Catherine the Great

in the Court calendar.⁶⁶ The sickly Peter missed it all, being confined to bed by a chest infection in October and by chickenpox in November. Only when he seemed well enough to travel did the Court depart for St Petersburg.⁶⁷

Begun by Bartolomeo Rastrelli almost as soon as the Court returned from Moscow in January 1732, the Winter Palace he completed three years later was a highly embellished wooden structure incorporating the mansion which had once belonged to Peter the Great’s Admiral Apraksin. Empress Anna’s apartments struck visitors as ‘rather beautiful’ but ‘not very imperial’, because they were small and dark.⁶⁸ Catherine and Peter were to think better of them during their brief occupation in the winter of 1746. This time, however, there was no room in the palace for either of them. While the lower floor was allocated to the small army of servants, actors, musicians and guards who accompanied the Court, the fun-loving Elizabeth was busy converting the upper rooms formerly occupied by her ladies-in-waiting to make space for a new merry-go-round, complete with expensively saddled wooden horses, to replace the dilapidated machine which stood outside the Summer Palace at the time of Catherine’s arrival in Russia.⁶⁹ She and Johanna Elisabeth were lodged in a neighbouring house, where for the first time they had separate apartments on either side of the main staircase. Catherine had known of Elizabeth’s orders in advance. For her status-conscious mother, who had not, it came as a shock:

As soon as she saw this arrangement, she lost her temper, primo, because she thought that my apartment was laid out better than hers; secondo because hers was separated from mine by a shared room. In fact, we each had four rooms, two at the front and two overlooking the courtyard, and the rooms were of equal size, furnished in exactly the same blue and red fabric.⁷⁰

Squabbles about precedence were the last thing Catherine needed now that her fiance had again been taken ill on the journey from Moscow. On learning of this new outbreak of pox, accompanied by a high fever, Elizabeth raced back from St Petersburg to join her nephew at Khotilov, a staging post between Novgorod and Tver where they had all celebrated her birthday on 18 December. Cancelling the New Year’s banquet, she stayed with him there until his recovery was assured, having cannon hauled specially from Tver to celebrate Epiphany, though Khotilov was too far from the river to conduct the customary blessing of the waters.⁷¹ By 26 January, empress and heir were safely back at Tsarskoye Selo. When they returned to the capital at the beginning of the following month, Catherine and her mother were taken straight to see Peter in the gloomy great hall of the Winter Palace. Johanna Elisabeth reported to her husband in Zerbst that Providence had granted the youth a miraculous recovery. Catherine remembered the scene differently:

All of his features were distorted; his face was still completely swollen, and one could see that he was bound to be permanently scarred. As his hair had been cut, he wore a huge wig that disfigured him all the more. He came up to me and asked if I found it difficult to recognise him. I stammered my congratulations on his recovery, but in truth he had become hideous.⁷²

At best this was a disconcerting turn of events. Yet there was nothing to be done about it now. While Lent kept her pock-marked fiance out of the public eye between his birthday and hers, preparations for their marriage continued in earnest.⁷³

* * *

Since Princess Charlotte of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, the consort of Peter the Great’s ill-fated tsarevich, had been permitted to retain her Lutheran faith, Elizabeth instructed Count Santi, her Master of Ceremonies, to model Catherine’s wedding on the marriage of her own elder sister, Anna Petrovna, to Karl Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp in 1725. On discovering that no records of that occasion survived, Santi had to work partly on oral tradition but above all on the basis of his own researches into the practice of rival European Courts.⁷⁴ The plan he presented to the College of Foreign Affairs on 22 March 1745 left plenty for the empress to decide. The seating arrangements for Johanna Elisabeth and her brother, Prince Adolf Friedrich, were a particularly sensitive matter. Unbeknownst to either Catherine or her mother, her uncle had been invited to Russia by Chancellor Bestuzhev, and his arrival on 5 February, motivated by his desire to gain control over the affairs of the duchy of Holstein, caused nothing but trouble.⁷⁵ (‘His appearance alone did him no favours,’ Catherine later commented. ‘He was very small and badly proportioned, not at all intelligent, hot tempered, and furthermore governed by his entourage.’) Santi, however, had already resolved to dispense with the idea of seating the bride under a canopy so that she could offer wine to the guests who came to congratulate her. Such an ‘Oriental’ custom might be appropriate for the ‘middling sort’, declared the haughty Piedmontese, who had spent the whole of Anna’s reign in exile in Siberia, but it was scarcely compatible with ‘good practice in the courts of Sovereigns’.⁷⁶

When it came to opulence, there was no question which of these Courts had set the standard. It can hardly have been a coincidence that the official press chose the eve of the announcement of Catherine’s nuptials to report on the festivities at Versailles following the Dauphin’s marriage to the Spanish Infanta.⁷⁷ ‘Never has finer magnificence been witnessed than during those three days,’ insisted the St Petersburg News on 15 March. ‘Diamonds worth 250 million were on display, not counting the crown, which is estimated at 70 million. The attire of the Dauphin and his wife alone stretched to 45 million.’⁷⁸ To allow them to prepare in suitable style, the leading Russian statesmen (known collectively as the generalitet because they ranked with army generals on the top four ranks of Peter the Great’s Table) were advanced a full year’s salary, normally paid in instalments every four months. Elizabeth issued a personal decree urging each of them to spend the money on ‘worthy costumes, as rich as possible, open landaus and other carriages, decorated where possible in silver and gold’. Since the celebrations were to continue for several days, more than one new outfit was permitted for each person, and courtiers were allowed separate carriages for their wives.⁷⁹

Catherine took no pleasure from the prospect. From the moment her marriage was announced, she was barely able to speak of it. Indeed, it is in describing that moment that the final version of her memoirs first mentions the word ‘melancholy’, or what we might now think of as depression. An earlier version, hinting at much the same symptoms, says that the closer the event approached, the sadder she became, and she ‘often burst into tears without really knowing why’.⁸⁰ Even if we discount the calculated note of martyrdom, it seems likely that a sense of foreboding took the edge off her first summer in St Petersburg, a romantic time when the river was alive with a flotilla of small craft, and the ‘white nights’ hummed to the melancholy sound of boatmen’s lullabies. The Court enjoyed its cruises too. Resident from 9 May at the new wooden Summer Palace on the Fontanka—one of Rastrelli’s most attractive creations, demolished by Tsar Paul to make way for the Mikhailovsky Palace—Catherine and her fiance sailed by barge to the Peter-Paul Fortress to celebrate his name day on 29 June.⁸¹ The day after the banquet for the Order of the Polish Eagle on 25 July, where she sat between the empress and Adolf Friedrich, they all boarded sloops to Aptekarsky Island in the delta of the Neva.⁸² Earlier that week, they had joined Elizabeth and a large group of courtiers on board the Dutch vessel St Petersburg to inspect the luxury goods it had brought to Russia.⁸³

Behind the scenes, ministers had been preoccupied since April with a particularly expensive and controversial measure: the first census of the male tax-paying population since 1719–23. Because this had raised many of the most awkward problems confronting the Russian government in the eighteenth century—tax evasion by peasants who tried to conceal children born since the previous census; fugitive serfs and soldiers; vagrant clergy, and so on —it is perhaps not surprising that the wedding seems to have been postponed more than once.⁸⁴ Peter’s doctors had urged that the event be delayed for at least a year to allow him to recover from the pox. By the end of July, however, all eyes were focused on the impending nuptials. ‘This Court is at present so busy in preparing for the Great Duke’s marriage,’ the British ambassador complained, ‘that every thing else is at a stand.’⁸⁵ When Elizabeth finally gave her formal assent to Santi’s plans on 3 August, the ceremony was scheduled for the 18th. The annual celebrations in honour of St Alexander Nevsky, established in the Court calendar the year before, were duly brought forward from 30 August to 17 August, when Catherine made her first visit to the monastery with Peter and the empress.⁸⁶ However, when the appointed day passed with only the customary Court reception, Lord Hyndford was unsure what would transpire. ‘The marriage, which was to have been solemnised as yesterday, is put off till tomorrow,’ he reported on 20 August, ‘and some say till Sunday