Great Catherine (35 page)

Catherine appeared at many of these gatherings, her smiling charm and affability always in evidence, the discomforts of her early pregnancy no apparent hindrance to her blithe facade. Gregory Orlov was often at her side, invariably the tallest, most broad-shouldered, best-looking man in the room, resplendent in gold-embroidered coat and breeches, jeweled rings and other prominent tokens of his sovereign's particular favor, his chest a glitter of orders and medals. A consort in all but name, Orlov was more than superbly decorative. He played his role expertly, never upstaging the empress yet enhancing her presence, treating her

son

with broadly affectionate familiarity yet never appearing to exalt himself or overreach his actual standing.

Orlov's towering, rocklike support was vital to Catherine, for behind her composed exterior she was anxious and apprehensive.

Ten days after the coronation, Catherine heard from her trusted chamberlain, Vasily Shkurin, that some among the young officers who had supported her coup were conspiring to dethrone her and replace her with the imprisoned Ivan VI. She acted immediately, ordering the arrest and torture of the men involved, and bringing back into existence a secret agency (little different from Elizabeth's Secret Chancery) to investigate, apprehend and punish all those suspected of political conspiracy and treason.

The affair was sobering to the fundamentally humane and just Catherine. Now that she had joined the long line of absolute rulers of Russia, stretching back over centuries, she was beginning to see why they had become tyrannical. She had always deplored what she had perceived as the abuse of power, yet now that she had been touched by the chill breath of perfidy, she understood its wellsprings. Her authority had its own imperatives, she discovered. Absolute power demanded ironclad obduracy toward traitors. Unwavering sternness alone could protect her. And she might never again be able to trust anyone completely.

During October, as a thick carpet of snow blanketed Moscow and a new round of feasts and amusements preoccupied the citizenry, the empress devoted herself to ferreting out disloyalty. She bought information, she paid some officers for denouncing others. She discovered who was prone to criticizing her, who was discontented, who became indiscreet when drunk. She had known that not all the men supported her completely, and that her every initiative, indeed her every move was being watched and judged by those who had made her accession possible. Some of the men felt slighted, others were jealous of the Orlovs' prominence. Still others, correctly sensing the vulnerability of the new government, were greedy for power themselves. But she had not

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realized how vigilant she would have to be to ensure that discontent did not turn into outright conspiracy. And she had not anticipated how combating the climate of disloyalty would drain her and tax her physically.

In the last week of October she announced to her subjects that a treasonous challenge to her authority had been discovered and circumvented. She had intended to have the principal instigators of the plot executed, but in the end she ordered them exiled to Siberia, with loss of their military rank, their noble status and of all privileges.

Once again crowds gathered in Red Square to hear the sentences read out and to watch while the prisoners, now reduced to the status of ordinary laborers or peasants, had their military swords broken over their heads. Catherine received a thorough report on the events in Red Square, but she could not watch them herself. She was confined to her bed, pale and sad-eyed, with midwives in attendance and her physicians waiting just out of sight in the next room. She had lost her baby.

Chapter Twenty

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Catherine's first winter in Moscow as empress passed in a blur of balls, suppers, and receptions and formal gatherings. She rose early and worked late, interrupting her labors to put on her silks and her diamonds and preside graciously at court fetes and private soirees, to attend weddings and sit through long church services.

Thick snow blanketed Moscow, the shroud of soft white ennobling the city's shabbiness. During the chill afternoons, in the intervals between snowfalls, people raced sledges on the frozen Moscow River, the horses flying along the ice, the bells on their harnesses jingling. Bands played at the river's edge, where spectators gathered to watch skaters glide past and to place wagers on the sledge races. The empress too watched, and wagered, and observers commented on her carefree cheerfulness and good humor.

She was determined to give the appearance of feeling completely secure, of not being afraid, though she had good reason to be fearful. She did not want to give anyone an excuse to say that she was becoming like the late Empress Elizabeth, consumed with apprehension for her safety, so alarmed that she dreaded falling asleep, her life a nightmare of clandestine maneuvers and precautions. Catherine often ordered an open carriage and rode out in

it at night with only a small escort to protect her. When she rode to the Senate, she took only two lackeys with her in her carriage— hardly the entourage of a frightened woman. She gave every evidence of being at ease.

Yet she knew the risk she was taking. Incipient conspiracies were uncovered at least once a month, sometimes every week. Agents of the reinstated Secret Branch brought the empress word of treasonous utterances, secret plotting, small but significant betrayals that undermined Catherine's authority. Two of the maids of Catherine's bedchamber were arrested for gossiping about her, sneering that she was more man than woman. They were sent away from court. Guards officers threatened to raise another rebellion, or boasted of their ability to do so. They were banished to Siberia. Nobles and others, chagrined at the favoritism Catherine showed toward Gregory Orlov—having granted him the title of count, she made him chamberlain, gentleman of the bedchamber, and general adjutant, adding other lucrative positions and giving him generous gifts of money and jewelry— plotted to remove him or even kill him. They were ferreted out, interrogated, and sent away.

Still, no matter how active the Secret Branch was, the climate of insecurity could not be dispelled. The British ambassador Lord Buckingham wrote to his superiors in London in February of 1763 that "great confusion" reigned within Catherine's government. "One does not see the same air of general satisfaction and contentment which appeared two months ago," he added, "and many people dare to let show their disapprobation with the measures taken by the court." Muscovites paused in their winter amusements to grumble about the empress and her paramour Orlov. Peasants bringing goods into the city to sell complained that ever since Catherine became empress the weather had been poor; her accession had brought bad luck, they said, crossing themselves and redoubling their prayers.

