Great Catherine

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  To lend plausibility to the story that Johanna and Sophie were going no farther than Berlin, Christian August accompanied them there. King Frederick II was also in Berlin at the time, the brilliant, eccentric successor to his father Frederick William, who had died four years earlier. Frederick was thirty-two, a formidable soldier who was at the same time well-read and cultivated; an Anglophile, he had once tried to escape his punitive father by running away to England.

  Frederick knew all about the journey that Johanna and Sophie were about to make to Russia. His ambassador at St. Petersburg, Baron Mardefeldt, kept him informed of all that transpired at Empress Elizabeth's court, and in particular about the empress's choice of a wife for her nephew and heir.

  The selection process had taken many months. Choosing a bride for the heir to the throne was a political decision, and Empress Elizabeth's officials and advisers were divided in their political loyalties. One faction, headed by the Chancellor Alexei Bestuzhev, favored closer ties with Austria, Britain, and the lesser powers within their orbit. The other, which included the Prussian ambassador Mardefeldt, the French ambassador Chetardie, many of the more influential Russian nobles and Empress Elizabeth's physician and trusted friend Armand Lestocq, favored Prussia and her political partner France. Accordingly, Bestuzhev proposed that Peter marry a Saxon princess, while Mardefeldt, Chetardie, and the others recommended a French princess. Sophie, Elizabeth's own preferred candidate, was forgotten in the factional battles that resulted.

  To break the deadlock Frederick was consulted. Would he consider sending one of his sisters to St. Petersburg to marry Peter? Certainly not, he said, but he suggested the names of several compromise candidates, including Sophie. As it happened, the French ambassador had been in Hamburg at the time that Johanna's family gathered there to congratulate the departing King Adolf. He had seen Sophie, and, like most who saw her, he had been impressed. He declared himself in favor of Sophie, which pleased Elizabeth and satisfied the others, except for Bestuzhev, who was outmaneuvered by his enemies. Sophie it was.

  Now Frederick wanted to meet Sophie, his compromise candidate, and he sent an invitation to Christian August, Johanna and Sophie inviting them to dine at the palace. At first Johanna refused to let Sophie go, but when the king insisted she had to give way. Frederick seated Sophie next to him at the dining table and talked to her all afternoon, asking her questions, discussing the theater, literature, opera—"whatever thousand things one could ask a girl of fourteen," she remembered many years later. Frederick did not ask Sophie anything about Peter, or the Empress Elizabeth— whom he privately thought to be a woman of "sybaritic tastes," unfit to govern a realm—or about what she knew of Russia. But he sampled her mind and her understanding, and made her blush with his gallant compliments.

  "In the beginning I was very timid with him," Sophie recalled, "but gradually I became accustomed to him, until by the end of the evening we were on the most cordial terms—so much so that the entire company was wide-eyed in amazement to see Frederick in conversation with a child."

  On another occasion Frederick talked to Johanna, telling her bluntly that he had been instrumental in bringing about Sophie's good fortune and striking a bargain with her: if Johanna would serve as his eyes and ears at the Russian court, promoting Prussian interests there and acting in concert with his ambassador Mar-defeldt, then he, Frederick, would ensure that Johanna's rotund sister Hedwig would become Abbess of Quedlinburg. Christian August, with his goodness and his devotion to virtue, Frederick did not approach.

  Johanna and Sophie set out on their secret journey in three coaches, taking only a minimum number of servants: a gentleman of the chamber, M. de Lattorf, four chamber women, a single valet de chambre, several lackeys, a cook, and, as companion and chief lady-in-waiting to Johanna, the superstitious Fraulein Kayn. On the orders of Count Brummer, Johanna adopted the name "Countess Rheinbeck," and swore her servants to secrecy about her true identity and the actual purpose of the journey. Christian August rode with his wife and daughter as far as Schwedt on the Oder, then he went on toward Zerbst, while they turned north. Sophie embraced her father for the last time, cherishing the letter of advice he gave her and remembering his caution that she should never, under any circumstances, abandon the Lutheranism in which she had been raised for the religion of the Orthodox church.

