Sex with the Queen

by Eleanor Herman

  Over the years, Catherine suffered from the capricious moods of Empress Elizabeth, which swung from loving generosity to vicious cruelty. But the last two years of her life, sensing that Catherine, not Peter, would lead her beloved Russia into the future, Elizabeth made peace with the grand duchess. “She is a paragon of truth and justice, she is a woman of great intelligence,” the empress remarked, “but my nephew is a monster.”29

  Looking about court for her next lover, Catherine realized her choice must fall on a Russian as foreign lovers ruffled the feathers of squawking rival diplomats. One day in the summer of 1759 the bored, frustrated grand duchess looked out of her window and saw in the courtyard below a guardsman with the face of Adonis and the body of Hercules. It was love at first sight, and she sent for him immediately.

  At thirty-four the magnificent Gregory Orlov was a man of action, of energy, of deeds. A few years earlier in a battle against the Prussians, Orlov, bleeding copiously from three serious wounds, had led a cavalry charge and vanquished the enemy. Towering head and shoulders over other men, this colossus reportedly boasted a penis of tremendous size. He was one of five exceptional soldier brothers renowned for courage, physical strength, whoring, drunkenness, and gambling.

  Unlike the smoothly seductive Saltikov or the sweetly ardent Poniatowski, Orlov was like a thundering flood, submerging everything in his path with his crashing brute force. Physically intimidating, he rolled into Catherine’s life and into her bed, and completely possessed her, body and soul. Catherine had, perhaps, always longed for a man to take her, rape her. In Orlov she finally found that.

  Catherine’s choice of Orlov as her lover may not have been solely determined by his lovemaking skills. Peter disliked his wife more and more each passing day and openly expressed his hatred of her. When he became czar, he would kill her unless she moved first. Orlov and his four burly brothers were highly regarded by their regiments and could, when the time came, assist Catherine in climbing onto the throne. The grand duchess kept her love affair secret, smuggling Orlov into her rooms at night for sex and plotting.

  In December 1761 Empress Elizabeth lay dying. For years Catherine had planned for this moment, knowing that either her husband would destroy her or she would destroy him. It was one or the other. But now, as that moment approached, Catherine was in no position to act. She was six months pregnant with Orlov’s child, ample reason for Peter to divorce her, imprison her, and murder her.

  On Christmas Day Empress Elizabeth died, and Peter was proclaimed Czar Peter III. He hated Russia and now, as its leader, would do all in his power to humiliate the country he ruled and the wife who reigned beside him.

  Catherine, her pregnancy hidden in a loose and fashionable sack gown, was the first to swear allegiance to the new czar, prostrating herself on the floor before him. She sat vigil with Elizabeth’s corpse in the church, day and night, while Peter publicly insulted the memory of his aunt by not saying a single prayer at her bier, joking with her ladies-in-waiting and emitting his own shrill raucous cackles over the corpse. He seemed to think the funeral procession was a colossal joke, and instead of keeping pace behind the coffin as chief mourner, lagged behind and then rushed to catch up, throwing the whole procession into disorder. Russians were scandalized at the behavior of their new emperor and contrasted Peter’s behavior with the respectful decorum of Empress Catherine.

  Worse than his behavior at the funeral, Peter immediately concluded the Seven Years’ War against his hero, Frederick the Great of Prussia, who had been beaten into a corner by valiant Russian soldiers. Peter returned to an astonished Frederick all the territories Russia had won with the blood of its fighting men. He wore a huge ring with a portrait of Frederick, whom he called “the king, my master.”30 Peter ordered the elite Preobrazhensky regiment to wear new uniforms modeled on those of King Frederick’s guards. Russian soldiers were aghast to find that their new emperor was a skinny heel-clicking weakling wearing an enemy uniform and barking drill orders in German.

  Equally threatening to Russians were Peter’s edicts to seize church properties, rid the churches of all icons except those representing Christ and the Virgin, and force Orthodox priests to dress like Lutheran ministers. Within weeks of his accession, he had alienated the army and the church, which together formed the keystone of support crucial to any reign.

