by Simon Dixon
Two days before the ceremony, Catherine and Peter moved with the rest of the Court into the Winter Palace, where her mother lectured her on her duties for the future: ‘we cried a little and parted very tenderly’.89 Woken by a canon salute at five on the appointed morning, the bride could see thousands of troops lining up on parade as she presented herself to be dressed in the empress’s state bedroom at eight o’clock. Though Elizabeth initially lost her temper with the hairdresser, he was eventually permitted to curl Catherine’s dark and unpowdered locks, now fully restored to their luxuriant prime. The empress placed a small crown on her head, leaving her mother to look on as the Court ladies continued their ministrations with her ‘awfully heavy’ dress, sewn with silver thread and embroidered in silver at the cuffs and hems.90
At ten o’clock, the carriages were ready to depart, led by a detachment of 100 Horse Guards. At the head of the procession came members of the generalitet, who drove off in order of rank and seniority, kept in line by a mounted officer for every ten coaches. In this status-obsessed society, members of the first two ranks were allowed between eight and twelve lackeys to walk in front of their carriages with a heyduck on either side (a more senior male servant dressed in semi-military costume derived originally from the Hungarian style). Ranks three and four had proportionately smaller retinues, specified in the edict of 16 March. All of them wore richly decorated silk tunics: no velvet, Santi had stipulated.91 Although Russia’s wealthiest aristocrats had spent their salaries (and much more) just as Elizabeth had ordered, many of their coaches remained unoccupied, representing owners who took their places further back in the procession as officers of the Court. One such was Semën Naryshkin, whose empty open landau was made entirely from mirrored glass. ‘Even the wheels were covered in mirrors,’ Catherine’s son learned twenty years later from Count Nikita Panin, who had not forgotten Naryshkin’s tunic, embroidered with an elaborate silver tree whose branches and leaves flowed down the sleeves and cuffs.92
After the generalitet came the empress’s ladies-in-waiting and the officers of the Court, led by Aleksey Razumovsky with four huntsmen on either side of his carriage. Immediately behind him came Adolf Friedrich and Johanna Elisabeth, whose state coach was as big as the one allocated to her brother, only newer and finer, as she was naturally keen to stress. In 1706, six years before the Court moved to St Petersburg, 290 of the Muscovite Stable Chancellery’s 313 coaches had been built in the Kremlin itself. Some 250 craftsmen were still attached to the palace stables in the new capital in the middle of the eighteenth century. By then, however, demand was so high that the Court had begun to import coaches from Berlin, Vienna, Paris and London—all of them intricately carved and gilded in the Baroque style.93 To Catherine’s impressionable mother, the state coach in which Elizabeth travelled with the bride and groom seemed like ‘a small palace’ in itself. Preceded by drummers and trumpeters and flanked by the Master of the Horse and two mounted Adjutants General, it was drawn by eight horses, each led by its own groom, with two pages on the running board and six moors and twelve heyducks alongside. All of them wore the new state livery commissioned expressly for the occasion.94 Resplendent in shiny white boots, the Chevaliers Gardes who rode in front of the empress were allowed wigs or their own hair, done ‘in the Spanish fashion’. Whichever they chose, pigtails were banned.95 Doubtless expecting his dispatch to be opened by Russian officials, Lord Hyndford joined the chorus of diplomatic approval: ‘The procession was the most magnificent that ever was known in this country, and infinitely surpassed anything I ever saw.’96
So great was the number of coaches—125 all told—and so deep the ranks of the cheering populace, that it took almost two hours for the procession to lumber barely half a mile down the Great Perspective Road to the wooden church of the Nativity of the Mother of God. Designed by Mikhail Zemtsov and known as the Kazan Church because it housed a miracle-working icon of the Virgin of Kazan, closely associated with Petrine triumphs, the church had its bells decorated with the imperial monogram as a symbol of the sacralisation of tsarist power. Its main function following its consecration in June 1737 had been to hold thanksgiving services to commemorate Russia’s ever-lengthening list of military and naval ‘victory days’.97 Now Santi had decreed that ‘for the prevention of confusion and overcrowding’, all doors were to be guarded by sentries with strict instructions to admit no one without a ticket. While Rastrelli had arranged seating in the body of the church for the empire’s highest-ranking officials and the foreign ambassadors, other senior men and their families found places upstairs, though their numbers were limited in advance to prevent the choir loft from collapsing. Only the ‘common people’ were explicitly refused admission.98
