Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire

by Leslie Carroll

  By now, Catherine had realized that although she was Empress Consort, her husband had no intention of permitting her to be a coruler of Russia. Moreover, it was becoming apparent that if he could, he would find a way to get rid of her and replace her with his mistress, Elizaveta Vorontsova. He had taken to referring to Catherine as “she,” and humiliated her before the entire court at a gala dinner on June 9 when he called her the equivalent of a moron for refusing to stand for a toast to the royal family.

  What her husband didn’t know was that by this time her plans to effect a coup were fully in place. On June 28 the elite guards swore allegiance to Catherine as empress as she stood on a balcony of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, dressed like one of them in a borrowed uniform of red and green. Beside her stood the seven-year-old Archduke Paul. A young petty officer noticed that Catherine had neglected to affix a sword knot to her weapon and gave her his own. The gallant young man was Grigory Potemkin, who years later would become Catherine’s most notorious lover and adviser.

  As manifestos were read proclaiming Catherine’s assumption of the imperial throne and justifying the coup by highlighting Peter’s erosion of Russia’s grand institutions, the emperor spent the day getting drunk. When he sent a few loyal men to counteract Catherine’s army of followers, they deserted as soon as they saw the magnitude of their enemy. The man who played at soldiers all his life proved utterly inept at actual troop maneuvers.

  At midnight Peter tried to escape the city by boat, but his flight was checked by an armed vessel blocking his way to the open sea.

  On June 29, Peter’s name day and the eighteenth anniversary of his betrothal to Catherine, he sent his wife a letter of conciliation but received no reply. At Peterhof, she received his signed letter of abdication, confirming that the handwriting was his. She withdrew into the upper castle so as not to witness Peter’s humiliation as a security detail of three hundred men escorted him into the palace, where he was asked to hand over his sword and divest himself of his elite guard uniform. Peter fainted from the shock. Later that afternoon the deposed emperor was taken by guarded coach to Ropsha, an estate some twenty miles inland, where he was imprisoned in a cramped chamber.

  On June 30, Catherine reentered St. Petersburg in triumph, believing that she had fulfilled God’s plan and her destiny by becoming empress. But then the hard work began. Catherine had inherited a mess. The treasury was in disarray, prisons overflowed, and political corruption was rampant.

  From Ropsha Peter wrote to his wife, assuring her that he would not “undertake anything against her person or her reign,” and humbly requesting that she remove the guards from his room because he was compelled to attend to calls of nature in their presence.

  With little else to do all day, Peter and his guards (at least one of whom, Alexei, was a brother of Catherine’s lover Grigory Orlov) drank and played cards together. On July 2, Alexei Orlov wrote to Catherine informing her that Peter was “gravely ill with an unexpected colic. The first fear is caused by the fact that he talks nonsense the whole time which amuses us, and the second is that he is really a danger to us all and behaves as though nothing had happened.”

  The following evening, after suffering diarrhea for a day, Peter was attended by his physician. Over the next two days his condition alternated between worsening and showing signs of recovery. But on July 6, Alexei Orlov wrote a stunning letter to Catherine: ... I swear that I cannot understand how this has happened. We are finished if you do not pardon us, our little mother, he is no more! No one wanted it to come to that, how we would dare to raise our hand against our sovereign! Nevertheless, Your Majesty, the misfortune has happened. At table he got into an argument with Prince Fyodor [Baryatinsky], and before we could have time to separate them, he was no more. . . . I have admitted everything to you, it would be useless to have an investigation . . .

  Catherine placed this letter in a cabinet in her study and locked it away. There it remained throughout her reign, discovered after her death by the new emperor, her son, Paul. By that point, he had long surmised that his mother, Grigory Orlov, and Orlov’s brothers had had a hand in his father’s judicial murder.

