Elizabeth’s principal grievance was her nephew’s open dislike of everything Russian. She appointed teachers to instruct him in the Russian language and Orthodox religion and worked tutors and priests overtime to see that he learned. Studying theology two hours a day, he learned to babble bits of Orthodox doctrine, but he despised this new religion and felt nothing but contempt for its bearded priests. Cynically, he told the Austrian and Prussian ambassadors, “One promised priests a great many things that one could not perform.” He approached the Russian language with the same attitude. He was given lessons, but he hated the language and made no effort to speak it grammatically. When he could, he surrounded himself with as many Holstein officials as possible and conversed with them only in German.
Peter’s difficulty ran deeper than dislike and cynicism. It was not merely a matter of acquiring the Russian language; given sufficient time, he might have mastered it. But behind every task his teachers set him loomed the greater obstacle: the prospect of succeeding to the Russian throne; it was against this future that Peter rebelled. He had not the least interest in governing a vast and—as he saw it—primitive, foreign empire. He was homesick for Germany and Holstein. He longed for the simple, straightforward life of the barracks in Kiel, where life required only uniforms and drums, command and obedience. Chosen to be the future ruler of the greatest empire on earth, he remained at heart a little Holstein soldier. His hero was not his own towering Russian grandfather but the idol of every German soldier, Frederick of Prussia.
Nevertheless, the empress eventually had her way. On November 18, 1742, in the court chapel of the Kremlin, Peter Charles Ulrich was solemnly baptized and received into the Orthodox Church under the Russian name of Peter Fedorovich—a Romanov name intended to wipe away the taint of his Lutheran beginnings. Empress Elizabeth then formally proclaimed him heir to the Russian throne, raised him to the rank of Imperial Highness, and granted him the title of grand duke. Peter, speaking in memorized Russian, promised to reject all doctrines contrary to the teaching of the Orthodox Church, whereupon, at the end of the service, the assembled court took the oath of allegiance to him. Throughout the ceremony and at the public audience afterward, he displayed an unmistakable sullenness; foreign ambassadors, noting his mood, said that “as he spoke with his customary petulance, one may conclude he will not be a fanatical believer.” That day, at least, Elizabeth simply refused to see these negative signs. When Peter was confirmed, she wept. Afterward, when the new grand duke returned to his apartment, he found waiting for him a draft for three hundred thousand rubles.
Despite her passionate display of emotion, Elizabeth still did not trust her nephew. To make his Russian commitments irrevocable and cut off all possibility of retreat, she liquidated his claim to the Swedish throne by making it a condition of a Russian-Swedish treaty that her nephew’s Swedish rights be transferred to his former guardian, Johanna’s brother, Adolphus Frederick of Holstein, Bishop of Lübeck. The bishop became heir to the Swedish throne in Peter’s place.
The more obvious it became that Peter was miserable in Russia, the more Elizabeth worried. She had removed from the throne a branch of her family hated for its German connections only to find that the new heir she had chosen was even more German. Every possible Russian influence had been brought to bear on Peter, yet his ideas, tastes, prejudices, and outlook remained stubbornly German. She was bitterly disappointed, but she had to accept him. She could not send him back to Holstein. Peter was her closest living relative; he was newly Orthodox, newly proclaimed the heir, now the future hope of the Romanov dynasty. And when, in October 1743, he became seriously ill—not leaving his bed until mid-November—she realized how very much she needed him.
Indeed, the poor condition of Peter’s health pushed Elizabeth into further action. He was always ailing; suppose he were to die? What then? A solution—the best, perhaps the only, solution—was to find him a wife. He was fifteen, and the presence of the right young wife might not only help him mature but might serve an even greater purpose by providing a new infant heir, a child better equipped than his father to guarantee the succession. Elizabeth decided to follow this path: a wife must be found quickly and an heir begotten. Hence the empress’s haste to choose a bride for Peter; hence the urgent dispatches that Brümmer wrote at her behest to Johanna in Zerbst: Come to Russia! Bring your daughter! Make haste! Make haste! Make haste!
