Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (42 page)

L’Hôpital then set about his mission of strengthening France’s ties with Russia. He began by pressing for Hanbury-Williams’s recall to England and Poniatowski’s return to Poland. He was warmly received by the Shuvalovs, but he was rebuffed at the young court. Peter had no sympathy for an enemy of Prussia, and Catherine remained linked to Bestuzhev, Hanbury-Williams, and Poniatowski. Unable to counteract the influence of these three, l’Hôpital reported to his government that attempts to influence the young court were useless.
“The grand duke is
as completely a Prussian as the grand duchess is an incorrigible Englishwoman,” he said.

Nevertheless, the French ambassador did manage to achieve a major goal: he succeeded in getting rid of his English diplomatic rival, Hanbury-Williams. He and his government pressed Elizabeth to force the recall of an envoy whose king, they pointed out, was now an ally of their mutual enemy, Frederick of Prussia. Elizabeth accepted this logic, and, in the summer of 1757, King George II was informed that his ambassador’s presence was no longer desired in St. Petersburg. Sir Charles was willing to leave; his liver was failing. But when the moment arrived, he was reluctant. In October 1757 he called on Catherine for the last time. “
I love you as my father,” she told him. “I count myself happy to have been enabled to acquire your affection.” His health worsened. After a stormy passage down the Baltic, he arrived, debilitated, in Hamburg and was hurried by doctors to England. There the elegant, witty ambassador degenerated into an embittered invalid, and, a year later, he ended his life by suicide. King George II, perhaps feeling responsibility for scuttling the alliance that Sir Charles had worked to negotiate, ordered that he be buried in Westminster Abbey.

35
Apraksin’s Retreat

R
USSIA
, bound by her alliance with Austria, had been nominally at war with Prussia since September 1756, when Frederick invaded Saxony. By late spring of 1757, however, not a single Russian soldier had marched. It was the first war of Elizabeth’s reign, and the victories of her father, Peter the Great, almost four decades earlier, had faded from Russian memory. No money had been spent on the army, and the troops were badly trained and poorly equipped. Morale was low, not only because Elizabeth had promised to send this army against Frederick, the foremost general of the age, but also because the empress’s declining health meant that the Russian crown might soon be placed on the head of a young man who was King Frederick of Prussia’s fervent admirer.

In the months before the war, Bestuzhev had promoted a friendship between Catherine and his own friend General Stepan Apraksin.
A descendant of Peter the Great’s most succesful admiral, Apraksin was described by Hanbury-Williams as “
a very corpulent man, lazy, and good-natured.” His friendship with the chancellor, rather than his military skill, had earned him command of the army being assembled to invade East Prussia. Once appointed, Apraksin had refused to embark on a winter campaign. He had political as well as military reasons for his caution. The empress’s uncertain health and the grand duke’s pro-Prussian sentiments made it obvious that the war would end as soon as Peter came to the throne. In these circumstances, even an aggressive general might be forgiven for not risking his own future by plunging ahead. Apraksin might also be excused for uneasiness about Catherine. She was born a German; Frederick had helped arrange her marriage; and her mother had been widely suspected of being a Prussian agent. In this reasoning, he was wrong. Catherine, now caught up in the politics of the Russian court, hoped for a Russian victory that would restore Bestuzhev’s prestige and prevent the final triumph of his and her mutual enemies, the Shuvalovs. Before Apraksin left to invade East Prussia, Catherine tried to make certain that he knew her views. When the general’s wife came to see her, Catherine spoke of her own worries about the empress’s health and said that she greatly regretted the departure of Apraksin at a time when she thought little reliance could be placed on the Shuvalovs. Apraksin’s wife repeated this to her husband, who was pleased and passed the grand duchess’s words along to Bestuzhev.

In mid-May 1757, the portly, red-faced field soldier, physically unable to mount a horse, climbed into his carriage and set out for East Prussia at the head of eighty thousand men. At the end of June, the army seized the fortress town of Memel, on the Baltic coast. On August 17, Apraksin defeated a part of the Prussian army in a battle at Grossjägersdorf, in East Prussia. It was not a brilliant victory; Frederick was not present and the Russians outnumbered their enemies by three to one. Even so, Russian national pride and expectations soared. Then, a strange thing happened. Instead of following up his victory by advancing into East Prussia and capturing Königsberg, the provincial capital, Apraksin remained motionless for two weeks, after which he turned around and retreated by forced marches so precipitous that his withdrawal appeared to be a rout. He burned his wagons and ammunition, destroyed his stores and powder, spiked and abandoned his cannon, and burned villages behind him so they could provide no shelter for a
pursuing enemy. He halted only when he reached the safety of the fortress of Memel.