  The brief, frigid days were at their shortest. A pallid yellow sun rose late and lay just above the horizon for only a few precious hours, illuminating trees and fields glistening with frost. The first snowfall was late that winter, but icy winds and hard, pelting rain swirled around the swaying coaches as they lumbered over the rutted post road, sinking suddenly into deep ditches and coming perilously close to overturning. Ordinary travelers never used the post road, they went by sea, and then almost never in winter; storms and ice made the Baltic unnavigable between December and April, when sensible people stayed home. Lone couriers braved the post road in all seasons, but they took their lives in their hands, for robbers haunted the bleak outlands and no search parties went out to look for couriers who lost their way or froze to death before they could reach shelter.

  The frosts grew thicker, the cold more biting as they reached Danzig on the Baltic coast. Huge chunks of ice floated on the frigid sea, the rocky shoreline was frozen, the dunes covered with ice. Johanna and Sophie, bundled in layers of wool, had to wrap woollen scarves around their red, swollen faces to protect them from the fierce wind. Black and blue from being tossed about and jolted in the coach, they longed for nightfall when the outriders would lead them to a posting station—or better still an inn with a huge earthenware stove where they could warm their hands and feet and thaw their stiff, bruised bodies. Inns were few and far between, however, and generally filthy. No special quarters were available for Countess Rheinbeck and her entourage; they had to join the innkeeper's children and livestock in the cluttered common room.

  Inn parlors were pigsties, Johanna complained to her husband in a letter written on the road. Dogs, hens and cocks rooted in the layers of straw and ordure on the floor, babies bawled in cradles, older children huddled together for warmth, "lying one on top of the other like cabbages and turnips" on ancient tattered featherbeds drawn up close to the stove. The food was terrible, there were bugs and rats and sometimes the wind howled through holes in the roof or walls, making sleep impossible. Sophie, trying to wash down her dinner with large quantities of the local beer, became sick to her stomach. Johanna, having satisfied herself that neither the innkeeper nor his numerous children had smallpox, ordered a bare plank brought for herself and lay down on it, fully clothed, in an effort to sleep.

  Once the travelers reached Memel both inns and post houses ceased. The impossible roads grew more rutted and at times disappeared altogether. Frozen marsh gave way to lakes covered with a treacherous crust of ice, thin in some places and thick in others. The coachmen hired local fishermen to test the firmness of the ice before venturing across, knowing that if the brittle crust gave way the coaches and their occupants would not survive their plunge into the chill black water. Where ice-clogged rivers flowed into the sea, the coaches were loaded onto wooden ferries and poled across. There were long delays to repair broken axles and take on fresh provisions, and when the horses grew tired, the servants were sent out to bargain with peasants for fresh teams.

  By the end of the third week of travel, with the cold becoming more and more severe and Sophie's feet swelling so badly from frostbite that she had to be carried in and out of the coach, she must have been having second thoughts about her impulsive decision to present herself to Empress Elizabeth. As she ate her unpalatable supper while a servant tried to rub life back into her painfully swollen feet, her thoughts must have turned to Karl Ulrich, her irritable, recalcitrant cousin who would one day be emperor of Russia. The boy, now on the threshold of manhood, who would, if all went well, become her husband. She must have recalled his pallor and his delicacy, his battles with Count Brum-mer and his affection for
his loutish valets, his liking for Johanna and his insatiable appetite for wine. She must have wondered, as she struggled to compose her miserably cold body for sleep, whether it might have been wiser to marry Uncle Georg and settle into obscurity.

  Chapter Four

  WEEK AFTER ARDUOUS WEEK THE TRAVELING PARTY crawled northward along the shores of the Baltic, into the teeth of the bitter wind. As they passed through each village, peasants wrapped in layers of rags came out to stare at the coaches, crossing themselves and murmuring prayers. Each evening the travelers bedded down where they could, and listened to the wolves howling outside. Along the mist-enshrouded Latvian coast the villages thinned out, and the blanched landscape took on a wearying sameness. At night, however, the sky was lit by the spectacular glow of a comet. Sophie was enraptured. "I had never seen anything so grand," she wrote in her memoirs. "It seemed very close to the earth."

