more beloved also.… This love certainly descends to his posterity and gives a general bent to the minds of the common people and of the soldiery, too.”
At first, the relationship between Anna Leopoldovna and Elizabeth was correct. Elizabeth was frequently invited to the Winter Palace, but she soon became more reserved and went only for ceremonies she could not avoid. By February 1741, the regent had given orders that Elizabeth be watched; these constraints did not escape the notice of the court and the diplomatic community. During the summer of 1741, the relationship worsened. Anna Leopoldovna now surrounded herself only with foreigners. Count Lynar continually pressed her to order Elizabeth’s arrest. The restrictions placed on Elizabeth became more onerous. In July, her income was reduced. In early autumn, she heard rumors that the regent was planning to insist that she put in writing a renunciation of her claim to the throne. A tale circulated that Anna Leopoldovna was about to force her to become a nun and enter a convent. On the morning of November 24, Dr. Lestocq came into Elizabeth’s bedroom, awakened her, and handed her a paper. On one side, he had drawn a picture of her as empress, seated on the throne; on the other, he had depicted her dressed as a nun, and behind her he had drawn a rack and a gibbet. “Madam,” he said, “you must choose finally now whether to be empress or to be relegated to a convent and see your servants perish under torture.” Elizabeth decided to act. At midnight, she set off for the barracks of the Preobrazhensky Guards. There, she said, “You know whose daughter I am. Follow me!”
“We are ready,” shouted the soldiers. “We will kill them all.”
“No,” said Elizabeth, “no Russian blood is to be spilled.” Followed by three hundred men, she made her way through a bitterly cold night to the Winter Palace. Walking past the unprotesting palace guards, she led the way to Anna Leopoldovna’s bedroom, where she touched the sleeping regent on the shoulder and said, “Little sister, it is time to rise.” Realizing that all was lost, Anna Leopoldovna begged for mercy for herself and her son. Elizabeth assured her that no harm would come to any member of the Brunswick family. To the nation she announced that she had ascended her father’s throne and that the usurpers had been apprehended and would be charged with having deprived her of her hereditary rights. On November 25, 1741, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Elizabeth reentered the Winter Palace. At thirty-two, the daughter of Peter the Great was the empress of Russia.
Her first act as sovereign was to shower gratitude on those who had supported her during the long years of waiting. Promotions, titles, jewels, and other rewards poured out in a rich stream. Each of the Preobrazhensky Guardsmen who had marched with her to the Winter Palace was promoted. Lestocq was made a privy councillor and physician in chief to the sovereign, besides receiving a portrait of the empress set in diamonds and a handsome annuity. Razumovsky became a count, a court chamberlain, and the Grand Master of the Hunt. Other privy councillors were appointed, other counts created, and more jewel-encrusted portraits, snuff boxes, and rings placed in eager hands.
But Elizabeth’s most pressing problem could not be resolved with largesse. A living tsar, Ivan VI, remained in St. Petersburg. He had inherited the throne at the age of two months, he was dethroned at fifteen months, he did not know he was emperor, but he had been anointed, his likeness had been scattered through the country on coins, and prayers had been offered for him in all the churches of Russia. From the beginning, Ivan haunted Elizabeth. She had originally intended to send him abroad with his parents, and, for this reason, she packed the entire Brunswick family off to Riga as a first stage of their journey west. Once they arrived in Riga, however, she had a second thought: perhaps it would be safer to keep her small, dangerous prisoner securely under guard in her own country. The child was removed from his parents and classified as a secret state prisoner, a status he retained for the remaining twenty-two years of his life. He was moved from one prison to another; even then, Elizabeth could not know when an attempt to liberate him and restore him to the throne might be made. Almost immediately, a solution suggested itself: if Ivan was to live and still be rendered permanently harmless, a new heir to the throne must be found, a successor to Elizabeth who would anchor the future of her dynasty and be recognized by the Russian nation and the world. Such an heir, Elizabeth knew by then, would never come from her own body. She had no acknowledged husband; it was late now, and no one suitable would ever be found. Furthermore, in spite of her many years as a carefree voluptuary, she had never known pregnancy. The heir she must have, therefore, must be the child of another woman. And there was such a child: the son of her beloved sister, Anne; the grandson of her revered father, Peter the Great. The heir whom she would bring to Russia, nurture, and proclaim was a fourteen- year-old boy living in Holstein.
5
The Making of a Grand Duke
THERE WAS NO ONE Elizabeth loved better than her sister Anne. Just as the younger of the two sisters had inspired rhapsodic descriptions of her beauty and high spirits, the elder also found euphoric admirers. “I don’t believe there is a princess in Europe at the present time who could vie with Princess Anne in majestic beauty,” wrote Baron Mardefeld, Prussian minister in St. Petersburg. “She is a brunette, but of a vividly white and quite un- artificial complexion. Her features are so perfectly beautiful that an accomplished artist, judging them by the severest classical standards, could desire nothing more. Even when she is silent, one can read the amiability and magnanimity of her character in her large and beautiful eyes. Her behavior is without affectation, she is always the same and serious rather than gay. From her youth up she has striven to cultivate her mind.… She speaks French and German perfectly.”
Anne’s life was shorter than Elizabeth’s. She was married at seventeen to Charles Frederick, Duke of Holstein, a young man of exalted prospects and moderate abilities. He was the only son of Hedwig Sophia, the sister of the legendary King Charles XII of Sweden, and Frederick IV, Duke of Holstein, who died fighting in King Charles’s army. Educated in Sweden, he had good reason to believe that his childless uncle, Charles XII, intended him to be his heir. When King Charles died and Frederick, Prince of Hesse, was given the Swedish throne, the rejected nineteen-year- old Charles Frederick retreated to St. Petersburg to seek the protection of Peter the Great. The tsar received the duke, who, being a pretender to the Swedish crown, could serve as a useful political weapon.
The visiting duke, whose ambition exceeded his abilities, had not been at the Russian court long before he began intriguing for the hand of one of the emperor’s daughters. Peter opposed any such marriage, but his wife, Catherine, liked the duke and persuaded her daughter Anne that he would be a good match. The princess yielded to her mother and an engagement was agreed upon.
Suddenly, in January 1725, Peter the Great fell mortally ill. On his deathbed, he awoke from delirium and cried, “Where’s little Annie. I would see her.” His daughter was summoned, but before she arrived, her father was delirious again, and he never recovered consciousness. The betrothal and marriage were postponed, but only briefly. On May 21, 1725, Anne married the duke.
During her mother’s short reign, Anne and her husband lived in St. Petersburg. When Catherine died in 1727, the duke and his wife left Russia for Holstein. Anne was sorry to leave her sister, Elizabeth, but pleased to find herself pregnant. On February 21, 1728, six months after her arrival in Holstein, she gave birth to a son, who, the following day, was christened in the Lutheran church in Kiel. The baby’s name, Charles Peter Ulrich, proclaimed his illustrious lineage: “Charles” came from his father, but also from his great-uncle, Charles XII; “Peter” from his grandfather, Peter the Great; “Ulrich” from Ulrica, the reigning queen of Sweden.
While Anne was recovering, a ball was given in honor of the new prince. It was February, and although the weather was damp and icy, the happy nineteen-year-old mother insisted on standing at an open window to watch the fireworks that followed the ball. When her ladies protested, she laughed and said, “I am Russian, remember, and my health is used to a ruder climate than this.” She caught a chill, which aggravated a tubercular condition; three months after the birth of her son, she was dead. In her will, she had asked to be buried next to her father, and a Russian frigate arrived to carry her body up the Baltic to St. Petersburg.
When Anne died, Charles Frederick mourned not only the loss of his young wife but also the shutting off of the