At the end of the opening liturgy, the archbishop of Novgorod emerged from the sanctuary to request the empress’s permission to conduct the marriage. As Elizabeth led the couple to their places on a dais facing the altar, two more prelates emerged bearing the wedding crowns that according to Orthodox tradition were held over the heads of the bride and groom throughout the blessing (Peter’s crown was held by Prince Adolf Friedrich while Aleksey Razumovsky performed the same service for his bride). According to Catherine, who missed no opportunity to highlight the superstitions that penetrated to the apex of Russian society, one of the Court ladies whispered to Peter not to turn round, ‘because the one who turns first will be the first to die’. Whether he really told her to ‘clear off’ cannot be known (it is possible, but it sounds very much like one of Catherine’s attempts to besmirch his memory). After the rings had been exchanged, the couple turned to prostrate themselves before the empress, who lifted them to their feet and embraced them as they listened to Simon (Todorsky), now bishop of Pskov, preach a sermon praising Providence for uniting these two offspring of the houses of Anhalt and Holstein.99 By four in the afternoon, they were all back at the Winter Palace for a banquet. Catherine sat to Elizabeth’s left, next to her uncle, Prince Adolf Friedrich. Behind her, in attendance, stood Count Peter Sheremetev; Count Andrey Hendrikov served as her ‘carver’ for the meal. When the tables were cleared, she was so exhausted by the weight of her crown that she longed to remove it. But since that gave rise to another superstitious worry on the part of her ladies, she was permitted to do so only after anxious consultations with the reluctant empress.100
The most theatrical celebration of all came on the following evening. That morning, after Peter had been formally congratulated by the ambassadors and leading statesmen, the Court transferred to the Summer Palace for lunch. While Her Majesty sat on her usual chair, upholstered in emerald green, Their Imperial Highnesses (as Catherine and Peter were to be called for the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign) were given trademark red ones embroidered in gold. Catherine was placed opposite her husband, between Elizabeth and Aleksey Razumovsky, who had an exultant Armand Lestocq on his other side. In their absence, the Winter Palace was made ready for a ball that went on until midnight, when the Marshal of the Court led the procession to dinner. While Elizabeth dined with the clergy and her intimates in a neighbouring stateroom, Peter and Catherine presided over a meal for 130 guests in a banqueting hall transformed for the occasion by Rastrelli.101 Let the architect describe his own fantastic creation:
Between the first two ledges of the tables another ledge was made, covered with turf, on which were arranged fifty pyramids with Italian flowers in earthenware pots, decorated with gilded carvings with festoons of the same flowers, and between them burned two rows of crystal lamps with candles made from the purest white wax. At the corners of the second table were eight fountains in the form of mushrooms, each three funts in diameter. To the side of each fountain stood two marble statues, three funts high. The whole of the large upper ledge was covered with glass pyramids burning with candles of various sorts, so that everything around the cascades and the pedestals of the statues was illuminated by some eight thousand flames. With the music that played throughout and the noise of the water flowing through the fountai
ns, it all made for a magnificent spectacle.102
Since it was nearly two in the morning by the time fountains and orchestra ceased playing, the Court required a day of rest before the festivities could resume. Among the most colourful events still to come was a ball on 26 August. While lottery tickets were sold at 2 roubles each (there were 15,000 losing numbers and 2,000 winning ones), the guests formed into four quadrilles, each comprising seventeen pairs. Catherine’s set was dressed in white and gold, Peter’s in rose and silver, Johanna Elisabeth’s in light blue and silver, and the last, led by Adolf Friedrich, in yellow and silver. Disconcerted to find that each quadrille had been ordered to stick to its allotted corner of the ballroom, a tearful grand duchess persuaded the Hofmarshal to allow them to mingle, since otherwise she would have been obliged to dance with courtiers as ‘lame, gouty and decrepit’ as her partner, Field Marshal Lacy. If it was an obvious exaggeration to claim that men such as Peter Shuvalov (b. 1710) were aged ‘between sixty and eighty’, he and the other senior members of her quadrille, who included Prince Nikita Trubetskoy and Count Mikhail Vorontsov, were no match for a fun-loving princess who had spent most of her first year in Russia playing riotous games with girls of her own age. ‘I never saw a more doleful or insipid entertainment,’ she recalled in 1791.103
