CHAPTER FOUR

AMBITION 1754–1759

When Catherine finally gave birth to a son on 20 September 1754, the Russian Court erupted in an explosion of relief whose tremors were felt across the continent. The British minister in Florence, Sir Horace Mann, wrote in December:

All Europe seems to have agreed for some months past to do nothing worth talking of–except the Great Prince of Russia, who has made a little Great Prince to exclude forever the lawful Czar [Ivan VI, still imprisoned at Schlüsselburg], and for whose birth the Empress has given such presents, and made such rejoicings, both at home and abroad, as quite outdo those on the birth of an heir to the French monarchy.¹

It was a pardonable exaggeration. Among the courtiers who competed to stage celebrations in Elizabeth’s honour in a series of festivities lasting through the New Year carnival, none could surpass her young favourite, Ivan Shuvalov, who hosted a public masquerade that lasted for two whole days and nights in the last week of October, beginning and ending with allegorical fireworks.² The scale of the empress’s own accession-day celebrations on 25 November can be judged from the tally of candles alone. In addition to 4000 plain white sticks for the chandeliers and 300 table candles of unspecified weight, the Court accountants recorded 1642 ‘semi-banquet’ candles and 1505 ‘ordinary’ ones weighing almost 900 lbs. Some 725 of these were used for the seven flaming pyramids designed by Rastrelli, who excelled himself by requiring 4000 glass bottles for their construction.³

In contrast to such unrestrained public rejoicing, Catherine had been abandoned in miserable isolation. On her return from Moscow, she had been disconcerted to find that the apartment being prepared for her confinement was in Elizabeth’s wing of the Summer Palace, where she was later to remember two sombre rooms, ‘badly done out with crimson damask, and with almost no furniture or comfort of any kind’. The reason for their location was confirmed when her child was taken from her at the end of a difficult labour lasting from two in the morning until midday. Catherine’s room was cold and draughty, and since no one dared to change her linen without orders from the empress, she was left to writhe in blood-stained sheets soaked with sweat. At the baptism on 25 September, when the baby was christened Paul, it was the fifty-four-year-old Princess of Hesse-Homburg (née Anna Trubetskaya), flanked by Ober-hofmeister Shepelëv and General Alexander Shuvalov, who carried him into the palace chapel behind Grand Duke Peter and the empress. Catherine could learn of him only ‘furtively’, because ‘asking for news would have been interpreted as casting doubt on the care the empress was taking of him, and would have been very badly received’. By the following Easter, she had seen her son on only three occasions, the first being the forty-day churching ceremony to celebrate the end of her confinement, when she was too weak even to stand for prayers. Paul’s upbringing for the first eight years of his life was almost entirely in Elizabeth’s hands.⁴

Anxious about the stifling conditions in which the swaddled child was kept, bathed in sweat in a cradle lined with the fur of a silver fox, Catherine descended into post-natal depression. Her mood sank lower still with the news that Sergey Saltykov had been sent abroad on the pretext of announcing Paul’s birth to the Court of Stockholm. (Later he was dispatched to Hamburg, showing every sign of having tired of their relationship.) Whether Saltykov was Paul’s father is a mystery that will never be resolved. Catherine’s memoirs hint strongly that he was, much to the horror of her nineteenth-century descendants who struggled to censor such an explosive revelation, and it is striking that Grand Duke Peter sired no other child, in spite of his many dalliances. Perhaps he was simply infertile. On the other hand, Catherine’s memoir may have been a rhetorical way of disinheriting her deposed husband rather than a confident biological claim. Paul certainly grew up to look and behave very much like Peter (puny, snub-nosed and prone to rage) and always revered him as his father. Amid all this circumstantial evidence, one thing is certain: Paul’s birth did nothing to reconcile Peter with Catherine. While the grand duke sought comfort in an affair with the unprepossessing Elizabeth Vorontsova, his wife looked out for a new companion of her own.

