Catherine the Great (19 page)

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

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 spent on velvet, taffeta and other fabrics, to the neglect of the corpse itself: ‘She had lain in state for a month,’ a British visitor remarked, ‘but not having been rightly embalmed was almost fallen to pieces before her burial.’
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Now, while work went ahead ‘day and night’ on Jacob Stählin’s designs for an allegorical chamber of mourning in the wooden Winter Palace and an elaborate catafalque in the Peter-Paul Cathedral, leading courtiers gathered on the evening of Monday 14 January to convey the corpse to the stateroom where it was first displayed to the Court. Dressed in her favourite virginal white, the late empress was laid out on a
lit de parade
on a dais covered in white cloth under a canopy trimmed with gold. The walls of the room were also draped in white cloth edged with gold braid.
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On Friday 25 January, Elizabeth’s corpse was transferred to lie in state in a second chamber of sorrows, where Stählin had gone to elaborate lengths to represent the Russian realm weeping at the tomb of its beloved ruler.
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At two in the
afternoon, the Captains of the Guard formed a new guard of honour in this much darker chamber, draped in black and adorned with festoons of silver brocade. Twelve Chevaliers Gardes placed the coffin, covered with a pall of gold cloth trimmed with Spanish lace, on a raised catafalque beneath a canopy emblazoned with the imperial crown. By its side stood four ladies-in-waiting, dressed in deep mourning, and entirely covered with crepe veils. Two officers, in full dress uniform, stood guard on the first step, while two archimandrites, standing at the foot of the coffin, took it in turn to read aloud from the Bible throughout the day and night.
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Yakov Shakhovskoy–a far from sentimental bureaucrat whose memoirs mention his wedding only as a temporary interruption to his work–was overcome with emotion at the sight of his late sovereign.
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Bowing twice on approaching the corpse, which was now dressed in a silver gown, trimmed with lace sleeves, he joined the procession of Russians who prostrated themselves before it, or rather ‘threw themselves face down on the ground in front of the bed’ so violently that at least one foreign observer ‘feared that they must fracture their skulls’.
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‘There is a multiplicity of such customs,’ the supercilious French ambassador reported, ‘full of superstitions at which [Catherine] naturally laughs, but the clergy and the people have faith in her deep grieving over the deceased and rate her feelings very highly.’
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According to Pauzié, the Court jeweller, it was Catherine rather than the tsar who summoned him to this ‘large room, lit by six thousand candles’, where he helped her to place a gold crown on the swollen skull of the deceased. Since Pauzié had ‘taken the precaution of placing several screws in the band that gripped the forehead’, he was able to use his tweezers to make the crown big enough to fit. But it was not a pleasant operation. ‘Despite all the incense and fragrance, the smell of the corpse was so strong that I could hardly stand near it. However, the empress bore all this with amazing fortitude and in this way completely won over the hearts of her subjects.’
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Peter made no secret of his impatience with such rituals and visibly chafed against them. Courtiers had been shocked to discover that deep mourning was not immediately prescribed when the empress died.
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Scarcely had the corpse been transferred to its second chamber of rest than Peter ordered them to abandon mourning dress altogether on future Sundays and feast days. That night, 27 January, he and Catherine dined with Prince Trubetskoy, returning to the palace at three and two in the morning respectively.
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On Monday 4 February, the tsar was taken incognito to inspect the final preparations at the Peter-Paul Cathedral,
promising further funds to ensure that the spectacle lacked nothing in magnificence. (The funeral commission’s outstanding expenses of 74,000 roubles were ultimately paid by Catherine shortly after her own accession.) While he spent the evening drinking with Prince Georg until three in the morning, his wife, now six months pregnant with Orlov’s child, remained in her apartments in order to be at her most demure for the next day’s funeral.
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Following a pattern established after her father’s death in 1725, Elizabeth’s coffin was borne with great pomp to its burial place on the far side of the frozen Neva, where, between the cathedral’s four main pillars, Stählin had created a Temple of Sorrow and Remembrance with a life-size half-length portrait of the late empress.
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The capital’s bells began to toll at ten as troops lined the route of the procession. Three hundred guardsmen led the way, followed by an even larger number of priests, processing two by two and chanting hymns. Behind them, in single file, came the gentlemen of the Court, wearing the uniforms of the various orders of chivalry, and each attended by a chamberlain. A single cavalier, armed from head to toe, rode ahead of the coffin on a stately charger held by two equerries. Released from captivity in the fortress by the pro-Prussian Tsar Peter, Count Hård was there to observe the scene:

Nothing could sound more solemn. Yet, according to Catherine, the tsar behaved in typically unseemly fashion. Irrepressibly cheerful throughout, he indulged in childish games, first lagging behind the hearse and then charging across the ice to catch it up, much to the embarrassment of the courtiers deputed to carry his train. When Count Sheremetev could no longer keep hold of it, it blew about in the wind to Peter’s intense amusement.
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‘Everyone dined privately that day,’ Hård recalled, ‘and spent the evening in
privacy, as if their grief and affliction had been real. But from the following day, no more was said or thought of Elizabeth, than if she had never existed. Such is ever the fate of things in this world: every thing passes; everything is forgotten.’
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As if to prove his point, the Court travelled to Tsarskoye Selo a mere three days after the funeral to celebrate the tsar’s thirty-fourth birthday in style. Before the first dinner in the Picture Gallery, he invested Anna Vorontsova with the Order of St Catherine and announced that Yelena Naryshkina was to take her place as senior lady-in-waiting. In the ensuing banquets, he sat next to Princess Golitsyna and Countess Bruce. Catherine, having travelled separately from St Petersburg, remained in her apartments throughout the weekend, apparently oblivious as the first fireworks to be set off since Elizabeth’s death exploded all around her.
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Conscious that the new empress had been isolated from the beginning of Peter’s reign, diplomats soon realised that she was entirely without influence. The disappointed Austrian ambassador, who had hoped to use her to undermine the tsar’s admiration for all things Prussian, assumed that her ‘calm exterior’ must conceal ‘some sort of secret undertakings’. But he had little hope of a plot maturing because, despite her obvious intelligence, Catherine seemed too impetuous to lead a successful conspiracy: ‘she lacks caution and fundamental sense, and her somewhat arrogant and lively nature will prevent her from following a premeditated plan’.
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She, not surprisingly, remembered things differently, telling Poniatowski soon after her accession that the coup had been ‘planned for the last six months’. Yet even if it was true that ‘propositions’ had been made to Catherine from the time of Elizabeth’s death, there was little that she could have done to challenge her husband before Easter.
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For one thing, she was pregnant. For another, the new tsar initially seemed to promise greater things than his detractors had anticipated.

For all his boorishness, Peter was the first adult male to ascend the Russian throne for more than a century. That in itself was cause for widespread jubilation. Further good news followed in February, when he issued an edict emancipating the nobility from the compulsory state service enforced by Peter the Great. Though this was one of the most significant pieces of legislation in eighteenth-century Russia, it is surprisingly difficult to be sure of its origins. Prince Shcherbatov famously claimed that the tsar had locked Dimitry Volkov, one of Elizabeth’s leading officials, into a palace stateroom with a great dane and told him to come up with something important overnight while he went off to carouse with Princess Kurakina: