Great Catherine (31 page)

The army filed slowly out of the city along the road that led northwestward toward Peterhof. Late as it was, people came out of their houses to cheer the soldiers along, and to shout "Vivat!" for Catherine. Once they left the outskirts behind, however, there was no sound but the clopping of hooves and the rasp of metal on metal. Deeply weary, for four hours the host rode on through the

crepuscular light, until, drooping with fatigue, they came to an inn and made bivouac until dawn.

Peter, meanwhile, had spent much of the long day of June 28 reacting to ever more troubling news.

The day had begun well. After a lazy morning he had ridden from Peterhof to Oranienbaum with a party of courtiers, including Elizabeth Vorontzov, the Prussian ambassador Baron Goltz, and several dozen women. He was in a buoyant mood; the party was carefree, and he looked forward to leaving in two days for Denmark, where he expected to show his mettle as a commander and win military glory.

The carriage had not yet reached the grounds of Oranienbaum when one of Peter's military aides, who had been sent on ahead, rode up with a disquieting report. Catherine had mysteriously disappeared. None of the servants knew where she was. Peter's irritation flared. Angrily he turned the women out of the coach and drove on in haste to Mon Plaisir, striding in through the same door Alexis Orlov had entered a scant eight hours earlier and demanding to know where the servants had hidden Catherine. With a fine display of indignation he stormed through the house, throwing open every cupboard and looking behind every hanging, sending the servants flying in fear. In vain he shouted his wife's name over and over, as if in conjuring her he could evoke her elusive ghost. But she was nowhere to be found, and by the time his companions reached the house he had all but given up.

"What did I tell you!" he said to Elizabeth Vorontzov. "The woman is capable of anything!"

For the next several hours Peter contemplated with mounting apprehension just what Catherine was capable of. A Holsteiner who by chance had been in the city when Catherine was proclaimed and who managed to leave before the roads were cordoned off brought word of the tumult in Petersburg. Stunned, then angered by his wife's betrayal, Peter at first assumed that what was facing his government was nothing worse than a brief commotion, with brawling in the streets and scuffling in the

son

taverns. As for Catherine's absurd self-aggrandizement in naming herself empress, he could not believe that his subjects would give it more than passing attention.

Ignoring the alarm of his courtiers, who were clearly much more distressed about the situation than he was, Peter called for his secretaries and set them to work writing out scathing accusations against Catherine and condemning everything she had done. He authorized his chancellor, along with Alexander Shuvalov and Prince Trubetskoy, to go to the capital and to use either persuasion or force to remove Catherine from the scene. He sent messengers to Petersburg to find out what was happening there, and to deliver orders to the guards regiments to march at once to Oranienbaum to join him and defend his court. He ignored the advice of the Prussian ambassador, who suggested that he drop everything and ride as fast as he could toward Finland.

He dispatched a rider to Peterhof to summon the Holsteiners to Oranienbaum in his name, ordering them to bring their artillery. If Catherine should be foolish enough to try to beseige him in the palace, then so be it. She would find out what his troops were made of.

While he waited for his messengers to return from Petersburg and for the guards regiments to arrive in response to his summons, Peter busied himself planning how he would array his defenses. Earlier in the day he had brushed aside the advice of the aged General Munnich, a seasoned and shrewd judge of palace revolutions, who strongly urged him to ride to the capital with a military escort and confront the rebels in person. Now he dallied in following another of Miinnich's sensible suggestions: that he take refuge in the strongly fortified island of Kronstadt, just across the water from Oranienbaum, where he would have the protection not only of several thousands of troops but of the entire Russian fleet.

Peter did send two officers to Kronstadt—unaware that the commandant had already received orders from the new empress to seal the fortress off—but did not immediately make plans to go

there. While waiting for his Holsteiners, he supped in the garden with his mistress and the other women, toasting his future successes, letting himself be lulled into inactivity by wine and false hopes. He put aside the nagging realization that none of his messengers had come back from Petersburg, and that Vorontzov, Trubetskoy and Shuvalov were also overdue in returning.

When the Holstein guards arrived he ordered them here and there, moving them around on the chessboard of Oranienbaum as he had once moved his toy soldiers in his palace chamber. The task absorbed him, crowding out the doubts that tugged at the corners of his mind. He had never actually commanded troops in a battle, despite his boastful claims to the contrary. If Catherine led a force against him, would he have the courage to face them? And what if the guardsmen from Petersburg defied his summons?

Sometime after ten o'clock, bleary-eyed and too tired to resist any longer, Peter allowed himself to be persuaded to go to Kron-stadt. Something in him must have known, by this time, that reinforcements from Petersburg were never going to arrive, and that his power had been snatched from his hands by his clever wife. But he could not admit it to himself. Instead he drank, and bullied the courtiers, insisting that he would not board the galley for Kronstadt until a large supply of liquor had been put on board, along with all his kitchen equipment. It took at least an hour for the servants to load the emperor's bottles and casks, pots and pans, and entire entourage of fifty people into the galley, with the excess baggage crammed onto a small yacht. Finally, just before midnight, the boats set sail.

The chilly voyage was unpleasant, and Peter relieved it by continuing to sip his brandy, his brain a muddled tangle of puzzlement, apprehension and dread. He had no one to turn to for comfort but his mistress, who was no doubt ashen-faced with worry and fatigue. When at one in the morning the lights of the fortress came into view, and the pilot of the galley reported that the harbor chains were closed, preventing their entry, Peter must

have felt his dread increase. Still, the shreds of his vainglory remained.

He got into a rowboat and had himself rowed toward the fortress.

