CHAPTER FIVE
Modern historians of medicine have stressed that ‘virtually no important doctor in the first half of the eighteenth century placed the root of hysteria in the uterus’ and that ‘all forms of hysteria tended to be seen as the physical manifestations of a specifically mental derangement’.1 Told that Elizabeth’s symptoms had first manifested themselves when colic seemed to threaten the life of the baby Grand Duke Paul, François Poissonnier, the French specialist summoned to examine her at Peterhof in August 1759, declared it ‘easy to understand’ that fear had unsettled ‘all her nerves, and particularly those of the uterus’. Though he could find little wrong with her ‘excellent constitution’, Elizabeth’s lifestyle left much to be desired. The collapse at Tsarskoye Selo had been made the more serious by her refusal to follow her doctors’ advice. Observing that with age ‘the humours become slower in their circulation’, Poissonnier prescribed a purgative intended to induce two or three evacuations every day for a month. To sweeten the pill, the doctor suggested that his tablets should be dipped in marmalade and swallowed with an infusion of lime-blossom tea. He also prescribed coffee at bedtime, flavoured with liqueur d’Hofmann mixed with sweetened water or diluted lemonade. ‘This liqueur, which resembles nothing one might call a remedy because it is very pleasant, has the singular property of strengthening the nerves without inflaming them.’ While he particularly recommended peony, ‘whose taste is as good as its effects are salutary’, his main aim was to steer Elizabeth away from dairy foods and pastries. ‘I realise that Her Imperial Majesty has been accustomed to them since childhood, but when circumstances change, it is equally necessary to alter one’s habits.’ By the same token, her preference for lettuce, chicory, spinach, sorrel and watercress, cooked in meat juices, was bound to give her constipation. If she persisted with such a damaging diet, then she must accept the enemas he prescribed in return. Her best option, however, was regular exercise. Poissonnier advised her firmly against ‘too sedentary a lifestyle, which seems opposed to the vivacity of her character and to the continuous activity in which she engaged until the age of forty-five’.2
Whether or not it owed anything to her doctor’s prescriptions, Elizabeth’s health seemed briefly to improve. In 1758, perhaps haunted by the memory of her collapse in the previous autumn, she had avoided Tsarskoye Selo altogether. Two brief visits are recorded from 1759, and the rhythm of her visits to the summer palaces began to pick up in 1760–a sure sign that she was feeling stronger. Even so, in these final years of her life she largely withdrew from public life, leaving much of the work of her government in the hands of her sophisticated favourite, Ivan Shuvalov. In retrospect, the continuities between Russian cultural policies of the late 1750s and those of Catherine’s own reign are obvious. It was largely thanks to Shuvalov, for example, that the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts was founded in St Petersburg in 1757 (Catherine was later to set it on firmer foundations), and he corresponded with Voltaire.3 But this burst of activity took place without the grand duchess’s involvement. In the wake of Bestuzhev’s disgrace, she had little option but to keep a low profile.
By the winter of 1760–61, the Russian Court was once again wreathed in gloom. On 7 January 1761, mourning was imposed for six weeks in memory of Britain’s George II.4 Elizabeth had not been seen in public since the St Andrew’s Day banquet at the end of November, where she sat between Peter and Paul.5 She did not appear again until Easter. At first, the British ambassador reported, it was ‘an attack of the tooth-ache which occasioned a swelling in her face’; after Christmas, Ivan Shuvalov told of lengthy nosebleeds.6 ‘Apart from bouts of hysteria, and gradual symptoms of blood loss, and another local disease,’ wrote a well-informed French diplomat in the spring, she had been ‘suffering for the whole of the current winter with sores in her legs’. Stubbornly refusing to seek a cure, the empress remained ‘locked up completely alone’, subject to ‘frequent attacks of melancholy’, and with only Paul and her young Kalmyk servants for company. ‘When she admitted society, she could bear the presence of only the most restricted number of courtiers.’7
Behind closed doors, however, Elizabeth seemed determined to keep up appearances. A sense of her routine emerges from letters sent by her lady-in-waiting, Countess Anna Vorontsova, to her daughter, who was travelling abroad with her husband (‘I am sending you your favourite food, flabby fish: I don’t think it will go off’).8 When a favourite chorister married in January, the empress threw a party followed by dancing until four in the morning. While she was too ill to attend the theatre, the theatre came to her. A French comedy was performed in her apartments at Candlemas and, later that week, Sumarokov’s Russian players gave her his tragedy Sinav and Truvor (they had been fetched back from Moscow at short notice, prompting tantrums from the notoriously volatile playwright, who resigned shortly afterwards).9 On 9 February, Elizabeth felt well enough to sit for her portrait.10 Following Peter Shuvalov’s marriage eleven days later, she hosted a banquet in her own apartments. (Further weddings were put off until the autumn: ‘Think of the poor couples!’) This time there was no dancing, but Shuvalov threw a ball of his own, where Catherine joined Peter on 23 February, the last day of the carnival.11
