Read Catherine the Great Online
Authors: Simon Dixon
By the time she moved to Zerbst, Sophie was already chafing at the restrictions of her restricted family society. She found a more attractive model on a visit to Countess Bentinck at Varel in the duchy of Oldenbourg. ‘I found her charming. How else could she have seemed to me? I was fourteen; she rode, danced whenever the fancy took her to do so, sang and laughed and skipped about like a child, though she was well over thirty at the time–she was already separated from her husband.’
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That phrase in the mature Catherine’s memoirs acquires an extra frisson in the light of the fate of her own assassinated spouse. At the time, however, minds were naturally concentrated on the initial task of finding her a partner.
Though both Prince William of Saxe-Gotha and Prince Henry of Prussia (who was later to visit her twice in St Petersburg) had started to pay her attention at the age of twelve or thirteen, her most assiduous suitor as she approached marriageable age was a close relative.
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Under the disapproving gaze of Babet Cardel, Georg Ludwig of Holstein-Gottorp, her mother’s younger brother, became infatuated with Sophie when he was twenty-four and she was ten years younger. How far he awakened her adolescent sexuality remains uncertain, though the passage in her memoirs in which she refers to ‘galloping astride her pillows’ has often been interpreted as a veiled reference to masturbation.
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Sophie saw no harm in his kisses–‘he was thoughtful and affectionate’–and apparently agreed to a wedding provided her parents consented. But while Johanna Elisabeth seems to have done little to stem her brother’s ardour, ambition had already prompted her to cast her eyes further afield.
Even when she began to look for a more promising match, closer in age to her
daughter, there was no need to look beyond the confines of her well-connected family. At Eutin in 1739, on a visit to her elder brother, Adolf Friedrich, then Prince Bishop of Lübeck, Johanna Elisabeth had introduced Sophie to her second cousin, Karl Peter Ulrich, who had inherited the dukedom of Holstein-Gottorp earlier that summer at the age of eleven. Since his late father, Duke Karl Friedrich, had been nephew to the childless Charles XII of Sweden, Peter was widely expected to inherit the Swedish throne. His late mother, Anna Petrovna, who died a few months after his birth, had been the eldest daughter of Peter the Great of Russia, and he was a far more eligible prospect than Georg Ludwig. As Court gossip began to link his name with Sophie’s, Johanna Elisabeth watched his future with interest.
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Peter’s fortunes sharply improved when Peter the Great’s surviving unmarried daughter, Elizabeth, deposed the infant Ivan VI of Russia in a bloodless coup on 25 November 1741. The following February, she brought her nephew to St Petersburg, obliged him to convert to Orthodoxy, and in November formally declared him her heir in accordance with her father’s law of 1722, which permitted reigning tsars to nominate their own successors. This move not only helped to secure the succession in Russia, but also forced Peter to renounce his claim to the throne of Sweden, with which Russia was at war between 1741 and 1743. At Elizabeth’s insistence, the Swedish succession now passed to Sophie’s uncle, Adolf Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp, giving her scheming mother an added incentive to cultivate her relationship with the empress, who had been engaged to another of her brothers, Karl August, before he died of smallpox in May 1727.
Egged on by Frederick the Great, who promoted Sophie’s father to the rank of field marshal to enhance the family’s prestige, Johanna Elisabeth sent her daughter’s portrait to the tsaritsa, who responded with a diamond-encrusted picture of herself. Elizabeth knew nothing of Sophie’s personality. Aside from ties of sentiment to the House of Holstein-Gottorp, she was attracted mainly by the prospect of a marriage alliance with a Protestant family in Prussian service. This promised the Court of St Petersburg a foothold in northern Germany to balance the diplomatic alliance with Austria which had dominated Russian foreign policy since 1726. Against the advice of her pro-Austrian vice chancellor, Aleksey Bestuzhev-Ryumin, who would have preferred a Catholic Saxon fiancée for Grand Duke Peter, Elizabeth invited Sophie to Russia at the end of 1743.
Catherine’s memoirs paint a remarkably domesticated portrait of the scene at Zerbst when the invitation arrived:
On 1 January 1744, we were all seated at the table when my father was handed a big packet of letters. After tearing open the first envelope, my father passed to my mother several letters addressed to her. I was sitting beside her and recognised the hand of the marshal of the Court of the duke of Holstein, the Grand Duke of Russia. This was a Swedish gentleman, named Brummer. My mother had written to him several times in 1739 and he had replied. My mother opened the letter and I saw the words: ‘
with the princess, her elder daughter’
. I knew at once what it meant–I guessed the rest and it turned out that I had guessed right. My mother had been invited by him on behalf of the Empress Elizabeth to come to Russia under the pretext of thanking Her Majesty for all the benefits she had conferred on my mother’s family.
