, Lord Hyndford was unsure what would transpire. ‘The marriage, which was to have been solemnised as yesterday, is put off till tomorrow,’ he reported on 20 August, ‘and some say till Sunday next, or til the weather gets better, for we have lately had great rains here.’
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He need not have worried. So anxious was the empress to secure the succession and hasten the departure of Johanna Elisabeth that she would brook no further delay. The wedding was at last fixed for 21 August.
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Two days before the ceremony, Catherine and Peter moved with the rest of the Court into the Winter Palace, where her mother lectured her on her duties for the future: ‘we cried a little and parted very tenderly’.
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Woken by a canon salute at five on the appointed morning, the bride could see thousands of troops lining up on parade as she presented herself to be dressed in the empress’s state bedroom at eight o’clock. Though Elizabeth initially lost her temper with the hairdresser, he was eventually permitted to curl Catherine’s dark and unpowdered locks, now fully restored to their luxuriant prime. The empress placed a small crown on her head, leaving her mother to look on as the Court ladies continued their ministrations with her ‘awfully heavy’ dress, sewn with silver thread and embroidered in silver at the cuffs and hems.
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At ten o’clock, the carriages were ready to depart, led by a detachment of 100 Horse Guards. At the head of the procession came members of the
generalitet
, who drove off in order of rank and seniority, kept in line by a mounted officer for
every ten coaches. In this status-obsessed society, members of the first two ranks were allowed between eight and twelve lackeys to walk in front of their carriages with a heyduck on either side (a more senior male servant dressed in semi-military costume derived originally from the Hungarian style). Ranks three and four had proportionately smaller retinues, specified in the edict of 16 March. All of them wore richly decorated silk tunics: no velvet, Santi had stipulated.
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Although Russia’s wealthiest aristocrats had spent their salaries (and much more) just as Elizabeth had ordered, many of their coaches remained unoccupied, representing owners who took their places further back in the procession as officers of the Court. One such was Semën Naryshkin, whose empty open landau was made entirely from mirrored glass. ‘Even the wheels were covered in mirrors,’ Catherine’s son learned twenty years later from Count Nikita Panin, who had not forgotten Naryshkin’s tunic, embroidered with an elaborate silver tree whose branches and leaves flowed down the sleeves and cuffs.
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After the
generalitet
came the empress’s ladies-in-waiting and the officers of the Court, led by Aleksey Razumovsky with four huntsmen on either side of his carriage. Immediately behind him came Adolf Friedrich and Johanna Elisabeth, whose state coach was as big as the one allocated to her brother, only newer and finer, as she was naturally keen to stress. In 1706, six years before the Court moved to St Petersburg, 290 of the Muscovite Stable Chancellery’s 313 coaches had been built in the Kremlin itself. Some 250 craftsmen were still attached to the palace stables in the new capital in the middle of the eighteenth century. By then, however, demand was so high that the Court had begun to import coaches from Berlin, Vienna, Paris and London–all of them intricately carved and gilded in the Baroque style.
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To Catherine’s impressionable mother, the state coach in which Elizabeth travelled with the bride and groom seemed like ‘a small palace’ in itself. Preceded by drummers and trumpeters and flanked by the Master of the Horse and two mounted Adjutants General, it was drawn by eight horses, each led by its own groom, with two pages on the running board and six moors and twelve heyducks alongside. All of them wore the new state livery commissioned expressly for the occasion.
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Resplendent in shiny white boots, the Chevaliers Gardes who rode in front of the empress were allowed wigs or their own hair, done ‘in the Spanish fashion’. Whichever they chose, pigtails were banned.
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Doubtless expecting his dispatch to be opened by Russian officials, Lord Hyndford joined the chorus of diplomatic approval: ‘The procession was the most magnificent that ever was known in this country, and infinitely surpassed anything I ever saw.’
