Empress Elizabeth was not there; she had gone ahead to Moscow two weeks earlier, but many in the court and diplomatic corps remained behind, and Elizabeth had commanded that the visitors be given an imperial welcome. Johanna wrote to her husband:
Here everything goes on in such magnificent and respectful style that it seemed to me … as if it all were only a dream.… I dine alone with the ladies and gentlemen whom Her Imperial Majesty has given me; I am served like a queen.… When I go in to dinner, the trumpets inside the house, and the drums of the guard outside sound a salute.… It does not seem real that all this can happen to poor me, for whom at only a few places a drum was ever stirred.
It was not all for “poor me,” of course, but while her mother draped herself in these honors, Sophia stood by and watched. The truth was that she was more interested in the antics of fourteen elephants, presented to the empress by the Shah of Persia, performing tricks in the Winter Palace courtyard.
To Frederick in Berlin, Johanna wrote in a different tone, presenting herself as his dutiful subject, working on his behalf. While the German princesses were being fitted with Russian wardrobes before proceeding to Moscow, Johanna had conversations with the two men in Russia whom Frederick had assigned to guide her. One was his own ambassador, Baron Mardefeld, the other the French minister, the Marquis de La Chetardie. The ambassadors reiterated that Vice-Chancellor Bestuzhev was fiercely opposed to the choice of Sophia as the bride of the heir. For this reason, they emphasized, he must be removed, and they counted on her assistance. Meanwhile, to put herself on the most amiable possible terms with the empress, they urged that she and her daughter hurry to Moscow in time to celebrate the new grand duke Peter’s sixteenth birthday on February 10.
Guided by this advice, the two travelers left for Moscow on the night of February 5 in a cavalcade of thirty sledges. This time, they traveled smoothly and swiftly over four hundred miles of hard-packed snow on the best- maintained road in Russia, the winter highway used by the empress. When they stopped to change horses, village people stared and told each other, “It is the bride of the grand duke.”
At four o’clock on the fourth day—it was the afternoon of February 9, 1744—the cavalcade reached a rest house forty-five miles from Moscow. There they found a message from the empress requesting that they delay their entrance into Moscow until after dark. While waiting, they drank fish soup and coffee and dressed for their presentation to the monarch; Sophia put on a rose-colored silk gown trimmed with silver. Meanwhile, to increase the speed of their sledge, sixteen fresh horses replaced the relays of ten that had brought them this far. Back in their sledge, they hurtled forward, reaching the walls of Moscow before eight. The city was dark until they reached the Golovin Palace, whose courtyard was lit by flaring torches. The journey was over. Now, at the foot of a wide staircase in the entrance hall, stood Otto Brummer, the writer of the empress’s summons, to welcome them. They had only a little time to speak, to remove their furs and smooth their gowns. Within a few minutes, fourteen-year- old Sophia would stand before the empress Elizabeth and her nephew, Grand Duke Peter, the two people who, for the next eighteen years, would dominate her life.
4
Empress Elizabeth
ELIZABETH HAD A FLAIR for the dramatic. On December 18, 1709, her father, Peter the Great, was just setting out through snowy streets of Moscow at the head of a parade celebrating his astonishing victory at Poltava the previous summer over his formidable enemy Charles XII of Sweden. Behind the tsar marched the regiments of the Russian Imperial Guard, followed by other Russian soldiers dragging three hundred captured Swedish battle flags through the snow, a file of defeated Swedish generals, and finally, by a long column of more than seventeen thousand Swedish prisoners, the remnants of the formerly invincible army that had invaded Russia two years before.
Suddenly, an officer rode up to the tsar and delivered a message. Peter’s hand went up. The parade halted. The tsar spoke a few words, then galloped away. Soon after, Peter reined his frothing horse before the great wooden Kolomenskoe Palace outside Moscow and burst through the door. In a room, he found his wife just emerging from childbirth. Beside her in the bed lay an infant baby girl. Her name was to be Elizabeth and, thirty-two years later, she would become empress of Russia.
Elizabeth was the fifth child born to Peter and the peasant who became his wife—the fifth of twelve, six boys and six girls, only two of whom lived beyond the age of seven. The other survivor was Elizabeth’s sister Anne, one year older. As far as the world knew, Elizabeth and Anne were both illegitimate; their father said that he had “not found the time” to publicly marry her mother, the buxom Livonian peasant Martha Skavronskya, renamed Catherine. In fact, in November 1707, Peter had married Catherine in private, but the secret was kept for reasons of state. Peter had already been married as a very young man, and his first wife, Eudoxia, to whom he was grievously ill- suited, had been divorced and placed in a convent. In 1707, with the Swedish army on the march, many traditional Russians would have found it shocking for the tsar to choose that moment to marry an illiterate foreign peasant. Five years later, with the victory at Poltava accomplished, Peter felt differently. On February 9, 1712, he married Catherine again, this time with public fanfare. At the second wedding, the two little girls, Anne and Elizabeth, then four and two, wearing jewels in their hair, served as their mother’s bridesmaids.
Peter always said that he “loved both his girls like his own soul.” On January 28, 1722, when he declared thirteen-year-old Elizabeth to be of age, she was fair-haired, blue-eyed, brimming with energy and health. She delighted everyone with her laughter and high spirits; this in contrast to her more sedate older sister, Anne, whom she worshipped. Both Anne and Elizabeth received the education of European princesses: languages, manners, and dancing. They learned French as well as Russian, and Anne, the better pupil, also learned some Italian and Swedish. Many years later, the empress Elizabeth recalled the keen interest her father had taken in his daughters’ education. He came frequently to their rooms to see them and often asked what they had learned in the course of the day. When he was satisfied, he praised them, kissed them, and sometimes gave each a present. Elizabeth also remembered how greatly Peter regretted the neglect of his own formal education. “My father often repeated,” she said, “that he would have given one of his fingers if his education had not been neglected. Not a day passed in which he did not feel this deficiency.”
When she reached fifteen, Elizabeth was not as tall and stately as her sister Anne, yet there were many who preferred the radiance of the lively blonde to the grace and majesty of the statuesque brunette. The Duke of Liria, the Spanish ambassador, described Elizabeth in superlatives: “She is a beauty the like of which I have never seen. An amazing complexion, glowing eyes, a perfect mouth, a throat and bosom of rare whiteness. She is tall and her temperament is lively. She is always with one foot in the air. One senses in her a great deal of intelligence and affability, but also a certain ambition.” The Saxon minister, Lefort, praised her large and brilliant blue eyes and he found irresistible her high spirits and her lighthearted sense of fun.
At fifteen, she was considered ready for marriage. From the time of Peter the Great’s visit to Paris in 1717, the great tsar had hoped to marry Elizabeth to Louis XV, who was two months younger than she. Elizabeth had been schooled with this marriage in mind. She was taught the French language and court manners along with French history and literature. Campredon, the French ambassador to St. Petersburg, wholeheartedly endorsed the tsar’s plan: “There is nothing but what is agreeable in the person of the Princess Elizabeth,” he wrote to Paris. “It may be said that she is a beauty in her figure, her complexion, her eyes and her hands. Her defects, if she has any, are on the side of education and manners, but I am assured that she is so intelligent that it will be easy to rectify what is lacking by the care of some skillful and experienced person who should be placed near her if the affair should be concluded.” Yet despite this recommendation and the girl’s manifest charms, at Versailles her credentials were tarnished: her mother was a peasant, and the daughter may have been born out of wedlock. France did not want a bastard on or near the throne.
