CHAPTER TWO
Though unaware of it at the time, Sophie had arrived in St Petersburg at a pivotal period in the city’s short history. Its origins are shrouded in mystery. Legend has it that on 16 May 1703, Peter the Great landed with a group of military companions on Hare Island, digging two turves with a bayonet and laying them crosswise as he pronounced: ‘Here a city is to be!’ But since there are no records of the occasion in the Court journals, and no first-hand accounts have survived, it is not even certain where Peter was on the date in question.1 There can be no doubt, however, of the importance of the new capital which began to emerge after the tsar’s victory over the Swedes at the battle of Poltava in 1709. Whereas Turin and Madrid had grown by having a Court imposed upon them, St Petersburg was the ultimate Residenzstadt: a city expressly developed as the site of the imperial Court. ‘Petersburg is just the Court,’ the philosophe Denis Diderot would remark following his visit to Catherine in 1774: ‘a confused mass of palaces and hovels, of grands seigneurs surrounded by peasants and purveyors.’2 For the first twenty years of its existence, the city was little more than a building site. While Russian noblemen grumbled about being forced to settle in such inhospitable surroundings, visitors were astonished by the sheer speed of construction. By the early 1720s, the new capital was consuming almost 5 per cent of the Russian empire’s total revenue: between 10,000 and 30,000 labourers worked there every year; thousands more were conscripted to replace those who sacrificed their lives in the effort to sink reliable foundations into the bog.3 Struck by such awesome ambition and progress, the Hanoverian envoy duly ranked St Petersburg as ‘a wonder of the world, was it only in consideration of the few years that have been employed in the raising of it’.4
Foreign verdicts such as this helped to generate the city’s lasting reputation as a fantastic place where nothing is quite as it seems.5 Tsar Peter and his image-makers did their best to enhance the illusion by investing the place he called his ‘paradise’ with layer upon layer of symbolic significance, designed to transform it at once into a New Amsterdam (a symbol of trade and prosperity), a New Rome and New Constantinople (symbols of power and kingship), and not least a New Jerusalem, a symbol of piety and devotion ‘coming down out of heaven from God’ and bisected by a ‘river of water of life’ (Revelation 21: 2; 22: 1).6 These were probably not comparisons that entered the minds of most of St Petersburg’s 70,000 inhabitants at the time of Sophie’s arrival in 1744. She herself claimed fifty years later that only three of the city’s streets had then been built in stone: Millionnaya (Millionnaires’ Row, a street of grand mansion houses which still runs parallel to the Neva to the south-east of the Winter Palace); Lugovaya (Meadow Street, which ran westwards towards the Admiralty); and the elegant row of merchants’ houses along the river to the west of St Isaac’s Square (known as the English Line or Quay by the time of Catherine’s reign, and subsequently as the English Embankment). These three thoroughfares formed ‘a curtain, so to speak’ around rows of ‘wooden barracks as unpleasant as it is possible to imagine’.7
Though this was plainly an attempt to advertise her own glorious achievements in the field of urban reconstruction, there was no disguising the squalor of much of the early eighteenth-century city. Even its palaces were wooden. So were most churches apart from Trezzini’s Peter-Paul Cathedral. By the early 1740s, many of St Petersburg’s leading buildings had already gone the way of the derelict Holy Trinity, where Tsar Peter had worshipped almost every day when resident in his new capital.8 Far from admiring the city, foreign visitors were now more likely to highlight the consequences of shoddy construction on marshy soil. According to Carl Reinhold Berch, a Swedish official resident in St Petersburg in 1735–6, careless building methods condemned the city’s brick walls to remain damp for years, while the timber in widespread use for roofs, gutters, staircases and vestibules was ‘notoriously and readily combustible’. ‘Many handsome houses,’ Berch complained, ‘cannot be reached by even a single carriage, so that one must enter via the back gates or through a breach in the wall on the first floor, in which case the passageway is as high as any triumphal arch: both these methods are utterly disgraceful.’9 Critics of tsarist despotism had a field day. Following his visit to Russia in 1739, the Venetian savant Francesco Algarotti snidely remarked that:
If the ground were a little higher and less marshy, if the plans had not been changed so many times, if a Palladio had been the architect and the building materials had been of a better quality and better assembled and, furthermore, if it were inhabited by people who try to live there pleasantly and comfortably, St Petersburg would be surely one of the finest towns in the world.10
As it was, he found the Russian capital characterised by ‘a kind of bastard architecture’ in which Dutch influences predominated over those from Italy and France, and believed that the poor quality of the city’s construction reflected the fact that its palaces had been ‘built out of obedience rather than choice’: ‘Their walls are all cracked, quite out of perpendicular, and ready to fall.’ Ruins generally formed themselves, Algarotti famously quipped, but at St Petersburg they were built from scratch.11