At that time, the Court was enjoying a visit from the French astronomer, the abbé Chappe d’Auteroche, en route to Siberia to see the transit of Venus across the sun. As Vasily Sukhodolsky’s attractive genre painting Astronomy suggests, this was a subject that interested courtiers of both sexes–indeed, one of the most extravagant purchases made by Peter’s mistress Elizabeth Vorontsova from the Court jeweller was a telescope with various figures mounted in gold and set with diamonds at a cost of 1200 roubles.12 On his return to France, Chappe repaid his hosts for their hospitality with a caustic account of his experiences in which Catherine is portrayed as the victim of a corrupt, despotic regime:
To all external appearances, the court of Russia seemed more tranquil than it had been for some time: but, on the inside, envy, jealousy, and mistrust swept through this vast palace. The grand duke no longer lived with his wife. The princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, born in a free country and brought up among the muses and the arts, was in no way brought down by this disgrace. Her natural talent and acquired knowledge furnished her with the greatest possible resources. She found tranquillity in the middle of the tumults of this court. Not wishing to remain ignorant of anything, she spent her moments of leisure in cultivating literature, the arts, and the sciences.13
In fact, Catherine kept up her duties at Court, attending both the theatre and the chapel in place of the fading empress. She and Peter hosted the Sunday reception days, sometimes together, sometimes separately. Looking back on their customary winter week at Oranienbaum in mid-January, Dashkova contrasted the ‘wit, good taste and decorum’ that prevailed in Catherine’s part of the palace with the cruder entertainments that Peter enjoyed with his Holsteiners at camp or in the Grüne Salle (Green Room), whose walls were draped with pine and fir branches.14There, in the company of dancers and singers from his opera troupe, he liked to set off table fireworks in the form of intricately decorated desserts, ‘not without inconvenience from the smoke and sulphurous vapours’, as Jacob Stählin remarked.15 A less combative picture of the visit emerges from the account by the Piedmontese Misere. Downstairs, a military band played while the men smoked their pipes. The weather stayed fine until after midnight, but after lunch on the following day, undeterred by snow and wind, Peter and his guests–Count Hendrikov and his wife, the Shafirov family and Prince Dashkov–set out for Catherine’s dacha in twelve small sledges. There was ‘much pleasure and a lot of laughter’ as they tumbled in the snow. The grand duchess herself served Italian liqueurs ‘in her beautiful round house at the top of the hill’, as they all ‘drank coffee and milk from the farm, with black bread and butter’.16
By the end of January, Chappe was ready to depart for Siberia, but the Court now found even more entertaining company in the shape of another visitor, King Irakly of Georgia. In a letter to her daughter, Countess Vorontsova listed his gifts with a practised eye for size and value:
Our Gracious Sovereign was presented with a very pure agate, weighing two zolotniks or more, twenty-three strings of large oriental pearls, and two Persian silver brocades. His Highness [Peter]–a dagger with diamonds and agates; Her Highness [Catherine]–a small mirror with precious stones and two strings of large pearls; and His Highness P[aul] P[etrovich]–a dagger. And he gave Mikhail Larionovich [Vorontsov] a very good dagger, which Shah-Nadir himself had worn, some gilded silver tackle for the horses, and a hookah-pipe with precious stones for smoking tobacco that Pauzié said was worth 2000 roubles. And he gave me a big diamond ring, a string of large pearls and a 15-string pearl bracelet (as big as yours), handmade from Persian silver.17
Elizabeth felt sufficiently recovered to appear before her Court on Easter Saturday. ‘We were all delighted to see [her] in the great chapel,’ reported her relieved lady-in-waiting, ‘and everyone was pleased that she permitted them to kiss her hand.’ Another important ‘first’ was achieved when Paul made his debut on the dance floor. ‘He is a very handsome child,’ reported the dutiful Sir Robert Keith, ‘and dances wonderfully well for one of his age.’18 The Court was glad to see the little boy dance with his mother at the coronation day ceremony. By then, Catherine’s birthday banquet celebrations had been followed by an opera on 23 April, which the Georgian king much enjoyed. Pleased to have found an exotic potentate to patronise, Vorontsova told her daughter that it was ‘impossible to believe how well he behaves!’19
On 11 May, Peter and Catherine travelled to Oranienbaum for what was probably their longest single spell of uninterrupted residence. Although they returned to Peterhof for Peter’s name day celebrations at the end of June–and both Catherine and Peter subsequently made separate trips to see their son (in her case for not much more than an hour)–they were to remain ‘in the country’ until they moved back to the Winter Palace on 9 September.20 Perhaps it was during this period of relative leisure that Catherine jotted down (or at any rate added to) a series of miscellaneous notes that give a sense of her developing political ideas and ambitions (though they cannot be dated precisely, the notes were made between February 1758 and February 1762, and the final one quotes a French periodical of March 1761).21 Peace and prosperity were two obvious aims for an empire engaged in an exhausting European war. ‘All I hope, all that I wish is that this country in which God has cast me should prosper. God is my witness to that. The glory of this country is my glory.’ ‘Peace is necessary to this vast empire; we need population, not devastation; we need to populate our great empty spaces as much as possible.’ A passage in Bielfeld’s Cameralist Political Instruction prompted her to reflect on the benefits of enlightened toleration: ‘To do nothing without principle or without reason, not to allow one to be led by prejudice, to respect religion, but not to give it any power in State matters, to banish everything that reeks of fanaticism and to draw the best out of every situation for the public good, is the basis of the Chinese Empire, the most durable of all those known on this earth.’ A strong sense of justice emerges, prompted by the treatment meted out to Bestuzhev: ‘All my life I will remain hostile to the idea of establishing a secret Committee of Inquiry to judge a guilty man. An open trial, the judgement of the Senate, as in France and England, where a peer is tried by his peers, is the only solution.’ There was also a strong note of idealism: ‘It is against justice and the Christian religion to make slaves out of men, born to be free.’22