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Despite Catherine’s claims that the decision to accept this invitation was her own, taken in the face of her Lutheran father’s profound misgivings, the invitation had in reality been engineered by Johanna Elisabeth, who had already learned from Frederick the Great that the empress intended to pay 10,000 roubles for their travel expenses.
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Faced with what amounted to an imperial summons, mother and daughter departed for St Petersburg without delay on 10 January 1744 NS.
Though Sophie’s feelings as she set out for Russia can only be imagined, excitement was surely tempered by trepidation. Isabella of Parma, who married the future Joseph II of Austria twelve years later, described a predicament shared by many European princesses in the eighteenth century: ‘There she is, condemned to abandon everything, her family, her country–and for whom? For an unknown person, whose character and manner of thinking she does not know.’
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Thanks to her meeting with Peter at Eutin, that was not quite Sophie’s situation. Indeed, as a German prince, born and raised in Kiel, the grand duke might have been expected to offer her a measure of familiar comfort in alien surroundings. Kiel, after all, was almost as insignificant as Zerbst in the eyes of the Russian elite, who scoffed that the whole city was no bigger than St Petersburg’s Summer Garden.
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Neither is it necessary to suppose, as Catherine’s memoirs later implied, that she faced a stark choice between obeying her future husband and overthrowing him. Though it was by no means easy for an intelligent woman to live a fulfilled life as a royal consort in the eighteenth century, it was certainly not impossible. Cultural patronage offered a natural opportunity for uncontroversial activity,
eagerly grasped by most European queens. The more determined among them could also play a significant role in government, either as political hostesses or as surrogate rulers behind the scenes. We shall never know how the philosophically minded Isabella would have coped with Joseph II, because death (a constant preoccupation in her prolific writings) snatched her from him not long after their wedding. However, Sophie’s childhood friend, Juliana Maria, overcame both shyness and a stutter to become the effective ruler of Denmark in conjunction with her favourite for twelve years after the coup of 1772.
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And although it was obviously easier for a female consort to dominate a weak king–Elizabeth Farnese, the ambitious second wife of Philip V of Spain, became notorious across Europe for her influence over her depressive husband
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–consorts of even the most powerful monarchs could carve out a workable division of labour. Frederick the Great despised Court flummery and spent progressively more of his time in male company at Potsdam to avoid its offensive trappings. But since it was unthinkable for a king entirely to dispense with a Court, the gap was filled by Juliana Maria’s elder sister, Queen Elisabeth Christine, whose summer palace at Schönhausen and regular reception days at Berlin provided a crucial meeting place for diplomats and foreign visitors.
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However uncertain she may have been about her future, Sophie was acutely conscious of how much she was leaving behind, subsequently portraying her journey to Russia in terms of sacrifice rather than opportunity. By convention, Christian August was not invited, though he accompanied his daughter to Berlin, where Frederick looked her over while instructing her mother about her conduct in St Petersburg. Though few of her contemporaries were to play such an important part in Sophie’s life, she never saw the king again. She caught her last glimpse of her father at a tearful parting at Schwedt an der Oder on 17 January, the day after leaving Berlin. ‘The separation was as sad as one could possibly imagine,’ she remembered in 1756.
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After that, she faced an uncomfortable trek across the wastes of Pomerania and East Prussia, so bereft of snow that winter that the journey had to be made in carriages rather than sleighs. Peering through narrow eye-slits in the woolly hats that protected their faces, they left Stargardt (now Szczecinski) in icy conditions on 18 January. From there, it was a tortuous progress eastwards through Keslin, skirting Danzig, and over the Vistula to Marienwerder.
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Although Frederick William I had already attempted to drain the Oder Marshes in the 1730s with the help of Dutch hydraulic engineers, the epic work of transforming the watery landscape east of the Oder still lay in the future in 1744. Over the next
thirty years, it would be the king’s son, Frederick the Great, and his colonists who transformed the valleys of the Elbe, the Oder, the Warthe, the Netze and the Vistula into productive agricultural land. (‘Making domain lands cultivable interests me more than murdering people,’ Frederick remarked in a characteristic jibe against his brutal father.)