  Peter treated his mistress Elizabeth Vorontsova as the reigning empress and went out of his way to publicly humiliate Catherine. Vorontsova’s behavior had become even more shocking now that her lover was emperor. A German visitor reported, “She swore like a trooper, had a squint, stank, and spat when she talked.”31 Catherine scathingly referred to her as “Madame de Pompadour,” advertising the difference between the coarse slattern of Peter III and the graceful mistress of Louis XV. When Peter became drunk, he boasted that he would divorce Catherine, marry and crown his mistress, and declare Catherine’s son Paul a bastard. With Orlov’s help, Catherine made sure that these boasts were repeated in every barracks in St. Petersburg.

  But Catherine’s primary concern was how to give birth secretly while living a few rooms down the hall from her husband. One of her devoted servants, Vasily Skourin, knowing that Peter loved to watch buildings burn, set fire to his own house as Catherine went into labor. Peter raced across town to see the fire and for hours stared as if hypnotized by the golden orange flames licking the walls, the black smoke curling to the sky. He listened intently to the crackle and sizzle of burning wood and shrieked with joy when the beams crashed down.

  While the emperor was indulging his passion for pyromania, the empress gave birth to her lover’s son. A trusted lady-in-waiting smuggled the baby out of the palace wrapped in a beaver skin, which resulted in the surname given him—Bobrinsky—a derivation of the Russian word for beaver. Peter, living in his hazy world of Prussian drill maneuvers and pyromania, never knew that his wife had even been pregnant.

  In an effort to support his master, the king of Prussia, Peter decided to join his attack on Denmark. Russian troops were furious to learn that they would be fighting for their sworn enemy Frederick the Great. Moreover, the emperor, whose idea of military valor was beating helpless animals and trembling servants, decided he would lead his men personally, dressed in a Prussian uniform. Peter’s antics played directly into the hands of the Orlov brothers, who were winning over followers in their regiments eager to proclaim Catherine empress.

  To prepare for his journey to Denmark, Peter set out for the palace of Oranienbaum several miles outside of St. Petersburg, which he transformed into an army camp. He ordered Catherine to move to the nearby palace of Peterhof, where he planned to join her to celebrate his name day on June 29, the Feast of St. Peter. But Catherine heard that the emperor was setting her up to have her arrested the evening after the celebration.

  Catherine, who kept up a friendly correspondence with Poniatowski in Poland, wrote him, “It was six o’clock in the morning of June 28, and I was fast asleep when Alexis Orlov came into my room and woke me up by telling me in the calmest manner that I must get dressed and come with him to St. Petersburg, where the army was ready to proclaim me their empress.”32

  Soldiers quickly swarmed her carriage as regiments raced to support her. By nine o’clock in the morning, she was kneeling at the high altar of Kazan Cathedral, receiving the archbishop’s blessing as Catherine II, autocrat of all the Russias. She would not rule as regent for her eight-year-old son Paul—a reign that would have ended when he turned sixteen—but as empress in her own right until her death.

  After receiving the church’s blessing, Catherine quickly changed into the green uniform of a colonel of the guards, a flaring coat, knee breeches, high black boots, and a fur-trimmed tricorn hat. She rode at the head of her troops to review the fourteen thousand men at arms who had proclaimed their loyalty. The new ruler looked like an ancient Greek goddess of victory, bold, confident, triumph shining in her eyes, her long dark hair tumbling in waves down to her waist.

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sp; Suddenly a twenty-two-year-old subaltern of the horse guards rode boldly out to her and, remarking that her uniform was lacking a sword knot, he gallantly gave her his own. His superior officers disapproved of his audacity, but the empress, pleased at his chivalric gesture and handsome appearance, accepted his gift with a smile. She asked his name. It was Gregory Potemkin.

  For the next twelve years he would dream of a proud young empress in a green uniform, astride a white horse, a glorious future reflected in her smile. After the tumults of that day, the young soldier went to his room and wrote her a love poem: “As soon as I beheld you, I thought of you alone. Your lovely eyes captivated me, yet I trembled to say I loved. O Heavens! The torture to love one to whom I dare not declare it. One who can never be mine! Cruel Gods!”33 But the gods were not as cruel as he thought. Potemkin would have his chance with her, but not yet.