6
Meeting Elizabeth and Peter
WHILE SOPHIA AND HER MOTHER waited, Peter suddenly appeared. “I could wait no longer,” he declared in German with an exaggerated smile. His enthusiasm seemed genuine, however, and both Sophia and her mother were pleased. As he stood before them, nervously fidgeting, Sophia looked carefully at the future husband whom she had seen only once before, as a boy of ten. Now, at fifteen, he was still unusually short and thin, and his features—pale face, wide mouth, sharply receding chin—had not changed greatly since she had seen him five years before. The warmth of his greeting might be explained by the fact that she was a cousin near his own age, someone with whom he could speak German and who had shared, and therefore understood, the background from which he had come. He may have believed that this little cousin would become his ally in resisting the demands that Russia was making on him. Walking back and forth, talking incessantly, he stopped only when Dr. Lestocq arrived to say that the empress was ready to receive them. Peter offered his arm to Johanna, a lady-in-waiting gave hers to Sophia, and they passed through a succession of candlelit halls, filled with people bowing and curtsying. At last, they reached the portal of the imperial apartments, and the double doors were flung open. Before them stood Elizabeth, empress of Russia.
Sophia and her mother were dazzled. Elizabeth was tall, with a full, rounded figure. She had large, brilliant blue eyes, a broad forehead, a full mouth, red lips, white teeth, and a clear, rosy complexion. Her hair, naturally blond, now was dyed a luxuriant black. She was dressed in an immense, hoop-skirted gown of silver trimmed with gold lace, and her hair, neck, and ample bosom were covered with diamonds. The effect of this woman, standing before her in a blaze of silver, gold embroidery, and jewels, was overwhelming. And Sophia still managed to notice and would always remember a particular crowning touch: a black feather standing upright from her hair on one side of her head, then curving to cover part of her face.
Johanna, remembering Brümmer’s advice, kissed Elizabeth’s hand and stammered her thanks for the favors showered on her and her daughter. Elizabeth embraced her and said, “All that I have done for you so far is nothing compared to what I shall do for your family in the future. My own blood is not dearer to me than yours.” When Elizabeth turned to Sophia, the fourteen-year-old bowed from the waist and curtsied. Elizabeth, smiling, noticed the girl’s freshness, intelligence, and discreet, submissive manner. Sophia meanwhile had made her own judgment, and, thirty years later, she wrote, “It was quite impossible on seeing her for the first time not to be astonished by her beauty and the majesty of her bearing.” Here, in this woman covered with jewels and radiating power, she saw the embodiment of what she hoped someday to become.
The next day was Peter’s sixteenth birthday. The empress, appearing in a brown dress embroidered with silver, “her head, neck, and bosom covered with jewels,” presented both mother and daughter with the Order of St. Catherine. Alexis Razumovsky, costumed as Master of the Hunt, bore the ribbons and insignia of the order on a golden plate. As he approached, Sophia passed another judgment: Razumovsky, the official lover, the “Emperor of the Night,” was, in Sophia’s words, “one of the most handsome men I have seen in my life.” Again, Elizabeth was in an excellent humor. Smiling broadly, she beckoned Sophia and Johanna and hung the ribbon of the order around their necks.
The empress’s display of warmth to Johanna and Sophia came from something deeper than her satisfaction that a promising political marriage seemed in the offing. Elizabeth had not had children. Two years before, she had reached out to her sister’s child, Pete
r, brought him to Russia, and made him her heir. But Peter had not responded to the kind of maternal love she had tried to give. Now she had chosen for him a bride who was the niece of the man she had loved. Alone on her throne, the empress of Russia was hoping to create around herself a family.
Johanna perceived the empress’s welcome as a part of her own political triumph. She found herself at the center of a glittering court, favored by a monarch whose generosity was legendary. Mother and daughter were given their own household, with chamberlains, ladies- and gentlemen-in-waiting, and a staff of lesser servants. “We are living like queens,” Johanna wrote to her husband. “Everything is bedecked, inlaid with gold, wonderful. We drive out in marvelous style.”