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At the time of Sophie’s departure for Russia, the whole area remained a patchwork quilt of stagnant pools and marsh, punctuated by areas of thick, waterlogged brush–an unregulated paradise for outlaws and bandits, offensive in itself to the standardising instincts of Frederick’s Enlightened administration. Like much of the rest of Europe, such a landscape was barely passable in spring and autumn, when flooding washed away the tracks that snaked across the marshes. In winter, it was a perilous wilderness. Sophie and her mother avoided the worst dangers by keeping close to the coast. ‘Our journey was long, very boring, and very painful,’ she later remembered of their odyssey between primitive roadside inns. ‘My feet were so swollen that I had to be lifted in and out of the carriage.’
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During a rare day of rest at Königsberg, where another product of Pietism, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, was already a twenty-year-old student at the university, Sophie wrote to her father (in French). Mindful of the instructions he had signed at Zerbst on 3 January that no one must persuade her to renege on her religious beliefs, she adopted her most dutiful tone:
Monseigneur,
I have received with all imaginable respect and joy the letter in which Your Highness does me the honour of reassuring me about his health, about his remembrance of me, and his good wishes. I beg to reassure him that his exhortations and his counsel will remain eternally engraved in my heart, just as the seeds of our holy religion will be in my soul, for which I ask God to lend all the strength that I shall require to resist the temptations to which I am preparing to expose myself.
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Before she faced those temptations, however, there was still almost two-thirds of the journey to go. Passing north-eastwards into Courland–‘at all times a desert country’, as a British diplomat had been warned by the canny purveyors of Königsberg four years earlier–she saw the ‘terrible’ comet first observed from Sweden and the Netherlands at the end of November 1743.
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At its brightest in the following March, it displayed as many as twelve fanning rays in the manner of a peacock’s tail. ‘I have never seen a bigger one,’ the mature empress declared;
‘it seemed very near to the earth.’
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She was not alone in her fascination. Though clouds obscured the comet from much of the continent until the New Year, news of it spread rapidly in the European press. ‘The Comet this Evening appeared exceeding bright and distinct,’ recorded an Oxford astronomer on 23 January, ‘and the Diameter of its Nucleus nearly equal to that of Jupiter’s; its Tail, extending above 16 Degrees from its Body, pointed towards Andromeda; and was in Length (supposing the Sun’s Parallax 10") above 23 Millions of Miles; but cloudy Weather succeeding, we lost this agreeable Sight till Feb. 5th.’
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That must have been roughly when Sophie saw it. Since comets had until recently been regarded as portents of disaster, she might have been forgiven for wondering what such an apparition beheld for her in a distant foreign land.
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But she would mock Empress Elizabeth for holding such superstitious views in 1756, when popular scientific accounts of comets were about to appear in Russian journals.
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And twenty-one years after her experiences on her journey to St Petersburg, Grigory Orlov, a keen amateur astronomer, would read aloud from one such treatise while Catherine amused the rest of the company by fantasising about what might happen if a comet carried them away and turned them all to glass.
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It was a very different Russian nobleman who met Princess Sophie just beyond Mitau (now Jelgava in Latvia) and guided her over the frozen River Dvina into the Russian empire. Johanna Elisabeth and her daughter had first encountered the thirty-three-year-old Semën Naryshkin in Hamburg on his return from London. As a youthful ambassador to the Court of St James, he had gained ample practice in the diplomatic niceties that would serve him well as a future Marshal of Elizabeth’s Court. Now Master of the Hunt, no one was better equipped than this most flamboyant of courtiers to flatter Sophie’s mother, who assumed he must be a prince and exposed her delusions of grandeur with a gushing travel account that placed her at the centre of events. Since it had proved impossible to heat the imperial apartments at Riga, where they gained eleven days by reverting to the Julian calendar, she and Sophie were given tastefully furnished rooms at the house of a wealthy merchant, not unlike the one in which her daughter had been born. In every other respect, theirs was a royal progress, intended to overwhelm them with a sense of Russia’s imperial power and prestige as they drove through crowded streets to fanfares of trumpets and drums. ‘It feels as though I am part of the entourage of Her Imperial Majesty or some great princess,’ wrote the disingenuous Johanna Elisabeth: ‘It never enters my head that all this is for poor me.’
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