Francesco Araja’s new opera, Scipio, which they had all attended the night before, must have run it close. Handel’s version of Scipio’s capture of New Carthage, drawn from the Roman historian Livy, had been premiered in London as long ago as 1726. But since his plot of a general exercising his rights of conquest over a beautiful female captive was scarcely appropriate for Catherine’s wedding, Araja’s librettist, the mediocre Florentine poet, Giuseppe Bonecchi, told a more conventional love story enhanced by his ballet intermezzo ‘Cupid and Psyche’. Even if the audience was reassured by the announcement in the extravagantly bound programme that the performance would be ‘at least a third shorter than last year’s’, they do not seem to have enjoyed it much. Though they dutifully sang a hymn in praise of the empress when it finished at half past ten, Scipio was reprised only once at Court.104
More immediately successful was the firework display on 30 August, the tenth and final day of the celebrations, preserved for posterity in an engraving by Grigory Kalachov. Stretching out behind a flaming obelisk bearing the emblems of the married couple, Elizabeth, and her father, Peter the Great, was a vast colonnade that catered to the empress’s anxieties about dynastic legitimacy by sheltering statues not only of Peter and his second wife, Catherine I, but also of his father, Tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich, and Tsar Mikhail Fëdorovich, the founder of the Romanov dynasty in 1613. The whole scene was set on a huge raft on the Neva, surrounded by tritons and all manner of fantastic sea creatures. In the foreground sat Neptune in a chariot drawn by sea horses, next to Venus, the goddess of love, who held two flaming hearts in her hands with two kissing doves behind her as a symbol of conjugal bliss.105
There could scarcely have been a less accurate image of the married life that Peter and Catherine were to lead. Although we have only her word for what happened on their wedding night, there seems little doubt that it was a disaster. By the time she came to write her memoirs, Catherine’s growing reputation for sexual licence required her to emphasise her childlike innocence.106 Yet even allowing for a degree of special pleading, there seems no reason to think of her as anything but a virginal novice in 1745. Although sexual teasing was an integral part of life at any eighteenth-century Court, as her experiences with her Uncle Georg had shown, neither she nor Peter had been given any formal advice about ‘the difference between the sexes’ (her mother, she said, scolded her when asked) and the playful discussion she remembered with her young companions was presumably so laced with myth and folk tales as to be wholly misleading.107 When Elizabeth led the married couple to their newly prepared apartments after the dancing (in a formal procession led by the Masters of Ceremonies and the Marshal of the Court), the grand duchess’s ladies undressed her and put her to bed. She was left alone for more than two hours, ‘not knowing what I was expected to do’:
Should I get up again? Should I go to sleep? I knew nothing. Eventually, Mme Kruse, my new lady of the bedchamber, came in and announced very gaily that the grand duke was waiting for his supper, which they were about to serve. Having eaten well, His Imperial Highness went to sleep.108
The eccentric accommodation decreed by the empress made married life no easier. Peter undressed in his apartments, but in order to reach Catherine’s, where the couple slept together, he had first to pass through rooms where his tutors were themselves preparing for bed, and then cross a vestibule at the top of a draughty staircase. Catherine suspected that these nocturnal peregrinations might have been the reason why her husband caught another fever in the spring of 1746, when he was ill for two months, causing renewed anxieties about the succession. Drawing on all her reserves of ‘natural sensitivity’, she apparently tried to broach the issue with the empress. She trod carefully all the same: ‘It always seemed to me that both of them were likely to turn on you, and I was wary of compromising myself with them.’109