She found him in Count Stanislaw August Poniatowski, a twenty-three-year-old Polish aristocrat who came to Russia in June 1755 in the entourage of the new British ambassador, Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams. Having befriended Stanislaw in Berlin in 1750, Williams took him under his wing, introducing him first to the Court at Dresden and later to some of the best company in Europe as together they visited Vienna, Hanover and The Hague in 1753. A classic man of his times, equally at home with the bawdy Hellfire Club and the refinements of Latin verse, Sir Charles set out to polish Stanislaw’s manners and broaden his mind, grooming his young protégé for the most enlightened circles in Paris. There his admittance was guaranteed thanks to the renown of a father who had fought with Charles XII against Peter the Great at Poltava and was praised by Voltaire as a ‘man of extraordinary merit’. At the literary salon presided over by Madame Geoffrin, herself the uneducated daughter of a footman, Stanislaw met Montesquieu. And it was Montesquieu’s thirty-two-year-old friend Charles Yorke who became his leading companion during his visit to England in 1754, when Williams was distracted by the demands of a Parliamentary election. A Fellow of the Royal Society whose library boasted some of the latest works of the French Enlightenment, Yorke introduced the young Pole to the pleasures of the English landscape and took him to Salisbury, Bath, Oxford and Stowe. With Yakov Sievers, a youthful secretary at the Russian embassy who later became one of Catherine’s most influential advisers, he went to the debtors’ prison in London to see Theodore I, the deposed self-proclaimed king of Corsica. Having sampled everything in England from Shakespeare to cock fighting, Stanislaw arrived in Russia equipped with a cosmopolitan ease of manner in the company of an avuncular ambassador with a talent for gaining the trust of the young.⁵

Catherine instinctively liked them both. While Sir Charles became her confidant (it was for him that she wrote her first memoir), Stanislaw became her lover. He offered her a seductive combination of wit, bookishness and sensitivity that her husband so obviously lacked. Hesitant at first–perhaps because he was a virgin (as he later liked to suggest), or more probably because he was understandably wary of the consequences–he eventually succumbed to her advances at the end of December. Like so many royal romances before and since, their affair began with furtive visits to her apartments and continued with secret assignations, fraught with risk, in the houses of complicit friends and courtiers. Catherine had to be smuggled in and out dressed as a man. Such a relationship was too precarious to survive for long, but while it lasted they made each other deliriously happy. ‘I did not think that I was made to love women,’ Stanislaw confessed in the revealing self-portrait he composed at her request. ‘I attributed the first attempts I made in that direction to particular circumstance, but then, at last, I found tenderness, and [now] I love with such passion that I feel that were my love to suffer any reverse I should become the most miserable man on earth.’⁶ Apart from ‘a mouth which seemed to invite kisses’, he later remembered the attractions of a mind capable of shifting effortlessly from madcap, childish games to complex arithmetical puzzles. In his handsome company, Catherine found the confidence to build a new life of her own.

She first encountered Stanislaw at Oranienbaum on 29 June 1755, when 121 guests of the first five ranks were spread across the palace staterooms at the banquet in honour of her husband’s name day.⁷ Though Peter had to be satisfied with toy soldiers in the winter months, he preferred drilling the real regiments he had been allowed to recruit from Holstein. An elaborate new star-shaped fort was built for their exercises. With its guns trained firmly on Yekaterinburg, Peterstadt was an excellent metaphor for their marriage.⁸ To avoid arguments, Catherine had bought all her own furniture for her part of the palace. But her true passion was not so much for interior design as for gardening. We cannot know how far Stanislaw discussed the subject with Catherine–on his visit to Stowe, he had risked offending his hosts by criticising ‘Capability’ Brown’s ‘natural’ landscapes–but by the time of their meeting she had both time and opportunity at Oranienbaum to create a garden of her own. ‘I began to make plans to build and plant, and since this was my first venture into building and planting, my plans became very ambitious.’⁹

When it came to ambition, the standard was set by Elizabeth herself. On arrival at St Petersburg, Stanislaw had reported home on ‘the astonishing prodigality’ of a Court which continued to look to Versailles for inspiration. In 1756, in response to requests from the francophile Ivan Shuvalov, Mikhail Vorontsov urged Russian diplomats in Paris to write ‘often and in detail’, not only about international affairs, but ‘especially about the king and his family and their way of life’. The favourite would be particularly interested, the vice chancellor continued, to receive detailed reports on the king’s lever and the toilette de la reine, and also to learn of new plays, operas and comedies, and other Parisian theatrical spectacles.¹⁰ To provide an appropriate setting for such display, his mistress had embarked on several extravagant construction projects. While the Court was in Moscow, she had initially planned a fundamental restoration of the Winter Palace, masterminded by Rastrelli from May 1753 with a budget of 567,674 roubles. By the following year, however, she had concluded that the existing building was ‘inadequate, not only for the reception of foreign ministers and the performance of ritual festivities on the appointed days in accordance with our great Imperial dignity, but also to accommodate us with the necessary servants and possessions’. So instead the Senate was ordered to find 900,000 roubles to build a new stone palace, ‘longer, wider, and taller’ than the old wooden one.¹¹ (While the new building was under construction, the Court moved into a temporary wooden structure, erected at characteristically breakneck speed at the junction of the Great Perspective Road with the Moika canal, which probably made it easier for Catherine to conduct her affair with Stanislaw.) Meanwhile, in May 1752, the month in which Rastrelli completed his seven-year transformation of Peterhof, Elizabeth had decreed another total reconstruction of the palace at Tsarskoye Selo. The costs will probably never be known. As Catherine later remarked, the surviving accounts totalled some 1.6 million roubles, ‘but in addition to that the empress paid a lot more money out of her own pocket of which there are no records’.¹²

