Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (12 page)

E
LIZABETH 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. Petersburg. 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.

Charles Augustus reached St. Petersburg on October 16, 1726, and made a favorable impression. Elizabeth saw him as the kinsman of her adored older sister’s husband, which made it easy for her to fall in love. The engagement announcement had been set for January 6, 1727, when Empress Catherine I was stricken by a series of chills and fevers. The ceremony was postponed until she recovered. The empress did not recover; instead, she grew worse, and in April, after reigning only twenty-seven months, she died. In May, only a month after her mother’s death, Elizabeth decided to go ahead with her marriage. Then, on May 27, on the eve of her engagement announcement, her prospective husband, Charles Augustus, was stricken; several hours later, the doctors
diagnosed smallpox; four days later, he, too, was dead. Elizabeth, her happiness shattered at seventeen, cherished his memory for the rest of her life—although as her hopes for a conventional marriage slipped away, her sadness did not prevent her from seeking consolation with other men.

When Catherine I died, the throne passed to Peter the Great’s eleven-year-old grandson, who became Emperor Peter II. In July 1727, soon after Catherine’s death, the Duke of Holstein decided that he had been in Russia long enough. Having spent his childhood in Sweden and six years of his young manhood in Russia, the hereditary duke was belatedly accepted as the ruler of his German duchy. He and his wife, Anne, departed for Kiel, the capital of Holstein, with a generous Russian pension.

Left behind, Elizabeth was plunged into grief. Within six months, her mother, her future husband, and her beloved sister had all abandoned her. Although, by her mother’s will, she now was next in line to the throne after Peter II, she posed no political threat to the youthful tsar. Indeed, she turned to him for friendship, and soon she and her nephew, a handsome, physically robust boy, tall for his age, became companions. Peter enjoyed his aunt’s beauty and bubbling high spirits and liked having her nearby. In March 1728, when the court moved to Moscow, Elizabeth accompanied him. She shared the young emperor’s passion for hunting, and together they galloped through the hills of the Moscow countryside. In summer, they went boating together; in winter, sledging and tobogganing. When Peter was not there, Elizabeth sought other male companions. She confessed that she was “content only when she was in love,” and there was talk that she had been generous in giving pleasure to the young emperor himself.

To the world, she might seem madcap, but despite her frivolity, there was another side to Elizabeth. She was a serious religious believer, and her moods of precipitous pleasure-seeking were followed by extended retreats into prayer. When in a mood of piety, she would spend hours on her knees in churches and convents. Then life would reach out for her again in the form of some laughing Guards officer. She was endowed with her father’s ardent impetuosity and never hesitated to gratify her desires; before she was twenty, there were reports that she had given herself to six young men. She was unashamed; she told herself that she had been made beautiful for a reason and that fate had robbed her of the only man she had ever really loved.

She remained indifferent to power and responsibility. The friends who urged her to take more interest in her future were turned away. Then, there was a moment when the throne itself seemed there for the taking. On the night of January 11, 1730, fourteen-year-old Peter II, dangerously ill, died of smallpox. Elizabeth, then twenty, was asleep nearby. Her French physician, Armand Lestocq, burst into her bedroom, saying that if she arose, presented herself to the Guards, showed herself to the people, hurried to the Senate, and proclaimed herself empress, she could not fail. Elizabeth sent him away and went back to sleep. By morning, the opportunity had evaporated. The Imperial Council had elected her thirty-six-year-old cousin, Anne of Courland, as empress. Elizabeth’s failure to act was based partly on her apprehension that if she moved and failed, there was the chance of disgrace, even imprisonment. The stronger reason was that she was not ready. She did not want power and protocol; she preferred freedom. She never regretted that night’s decision. Later, she said, “
I was too young then. I am very glad that I did not assert my right to the throne earlier; I was too young and my people would never have borne with me.”

The council had pushed Anne of Courland forward that night because it believed that Anne would prove a weaker, more docile monarch than the daughter of Peter the Great. Anne, who had left Russia twenty years before as a seventeen-year-old widow and who had remained unmarried and had no children, was the daughter of Peter’s gentle, weak-minded half-brother and co-tsar, Ivan V. Peter had been fond of Ivan, and when his hapless brother died, Peter swore to take care of his wife and her three young daughters. Peter kept his word. In 1710, after his victory at Poltava, he arranged the marriage of his half-niece, seventeen-year-old Anne, to nineteen-year-old Frederick William, Duke of Courland. The marriage, however, was brief. Peter himself arranged a gargantuan wedding feast at which the new bridegroom drank himself into a stupor. On leaving Russia a few days later, he developed colic, went into paroxysms, and died on the road. His young widow begged to be allowed to remain with her mother in St. Petersburg, but Peter insisted that she take up her position in Courland. She obeyed and, supported by Russian money and military power, became the ruler of the duchy. Twenty years later, she still was there, governing with the aid of her German secretary and lover, Count Ernst Johann Biron. When the Imperial Council of Russia offered her the throne, the offer was hedged with many conditions: she was not to marry or appoint her
successor, and the council was to retain approval over war and peace, levying taxes, spending money, granting estates, and the appointment of all officers over the rank of colonel. Anne accepted these conditions and was crowned in Moscow in the spring of 1730. Then, with the support of the Guards regiments, she tore up the documents she had signed and reestablished the autocracy.

Despite her crown, Anne was always wary of Elizabeth. Concerned that her twenty-one-year-old cousin might constitute a threat, she took Elizabeth aside when the younger woman came to pay her respects. “My sister,” Anne said, “we have very few princesses of the Imperial House remaining and it therefore behooves us to live together in the strictest union and harmony, whereto I mean to contribute with all my power.” Elizabeth’s cheerful, open reply partially convinced the empress that her own fears were exaggerated.

For eleven years, from the age of twenty to the age of thirty-one, Elizabeth lived under the rule of Empress Anne. At first, she was expected to attend court on formal occasions and sit demurely near the empress. Elizabeth did her best, but nothing could prevent her outshining her cousin. Not only was she the only living child of Peter the Great, she was also the undisputed belle of the imperial court. Eventually, she wearied of the strain of living at court and retreated to a country estate, where she resumed her independent life, and her behavior and morals were free of court surveillance. A magnificent horsewoman, she often rode dressed as a man; her purpose was to display her legs, which were shapely and could best be admired in male breeches. Elizabeth loved the Russian countryside, with its primeval forests and wide meadowlands. She joined in the lives of the peasants and shared their amusements: dancing and singing, mushrooming in summer, tobogganing and skating in winter, sitting before a fire, eating roasted nuts and butter cakes.