  In fact, even at the time of Peter’s death no one believed that the tsar had died of a violent stomachache and hemorrhoidal colic, as stated in the formal declaration of his demise. Catherine had told a former lover that her husband drank excessively on the date of his death, adding “that the illness affected his brain. . . . I had him opened up—but his stomach showed no traces of ill-health. The cause of death was established as inflammation of the bowels and apoplexy.” Indeed, the autopsy of Peter’s body confirmed that he had died of natural causes.

  However, according to one witness, Peter’s “face was extraordinarily black . . . he was oozing through the skin an extravasated blood which could be seen even on the gloves which covered the hands. . . . Finally, people claim to have noticed on the corpse all the symptoms which may indicate poisoning.”

  Peter’s body was dressed in the light blue uniform of his beloved Holstein guards. A large hat was tugged down over his face, obscuring the discoloration, and an ample cravat disguised evident marks of strangulation. On July 10, he was buried in the Nevsky monastery. Catherine was not present.

  Two days after Archduke Paul’s eighth birthday, on September 22, 1762, Catherine was crowned empress. Her subjects didn’t seem to care that Grigory Orlov was her lover, and he remained so for another decade. Catherine had immediately recognized that if she was to remain an absolute ruler, she could never remarry because the Russian people would want (and expect) power to be concentrated in her husband’s hands.

  As empress, Catherine saw herself as an “enlightened autocrat” and began her reign as an innovator and a pragmatist, convinced that the best way to discover whether a proposed law would be effective was to discuss it fully and solicit opinions from the people it would affect before implementing it. And she believed in the importance of respecting religion, but not in allowing it to influence matters of state.

  Catherine supported the radical new vaccination against smallpox, founded a medical college, built hospitals, and, entirely from her own purse, funded the creation and maintenance of a foundling home that offered free care to the indigent. Her massive art collection became the basis for the renowned Hermitage. And in 1785 she took up playwriting; her works were produced, albeit under a pseudonym, at the palace.

  Then there were the more mundane, but charming and deeply personal, innovations. Catherine invented an eighteenth-century “onesie” for her six-month-old first grandson. “His whole outfit is sewn together, is put on in one go and is fastened behind with four or five little hooks; around the costume there is a fringe, and in that he is perfectly well dressed. . . . There is no tying to be done in any of it, and the child is hardly aware that he is being dressed; one stuffs his arms and feet into his costume at the same time, and it’s done; this costume is a stroke of genius on my part. . . .”

  A verbal portrait of Catherine survives from visiting Briton William Richardson. He found the thirty-nine-year-old empress “. . . taller than the middle size, very comely, gracefully formed but inclined to grow corpulent and of a fair complexion, which like every other female in this country, she endeavors to improve by the addition of rouge. She has a fine mouth and teeth; and blue eyes, expressive of scrutiny, something not so good as observation and not so bad as suspicion. . . . Indeed, with regard to her appearance altogether, it would be doing her injustice to say it was masculine, yet it would not be doing her justice to say it was entirely feminine.”

  Catherine was Empress of all the Russias until her death in 1796. On June 8, 1774, she and her longtime lover and political adviser Grigory Potemkin had a secret ceremony at the Church of St. Sam-son, not far from the Summer Palace in Petersburg. It may have been a sort of “commitment ceremony,” although over the centuries assertions have been made referencing the existence of actual marriage certificates. Such documents, if they ever
existed, have never surfaced.

  And even so, her relationship with Potemkin eventually cooled and he was replaced in the empress’s bed with a number of handsome studs several years her junior—some of whom were handpicked by Potemkin to gratify Catherine’s libido, while never presenting a political threat to his own power and authority, as granted to him by the empress. As Catherine’s favorite, Potemkin held several key governmental and military positions and reaped substantial material rewards, becoming the most powerful man in Russia. Long after their love affair had ended, he remained her primary, and most trusted, counselor.

  As the years went by, Catherine grew even more estranged from her son, Paul, and continued to insist that he was utterly unsuited to succeed her, refusing to cede him the merest scintilla of power or responsibility. He had married twice, his first wife dying while giving birth to a stillborn girl in 1776. Later in the year his mother arranged a marriage with Sophia Dorothea of Württemburg, who took the Russian name of Maria Feodorovna. Luckily for the young royals, it turned out to be a love match and the couple had ten children.