Scarcely less fabulous sums were spent by leading courtiers, for the mid-1750s was the heyday of private building projects in St Petersburg. Catherine’s architect at Oranienbaum, Antonio Rinaldi, had initially come to Russia to build a palace for Kirill Razumovsky, brother of Aleksey. Rastrelli also accepted numerous private commissions. Delayed by the vice chancellor’s debts, it took him more than a decade to complete the Vorontsov Palace on the Fontanka, where the empress herself attended the consecration of the chapel on 23 November 1758, rewarding its exultant (and bankrupt) owner with 40,000 roubles.¹³ It was there, over the coming winter, that Catherine first met and befriended his fifteen-year-old niece, the future Princess Dashkova. Between 1753 and 1755, while Vorontsov was struggling to find the money to pay his builders, Elizabeth’s largesse to her favourite allowed Savva Chevakinsky to build a palace for Ivan Shuvalov on Italian Street, overlooking the Summer Palace labyrinth.¹⁴ Nearby on the Great Perspective Road, the limitless resources of his family’s salt mines allowed Baron Sergey Stroganov to complete his new palace–an innovative design, adapted to the increasing density of building in the city centre by fronting directly onto the street without a garden–in less than two years after its predecessor was destroyed by fire in 1752.¹⁵

As Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov later complained, ‘such examples could not fail to spread to the whole nation, and luxury and voluptuousness everywhere increased’. Nobles who had once been satisfied with tallow candles were now content only with the finest white wax. ‘Houses began to be magnificently furnished,’ Shcherbatov continued, ‘and people were ashamed not to have English furniture. Meals became magnificent, and cooks who were not originally considered the most important servant in the household, began to receive large salaries…Costly and hitherto unknown wines came into use, and not only in the houses of the great.’¹⁶ Tempting though it may be to put such grumbling down to the rhetoric of Russia’s most acerbic critic of luxury, it is worth remembering that in 1754–5 alone, the English merchants in St Petersburg imported furniture to the value of 37,000 roubles, far outstripping their continental rivals.¹⁷ And there was no limit to the pretensions of the great. Reputed to be the first private individual in Russia to plant his own pineapple orchard, Elizabeth’s principal minister Peter Shuvalov had its fruit fermented into wine and once served a dessert in the form of a mountain studded with precious stones from his own mineralogical collection.¹⁸ Mikhail Vorontsov, who frequently enjoined his nephew Alexander to live within his means, nevertheless sent him orders for expensive clarets, port and madeira from Paris and Madrid: ‘P.S. The best chocolate is made in Spain. Buy 100 lbs of it for me, and two or three pounds of the best Spanish snuff.’¹⁹

Catherine was aware of the competition. Looking back, she dismissed Shuvalov’s palace as ‘tasteless and ugly, though very richly appointed’:

There were a lot of paintings, but most were copies. One room had been done out in chinar wood, but since chinar does not shine, it had been covered with varnish, which made it yellow, but an unpleasant yellow that made it look nasty. To make up for this, the room was covered in very heavy and richly carved wood, painted in silver. Impressive in itself from the outside, the house was so heavily decorated that its ornamentation resembled ruffles of Alençon lace.²⁰

At the time, her tone was less secure. ‘I would like to know whether they were pleased,’ she wrote plaintively to Sir Charles, following a visit by his compatriots that had made her country estate resemble ‘an English colony’. The ambassador was all suave reassurance: ‘All the English who returned from Oranienbaum are enchanted. I do not believe in spells. But they are enchanted. They speak of you as if I were speaking myself. That is all there is to say.’²¹

