Great Catherine (21 page)

beasts harder with his whip and she was forced to leave the room. Peter despised pity, Catherine thought. It made him angry, and drove him to worse atrocities. She knew that this was only one of many signs that his mind was unhinged—though she did not dare say so in so many words.

She thought she knew what had unbalanced him. As she wrote in her memoirs later, Peter had developed, in his early twenties, "a thirst to reign." Knowing that he was heir to the Swedish as well as the Russian throne, he nourished a secret wish to be rescued from Russia by a call to become King of Sweden. In 1750 he thought that opportunity had come, but in the end events proved that he had been mistaken.

"He died of envy," Catherine wrote. His disappointment gnawed at him, and made him bitter. Now he was trapped, forced to live in a place he hated, under the thumb of an aunt who despised him and whom he had come to abhor, yoked to a wife whom he could not love and who was in every way more capable than he was. His thirst to reign was certain to be thwarted, for the kingdom that would one day be his was galling to him. Hence his uncontrollable drinking, his spasms of sadism, the caustic inner rage that ate away at him and caused him to take leave of his senses.

As ever, Catherine fell victim to his dark moods. A few months before Hanbury-Williams's arrival in Russia Peter had come staggering into Catherine's room, shouting and waving a sword, "reduced to brute animalism," as she put it, by drink and furious anger. He told her that she was becoming insupportably proud, backing her up against the wall and threatening her with his sword.

She played along with him, fending him off, as she often did, with good humor. "I asked him what this meant," she wrote later in her memoirs, recalling the distasteful scene, "whether he was going to fight with me. In that case I'd need a sword too."

He sheathed the sword and told her scathingly that she was unbearably malicious. His speech was slurred but Catherine

understood; he was complaining of her newfound boldness and assurance, her open attacks on the Shuvalovs.

She faced him, she did not back down. "I saw clearly," she wrote, "that the wine had separated him from reason." She told him firmly to go and lie down, and Peter, his head swimming and his brief burst of hostility past, staggered off to do as he was told.

She had won. She had nothing more to fear from Peter, for the moment. She had no illusions about him, she knew that he needed her and would continue to need her more and more in the future. Yet he was and would remain her enemy, and an enemy of the most dangerous kind, unpredictable, irrational, full of festering resentment.

Catherine had kept all this to herself. But now that Hanbury-Williams was on the scene, offering her his amusing company, delighting in her friendship, showing himself in every way her ally, she at last had someone to confide in. She knew full well that in cultivating her friendship the ambassador was furthering his own interests, and she was not above using him in turn to advance her own security and achieve her private ends. She gave him a great deal of information useful to his government; in return she asked him to loan her large sums of money, and used some of it to pay her informants who served in the empress's household.

But self-interest apart, the friendship between the middle-aged diplomat and the steadfast, resolute and embattled grand duchess flourished, and both were benefited. Catherine, who had heretofore had no political mentor but Bestuzhev, looked on Charles Hanbury-Williams as nothing short of a gift from heaven.

"What do I not owe to the providence which sent you here, like a guardian angel, to unite me with you in ties of friendship?" Catherine wrote to her English friend in April of 1756. "You will see, if one day I wear the crown, that I shall partially owe it to your counsels."

Chapter Thirteen

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LATE IN OCTOBER OF 1756, THE EMPRESS SANK DOWN ON HER swollen legs and collapsed in a dead faint. Immediately her waiting women crowded around her, shrieking and calling for her surgeon, who came at once and put his ear to the old woman's chest.

She was breathing, but just barely. Low rasping sounds came from her lungs, and each breath moved through her throat with a strangulated cough. Her eyes were shut tight, and even though the women tried again and again to revive her, rubbing her feet and shouting into her ears, holding stinking bunches of herbs under her nose and applying hot and cold cloths to her temples, she remained in a corpselike stupor, the muscles of her face and jaw slack and her skin the dead white of marble.

Her confessor was summoned, she was lifted into bed and covered with fur blankets. The little knot of old women who had been keeping watch over her in recent months, peasant healers from the countryside, shook their heads and crossed themselves repeatedly. Their prognostications had erred. They had been certain that, though weak, the empress was gaining strength; each night they had watched the waning moon, confident that when the new moon rose in the sky, she would begin to throw off the ills that had assailed her. Now, however, they were sure of

nothing, save that the imperial physician, the Greek Condoidi, had given up hope and that most of the courtiers expected the empress to die.

"A little patience, I implore you," the Greek was overheard to say to one of the old women after she had been keeping vigil at Elizabeth's bedside for two nights. "You have not much longer to wait. She cannot live."

Elizabeth had been dangerously ill for months. A stroke had laid her low at the beginning of the summer. Severe pains in her stomach, her legs, her head all tormented her, and she could hardly speak a word without bringing on fits of coughing. So tender was her tormented flesh that her women could no longer lace up her gowns without giving her unbearable pain. So she had the gowns cut from her body, and draped herself in long shapeless robes. In these she dragged herself from room to room, determined to appear in public despite the agony it cost her. She could not afford to have it known that she was dying, not with her country at war and the succession uncertain.

Peter and Catherine were kept out of the way at Oranienbaum, and little Paul, now two years old, was kept near his great-aunt in the imperial nursery. The empress's young relative Ivan, the former boy-emperor whom she had deposed many years earlier, had been brought from his exile in Siberia to the fortress of Schlusselberg nearer to the capital, and from there, in great secrecy, he was smuggled in to the Winter Palace so that she could observe him.

