Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  Zerbst and the Prussian capital, however, were primarily calling points en route to the Court of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel in Lower Saxony, where Sophie’s mother had herself been raised and where her godmother, the dowager Duchess Elisabeth Sophie Marie of Brunswick-Lüneburg, had paid her dowry and arranged her marriage to Christian August at the palace at Vechelde, six miles west of Brunswick, in 1727.29 More at ease than her husband in the grande monde, Johanna Elisabeth willingly returned to spend several months of the year with her benefactress. For the growing Sophie, it proved to be a memorable experience: ‘I was cajoled and made much of, small as I was. I heard it said so often that I was clever, and that I was a big girl, that I fancied it must be true. I stayed up for all the masquerade-balls and festivals and went all over the place. I chattered like a magpie and was excessively forward.’30

  There was much for an inquisitive child to see. The Court of Brunswick had been an important centre for the arts since the time of Shakespeare’s contemporary Duke Heinrich Julius, himself a notable playwright. Duke Anton Ulrich (r. 1685–1714) was an even more prolific Baroque novelist and poet, and it was during his reign that the built environment of the Court was transformed. That seasoned observer of European Court life, Baron Pöllnitz, particularly admired the duke’s homage to Versailles, his new country seat (Lustschloss) at Salzdahlum, a stone-clad timber palace halfway between Brunswick and Wolfenbüttel: ‘It has a great gallery with a collection of pictures by the chief painters which is not to be met with elsewhere.’31 Salzdahlum’s architect Hermann Korb also designed a celebrated rotunda to house the Duke August Library at Wolfenbüttel—then, as now, one of Europe’s leading scholarly collections—of which no less a philosopher than Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was chief librarian between 1691 and 1716.32 The interior of the residence itself, one of the largest castles in northern Germany, was reshaped by the addition of a suite of Baroque staterooms.33 The long reign of Duke Karl I (r. 1735–80) proved to be a flourishing period for the arts during which Gotthold Lessing, the greatest literary figure of the German Enlightenment, took charge of the Duke August Library in the 1770s and the Court maintained both an Italian opera company and a French ballet.34 As a result of such lavish expenditure, Brunswick’s national debt rose from 1 million thalers in 1693 to 11 million in 1750, by which time Karl’s Court had more than doubled in size to around 400 people.35 Even so he never doubted the value of the splendour he created, and there was no sign of a decline in his dynasty’s fortunes at the time of Sophie’s visits.

  Though the regal status achieved by their more powerful rivals in Dresden and Berlin proved beyond the reach of second-division German princes such as the dukes of Brunswick, there was no shortage of royalty to be found at their Court. Duke Karl’s sisters included not only Elisabeth Christine, who in 1733 had married the future Frederick the Great of Prussia (r. 1740–86), but also Sophie’s exact contemporary, Princess Juliana Maria, who corresponded with her in later life after becoming queen of Denmark. Among their brothers were Prince Ludwig of Brunswick, who became tutor to the Stadtholder of the Netherlands and Prince Ferdinand, subsequently a general in Prussian service. Sophie got to know them all. As she later recalled in a passage of her memoirs intended to show that she had by no means arrived in Russia as a naïve provincial:

  The Court of Brunswick was then a truly regal one, judging by the quantity of fine houses it occupied and their decoration, by the good order that reigned at this Court, and by the number of people of various sorts whom it maintained, and by the crowd of foreigners who visited it continually, and the grandeur and magnificence that characterised every aspect of its life. Balls, operas, concerts, hunts, promenades, banquets followed one another every day. That was what I saw for three or four months of the year, every year between the ages of seven and fourteen. The Prussian Court was by no means so well regulated, nor did it seem as splendid as that of the Duke of Brunswick.36

  Petty German princes may have strained every sinew to emulate Versailles, but according to the French historian Adrien Fauchier-Magnan, writing shortly after the end of the Second World War, all they achieved was ‘a puerile, grimacing parody, an extravagant caricature of the luxury and elegance of the Roi Soleil’.37 In this way of thinking, the best that could be expected of a German ruler was harmless eccentricity. In all too many cases, however, oddity seemed to border on insanity—‘Germany teems with princes and dukes,’ Count Manteufel observed in 1738, ‘three-quarters of whom are not right in the head’—so that the political landscape was dotted by a profusion of self-indulgent despots, each extorting taxes from his benighted subjects to fuel his obsession with personal glory.38