There was more to be said about the costs. Since no account was taken of inflation, Catherine received the same annual allowance in 1761 that Elizabeth herself had been paid as tsarevna thirty years earlier. Though 30,000 roubles seems generous alongside a general’s salary of 4118–and it was a king’s ransom by comparison with the 20 roubles paid to the palace grooms–it was never enough to sustain the lifestyle to which the grand duchess aspired. (Vorontsov’s account books, kept in his own hand while the Court was in Moscow in 1753, registered an annual turnover of rather more than 35,000 roubles. But the apparently perfect balance between income and expenditure was achieved only because none of his building costs was entered.)²² Catherine’s need for money was an open secret. When Peter requested a subsidy for his German regiments in 1753, the British Resident explained to Whitehall that since the two major generals on his list were none other than the grand duke and his wife, they might not require payment, ‘though I can assure Your Grace that they want it as much as the poorest cornet or ensign in the Holstein troops’.²³Faced with the need to support their outlay, the couple became familiar figures among the foreign communities in St Petersburg, who acted, in the absence of any Russian bank, as the principal source of credit. The British led the field. So well had they cornered the market, indeed, that an envious French diplomat noted at the end of the decade that Peter treated the British merchants ‘less as creditors than as friends’.²⁴

The most influential figure in such deals was Jacob Wolff, British consul general between 1744 and his death in 1759. Having made his fortune in the 1730s by exporting the ‘wondrous drug’ rhubarb from Russia and importing British woollen cloth, the Russian-speaking Wolff developed some of the best connections in St Petersburg. The Austrians made him a baron on the strength of it.²⁵ Wolff even hired out his Italian confectioner to show the Court kitchens how to make ice cream.²⁶ Mostly, however, he lent money. It was thanks to him that Chancellor Bestuzhev managed to pay for his ornate Baroque mansion on the Neva, where Carlo Rossi’s Senate Building now stands. Vorontsov was another desperate client who turned to Ivan Shuvalov only after exhausting his credit with Wolff. In 1754, he mortgaged his Baltic estates to the British consul for 40,000 roubles, repayable over eight years, simultaneously offsetting existing debts of more than 19,000 roubles. And still it was not enough. ‘I have already borrowed 5000 roubles from Baron Wolff this month,’ he confessed in October 1756, ‘and it has all gone to pay my suppliers and labourers; and now I must quickly satisfy these poor people again.’²⁷

Catherine was not far behind. She was evidently already indebted to the baron when she asked for 1000 golden ducats at the end of July 1756: ‘It is with difficulty that I address myself to you again’. That same month, Williams secretly arranged a much larger loan from the British government for which Wolff was to be the crucial intermediary. Once they had settled a rate of exchange, the ambassador expected to be able to convert the original £10,000 sterling into 42,500 roubles. ‘You can count on me to strike a good bargain for you,’ he promised.²⁸ Clearly expecting to gain a hold over the young grand duchess by acting as her personal banker, Sir Charles advised her ‘to order me to pay Baron Wolff what is due to him, because that will help to arrange your future credit with him. When I have done that, I shall retain the rest, which I shall pay at any time to your order.’²⁹ ‘Here is the form which the bond should take,’ he explained, asking Catherine to insert the date:

I have received by the hand of the British Ambassador the sum of ten thousand pounds sterling, which I promise to repay to His Majesty, the King of Great Britain, whenever he demands it of me. C.

Since such business methods were evidently foreign to her, he had to explain further in the autumn. ‘All money leaving our Treasury pays in the region of 6 per cent to the Treasury officials, which is repaid when the money is returned. So, on the 44,000 roubles, there is around 2600 to be paid, which you will be reimbursed. I have already paid it in London, and I shall be obliged if you will send it to me at your convenience.’³⁰ But still she did not understand. ‘The form of your bond to Wolff is no bond at all,’ Sir Charles complained, offering her a further model to follow. ‘It would not befit your honour to give a worthless bond as this would convert into a gift what is only a loan. Send word to Wolff to send you your money in gold little by little. He can always find five or six thousand roubles in imperials, and in three or four instalments you will have it all. The sum which you have to send me will amount to 2600 crowns…This will be returned to you when the debt is paid off.’³¹ Once a suitably clandestine means of payment had been arranged–a process that took several months–Wolff delivered the money in person in November.³² He was only just in time. ‘I learned today,’ wrote Williams a week later, ‘that a Dutch vessel, which arrived at Riga, brought 86,000 gold ducats for [the Austrian ambassador] Count Esterhazy. You see by that, how the Russian trade flourishes!’³³

