Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (18 page)

9
Conversion and Betrothal

T
HE EMPRESS
, wishing to hurry events along, fixed the date of Sophia’s betrothal to Peter for June 29. Accordingly, on the day just before, June 28, 1744, the young German princess was scheduled to formally and publicly disavow the Lutheran faith and be admitted into the Orthodox Church. Almost to the last minute, Sophia worried about the irreversible step she was about to take. Then, on the night before the ceremony, her hesitations seemed to disappear. “
She slept soundly the whole night,” Johanna wrote to her husband, “a sure sign that her mind is at peace.”

The next morning, the empress sent for Sophia to be dressed under her supervision. Elizabeth had ordered the young woman a gown identical to her own; both were made of heavy, scarlet, silk taffeta, embroidered with silver threads along the seams. The difference was that Elizabeth’s dress was ablaze with diamonds, while Sophia’s only jewels were the pendants and brooch that the empress had given her after her pneumonia. Sophia was pale from the required three days of fasting before the service, and she wore only a white ribbon in her unpowdered hair, but, Johanna wrote, “
I must say,
I thought she was lovely.” Indeed, many that day were struck by the elegance of the slender figure with her dark hair, pale skin, blue eyes, and scarlet dress.

Elizabeth reached for her hand and together they led a long procession through many halls to the crowded palace chapel. There, Sophia kneeled on a square cushion and the long ceremony began. Johanna described parts of it to her absent husband: “
The forehead, eyes, neck, throat, and palms and backs of hands are anointed with oil. The oil is wiped off with a piece of cotton immediately after application.”

Kneeling on the cushion, Sophia performed her role expertly. Speaking in a firm, clear voice, she recited the creed of her new faith. “
I had learned it by heart in Russian. Like a parrot,” she admitted later. The empress cried, but, said the young convert, “I remained quite in control for which I was highly praised.” For her, this ceremony was another challenging piece of schoolwork, the kind of performance at
which she excelled. Johanna was proud of
her daughter: “
Her bearing … through the entire ceremony was so full of nobility and dignity that I should have admired her [even] had she not been to me what she is.”

In this way, Sophia Augusta Fredericka of Anhalt-Zerbst became Ekaterina, or, in English, Catherine. Sophia could have been baptized with her own name, Sophia, which was a common name in Russia. But Elizabeth had rejected this because Sophia had been the name of her own aunt, the half-sister and rival of Peter the Great who had struggled for the throne with the young tsar fifty-five years before. Instead, Elizabeth chose the name of her own mother, Catherine.

As she left the chapel, the new convert was presented with a diamond necklace and brooch by the empress. Despite her gratitude, the new Catherine was so exhausted that, in order to save her strength for the morrow, she asked permission to be excused from the banquet following the ceremony. Later that night, she drove with the empress, the grand duke, and her mother to the Kremlin, where her betrothal was to be celebrated the following day.

The next morning, Catherine opened her eyes and was handed two miniature portraits, one of Elizabeth, the other of Peter, both framed with diamonds, both gifts from the empress. Soon, Peter himself arrived to escort her to the empress, who was wearing the imperial crown and, over her shoulders, an imperial mantle. Leaving the Kremlin palace, Elizabeth walked under a canopy of solid silver whose great weight required eight generals to carry it. Behind the empress came Catherine and Peter, followed by Johanna, the court, the Synod, and the Senate. The procession descended the famous Red Staircase, crossed the square lined by men of the Guards regiments, and entered the Assumption Cathedral, where Russian tsars were crowned. Once inside, Elizabeth took the two young people by the hand and led them to a velvet-carpeted dais erected between the massive pillars in the center of church. The archbishop of Novgorod conducted the service, and the betrothal rings exchanged by the couple were handed to them by the empress herself. Johanna, with her appraising eye, observed that the rings were “
real little monsters, both of them”; her daughter noted specifically, “The one he gave me was worth twelve thousand rubles, the one he received from me, fourteen thousand.” At the end of the ceremony, a court official read an imperial decree granting Catherine the rank of grand duchess and the title of imperial highness.

