Among the women the Grand Duchess Catherine would have stood out even if her rank had not distinguished her. "Her person is very advantageous, and her manner very captivating," the Englishman wrote. He watched her walking with head held high, magnificently gowned, carressing her friends and hurling carefully worded barbs at her enemies. She was becoming a master politician, and he was impressed with her.
Seated next to Catherine at imperial banquets, Hanbury-Williams had ample opportunity to take the measure of her mind and judgments as well as her personal attractions, and he found her conversation "worthy of the good sense of Richelieu and the genius o£ Moliere." Each sparked the other's wit. They discovered that they had read many of the same books, that they shared an admiration for Voltaire and an aversion to pretention in all its forms. ("I know of no dish so agreeable as good sense seasoned by ridicule," the diplomat remarked to Catherine, "when a conceited ignoramus or false confidence produce such fare." She heartily agreed.)
With the empress in failing health, and her successor rapidly descending into drunken impotence (Hanbury-Williams judged Peter to be "weak and violent"), Catherine appeared to be the natural heir to power. He wrote to his superiors in London that should Elizabeth die suddenly, Catherine would rule. For despite his petty cruelties, his clumsy posturing and unbounded ego, Peter deferred to his wife when it came to matters of substance.
He bowed to her breadth of knowledge; according to the ambassador, Peter told people that "though he did not understand things himself, yet his wife understands everything." He called her "Madame la Ressource."
Hanbury-Williams was struck by how intelligently Catherine had adapted herself to her circumstances. "Since her coming into the country," he told his superiors, "she has by every method in her power endeavored to gain the affection of the nation." She had applied herself to learning Russian, spoke it fluently (if imperfectly) and understood it very well. She had made herself "esteemed and beloved" to a high degree, the ambassador thought, adding that Catherine "has a great knowledge of this empire and makes it her only study." "She has parts and sense," he concluded, "and the Great Chancellor tells me nobody has more steadiness and resolution."
Certainly steadiness and resolution, not to mention common sense, were in short supply at the imperial court. "The court is governed by passion and events, and not by reason," the Englishman concluded after he had been in Russia six months. The empress, with her persistent coughing and breathlessness, her weakened limbs and swollen body, still ruled, though with a palsied hand. The Shuvalovs lacked the boldness to seize power, yet they made mischief; should a forceful French ambassador be sent to the Russian court, Hanbury-Williams thought, he could work through the Shuvalovs to undermine and gravely damage British interests.
The ambassador cultivated the friendship of the grand duchess, and she responded with all the warmth of a cultured woman starved for urbane company. They conversed at supper parties, he visited her at Oranienbaum where Catherine and Peter spent more and more of their time, and where she oversaw the planting of extensive gardens. She introduced him to her gardener Lam-berti, who dabbled in prophecy and who predicted that Catherine would not only become sovereign Empress of Russia, but that she would live to see her great-grandchildren and would not die until she was well over eighty years old.
Together the ambassador and the grand duchess watched with a mixture of embarrassment and horror as the scandal of the summer unfolded.
Peter, already viewed with contempt for his love of Germany and Germans, now brought on himself the deep and abiding resentment of the Oranienbaum household troops. Most of these soldiers were Finns, from a region called Ingermanland. They were loyal to the Russian throne, but their loyalty was severely tested when the grand duke, their nominal commander and a lieutenant colonel in the honored Preobrazhensky regiment, began wearing the uniform of a Holstein officer and brought to Oranienbaum in the summer of 1755 a large contingent of Holstein soldiers.
The Holsteiners set up camp on the grounds of the grand ducal estate, at some distance from the mansion and outbuildings. There they raised their tents, established their arsenal and stabled their horses. They were a ragtag little army, not regular soldiers but vagabonds and drifters, runaway apprentices and deserters from the armies of a dozen German princelings. Many were not from Holstein, not a few were runty boys who could barely hold their muskets. Still, they were Peter's men, his very own, his toy regiments come to life. He drilled them as he had once drilled Catherine and his servants, waving the long military whip he carried, shouting commands, teaching them to march and countermarch with something like precision.
So enamored was the grand duke of his lifesize toys that he set up a tent alongside them and lived in their camp, carousing with his men, sharing their cheap brandy and their tobacco, drinking in the gratifying noise of their rough German speech and imagining himself back in Holstein.
By his side was his newest adviser Colonel Brockdorff, a tall, swaggering Holsteiner with limited intelligence and a large capacity for liquor. In his scarlet colonel's coat and tricorn hat, Brockdorff was a highly visible presence, and to the Russian troops a highly irritating one, especially when he ordered the Russians to serve the Holsteiners as menials.
The Holsteiners had to be fed; having no provisions of their own they were dependent on the Oranienbaum kitchens. So it fell to the household guard, who murmured among themselves that the Holsteiners were traitors and spies for the Prussian king, to carry out trays of food and drink to the despised foreign visitors and scrape up their leavings once they had dined. No extra pay was offered them for this service, and this, added to the insult itself, made them mutinous.
"Now we've become valets to those damned Germans!" they shouted, cursing Brockdorff, the Holsteiners, and the strutting grand duke.
As for Catherine, she held her peace in the face of this grand fiasco, though she let it be known that she did not approve of what her husband was doing. She taunted Brockdorff openly, calling him "a good-for-nothing and an idiot" and referring to him as "the pelican." He in turn called her "the viper" and used his influence with Peter to widen the gap between the spouses.
Catherine confided to Hanbury-Williams, as the summer wore on and the presence of the Holsteiners continued to offend not only the palace troops but the public in general, that her husband's behavior was becoming more and more disturbed. With Peter's enthusiastic approval, Brockdorff was serving as master of ceremonies for a perpetual round of drunken revels and dissolute supper parties that ended in "real orgies." The reek of sour wine, strong tobacco and unwashed linen clung to the grand duke and drove others away. His breath, never sweet, had become nauseatingly foul and his tantrums had become frenzies of sadism.
Catherine discovered him, when he thought he was unobserved, beating his dogs, or having his servants hold the helpless creatures by their tails while he whipped them without mercy. In his twisted mind he was convinced that the animals had committed some offense; they required correction and punishment. The sight of her husband's cruelty made the tender-hearted Catherine weep, but when she protested, he only lashed the poor beasts harder with his whip and she was forced to leave the room. Peter despised pity, Catherine thought. It made him angry, and drove him to worse atrocities. She knew that this was only one of many signs that his mind was unhinged—though she did not dare say so in so many words.
She thought she knew what had unbalanced him. As she wrote in her memoirs later, Peter had developed, in his early twenties, "a thirst to reign." Knowing that he was heir to the Swedish as well as the Russian throne, he nourished a secret wish to be rescued from Russia by a call to become King of Sweden. In 1750 he thought that opportunity had come, but in the end events proved that he had been mistaken.
"He died of envy," Catherine wrote. His disappointment gnawed at him, and made him bitter. Now he was trapped, forced to live in a place he hated, under the thumb of an aunt who despised him and whom he had come to abhor, yoked to a wife whom he c
ould not love and who was in every way more capable than he was. His thirst to reign was certain to be thwarted, for the kingdom that would one day be his was galling to him. Hence his uncontrollable drinking, his spasms of sadism, the caustic inner rage that ate away at him and caused him to take leave of his senses.
As ever, Catherine fell victim to his dark moods. A few months before Hanbury-Williams's arrival in Russia Peter had come staggering into Catherine's room, shouting and waving a sword, "reduced to brute animalism," as she put it, by drink and furious anger. He told her that she was becoming insupportably proud, backing her up against the wall and threatening her with his sword.
She played along with him, fending him off, as she often did, with good humor. "I asked him what this meant," she wrote later in her memoirs, recalling the distasteful scene, "whether he was going to fight with me. In that case I'd need a sword too."
He sheathed the sword and told her scathingly that she was unbearably malicious. His speech was slurred but Catherine understood; he was complaining of her newfound boldness and assurance, her open attacks on the Shuvalovs.
She faced him, she did not back down. "I saw clearly," she wrote, "that the wine had separated him from reason." She told him firmly to go and lie down, and Peter, his head swimming and his brief burst of hostility past, staggered off to do as he was told.
She had won. She had nothing more to fear from Peter, for the moment. She had no illusions about him, she knew that he needed her and would continue to need her more and more in the future. Yet he was and would remain her enemy, and an enemy of the most dangerous kind, unpredictable, irrational, full of festering resentment.
Catherine had kept all this to herself. But now that Hanbury-Williams was on the scene, offering her his amusing company, delighting in her friendship, showing himself in every way her ally, she at last had someone to confide in. She knew full well that in cultivating her friendship the ambassador was furthering his own interests, and she was not above using him in turn to advance her own security and achieve her private ends. She gave him a great deal of information useful to his government; in return she asked him to loan her large sums of money, and used some of it to pay her informants who served in the empress's household.
But self-interest apart, the friendship between the middle-aged diplomat and the steadfast, resolute and embattled grand duchess flourished, and both were benefited. Catherine, who had heretofore had no political mentor but Bestuzhev, looked on Charles Hanbury-Williams as nothing short of a gift from heaven.
"What do I not owe to the providence which sent you here, like a guardian angel, to unite me with you in ties of friendship?" Catherine wrote to her English friend in April of 1756. "You will see, if one day I wear the crown, that I shall partially owe it to your counsels."
Chapter Thirteen
LATE IN OCTOBER OF 1756, THE EMPRESS SANK DOWN ON HER swollen legs and collapsed in a dead faint. Immediately her waiting women crowded around her, shrieking and calling for her surgeon, who came at once and put his ear to the old woman's chest.
She was breathing, but just barely. Low rasping sounds came from her lungs, and each breath moved through her throat with a strangulated cough. Her eyes were shut tight, and even though the women tried again and again to revive her, rubbing her feet and shouting into her ears, holding stinking bunches of herbs under her nose and applying hot and cold cloths to her temples, she remained in a corpselike stupor, the muscles of her face and jaw slack and her skin the dead white of marble.
