Catherine the Great (17 page)

At the time, her tone was less secure. ‘I would like to know whether they were pleased,’ she wrote plaintively to Sir Charles, following a visit by his compatriots that had made her country estate resemble ‘an English colony’. The ambassador was all suave reassurance: ‘All the English who returned from Oranienbaum are enchanted. I do not believe in spells. But they are enchanted. They speak of you as if I were speaking myself. That is all there is to say.’
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There was more to be said about the costs. Since no account was taken of
inflation, Catherine received the same annual allowance in 1761 that Elizabeth herself had been paid as tsarevna thirty years earlier. Though 30,000 roubles seems generous alongside a general’s salary of 4118–and it was a king’s ransom by comparison with the 20 roubles paid to the palace grooms–it was never enough to sustain the lifestyle to which the grand duchess aspired. (Vorontsov’s account books, kept in his own hand while the Court was in Moscow in 1753, registered an annual turnover of rather more than 35,000 roubles. But the apparently perfect balance between income and expenditure was achieved only because none of his building costs was entered.)
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Catherine’s need for money was an open secret. When Peter requested a subsidy for his German regiments in 1753, the British Resident explained to Whitehall that since the two major generals on his list were none other than the grand duke and his wife, they might not require payment, ‘though I can assure Your Grace that they want it as much as the poorest cornet or ensign in the Holstein troops’.
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Faced with the need to support their outlay, the couple became familiar figures among the foreign communities in St Petersburg, who acted, in the absence of any Russian bank, as the principal source of credit. The British led the field. So well had they cornered the market, indeed, that an envious French diplomat noted at the end of the decade that Peter treated the British merchants ‘less as creditors than as friends’.
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The most influential figure in such deals was Jacob Wolff, British consul general between 1744 and his death in 1759. Having made his fortune in the 1730s by exporting the ‘wondrous drug’ rhubarb from Russia and importing British woollen cloth, the Russian-speaking Wolff developed some of the best connections in St Petersburg. The Austrians made him a baron on the strength of it.
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Wolff even hired out his Italian confectioner to show the Court kitchens how to make ice cream.
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Mostly, however, he lent money. It was thanks to him that Chancellor Bestuzhev managed to pay for his ornate Baroque mansion on the Neva, where Carlo Rossi’s Senate Building now stands. Vorontsov was another desperate client who turned to Ivan Shuvalov only after exhausting his credit with Wolff. In 1754, he mortgaged his Baltic estates to the British consul for 40,000 roubles, repayable over eight years, simultaneously offsetting existing debts of more than 19,000 roubles. And still it was not enough. ‘I have already borrowed 5000 roubles from Baron Wolff this month,’ he confessed in October 1756, ‘and it has all gone to pay my suppliers and labourers; and now I must quickly satisfy these poor people again.’
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Catherine was not far behind. She was evidently already indebted to the baron when she asked for 1000 golden ducats at the end of July 1756: ‘It is with difficulty
that I address myself to you again’. That same month, Williams secretly arranged a much larger loan from the British government for which Wolff was to be the crucial intermediary. Once they had settled a rate of exchange, the ambassador expected to be able to convert the original £10,000 sterling into 42,500 roubles. ‘You can count on me to strike a good bargain for you,’ he promised.
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Clearly expecting to gain a hold over the young grand duchess by acting as her personal banker, Sir Charles advised her ‘to order me to pay Baron Wolff what is due to him, because that will help to arrange your future credit with him. When I have done that, I shall retain the rest, which I shall pay at any time to your order.’
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‘Here is the form which the bond should take,’ he explained, asking Catherine to insert the date:

Since such business methods were evidently foreign to her, he had to explain further in the autumn. ‘All money leaving our Treasury pays in the region of 6 per cent to the Treasury officials, which is repaid when the money is returned. So, on the 44,000 roubles, there is around 2600 to be paid, which you will be reimbursed. I have already paid it in London, and I shall be obliged if you will send it to me at your convenience.’