  Meanwhile, Peter and his companions arrived at Peterhof to find the palace almost empty and Catherine nowhere in sight. Upon learning of the coup, Peter’s advisers urged him to flee the country to save his life, to return to the town of Kiel, which he possessed as duke of Holstein. Peter, however, petulantly insisted that he return to negotiate with his wife. He should have fled; the Orlov brothers took Peter prisoner and forced him to sign an act of abdication. A disappointed Frederick the Great dryly remarked that Peter III “let himself be driven from the throne as a child is sent to bed.”34

  Unlike many of her contemporaries, Catherine was not vindictive. She would have preferred to send poor stammering Peter back to his duchy of Holstein. “This young man, frankly speaking, deserved pity rather than censure,” she wrote in her memoirs.35 But she knew that as long as he lived, her husband would always be a focus of discontent and rebellion, and her throne would sit on a shaky foundation. Catherine was, above all, a practical woman. Within a week, Peter was dead.

  Gregory Orlov’s brother Alexis had killed him, claiming in a letter to Catherine that it had occurred accidentally during a drunken brawl. For the public viewing, the corpse wore a high collar to cover the black finger marks on its neck and a huge hat to shade the face black and swollen from asphyxiation. Doctors declared the emperor had died of a “hemorrhoidal colic” with brain complications. Few Russians were upset at Peter’s murder. Even the great philosopher Voltaire, a friendly correspondent of Catherine’s, shrugged off the matter. “I know that she is reproached with some trifles about her husband,” he wrote, “but these are family affairs with which I do not meddle.”36

  Upon taking the throne she found an empty treasury, two hundred thousand peasants on strike, a restless army unpaid for eight months, rebellion across the empire, unfathomable corruption in the legal system, and a near paralysis of commerce. Working fourteen hours a day, Catherine undertook reorganization of almost every aspect of Russian government with traditional German efficiency, presiding personally over council and senate meetings, peppering officials with probing questions they could not answer, and prolonging their working hours. Catherine worked her ministers harder than any man could have. Indeed, she considered herself a male soul wrapped in a female body, and though delighting in that body, she considered other women weak, whining, and utterly useless.

  Within a year of taking the throne she had founded an orphanage, a school for midwives, an organization for public health, and a school for the daughters of the nobility. An avid student of French philosophy, at the outset of her reign Catherine hoped to create a just and equitable society. Out of a population of some nineteen million Russians, almost eight million were serfs, slaves owned either by individual families or the state itself. Russian wealth was usually measured in serfs—or “souls,” as they were called—rather than money or land. Catherine, who had hoped to free the serfs, soon found that this lofty goal was all but impossible in her turbulent realm. Threatened by the loss of their most prized possessions, the nobles who had supported her would have toppled her. “You philosophers are lucky men,” she wrote to Denis Diderot. “You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.”37

  She invited to Russia doctors, dentists, engineers, craftsmen, architects, gardeners, artists, and, of course, her favorite philosophers. Her offers were not always accepted. The philosopher Jean d’Alembert, obviously referring to Peter’s death, sent his regrets. “I am too subject to hemorrhoids,” he explained. “They are too serious in that country and I want to have my rear end hurt in complete safety.”38

  At the outset of her reign, no one thought she would survive more than a few months. One French visitor called Russia “an absolute monarchy tempered by assassination.”39 And indeed Catherine started, horrified, whenever there was a sudden noise, as if expecting a knife or bullet to rip into her back. Suffering from intense stress, she put on weight and aged rapidly in the months after her accession.

  To secure more firmly her shaky grip on the throne, Catherine generously rewarded her supporters. All five Orlov brothers were made counts and given large amounts of cash. Gregory Potemkin, whom she had not forgotten, was promoted two ranks and given ten thousand rubles, an ample reward for a sword knot.

