Catherine the Great

them to kiss her hand.’ Another important ‘first’ was achieved when Paul made his debut on the dance floor. ‘He is a very handsome child,’ reported the dutiful Sir Robert Keith, ‘and dances wonderfully well for one of his age.’¹⁸ The Court was glad to see the little boy dance with his mother at the coronation day ceremony. By then, Catherine’s birthday banquet celebrations had been followed by an opera on 23 April, which the Georgian king much enjoyed. Pleased to have found an exotic potentate to patronise, Vorontsova told her daughter that it was ‘impossible to believe how well he behaves!’¹⁹

On 11 May, Peter and Catherine travelled to Oranienbaum for what was probably their longest single spell of uninterrupted residence. Although they returned to Peterhof for Peter’s name day celebrations at the end of June— and both Catherine and Peter subsequently made separate trips to see their son (in her case for not much more than an hour)—they were to remain ‘in the country’ until they moved back to the Winter Palace on 9 September.²⁰ Perhaps it was during this period of relative leisure that Catherine jotted down (or at any rate added to) a series of miscellaneous notes that give a sense of her developing political ideas and ambitions (though they cannot be dated precisely, the notes were made between February 1758 and February 1762, and the final one quotes a French periodical of March 1761).²¹ Peace and prosperity were two obvious aims for an empire engaged in an exhausting European war. ‘All I hope, all that I wish is that this country in which God has cast me should prosper. God is my witness to that. The glory of this country is my glory.’ ‘Peace is necessary to this vast empire; we need population, not devastation; we need to populate our great empty spaces as much as possible.’ A passage in Bielfeld’s Cameralist Political Instruction prompted her to reflect on the benefits of enlightened toleration: ‘To do nothing without principle or without reason, not to allow one to be led by prejudice, to respect religion, but not to give it any power in State matters, to banish everything that reeks of fanaticism and to draw the best out of every situation for the public good, is the basis of the Chinese Empire, the most durable of all those known on this earth.’ A strong sense of justice emerges, prompted by the treatment meted out to Bestuzhev: ‘All my life I will remain hostile to the idea of establishing a secret Committee of Inquiry to judge a guilty man. An open trial, the judgement of the Senate, as in France and England, where a peer is tried by his peers, is the only solution.’ There was also a strong note of idealism: ‘It is against justice and the Christian religion to make slaves out of men, born to be free.’²²

By the summer of 1761, Catherine was pregnant again, this time by a new lover, Grigory Orlov, the virile guards officer who was to remain by her side until 1773. Wounded at the battle of Zorndorf, Grigory had returned from the war with a reputation for valour. We do not know when their affair began, but here was a type who would subsequently attract her again and again. Though he could boast none of Poniatowski’s intellectual accomplishments, Grigory seemed willing to learn (he too was interested in astronomy) and keen to listen to her ideas. As her political ambitions developed, she may well have chosen him for his military connections—he and his four brothers, all gallant and popular officers, could support her in good times and bad. And the Orlovs were not the only people Catherine had begun to cultivate. Nikita Panin, a protege of Bestuzhev who had survived his master’s disgrace and remained on terms with the Vorontsovs during his twelve years as ambassador to Sweden, had returned to St Petersburg in 1760 to take charge of her son’s education and allowed her to see more of him than she had previously been able to do. Another occasional visitor to Oranienbaum was Princess Dashkova, a potential source of intelligence on the whole Vorontsov clan.²³

While Catherine kept out of sight in the country, an increasingly breathless Elizabeth was left to cope with the heat of the summer in St Petersburg. After lunch on 26 May, she drove out to watch the fire that blazed all day in Mesh-chanskaya Street.²⁴ June brought the prospect of more pleasurable excursions, as she travelled first to Peter Shuvalov’s estate at Pargolovo and then to Peterhof, reliving the old days by dining in Aleksey Razumovsky’s rooms while hunting horns serenaded them outside. After another excursion a few days later, it was three in the morning before she returned from Monplaisir, the seaside pavilion at Peterhof. Such a regime was bound to alarm the medics. Dr Condoidi, Elizabeth’s Greek physician, himself died of apoplexy the previous August, being replaced by the Scot, James Mounsey, and Dr Schilling. Karl Kruse joined them in June 1761. ‘We are rich in doctors here,’ Countess Vorontsova told her daughter.²⁵

