*7 Favourites had developed by the seventeenth century into the minister–favourites such as Olivares in Spain and Richelieu and Mazarin in France, who were not the King’s lovers but able politicians chosen to run the increasingly heavy bureaucracies. When Louis XIV chose to rule himself on the death of Mazarin in 1661, the fashion ended. But Russia’s female rulers, beginning with Catherine I in 1725, reinvented it.
*8 In the Smolensk Local History Museum, there is just such a glass goblet which is said to have belonged to Potemkin. The story goes that when Catherine the Great passed through Smolensk she drank a toast from it.
*9 Alcibiades was famously bisexual – his lovers included Socrates – but there was never any suggestion that Potemkin emulated his sexual tastes. The other eighteenth-century figure known as Alcibiades was a favourite of King Gustavus III of Sweden and later friend of Tsar Alexander – Count Armfeld was ‘l’Alcibiade du Nord’.
2
THE GUARDSMAN AND THE GRAND DUCHESS: CATHERINE’S COUP
Heaven knows how it is that my wife becomes pregnant.
Grand Duke Peter, in Catherine the Great, Memoirs
The future Catherine II, known as the Great, was not a Russian at all, but she had lived at Elisabeth’s Court since she was fourteen and she had made every effort to behave, in her words, ‘so the Russians should love me’. Few yet realized that this Grand Duchess aged thirty-two was a gifted politician, far-sighted statesman and consummate actress, with a burning ambition to rule the Russian Empire, a role for which she was admirably qualified.
She was born Princess Sophia of Zerbst-Anhalt on 21 April/2 May 1729 in Stettin. Her dreary destiny as the daughter of a minor German princely house was changed in January 1744 when the Empress Elisabeth scoured the Holy Roman Empire, that dating agency for kings, to find a girl to marry her newly appointed Heir, Karl-Peter-Ulrich, Duke of Holstein, her nephew and therefore a grandson of Peter the Great. He had just been proclaimed Grand Duke Peter Fyodorovich of Russia and required an heir to safeguard Elisabeth’s throne. For a variety of reasons – political, dynastic and personal – the Empress settled on Sophia, who converted to Orthodoxy as Ekaterina Alexevna – Catherine – and then married Peter on 21 August 1745, wearing modest dress and unpowdered hair. Observers remarked on her excellent Russian and cool composure.
Catherine realized swiftly that Peter was not suited to be either her husband or the tsar of Russia. She noted ominously that he was ‘very childish’, lacking in ‘judgement’ and ‘not enamoured of the nation over which he was destined to reign’. It was not to be a happy or romantic marriage. On the contrary, it was a tribute to Catherine’s character that she survived it in such an advantageous way.
Peter was already afraid of the Russian Court and perhaps sensed that he was out of his depth. Despite being the grandson of Peter the Great, ruling Duke of Holstein and, at one moment, the heir of Russia and Sweden, Peter had had an ill-starred life. When he was a boy, his late father had handed him over to the pedantic and cruel marshal of the Holstein Court, who starved him, beat him and made him kneel for hours on dried peas. He grew up into a teenage paradomaniac obsessed with drilling dolls and later soldiers. Alternately starved of affection and spoilt with sycophancy, Peter developed into a confused, pitiful creature who loathed Russia. Once ensconced at the Russian Court, he clung desperately on to his belief in all things German – particularly Prussian. He despised the Russian religion, preferring Lutheranism; he disdained the Russian army, avidly hero-worshipping Frederick the Great.1 He could not help but display his worrying lack of sense and sensitivity, so Catherine resolved on this plan: ‘(1) to please the Grand Duke, (2) to please the Empress, (3) to please the nation’. Gradually the third became more important than the first.
Peter’s already unprepossessing features had been scarred by smallpox soon after Catherine’s arrival. She now found him ‘hideous’ – though his hurtful behaviour was worse.2 On the night of her wedding, no one came to join her, a humiliation for any bride.3 During the peripatetic seasonal migrations of the Court from Petersburg’s Summer to Winter Palaces, from Peterhof on the Gulf of Finland and Tsarskoe Selo inland, south to Moscow and westwards to Livonia, she consoled herself by reading the classics of the Enlightenment – for the rest of her life she always had a book to hand – and by energetic riding. She had designed a special saddle so that she could pretend to ride sidesaddle for the Empress and then switch once she was on her own. Though far from our own age of psychology, when one reads her Memoirs one has the distinct impression that the era of sensibilité perfectly understood the sexual implications of this frantic exercise.4
Catherine was sensuous and flirtatious, though possibly unawakened, but she found herself stranded in a sterile, unconsummated marriage to a repulsive and childish man while being surrounded by a treacherous Court filled with the most handsome and sophisticated young men in Russia. Several now fell in love with her, including Kirill Razumovsky, brother of the Empress’s favourite, and Zakhar Chernyshev, her future minister. She was watched at all times. The pressure became awkwardly specific: she had to be faithful and she had to conceive a child. Faced with this life, Catherine became addicted to games of chance, especially faro – the lot of many unhappy and privileged women in that time.
By the early 1750s, the marriage had deteriorated from awkwardness to misery. Catherine had every reason to ruin the reputation of Peter, but she also showed pity and kindness towards him until his behaviour began to threaten her very existence. Yet in this aspect her accounts of his backwardness and rudeness are not exaggerated: the marriage had still not been consummated. Peter may have had a physical malformation like that of Louis XVI. Certainly he was an inhibited and ignorant late developer.5 The details of the marriage would chill any female heart: Catherine lay alone in bed while her puny husband played with dolls and toy soldiers and sometimes scratched away at a violin beside her; he kept his dogs in her room and made her stand guard for hours with a musket.6
Most of her flirtations came to nothing, but Serge Saltykov, then twenty-six and a scion of old Muscovite nobility, was different: he was ‘handsome as the dawn’ according to Catherine, but, reading between the lines, he was something of a cheap ladies’ man. She fell for him. He was probably her first lover. Amazingly, steps were now taken at the highest level to make sure this was indeed the case – the Empress required an heir no matter who was the father.7
After one miscarriage, Catherine found herself pregnant again. The moment the child was born on 20 September 1754, the heir, named Paul Petrovich, was taken away by the Empress. Catherine was left in tears, ‘cruelly abandoned’ for hours in her sweaty and soiled linen: ‘nobody worried about me’.8 She comforted herself by reading Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois and Tacitus’ Annals. Saltykov was sent away.
Who was the father of the future Emperor Paul I, from whom the rest of the Romanov dynasty, down to Nicholas II, were descended? Was it Saltykov or Peter? Catherine’s claim that the marriage was never consummated may or may not be true: she had every reason to belittle Peter and she later considered disinheriting Paul. He grew up to be ugly and pug-nosed while Saltykov, nicknamed ‘le beau Serge’, was admired for his looks. But then Catherine slyly noted the ugliness of Saltykov’s brother. Most likely, Saltykov was the natural father.