Foreign governments would scarcely have been prepared to invest so heavily in Catherine’s prospects had they not suspected that Elizabeth’s reign might soon come to an end. An empress who spent the summer months ‘rambling from one country house to another, as long as the weather will permit’ had long tried the ambassadors’ patience.³⁴ ‘Their way and manner of proceeding here with respect to every thing that has the name of business, is so extraordinary and shocking, that I am surprised they are not ashamed of it,’ complained Britain’s Colonel Guy Dickens in 1750. ‘But we are so entirely given up to our pleasures, that we are deaf to all remonstrances and declare publicly that we will not be interrupted in the pursuit of them.’ He was not the last diplomat to mistake Russian prevarication for idleness. When Bestuzhev seemed, as usual, to have evaporated at the height of a diplomatic crisis, the colonel confessed that the ambassadors knew ‘as little, what his mistress and he are doing, as if they were at Japan’.³⁵ It would probably not have surprised him to learn that the empress had no idea that Britain was an island, or so Dimitry Volkov the secretary of her governing Conference later suggested.³⁶ There is no need to worry about the literal accuracy of this claim, which merely suggests that some eighteenth-century rulers (like some modern American presidents) had a greater grasp of geography than others. Unlike Maria Theresa, who had succeeded to the Austrian throne a year before her own coup, Elizabeth displayed little interest in the details of day-to-day government. Indeed, her aversion to business became so legendary that by Christmas 1751, Europe’s chancelleries were humming with talk of her impending abdication. Following rumours that she might take the veil in the 1730s, an earlier British ambassador had reassured his masters that she had ‘not an ounce of the nun’s flesh about her’.³⁷ Now Guy Dickens again poured scorn on the idea. Though it was true that the empress had talked of entering her new Smolny Convent when she reached her sixtieth birthday, there was no prospect of her abdication since ‘the first act of her successor’s authority, let him be who he will, would be to lock her up in a cloister for the remainder of her life’.³⁸

The real question was how long that life could be expected to last. Elizabeth’s health was already a cause of serious anxiety. The first scare had come in 1749, soon after the Court’s arrival in Moscow, when she was stricken with constipation halfway through the carnival. Catherine learned of the crisis almost immediately from Mme Vladislavova and her valet Yevreinov, but was sworn to secrecy in case her informants lost their jobs.³⁹ Lord Hyndford reported that, apart from Dr Boerhaave, only Aleksey Razumovsky and his brother Kirill, Bestuzhev and Apraksin were aware of ‘the imminent danger’. All four had ‘taken proper measures for their security, in case of an accident, for they are by no means in favour with the Great Duke’. Once the worst had been averted, Hyndford hoped that Elizabeth would ‘take more care, for altho’ she is of a very strong constitution, yet she neglects herself too much’.⁴⁰ Hedonism was indeed beginning to take its toll. By the mid-1750s, staircases in all the palaces had been fitted with mechanical chairlifts to allow the increasingly breathless empress to get about. Another was installed in the garden at Peterhof so that she could manoeuvre between the terraces during the summer sanctification ceremonies. Later in the reign, a similar device, operated by a servant in the basement, was even installed at the Alexander Nevsky monastery once the narrow wooden stairs to the upper cathedral proved too steep for Elizabeth to negotiate.⁴¹

None of these contraptions could save her from further bouts of debilitating illness. Sensing that the end might be near, she took communion twice in 1756: first on Maundy Thursday and again on 6 August, halfway through the Dormition Fast, when she was too ill even to greet the Preobrazhensky Guards on their annual feast day. Three days of celebrations following the consecration of Chevakinsky’s new chapel at Tsarskoye Selo on 30 July had left her exhausted.⁴² ‘A certain person’s health is worse than ever,’ Catherine confided to Sir Charles on 3 August. ‘They say that her leading doctor wishes to leave in three months’ time, as the prospect gives him nothing to laugh about. During her stay at M[oscow], she tried witchcraft without his knowledge to cure herself; and an old woman, who was employed, has, it is said, succeeded in putting an end to the discomfort from which she was suffering.’ Imploring Catherine to tell him everything she heard about the empress’s health, the ambassador assured her that ‘There is nothing in the world that interests me so much’.⁴³

The extraordinary correspondence into which Catherine and Sir Charles entered over the summer of 1756, while Stanislaw Poniatowski had temporarily been recalled to Poland, gives us the first incontrovertible sign of her maturing political aspirations. By her own subsequent account, Catherine survived the years of misery she suffered as Peter’s consort through ‘ambition alone’, sustained by a pervading sense of destiny–‘a je ne sais quoi that never left me in doubt for a moment that sooner or later I should succeed in becoming sovereign empress of Russia in my own right’.⁴⁴ It seems unlikely that such ambitions were very far developed when she first arrived from Zerbst. Although she claimed quickly to have mastered the blacker arts of the Court, she can hardly have ‘learned many things’ by feigning sleep during her illness in 1744 because at that time she knew scarcely any Russian. There can be no doubt, however, that, in contrast to her husband (a gossip ‘as discreet as a cannon-ball’), Catherine soon learned to keep her own counsel while redoubling her efforts ‘to gain the affection of everyone, both great and small’. Widely suspected of being a Prussian agent, she understandably claimed to have been no more than ‘a very passive spectator’ of the great debates on foreign policy when she first arrived in Russia–‘very discreet and more or less indifferent’ was how she later described herself. ⁴⁵ Nevertheless, the frequency of her contact with foreign diplomats gave her plenty of opportunities to develop her political antennae. One of the longest entries in the Complete Collected Laws of the Russian Empire describes the ceremonial by which foreign ambassadors presented their credentials to the tsar.⁴⁶ Peter and Catherine had a crucial part to play in these audiences and often found themselves in the company of the ambassadors, not only at regular Court reception days, but also on state occasions. While Elizabeth, ‘dressed in her regimentals’, chose as usual to dine with her intimates at the banquet on Catherine’s name day in 1751, it was the grand duchess and her husband who entertained the great officers of the crown and the foreign ministers.⁴⁷