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So great was the number of coaches–125 all told–and so deep the ranks of the cheering populace, that it took almost two hours for the procession to lumber barely half a mile down the Great Perspective Road to the wooden church of the Nativity of the Mother of God. Designed by Mikhail Zemtsov and known as the Kazan Church because it housed a miracle-working icon of the Virgin of Kazan, closely associated with Petrine triumphs, the church had its bells decorated with the imperial monogram as a symbol of the sacralisation of tsarist power. Its main function following its consecration in June 1737 had been to hold thanksgiving services to commemorate Russia’s ever-lengthening list of military and naval ‘victory days’.
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Now Santi had decreed that ‘for the prevention of confusion and overcrowding’, all doors were to be guarded by sentries with strict instructions to admit no one without a ticket. While Rastrelli had arranged seating in the body of the church for the empire’s highest-ranking officials and the foreign ambassadors, other senior men and their families found places upstairs, though their numbers were limited in advance to prevent the choir loft from collapsing. Only the ‘common people’ were explicitly refused admission.
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At the end of the opening liturgy, the archbishop of Novgorod emerged from the sanctuary to request the empress’s permission to conduct the marriage. As Elizabeth led the couple to their places on a dais facing the altar, two more prelates emerged bearing the wedding crowns that according to Orthodox tradition were held over the heads of the bride and groom throughout the blessing (Peter’s crown was held by Prince Adolf Friedrich while Aleksey Razumovsky performed the same service for his bride). According to Catherine, who missed no opportunity to highlight the superstitions that penetrated to the apex of Russian society, one of the Court ladies whispered to Peter not to turn round, ‘because the one who turns first will be the first to die’. Whether he really told her to ‘clear off’ cannot be known (it is possible, but it sounds very much like one of Catherine’s attempts to besmirch his memory). After the rings had been exchanged, the couple turned to prostrate themselves before the empress, who lifted them to their feet and embraced them as they listened to Simon (Todorsky), now bishop of Pskov, preach a sermon praising Providence for uniting these two offspring of the houses of Anhalt and Holstein.
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By four in the afternoon, they were all back at the Winter Palace for a banquet. Catherine sat to Elizabeth’s left, next to her uncle, Prince Adolf Friedrich. Behind her, in attendance, stood Count Peter Sheremetev; Count Andrey Hendrikov served as her ‘carver’ for the meal. When the tables were cleared, she was so exhausted by the weight of her crown that she longed to remove it. But since that gave rise to another superstitious worry on the
part of her ladies, she was permitted to do so only after anxious consultations with the reluctant empress.
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The most theatrical celebration of all came on the following evening. That morning, after Peter had been formally congratulated by the ambassadors and leading statesmen, the Court transferred to the Summer Palace for lunch. While Her Majesty sat on her usual chair, upholstered in emerald green, Their Imperial Highnesses (as Catherine and Peter were to be called for the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign) were given trademark red ones embroidered in gold. Catherine was placed opposite her husband, between Elizabeth and Aleksey Razumovsky, who had an exultant Armand Lestocq on his other side. In their absence, the Winter Palace was made ready for a ball that went on until midnight, when the Marshal of the Court led the procession to dinner. While Elizabeth dined with the clergy and her intimates in a neighbouring stateroom, Peter and Catherine presided over a meal for 130 guests in a banqueting hall transformed for the occasion by Rastrelli.
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Let the architect describe his own fantastic creation:
Between the first two ledges of the tables another ledge was made, covered with turf, on which were arranged fifty pyramids with Italian flowers in earthenware pots, decorated with gilded carvings with festoons of the same flowers, and between them burned two rows of crystal lamps with candles made from the purest white wax. At the corners of the second table were eight fountains in the form of mushrooms, each three
funts
in diameter. To the side of each fountain stood two marble statues, three
funts
high. The whole of the large upper ledge was covered with glass pyramids burning with candles of various sorts, so that everything around the cascades and the pedestals of the statues was illuminated by some eight thousand flames. With the music that played throughout and the noise of the water flowing through the fountains, it all made for a magnificent spectacle.