By the summer of 1761, Catherine was pregnant again, this time by a new lover, Grigory Orlov, the virile guards officer who was to remain by her side until 1773. Wounded at the battle of Zorndorf, Grigory had returned from the war with a reputation for valour. We do not know when their affair began, but here was a type who would subsequently attract her again and again. Though he could boast none of Poniatowski’s intellectual accomplishments, Grigory seemed willing to learn (he too was interested in astronomy) and keen to listen to her ideas. As her political ambitions developed, she may well have chosen him for his military connections–he and his four brothers, all gallant and popular officers, could support her in good times and bad. And the Orlovs were not the only people Catherine had begun to cultivate. Nikita Panin, a protégé of Bestuzhev who had survived his master’s disgrace and remained on terms with the Vorontsovs during his twelve years as ambassador to Sweden, had returned to St Petersburg in 1760 to take charge of her son’s education and allowed her to see more of him than she had previously been able to do. Another occasional visitor to Oranienbaum was Princess Dashkova, a potential source of intelligence on the whole Vorontsov clan.23
While Catherine kept out of sight in the country, an increasingly breathless Elizabeth was left to cope with the heat of the summer in St Petersburg. After lunch on 26 May, she drove out to watch the fire that blazed all day in Mesh-chanskaya Street.24 June brought the prospect of more pleasurable excursions, as she travelled first to Peter Shuvalov’s estate at Pargolovo and then to Peterhof, reliving the old days by dining in Aleksey Razumovsky’s rooms while hunting horns serenaded them outside. After another excursion a few days later, it was three in the morning before she returned from Monplaisir, the seaside pavilion at Peterhof. Such a regime was bound to alarm the medics. Dr Condoidi, Elizabeth’s Greek physician, himself died of apoplexy the previous August, being replaced by the Scot, James Mounsey, and Dr Schilling. Karl Kruse joined them in June 1761. ‘We are rich in doctors here,’ Countess Vorontsova told her daughter.25
In mid-July ‘the Empress caused great anxiety to all her Court’ with ‘an attack of the hysterical vapours and convulsions which knocked her unconscious for several hours’.26 It was the beginning of the end. Now that Elizabeth’s horizons were shrinking, there was no great ceremony or banquet at the end of August for the knights of the Order of St Alexander Nevsky. Back in St Petersburg, she took her meals at a round table in a corner room of the Summer Palace, overlooking the Fontanka. She still found the energy for the occasional visit to Ivan Shuvalov, but was always back by 10 p.m. The banquet and ball, hosted by Peter and Catherine on Paul’s birthday, went ahead without her. After the Court’s return to the temporary Winter Palace two days later, the grand ducal couple hosted the Court receptions, too. Elizabeth celebrated with Catherine in the great chapel for the first time that autumn on 26 October to give thanks for the capture of Troppau by Field Marshal Buturlin. On 13 November, they both attended a French comedy. It proved to be the empress’s last appearance in public. Only the grand duchess and her son attended the ball on her name day. It was over by eleven. Though the following day, 25 November, was the empress’s accession day, the greatest day in the Court calendar, Elizabeth remained closeted in her apartments. Despite the customary 101-gun salute, the servants wore only standard livery. Banquet, music and fanfares were all cancelled on her birthday, 18 December, though there was a salute after the end of the morning liturgy attended on the empress’s behalf by Catherine alone.27
Mikhail Vorontsov tried to forestall rumours in Europe by sending a circular to the Russian ambassadors on 19 December:
For several days, all Her Imperial Majesty’s faithful subjects have been in a state of general sadness and wild alarm on account of an illness deriving from a fever which at first seemed dangerous because Her Majesty, out of a natural aversion to doctors, was reluctant to see one, and her blood was so inflamed that it caused her to vomit. But as result of two bleedings administered over three days, the fever has so far dropped and the illness so far changed for the better this seventh day of the crisis, that, thank God, the misery into which we were all plunged is now transformed into ravishing transports of joy by the great hope we have that with the aid of Divine Providence, the Empress will soon entirely recover her precious health.28
He was hoping against hope. By the time the ambassadors received his message, it was already too late. The Court journal for Elizabeth’s reign falls silent on 24 December. She died the next day.
In the event, all Catherine’s dreams of seizing the throne came to nothing. Pregnant and politically isolated, she could only stand by as the Shuvalovs and Vorontsovs ensured that all Russia proclaimed the advent of Tsar Peter III–and she became his empress.