By then, Catherine had become involved in complex (and ultimately fruitless) negotiations over Peter’s Holstein possessions. The Holsteiners were represented by the Danish envoy, Count Lynar, a burly redhead with a penchant for lilac and flesh-pink clothes who took such great care of his complexion that he was reputed to wear gloves and face cream in bed. (Lest such behaviour be mistaken for effeminacy, Lynar was swift to boast of his eighteen children, claiming that he had always prepared their wet nurses by getting them pregnant too.)⁴⁸ To practical experiences such as these, Catherine added further intellectual reflection. In her self-imposed seclusion after the birth of her son, she read more seriously than ever before. This, it seems, is when she first tackled Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, the eighteenth century’s greatest work of political philosophy, which was later to be the main inspiration for the Instruction (Nakaz) she presented to the Legislative Commission she summoned in 1767. She also immersed herself in the Annals of Tacitus, and since no reader of Tacitus in Elizabeth’s Russia could fail to hear the contemporary echoes of the Praetorian Guards’ role in deciding the fate of the Roman emperors, his book produced ‘a singular revolution’ in Catherine’s mind. ‘Aided perhaps by my depressed state of mind at the time, I began to see many things in black and searched to find deeper causes for the various events which presented themselves to my sight.’⁴⁹

There was scarcely any limit to her ambitions in the summer of 1756, when she was openly prepared to contemplate the consequences of the empress’s demise. Already on 11 August, Catherine’s head was ‘a jumble of intrigues and negotiations’. A week later, she confided to Sir Charles her remarkable ‘dreams’:

After being alerted [to Elizabeth’s death], and being certain that I am not mistaken, I shall go straight to my son’s room. If I meet, or can quickly get hold of, the Grand Master of the Hunt [Aleksey Razumovsky], I shall leave the boy with him and the men under his command. If not, I shall carry him off to my room. I shall also send a man that I can trust to warn five officers of the Guards of whom I am sure, who will each bring me fifty soldiers (this is arranged at the first signal), and though perhaps I may not use them, they will follow me as a reserve in case of difficulty. NB that they will take no orders except from the grand duke or me. I shall send orders to the Chancellor [Bestuzhev], [General] Apraksin and Lieven to come to me, and meanwhile I shall enter the death chamber, where I shall summon the captain of the guard, and shall make him take the oath and keep him at my side. I think that it would be better and safer if the two grand dukes [Peter and Paul] were together, than if only one went with me; also that the rendezvous for my followers should be my ante-chamber. If I see any commotion, or even the slightest signs of it, I shall secure, either with my own people or with those of the captain of the guard, the Shuvalovs and the Adjutant General of the day. Add to that the fact that, the lower ranking officers of the Life Guards are trustworthy; and though I have had no communication with all of them, I can count sufficiently on two or three, and on having enough means at my disposal to make myself obeyed by everyone who is not bought.⁵⁰

This astonishing letter was followed by a stream of others scarcely less frank, in which Catherine commented in characteristically ironic fashion on everything from Elizabeth’s failing health to the plans for Russian troop movements. (As her ‘dreams’ revealed, she was friendly with the Russian commander-in-chief, General Apraksin, and attempted to persuade him on Sir Charles’s behalf to oppose the resumption of diplomatic relations with France.) ‘I do not know what I am saying, or what I am doing,’ she confessed on 11 September, ‘I can truly say that it is the first time in my life that this has happened to me.’ Hardly able to believe what he was reading, Sir Charles coaxed her into further indiscretion in terms quite outside the normal diplomatic lexicon:

One word from you is my most sacred law. When I think of you, my duty to my Master [George II] grows less. I am ready to carry out all the orders you can give me, provided they are not dangerous to you; for in that case I shall disobey with a firmness equal to the obedience with which I would carry out all others…I am yours, yours alone, and all yours. I esteem you, I honour you, I adore you. I shall die convinced that there was never a sweetness, a soundness, a face, a heart, a head, to equal yours.

