Great Catherine

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  When the princess was eight, Johanna took her to Berlin for the first time. They stayed for several months, and Sophie went to court, dressed like a miniature lady in a gown with a long train. Her spine no longer zigzagged down her back, her shoulders were level and she held her proud little head straight as she passed through the halls of the royal palace—which, in truth, was less grand than her great-grandmother's establishment at Brunswick. The king renewed his acquaintance with her, and the queen invited her to dine with her and Crown Prince Frederick, then a young man of twenty-five. Both were charmed by her and impressed with her, and Frederick, who like Sophie possessed an outstanding intellect and a spirit of questioning, was to remember her well.

  That her eight-year-old daughter should eclipse her was irksome to Johanna, in whose rather limited understanding girls had value only insofar as they were beautiful—or at least reasonably attractive. Sophie, Johanna thought, was ugly, and no matter how intelligent she was, her ugliness could not be disguised. Johanna did not broadcast her opinion outside the family circle, but her sensitive daughter was well aware of it. Besides, Sophie was growing up in a social environment where a woman's value was determined by her beauty. Everyone knew that ugly little girls grew up to be plain women, and plain women did not find husbands. They languished in their parents' houses, or in convents where they lived in secluded luxury, not taking religious vows but boarding with the nuns in their own well-appointed apartments. Every family, including Sophie's, had several of these unfortunates in it, superfluous women for whom no other place could be found. In Johanna's view, Sophie was in danger of growing up to be one of them.

  Highly intelligent, pleasing, but plain: such was the verdict on Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst. The child did what was expected of her, observed her world through her large, bright eyes, asked a thousand questions, and awaited her chance to shine.

  Chapter Two

  FROM THE AGE OF EIGHT ON, SOPHIE SPENT LESS AND LESS time in the cold and dreary backwater of Stettin and more and more time at the active, vital courts of Brunswick and Berlin. Johanna joined her grandmother's court for three or four months each year, and spent the long northern winter in Berlin, and she took Sophie with her.

  Christian August did not object to his wife's being away for months at a time. He was now in his fifties, she in her mid-twenties; they were dissimilar in personality, he serious and austere, and liking solitude, she witty and vivacious and teasing, at her best when surrounded by admiring friends. Johanna, her daughter recalled years later, was considered to be the more intelligent of the two, but Christian August "was a man of rectitude, and solid judgment," acquainted with many subjects because of his wide reading. He and Johanna cannot have been very good company for one another. Christian August was beginning to age, his circulation was poor and he could not have kept up with the ceaseless round of hunting parties and balls and promenades that court society demanded.

  So Johanna went off with Sophie and the other children, and took her place among the minor notables surrounding King Frederick William, reminding herself that, though her husband was only a very obscure prince, she herself came from a family closely allied to royalty. Her great-grandfather was Frederick III, King of Denmark, her late father had been Prince Bishop of Lubeck and her cousin Karl Frederick was married to Anna, daughter of Emperor Peter the Great of Russia. Karl's son and namesake, nine-year-old Karl Ulrich, was heir to the thrones of Sweden and Russia. Johanna's late brother Karl August had been betrothed to Peter the Great's younger daughter Elizabeth, but had died on the eve of his wedding.

  To be sure, Johanna's royal connections had not brought her wealth, and she had married beneath her. She was only the fourth daughter of the prince bishop, among the least significant of his twelve children, and apparently estranged from her own mother for reasons history does not record. Yet she had hope that her own children would do better than she had. Possibly because she had not succeeded in advancing herself very far, Johanna was intensely ambitious for her children. If boldness and pride could push them to the forefront of society, then push she would. She consulted mediums and fortune-tellers in hopes of discovering what lay in store for each of them, though when it came to the homely little Sophie, Johanna was inclined to wince at her prospects, no matter what any self-professed visionary said.

  Among the other children at the court of Brunswick was little Princess Marianne of Brunswick-Bevern, whose attractive features bore in them the promise of beauty. Johanna liked her and singled her out for praise. Now, there's a little girl who'll win a crown one day, she said, or words to that effect—in the hearing of the ill-favored Sophie. Also within earshot was a clairvoyant monk, a member of the entourage of the Prince Bishop of Corbie. The monk hastened to correct Johanna's prediction, telling her that he saw no crowns in Marianne's future but that there were three crowns visible over Sophie's head.