For more than a decade after Peter the Great’s death in 1725, the city’s growth had indeed lacked direction. The initial impetus was lost when the Court returned to Moscow in 1728, and even when Empress Anna brought it back to St Petersburg four years later, her advisers hesitated to take decisive action for fear of disturbing a volatile populace. Only when fire destroyed hundreds of wooden shacks in the area around the Admiralty in August 1736 did the government contemplate the opportunity for wholesale change, though not before taking instant retribution against three alleged arsonists. John Cook, a visiting Scottish doctor, saw the two men chained to the top of tall masts:
They stood upon small scaffolds and many thousand billets of wood were built from the ground, so as to form a pyramid round each mast. These pyramids were so high as to reach within two or three fathoms of the little stages on which the men stood in their shirts, and their drawers. They were condemned in this manner to be burnt to powder. But before the pyramids were set on fire, the woman was brought betwixt these masts, and a declaration of their villainy, and the order for their execution, read…No sooner was the woman’s head chopped off, than a link was put to the wooden pyramids, and as the timber was very dry, it formed in an instant a very terrible fire. The men would soon have died had not the wind frequently blown the flames from them; however, they both expired in less than three quarters of an hour, in great torment.12
A second fire on Millionnaya and the palace embankment in June 1737 hastened plans for longer-term reconstruction.. Led by the first Russian architects to make a serious impact on the new capital–Peter Yeropkin, Mikhail Zemtsov and Ivan Korobov–the Commission for the Construction of St Petersburg, established shortly afterwards, definitively shifted the centre of the city to the south.13
It was a logical enough move to make. Although Peter the Great had insisted on locating his main government buildings on Vasilevsky Island, both these and the Peter-Paul Fortress were inconveniently situated on the northern bank of the Neva, accessible in summer only by boat (the sole bridge was a temporary pontoon to the west of the Admiralty, first strung across the river in 1727 and rebuilt annually after 1732).14 The new commission determined instead to develop three great avenues radiating out from the Admiralty: Voznesensky Prospect, leading to the barracks of the Izmailovsky Guards in the south-west; Gorokhovaya (Pea Street), culminating at the barracks of the Semënovsky Guards to the south; and Nevsky Prospect, then known as the Great Perspective Road, which stretched south-eastward for almost three miles towards the Alexander Nevsky monastery founded by Peter the Great in memory of the thirteenth-century warrior-saint. Though delayed by political upheavals after Anna’s death in 1740, these three avenues, linked by a network of semicircular streets between the Moika and Fontanka canals, were soon to give the city the elegant, geometrical ground plan at which visitors still marvel today.15
In the early 1750s, Russia’s greatest polymath Mikhailo Lomonosov claimed that from the top of any tall building in the capital one could see ‘houses that seemed to float on water and streets laid out in lines as straight as regiments on parade’.16 As if to prove his point, Mikhailo Makhaev spent the late 1740s perched among the city’s bell towers and on top of Tsar Peter’s Kunstkamera, sketching with the assistance of a large optical ‘camera’. The machine’s wide-angled lens combined with the artist’s elevated viewpoint to distort the perspective in such a way that his famous engravings are dominated by the space between buildings rather than by the buildings themselves.17 But that is not to underestimate the extent to which St Petersburg was transformed in Elizabeth’s reign ‘from a Europeanized riverfront backed by thousands of native hovels into a Western metropolis’.18 In a conscious attempt to legitimise her seizure of the throne, the grandest Baroque edifices were built to mark the route she had taken on that fateful night in November 1741.19 Indeed, so rapidly had those events acquired mythical status, that shortly after her arrival in February 1744, Johanna Elisabeth was taken to retrace the empress’s steps, starting from ‘the famous barracks of the Preobrazhensky Guards’ where Elizabeth had already laid the foundation stone of a magnificent new cathedral of the Transfiguration. ‘It is incomprehensible that Her Majesty should have managed such a long march without being betrayed.’20
Since Tsar Peter had intended his new capital to stand as an icon of Russia’s aspirations to sophisticated cosmopolitanism, it is all the more striking that the entertainment laid on for fourteen-year-old Princess Sophie should have been unashamedly exotic and emphatically popular. After dinner at the Winter Palace, she was treated to a display by the fourteen elephants which had become familiar figures on the capital’s streets following their presentation to Empress Anna by a visiting Turkish embassy. One of the animals on that occasion was said to be draped in King Solomon’s tent, a characteristically extravagant notion duly dismissed by Dr Cook: ‘It was of silk, very large, and certainly the worse of the wearing, but I scarcely believe it was Solomon’s.’ Not long afterwards, a bystander lost his life when two beasts bolted from soldiers who had thrown fireworks at their feet in an attempt to make them fight in the snow.21 Fortunately for her hosts, the show staged in Sophie’s honour passed off without incident. Once the elephants had completed their stately pirouettes in the palace courtyard, she was taken out onto the frozen river to see the ice hills that were a prominent feature of the capital at carnival time.22