By the time of her husband’s accession, he and Catherine had long been leading separate lives. In that sense, little now changed. The thirty-four-year-old tsar rose at seven and gave his first orders of the day while dressing. By eight, he was in his study to hear the Procurator-General, Alexander Glebov, deliver his reports. Occasionally Peter visited government offices unannounced to keep negligent officials on their toes. Regularly at eleven, he inspected the parade in the square outside the palace. Although he called on his new empress most mornings, they rarely dined together.29 While she ate with senior courtiers, he preferred to eat with Elizabeth Vorontsova and carouse in the company of Prince Georg Ludwig, the very same uncle who had courted Catherine twenty years earlier and was greeted with great pomp on his arrival at the military encampment Krasnoye Selo on 23 January and later lodged at Ivan Shuvalov’s palace.30 Even on ceremonial occasions, the imperial couple played roles that kept them apart. At the Blessing of the Waters at Epiphany–a ritual revived in all its splendour at the beginning of the new reign–Catherine followed the icon procession to the Jordan on the Moika while the tsar emulated his hero Peter the Great by riding at the head of his troops.31Though they were unavoidably brought together for the funeral procession of Peter Shuvalov, which they watched from the balcony of the Stroganov Palace on 21 January, the tsar arrived late and there was little contact between them.32
Though Shuvalov’s funeral was exactly the sort of elaborate ritual that Elizabeth despised, the most extravagant obsequies were reserved for the late empress herself. The day after her death, the tsar allocated 100,000 roubles to the newly appointed funeral commission which met daily at the mansion of the disgraced Chancellor Bestuzhev. The commission established after Anna’s death in 1740 offered the most recent precedent, though it was not to be emulated in every respect. Almost 45,000 roubles of its total budget of 65,000 had been spent on velvet, taffeta and other fabrics, to the neglect of the corpse itself: ‘She had lain in state for a month,’ a British visitor remarked, ‘but not having been rightly embalmed was almost fallen to pieces before her burial.’ 33 Now, while work went ahead ‘day and night’ on Jacob Stählin’s designs for an allegorical chamber of mourning in the wooden Winter Palace and an elaborate catafalque in the Peter-Paul Cathedral, leading courtiers gathered on the evening of Monday 14 January to convey the corpse to the stateroom where it was first displayed to the Court. Dressed in her favourite virginal white, the late empress was laid out on a lit de parade on a dais covered in white cloth under a canopy trimmed with gold. The walls of the room were also draped in white cloth edged with gold braid.34
On Friday 25 January, Elizabeth’s corpse was transferred to lie in state in a second chamber of sorrows, where Stählin had gone to elaborate lengths to represent the Russian realm weeping at the tomb of its beloved ruler.35 At two in the afternoon, the Captains of the Guard formed a new guard of honour in this much darker chamber, draped in black and adorned with festoons of silver brocade. Twelve Chevaliers Gardes placed the coffin, covered with a pall of gold cloth trimmed with Spanish lace, on a raised catafalque beneath a canopy emblazoned with the imperial crown. By its side stood four ladies-in-waiting, dressed in deep mourning, and entirely covered with crepe veils. Two officers, in full dress uniform, stood guard on the first step, while two archimandrites, standing at the foot of the coffin, took it in turn to read aloud from the Bible throughout the day and night.36
Yakov Shakhovskoy–a far from sentimental bureaucrat whose memoirs mention his wedding only as a temporary interruption to his work–was overcome with emotion at the sight of his late sovereign.37 Bowing twice on approaching the corpse, which was now dressed in a silver gown, trimmed with lace sleeves, he joined the procession of Russians who prostrated themselves before it, or rather ‘threw themselves face down on the ground in front of the bed’ so violently that at least one foreign observer ‘feared that they must fracture their skulls’.38 ‘There is a multiplicity of such customs,’ the supercilious French ambassador reported, ‘full of superstitions at which [Catherine] naturally laughs, but the clergy and the people have faith in her deep grieving over the deceased and rate her feelings very highly.’39
According to Pauzié, the Court jeweller, it was Catherine rather than the tsar who summoned him to this ‘large room, lit by six thousand candles’, where he helped her to place a gold crown on the swollen skull of the deceased. Since Pauzié had ‘taken the precaution of placing several screws in the band that gripped the forehead’, he was able to use his tweezers to make the crown big enough to fit. But it was not a pleasant operation. ‘Despite all the incense and fragrance, the smell of the corpse was so strong that I could hardly stand near it. However, the empress bore all this with amazing fortitude and in this way completely won over the hearts of her subjects.’40