Not to be outdone, the grand duchess replied in kind: ‘My head is splendid, when it has one like yours to think for it.’⁵¹

So long as Elizabeth stubbornly confounded predictions of her demise, there was no opportunity to test the power of such fantasies. Instead, Catherine had to cope with the changed circumstances in which Stanislaw Poniatowski made his long awaited return to St Petersburg in January 1757. In that same month, despite all Sir Charles’s efforts to prevent it, Russia entered the Seven Years’ War against Prussia on the side of France, Austria and Saxony, for whom Stanislaw was charged with securing Russian military aid. Since England was Prussia’s informal ally, it was no longer possible for the young Pole to consort openly with his mentor, who, amid the debris of his failed diplomacy, was already beginning to show signs of the mental derangement that would kill him two years later. Sir Charles was recalled to London in July. By then, however, Stanislaw’s love affair with Catherine had resumed in all its passion. Indeed, she was already four months pregnant with his child.

Following her twenty-eighth birthday in April, Catherine retreated to Oranienbaum, where the seating plans for her dinner parties were distributed by lot to avoid the torture of official precedence regulations. A French diplomat’s account of the procedure suggests that not everything was left to chance:

Just before we ate, pages came in with gilded vases full of little tickets: these were for us to draw the valentins, a custom which overthrows etiquette and removes all the appointed places, even from princes. The seats are numbered 1, 1; 2, 2; etc. The gentleman who has the same number as a lady sits next to her. This put me on the grand duchess’s left and Monsieur de Poniatowsky on her right. On my other side, I had the princess of Georgia, who spoke only Armenian. The grand duchess took pity on my embarrassment, sometimes joining in the conversation.⁵²

Anxious to mollify Peter, who was irritated by her refusal to receive his mistress, Elizabeth Vorontsova, Catherine, knowing her husband’s love for music, commissioned Rinaldi and Araja to stage a lavish outdoor spectacle at Oranienbaum on 17 July, paid for by a further British loan at a cost of between 10,000 and 15,000 roubles.

We sat down at table, and after the first course the curtain that hid the main avenue was raised and we saw in the distance the rolling orchestra, drawn by twenty oxen decorated with garlands and surrounded by all the male and female dancers I could find. The avenue was so brightly lit that we could make out everything in it. When the chariot came to a halt, chance had it that the moon hung directly overhead, which made an admirable impression and greatly astonished the whole company. Moreover, the weather was the finest in the world. Everyone jumped up from the table to enjoy the beauty of the symphony and the spectacle. When it was over, the curtain was lowered and we returned to the table for the second course. At the end of this, we heard trumpets and drums and a barker cried out: ‘Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen, get your free lottery tickets here in my booths!’ On both sides of the large curtain, two smaller ones were raised and we saw two brightly lit booths, one of which distributed free tickets for the porcelain lottery, and the other tickets for flowers, ribbons, fans, combs, purses, gloves, sword knots, and other finery of the kind. Once the booths were empty, we went back for dessert, after which we danced until six in the morning.

‘In short,’ as Catherine wrote in her memoirs, ‘on that day people discovered qualities in me that they had not known I possessed, and in this way I disarmed my enemies. That was my aim, but it did not last for long, as we shall see.’⁵³

The most disconcerting part of the celebration at Oranienbaum was a fall Catherine suffered when the horse drawing her carriage reared up as she stepped out to inspect the preparations. Fortunately, her pregnancy was unaffected. When her daughter was born at the end of November, she begged Elizabeth to be allowed to choose a name. Instead, the empress pointedly had the child christened Anna Petrovna, in memory of her older sister, Peter’s mother. Peter himself rejoiced at Anna’s birth, though he was surely not her father. Poniatowski, who was, made clandestine visits to Catherine, who remained in solitary confinement while her baby was removed, as Paul had been before her, to the care of the empress’s wet nurses. But worse was still to come for the grand duchess when Chancellor Bestuzhev was arrested, along with Vasily Adodurov and other friends of hers, on the night of 14 February 1758.