By the time the last of Anna’s elephants died in 1765, the elephant house had long been moved from its central location on the Fontanka Canal to a suburban site near the Alexander Nevsky monastery.23 Ice hills, however, remained popular throughout Catherine’s reign, attracting vast crowds of spectators to watch as intrepid revellers descended precipitous slopes at great speed, either upright on skates or seated on wooden trays. She adored the one at Gostilitsy–the suburban estate belonging to Elizabeth’s favourite, Aleksey Razumovsky, where the Russian Court regularly paid a visit halfway through Lent–and in 1762 she had Antonio Rinaldi build her own all-weather tobogganing pavilion at the Summer Palace at Oranienbaum, a fantasy of powder-blue and white.24
It consists of steep declivities built of timber, the highest end being ten fathoms above the ground, and borne up on an arch. The impetus acquired by rapidly descending the first forces the carriage up the second, which having turned it is carried up a third and so proceeds in diminishing altitudes, with amazing velocity. The carriages are made to contain one person, or two seated facing one another, the wheels running in grooves.25
A less extravagant wooden sleigh-run at Tsarskoye Selo was demolished in 1777 to make way for a merry-go-round. Even in the last years of her life, Catherine liked to take visitors to play on the ice hills near the Tauride Palace she had built for Potëmkin, where she treated the local populace and donated money to their other entertainments.26
In 1744, such pleasures lay in the future, for no sooner had Sophie arrived in St Petersburg than she was whisked off to Moscow, where the Court was in residence and where Elizabeth expected her in time to celebrate Grand Duke Peter’s sixteenth birthday on 10 February. Improved in Catherine’s own reign by a series of costly schemes, the highway between the two capitals remained in 1744 in much the same state as other Russian roads–a primitive track, constructed from tree-trunks covered with gravel and sand, and passable at speed only when frozen. While it might take the empress’s humbler subjects several weeks to complete the 370-mile journey, she herself could cover the distance in a little over three days by racing through the night and changing horses every twelve or fifteen miles. That January, she had spent forty-nine hours on the road and another twenty-six at staging posts along the way.27 Even Elizabeth had come to regard the price of such speed as prohibitive. When the officer charged with removing snowdrifts, branches and tree stumps from the relatively short section of road between Chudov and Novgorod requested another 1600 men to assist the 400 already assigned to him, he was ordered to dismiss the whole detachment as the decree went out making the owner of each property along the road responsible for clearing it in the following spring.28 Sophie’s entourage encountered a different problem. Shortly after their departure, her mother’s sleigh hit a building while cornering too fast in the dark, injuring a sentry and catapulting the driver from his seat. While Johanna Elisabeth described the incident in typically purple prose, implying that they had all had a brush with death, Catherine’s memoir was cooler: ‘She claimed that she had been grievously injured, though nothing could be seen, not even a bruise.’ Nevertheless, they were delayed for several hours, and it was not until the afternoon of 9 February that they approached the outskirts of the old capital to be escorted to the palace at Lefortovo on the Yauza River, not far from the island where relatives of the young Peter I had created a fortress for his play regiments as a way of mobilising support for his candidature for the throne in the 1680s.29
Had it been summer, Sophie and her mother would have been greeted by ‘rows of clipped yew-trees, long straight canals’ and what her own generation, fond of less formal layouts, would dismiss as ‘a profusion of preposterous statues’: ‘every little structure was a pantheon; and every grove was haunted by its Apollos and Dianas’.30 For the moment, however, the gardens on which Empress Anna had lavished such careful attention were deep in snow, and the Court was resident not in Rastrelli’s Summer Palace but at the nearby Winter Annenhof (re-christened the Golovin Palace by imperial decree on 29 February) on the other side of the Yauza.31 This ornate wooden structure had been transferred in its entirety from the Kremlin in 1736 before being enlarged and embellished six years later in preparation for Elizabeth’s coronation. Its interiors were brightly painted in green, yellow and blue–all typical colours for Russian palaces in the first half of the eighteenth century.32
Having met the new arrivals at the foot of the ceremonial staircase, Field Marshal the Prince of Hesse-Homburg, a leading member of the pro-Prussian party at Court, offered his arm to Johanna Elisabeth and led them to their apartments. There they were joined by the household of Grand Duke Peter, who apparently burst in on Sophie’s mother as she was loosening her head-dress. A little before 10 p.m., another anti-Austrian schemer, the empress’s surgeon Armand Lestocq, announced that the empress was ready to receive them. Having been presented to the ladies-and gentlemen-in-waiting in the crowded ante-chamber, where Johanna Elisabeth was conscious of being scrutinised ‘from head to toe’, they processed through the state apartments to the audience chamber, where the thirty-five-year-old empress appeared before them on the threshold of her state bedroom.
