Sex with the Queen (30 page)

At the age of forty Catherine was exhausted from spending twenty years of her life pacifying her volatile, sadistic husband.

Though she pasted a professional smile on her face whenever she heard of Peter’s orgies, she must have been deeply hurt. She had grown corpulent from bearing ten children and taking out her unexpressed frustrations at the table. Life as empress of all the Russias was, perhaps, not as good as life as a laundress.

And then William Mons began to flirt with her. Peter’s hand-some chamberlain Mons was blond, elegant, and foppish, a complete contrast to his master. He sent her romantic verses confiding his deep love for her. Some reported that Catherine’s passion for William was “so violent that everyone perceived it.”5

Everyone except Peter, who was eventually informed by an anonymous letter. In November 1724 the czar found the two in a rendezvous in a palace garden and angrily told Mons to leave. No sooner was Mons back in his room lighting a pipe than the secret police came. Enraged that the servant girl he had raised to em-press was unfaithful, Peter had several courtiers interrogated and tortured, and their letters seized.

Catherine’s female accomplice had been, as tradition de-creed, her lady-in-waiting. Matriona Balk, the sister of William Mons, had arranged the secret meetings and taken letters back and forth. But most of the other ladies-in-waiting had either been involved or at least known about the affair.

William Mons was condemned to be beheaded, but not for having sex with the empress. It was a gentlemen’s agreement that he would suffer his penalty under the name of another crime, stealing from state coffers. It would preserve Peter’s pride. Mons spent his last hours writing romantic verses:
It is love which brings about my downfall
There is a fire burns in my breast

From which I know that I must die.

I know the reason for my downfall:

That I have loved

Where I should only honor.
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On November 16 the handsome William Mons climbed up the scaffold, heard his sentence read out, bowed, took off his cloak and jacket, and asking the headsman to be quick, placed his head on the block. He was quick. Mons’s head was placed on a stake, his body tied to a wheel. Matriona Balk and the other guilty ladies-in-waiting were whipped on their bare backs, also al-legedly for corruption. Matriona was exiled to Siberia.

Throughout all this, Catherine showed a calm serenity, knowing that any sign of agitation would inflame Peter, who might send her to the scaffold as well. The day of her lover’s ex-ecution, the empress calmly attended her daughters’ dancing lesson. The French envoy reported, “Although the Empress hides her grief as much as possible, it is painted on her face, so that everyone is wondering what may happen to her.”7 The next day Peter issued orders that no one was to obey any command given by the empress. Catherine was immediately cut off from all funds and had to borrow money from those ladies-in-waiting who had not been whipped and exiled. Perhaps she wondered if she would be sent to a convent like his first wife, Eudoxia, or murdered in prison like his son, Alexis.

The day after Mons’s execution, Peter drove her in an open sleigh to see the grisly remains of her lover. She betrayed no emotion, not even when the edge of her gown rubbed against a black and stiffened leg projecting from the wheel. After they re-turned to the palace Peter stomped up carrying a priceless Venetian vase. “Do you see this?” he asked. “It’s made from the simplest materials. Artistry has made it fit to decorate a palace, but I can return it to its former valueless condition.” He smashed it on the floor.

“Of course you can,” she replied with characteristic practical-ity, “but do you think that you made the palace any more beauti-ful by breaking that vase?”8

Peter, furious that Catherine showed no emotion despite his threats, decided the situation called for something more. That evening when Catherine returned to her room she found William Mons’s gaping head staring at her in a bottle of alcohol e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y r u s s i a 1 3 7

on her table. She ignored it. After several days, realizing he would get no reaction from her, Peter had the head removed.

The Saxon envoy wrote his master, “They almost never talk to each other. They no longer eat together, they no longer sleep to-gether.”9 Peter muttered ominously about Henry VIII’s effective manner of dealing with Anne Boleyn. But in the meantime, he was angling to marry his two daughters to Western rulers, and slicing off their mother’s head for adultery would not help his case. He already was encountering problems disposing of the girls because they were illegitimate, born to the czar’s washer-woman mistress before he had married her.