  Sophie treasured that brief triumph, and connected it with another fragment of information that had come to her from her father's mentor and friend Bolhagen, who had lived in close proximity to the family since before Sophie was born and had spent a good deal of time with the children. Once when Bolhagen was reading the newspaper he told the children about a notice he saw there concerning the forthcoming marriage of Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha with the eldest son of King George II of England. "Well now," he remarked, "that Princess Augusta was much less well brought up than ours; she isn't a bit pretty, and there she is destined to become the Queen of England. Who knows what our princess will become?"

  German princesses were in demand at foreign courts. There seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of them, and if they did not bring large dowries, at least their fathers were too unimportant to drive hard bargains with prospective bridegrooms. Many European ruling houses sent representatives to the German courts to examine their princesses in person, and to request portraits to carry back home with them.

  Reluctantly at first, Johanna began to see that Sophie might be a commodity in this bride-market—a marginal commodity, to be sure, yet not entirely without value. As Sophie grew older she became slightly less ugly, and much more impressive in her ability to learn and to discuss ideas. Many people admired her original turn of mind, and complimented her mother on Sophie's pleasing personality. Johanna remained skeptical about Sophie's prospects, but saw to it that her daughter made the right friends and remained within the circle of familiars around the Prussian royal family—-just in case.

  Johanna loved Berlin, and was at her happiest when in residence there. A small, picturesque city with wide streets and many fine houses—a number of them built by the king himself, who had a penchant for knocking down small and inferior structures and ordering better ones erected at his own expense—Berlin was dominated by its military population. Some twenty thousand soldiers were quartered in the homes of the inhabitants; every fourth or fifth person one met in the street was a soldier. Between campaigns, especially during the winter, these men were largely idle, and free to attend masquerades and fetes. Johanna, pretty and unencumbered by her husband, was an attractive ornament at these gatherings.

  When the balls were over, however, Johanna had to return to her responsibilities. Her chief concern, as always, was the ill health of her eldest son Wilhelm. His leg hung uselessly, he had to be carried everywhere. His temper, if Sophie's account in her memoirs is to be trusted, was irritable if not savage. Johanna hovered over him, calling in every physician she knew of, accompanying her son to bathe in the health-giving waters of mineral spas. She began to worry over her younger son Frederick as well, looking on him as more and more precious as Wilhelm declined.

  Sophie's vibrant good health must have seemed almost an affront to her more delicate brothers. She was big for her age, and strong. She amused herself by seeing how fast she could run up and down steep staircases and by playing boys' games. At night she was put to bed quite early; wakeful and full of energy, she feigned sleep and then, when her women left her alone, jumped up and arranged her pillo
ws like a saddle and galloped astride them until she was exhausted.

  In the course of taking Wilhelm to consult physicians and bathe in mineral springs, Johanna stopped to visit various relatives and in-laws. Her aunt Marie Elizabeth was abbess of the Protestant convent of Quedlinburg, where her own older sister Hedwig was provost. The two women, aunt and niece, quarreled incessantly, sometimes contriving not to see one another for years at a time, though they occupied the same set of buildings and walked the same grounds. Johanna did her best to make peace between them, and sometimes succeeded, but the reconciliations were invariably brief; clearly the enmity that bound Marie Elizabeth and Hedwig gave a focus to their lives, and neither was about to give that up.

  Hedwig was short and grossly fat, and passionately fond of animals. Though her room at the convent was small she kept there sixteen pug dogs. Many of them had puppies, and all of the dogs, adults and puppies, slept, ate, and relieved themselves in the one small room. Hedwig employed a young servant girl to do nothing but clean up after the dogs. She was kept busy from dawn to dusk doing nothing else, but despite her efforts the room stank like a kennel and to add to the odor Hedwig kept a good many parrots that flew from rafter to rafter, twittering and screeching and driving visitors mad. Whenever Hedwig went riding in her carriage, at least one of the parrots and half a dozen dogs rode along with her; the dogs went with her even to church.