On seeing her for the first time, it was impossible not to be struck by her beauty and majestic bearing. She was a large woman who, in spite of being very stout, was neither disfigured by her size, nor embarrassed in her movements; her head, too, was very beautiful.33
Sophie would soon come to suspect that Elizabeth’s ‘good looks and natural sloth had significantly spoiled her character’. ‘Her beauty ought to have saved her from the envy and rivalry she exhibited against every woman who wasn’t remotely hideous; but in fact, the anxiety not to be outdone by anyone else was the cause of the extreme jealousy which often threw her into bouts of captiousness unworthy of her majesty.’34 At this first meeting, however, the star-struck girl followed dutifully as Elizabeth, wearing a huge hooped skirt, embroidered in silver and gold, with a black feather to one side of her head and diamonds in her hair, admitted them to the state bedroom. There they spoke in French for about half an hour before retiring to eat, observed incognito by the empress, who dined separately during the Lenten Fast.35
Next day, Peter’s birthday, Sophie caught her first sight of Aleksey Razumovsky, ‘one of the most handsome men I have seen in my life’.36 He had first been listed among Elizabeth’s servants in 1731, when he was recruited to join the ranks of other talented Ukrainian singers in the Court choir. He soon caught the eye of a princess devoted to Orthodox chant, and even when a throat infection ruined his voice, forcing him instead to take up the bandura (a large Ukrainian mandolin), his dashing looks were enough to preserve the spell. Before long, he and the tsarevna were sharing a bed. They may even have married in secret in 1742, though neither this ceremony nor persistent rumours of children have ever been substantiated. Still, there is no doubt that the languid Razumovsky–the most equable of men unless roused by drink–was Elizabeth’s right-hand man until the end of the 1740s. Revelling in the riches she bestowed upon him, including vast estates at Kozelets in his native Chernigov province, he took no active part in either her coup or her subsequent government. But to judge from the number of petitions he received and the fawning attitude of the empress’s ministers, many Russians shared the view of the Saxon envoy that she hung on his every word.37 Even if such judgements depended on a widespread misapprehension that only men were fit to rule, Aleksey was at his mistress’s side on all major Court occasions as Grand Master of the Hunt. Now he was on hand to pass her the insignia of the Order of St Catherine, which she presented to Sophie and her mother ‘in a ritual of sorority that simultaneously welcomed them as “princesses of the blood” and placed them formally under Elizabeth’.38
Since the empress customarily took her annual communion after confession at the end of the first week of the Lenten Fast, Sophie’s first experience of the incense-filled world of the Russian Orthodox Church was one of the most emotional services in the ecclesiastical calendar. In the mocking phrase of a later foreign diplomat, Lent was a time when ‘mushrooms, pickled cucumber, prayers and priests succeed to the active dance, the becoming dress, the genial banquet and the gallant officers’ and when Court ladies were left with nothing ‘to subsist on but faith, hope and meditation–faith in the constancy of their lovers, hope that the same dear delusions may return, and meditation upon pleasures past’.39 In 1744, however, the conventional routine was broken by a hectic round of social gatherings as the curious Russian elite scrambled to meet the new arrivals and they in their turn settled into the endless games of cards with which the Court passed the time between Lenten vigil services. Elizabeth herself occasionally called on Sophie and her mother as a sign of her satisfaction with them. Indeed, when the empress set out at the beginning of March on one of her frequent pilgrimages to the Trinity monastery, forty miles north-east of the old capital, all seemed set fair for the future.40
Disaster struck on the following Tuesday when Sophie suffered an attack of pleurisy, the first serious illness she had ever experienced. Convinced that it must be smallpox, Johanna Elisabeth refused to allow doctors to bleed her daughter, alleging that her brother, Karl Friedrich, had perished under similar treatment in Russia in 1727. While the bickering continued, Sophie lapsed into a state of delirium until the Saturday, when Elizabeth returned to take command. With the agitated Johanna Elisabeth in attendance, she held the girl’s head in her arms as a surgeon opened the first vein. Over the following four weeks, while her mother was kept out of the way and the empress offered prayers for her recovery in a variety of Moscow churches, bleedings were repeated with a vengeance, sometimes as often as four times a day. It is hard to be sure of the effects of this treatment. Sophie certainly did not lack for medical expertise. Abraham Boerhaave, Peter’s doctor, was related to the celebrated Dutch specialist, Herman Boerhaave, while the empress’s personal physician, António Sanches (1699–1783), a baptised Portuguese Jew who had studied with Boerhaave at Leiden, was a specialist in venereal disease who later published a treatise on the curative powers of steam baths.41 Yet if her memoir is to be believed, it was not until an abscess on one of her inflamed lungs burst of its own accord that their severely weakened patient began to regain her strength. She managed her first tentative steps around her bedroom at the beginning of April. Though this episode is understandably thought to have bequeathed a lifelong suspicion of doctors, it is worth remembering the tribute she paid to Sanches and Abraham Boerhaave in 1771: ‘I swear by God that it is to their care that I owe my life.’ Soon after she came to the throne, she rewarded Sanches with an annual pension of 1000 roubles.42
To Sophie’s anxious Prussian sponsors, her recovery came as a blessed relief.43 The Russian Court expressed its gratefulness with a series of lavish presents, all duly publicised in the official press. Elizabeth had already rewarded the girl’s bravery after the first bleeding with earrings and a diamond cluster variously estimated at between 25,000 and 60,000 roubles. Now more jewels and a diamond watch from the grand duke helped to compensate for Sophie’s distress at having to appear in public at the ball in honour of her fifteenth birthday. Heavily rouged, at the empress’s insistence, she was as ‘thin as a skeleton’ and miserably conscious that her scalp had been shaven as smooth as her hand. ‘I thought I looked frighteningly ugly and was unable to recognise my own features.’ The loss of her hair was especially keenly felt at a time when she ‘had the finest hair in the world: it curled naturally without being waved or crinkled in any way’.44
More damaging for the pro-Prussian party at Court was Johanna Elisabeth’s behaviour during Sophie’s illness. Well aware that daughters of eighteenth-century princely houses were little more than saleable breeding stock, she had been enterprising in the search for a match for her firstborn. Dizzy with success on arrival in Russia, she failed to grasp that she was bound to lose control of her prized asset as soon as the deal had been done. Instead, still dreaming of a glorious future for herself, she rashly attempted to help topple the pro-Austrian vice chancellor Bestuzhev. Perhaps she had been lulled into thinking that this would be a simple operation by the pro-Prussian courtiers who had watched over her since that first dinner at the Winter Palace.45 No doubt her pretensions had been further inflated by Frederick the Great’s promise to ‘do everything in the world to bring what we have begun to a happy conclusion’. For the king, struggling against Austria for mastery of Germany in the wake of his invasion of Silesia in 1740, Bestuzhev’s removal seemed ‘a sine qua non’: ‘We need a minister at the Russian Court who would compel the empress to do as we wish.’46 To achieve this aim, which he regarded as the essential precondition for a triple alliance between Prussia, Russia and Sweden, Frederick was prepared to trust even such an inexperienced agent as Johanna Elisabeth. He was amply repaid for his folly. At the beginning of June, when the king was contemplating a desperate attempt to bribe the vice chancellor to switch sides, Bestuzhev presented the empress with more than seventy decoded dispatches revealing Johanna Elisabeth’s unguarded conversations with his other main enemy, the former French ambassador, the Marquis de la Chétardie. The consequences could hardly have been more embarrassing. Bestuzhev was promoted Chancellor; Chétardie was arrested and escorted to the border; Johanna Elisabeth’s reputation was permanently blackened. Reduced to tears by the empress’s ‘terrible wrath’, she, too, would soon be obliged to return home.47
The sole consolation for the pro-Prussian party was their success in persuading Elizabeth not to cancel plans for Sophie’s wedding. Though Lestocq had feared the worst when the scandal broke, the empress had invested too much political capital to send the girl packing now. The sooner she married, the sooner Russia could be rid of her meddlesome mother, and the sooner the succession could be secured. Since the couple were not yet formally engaged, and a crucial precondition of their betrothal was Sophie’s conversion to Orthodoxy, it was all the more pressing to complete her induction to the Russian faith. Frederick, who feared that her stubbornness in matters of religion would be the greatest stumbling block to the whole project, was confident that she could be brought round by careful persuasion. To make the task as painless as possible, her conversion was entrusted to Archimandrite Simon (Todorsky), a monk who had studied in Halle, the nerve centre of the Pietist religion in which she had been raised. Only 29 of his 800 books were in Russian, the overwhelming majority being in German, Latin and Greek.48 At a time when Orthodox theologians depended so heavily on Western scholarship, it was not so difficult to argue that the two faiths were separated more by external rituals than by essential doctrine. Simon assuaged any anxieties on the former score by ascribing the Russian Church’s famously flamboyant rites to popular superstition. He probably did not have to work very hard. Sophie’s acceptance of Orthodoxy is the first clear sign of her lifelong grasp of the realities of power. Since there was plainly no alternative, she wrote coolly to her father at the beginning of May that because she could detect ‘hardly any difference’ between Orthodoxy and Lutheranism, she had already resolved to convert.49
Following her first visit to the Trinity monastery later that month, she settled down to prepare for her baptism. Like the great majority of the Orthodox episcopate until the 1760s, Simon was a Ukrainian whose pronunciation proved controversial when she came to learn the creed. (The poet and versifier Alexander Sumarokov later blamed the ‘shameful’ influence of Ukrainian bishops for the ‘incorrect and provincial dialect’ allegedly adopted by the Russian clergy as a whole.)50 Sophie, who was given a German translation to ensure that she grasped the meaning, eventually opted to recite the Slavonic text ‘parrot-fashion’ in the Russian diction recommended by her language tutor, Vasily Adodurov, a likeable writer and grammarian twenty years her senior who was to become a valued friend and confidant. ‘Otherwise you will make everyone laugh with your Ukrainian pronunciation,’ Peter warned.51 On the appointed day, Thursday 28 June, Elizabeth had the girl dressed in scarlet and silver to match her own costume and led her in solemn procession through packed antechambers to the chapel of the Summer Annenhof. Sophie was left kneeling at the door while the empress went in search of the abbess of the Novodevichy convent, chosen as the new convert’s baptismal sponsor in the face of fierce competition among the Court ladies. (Having already performed this function for her nephew, Elizabeth was unable to repeat the honour for Sophie since by Orthodox tradition those who have the same baptismal witness are unable to marry.) When the ritual finally began, the girl knelt on a red cushion to receive the blessing of Amvrosy (Iushkevich), who had less than a month to live as archbishop of Novgorod. (This was the same ‘bigoted or corrupt prelate’ to whom Frederick the Great’s ambassador, Baron Mardefeld, had offered a bribe of 2000 roubles to overcome the Holy Synod’s scruples about a match between two such close relatives, with a promise to ‘triple the dose’ when the deed was done.)52 Then Sophie stood to declaim the confession of faith in words that she did not yet understand before reciting the creed from memory to a tearful congregation. If critics detected any failings in her confident performance, then they kept their opinions to themselves. Those who had most to lose were keenest to praise her achievements. Sophie was ‘a heroine’, Mardefeld declared. Johanna Elisabeth was predictably emotional: ‘I was already so overcome in advance that I burst out crying before she had reached the end of the first word.’53