  Like all caricatures, this one incorporates a recognisable grain of truth. As Sophie was soon to discover, flagrant marital infidelity was a feature common to hothouse Court societies all over Europe. Though German Courts were no exception, there was no doubt about the identity of the monarch who had set new standards of shamelessness in his relationships with the opposite sex. When Duke Eberhard Ludwig of Württemberg scandalised his Lutheran officials in 1707 by declaring his intention to marry his paramour while his first wife was still alive, he countered their objections by pointing to the example of Louis XIV.39 Louis had sired a string of royal bastards—so-called ‘children of France’—by a succession of mistresses which ended only with his secret second marriage to Madame de Maintenon in 1683. Only then, as a recent biographer remarks, did the king undergo a ‘drastic conversion to monogamy’, coming to resemble ‘a reformed alcoholic who will not have a bottle in the house’.40

  Versailles was equally inspirational in matters of Court culture. The Elector of Saxony, Augustus the Strong, was so impressed by his youthful visit to the French Court in the late 1680s that the image of Louis XIV continued to fascinate him even from the grave. Aspiring to resemble his idol as precisely as possible at his son’s wedding, Augustus ordered his Parisian agent in 1717 to send a costume doll to Dresden wearing an outfit ‘such as the late King of France wore on great occasions like his wedding’. A drawing would not suffice, Augustus insisted: it had to be a doll.41 Those unable to marvel at Louis XIV’s palace in person avidly collected the illustrated descriptions that the Bourbon kings were eager to see published as a way of propagating French culture. Karl Eugen of Württemberg employed a full-time agent in Paris from 1748, charged solely with sending to Stuttgart all new publications relating to the Court or to palace design. Goethe expressed a widespread contemporary ambivalence about the whole enterprise:

  Duke Karl, to whom one must concede a certain grandeur of vision, worked nevertheless to gratify his momentary passions and to act out a series of ever-changing fantasies. But in that he strove for status, show, and effect, he had a particular need for artists. And even when his motives were less than noble, he could not help but further a higher cause.42

  Fauchier-Magnan’s condescension is therefore seriously distorted. Not only does he fail to see the way that most of the smaller German Courts had risen above the drunken rusticity that disfigured some of the earliest attempts to imitate Versailles, he also misses the central political purpose of representational display. Monarchs in early-modern Europe exercised power over their subjects not by keeping them under observation (as the modern state seeks to do), but by directly representing their exalted status through a series of symbolic gestures, clothing, rhetoric and rituals.43 Everything at Versailles was designed to glorify Louis XIV, from the paintings on the ceiling to the clock that made Fame crown his statue with a laurel every time it struck the hour.44 Princes throughout Europe exhausted their revenues to compete. Since there could be no more lavish setting in which to impress their leading subjects and dynastic rivals than a magnificent palace and Court, cultural rivalry between monarchs was intense. ‘For the baroque prince,’ Tim Blanning has rightly insisted, ‘representational display was not self-indulgence, it was his métier.’45 And as Sophie discovered when she left Stettin for the last time in 1743, it was a métier practi
sed even by such a minor potentate as Prince Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst.

  Dwarfed by their Saxon and Prussian neighbours, the princes of the House of Anhalt were among the poorest and most insignificant in Germany. Since being divided into four tiny principalities in 1603, their lands had ‘been partitioned so much that there has remained little to partition’, as the mature Catherine observed from the throne of the largest territory on earth since the fall of the Roman Empire.46 That did not mean that their Courts were culturally barren. No less a composer than Johann Sebastian Bach was appointed Court Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen in 1717. Sandwiched between periods of even more astonishing creativity at Weimar and Leipzig, Bach’s six years in Leopold’s service produced the six Brandenburg Concertos and the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier (forty-eight preludes and fugues).47 Yet scarcely anyone beyond the area knew anything of his genius at the time. There was nothing unusual about that in the introverted confessional world of Protestant northern Germany. The only prince of Anhalt to make a wider European impact was Sophie’s contemporary, Leopold III Friedrich Franz of Anhalt-Dessau, who created the first English-style landscape garden in eighteenth-century Germany at Wörlitz between 1763 and 1790, complete with islands named after Rousseau and Herder. Designed to symbolise the reconciliation of technical progress with sentimentalist philosophy, the garden boasted a model volcano whose eruptions were intended to represent the transformative power of Enlightened political reform.48

  Although his volcano has long since gone, Franz’s elegant neoclassical architecture still stands as an oasis of civilisation in the desert of decaying chemical plants that disfigure the former East Germany. The House of Anhalt-Zerbst can boast no such living legacy. Whereas the princes of Anhalt-Dessau survived to witness the formation of the Weimar Republic, Sophie’s father’s line came to an end even within her own lifetime at the death of her brother, Friedrich August, in 1793. Since little remains of the castle at Zerbst, it is tempting to suppose that it must have been no more distinguished than the town which surrounded it. In fact, like so many Baroque palaces in Europe, it was a quintessentially cosmopolitan creation of considerable elegance and beauty.

  When its Dutch architect Cornelis Ryckwaert died in 1693, the central block planned in 1680–81 was already complete. By 1710, the addition of the west wing by the Swiss stucco-master Giovanni Simonetti provided the prince’s small retinue with all the ceremonial apartments of a Baroque Court in miniature: a central reception room (Festsaal), with ceiling paintings on themes from the Iliad and the Aeneid; a smaller reception room whose ceiling painting glorified the investiture of the first prince of Anhalt in 1212; and a formal dining hall (Speisesaal). By the time that Johann Friedrich Friedel completed the east wing in the spirit of Potsdam rococo, between 1744 and 1748, Sophie had already left for Russia, but she would have worshipped in the ornate chapel at the southern end of the west wing, where Francesco Minetti worked with other artists between 1717 and 1718, inspired by motifs from the Zwinger in Dresden, and she would also have been familiar with the tower built over the castle’s main entrance between 1718 and 1722 by Johann Christoph Schütze, who later took charge of construction at the Saxon Court.49

  In such a modest palace, it was neither possible nor necessary to replicate every element of the etiquette practised at Versailles, which had never been the only available model for the smaller German Courts. Many of them—especially though not exclusively the Catholic ones—adopted the ceremonial of the imperial Court at Vienna, where the Habsburgs preserved, in the relatively unpretentious surroundings of the Hofburg, a ritual tradition adopted from Burgundy and Spain in the sixteenth century. Whereas almost everything in the life of the kings of France was a public spectacle—from the moment they rose in the morning (lever du roi) to the moment they retired to bed (coucher)—the Austrian emperors lived in comparative seclusion, appearing in public only for a limited number of formal meals.50 We do not know which ceremonial model was adopted at Zerbst. Neither can we be sure how far the various procedural manuals potentially available to Christian August were translated into everyday practice.51 However, the unusual fact that his private apartments were built alongside those of his wife, rather than being in separate wings or divided by the main staircase, implies a degree of domestication that serves as a reminder that the Courts of early-modern Europe were by no means monolithic. While itinerant medieval princely households had everywhere settled at a permanent dwelling place (Residenz) by 1700, the transformation took place in different ways and at different speeds, and even as more or less regular institutions formed around departments responsible for ceremonial, banqueting, the stables and the hunt, Courts remained complex social organisms, following their peripatetic monarchs to a range of summer and winter palaces, sometimes for whole seasons but often for only a few days at a time.52 Even Christian August had his own country seat at Dornburg on the Elbe, not far from Zerbst, where Schütze had worked his magic so that Sophie found the castle ‘not only very well situated, but embellished as much as possible, both inside and out’.53

  By the time she moved to Zerbst, Sophie was already chafing at the restrictions of her restricted family society. She found a more attractive model on a visit to Countess Bentinck at Varel in the duchy of Oldenbourg. ‘I found her charming. How else could she have seemed to me? I was fourteen; she rode, danced whenever the fancy took her to do so, sang and laughed and skipped about like a child, though she was well over thirty at the time—she was already separated from her husband.’54 That phrase in the mature Catherine’s memoirs acquires an extra frisson in the light of the fate of her own assassinated spouse. At the time, however, minds were naturally concentrated on the initial task of finding her a partner.

  Though both Prince William of Saxe-Gotha and Prince Henry of Prussia (who was later to visit her twice in St Petersburg) had started to pay her attention at the age of twelve or thirteen, her most assiduous suitor as she approached marriageable age was a close relative.55 Under the disapproving gaze of Babet Cardel, Georg Ludwig of Holstein-Gottorp, her mother’s younger brother, became infatuated with Sophie when he was twenty-four and she was ten years younger. How far he awakened her adolescent sexuality remains uncertain, though the passage in her memoirs in which she refers to ‘galloping astride her pillows’ has often been interpreted as a veiled reference to masturbation.56 Sophie saw no harm in his kisses—‘he was thoughtful and affectionate’—and apparently agreed to a wedding provided her parents consented. But while Johanna Elisabeth seems to have done little to stem her brother’s ardour, ambition had already prompted her to cast her eyes further afield.

  Even when she began to look for a more promising match, closer in age to her daughter, there was no need to look beyond the confines of her well-connected family. At Eutin in 1739, on a visit to her elder brother, Adolf Friedrich, then Prince Bishop of Lübeck, Johanna Elisabeth had introduced Sophie to her second cousin, Karl Peter Ulrich, who had inherited the dukedom of Holstein-Gottorp earlier that summer at the age of eleven. Since his late father, Duke Karl Friedrich, had been nephew to the childless Charles XII of Sweden, Peter was widely expected to inherit the Swedish throne. His late mother, Anna Petrovna, who died a few months after his birth, had been the eldest daughter of Peter the Great of Russia, and he was a far more eligible prospect than Georg Ludwig. As Court gossip began to link his name with Sophie’s, Johanna Elisabeth watched his future with interest.57

  Peter’s fortunes sharply improved when Peter the Great’s surviving unmarried daughter, Elizabeth, deposed the infant Ivan VI of Russia in a bloodless coup on 25 November 1741. The following February, she brought her nephew to St Petersburg, obliged him to convert to Orthodoxy, and in November formally declared him her heir in accordance with her father’s law of 1722, which permitted reigning tsars to nominate their own successors. This move not only helped to secure the succession in Russia, but also forced Peter to renounce his claim to the throne of Sweden, with which Rus
sia was at war between 1741 and 1743. At Elizabeth’s insistence, the Swedish succession now passed to Sophie’s uncle, Adolf Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp, giving her scheming mother an added incentive to cultivate her relationship with the empress, who had been engaged to another of her brothers, Karl August, before he died of smallpox in May 1727.

  Egged on by Frederick the Great, who promoted Sophie’s father to the rank of field marshal to enhance the family’s prestige, Johanna Elisabeth sent her daughter’s portrait to the tsaritsa, who responded with a diamond-encrusted picture of herself. Elizabeth knew nothing of Sophie’s personality. Aside from ties of sentiment to the House of Holstein-Gottorp, she was attracted mainly by the prospect of a marriage alliance with a Protestant family in Prussian service. This promised the Court of St Petersburg a foothold in northern Germany to balance the diplomatic alliance with Austria which had dominated Russian foreign policy since 1726. Against the advice of her pro-Austrian vice chancellor, Aleksey Bestuzhev-Ryumin, who would have preferred a Catholic Saxon fiancée for Grand Duke Peter, Elizabeth invited Sophie to Russia at the end of 1743.

  Catherine’s memoirs paint a remarkably domesticated portrait of the scene at Zerbst when the invitation arrived:

  On 1 January 1744, we were all seated at the table when my father was handed a big packet of letters. After tearing open the first envelope, my father passed to my mother several letters addressed to her. I was sitting beside her and recognised the hand of the marshal of the Court of the duke of Holstein, the Grand Duke of Russia. This was a Swedish gentleman, named Brummer. My mother had written to him several times in 1739 and he had replied. My mother opened the letter and I saw the words: ‘with the princess, her elder daughter’. I knew at once what it meant—I guessed the rest and it turned out that I had guessed right. My mother had been invited by him on behalf of the Empress Elizabeth to come to Russia under the pretext of thanking Her Majesty for all the benefits she had conferred on my mother’s family.58