Peter made no secret of his impatience with such rituals and visibly chafed against them. Courtiers had been shocked to discover that deep mourning was not immediately prescribed when the empress died.41 Scarcely had the corpse been transferred to its second chamber of rest than Peter ordered them to abandon mourning dress altogether on future Sundays and feast days. That night, 27 January, he and Catherine dined with Prince Trubetskoy, returning to the palace at three and two in the morning respectively.42 On Monday 4 February, the tsar was taken incognito to inspect the final preparations at the Peter-Paul Cathedral, promising further funds to ensure that the spectacle lacked nothing in magnificence. (The funeral commission’s outstanding expenses of 74,000 roubles were ultimately paid by Catherine shortly after her own accession.) While he spent the evening drinking with Prince Georg until three in the morning, his wife, now six months pregnant with Orlov’s child, remained in her apartments in order to be at her most demure for the next day’s funeral.43
Following a pattern established after her father’s death in 1725, Elizabeth’s coffin was borne with great pomp to its burial place on the far side of the frozen Neva, where, between the cathedral’s four main pillars, Stählin had created a Temple of Sorrow and Remembrance with a life-size half-length portrait of the late empress.44 The capital’s bells began to toll at ten as troops lined the route of the procession. Three hundred guardsmen led the way, followed by an even larger number of priests, processing two by two and chanting hymns. Behind them, in single file, came the gentlemen of the Court, wearing the uniforms of the various orders of chivalry, and each attended by a chamberlain. A single cavalier, armed from head to toe, rode ahead of the coffin on a stately charger held by two equerries. Released from captivity in the fortress by the pro-Prussian Tsar Peter, Count Hård was there to observe the scene:
The coffin, placed on a sort of chariot, drawn by eight horses and adorned with black velvet festoons, was covered with a black cloth pall richly trimmed with Spanish silver-point lace. A canopy made from the same materials was carried by Generals and Senators, accompanied by several officers of the guards. The Emperor followed immediately behind the coffin, wearing a large black cloak carried by twelve chamberlains, each holding a wax taper in his hand. Prince Georg of Holstein followed the Emperor as his nearest relation; then came the Prince of Holstein-Beck. The Empress followed also on foot, holding a burning taper and clad in a robe carried by all her maids of honour. Three hundred grenadiers brought up the rear of the procession.45
Nothing could sound more solemn. Yet, according to Catherine, the tsar behaved in typically unseemly fashion. Irrepressibly cheerful throughout, he indulged in childish games, first lagging behind the hearse and then charging across the ice to catch it up, much to the embarrassment of the courtiers deputed to carry his train. When Count Sheremetev could no longer keep hold of it, it blew about in the wind to Peter’s intense amusement.46
‘Everyone dined privately that day,’ Hård recalled, ‘and spent the evening in privacy, as if their grief and affliction had been real. But from the following day, no more was said or thought of Elizabeth, than if she had never existed. Such is ever the fate of things in this world: every thing passes; everything is forgotten.’47 As if to prove his point, the Court travelled to Tsarskoye Selo a mere three days after the funeral to celebrate the tsar’s thirty-fourth birthday in style. Before the first dinner in the Picture Gallery, he invested Anna Vorontsova with the Order of St Catherine and announced that Yelena Naryshkina was to take her place as senior lady-in-waiting. In the ensuing banquets, he sat next to Princess Golitsyna and Countess Bruce. Catherine, having travelled separately from St Petersburg, remained in her apartments throughout the weekend, apparently oblivious as the first fireworks to be set off since Elizabeth’s death exploded all around her.48
Conscious that the new empress had been isolated from the beginning of Peter’s reign, diplomats soon realised that she was entirely without influence. The disappointed Austrian ambassador, who had hoped to use her to undermine the tsar’s admiration for all things Prussian, assumed that her ‘calm exterior’ must conceal ‘some sort of secret undertakings’. But he had little hope of a plot maturing because, despite her obvious intelligence, Catherine seemed too impetuous to lead a successful conspiracy: ‘she lacks caution and fundamental sense, and her somewhat arrogant and lively nature will prevent her from following a premeditated plan’.49 She, not surprisingly, remembered things differently, telling Poniatowski soon after her accession that the coup had been ‘planned for the last six months’. Yet even if it was true that ‘propositions’ had been made to Catherine from the time of Elizabeth’s death, there was little that she could have done to challenge her husband before Easter.50 For one thing, she was pregnant. For another, the new tsar initially seemed to promise greater things than his detractors had anticipated.
For all his boorishness, Peter was the first adult male to ascend the Russian throne for more than a century. That in itself was cause for widespread jubilation. Further good news followed in February, when he issued an edict emancipating the nobility from the compulsory state service enforced by Peter the Great. Though this was one of the most significant pieces of legislation in eighteenth-century Russia, it is surprisingly difficult to be sure of its origins. Prince Shcherbatov famously claimed that the tsar had locked Dimitry Volkov, one of Elizabeth’s leading officials, into a palace stateroom with a great dane and told him to come up with something important overnight while he went off to carouse with Princess Kurakina:
Not knowing the reason for this or what the monarch had in mind, Volkov did not know what to begin writing. But write he must. Being an enterprising man, he remembered the frequent exhortations made by Count Roman Larionovich Vorontsov to the monarch, concerning the freedom of the nobility. Sitting down, he wrote out the manifesto concerning this. In the morning he was released from confinement, and the manifesto was approved by the monarch and promulgated.51
Though we cannot be sure precisely how the final compromise was negotiated, or how difficult it was to reach it, the manifesto seems actually to have emerged from a spectrum of interests in Peter’s new government, all of which had deeper roots in Elizabeth’s reign. Roman Vorontsov was indeed anxious to secure noble property interests in an expanding land market, but his interests had to be balanced against those of the Shuvalovs, who took a more favourable view of the merchants. In the event, the nobles were denied a monopoly of serf ownership and immunity from corporal punishment (privileges that were ultimately confirmed by Catherine’s own Charter to the Nobility in 1785), but granted the option of serving voluntarily–no great sacrifice for a government which could already rely on a flourishing central bureaucracy and now wanted nobles to return to their provincial estates.52 Whatever the precise balance of forces, the decree seemed to presage a more considered approach to government than the tsar’s earlier behaviour had led people to expect. As Catherine’s first English biographer put it: ‘The grand duke had been inconsistent, impetuous and wild: Peter III now shewed himself equitable, patient, and enlightened.’53
Easter, however, marked a turning point in the fortunes of both the tsar and his consort. One of Peter’s first acts on his accession had been to inspect Rastrelli’s stone Winter Palace, whose construction had been delayed by the Seven Years’ War. As he and Catherine made another visit on 19 February, workmen laboured day and night to allow them to move in at the end of Lent. With the snow swirling all around, the tsar made a final inspection on Tuesday 2 April, decreeing that everything be made ready for the following Saturday.54 It was a tall order. A vast swathe of land, stretching south towards the Moika and west beyond the Admiralty, was still a building site, home to a small army of craftsmen housed in primitive wooden shacks, and festooned with the debris of an eight-year construction project. The authorities solved their problem in characteristically imaginative fashion by allowing the populace to take whatever they liked: thousands of scavengers swarmed towards the palace, denuding the surrounding area of timber, stones, bricks, tar and all manner of valuable building materials. The site having been miraculously cleared, Peter duly took possession of his new residence on 6 April.55
No ceremony was shown: the tsar entered the palace incognito and only the firing of the guns announced that he had done so. But it was a different story in the week that followed, as celebration followed celebration. There could hardly have been better cover for the final stages of Catherine’s pregnancy. On Thursday of Easter week she gave birth to a boy–named Aleksey Grigoryevich in acknowledgement of the paternity of Grigory Orlov–who was promptly spirited away. Peter, who may never have known of his wife’s pregnancy (conveniently concealed by the mourning dress she wore throughout his reign), was irritated to discover that she was too ill to attend the banquet in honour of the peace with Prussia held on 29 April, less than three weeks after the birth. While that celebration had to be turned into a men-only affair, the tsar determined to hold another as soon as the ratification papers had been exchanged.56
Before he learned of Elizabeth’s death, Frederick had begun the New Year nervous of a Russian attack on Berlin and anxious that Europe would self-combust into a general war within six months.57 The accession of a pro-Prussian tsar in St Petersburg offered the unexpected prospect of delivery for his war-torn state. To escape from his ‘moment of great crisis’, the king had been unwilling to oppose Peter’s ambition to recapture Schleswig for Holstein by invading Denmark. ‘There is nothing more pressing for us,’ he had written at the end of January, ‘than to achieve a prompt reconciliation with Russia to pull us back from the edge of the precipice.’ To hinder Peter’s plans was to ‘risk embittering him and spoiling everything right from the start’.58 Paradoxically, it would be the tsar who ultimately suffered most from the apparent encouragement of his Prussian hero. Secure in the knowledge that Frederick would not stand in his way, he launched into rash plans to attack the Danes.
Catherine and her friends had aspirations of their own. Left alone since February, when her husband had been appointed as ambassador to Constantinople after a public altercation with the tsar, Princess Dashkova had had plenty of time to mull over her plans for a revolution. It was in April that she later claimed to have begun to sound out contacts in the capital–and it is possible that she did, since the Austrian ambassador reported her in mid-May as an ‘intriguer who likes to meddle in affairs’.59 The signs could hardly have been more promising. If only ‘the desire of making improvements’ had not made Peter III ‘imprudently hazard premature reformations’, he might have achieved so much more.60 As it was, most of the political capital his government had gained by emancipating the nobility was dissipated by more impetuous measures that undermined the security of the governing elite. By substituting his Holsteiners for Elizabeth’s trusty Life Guards, and forcing haughty courtiers such as Prince Trubetskoy to parade in front of the Winter Palace at eleven o’clock each morning, Peter ruptured his relationship with the highest civil and military officers. By depriving the Senate of its powers of patronage over lesser government offices and formally forbidding it to declare laws in its own name, he launched ‘something in the nature of a constitutional revolution’. And by determining to confiscate the Church’s lands in a series of edicts beginning on 21 March, he had alienated the clergy and left himself open to the charge of being an alien ruler determined to undermine the foundations of Russian culture.61