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But still she did not understand. ‘The form of your bond to Wolff is no bond at all,’ Sir Charles complained, offering her a further model to follow. ‘It would not befit your honour to give a worthless bond as this would convert into a gift what is only a loan. Send word to Wolff to send you your money in gold little by little. He can always find five or six thousand roubles in imperials, and in three or four instalments you will have it all. The sum which you have to send me will amount to 2600 crowns…This will be returned to you when the debt is paid off.’
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Once a suitably clandestine means of payment had been arranged–a process that took several months–Wolff delivered the money in person in November.
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He was only just in time. ‘I learned today,’ wrote Williams a week later, ‘that a Dutch vessel, which arrived at Riga, brought 86,000 gold ducats for [the Austrian ambassador] Count Esterhazy. You see by that, how the Russian trade flourishes!’
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Foreign governments would scarcely have been prepared to invest so heavily in Catherine’s prospects had they not suspected that Elizabeth’s reign might soon come to an end. An empress who spent the summer months ‘rambling from one country house to another, as long as the weather will permit’ had long tried the ambassadors’ patience.
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‘Their way and manner of proceeding here with respect to every thing that has the name of business, is so extraordinary and shocking, that I am surprised they are not ashamed of it,’ complained Britain’s Colonel Guy Dickens in 1750. ‘But we are so entirely given up to our pleasures, that we are deaf to all remonstrances and declare publicly that we will not be interrupted in the pursuit of them.’ He was not the last diplomat to mistake Russian prevarication for idleness. When Bestuzhev seemed, as usual, to have evaporated at the height of a diplomatic crisis, the colonel confessed that the ambassadors knew ‘as little, what his mistress and he are doing, as if they were at Japan’.
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It would probably not have surprised him to learn that the empress had no idea that Britain was an island, or so Dimitry Volkov the secretary of her governing Conference later suggested.
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There is no need to worry about the literal accuracy of this claim, which merely suggests that some eighteenth-century rulers (like some modern American presidents) had a greater grasp of geography than others. Unlike Maria Theresa, who had succeeded to the Austrian throne a year before her own coup, Elizabeth displayed little interest in the details of day-to-day government. Indeed, her aversion to business became so legendary that by Christmas 1751, Europe’s chancelleries were humming with talk of her impending abdication. Following rumours that she might take the veil in the 1730s, an earlier British ambassador had reassured his masters that she had ‘not an ounce of the nun’s flesh about her’.
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Now Guy Dickens again poured scorn on the idea. Though it was true that the empress had talked of entering her new Smolny Convent when she reached her sixtieth birthday, there was no prospect of her abdication since ‘the first act of her successor’s authority, let him be who he will, would be to lock her up in a cloister for the remainder of her life’.
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The real question was how long that life could be expected to last. Elizabeth’s health was already a cause of serious anxiety. The first scare had come in 1749, soon after the Court’s arrival in Moscow, when she was stricken with constipation halfway through the carnival. Catherine learned of the crisis almost immediately from Mme Vladislavova and her valet Yevreinov, but was sworn to secrecy in case her informants lost their jobs.
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Lord Hyndford reported that, apart from Dr Boerhaave, only Aleksey Razumovsky and his brother Kirill, Bestuzhev and Apraksin were aware of ‘the imminent danger’. All four had ‘taken proper
measures for their security, in case of an accident, for they are by no means in favour with the Great Duke’. Once the worst had been averted, Hyndford hoped that Elizabeth would ‘take more care, for altho’ she is of a very strong constitution, yet she neglects herself too much’.
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Hedonism was indeed beginning to take its toll. By the mid-1750s, staircases in all the palaces had been fitted with mechanical chairlifts to allow the increasingly breathless empress to get about. Another was installed in the garden at Peterhof so that she could manoeuvre between the terraces during the summer sanctification ceremonies. Later in the reign, a similar device, operated by a servant in the basement, was even installed at the Alexander Nevsky monastery once the narrow wooden stairs to the upper cathedral proved too steep for Elizabeth to negotiate.
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None of these contraptions could save her from further bouts of debilitating illness. Sensing that the end might be near, she took communion twice in 1756: first on Maundy Thursday and again on 6 August, halfway through the Dormition Fast, when she was too ill even to greet the Preobrazhensky Guards on their annual feast day. Three days of celebrations following the consecration of Chevakinsky’s new chapel at Tsarskoye Selo on 30 July had left her exhausted.
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‘A certain person’s health is worse than ever,’ Catherine confided to Sir Charles on 3 August. ‘They say that her leading doctor wishes to leave in three months’ time, as the prospect gives him nothing to laugh about. During her stay at M[oscow], she tried witchcraft without his knowledge to cure herself; and an old woman, who was employed, has, it is said, succeeded in putting an end to the discomfort from which she was suffering.’ Imploring Catherine to tell him everything she heard about the empress’s health, the ambassador assured her that ‘There is nothing in the world that interests me so much’.
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The extraordinary correspondence into which Catherine and Sir Charles entered over the summer of 1756, while Stanislaw Poniatowski had temporarily been recalled to Poland, gives us the first incontrovertible sign of her maturing political aspirations. By her own subsequent account, Catherine survived the years of misery she suffered as Peter’s consort through ‘ambition alone’, sustained by a pervading sense of destiny–‘a
je ne sais quoi
that never left me in doubt for a moment that sooner or later I should succeed in becoming sovereign empress of Russia in my own right’.
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It seems unlikely that such ambitions were very far developed when she first arrived from Zerbst. Although she claimed quickly to have mastered
the blacker arts of the Court, she can hardly have ‘learned many things’ by feigning sleep during her illness in 1744 because at that time she knew scarcely any Russian. There can be no doubt, however, that, in contrast to her husband (a gossip ‘as discreet as a cannon-ball’), Catherine soon learned to keep her own counsel while redoubling her efforts ‘to gain the affection of everyone, both great and small’. Widely suspected of being a Prussian agent, she understandably claimed to have been no more than ‘a very passive spectator’ of the great debates on foreign policy when she first arrived in Russia–‘very discreet and more or less indifferent’ was how she later described herself.
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Nevertheless, the frequency of her contact with foreign diplomats gave her plenty of opportunities to develop her political antennae. One of the longest entries in the
Complete Collected Laws of the Russian Empire
describes the ceremonial by which foreign ambassadors presented their credentials to the tsar.
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Peter and Catherine had a crucial part to play in these audiences and often found themselves in the company of the ambassadors, not only at regular Court reception days, but also on state occasions. While Elizabeth, ‘dressed in her regimentals’, chose as usual to dine with her intimates at the banquet on Catherine’s name day in 1751, it was the grand duchess and her husband who entertained the great officers of the crown and the foreign ministers.
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By then, Catherine had become involved in complex (and ultimately fruitless) negotiations over Peter’s Holstein possessions. The Holsteiners were represented by the Danish envoy, Count Lynar, a burly redhead with a penchant for lilac and flesh-pink clothes who took such great care of his complexion that he was reputed to wear gloves and face cream in bed. (Lest such behaviour be mistaken for effeminacy, Lynar was swift to boast of his eighteen children, claiming that he had always prepared their wet nurses by getting them pregnant too.)
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To practical experiences such as these, Catherine added further intellectual reflection. In her self-imposed seclusion after the birth of her son, she read more seriously than ever before. This, it seems, is when she first tackled Montesquieu’s
Spirit of the Laws
, the eighteenth century’s greatest work of political philosophy, which was later to be the main inspiration for the Instruction (
Nakaz
) she presented to the Legislative Commission she summoned in 1767. She also immersed herself in the
Annals
of Tacitus, and since no reader of Tacitus in Elizabeth’s Russia could fail to hear the contemporary echoes of the Praetorian Guards’ role in deciding the fate of the Roman emperors, his book produced ‘a singular revolution’ in Catherine’s mind. ‘Aided perhaps by my depressed state of mind at the time, I began to see many things in black and searched to find deeper causes for the various events which presented themselves to my sight.’
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