In December 1724 Peter was stricken with a urinary tract in-fection which became rapidly worse. By January he was suffering from kidney stones and a relapse of the venereal disease he had picked up in his youth. A physician perforated his swollen blad-der and removed four pounds of urine. But the bladder was al-ready gangrenous.

When Peter died on January 28, 1725, Catherine was pro-claimed empress. Dazed, she blindly signed documents placed before her, wandered around Peter’s workrooms, and handled his beloved tools. She never gripped the reins of power but handed them to her numerous lovers.

A mere figurehead, Catherine loved pomp and ceremony, es-pecially banquets where she overate and drank herself senseless.

She took different men into her bed every night and ordered new carriages and daring gowns. But it made no difference. For nothing could fill the huge gap where Peter had stood, all six feet eight inches of him. He had so completely dominated her life that when he was torn out of it, the space would remain forever vacant. She tried to pack the emptiness full with food and drink and sex, with games and pageants and midnight wanderings. But still the void remained.

Worn out by excess, Catherine died in 1727 after two years as empress. She was forty-four years old.

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E m p r e s s E l i z a b e t h a n d t h e N i g h t E m p e r o r

Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great and Empress Catherine I, did not succeed directly to the imperial throne. At her mother’s death the nobles proclaimed as czar Peter II, the thirteen-year-old son of her murdered half brother, Alexis. When the sickly boy died after three years, Elizabeth’s waspish cousin Anna was chosen as empress by nobles who hoped to find the disappointed, neglected woman putty in their hands. Widowed six weeks after her marriage at the age of seventeen, she had not been permitted to remarry and had lived in lonely exile for two decades. Surely she would be grate-ful to those who put her on the throne. They were mistaken.

Tart, sour, and yellow-faced as a lemon, Anna set about wreaking revenge on those who had wronged her. And Elizabeth, by virtue of her impudent youth and blond beauty, wronged the empress on a daily basis. Elizabeth had inherited her command-ing height from her father and stood taller than most men. She had a ravishing figure, a dazzling complexion, and gorgeous wide blue eyes. When New Year’s fireworks ushering in the year 1737

shattered a window, cutting Elizabeth’s face, Anna was delighted.

She was less pleased when the wounds healed perfectly, leaving no trace of a scar.

Worse than the sin of her beauty was the fact that Elizabeth was politically inconvenient. Many discontented factions at court hoped that the statuesque daughter of Peter the Great would stage a coup and proclaim herself empress. Anna, well aware of these hopes, debated whether she should imprison the girl, mur-der her, or send her to a convent.

Elizabeth’s behavior proclaimed that she lived for love, not for politics. Reckless and extravagant, she took into her bed pages, peasants, ambassadors, doctors, and soldiers. The duque de Liria, who served as Spain’s ambassador to St. Petersburg, re-ported, “The behavior of the Princess Elizabeth gets worse and worse each day. She does things without shame, things that would make even the humble blush.”10

She was described as “content only when she was in love,” and e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y r u s s i a 1 3 9

refused to hide her passions under a veil of false modesty.11 Her lack of restraint possibly kept her alive, for the ruling powers saw her as a person of no political significance, a woman who lived for sex and dancing.

Yet Elizabeth’s flighty persona was a concoction to help her survive in a scorpions’ nest. While vaunting her numerous love affairs, she carefully concealed her political acumen. The British envoy’s wife reported, “In public she has an unaffected gaiety, and a certain air of giddiness that seems entirely to possess her whole mind. . . . In private I have heard her talk with such a strain of good sense and steady reasoning that I am persuaded the other behavior is a feint.”12

Sensing the cold hand of death upon her, Empress Anna arranged for her niece’s son, the infant Ivan, to succeed her.

This would serve the twin purpose of disinheriting Elizabeth and allowing Anna’s lover of thirty years, Ernest Biron, to rule as re-gent. But in 1741, after only a year, Biron was chased out of power by an opposing faction and Anna Leopoldovna, Ivan’s mother, became regent.