Such changes seemed all the more unnerving against a background of financial crisis. Although Russia’s annual deficit, having peaked at 3.6 million roubles in 1748, had been reduced to something nearer 1.25 million by 1755, the Seven Years’ War had put the treasury under intolerable strain. By the autumn of 1760, no further funds could be found to support a campaign that had already cost some 40 million roubles; a year later Russian troops were owed more than 1.5 million in arrears and deserters were causing havoc with arson and theft. In these circumstances, peace with Prussia was not so much an act of homage to Frederick as a financial necessity.62 Peter’s ministers planned imaginatively for financial reform. But since their measures could only be expected to bear fruit in the medium term (as indeed they did, much to Catherine’s subsequent benefit), the short-term options were limited. Since no Russian bid to borrow on the Amsterdam finance markets had yet succeeded, the tsar had more than 2 million roubles minted.63But once the Senate learned on 23 May that the deficit stood at 1.1 million, Peter’s plan to attack Denmark could hardly be countenanced. A week later, the ten-man council of war, claiming to speak ‘on behalf of the nation’, unanimously recommended him to reconsider. Even advisers who had initially urged him on were now, as the British ambassador reported, ‘throwing pitchforks into the fire to stop the Emperor from going’.64
It was at this point, according to his own account, that Nikita Panin began to plan for a bloodless coup. As a former ambassador to Stockholm, the idea of attacking Denmark was particularly abhorrent to him, and everything in Peter’s emerging style of government seemed to echo the arbitrary elements of Elizabeth’s reign that Panin, a confirmed constitutionalist, was anxious to supersede. Expert in the art of political bribery as a result of his time in Sweden, he set out to buy support for Catherine.65Meanwhile, as if to prove that he remained his own worst enemy, Tsar Peter risked further obloquy by publicly humiliating the empress at the second banquet in honour of the peace with Prussia on 9 June. Having placed himself at some distance from his consort in order to sit opposite the Prussian ambassador, he lost his temper when she failed to rise for the toast to the Imperial family (among whom she had in all innocence included herself). Yelling across the table that she was ‘a fool’, Peter reduced Catherine to floods of tears. This incident understandably caused ‘a great sensation in the city’. After it, as Dashkova recalled, ‘sympathy for the empress grew in proportion to contempt for her husband’.66 Barely a week after the coup that soon followed, Sumarokov highlighted the event in his ode on her accession, in which Catherine’s tears were made to symbolise the consternation of the whole Russian nation.67
By her own subsequent testimony, it was this public humiliation that persuaded Catherine herself to ‘lend an ear’ to the treasonous plots developing all around her.68 When Peter, who had never been blessed with sensitive political antennae, departed for Oranienbaum on 12 June, she was left in St Petersburg for a further five days, in constant touch with Dashkova, Grigory Orlov and Panin. It was then that their conspiracy began to take shape.
‘If all leaders of conspiracies were to admit how much chance and opportunity had contributed to the success of their various ventures,’ Dashkova later observed, ‘they would have to descend from a very high scaffold.’69 She, however, showed little sign of modesty in a notoriously self-serving account that attributed all the major initiatives of Catherine’s coup to her own zeal and ingenuity. In fact, she knew nothing of her friend’s relationship with Grigory Orlov. He himself apparently took little part in the plotting, fearful that the tsar was having him watched. His brother, Aleksey, was more active in recruiting forty or so of his fellow Guards officers. Though his allegiances remain uncertain, the chief of police, Baron Korf, may also have been at least a tacit supporter. Having once been a firm ally of the tsar, he began to pay more attention to Catherine in June, and his subordinates did nothing to prevent the coup that they were obviously expecting.70
Having initially determined to arrest Peter when he returned to St Petersburg to depart for the Danish campaign, the plotters were thrown into action earlier than they had expected when careless talk led to the arrest of one of their supporters, Captain Passek. At dawn on the morning of 28 June, Aleksey Orlov woke Catherine at Peterhof, where Peter was expected later that day to prepare for his name day celebrations. According to her own account, they drove at speed towards St Petersburg. Met by Grigory along the way, they made straight for the barracks of the Izmailovsky Guards where Catherine was immediately proclaimed empress and sovereign of all the Russias. From there, Kirill Razumovsky took her to the Semënovsky Regiment’s barracks where they were joined by the Preobrazhensky Guards. The Horse Guards soon followed as Catherine made her way to the Kazan Church where she was again proclaimed sovereign by the clergy. It was barely ten in the morning when she reached the Winter Palace, where Paul, brought from the Summer Palace in his nightclothes by Nikita Panin, was displayed from a balcony to the cheering crowds while Archbishop Dimitry (Sechënov) circulated among the soldiers to administer the oath of loyalty.
By their swift action, the Orlovs had ruthlessly undercut any attempt on Panin’s part to have Catherine rule as regent for her son. Now it remained to secure her throne. Although sentries were posted across the city on 30 June to prevent drunken brawls, there was surprisingly little violence in St Petersburg, where quantities of alcohol released from the taverns made the atmosphere seem festive rather than vengeful among soldiers thankful not to be sent to invade Denmark.71 Instead they attacked the house of the unpopular Prince Georg Ludwig. For Johann Georg Eisen, a Lutheran pastor resident there thanks to the prince’s support for his Enlightened agricultural reforms, it was a deeply unnerving experience. ‘Those were such days,’ wrote Eisen after his return to Estland, ‘that the Last Judgment cannot appear any worse. I got back as if saved from a great fire.’72
‘They who plan a conspiracy’, Tooke remarked, ‘have always more zeal, more vigilance and activity, than he against whom it is directed.’73 So it proved in the case of Peter III. For twenty-four hours he remained at Oranienbaum, unaware that he had been overthrown. Only when he found Peterhof deserted on the morning of 29 June did he begin to realise the scale of the disaster. Had the tsar been made of sterner stuff, he might have marched on the capital, as he was urged to do by Field Marshal Münnich, a veteran of Empress Anna’s war against the Turks in 1735–9 and the most distinguished of the exiles he had released from Siberia. But since Peter was no hero, this option was rapidly dismissed. Neither was he a coward, however, so he refused to flee to Mitau. Instead, he determined to sail to Kronstadt. Yet for once caution got the better of him, so that by the time he arrived the fortress had fallen to the rebels. When the tsar identified himself to a sentry at the blockaded entrance to the harbour, he was told that Peter III no longer existed. Having successfully repelled his ‘guest’, Admiral Talyzin wrote anxiously to Panin, asking for reinforcements.74 He need not have worried. Whatever resolve Peter may initially have possessed had gone. As his galley returned to Oranienbaum, he fainted into the arms of Elizabeth Vorontsova.