Catherine did her best to keep her balance amid the unsettled atmosphere, dividing her time between work and pleasure. 'The

life of the empress," Lord Buckingham reported, "is a melange of frivolous amusements and an intense application to business— which application has not produced anything yet, due to the obstacles which people throw deliberately in Catherine's path, and also due to the diversity of her projects." "Her plans are numerous and vast," he noted, "but very disproportionate to the means at her disposal."

Day after day she took council with her six secretaries, the men who brought her official documents and with whom she consulted on decisions to be made, edicts and other pronouncements to be issued. She talked with Panin and the elderly Bestuzhev— she had recalled the latter from his exile, and listened to his advice with the greatest interest—and read, studied, and thought through a wide range of issues. And day after day, having put in hours of effort, she was forced to admit that her efforts were largely wasted. Inertia, hostility, the petty self-interest of those she was forced to rely on to forward her plans thwarted her and drove her projects backward.

Ruling was not proving to be what she had imagined it would be, and in her inmost heart she was disappointed.

Catherine opened her heart to the French ambassador Breteuil early in 1763. She admitted to him that "she was not at all happy, and that she had to govern people who were impossible to please." She expected that it would take her subjects several years to become accustomed to her, and this left her ill at ease, she told Breteuil.

The ambassador was struck not only by the empress's candor, but by her vanity. "She has a high opinion of her grandeur and her power," he wrote. In talking to him she referred again and again to her "great and powerful empire," using the phrase almost as a talisman. She alluded more than once to her sustaining ambition, which had propelled her toward power from the day she first set foot in Russia.

Clearly her exalted position had turned her head—yet it was as clearly causing her anxiety, and no wonder, Breteuil noted, given

all the chicanery surrounding her. Everyone at her court, even those she trusted most, was maneuvering for influence, wealth and high status, the Frenchman thought. "The intrigues, the manipulations, could not help but make her uneasy." Factionalism was growing, and in the midst of all the countercurrents, it seemed to the ambassador that the formerly rock-steady Catherine was wavering and at times losing her sense of command.

"The empress," he wrote, "is feeble and indecisive, defects which never before appeared in her character. . . . The fear of losing what she had the audacity to seize is easily read in her conduct. Everyone takes advantage of her, sensing this."

If Catherine was indecisive, many people said, it was because she needed a husband. Bestuzhev in particular urged her to marry, and, with her knowledge and agreement, began sounding out opinion on the subject.

He soon discovered that, not surprisingly, the question of whether or not the empress ought to marry, and whom she ought to marry, was embroiled in politics. Two factions had emerged among the royal advisers, one coalescing around Panin, the other around Gregory Orlov and his brothers and Bestuzhev himself. As the senior statesman well knew, the Orlovs and their allies wanted Catherine to do the logical, natural thing and marry the man she loved, the man whose personal magnetism, vigor, and influence had been the driving force behind her coup. With Gregory Orlov as her husband Catherine could strengthen the dynasty by having more children. After all, Orlov had already given her one son, and she would have had a second child by him had her recent pregnancy not ended in a miscarriage. Should the weak Paul die, there would be no succession crisis. The empress and her virile, attentive husband would be certain to provide another heir to the throne.

Gregory Orlov himself had been urging Catherine to marry him every since the conspiracy among the guardsmen was brought to light in October of 1762. What form his inducements took can only be imagined, but in addition to his emotional and

no doubt sexual hold on the empress he had precedent on his side: Empress Elizabeth had married a man who was a commoner by birth, Alexei Razumovsky. Catherine could do the same.

Panin and those who supported him took an opposing view, contending that if Catherine married at all, it should be a prince of royal blood, perhaps a brother of the deposed Emperor Ivan VI, or another, more distant Romanov relation. If she married a commoner such as Orlov she would inevitably weaken her own position, while she ought to be strengthening it. Then there was the scandal of Peter's death, in which the Orlov brothers had been instrumental. How would it look, Panin argued, if the empress married a man who was generally believed to have been her accomplice in killing her husband?

Catherine's own musings in the winter and spring of 1763 on the question whether or not she should marry are difficult to surmise. She admired women who had ruled unmarried, such as Elizabeth I of England, yet she saw the political advantages to be derived from taking the right husband. Her own experience of marriage had been as bad as possible, a nightmarish ordeal of suffering, cruelty and neglect. Yet for that very reason she may have dreamed of healing her wounds and finding redemption in a happier union with a benign and pleasing husband of her own choosing.

Clearly Orlov pleased her, though she was neither blind to his flaws nor overly impressed with his talents. She knew that he was, in her phrase, "nature's spoiled child," and that he relied on his handsome face and brawny body, his courage and charisma to carry him through life without his having to put forth much effort. He was intelligent, but indolent and self-indulgent. He was excessive in his appetites and extravagant with the money she lavished on him. He gambled, he put pleasure before business, he did as little business as possible.

Yet Orlov pleased Catherine because, as she confided some years later to her friend Melchior Grimm, she always liked to be

propelled forward by men more purposeful and active than she was. She had never known a man who suited her better in this way; Orlov, she told Grimm, "instinctively leads, and I follow him." He had lead her to the throne, she could trust him to lead her on through life, as her husband.