Hidden behind a screen, through which she squinted at the pale, undersize creature she had kept in prison nearly all his sixteen years, Elizabeth listened while others interviewed Ivan. Once or twice she put on a man's boots, loose trousers and tunic, and talked to the boy briefly herself, without letting him suspect who she really was.

Ivan was a sorry specimen. His long years of isolation, his almost complete lack of education and normal companionship had made him feeble, a near-idiot. He was not a realistic alterna-

tive to either the infant Paul or the besotted Peter as heir to the Russian throne.

The succession weighed on the declining empress almost as heavily as the war in which her country had recently become embroiled. The armies of Frederick II were advancing, and the empress, when she was able to rouse herself, raved on about how she was going to lead her soldiers into the field herself against the hated Prussians.

"How can you?" one of her attendants asked her. "You are a woman."

"My father went," the empress replied. "Do you believe that I am stupider than he?"

"He was a man," the other insisted, "and you are not."

It was an unwise encounter. The attendant, who should have known better, succeeded only in making the cantankerous old woman even more irascible. She had been more irritable and peevish than ever since her stroke, frequently reverting to childish petulance. Now she swore angrily that she would go and join the soldiers, no matter what anyone said, and made a pathetic effort to get up and do so. Of course her frailty quickly defeated her, and the effort tired her and brought on terrible pains in her abdomen. Still, she would not be quietened, and Condoidi had to be brought in—he was always available, having moved into a room next to the imperial apartments—to give her drugs to put her to sleep.

On throughout the summer and early fall the death watch continued. Courtiers tiptoed through the corridors of the palace, vigilant for news from the sickroom, waiting for bulletins from the doctors and conferring about the latest information they had. Some said the empress had "water in the belly," which was known to be fatal. Others expected an imminent attack of apoplexy to be the agency of death. Hanbury-Williams's informants brought him word that the empress's "trouble" was "in her womb," a cancerous growth that would soon kill her.

All but breathless, half-drugged, suspicious of everyone around

son

her, even her doctor (she clutched Condoidi's sleeve in her clawlike grip and forced him to swear that he was really treating her for illness and not being bribed to poison her), Elizabeth fought for life. When on October 2 a comet was visible in the sky, even at midday, she snatched her icons and held them to her chest in terror. Comets were known to be harbingers of death, and within hours of the visitation in the heavens one of the courtiers, Baron Stroganov, fell dead. The empress dreaded that she might be next, and her symptoms grew worse. She felt faint, and went into convulsions. "The fingers of her hands were bent back, her feet and arms were cold as ice, her eyes sightless," Catherine wrote to Hanbury-Williams. 'They drew much blood from her, and sight and feeling returned."

Finally, after three weeks of increasingly severe attacks, in the last week of October the empress fell into a deathlike faint and entered what everyone at court believed would be her last relapse. The scramble for power began, and all those with political aspirations positioned themselves to fulfill them.

Peter Shuvalov set about raising a private army of thirty thousand men, and there were rumors that the Shuvalovs were plotting to capture Ivan, set him on the throne and make him their puppet. Catherine, who had been making plans with the aid and advice of Hanbury-Williams and Bestuzhev for over a year, braced herself to act as soon as she received word of the empress's death, and called in those pledged to aid her.

Peter, informed of the Shuvalov army, rushed to his wife, "full of alarm," as she wrote, "for in moments of great crisis he looked to me alone to suggest remedies." His Holsteiners had been sent back home, he no longer had them to rely on, and though he still had his Russian commands he would have been justified in doubting whether or not the Russian soldiers would obey him. He was in panic. The threat from the Shuvalovs "seemed to him terrible," and he did not know where else to turn.

Catherine managed, with difficulty, to quiet her husband and to make him feel some degree of confidence in the plans and

preparations she had made. Their safety depended on the speed with which they acted, she explained, once the empress died. And she would know almost as soon as it happened, thanks to the three paid informants she had secured among the women who served the empress in her bedchamber.

Once word reached her that the empress had breathed her last, Catherine told Peter, she would send a trusted envoy to make absolutely certain that there had been no mistake. Then she would go immediately to Paul's nursery and fetch her son, whom she would entrust to a man whose loyalty to her was beyond doubt, Count Kiril Razumovsky—brother of the empress's husband and prior favorite Alexei Razumovsky—and Razumovsky's band of guardsmen. If through some mischance the count was not to be found, she would take Paul to her own room, meanwhile sending off swift messengers to alert five guards officers in her pay who would each bring fifty men to protect her, along with Paul and Peter. Each of these men had been heavily rewarded (with money Catherine received from the British government via Hanbury-Williams), and had sworn to take orders from no one but Catherine herself or Peter.

This done, Catherine said, she would enter the death chamber herself, summon the captain of the guard, and demand that he take an oath of loyalty to her and to Peter. Members of the imperial council and General Apraxin, the highest-ranking general, would also be summoned. Presented with a fait accompli, they could be counted on to agree to support Peter as emperor. If they balked, or if the Shuvalov faction attempted to order in their own forces or to interfere with Catherine's arrangements, her own sworn lieutenants would arrest them.

She had thought through this plan carefully—bearing in mind the lessons she learned from her reading of Tacitus—and had bought the loyalty of large numbers of guardsmen. Some, particularly the lower grade officers of the imperial bodyguard, were ready enough to follow her even without bribes. She had won their devotion over many years. They saw her—and not her

husband—as Empress Elizabeth's natural successor. Most of the officers, Catherine told Hanbury-Williams a few months before the crisis of October 1756, were "in the secret." She relied on them to support her, though she was well aware that the Shuva-lov faction would attempt "every dirty trick" in the first few hours after the empress's death.