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Machinations around the Throne shake off the yoke of Menshikov and to liberate Peter II from a humiliating guardianship.
Alas! June 1, 1727, the young bishop Charles Augustus was carried off by smallplox. Overnight, Elizabeth found herself with no suitor, no more marital hopes. After Louis XV balked, she now had lost another pretender - less prestigious, certainly, than the King of France, but a very honorable match for a Russian grand duchess. Really, fate seemed dead set against her dreams of marriage. She lost heart, took a strong dislike to the court of St. Petersburg and withdrew, with her putative brother-in-law Charles Frederick and her sister Anna, to the palace of Ekaterinhof, at the edge of St. Petersburg, under the shade trees of an immense park surrounded by canals. In this idyllic setting, she relied very much upon the affection of her close relations to help her ease her disappointment.
The very same day of their departure, Menshikov gave an extravagant feast at his palace in honor of the betrothal of his elder daughter, Maria, to the young Tsar Peter II. The intended, bedecked and bejeweled like a gilded coffer, received on this occasion the title of Her Most Serene Highness and the guarantee of an annual income of 34,000 rubles from the State Treasury. More parsimonious when it came to compensating the Tsarevna2 Elizabeth, Menshikov only allocated 12,000 rubles to her to assuage the rigor of her mourning.3 But Elizabeth wanted to be seen by one and all as an inconsolable fiancee. The fact that she was not yet married (by the age of 18), and that only the most ambitious seemed interested in her - and only out of political considerations - was too cruel a fate to be swallowed anytime soon. Fortunately, her friends immediately set about finding a high-quality substitute for Charles Augustus, in Russia or abroad. The dear departed’s coffin had hardly been laid in the ground in Lubeck when the possible candidature of Charles Adolf of Holstein was
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Terrible Tsarinas suggested - the proper brother of the departed - and also that of Count Maurice of Saxony and several other gentlemen of easily verifiable merits.
While Elizabeth, at Ekaterinhof, was dreaming over these various parties, whose faces she barely recognized, in the heart of St. Petersburg Menshikov, as ever a practical man, was studying the available bachelors’ relative advantages. In his eyes, the halfwidowed tsarina represented an excellent bargaining chip in the diplomatic negotiations that were underway. But these matrimonial concerns did not make him lose sight of the education of his imperial pupil. Observing that Peter seemed to have become slightly less extravagant recently, he recommended to Ostermann that he step up his struggle against his pupil’s natural idleness by accustoming him to fixed hours, whether they be spent in study or recreation. The Westphalian was assisted in this task by Prince Alexis Grigorievich Dolgoruky, the “assistant governor”; he often visited the palace with his young son, Prince Ivan, a beautiful, hot-blooded young man of 20 years, elegant and effeminate, who amused His Majesty with his inexhaustible chattering.
Upon her return from Ekaterinhof, where she had spent a few weeks in sentimental retirement, Elizabeth installed herself at the Summer Palace; but not a day went by that she did not pay a visit, with her sister Anna, to her dear nephew in his gilded cage.
They would listen to the confidences of the spoiled child, share his passion for Ivan Dolgoruky - that irresistibly handsome young man - and keep them both company in their nightly revels. Despite the remonstrances of their male chaperons, a wind of madness blew through this shameless quartet. In December 1727, Johann Lefort brought the minister at the court of Saxony up to date on young Peter’s escapades. “The master [Peter II] has no other occupation but to run in the streets, day and night, with the princess Elizabeth and her sister, to visit the chamberlain Ivan
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Machinations around the Throne
[Dolgoruky], the pages, the cooks and God knows whom else.”
Hinting that the sovereign under supervision had unnatural tastes and that the delightful Ivan was inciting him in forbidden pleasures instead of curbing his inclinations, Lefort continued: “One could almost believe that these misguided people [the Dolgorukys] are encouraging the various vices by fostering [in the Tsar] the sins of the Russia of the past. I know an apartment contiguous to the billiard parlor where the deputy governor [Prince Alexis Grigorievich Dolgoruky] hosts pleasure parties for him… they don’t go to bed until 7:00AM.”4 That these young people should satiate their appetites in such entertainment suited Menshikov just fine. As long as Peter and his aunts continued to dope themselves in love intrigues and casual affairs, their political influence would be nil. On the other hand, the “Most Serene One” feared that Duke Charles Frederick of Holstein, with his exasperating ambitions, might be ignoring his wife Anna’s warnings and might be overdoing things, in an effort to destroy the modus vivendi that the Supreme Privy Council had managed to impose upon the junior tsar and his close relatives. In order to cut short Charles Frederick’s foolish dreams, Menshikov took away from him (via an ukase that escaped Peter II’s vigilance one evening during a drunken binge) the island of Oesel, in the Gulf of Riga, which the couple had received as a wedding present, and cut back the duke’s expense account. These displays of pettiness were accompanied by so many minor vexations at the hand of Menshikov that the Duke and his wife were annoyed for good and decided to leave the capital, where they were treated like poor relations and intruders. Hugging her sister before embarking with her husband for Kiel, with heart overflowing, Anna was gripped by a disastrous presentiment. She confided to her friends that she was very much afraid of Menshikov’s intrigues, on behalf of Elizabeth as well as Peter. She felt he was an
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Terrible Tsarinas implacable enemy of their family. Because of his giant size and his broad shoulders, he was called the “proud Goliath,” and Anna beseeched Heaven that Peter II, a new David, should bring down the monster of pride and spite that had such a hold on the empire.
After her sister departed for Holstein, Elizabeth tried at first to forget her sorrows and her fears in a swirl of romance and intrigue. Peter assisted her in this distracting enterprise by inventing new excuses for fooling around and intoxicating themselves every day. He was only 14 years old, yet he felt the desires of a man. To secure greater freedom of movement, Elizabeth and he emigrated to the old imperial palace of Peterhof. For a moment, they could believe that their secret vows were about to be fulfilled; for Menshikov, although he enjoyed an iron constitution, suddenly had a fainting spell and was spitting blood. He had to be confined to bed. According to the echoes that reached Peterhof, the doctors considered that the indisposition could be long lasting, if not fatal.
During this vacuum of power, the usual advisers met to comment on current matters. In addition to the illness of His Most Serene, another event of importance occurred meanwhile, and an embarrassing one, at that. Peter the Great’s first wife, the Tsarina Eudoxia, whom he had imprisoned in the convent at Suzdal and then transferred to the fortress at Schlusselburg, had suddenly resurfaced. The emperor had repudiated her in order to marry Catherine. An old woman, weak but still valiant after thirty years of reclusion, Eudoxia was the mother of the Tsarevich Alexis who had died under torture and the grandmother of Tsar Peter II who, by the way, had never met her and did not see any need to do so.
Now that she was out of prison and Menshikov, her sworn enemy, was tied to his bed, the other members of the Supreme Privy Council thought that the grandson of this martyr, so worthy in her effacement, should pay her a