  Another maiden aunt of Sophie's, her father's sister Sophie Christine, also loved animals but had a somewhat more balanced life. She was past fifty when little Sophie knew her, very tall and painfully thin yet inordinately proud of her spare figure— probably in compensation for her unsightly face. As a girl, she told her niece, she had been beautiful, but a tragic accident had marred her beauty permanently when a little cape she was wearing caught fire and the lower part of her face was burned. The scarring was quite hideous, and put an end to her hopes of marrying well.

  A poor deformed thing herself, Aunt Sophie Christine took in crippled and injured birds, and looked after them until they healed. Young Sophie described her aunt's winged menagerie as she remembered it: a one-legged thrush, a lark with a broken wing, a one-eyed goldfinch, a chicken attacked by a cock, its head halfway bitten off, a nightingale paralyzed on one side, a legless parrot that lay on its belly, and many other such creatures, all of which roamed free about the room. Sophie Christine's compassion made less of an impression on her niece than her anger when young Sophie left one of the windows open and half the birds escaped.

  It must have seemed to Sophie that spinsters inevitably fell prey to eccentricity. Without a husband to obey, children to worry over or in-laws to placate, they devoted themselves to animals or to nurturing petty quarrels. Or to superstition.

  One of Johanna's attendants was Fraulein Kayn, a woman of mature years who believed in ghosts and claimed to see them often. ("I was a Sunday child," she told Sophie. "I have the second sight.") When Sophie was eleven years old, she shared a bedroom with Fraulein Kayn one night while she and her mother were on a journey to Brunswick. The room had two beds. Sophie went to sleep in hers but was awakened in the middle of the night when she felt someone crawl into bed beside her. She opened her eyes and saw, by the dim light of a candle, that Fraulein Kayn had joined her. She asked her why.

  Speaking with difficulty, for she was trembling with fright and could hardly utter a sound, the older woman whispered, "For God's sake leave me alone and go to sleep quietly!"

  Sophie was persistent, and pressed her to explain why she had left her own bed.

  "Don't you see what is going on in the room and what is there on the table?" Fraulein Kayn said—and drew the covers up over her face.

  Sophie looked around the room, but could neither hear nor see anything odd, only two beds and a small table with a candle, pitcher and basin. She told Fraulein Kayn what she saw, and succeeded in calming her somewhat. But neither of them could sleep, and shortly afterwards the fearful Fraulein crawled out of bed and over to the door, checking to see that it was locked. Sophie managed to go to sleep again but her companion was wakeful; the following morning she looked as if she hadn't slept a wink and her anxiety was evident. Again Sophie questioned her, but Fraulein Kayn was tightlipped.

  "I cannot say," she murmured portentously and refused to be pressed further. But it seemed clear to Sophie that she thought she had had a brush with the occult.

  Fraulein Kayn often frightened Johanna with her talk of apparitions, "white ladies," and other appearances from the beyond, and Sophie could not help but be affected by these stories and by the folk tales about witches, goblins and spirits repeated within her hearing. But counteracting the general climate of superstition was the bastion of reason, manned by Babette Cardel. Babette held every belief up to the light and scrutinized it.

  'That is not common sense," Babette said whenever she heard something farfetched. Sophie too came to revere common sense, and she listened with interest when Babette's friend Monsieur de Mauclerc came to call and the two of them discussed the com-monsensical English approach to law, religion and government. Monsieur de Mauclerc was engaged in editing a history of England written by his father-in-law, and through listening to him talk with Babette Sophie encountered concepts of social equality, popular representation and political reform—while learning to scorn credulity and prize rigorous debate.

  At the age of eleven Sophie was taken to Eutin in the ducal state of Holstein to meet her second cousin Karl Ulrich, the promising boy who was heir to two thrones and who had just become the object of a great deal of excitement in the family. Karl Ulrich's father, Johanna's cousin Karl Frederick, had just died, and his son had inherited his ducal title and his claim to the throne of Sweden. And since through his late mother the boy was also the grandson of Peter the Great, he had a strong claim to the sovereignty of Russia as well—a sovereignty tenuously held by his aging childless relative Empress Anna Ivanovna, his mother's cousin.