On her acceptance into the Russian faith, Princess Sophie Auguste Friderike at last became Yekaterina Alekseyevna, a name chosen by Elizabeth in honour of her own mother, Catherine I. That night, after receiving yet more diamonds from the empress and allowing courtiers to kiss her hand for the first time (a formal ceremony which lasted almost two hours), Catherine and Peter drove incognito across Moscow to the Kremlin in preparation for the following day’s betrothal service on the feast of Sts Peter and Paul.54 After morning prayers in her apartments, they processed through the Palace of Facets and out onto the Red Staircase exactly as she would eighteen years later at her own coronation. Before the liturgy in the Dormition Cathedral began, Elizabeth placed engagement rings on the fingers of her heir and his fiancée. Now Catherine had a new title–grand duchess–as well as a new name. As cannon fired to signal the moment to the expectant crowd, the liturgy began, culminating with a sermon by Metropolitan Arseny of Rostov, the only prelate who protested against her secularisation of the monastic lands twenty years later (he paid the price with lifelong monastic imprisonment). At lunch in the Palace of Facets, Elizabeth sat beneath a canopy at the centre of her customary dais with Peter to her right and Catherine to her left. As always at a Russian banquet, there was a series of elaborate toasts. The empress toasted her heir; he returned the compliment; she toasted his new fiancée before finally raising her glass to all her loyal subjects. More festivities followed in the evening so that it was half past one in the morning before the exhausted couple started the journey back to the Golovin Palace. Elizabeth stayed up even longer to watch the fireworks on the Ivan the Great bell tower.55 Relieved to hear of the triumphant conclusion of his schemes, Frederick the Great laid on the flattery with a trowel:
I count it among the finest days of my life to have seen the elevation of Your Imperial Highness to this high rank. I am happy to have contributed to it and pleased to have rendered service to my dear ally, the empress of Russia, and all her vast empire by procuring a princess of your abilities, Madame, as a bedfellow for the Grand Duke.56
Though they were not quite yet ready to sleep together, Catherine and Peter seem initially to have got on well enough, and until the Court set out for Kiev at the end of July after celebrating the peace with Sweden, Catherine had seen little of the empress’s irascibility.57 It was only at close quarters on the journey south that cracks in their relationships began to appear. Delayed by inaccurate mileposts, which she insisted must be replaced later that year, Elizabeth was in a foul temper by the time she caught up with the young couple at Razumovsky’s estate at Kozelets, where Johanna Elisabeth had her first serious argument with Peter. They relieved the tension by gambling for high stakes for a fortnight.58
On arrival at Kiev in the last week of August, Catherine had her first taste of the embarrassment caused by over-eager subjects. When they went to see a theatrical performance staged in the grounds of a nearby convent, where they had to pass through the chapel to reach their seats, it became clear that they were in for a long evening:
There were prologues, ballets, a comedy, in which Marcus Aurelius hanged his favourite, a battle in which the Cossacks defeated the Poles, a fishing scene on the Boristhène [the River Dnieper], and choruses without end. The empress kept her patience until almost two in the morning, when she sent someone to ask if it might finish soon. She was told that they were not yet half way through, but that if Her Majesty ordered it, they would stop straightaway.
Stop they did, but only to launch a disastrous firework. The first rockets flew straight into the main marquee, causing pandemonium among the imperial party and a stampede of the horses waiting patiently by the nearby carriages.59
The main reason for visiting Kiev was to pay tribute to the cradle of Orthodoxy in the empire, for it was there that Prince Vladimir had accepted the Christian faith in 988. At the Monastery of the Caves, the pious empress was in her element. Though it would soon be possible, with the aid of a telescope, to see back to Kozelets from the top of the Baroque bell tower which she commissioned, the monastery’s real ‘sights’ lay within its own walls, in the catacombs and in the ancient Cathedral of the Dormition, where the relics of the great men of Kievan Rus were objects of open veneration (the head of Vladimir himself had been returned to the monastery in 1634).60 Catherine and her fiancé were forbidden entry to the catacombs in case they caught a chill, but she was much taken by the cathedral. ‘I had never been more struck in my life,’ she recalled in 1771, ‘than I was by the extreme magnificence of that church, where all the icons were covered in gold, silver and jewels. The church itself is spacious and built in the Gothic style of architecture that gives churches a much more majestic appearance than the current ones, where the size and transparency of the windows makes them indistinguishable from a ballroom or a [winter]–garden.’61
Back in Moscow for Elizabeth’s name day on 5 September, the Court launched into its customary autumn round of celebrations. Although Catherine took dancing lessons with the ballet master Jean-Baptiste Landé, nothing in her experience had prepared her for the cross-dressing balls that so delighted the empress. Elizabeth enjoyed showing off her excellent legs, but no one else took much pleasure from these so-called metamorphoses, at which the men were forced to stumble about the dance floor in huge hooped skirts.62 They were happier watching the French comedies and German dramas staged at the 5000-seat opera house built near the Golovin Palace for Elizabeth’s coronation in 1742.63 No less important to the life of the Court were its ‘theatres of piety’ in which the imperial family celebrated the major autumn feasts in the Orthodox calendar: the Nativity of the Mother of God on 8 September, the Exaltation of the Honourable and Life-Giving Cross on 14 September, and the Presentation of the Mother of God in the Temple on 21 November. 64 Since the reign of Empress Anna, this last had been appropriated as the annual celebration of the Semënovsky Guards, so that the day which began with morning service culminated in a banquet and ball.65 Now there were two new fixtures to add to the list of secular festivities: the birthday of Johanna Elisabeth on 13 October and Catherine’s name day on 24 November. The following day was Elizabeth’s accession day–the most significant event in the Court calendar.66 The sickly Peter missed it all, being confined to bed by a chest infection in October and by chickenpox in November. Only when he seemed well enough to travel did the Court depart for St Petersburg.67