Her confessor was summoned, she was lifted into bed and covered with fur blankets. The little knot of old women who had been keeping watch over her in recent months, peasant healers from the countryside, shook their heads and crossed themselves repeatedly. Their prognostications had erred. They had been certain that, though weak, the empress was gaining strength; each night they had watched the waning moon, confident that when the new moon rose in the sky, she would begin to throw off the ills that had assailed her. Now, however, they were sure of nothing, save that the imperial physician, the Greek Condoidi, had given up hope and that most of the courtiers expected the empress to die.
"A little patience, I implore you," the Greek was overheard to say to one of the old women after she had been keeping vigil at Elizabeth's bedside for two nights. "You have not much longer to wait. She cannot live."
Elizabeth had been dangerously ill for months. A stroke had laid her low at the beginning of the summer. Severe pains in her stomach, her legs, her head all tormented her, and she could hardly speak a word without bringing on fits of coughing. So tender was her tormented flesh that her women could no longer lace up her gowns without giving her unbearable pain. So she had the gowns cut from her body, and draped herself in long shapeless robes. In these she dragged herself from room to room, determined to appear in public despite the agony it cost her. She could not afford to have it known that she was dying, not with her country at war and the succession uncertain.
Peter and Catherine were kept out of the way at Oranienbaum, and little Paul, now two years old, was kept near his great-aunt in the imperial nursery. The empress's young relative Ivan, the former boy-emperor whom she had deposed many years earlier, had been brought from his exile in Siberia to the fortress of Schlusselberg nearer to the capital, and from there, in great secrecy, he was smuggled in to the Winter Palace so that she could observe him.
Hidden behind a screen, through which she squinted at the pale, undersize creature she had kept in prison nearly all his sixteen years, Elizabeth listened while others interviewed Ivan. Once or twice she put on a man's boots, loose trousers and tunic, and talked to the boy briefly herself, without letting him suspect who she really was.
Ivan was a sorry specimen. His long years of isolation, his almost complete lack of education and normal companionship had made him feeble, a near-idiot. He was not a realistic alternative to either the infant Paul or the besotted Peter as heir to the Russian throne.
The succession weighed on the declining empress almost as heavily as the war in which her country had recently become embroiled. The armies of Frederick II were advancing, and the empress, when she was able to rouse herself, raved on about how she was going to lead her soldiers into the field herself against the hated Prussians.
"How can you?" one of her attendants asked her. "You are a woman."
"My father went," the empress replied. "Do you believe that I am stupider than he?"
"He was a man," the other insisted, "and you are not."
It was an unwise encounter. The attendant, who should have known better, succeeded only in making the cantankerous old woman even more irascible. She had been more irritable and peevish than ever since her stroke, frequently reverting to childish petulance. Now she swore angrily that she would go and join the soldiers, no matter what anyone said, and made a pathetic effort to get up and do so. Of course her frailty quickly defeated her, and the effort tired her and brought on terrible pains in her abdomen. Still, she would not be quietened, and Condoidi had to be brought in—he was always available, having moved into a room next to the imperial apartments—to give her drugs to put her to sleep.
On throughout the summer and early fall the death watch continued. Courtiers tiptoed through the corridors of the palace, vigilant for news from the sickroom, waiting for bulletins from the doctors and conferring about the latest information they had. Some said the empress had "water in the belly," which was known to be fatal. Others expected an imminent attack of apoplexy to be the agency of death. Hanbury-Williams's informants brought him word that the empress's "trouble" was "in her womb," a cancerous growth that would soon kill her.
All but breathless, half-drugged, suspicious of everyone around her, even her doctor (she clutched Condoidi's sleeve in her clawlike grip and forced him to swear that he was really treating her for illness and not being bribed to poison her), Elizabeth fought for life. When on October 2 a comet was visible in the sky, even at midday, she snatched her icons and held them to her
chest in terror. Comets were known to be harbingers of death, and within hours of the visitation in the heavens one of the courtiers, Baron Stroganov, fell dead. The empress dreaded that she might be next, and her symptoms grew worse. She felt faint, and went into convulsions. "The fingers of her hands were bent back, her feet and arms were cold as ice, her eyes sightless," Catherine wrote to Hanbury-Williams. 'They drew much blood from her, and sight and feeling returned."
Finally, after three weeks of increasingly severe attacks, in the last week of October the empress fell into a deathlike faint and entered what everyone at court believed would be her last relapse. The scramble for power began, and all those with political aspirations positioned themselves to fulfill them.
Peter Shuvalov set about raising a private army of thirty thousand men, and there were rumors that the Shuvalovs were plotting to capture Ivan, set him on the throne and make him their puppet. Catherine, who had been making plans with the aid and advice of Hanbury-Williams and Bestuzhev for over a year, braced herself to act as soon as she received word of the empress's death, and called in those pledged to aid her.
Peter, informed of the Shuvalov army, rushed to his wife, "full of alarm," as she wrote, "for in moments of great crisis he looked to me alone to suggest remedies." His Holsteiners had been sent back home, he no longer had them to rely on, and though he still had his Russian commands he would have been justified in doubting whether or not the Russian soldiers would obey him. He was in panic. The threat from the Shuvalovs "seemed to him terrible," and he did not know where else to turn.
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