The truth was that the more they got to know one another, the less compatible Catherine and her husband seemed. While she was intelligent, bookish and eager to learn, sustained thought proved beyond Peter’s grasp. Modern historians have gone to great lengths to show that, as a young boy in Holstein being groomed for the Swedish throne, he was exposed to an ambitious and unrelenting curriculum: French, Theology and Latin for three hours in the morning (when Latin, which he hated, eventually gave way to geometry and the study of artillery); dancing, history and geography or jurisprudence for three hours in the late afternoon.110 Nevertheless, Rulhière (the French diplomat who wrote a controversial account of Catherine’s coup) judged right in remarking that Peter’s tutors made ‘a great mistake in attempting to form their pupil after the grandest models, attending rather to his fortune than to his capacity’.111 Catherine apparently decided much the same when she first met him at Eutin in 1739: by coercing this ‘thin, delicate’ child ‘to perform as an adult’, his entourage had ‘inculcated the duplicity in his character’.112 Though nothing she says about her husband can be taken at face value, and each version of her memoirs presents a slightly different portrait, she was right about the coercion.113 As he later told his Russian tutor, Jacob Stählin, Peter had been forced to kneel on dried peas (which made it almost impossible for him to walk next day), and public floggings of up to forty strokes of the birch were inflicted with dread ceremony by a masked soldier to the beat of a drum at eight o’clock on a Saturday evening.114 By tempting him with images from historic coins and medals, Stählin managed to teach Peter to count out the names of the tsars on his fingers. Even so, the grand duke’s attention span remained dangerously short. The only academic exercises that excited his interest were those relating to military affairs. For these he had a genuine talent, based on a prodigious memory.115 But it was not enough to bring him close to Catherine. Deprived of her husband’s affections and further isolated by her debt-ridden mother’s departure on 28 September, barely a month after her wedding, she faced an uncertain future in the hostile environment of a foreign Court.
CHAPTER THREE
Living and Loving at the Court of Empress Elizabeth
1746–1753
Having been raised as an adult from a comparatively tender age, Catherine now found herself treated as a child just as she was blossoming into maturity. For nine lonely years between her wedding and the birth of her son Paul, she had to negotiate the hazards of a Court shot through with intrigue while coping with an unpredictable empress irritated by her failure to produce a male heir. It was all a far cry from the carefree life she had led at the Court of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.
Though Catherine had been provided with young female companions on her arrival in Moscow, it was only after her betrothal that a formal establishment was settled upon her. Peter’s household was also exp
anded on the occasion of the celebration of the peace with Sweden in 1744. Count Zakhar Chernyshëv, one of three gentlemen of the bedchamber appointed to the Young Court (the small entourage settled on the grand duke and duchess), was still among Catherine’s closest advisers on his death in 1785. Another, Field Marshal Alexander Golitsyn, was to lead her troops against the Turks in 1768. But if these proved to be early examples of her capacity for lifelong trust, the immediate prospects for lasting friendships looked bleak. Zakhar was soon removed when Johanna Elisabeth feared that he might be pressing his attentions on her daughter and the level of supervision over the Young Court was sharply intensified when Countess Rumyantseva was replaced as Catherine’s leading lady-in-waiting by the empress’s cousin, Maria Choglokova.1
Only six years older than her new charge, Choglokova was appointed in May 1746 when Elizabeth, alarmed that Catherine had failed to conceive in the early months of her marriage, ordered Bestuzhev to draw up a formal instruction for the Young Court which made ‘marital relationships between both Imperial Highnesses’ a matter of state significance, second only to the formulaic acknowledgement of Catherine’s ‘true zeal’ in the Orthodox faith.2 It was widely assumed that the attractive new governess, who had grown up as a maid of honour in Elizabeth’s household in the 1730s, had been chosen in the hope that her affection for her equally uxorious spouse might serve as a model for the royal couple.3 At first, however, Catherine regarded her as ‘the most disagreeable and most capricious woman at Court’. Not that her husband was any better. However adorable he may have seemed to Maria, Nikolay Choglokov, who assumed charge of Peter’s household, struck the young grand duchess as ‘far from loveable’. ‘No man in the world was more puffed up with amour propre.’ ‘Fat, stupid, arrogant and contemptuous,’ Choglokov was ‘at least as unpleasant as his wife, which was saying something.’ Faced with the prospect of life under the surveillance of such a ghastly couple, Catherine spent much of the Court’s visit to Reval (now Tallinn) in tears and continued to be plagued by headaches and low mood on her return at the end of July.4