  Comets were portents of disaster, as Fraulein Kayn no doubt pointed out to her companions. And there was a disaster in the making, or so it seemed to Sophie's relatives once Christian August revealed to them that his daughter was en route to Russia. He wrote to Johanna, telling her of the all but universal outrage expressed by her sisters and aunts and cousins when they learned the news. They had wanted Sophie to marry Karl Ulrich when he was Duke of Holstein. But the last thing they wanted was for her to marry him now that he was Peter, Grand Duke of Muscovy, living at a court notorious for its political instability and barbarity. She would be at the mercy of the empress, she could be murdered or shut away in a dungeon or worse. Her very soul would be in peril, amongst the heathen Russians who would be sure to persecute her for her Lutheran faith.

  Johanna was not surprised by her relatives' reactions. She had expected a whirlwind of opposition, she wrote to her husband. But Providence had determined that Sophie would go to Russia, and Providence could not be denied, even by Aunt Marie Elizabeth and sister Hedwig in Quedlinburg. "We can be certain that the Omniscient brings to fruition His plans which are hidden from us," she wrote piously, praying that the Omniscient would continue to provide fresh horses and edible food and would not let them lose themselves in a blizzard.

  They were nearing the Russian border. Dense silver-gray marshes spread themselves on all sides, glowing faintly in the pale light of midday. Out of the emptiness a figure rode toward them. It was a courier, sent to meet them and then to ride back the way he had come, spreading the word that their arrival was imminent. Soon another rider approached, Colonel Vokheikov, and escorted them across the frontier and on to the town of Riga.

  It seemed as though the entire population of the town had turned out to greet the frozen visitors from Anhalt-Zerbst. Cannon thundered, bells pealed, and one of the empress's ambassadors, Semyon Naryshkin, made a speech of welcome. The vice-governor Dolgorukov was present with an escort of soldiers from the garrison, and there were generals and civic officials galore.

  Johanna's head was turned by all the pageantry. She could now abandon her alias and assume her own honored name, as a parade of nobles lined up to bow to her and kiss her hand. For two days the display of honors continued, with guardsmen at attention and trumpeters announcing every move the visitors made. Johanna and Sophie were given warm sable coats sewn with gold brocade, fur collars and a fur coverlet, along with letters of welcome from the empress and Count Brummer.

  Sophie let her extroverted mother take center stage in all the festivities, though she knew that she, as the future grand duchess, was the important one. Her mind was already at work, observing the behavior and tastes of their Russian hosts. She asked one of the generals to tell her about the imperial court, who the key personalities were and what they were like. Her political sense was already aroused, she knew she would need to inform herself as fully as possible in order to adapt.

  Sophie must also have thought a good deal about Peter, recalling his pale good looks and his incorrigible behavior, his liking for her mother, and the boorish valets who were his favorite companions. She must have wondered how much he had changed in the years since their meeting at Eutin, and whether his exalted position had gone to his head.

  Deep snow now blanketed the fields and marshes, and the travelers abandoned their uncomfortable coaches for a capacious and warm sleigh provided from the empress's personal carriage house. It was less a vehicle than a small house on wheels, so large and heavy that a dozen horses were needed to draw it through the snowdrifts. The sleigh was equipped with a stove, mattresses and snug fur-lined bedding, indeed the very walls were covered with fur and Sophie, Johanna and Fraulein Kayn lay on silk cushions to sleep at night. To protect them on this last stage of their journey they had a squadron of cavalry and a detachment of footsoldiers, plus the sleighs of a number of Russian nobles and officials.

  Another four days of travel brought them to St. Petersburg, the city built a generation earlier by Empress Elizabeth's father, Peter the Great. Here, as at Riga, cannonades and extravagant peals of bells announced the arrival of the important German visitors and a huge crowd gathered on the outdoor staircase of the Winter Palace to greet them. The empress and most of the courtiers were in Moscow, four hundred miles away, but the Chancellor Be-stuzhev and a number of other courtiers greeted Johanna and Sophie and escorted them to their lavishly appointed rooms in the grand and opulent structure the Italian architect Rastrelli had built for Elizabeth.