Begun by Bartolomeo Rastrelli almost as soon as the Court returned from Moscow in January 1732, the Winter Palace he completed three years later was a highly embellished wooden structure incorporating the mansion which had once belonged to Peter the Great’s Admiral Apraksin. Empress Anna’s apartments struck visitors as ‘rather beautiful’ but ‘not very imperial’, because they were small and dark.68 Catherine and Peter were to think better of them during their brief occupation in the winter of 1746. This time, however, there was no room in the palace for either of them. While the lower floor was allocated to the small army of servants, actors, musicians and guards who accompanied the Court, the fun-loving Elizabeth was busy converting the upper rooms formerly occupied by her ladies-in-waiting to make space for a new merry-go-round, complete with expensively saddled wooden horses, to replace the dilapidated machine which stood outside the Summer Palace at the time of Catherine’s arrival in Russia.69 She and Johanna Elisabeth were lodged in a neighbouring house, where for the first time they had separate apartments on either side of the main staircase. Catherine had known of Elizabeth’s orders in advance. For her status-conscious mother, who had not, it came as a shock:
As soon as she saw this arrangement, she lost her temper, primo, because she thought that my apartment was laid out better than hers; secondo because hers was separated from mine by a shared room. In fact, we each had four rooms, two at the front and two overlooking the courtyard, and the rooms were of equal size, furnished in exactly the same blue and red fabric.70
Squabbles about precedence were the last thing Catherine needed now that her fiancé had again been taken ill on the journey from Moscow. On learning of this new outbreak of pox, accompanied by a high fever, Elizabeth raced back from St Petersburg to join her nephew at Khotilov, a staging post between Novgorod and Tver where they had all celebrated her birthday on 18 December. Cancelling the New Year’s banquet, she stayed with him there until his recovery was assured, having cannon hauled specially from Tver to celebrate Epiphany, though Khotilov was too far from the river to conduct the customary blessing of the waters.71 By 26 January, empress and heir were safely back at Tsarskoye Selo. When they returned to the capital at the beginning of the following month, Catherine and her mother were taken straight to see Peter in the gloomy great hall of the Winter Palace. Johanna Elisabeth reported to her husband in Zerbst that Providence had granted the youth a miraculous recovery. Catherine remembered the scene differently:
All of his features were distorted; his face was still completely swollen, and one could see that he was bound to be permanently scarred. As his hair had been cut, he wore a huge wig that disfigured him all the more. He came up to me and asked if I found it difficult to recognise him. I stammered my congratulations on his recovery, but in truth he had become hideous.72
At best this was a disconcerting turn of events. Yet there was nothing to be done about it now. While Lent kept her pock-marked fiancé out of the public eye between his birthday and hers, preparations for their marriage continued in earnest.73
Since Princess Charlotte of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, the consort of Peter the Great’s ill-fated tsarevich, had been permitted to retain her Lutheran faith, Elizabeth instructed Count Santi, her Master of Ceremonies, to model Catherine’s wedding on the marriage of her own elder sister, Anna Petrovna, to Karl Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp in 1725. On discovering that no records of that occasion survived, Santi had to work partly on oral tradition but above all on the basis of his own researches into the practice of rival European Courts.74 The plan he presented to the College of Foreign Affairs on 22 March 1745 left plenty for the empress to decide. The seating arrangements for Johanna Elisabeth and her brother, Prince Adolf Friedrich, were a particularly sensitive matter. Unbeknownst to either Catherine or her mother, her uncle had been invited to Russia by Chancellor Bestuzhev, and his arrival on 5 February, motivated by his desire to gain control over the affairs of the duchy of Holstein, caused nothing but trouble.75 (‘His appearance alone did him no favours,’ Catherine later commented. ‘He was very small and badly proportioned, not at all intelligent, hot tempered, and furthermore governed by his entourage.’) Santi, however, had already resolved to dispense with the idea of seating the bride under a canopy so that she could offer wine to the guests who came to congratulate her. Such an ‘Oriental’ custom might be appropriate for the ‘middling sort’, declared the haughty Piedmontese, who had spent the whole of Anna’s reign in exile in Siberia, but it was scarcely compatible with ‘good practice in the courts of Sovereigns’.76
When it came to opulence, there was no question which of these Courts had set the standard. It can hardly have been a coincidence that the official press chose the eve of the announcement of Catherine’s nuptials to report on the festivities at Versailles following the Dauphin’s marriage to the Spanish Infanta.77 ‘Never has finer magnificence been witnessed than during those three days,’ insisted the St Petersburg News on 15 March. ‘Diamonds worth 250 million were on display, not counting the crown, which is estimated at 70 million. The attire of the Dauphin and his wife alone stretched to 45 million.’78 To allow them to prepare in suitable style, the leading Russian statesmen (known collectively as the generalitet because they ranked with army generals on the top four ranks of Peter the Great’s Table) were advanced a full year’s salary, normally paid in instalments every four months. Elizabeth issued a personal decree urging each of them to spend the money on ‘worthy costumes, as rich as possible, open landaus and other carriages, decorated where possible in silver and gold’. Since the celebrations were to continue for several days, more than one new outfit was permitted for each person, and courtiers were allowed separate carriages for their wives.79