"Loose these chains at once! It is I, the emperor!" Peter commanded when he came within hailing distance of the watchman. Ordering a lantern held close, he opened his coat to display a decoration blazing on his chest, proof that he was who he said he was.

The response made his blood turn to ice.

"There is no emperor—only an empress."

As the rowboat retreated, trumpets and drums sounded in the fortress, summoning the men to arms. Their shouts reached Peter's ears: "Vivat Catherine! Vivat Catherine! Vivat!"

All was not lost. Once aboard the galley, Peter still had a chance. He could attempt to evade the fleet and sail to safety in a western port, even though armed vessels stood in his way. Should he reach a provincial fortress, he might find that some troops were still loyal to him. With their backing, he might yet regain the throne.

Peter heard the clamoring voices around him, yet did not hear them. He could no longer think, let alone act. He was numbed by wine, by the cold, by the shock of having been dispossessed. Ordering the pilot to sail back to Oranienbaum, he retreated into the depths of his cabin and went to sleep in his mistress's plump lap.

Chapter Eighteen

-•-•o*"*-

ON THE FOLLOWING MORNING, JUNE 29, PETER SURREN-dered to Alexis Orlov and his hussars at Oranienbaum. Shortly afterward he signed a hastily composed document of abdication, gave up his sword and, utterly forlorn, took off his beloved uniform and handed it to his captors.

He was no longer Emperor of All the Russias. He was merely Peter, consort of Empress Catherine, a helpless prisoner at the mercy of his longsuffering wife, who had every imaginable reason to wreak a terrible vengeance on him.

Peter wrote Catherine a pathetic letter, admitting that he had treated her badly and begging her to forgive him; all he asked, he said, was to be allowed to leave Russia and take refuge in Holstein along with his mistress and a military escort. Panin, who watched the sad spectacle of the ex-emperor's disgrace, was utterly mortified when Peter grasped his hand and tried to kiss it, begging for mercy. Elizabeth Vorontzov, in terror of the new empress, fell to her knees and implored Panin not to separate her from her dishonored lord. But the empress's orders were explicit: Elizabeth Vorontzov was to be sent home to her father, while Peter was to be escorted, under heavy guard, to his estate at Ropsha, and kept there under the close supervision of Alexis Orlov while more permanent quarters were made ready for him at Schliisselburg— where the hapless Ivan VI still languished.

Though no opposition to the transfer of power had yet manifested itself neither Catherine nor her advisers could be certain that Peter would not become the object of a countercoup; spineless as he was, he remained a dangerous liability, a potential focus for discontent. And given the unsettled state of Petersburg, it was as well to have the former emperor far away and kept out of sight.

For days following the thrilling events of June 28 the capital was in a state of excited confusion. Work and commerce were interrupted, drunkenness and brawling increased to such an extent that all the taverns had to be closed by imperial order. Noisy parades of soldiers, pealing bells, shouting throngs of wine-soaked revelers made such a constant din that ordinary life was impossible. Yet the joy was mingled with apprehension. Though armed troops were posted on every street and in every square, neither the populace nor the soldiers felt safe. There were periodic rumors of Prussian perfidy, and anyone seen wearing a Prussian uniform had to run for his life. The Ismailovsky barracks exploded into bedlam late one night, the men agitated to a frenzy by a wild story that a Prussian army, thirty thousand strong, was on its way to dethrone Catherine. Only after the empress herself appeared at the barracks to calm the men's fears did the fracas die down.

Then on July 6 came word from Ropsha that Peter was dead, the victim of a sudden violent quarrel with one of his guards, Prince Feodor Baryatinsky. It was a chilling beginning to Catherine's reign, and one that would haunt her for the rest of her life.

According to Alexis Orlov, who sent Catherine a letter from Ropsha, the "misfortune" was sudden and unavoidable. A quarrel erupted, blows were exchanged, "we could not separate them, and already he was no more." More likely the truth is much darker; Orlov or his subordinates strangled Peter, secure in the knowledge that they were doing the empress a favor.

When or by whom the suggestion was made to murder the former emperor will never be known with certainty. Catherine certainly benefited from the crime, which was carried out in the

rea

t Catherine 227

presence of her key ally Alexis Orlov and a number of others. To impute Peter's death to Orlov's overzealousness would be to ignore both the toughness of Catherine's resolve and her political astuteness, as well as her capacity for encompassing the unthinkable. She had just taken over a kingdom; she was neither too tenderhearted nor too ethical to shrink from doing what had to be done, however distasteful, in order to safeguard her precarious authority. Yet she may not have given a direct order to kill her husband, or even hinted that his demise would be welcome to her. Still, her critics took note that she punished no one for the crime.

When word of the villainy reached her Catherine took it in stride, though on the following day she gave way to tears and sobbed on Princess Dashkov's shoulder. Two things concerned her above all: the popular reaction to Peter's death, and the reaction of her trusted adviser Panin, who, she feared, might be so appalled at the wickedness of the crime that he might want to disassociate himself from her government. Panin had after all preferred to see Peter replaced by a regency, not by Catherine as empress. He might see in Peter's death not only a crime but a colossal miscalculation—proof that Catherine was not fit to govern.

For a tense few hours Catherine, Panin and one or two others met to discuss the crisis. No record of what was said at that meeting has ever come to light, but it must have been a crucial test of Catherine's leadership. According to the French ambassador Berenger, Catherine summoned all her persuasiveness to convince Panin that she had not been complicit in her husband's murder. In the end he proved cooperative, and helped to draft the official announcement of Peter's death.

According to this announcement, the former emperor had died of colic—from which he had, in fact, been suffering during his captivity—following a severe attack of hemorrhoids. The Russian people were instructed to regard the tragedy as "evidence of God's divine intent," a sign from heaven that Catherine was