When Catherine first arrived in Russia, Bestuzhev had been her greatest enemy. No one had done more to make her life at the Young Court a misery. After the ‘diplomatic revolution’ of 1756, however, as Russia edged ever closer to an improbable alliance with France (her principal continental rival), the Machiavellian chancellor had come to see the grand duchess as a potential counterbalance to his Francophile rivals at Court, the Shuvalovs and the Vorontsovs. Though he was initially horrified to learn from Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams of Catherine’s liaison with Stanislaw Poniatowski, he helped her to conceal it, and it was Bestuzhev, remembered by Stanislaw as a ghoulish figure ‘with a mouth which opened to reveal only four stumps of teeth and a pair of small flashing eyes’, who did most to secure the young Pole’s return to Russia.⁵⁴ The very chancellor who had prevented her from corresponding with her mother in the 1740s now opened up a channel to Johanna Elisabeth. Meanwhile, the empress’s failing health prompted him to make his own plans for an alternative regime, drafting a manifesto that would place Peter on the throne with Catherine as his co-ruler. She was flattered to discover that the chancellor regarded her ‘as perhaps the only person upon whom at that time the hopes of the public could rest when the empress was no more’.⁵⁵

Precisely when Bestuzhev showed Catherine his plans remains uncertain, but the issue of the succession was brought into focus more sharply than ever before when Elizabeth collapsed in public outside her favourite Church of the Sign at Tsarskoye Selo on 8 September 1757. (For an index of the panic she created, we need look no further than the Court journals, which are blank for the following week.)⁵⁶ Faced with the possibility that the pro-Prussian Grand Duke Peter might come to the throne, Russian generals leading the campaign against Frederick the Great were placed in a delicate position. As recently as 19 August, they had scored a famous victory over the king at Gross Jägersdorf, less than a year after Frederick had himself routed the French at Rossbach. In the wake of such a triumph, General Apraksin had been expected to advance on Berlin. Instead, he retreated to Memel. Driven by the fragility of Russia’s supply line (his troops had to wait while the grass grew under their feet to feed their horses),⁵⁷Apraksin’s decision was taken on 27 August–before the empress’s collapse. But in St Petersburg it could easily be made to seem that he had been motivated by doubts about her health, generated by his treasonable correspondence with Catherine and Bestuzhev. Urged on by the chancellor, Catherine begged Apraksin to reverse his retreat. But by then it was too late. In October, he was removed from his command as Bestuzhev’s enemies, profiting from Catherine’s withdrawal from the public gaze in the final months of her pregnancy, steadily poisoned Elizabeth’s mind against him.⁵⁸

Catherine learned of Bestuzhev’s arrest from Stanislaw Poniatowski on the morning after it occurred. That evening, as the lovers attended a ball pretending that nothing had happened, she felt ‘a dagger in the heart’. While the chancellor fell under a lengthy investigation that was to end in public disgrace and banishment, Catherine faced a crisis more dangerous than the one in 1744, when it could reasonably be claimed that she had been no more than an unwitting accomplice to her mother’s clumsy pro-Prussian machinations. Now her complicity was harder to deny and it was vital to limit the damage. Following the chancellor’s example, she had burned all her papers as soon as the danger arose. Now, according to the account in her memoirs, which comes closer to her mother’s purple prose than her own customarily deadpan style, she prostrated herself in front of Elizabeth on the night of 13 April and pleaded tearfully to be sent back to Zerbst. While her husband berated her as a liar, she stubbornly refused to admit any treasonable intent in her correspondence with Apraksin. Perhaps, as she suggests, her performance was enough to win Elizabeth over. At any rate, she was given a stay of execution until a further audience six weeks later, when she faced more questioning about her letters to the general. Although we cannot know precisely how the matter was resolved–for one thing, her memoirs dramatically break off at this point–Bestuzhev’s enemies probably decided (just as he had before them) that Catherine could still be useful to them. While he was eventually committed to house arrest on his estate on 5 April 1759 in a manifesto that highlighted his vain attempts to corrupt both Catherine and Peter–the manifesto was published at the beginning of Passion Week, creating an inescapable association with sinfulness–the Vorontsovs and the Shuvalovs left the grand duchess in place as a pawn on the chessboard of Court politics and began to treat her well.⁵⁹

That, as events were to show, was a serious underestimation of her abilities. But there was no sign of a glorious future for Catherine in the spring of 1759. Poniatowski had gone back to Poland in the previous August; Bestuzhev’s disgrace made it impossible for him to return to Russia. The death of her infant daughter on 8 March left her ‘inconsolable’. ‘It was only her virtue and her complete resignation to the decrees of Providence that could bring her out of her state of shock,’ Vorontsov reported to his nephew, enclosing a letter of condolence for Johanna Elisabeth.⁶⁰ When Catherine’s debt-ridden mother herself died in Paris in May 1760, she was left completely alone. Like everyone else at the Russian Court, all she could do was watch and wait as the ailing empress entered the sixth decade of her life.