  Never one to hold a grudge, Catherine gave her dead husband’s obnoxious mistress, Elizabeth Vorontsova, a house in Moscow and arranged for her to marry a senator. Sergei Saltikov was appointed envoy to France, given twenty thousand rubles for his journey and two years later loaned twenty thousand more to clear his considerable debts. His reputation as a scoundrel wafted around him like a bad odor; the ladies avoided him as much as the politicians he was supposed to court. Jaded, faded Saltikov, his jowl sagging a bit more with each passing year, must have kicked himself for having so unceremoniously dumped the insignificant little grand duchess. He soon dropped out of the foreign service, living in obscurity until his death in 1813.

  Stanislaus Poniatowski, who had always remained on good terms with Catherine, received the greatest reward of all, a crown. In 1763 Catherine signed a treaty with Frederick the Great of Prussia in which Frederick would not protest Poniatowski’s election as king of Poland. The Polish crown was part reward for his former services in bed, part political strategy; Catherine knew that Poniatowski’s gentle nature would render him a mere puppet of Russia. At first, he refused the crown. “Don’t make me king, but bring me back to your side,” he implored, still deeply in love with her.40 But having enjoyed Orlov’s animalistic rutting, she shuddered at the thought of Poniatowski’s pale slender hands upon her.

  He finally relented and once seated on the Polish throne tried his best to be a good king. Catherine quickly dispelled any illusions he might have had of his own power, however. She sent thousands of troops to Warsaw to keep the peace, as she said, but in reality to force her puppet king to dance to a Russian tune.

  As empress in her own right, Catherine no longer had reason to hide her love affair with Gregory Orlov. Indeed, she flaunted him, taking his arm proudly; in palace ballrooms this brilliant pair parted the crowds as Moses had parted the Red Sea. Orlov was such a splendid specimen of manhood that even those at court who detested him were forced to admit his overwhelming physical magnificence. For all his brute strength, he had the features of a classical statue and moved with an elegant animal grace. A stranger arriving at court could pick out the empress’s lover at a glance—the tallest, handsomest man in the room, wearing the finest gold-embroidered suit with diamond buttons, and a large miniature of Catherine hanging from his breast, set in a frame of huge diamonds. Orlov was a tremendous asset to the court for his decorative value alone.

  Catherine’s lover was often seen reclining on a couch in the empress’s bedroom, wearing only a bathrobe. Lazy and in love with the trappings of royalty, he had few political ambitions. The French envoy reported that Orlov was “very handsome, but very stupid.”41

  Many at court hated the increasing arrogance and power of the Orlovs. All petitions and favors passed through their hands. Gregory Orlov held a morning reception as i
f he were royal himself, and all favor seekers were expected to show up and pay their respects. Princes of noble lineage were forced to trot next to his carriage as mounted escorts when he sat inside.

  Over the first decade of her reign, Catherine remained faithful to her lover, putting up patiently with his increasing moodiness, rude treatment, and flagrant infidelities. The French envoy wrote, “He is emperor in all but name and takes liberties with his sovereign such as no mistress in polite society would tolerate from her lover.”42 Catherine loved him passionately, but her love was tempered by fear. The Orlov brothers had brought her to the throne and had murdered an emperor for her. She had rewarded all five with key government positions. Boasting thousands of devoted supporters in the army and government, the kingmakers could, perhaps, unmake an empress.

  When Orlov pressed her to marry him, Catherine must have seriously considered his proposal. She sent an emissary to Alexei Razumovsky, the late Empress Elizabeth’s lover and reputed husband, seeking a precedent for a Russian empress to marry secretly. When questioned, Razumovsky opened a chest, took out a parchment scroll tied with a faded pink ribbon, and tossed it into the fire. “No,” he said softly. “There is no proof. Say that to our gracious sovereign.”43

  Catherine, a student of history, found herself in the uneasy position of Mary Queen of Scots two centuries earlier. Though not directly involved in the murder of her idiot husband, Henry Darnley, soon thereafter Mary married his murderer, James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell—who some said had been her lover— and the resulting uproar lost her the throne. Taking her cue from history, Catherine refused to marry Orlov.