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Since it was nearly two in the morning by the time fountains and orchestra ceased playing, the Court required a day of rest before the festivities could resume. Among the most colourful events still to come was a ball on 26 August. While lottery tickets were sold at 2 roubles each (there were 15,000 losing numbers and 2,000 winning ones), the guests formed into four quadrilles, each comprising seventeen pairs. Catherine’s set was dressed in white and gold, Peter’s in rose and silver, Johanna Elisabeth’s in light blue and silver, and the last, led by Adolf Friedrich, in yellow and silver. Disconcerted to find that each quadrille had
been ordered to stick to its allotted corner of the ballroom, a tearful grand duchess persuaded the Hofmarshal to allow them to mingle, since otherwise she would have been obliged to dance with courtiers as ‘lame, gouty and decrepit’ as her partner, Field Marshal Lacy. If it was an obvious exaggeration to claim that men such as Peter Shuvalov (b. 1710) were aged ‘between sixty and eighty’, he and the other senior members of her quadrille, who included Prince Nikita Trubetskoy and Count Mikhail Vorontsov, were no match for a fun-loving princess who had spent most of her first year in Russia playing riotous games with girls of her own age. ‘I never saw a more doleful or insipid entertainment,’ she recalled in 1791.
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Francesco Araja’s new opera,
Scipio
, which they had all attended the night before, must have run it close. Handel’s version of Scipio’s capture of New Carthage, drawn from the Roman historian Livy, had been premiered in London as long ago as 1726. But since his plot of a general exercising his rights of conquest over a beautiful female captive was scarcely appropriate for Catherine’s wedding, Araja’s librettist, the mediocre Florentine poet, Giuseppe Bonecchi, told a more conventional love story enhanced by his ballet intermezzo ‘Cupid and Psyche’. Even if the audience was reassured by the announcement in the extravagantly bound programme that the performance would be ‘at least a third shorter than last year’s’, they do not seem to have enjoyed it much. Though they dutifully sang a hymn in praise of the empress when it finished at half past ten,
Scipio
was reprised only once at Court.
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More immediately successful was the firework display on 30 August, the tenth and final day of the celebrations, preserved for posterity in an engraving by Grigory Kalachov. Stretching out behind a flaming obelisk bearing the emblems of the married couple, Elizabeth, and her father, Peter the Great, was a vast colonnade that catered to the empress’s anxieties about dynastic legitimacy by sheltering statues not only of Peter and his second wife, Catherine I, but also of his father, Tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich, and Tsar Mikhail Fëdorovich, the founder of the Romanov dynasty in 1613. The whole scene was set on a huge raft on the Neva, surrounded by tritons and all manner of fantastic sea creatures. In the foreground sat Neptune in a chariot drawn by sea horses, next to Venus, the goddess of love, who held two flaming hearts in her hands with two kissing doves behind her as a symbol of conjugal bliss.
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There could scarcely have been a less accurate image of the married life that Peter and Catherine were to lead. Although we have only her word for what happened on their wedding night, there seems little doubt that it was a disaster. By
the time she came to write her memoirs, Catherine’s growing reputation for sexual licence required her to emphasise her childlike innocence.
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Yet even allowing for a degree of special pleading, there seems no reason to think of her as anything but a virginal novice in 1745. Although sexual teasing was an integral part of life at any eighteenth-century Court, as her experiences with her Uncle Georg had shown, neither she nor Peter had been given any formal advice about ‘the difference between the sexes’ (her mother, she said, scolded her when asked) and the playful discussion she remembered with her young companions was presumably so laced with myth and folk tales as to be wholly misleading.
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When Elizabeth led the married couple to their newly prepared apartments after the dancing (in a formal procession led by the Masters of Ceremonies and the Marshal of the Court), the grand duchess’s ladies undressed her and put her to bed. She was left alone for more than two hours, ‘not knowing what I was expected to do’: