Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (32 page)

The mismatched teens were wed on August 21, 1745. To the dismay of the empress, Peter evinced no interest in consummating the marriage. In 1746, after recovering from an illness, the eighteen-year-old Grand Duke didn’t hop into bed; instead, he erected a puppet theater in his rooms and invited the court to attend performances. Evidently, Peter’s issues regarding sex were not only a matter of emotional immaturity or psychological unsoundness. He suffered from phimosis, a condition in which the foreskin cannot be fully retracted over the penis, making intercourse, or even an erection, considerably painful. Catherine, however, became convinced that the greater issue was political, certain that factions at court were deliberately keeping the couple apart.

By 1752, Peter and Catherine had been married for seven years with nothing to show for it. The exasperated empress instructed the young couple’s respective minders to find each of the heirs a lover to initiate them into the mysteries of sex. The dynasty had to continue. Eventually, they figured things out on their own as well. On September 20, 1754, Catherine finally bore her first child, a son, Paul. Although there were rumors about the boy’s paternity, they were put to rest as Paul grew up to resemble his father both temperamentally and physically. Paul would be Catherine’s only legitimate child.

Many at court were already aware that Peter would prove to be a disastrous emperor when the time came. Apart from his psychological issues, his politics were dangerous. His hero was Russia’s deadliest enemy, Frederick the Great of Prussia, on account of his natty uniforms. While the empress Elizabeth still reigned, the politically astute Catherine quietly began amassing adherents, assuring that she would have the backing to be a coruler. “I shall either perish or reign,” Catherine declared.

Elizabeth died on Christmas Day, 1761, and the thirty-four-year-old Peter immediately proved his unsuitability to rule by chasing his aunt’s coffin down the road during the somber funeral procession. He established new laws that were an immediate disaster for both church and state, and made it abundantly clear to Catherine that not only had he no intentions of permitting her to reign beside him, but he was looking for a way to cast her aside and replace her with his mistress. He even ordered her arrest and imprisonment, but, through
the mutual cousin charged with enforcing Peter’s orders, Catherine managed to get the command circumvented.

With her marriage as well as the state of the empire in the balance, Catherine seized control. On June 28, 1762, the elite guards swore allegiance to her. Peter was deposed and imprisoned. He became ill on July 2, and four days later he died under mysterious circumstances while under the ostensible aegis of the Orlov brothers, one of whom, Grigory, was Catherine’s lover at the time.

Catherine was crowned empress on September 22. Throughout her thirty-four-year reign she continued to carry out the reforms begun by the popular Peter the Great, modernizing Russia, making her a player on the world stage, and improving the lot of many of her subjects, although the empire’s economy continued to depend upon the labor of serfs.

The empress does deserve the epithet “Great,” bestowed by her own nobility in the third year of her reign. The “Catherinian era,” as her reign is sometimes called, is considered a golden age for Russia—a time of geographical expansion (adding approximately two hundred thousand square miles to the empire), as well as advancements in education, medicine, the arts, and culture. Catherine supported the radical new smallpox vaccination, built hospitals, and founded a medical college and the first foundling home. In 1785, she took up playwriting, and her efforts were produced at the palace, albeit under a pseudonym. Her personal art collection formed the basis for the renowned Hermitage. Many of the treasures had been purchased in early 1771 at a bargain-basement price from the collection of France’s disgraced foreign minister, the duc de Choiseul, the architect (with Madame de Pompadour) of Marie Antoinette’s marriage to the dauphin of France, and whose ouster was engineered by Louis XV’s last
maîtresse en titre
, Madame du Barry. (For more on Choiseul’s intrigues, see the chapter on Mesdames de Pompadour and du Barry.)

The final year of Catherine’s reign was devoted to making brilliant marriages for her grandchildren and to the dismemberment of Poland, marking the third time since 1772 that Russia, Prussia, and Austria had conspired to carve her apart. As a consequence of this political wheeling and dealing, Stanislas Poniatowski, Catherine’s former lover, whom she had recommended in 1764 for the job of king
of Poland, found himself unemployed, the hapless poster boy for the slogan “All’s fair in love and war.”

Catherine was as renowned for her libido as some of her fellow male sovereigns, such as England’s Charles II as well as the first, second, and fourth Georges, and France’s Bourbon kings Louis XIV and XV. She insisted that she could not be an effective ruler unless her emotional and physical needs were satisfied.

The empress died from a cerebral stroke on November 6, 1796, at the age of sixty-seven. She was succeeded by her son, Paul, from whom she had been estranged for several years. He had long harbored suspicions that his mother played some role in his father’s demise. After her death, Paul discovered documents in a lockbox belonging to the empress that incriminated both her and the Orlov brothers. He also found a paper removing him from the succession to the throne, which he surreptitiously consigned to the flames. He then disinterred his disgraced father’s body and saw that it was brought to the Winter Palace, where it lay in state beside Catherine’s bier, leaving the impression that their inhabitants had been corulers for decades. On December 5, 1796, the two coffins were entombed alongside each other at the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, the traditional resting place for the Romanov dynasty.

Emperor Paul I ruled for only five years. He was assassinated on March 11, 1801. Coincidentally, one of the murderers was Catherine’s last lover, Platon Zubov. Perhaps the most indelible mark Paul left upon Russia was a testament to how much he detested his mother: the law of succession establishing male primogeniture and forbidding any female from assuming the throne.

C
ATHERINE
THE
G
REAT
(C
ATHERINE
II)
AND
G
RIGORY
P
OTEMKIN
(1739–1791)

On June 28, 1762, Catherine, wife of Emperor Peter III of Russia, stood on the balcony of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg and staged a coup d’état, with the support of the three separate regiments of elite guards. Aware that it conveyed the message that she was as powerful and competent as a man (and that her tall figure was shown
to best advantage in breeches), she was garbed as they were, having borrowed a Preobrazhensky guard’s uniform of red and green. Alongside Catherine stood her seven-year-old son, the archduke Paul. Here indeed was Mother Russia.

A young cavalry officer noticed that Catherine had neglected to affix a sword knot to her saber and gave her his own. She thanked him for his gallantry and asked him his name.

Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin.

He was born into the petty nobility in the small city of Chizhova near what at the time was the Polish border, and displayed an early aptitude for languages and theology. At the tender age of eleven, he enrolled in the army, a fairly customary practice for boys of his age and social station. Five years later, in 1755, he was selected for the elite Horse Guards unit. He was one of the first students to enroll at the University of Moscow, and won the school’s Gold Medal in 1757. Part of the prize was a trip to St. Petersburg later that year.

There, Potemkin received an introduction to the empress Elizabeth, who, after learning that the eighteen-year-old excelled in Greek and theology, recommended that he be promoted to the rank of corporal. But just one taste of the headiness of the imperial court may have turned Potemkin’s head, because he suddenly lost all desire to study and ended up getting kicked out of the university. Although he continued to acquit himself admirably in the guards, Potemkin wasted much of his potential with “drinking, gambling, and promiscuous lovemaking,” in the words of his twentieth-century biographer George Soloveytchik.

After handing Catherine his own
dragonne
, or sword knot, during the declaration of her coup, the twenty-two-year-old Potemkin spurred his mount to return to his men. But his horse wouldn’t budge, as the steed had been trained to ride knee-to-knee in squadron formation and it thought Catherine’s horse was his partner. As he struggled with the bridle, Potemkin had no alternative but to converse with the new empress, and the pair shared a laugh over the situation. It was quite a way to get noticed, and his striking looks—his giant physique and brownish auburn mane of hair crowning a large, proud head—ensured that he wouldn’t soon be forgotten. Years later, when he was Catherine’s coruler, Potemkin told a friend
that he was “thrown into the career of honor, wealth and power—all thanks to a fresh horse.”

Potemkin, however, was a fine equestrian; he was also a master of the theatrical gesture. It’s entirely possible that the young cavalry officer deliberately let his horse delay the proceedings by not returning to formation so that he could press his serendipitous advantage with the equally charismatic empress.

After her successful coup in June 1762, the empress distinguished Potemkin by promoting him to second lieutenant. The following month, after the death of her husband, Peter, Catherine appointed her handsome guardsman a gentleman of the bedchamber, or
Kammerjunker
. For Potemkin’s role in assisting the coup, which seems to have been limited to the loan of a sword knot, he also received a gift of eighteen thousand rubles.

Clever and witty, Potemkin could hold court, even when the court wasn’t his. His wicked talent for mimicry was discovered at a celebration following Catherine’s coronation, when someone dared him to mimic Grigory Orlov, the empress’s favorite. In a high-pitched half-German, half-Russian accent that mispronounced some of the Russian words, he insisted that he didn’t do impressions. The room fell silent. It was a spot-on impression of Her Imperial Majesty’s voice. Luckily for Potemkin, Catherine burst out laughing.

Whenever he would encounter Catherine in one of the hundreds of corridors of the Winter Palace, he would fall to his knees, kiss her hand, and declare that he was passionately in love with her. Because Potemkin was a gentleman of the bedchamber, it was not unusual for the pair to cross paths, but his amorous genuflections were a rash gesture and would have caused quite a scandal had they been observed, especially since the handsome, burly, and jealous Grigory Orlov had been Catherine’s lover for several months. While Catherine and Potemkin may have flirted with each other, she loved Orlov and had no intentions of dumping him. Indeed, Grigory Orlov would remain her consort for another decade. On the other hand, Catherine adored being adored. Not only didn’t she try to discourage Potemkin’s flamboyant posturing; she flirtatiously accepted it.

Later that year Potemkin was sent to Sweden to inform them of Catherine’s coup d’état. On his return to the Russian court, he received
another promotion, appointed the assistant to the procurator of the Holy Synod. As the procurator was the administrative judge in religious matters, it was a post designed to appeal to Potemkin’s passion for theology.

At some point, Potemkin suffered a serious injury, losing the sight in his left eye. No one, from contemporary authors to modern scholars, can pinpoint the date or the circumstances, although they have been able to debunk the myths that sprang up around the mysterious accident. Potemkin was not in a fight with Grigory Orlov, losing the eye to Orlov’s fist, a billiards cue, or during a tennis match. It remains popularly held that the wound, however it was received, was mistreated by a quack physician, which led to Potemkin’s blindness.

What is certain is that after becoming disfigured and losing half his sight, Potemkin believed he had lost all of his looks. Being more than moderately vain, he fell into a funk and withdrew from society, mortified about his appearance. Throughout his life he made sure that his portraits were painted from the same angle, so as to conceal the defect.

Potemkin stayed away from court for eighteen months. During this time, Catherine sent him messages through anonymous female friends. Years later she admitted that Countess Bruce, her confidante, and the
éprouveuse
who was reputed to road test the empress’s lovers (though not Potemkin) for virility, always informed her that Potemkin still loved her.

When he returned to court, he had a bandage swathed about his head like a pirate’s bandanna. Over the next few years, Catherine awarded him a number of political and military appointments in which he invariably distinguished himself, including Guardian of Exotic Peoples, Chamberlain, and Major General of the Cavalry.

In November 1770, Potemkin brought the news of Russia’s victory over the Turks to St. Petersburg, remaining in the capital several months and dining with the empress many times before returning to his military duties. He was at the front once again in December 1773, participating in the siege of Silistria, but never remained far from Her Imperial Majesty’s thoughts. On December 4 she sent Potemkin a supportive note, confirming that he was surrounding himself with “eager, brave, clever and talented people, and so I request that you
should not needlessly expose yourself to danger. On reading this letter, you may ask: why was it written? To this I answer: so that you should have confirmation of how I think about you; for towards you I am always well-disposed.”

Potemkin chose to interpret the note as a direct summons from the empress to come to court. He returned to St. Petersburg at the beginning of 1774, and expected to be welcomed with open arms. But when he discovered that her lover Vassilchikov still remained entrenched as the royal favorite, he hied off to the Alexander Nevsky monastery and flung himself into one of his alternate passions—religion—growing a beard and ostentatiously adopting the life of a monk. Evidently, his perpetual wailing at the top of his lungs about his unrequited devotion to the empress kept the brothers awake at night, and they couldn’t wait to be rid of him.