Johanna’s report on the betrothal
service was a litany of complaint:

Johanna’s mixed feelings about her daughter, now the central figure in this ceremonial pageantry, should have been mollified when Elizabeth went out of her way to be gracious to a woman she despised. In the cathedral, the empress had prevented Johanna from kneeling before her, saying, “
Our situation is the same; our vows are the same.” But when the ceremony was over, with the cannon thundering, the church bells pealing, and the court moving to the adjacent Granovitaya Palace for the betrothal banquet, Johanna’s unhappiness burst out. By rank, the bride’s mother could not sit at the imperial table with the empress, the grand duke, and the newly proclaimed grand duchess. When this was explained to her, Johanna protested, declaring that her place could not be among mere ladies of the court. The master of ceremonies was uncertain what to do, and Catherine witnessed and suffered her mother’s behavior in silence. Elizabeth, again infuriated by the presumption of this ungrateful, deceitful guest, ordered a separate table set up in a private alcove where Johanna could watch from a window.

The ball that evening was in the Hall of Facets of the Granovitaya Palace, a room constructed with a single central pillar, filling one quarter of the room, supporting the low ceiling. In this place, said Catherine, “one was almost suffocated by the heat and the crowd,” Then, walking back to the state apartments, other new rules of precedence took effect. Catherine now was Her Imperial Highness, a Grand Duchess of Russia, the future wife of Heir to the Throne; Johanna, therefore, was obliged to walk behind her daughter. Catherine attempted to avoid these situations, and Johanna recognized Catherine’s effort. “
My daughter conducts herself very intelligently in her new situation,” she wrote to her husband. “She blushes each time she is forced to walk in front of me.”

Elizabeth continued to be generous. “
There was not a day on which I did not receive presents from the empress,” Catherine said later. “Silver and jewels, cloth and so forth, indeed everything that one can imagine,
the least of which was worth from ten to fifteen thousand rubles. She showed me extreme affection.” Soon afterward, the empress gave Catherine thirty thousand rubles for personal expenses. She, who had never had any pocket money at all, was awed by this sum. She immediately sent money to her father to help with the education and medical care of her younger brother. “
I know that Your Highness has sent my brother to Hamburg and that this has entailed heavy expenses,” she wrote to Christian Augustus. “I beg Your Highness to leave my brother
there as long as is necessary to restore him to health. I will undertake to pay all his expenses.”

Elizabeth also gave the new grand duchess a small court of her own, including young chamberlains and maids-in-waiting. Peter already had his own court, and in the apartments of the grand duke and grand duchess, the young people played blindman’s buff and other games, laughing, jumping, dancing, running—even taking the lid off a big harpsichord, placing it on pillows, and using it as a toboggan to slide along the floor. By participating in these frolics, Catherine was trying to please her future husband. Peter was friendly toward this willing playmate; he was also intelligent enough to know that any fondness he showed his fiancée would
please the empress. Even Brümmer, observing them together and deciding that she might help him deal with his rebellious charge, asked her to “
use my influence to correct and reprimand the Grand Duke.” She refused. “I told him it was impossible for in that case, I should become as hateful to him [Peter] as the rest of his entourage already were.” She understood that to have any influence on Peter, she must be the opposite of those who tried to “correct” him. He could not come to her looking for friendship only to find he had another watchdog.

Johanna became more distant. Now, when she wanted to see her
daughter, she had to have herself announced. Reluctant to do this, she stayed away, declaring that the young court around Catherine was too wild and noisy. Meanwhile, Johanna herself was making new friends. She joined a circle of people of whom the empress and most of the court disapproved. It was not long before her intimacy with the chamberlain, Count Ivan Betskoy, began to cause talk; eventually, the two were so often together that some at court began saying that they were having an affair—and even whispering that the thirty-two-year-old Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst was pregnant.

10
A Pilgrimage to Kiev and Transvestite Balls

T
HE BRIDE HAD ARRIVED
in Russia, she was young, her health was restored, and the difficulties involving her conversion to Orthodoxy had been overcome. Now that she and Peter were betrothed, what stood in the way of an immediate marriage? One obstacle, difficult to surmount even for an empress, was the doctors’ strong cautionary opinion regarding Peter. At sixteen, the grand duke looked more like fourteen, and the medical men still could not detect in him any convincing signs of puberty. It would be at least a year, they believed, before he could father a child. Even if a pregnancy occurred, there must be another nine months before an infant could be born. To Elizabeth, this length of time—twenty-one months—seemed an eternity. And because the wedding had to be postponed, the empress also had to postpone Johanna’s departure.