1790, complete with islands named after Rousseau and Herder. Designed to symbolise the reconciliation of technical progress with sentimentalist philosophy, the garden boasted a model volcano whose eruptions were intended to represent the transformative power of Enlightened political reform.48
Although his volcano has long since gone, Franz’s elegant neoclassical architecture still stands as an oasis of civilisation in the desert of decaying chemical plants that disfigure the former East Germany. The House of Anhalt- Zerbst can boast no such living legacy. Whereas the princes of Anhalt-Dessau survived to witness the formation of the Weimar Republic, Sophie’s father’s line came to an end even within her own lifetime at the death of her brother, Friedrich August, in 1793. Since little remains of the castle at Zerbst, it is tempting to suppose that it must have been no more distinguished than the town which surrounded it. In fact, like so many Baroque palaces in Europe, it was a quintessentially cosmopolitan creation of considerable elegance and beauty.
When its Dutch architect Cornelis Ryckwaert died in 1693, the central block planned in 1680–81 was already complete. By 1710, the addition of the west wing by the Swiss stucco-master Giovanni Simonetti provided the prince’s small retinue with all the ceremonial apartments of a Baroque Court in miniature: a central reception room (
In such a modest palace, it was neither possible nor necessary to replicate every element of the etiquette practised at Versailles, which had never been the only available model for the smaller German Courts. Many of them—especially though not exclusively the Catholic ones—adopted the ceremonial of the imperial Court at Vienna, where the Habsburgs preserved, in the relatively unpretentious surroundings of the Hofburg, a ritual tradition adopted from Burgundy and Spain in the sixteenth century. Whereas almost everything in the life of the kings of France was a public spectacle—from the moment they rose in the morning (
By the time she moved to Zerbst, Sophie was already chafing at the restrictions of her restricted family society. She found a more attractive model on a visit to Countess Bentinck at Varel in the duchy of Oldenbourg. ‘I found her charming. How else could she have seemed to me? I was fourteen; she rode, danced whenever the fancy took her to do so, sang and laughed and skipped about like a child, though she was well over thirty at the time—she was already separated from her husband.’54 That phrase in the mature Catherine’s memoirs acquires an extra frisson in the light of the fate of her own assassinated spouse. At the time, however, minds were naturally concentrated on the initial task of finding her a partner.
Though both Prince William of Saxe-Gotha and Prince Henry of Prussia (who was later to visit her twice in St Petersburg) had started to pay her attention at the age of twelve or thirteen, her most assiduous suitor as she approached marriageable age was a close relative.55 Under the disapproving gaze of Babet Cardel, Georg Ludwig of Holstein-Gottorp, her mother’s younger brother, became infatuated with Sophie when he was twenty-four and she was ten years younger. How far he awakened her adolescent sexuality remains uncertain, though the passage in her memoirs in which she refers to ‘galloping astride her pillows’ has often been interpreted as a veiled reference to masturbation.56 Sophie saw no harm in his kisses—‘he was thoughtful and affectionate’—and apparently agreed to a wedding provided her parents consented. But while Johanna Elisabeth seems to have done little to stem her brother’s ardour, ambition had already prompted her to cast her eyes further afield.
Even when she began to look for a more promising match, closer in age to her daughter, there was no need to look beyond the confines of her well-connected family. At Eutin in 1739, on a visit to her elder brother, Adolf Friedrich, then Prince Bishop of Lubeck, Johanna Elisabeth had introduced Sophie to her second cousin, Karl Peter Ulrich, who had inherited the dukedom of Holstein-Gottorp earlier that summer at the age of eleven. Since his late father, Duke Karl Friedrich, had been nephew to the childless Charles XII of Sweden, Peter was widely expected to inherit the Swedish throne. His late mother, Anna Petrovna, who died a few months after his birth, had been the eldest daughter of Peter the Great of Russia, and he was a far more eligible prospect than Georg Ludwig. As Court gossip began to link his name with Sophie’s, Johanna Elisabeth watched his future with interest.57
Peter’s fortunes sharply improved when Peter the Great’s surviving unmarried daughter, Elizabeth, deposed the infant Ivan VI of Russia in a bloodless coup on 25 November 1741. The following February, she brought her nephew to St Petersburg, obliged him to convert to Orthodoxy, and in November formally declared him her heir in accordance with her father’s law of 1722, which permitted reigning tsars to nominate their own successors. This move not only helped to secure the succession in Russia, but also forced Peter to renounce his claim to the throne of Sweden, with which Russia was at war between 1741 and 1743. At Elizabeth’s insistence, the Swedish succession now passed to Sophie’s uncle, Adolf Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp, giving her scheming mother an added incentive to cultivate her relationship with the empress, who had been engaged to another of her brothers, Karl August, before he died of smallpox in May 1727.
Egged on by Frederick the Great, who promoted Sophie’s father to the rank of field marshal to enhance the family’s prestige, Johanna Elisabeth sent her daughter’s portrait to the tsaritsa, who responded with a diamond- encrusted picture of herself. Elizabeth knew nothing of Sophie’s personality. Aside from ties of sentiment to the House of Holstein-Gottorp, she was attracted mainly by the prospect of a marriage alliance with a Protestant family in Prussian service. This promised the Court of St Petersburg a foothold in northern Germany to balance the diplomatic alliance with Austria which had dominated Russian foreign policy since 1726. Against the advice of her pro-Austrian vice chancellor, Aleksey Bestuzhev-Ryumin, who would have preferred a Catholic Saxon fiancee for Grand Duke Peter, Elizabeth invited Sophie to Russia at the end of 1743.
Catherine’s memoirs paint a remarkably domesticated portrait of the scene at Zerbst when the invitation arrived:
On 1 January 1744, we were all seated at the table when my father was handed a big packet of letters. After tearing open the first envelope, my father passed to my mother several letters addressed to her. I was sitting beside her and recognised the hand of the marshal of the Court of the duke of Holstein, the Grand Duke of Russia. This was a Swedish gentleman, named Brummer. My mother had written to him several times in 1739 and he had replied. My mother opened the letter and I saw the words: ‘
Despite Catherine’s claims that the decision to accept this invitation was her own, taken in the face of her Lutheran father’s profound misgivings, the invitation had in reality been engineered by Johanna Elisabeth, who had