In mid-July ‘the Empress caused great anxiety to all her Court’ with ‘an attack of the hysterical vapours and convulsions which knocked her unconscious for several hours’.²⁶ It was the beginning of the end. Now that Elizabeth’s horizons were shrinking, there was no great ceremony or banquet at the end of August for the knights of the Order of St Alexander Nevsky. Back in St Petersburg, she took her meals at a round table in a corner room of the Summer Palace, overlooking the Fontanka. She still found the energy for the occasional visit to Ivan Shuvalov, but was always back by 10 p.m. The banquet and ball, hosted by Peter and Catherine on Paul’s birthday, went ahead without her. After the Court’s return to the temporary Winter Palace two days later, the grand ducal couple hosted the Court receptions, too. Elizabeth celebrated with Catherine in the great chapel for the first time that autumn on 26 October to give thanks for the capture of Troppau by Field Marshal Buturlin. On 13 November, they both attended a French comedy. It proved to be the empress’s last appearance in public. Only the grand duchess and her son attended the ball on her name day. It was over by eleven. Though the following day, 25 November, was the empress’s accession day, the greatest day in the Court calendar, Elizabeth remained closeted in her apartments. Despite the customary 101-gun salute, the servants wore only standard livery. Banquet, music and fanfares were all cancelled on her birthday, 18 December, though there was a salute after the end of the morning liturgy attended on the empress’s behalf by Catherine alone.²⁷

Mikhail Vorontsov tried to forestall rumours in Europe by sending a circular to the Russian ambassadors on 19 December:

For several days, all Her Imperial Majesty’s faithful subjects have been in a state of general sadness and wild alarm on account of an illness deriving from a fever which at first seemed dangerous because Her Majesty, out of a natural aversion to doctors, was reluctant to see one, and her blood was so inflamed that it caused her to vomit. But as result of two bleedings administered over three days, the fever has so far dropped and the illness so far changed for the better this seventh day of the crisis, that, thank God, the misery into which we were all plunged is now transformed into ravishing transports of joy by the great hope we have that with the aid of Divine Providence, the Empress will soon entirely recover her precious health.²⁸

He was hoping against hope. By the time the ambassadors received his message, it was already too late. The Court journal for Elizabeth’s reign falls silent on 24 December. She died the next day.

In the event, all Catherine’s dreams of seizing the throne came to nothing. Pregnant and politically isolated, she could only stand by as the Shuvalovs and Vorontsovs ensured that all Russia proclaimed the advent of Tsar Peter III—and she became his empress.

* * *

By the time of her husband’s accession, he and Catherine had long been leading separate lives. In that sense, little now changed. The thirty-four-year-old tsar rose at seven and gave his first orders of the day while dressing. By eight, he was in his study to hear the Procurator-General, Alexander Glebov, deliver his reports. Occasionally Peter visited government offices unannounced to keep negligent officials on their toes. Regularly at eleven, he inspected the parade in the square outside the palace. Although he called on his new empress most mornings, they rarely dined together.²⁹ While she ate with senior courtiers, he preferred to eat with Elizabeth Vorontsova and carouse in the company of Prince Georg Ludwig, the very same uncle who had courted Catherine twenty years earlier and was greeted with great pomp on his arrival at the military encampment Krasnoye Selo on 23 January and later lodged at Ivan Shuvalov’s palace.³⁰ Even on ceremonial occasions, the imperial couple played roles that kept them apart. At the Blessing of the Waters at Epiphany—a ritual revived in all its splendour at the beginning of the new reign—Catherine followed the icon procession to the Jordan on the Moika while the tsar emulated his hero Peter the Great by riding at the head of his troops.³¹ Though they were unavoidably brought together for the funeral procession of Peter Shuvalov, which they watched from the balcony of the Stroganov Palace on 21 January, the tsar arrived late and there was little contact between them.³²

Though Shuvalov’s funeral was exactly the sort of elaborate ritual that Elizabeth despised, the most extravagant obsequies were reserved for the late empress herself. The day after her death, the tsar allocated 100,000 roubles to the newly appointed funeral commission which met daily at the mansion of the disgraced Chancellor Bestuzhev. The commission established after Anna’s death in 1740 offered the most recent precedent, though it was not to be emulated in every respect. Almost 45,000 roubles of its total budget of 65,000 had been