  After six weeks of exhausting travel, Sophie and Johanna must have craved rest and peace, but peace was denied them. They had to meet dozens of courtiers and dignitaries, they had to be shown the principal landmarks of the extraordinary city that the great Emperor Peter had erected on a remote and unpromising marsh. They had to attend the winter carnival, to ride down a snowy hill on a toboggan—which the tomboyish Sophie thoroughly enjoyed—and to attend elaborate dinners and suppers. The chamberlain Naryshkin presented the newcomers with an exotic spectacle. Fourteen elephants, a gift to the empress from the Shah of Persia, were led into the courtyard of the Winter Palace and made to perform.

  In the intervals between entertainments, Johanna was closeted with the Prussian ambassador Mardefeldt and the French ambassador Chetardie. Both instructed her on how best to ingratiate herself with the empress, and reminded her that it was the Chancellor Bestuzhev who represented the greatest obstacle to her interests and Sophie's. Bestuzhev, the ambassadors said, was strongly opposed to having Peter marry Sophie. Such a marriage would symbolize the union of Russia and Prussia (since Sophie was Frederick's nominee) and all of Bestuzhev's efforts were directed toward preventing such a union. Chetardie recommended that Johanna cut short her stay in Petersburg and try to reach Moscow by the tenth of February (by Russian reckoning; in Russia the Julian calendar still prevailed, and the date was ten days behind that of Western Europe), which was Peter's birthday. The empress would be certain to appreciate this gesture.

  Still weary from their long and grueling journey, Johanna and Sophie got back into the empress's fur-lined sleigh for the trip to Moscow. They were joined by four of Elizabeth's ladies of honor, and all six women, plus Fraulein Kayn and the other attendants from Zerbst, braced themselves for four hundred miles of swaying and bouncing and general discomfort. A great many officials joined the cortege, there were thirty sleighs in all, each requiring ten horses.

  Stopping only when the horses were spent, the procession moved forward through the night, relying on bonfires tended by shivering peasants to illuminate the way. Crowds gathered to glimpse the long train of sleighs. Sophie heard shouts and asked her Russian companions what they meant. "It is the fiancee of the grand duke who is being escorted!" people were saying.

  With the horses galloping at breakneck speed over the frozen snow, and the drivers at times blinded by sleet and wind, there were bound to be accidents. Passing through a village the sleigh in which Johanna and Sophie were riding turned sharply and ran into a house. The collision wrenched loose one of the heavy iron bars supporting the roof of the sleigh, and it fell heavily on Johanna's hea
d and shoulder. Sophie was unhurt.

  Johanna, shocked and smarting from the blow, thought she was dying. The entire procession came to a halt in the village while her injuries were examined. One by one the thick layers of fur came off and no blood or bruises were revealed. Johanna angrily insisted that she had been grievously wounded but eventually conceded that the furs had protected her. After a delay of several hours, the sleigh was repaired and the journey continued.

  On the third day, some five miles outside of Moscow a courier approached with a message from the empress. She wanted the visitors to delay making their entrance into the city until after nightfall. They halted and waited, then proceeded after dark. Sophie's first view of Moscow was of a dim and dingy place with narrow crooked streets and scurrying inhabitants muffled in furs. Presently they came to a torchlit mansion where the empress's adjutant general, the Prince of Homburg, was waiting with the entire glittering court. The newcomers were welcomed with far less fanfare than they had been at Petersburg and were subjected to thorough scrutiny. Sophie, who had put on a pink silk gown with silver trim, must have felt very conspicuous as the prince escorted her from one grand, high-ceilinged room to the next.

  She heard him murmur the names of people they passed— courtiers who bowed low—but the hundreds of faces and names must have blurred.

  Then she saw Peter, taller and better looking than he had been when she saw him last, with small eyes and delicate features in a thin face.