Catherine had meanwhile borrowed a Guards uniform, mounted her charger and ridden out with Dashkova to arrest her deposed husband. At the Trinity monastery, on the road to Peterhof, she met the vice chancellor, Prince Alexander Golitsyn, who presented a letter in which Peter offered to negotiate. The missive went without reply as Golitsyn swore allegiance to Catherine. Peter now offered to abdicate in return for safe passage to Holstein with his mistress. After this offer, too, had been refused, he was persuaded to sign an unconditional abdication. At first, he was taken with Vorontsova to Peterhof, where he was arrested after surrendering his sword, and transferred to his country estate, Ropsha. Here he was intended to remain in the custody of Aleksey Orlov, Fëdor Baryatynsky and Peter Passek, until the Schlüsselburg fortress was ready to receive him.
After his first restless night at Ropsha, Peter complained of headaches and wrote a pathetic letter to Catherine, asking her to remove the sentries from the neighbouring room since his own was so small and he was too fastidious to relieve himself in the presence of others. ‘[Your Majesty] knows that I always pace about in my room. This will make my legs swell up.’ That day, 30 June, his favourite bed was brought from Oranienbaum to make him more comfortable. Catherine, however, had no intention of granting his request to be taken to Holstein. As she later explained to Poniatowski, ‘he had everything he wanted, except for his freedom’.75 They made an odd couple, the giant, scar-faced Aleksey Orlov, and the shrivelled, sickly emperor. Only copious quantities of alcohol obscured the artificiality of their situation. This was fully revealed on 2 July, when Peter’s health took a turn for the worse. As Orlov reported to Catherine, ‘our ugly freak’ had fallen ‘seriously ill’ with ‘an unexpected colic’. ‘I fear that he might die tonight, but I fear even more that he might live through it. The first fear is caused by the fact that he talks nonsense all the time, which amuses us, and the second fear is that he is really a danger to us all and behaves as though nothing had happened.’76
The note of menace was unmistakeable. According to the Danish diplomat Andreas Schumacher, the end was swift. After refusing a poisoned cocktail made up by Dr Kruse, Peter was murdered on 3 July, so that he was dead by the time Dr Lüders reached Ropsha, and the only remaining job for a medic was the dissection performed by a second physician.77 The villains of the piece in this version of Peter’s demise are Grigory Teplov and Nikita Panin. Indeed, a prominent Russian historian has recently argued on the basis of Schumacher’s account that Panin ordered the deposed tsar’s murder as a last-ditch attempt to wrest the initiative from Catherine and the Orlovs and to ensure that she ruled as regent for her son.78
Ingenious as this reconstruction of events may be, its central assumption remains incredible. Why should Panin, the urbane constitutionalist who had been anxious all along to ensure a bloodless transition of power, suddenly sanction Peter’s assassination? It is no more likely that Catherine herself gave explicit orders to kill him. She had proved herself audacious in a crisis, but there was nothing to be gained from making a martyr of her husband. Though a third letter from Aleksey Orlov to Catherine, dated 5 July, survives only in the form of a later copy, there seems no reason to disbelieve its claim that Peter was killed in a drunken scuffle:
Little Mother, most gracious lady, How can I explain or describe what happened. You will not believe your faithful servant but before God I speak the truth…. Little Mother, he is no more. But it never occurred to anyone, how could anyone think of raising a hand against our sovereign lord. But Sovereign lady, the deed is done. He started struggling with Prince Fëdor [Baryatynsky] at table. We had no time to separate them and he is no more. I don’t remember what we did but all of us are guilty and worthy of punishment. Have mercy upon me if only for my brother’s sake. I confess it all to you, and there is nothing to investigate. Forgive us, or order an end to be made quickly. Life is not worth living. We have angered you, and lost our souls forever.79
Catherine accepted his word. She may not have sanctioned her husband’s death, but his survival would surely have imperilled hers. Now she was not only a usurper, but an assassin by association. Peter was given a paltry burial at the Alexander Nevsky monastery. Thirty-four years later, Tsar Paul would make Orlov, Baryatynsky and Passek pay dearly for their treachery. But for the moment, their star was in the ascendant, as Russia’s new ruler laid plans for her coronation and for the burst of reforming legislation that was to occupy the first five years of her reign.