  Karl Ulrich was a year older than Sophie, a pale, thin, delicate-looking boy who could put on pleasant manners when he chose. Sophie's uncle Adolf, Johanna's brother, was in charge of looking after him and guiding his education, and a number of family members gathered to witness the boy's investiture with his ducal honors and to try to benefit from his prospects. The matriarch of the Holstein family, Johanna's mother Albertine, was present along with Sophie's Aunt Anna and her Uncle Augustus.

  Sophie had been brought to Eutin for the express purpose of matchmaking. Given the role Karl Ulrich seemed destined to play on the world stage, a wife would have to be chosen for him soon, and a wife from among his near relations, one whom he had met and with whom he felt familiar, would be a safe choice. Sophie was not told directly that she should try to please her cousin, but her uncles and aunts, along with Karl Ulrich's chamberlain, a Swede named Brummer, let fall a great many hints that a betrothal between them would be gratifying to the family.

  Sophie's first impression of Karl Ulrich was that he was good-looking and courteous. She liked the idea that, if they married, she would be Queen of Sweden, and although he paid much more attention to her mother than to her, his inattention did not bother her. Possibly she remembered the prediction of the soothsaying monk and thought that marriage to this pale boy would fulfill it. As for Karl Ulrich's response to Sophie, it was limited to one overwhelming reaction: he envied her her liberty.

  The young duke was clearly miserable. Surrounded by flatterers, he was smothered by handlers and pedagogues who watched him day and night. He chafed under their restraints and it soon became evident to his visiting relatives that beneath his polished manners lurked an irritable temper.

  He had had an unnatural upbringing. His mother died when he was two months old, and his father, a rather feeble, sickly man, passed on to his son little besides his title and his attachment to Holstein. From infancy the boy had been the center of a grand and numerous household; though constrained by a thousand restrictions he had been at the same time indulged and spoiled, wi
th the result that his recalcitrance and fiery temper had never been curbed. He did what he liked and said what he thought. He was not unintelligent, but his behavior was so incorrigible that his teachers could not teach him anything. He hated most of the men in charge of him, especially when they tried to prevent him from enjoying his wine at meals. All too often, he drank too much, and could hardly get up from the table. It seemed to Sophie that he showed affection to only two people, of all those around him. They were his valets de chambre, a Livonian named Cramer and a loutish Swede, Roumberg, an ex-soldier with whom he could play military games.

  Sophie came away from her meeting with Karl Ulrich convinced that everyone expected her to marry him. Yet other eligible princes also came forward, among them King Frederick's intelligent and promising brother Prince Henry, to indicate an interest in Sophie. At twelve and thirteen she was physically mature—"larger and more developed than one is ordinarily at that age," as she expressed it in her memoirs—and already ripe for marriage.

  Another distant cousin, Wilhelm of Saxe-Gotha, sidled into her life. He was lame, but attentive; he sat beside her in church, pestered her with his conversation and ultimately declared himself intent on marrying her. But Christian August put him off and suggested that he marry Johanna's sister Anne instead. Apparently Wilhelm was not too particular. He gladly married the thirty-six-year-old Anne and the two disappeared into obscurity together.

  In the year that Sophie turned thirteen, Christian August had a stroke that left him temporarily paralyzed on his left side. He recovered, and was able to return to his work of soldiering and governing, but the stroke was a reminder of mortality and a worry to Johanna, who was pregnant once again and also more concerned than usual about her eldest son.

  Wilhelm was growing weaker. All the doctors, remedies and mineral baths were of no avail now. He lay in his bed, limp and feverish, with his distraught mother keeping vigil beside him. Wilhelm had been her dearest treasure since his birth, and everyone in the family knew it. Now he was slipping away. When he died she was inconsolable. All her relatives, even the aged Alber-tine, came to stand by her in her grief, but her son's death left a void in her heart that nothing and no one could ever fill.