Catherine took no pleasure from the prospect. From the moment her marriage was announced, she was barely able to speak of it. Indeed, it is in describing that moment that the final version of her memoirs first mentions the word ‘melancholy’, or what we might now think of as depression. An earlier version, hinting at much the same symptoms, says that the closer the event approached, the sadder she became, and she ‘often burst into tears without really knowing why’.80 Even if we discount the calculated note of martyrdom, it seems likely that a sense of foreboding took the edge off her first summer in St Petersburg, a romantic time when the river was alive with a flotilla of small craft, and the ‘white nights’ hummed to the melancholy sound of boatmen’s lullabies. The Court enjoyed its cruises too. Resident from 9 May at the new wooden Summer Palace on the Fontanka–one of Rastrelli’s most attractive creations, demolished by Tsar Paul to make way for the Mikhailovsky Palace–Catherine and her fiancé sailed by barge to the Peter-Paul Fortress to celebrate his name day on 29 June.81 The day after the banquet for the Order of the Polish Eagle on 25 July, where she sat between the empress and Adolf Friedrich, they all boarded sloops to Aptekarsky Island in the delta of the Neva.82Earlier that week, they had joined Elizabeth and a large group of courtiers on board the Dutch vessel St Petersburg to inspect the luxury goods it had brought to Russia.83
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.84 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.’85 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.86 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.’87 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.88
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’.89 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.90
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.91 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.92
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.93 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.94Resplendent 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.95 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.’96
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’.97 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.98
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.99 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.100
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.101 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.102
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 1791.103
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.104
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.105
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.106 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.107 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’:
Should I get up again? Should I go to sleep? I knew nothing. Eventually, Mme Kruse, my new lady of the bedchamber, came in and announced very gaily that the grand duke was waiting for his supper, which they were about to serve. Having eaten well, His Imperial Highness went to sleep.108
The eccentric accommodation decreed by the empress made married life no easier. Peter undressed in his apartments, but in order to reach Catherine’s, where the couple slept together, he had first to pass through rooms where his tutors were themselves preparing for bed, and then cross a vestibule at the top of a draughty staircase. Catherine suspected that these nocturnal peregrinations might have been the reason why her husband caught another fever in the spring of 1746, when he was ill for two months, causing renewed anxieties about the succession. Drawing on all her reserves of ‘natural sensitivity’, she apparently tried to broach the issue with the empress. She trod carefully all the same: ‘It always seemed to me that both of them were likely to turn on you, and I was wary of compromising myself with them.’109
The truth was that the more they got to know one another, the less compatible Catherine and her husband seemed. While she was intelligent, bookish and eager to learn, sustained thought proved beyond Peter’s grasp. Modern historians have gone to great lengths to show that, as a young boy in Holstein being groomed for the Swedish throne, he was exposed to an ambitious and unrelenting curriculum: French, Theology and Latin for three hours in the morning (when Latin, which he hated, eventually gave way to geometry and the study of artillery); dancing, history and geography or jurisprudence for three hours in the late afternoon.110 Nevertheless, Rulhière (the French diplomat who wrote a controversial account of Catherine’s coup) judged right in remarking that Peter’s tutors made ‘a great mistake in attempting to form their pupil after the grandest models, attending rather to his fortune than to his capacity’.111 Catherine apparently decided much the same when she first met him at Eutin in 1739: by coercing this ‘thin, delicate’ child ‘to perform as an adult’, his entourage had ‘inculcated the duplicity in his character’.112 Though nothing she says about her husband can be taken at face value, and each version of her memoirs presents a slightly different portrait, she was right about the coercion.113 As he later told his Russian tutor, Jacob Stählin, Peter had been forced to kneel on dried peas (which made it almost impossible for him to walk next day), and public floggings of up to forty strokes of the birch were inflicted with dread ceremony by a masked soldier to the beat of a drum at eight o’clock on a Saturday evening.114 By tempting him with images from historic coins and medals, Stählin managed to teach Peter to count out the names of the tsars on his fingers. Even so, the grand duke’s attention span remained dangerously short. The only academic exercises that excited his interest were those relating to military affairs. For these he had a genuine talent, based on a prodigious memory.115 But it was not enough to bring him close to Catherine. Deprived of her husband’s affections and further isolated by her debt-ridden mother’s departure on 28 September, barely a month after her wedding, she faced an uncertain future in the hostile environment of a foreign Court.