In St. Petersburg, elation turned to shock. The public could not understand what had happened, and Apraksin’s friends could find no way to justify his behavior. Catherine could not explain the marshal’s chaotic retreat, but she speculated that he may have been receiving alarming news about the empress’s health. If this were true and Elizabeth were to die, her death would signal an immediate end to the war. He would be needed in Russia, and, rather than advancing farther into Prussia, his duty would be to fall back to the Russian frontier.

Apraksin’s retreat provoked angry complaints from the Austrian and French ambassadors. Bestuzhev was alarmed. Because Apraksin was his friend and had received command of the army from him, the chancellor knew that he would bear a share of blame. Faced with the political necessity of a renewed offensive, which would restore Russia’s prestige among her allies and his own with the empress, he asked Catherine to write to the general. Catherine did so, warning Apraksin of the harmful rumors circulating in Petersburg and of the difficulty his friends were having in explaining his retreat. She begged him to retrace his steps, resume his advance, and carry out his orders from the government. Ultimately, she wrote three letters, all harmless, although later they were to be produced as evidence that the grand duchess was interfering in matters beyond her concern. Bestuzhev forwarded these letters to Apraksin. The letters were never answered.

Meanwhile, St. Petersburg was a cauldron of recrimination. Elizabeth, pressed by the Shuvalovs and the French ambassador, relieved Apraksin of his command, and sent him to one of his estates to await investigation. General Wilhelm Fermor took over the army, and, despite bad weather, moved forward and seized Königsberg on January 18, 1758. Fermor also tried to clear his predecessor by pointing out that, through no fault of Apraksin’s, the Russian soldiers had not been paid, that they were short of ammunition, weapons, and clothing, and that the men were desperately hungry. With endurance and courage, they had defeated the Prussians at Grossjägersdorf, but the effort had proved too much, and Apraksin, unable to supply his troops in enemy territory, had been compelled to retreat.

Fermor’s account was only partially accurate. The decision to retreat
had not been made by Apraksin. After the victory at Grossjägersdorf, the general had informed the war council in St. Petersburg of the problems he and the army faced. The council had met three times—on August 27, September 13, and September 28, 1757—and had ordered Apraksin to withdraw. These facts had been withheld from Vienna, Paris, and the people of St. Petersburg. Elizabeth had concurred in this withdrawal but never admitted it. Catherine had not known.

On September 8, at Tsarskoe Selo, Elizabeth went on foot from the palace to attend Mass at the parish church near the palace gate. Scarcely had the service begun when, feeling unwell, she left the church, descended a short flight of steps, staggered, and collapsed unconscious on the grass. The empress’s attendants, following behind, found her surrounded by a crowd of people who had come from nearby villages to hear Mass. At first, no one knew what was wrong. The attendants covered her with a white cloth, and members of the court went to look for a doctor and a surgeon. The first to arrive was a surgeon, a French refugee, who bled her while she lay unconscious on the ground in the middle of the crowd. The treatment failed to revive her. The doctor, a Greek, took longer to arrive; being himself unable to walk, he had to be carried to her in an armchair. Screens and a couch were brought from the palace. Placed on the couch behind the screens, Elizabeth stirred and opened her eyes but did not recognize anyone and spoke unintelligibly. After two hours, she was carried on the couch into the palace. The consternation of the court, already immense, was increased by the fact that the collapse had occurred in public. Until then, the state of the empress’s health had been a tightly kept secret. Suddenly, it was public knowledge.

Catherine learned of the incident the following morning at Oranienbaum from a note sent by Poniatowski. She hurried to tell Peter. A messenger, sent to ask for more news, returned with the information that Elizabeth was able to speak only with difficulty. Everyone realized that something more serious than a fainting spell had happened; today we might realize that Elizabeth had suffered a stroke.

After Elizabeth’s collapse, everyone in St. Petersburg linked Elizabeth’s health and Apraksin’s retreat with concerns about the succession to the
throne. “
If the empress should die,” the Marquis de l’Hôpital wrote to Versailles on November 1, “we shall see a sudden palace revolution, for the grand duke will never be allowed to reign.” Some believed that the empress would disinherit her nephew in favor of three-year-old Paul. A rumor suggested that with Paul on the throne under the control of the Shuvalovs, his parents, Peter and Catherine, would both be sent back to Holstein.

In mid-January 1758, Alexander Shuvalov interrogated Apraksin. The general’s testimony included his sworn denial that he had received any political or military directions from Catherine. Apraksin did admit to receiving correspondence from the grand duchess, and he handed over to Shuvalov all of his personal papers, including the three letters Catherine had written to him. Catherine was to see these letters again.

A year after his dismissal, Apraksin was brought before a judge to receive his sentence: “
And there now remains no course but—” Apraksin, overweight and apoplectic, never heard the end of the judge’s sentence. Expecting the words “torture” and “death,” he fell dead on the floor. The judge’s last words were to have been “to set him free.”

36
Catherine’s Daughter