  The final year of Catherine’s life was devoted to the dismemberment of Poland, which was divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, and to making brilliant marriages for her numerous grandchildren.

  On Wednesday, November 5, 1796, Catherine suffered a stroke while in her water closet. When she was found by her valet Zakhar Zotov, the empress’s eyes were closed, her face was purple, and her breathing was labored. A number of servants were summoned but could not budge the rotund autocrat—partially because she had collapsed in such a position that her leg was wedged against the lavatory door. Finally, with the aid of additional manpower, Catherine was conveyed to her bedroom.

  After diagnosing a stroke, her doctor bled her and applied plasters of Spanish fly to her feet. At five p.m., the empress was still unconscious, a dark liquid seeping from her mouth.

  Last rites were administered on November 6. That afternoon Paul combed through all of his mother’s personal papers, discovering Alexei Orlov’s pseudo-confession to the murder of his father. He allegedly found another document that removed him from the imperial succession, which he immediately burned.

  At nine forty-five p.m., Catherine died, having never regained consciousness. An autopsy revealed a cerebral stroke. After a four-week period of national mourning, on December 5 she was buried in the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul, the traditional resting place of the Romanov dynasty, Russia’s royal family.

  On February 22, 1788, seven and a half years before her death, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, Catherine had drafted her own epitaph. After referring to her arrival in Russia at the age of fourteen, she added, “Eighteen years of boredom and solitude made her read plenty of books. Arrived on the throne of Russia she desired its good and sought to procure for her subjects happiness, liberty, and prosperity. She forgave easily and hated no one; indulgent, easy to live with, naturally cheerful, with a republican soul and a good heart, she had friends: she found work easy, she liked good society and the arts.”

  There was nothing about horses.

  As part of the burial rite, Catherine’s son, now Emperor Paul I, had his father’s body exhumed and the imperial crown brought from Moscow and placed on Peter’s resealed coffin in a gesture of posthumous coronation. At their son’s insistence, the spouses, who had abhorred each other since their betrothal, were united in death, despite the fact that Catherine had deposed—and possibly conspired to murder—her husband.

  LOUIS XVI 1754-1793

  RULED FRANCE: 1774-1792

  and

  MARIE ANTOINETTE

  1755-1793

  married 1770-1793

  “The King is not fond of sleeping in the same bed

  with me.”

  —Marie Antoinette, in a letter to her family

  IN MAY OF 1770, A GERMAN UNIVERSITY STUDENT AND his buddies managed to sneak into the lavish pavilion under construction on the Ile des Epis in the center of the Rhine, a “no-man’s-land” near Strasbourg that straddled the borders of the Austrian empire and France. The walls of the five-room pavilion were hung with elaborate Gobelin tapestries and furnished as sumptuously as any room at Schönbrunn, the Viennese palace where the fourteen-year-old bride-to-be, Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria, was to be handed off to the representatives of her fifteen-year-old groom, Louis-Auguste, Dauphin of France.

  As they roamed about the pavilion, one of the German youths— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—immediately recognized that among the classical subjects depicted in the tapestries was the wedding of Jason and Medea, a mythological love story in which a foreign princess journeys to Greece and marries the hometown sovereign. Things don’t end prettily, to put it mildly. Aghast, Goethe exclaimed aloud, “What? Is it permissible thus unreflectingly to display before the eyes of a young queen entering upon married life this example of the most horrible wedding that perhaps ever took place?”

  Goethe saw the writing on the wall, but no one else appeared to be concerned. Not enough to remove the offensive tapestry and certainly not enough to reconsider an alliance that had been four years in the making.

  Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna von Hapsburg-Lothringen (Antonia to her family) was the youngest of the numerous daughters born to the Hapsburg empress Maria Teresa of Austria and Francis of Lorraine, the Holy Roman Emperor by virtue of his marriage.

  The Bourbons, who sat on the thrones of France, Spain, and Naples, had been a rival dynasty for centuries. Part of the empress’s life’s work was to make brilliant political matches for her thirteen surviving children, but during the mid-1760s, both Catherine of Russia and Frederick the Great of Prussia were becoming territorial threats to her realm. She desperately needed to cement a powerful alliance and the French Bourbons filled the bill to perfection.

  Antonia was a pretty little blue-eyed blonde with a high forehead, and a long neck—a Sèvres porcelain figurine, in the flesh, although she had yet to reach puberty. “The little one,” as her mother called her, was graceful and vivacious, but a spoiled, temperamental little hoyden. So perhaps it was a good thing that by the time Antonia turned thirteen in 1768, her marriage negotiations were still pending. Her mother was both frustrated and disgusted that the future Queen of France still couldn’t read and write French and German correctly and remained clueless as to the barest rudiments of history.

  It was time for a major makeover. A French dentist was brought in to straighten Antonia’s teeth with an eighteenth-century form of braces. A Parisian hairdresser came to Vienna to do something about the girl’s unfashionable forehead and uneven hairline. But just as important, her brain needed to be kick-started.

  It was an uphill battle for Abbé Vermond, the tutor hired to turn Antonia into an intellectual. “She is more intelligent than has been generally supposed,” he acknowledged. But “she is rather lazy and extremely frivolous, she is hard to teach. . . . I came in the end to recognize that she would only learn so long as she was being amused.” Physically, however, Vermond noted that “she has a most graceful figure; holds herself well; and if (as may be hoped) she grows a little taller, she will have all the good qualities one could wish for in a great princess. Her character, her heart, are excellent.”

  The venerable abbé neglected to mention another international concern, but perhaps it wasn’t foremost in his mind: Antonia’s bosom was still as flat as a flapjack.

  Finally, in 1769, Louis XV made the official request for Archduchess Maria Antonia’s hand on behalf of his young grandson, and Easter 1770 was the proposed date for the marriage. Empress Maria Teresa was both relieved and delighted, but made sure to give the monarch a heads-up about her flighty and high-spirited daughter: “Her age craves indulgence,” she warned.

  On April 17, 1770, Antonia renounced her rights to succeed her mother, an act of protocol, as she was going to become French by virtue of her marriage. Two days later, she was married by proxy in the Augustinian Church. The Dauphin of France was r
epresented by Antonia’s brother, Archduke Ferdinand. To complete the transformation, she had to change her name. No longer Austrian, but French, the little girl called Maria Antonia would henceforth be known as Marie Antoinette.

  Thus rechristened and remade, on April 21, her face wet with tears, Marie Antoinette paid her formal farewell to her family and was driven away from Vienna in an elaborate coach owned by the King of France. She would never see her formidable mother again.

  When the carriage reached the temporary pavilion on the Ile des Epis that Goethe had sneaked into when it was under construction, Marie Antoinette entered one of the two antechambers that were located in Austria. There, she was to dispense with all things Austrian, from her gown to her shoes and hose to her underwear to her hair ribbon. Historians disagree as to whether Marie Antoinette was literally stripped down to her birthday suit in the presence of prying eyes, effecting the erotic and voyeuristic transition from archduchess to dauphine as her fourteen-year-old body, more childlike than womanly, was dressed in garments constructed entirely in France.

  The marriage contract was signed in the central chamber of the five-room pavilion, literally neutral territory. Marie Antoinette then swallowed her tears, ginned up her courage, and walked into the next room—into France—led in an elaborately choreographed routine by the duc de Choiseul, who handed her over to the French delegation as the Austrian delegation slowly retreated, walking backward into their homeland.

  After grand celebrations in the streets of Strasbourg, the lavish procession then conveyed Marie Antoinette to the forest of Compiègne, where she would meet her bridegroom for the first time.