Johanna’s ambition for herself and her daughter was approaching fruition. As to the private, intimate side of this coming marriage, and the obligation to give her daughter useful advice, the thirty-two-year-old mother had given the matter little thought; after all, no one had cared about her feelings when, years earlier, she had married a man almost twice her age. She knew little about the real character of the future bridegroom; the fact that he was to be an emperor was sufficient. If Johanna had asked herself whether these two adolescents were likely to develop any mutual romantic passion, her honest answer would have been a shrug. In arranged royal marriages, these questions were irrelevant. Johanna knew this; Sophia sensed it. The only figure who still believed in love and hoped that passion as well as politics would bind this youthful relationship was Elizabeth.
Sophia later remembered of Peter that “for the first ten days, he seemed glad to see my mother and me.… In that short space of time I became aware that he cared little for the nation over which he was destined to rule, that he remained a convinced Lutheran, did not like his entourage, and was very childish. I kept silent and listened which helped gain his confidence.”
What did Peter think of Sophia and their approaching betrothal? It is true that on the night of her arrival, he had made a pretty speech. And in the days that followed, he repeatedly expressed his delight at having a relative his own age to whom he could talk freely. But soon her polite interest in him encouraged him to speak freely, too freely. At the first opportunity, he told her that he was really in love with someone else, the daughter of a former lady-in-waiting of Elizabeth’s. He still wanted to marry this girl, he said, but, sadly, her mother had recently been disgraced and exiled to Siberia. Now his aunt, the empress, would not permit a marriage to the daughter. He went on to say that he was now resigned to marrying Sophia “because his aunt wished it.”
Peter, still regarding Sophia more as a playmate than as a future wife, had not meant to hurt her; he was simply, in his way, being honest. “I blushed to hear these confidences,” Sophia wrote in her Memoirs, “and thanked him for his trust in me, but in my heart I was astonished at his imprudence and want of judgment.” If she was wounded by his mindless insensitivity, she did not show this. She had learned to deal with absence of love in her own family, and now she was prepared to deal with it in this new situation. Besides, her father’s parting command had been that she should respect the grand duke as her “master, father and sovereign lord” and seek to win his love “through meekness and docility.”
Sophia was only fourteen, but she was wise and practical. For the moment, she adapted herself to Peter’s ways and accepted her role as a friend and playmate. But there was no trace of love, not even the fumbling version she had experienced with her uncle George.
7
Pneumonia
IT DID NOT TAKE Sophia long to understand two underlying facts about her position in Russia: first, that it was Elizabeth, not Peter, whom she had to please; and, second, that if she wanted to succeed in this new country, she must learn its language and practice its religious faith. Within a week of her arrival in Moscow, her education began. A professor was provided to teach her to read and speak Russian, and a scholarly priest was assigned to instruct her in the doctrines and liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church. In contrast to Peter, who had bucked and rebelled against everything his teachers tried to teach him, Sophia was eager to learn.
The more urgent task, in the empress’s thinking, was conversion to Orthodoxy, and the religious figure chosen to teach was specifically equipped to calm the apprehensions of a young Protestant being asked to abandon her Lutheran faith. Simon Todorsky, bishop of Pskov, was a cultivated, broad-minded man who spoke fluent German, having spent four years studying at the University of Halle in Germany. There he had come to believe that what mattered in religion was not the differences between creeds but the inner, fundamental message of Christianity. He counseled Sophia that the Orthodox faith was not so different from the Lutheran and that she would not be betraying her promise to her father if she converted. Impressed, Sophia wrote to her father that she had come to realize that the discrepancy between Lutheranism and Orthodoxy was only that “the external rites are quite different, but the Church here is bound to them by the uncouthness of the people.” Christian Augustus, alarmed at the speed with which his daughter’s Protestantism seemed to be slipping away, wrote back:
Search yourself with care whether you are really in your heart inspired by religious inclination or whether, perhaps, without being aware of it, the marks of favor shown you by the empress … have influenced you in that direction. We human beings often see only what is before our eyes. But God in His infinite justice searches the heart and our secret motives and manifests accordingly to us His mercy.
Sophia, struggling to reconcile the opposing beliefs of two men she respected and honored, had difficulty finding her way. “The change of religion gives the princess infinite pain,” Mardefeld, the Prussian ambassador, wrote to King Frederick. “Her tears flow abundantly.”
While studying with Todorsky, Sophia also flung herself into study of the Russian language. The day was too short for her; she begged that her lessons be prolonged. She began rising from bed at night, taking a book and a candle, and walking barefoot on the cold stone floor, repeating and memorizing Russian words. Not surprisingly, this being Moscow in early March, she caught a cold. At first, Johanna, alarmed that her daughter might be criticized as too susceptible to illness, tried to conceal her sickness. Sophia developed a fever, her teeth began to chatter, she was bathed in sweat—eventually, she fainted. Doctors, summoned belatedly, diagnosed acute pneumonia and demanded that the unconscious patient be bled. Johanna vehemently refused, claiming that excessive bleeding had caused the death of her brother Charles, about to be betrothed to the young Elizabeth, and that she would not permit other doctors to kill her daughter. “There I lay with a high fever between my mother and the doctors, arguing,” Sophia wrote later. “I could not help groaning, for which I was scolded by my mother who expected me to suffer in silence.”
Word that Sophia’s life was in danger reached the empress in retreat at the thirteenth-century Troitsa Monastery, forty miles away. She rushed back to Moscow, hurried to the sickroom, and walked in on an argument still raging between Johanna and the physicians. Elizabeth immediately intervened and commanded that whatever the medical men considered necessary must be done. Berating Johanna for daring to oppose her doctors, she ordered an immediate bloodletting. When Johanna continued to protest, the empress had the girl’s mother evicted from the room. Elizabeth then cradled Sophia’s head while a doctor opened a vein in her foot and took two ounces of blood. From that day on, for the four weeks that followed, Elizabeth nursed Sophia herself. Because the fever persisted, Elizabeth prescribed repeated bleeding—and the fourteen-year-old girl was bled sixteen times in twenty-seven days.
With the patient slipping in and out of consciousness, Elizabeth sat by her bed. When the physicians shook their heads, the empress wept. The childless woman was filled with a kind of maternal love for this young girl whom she scarcely knew and whom she thought she was about to lose. When Sophia awoke, it was in Elizabeth’s arms. Afterward, Sophia always remembered these moments of intimacy. Through all she wa
s to enjoy and endure over the years at Elizabeth’s hands—generosity and kindness, alternating with pettiness and harsh disapproval—Sophia was never to forget the woman who, during these uncertain days, had leaned over her, stroked her hair, and kissed her forehead.
There were some for whom Sophia’s illness was a cause for joy, not grief. The vice-chancellor, Alexis Bestuzhev, and those who had favored a Saxon marriage for Peter were jubilant, although Elizabeth quickly dampened their glee by declaring that no matter what happened—even if she had the misfortune to lose Sophia—“the devil would take her before she would ever have any princess of Saxony.” In Berlin, Frederick of Prussia began thinking of replacement candidates; he wrote to the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt asking about his daughter’s availability in case Sophia should die.
Meanwhile, the youthful invalid was—without awareness of the fact—winning hearts. Her ladies-in-waiting knew how she had contracted this illness; they told the chambermaids, who told the lackeys, who passed it through the palace and thence out into the city: the little foreign princess loved Russia so much that now she was lying at death’s door because she had risen from bed every night in order to learn the Russian language more quickly! In the space of a few weeks, this story won Sophia the affection of many who had been repelled by the aloof, negative attitude of Grand Duke Peter.
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