Great Catherine (29 page)

Ambassador Breteuil, who became a confidant to Catherine as the new reign began, wrote in his dispatches that she was suffering the greatest humiliation, and that she seemed perpetually

downcast. Yet beneath her abject pose he detected a growing resentment.

"The empress is in the cruelest condition, and treated with the most marked scorn," he wrote. "She puts up with the emperor's conduct toward her with great impatience and also the haughty airs of Mademoiselle Vorontzov. I do not doubt but that the will of this princess, whose courage and force I know well, will drive her sooner or later to take extreme measures."

He added that Catherine was only too aware of her husband's power to shut her away, as Peter the Great had shut away his first wife. The story was well known at court. Emperor Peter, tiring of the wife whom he had been forced to marry for reasons of state—-just as Peter III had been forced to marry Catherine—had taken a mistress to whom he was devoted. He demanded that the unwanted wife, Eudoxia, voluntarily enter a convent and thus dissolve the marriage. When she refused, he ordered his servants to abduct her. They came to her apartments by stealth, stifled her protests and bundled her into a cart. No one came to her aid. A few months later Eudoxia became a nun, and the emperor married his mistress.

Peter's power to banish her was very much on Catherine's mind as she went into labor on April 18. She had recently moved into a suite of rooms far from her husband's in a newly completed wing of the Winter Palace. It was to her advantage to be far removed from the royal apartments, given her condition, yet in keeping her at a physical distance Peter was slighting his wife, and she knew it. (Significantly, Elizabeth Vorontzov was given rooms adjoining the emperor's.)

Preparations for Catherine's delivery had been kept to a minimum. The court did not officially acknowledge the pregnancy; Catherine's servants put out the story that their mistress had a "slow fever," and was indisposed. Those few people who saw her in the last days before she gave birth remarked that she was dangerously depressed and ill. They hardly recognized her and worried that she might not live.

It is not clear how many people actually knew that Catherine was carrying Orlov's child. She certainly did nothing to advertise it, and made every effort to disguise it. There can be no doubt that Peter knew, as did his closest advisers. But to him the child was merely one more proof that Catherine was disloyal and immoral. And if things went as he hoped, it would soon cease to matter what Catherine did or how many bastards she produced. She would be banished from court, she would never trouble Peter again.

The tiny boy that came into the world on April 18, just three days before his mother's thirty-third birthday, was given the name Alexis Gregorevich, Alexis son of Gregory. No bells rang, no guns were fired. There were no celebrations, official or otherwise. For the first time in Catherine's experience, her child remained with her, a healthy son whom she could gaze on and take pleasure in. He belonged to her—to her and to Gregory Orlov. No jealous empress could stride in and take him away.

On Catherine's birthday, when by custom the courtiers came to pay their respects, the new mother made herself presentable and received the congratulations of her friends. But she retired early, as she often did, too exhausted to sit through the long hours of dinner and the night of dissipation that was sure to follow it. She knew she would not be missed.

Only a week after the birth of her son Catherine had what must have been a tense and awkward interview. Etiquette demanded that she receive Sergei Saltykov, and she dared not refuse to receive him lest her refusal arouse suspicion. She knew why he had been brought to court, and she may have known—or surmised—that he had so far been silent when questioned by Peter about what had gone on between them so many years earlier.

In the years since they had seen one another, Catherine had matured into a shrewd, careful political survivor, visibly wearied by her role yet handsome in her maturity, while Saltykov, his good looks marred by sagging skin and age lines, his black hair

thinning and receding from his creased forehead, was an unctuous, aging roue. That Saltykov had continued his career of casual seduction Catherine knew from reports reaching her from the foreign courts where he had been in residence. No doubt she had long since ceased to care what he did, but given her romantic sensibility, she must have felt an echo of her old pain when she saw him. He had taken advantage of her, exploited her and left her disillusioned. Now he was in a position to do her substantial harm, but only at greater cost to himself. "People are always driven by self-interest," she liked to say, quoting Machiavelli. If ever there was a time when she hoped self-interest would prevail, it was now.

No record remains of the meeting between Catherine and Saltykov. Catherine wrote in her memoirs that when she first knew him, Saltykov was "a very proud and suspicious man." One wonders whether his pride continued to sustain him, for by 1762 he was both disgraced and disappointed. His indiscretion with Catherine had sealed his fate; he would never be anything but a low-ranking diplomat, kept in exile from his homeland, a peripatetic cosmopolite wandering from court to court and bedroom to bedroom. Even if he escaped the full force of Peter's wrath, he could expect to suffer. Knowing all this, and seeing what time had done to the man to whom she once yielded in joyful abandon, the man who had taken her virginity, Catherine must have had to steel herself to get through her hour with Saltykov, an hour of mutual politeness and surface pleasantries, with, one assumes, no mention of the blond, brown-eyed boy who would always remain a bond between them.

Events were overtaking the new regime. In the soldiers' barracks, murmurs of discontent had grown into clamorous shouts of protest. Fed by the constant harangues of the Orlovs, who stirred up the men by praising Catherine and defaming Peter at every opportunity, and who passed out money and drink in Catherine's name, dissatisfaction was ripening into rebellion.

Peter's military reforms were seen as punitive, his peace treaty with Prussia—a treaty, it was said, that had been drafted by an envoy of Frederick—an affront too grave to be borne. The men hated their new German commander, and hated having to wear the blue uniforms of Prussia even more. Their pay was slow in reaching them, and there was talk of a new campaign against Denmark, not to uphold Russian sovereignty but to preserve the integrity of the emperor's Holstein lands.

Preparations for the new campaign were intensifying as the cold weather retreated and the river ice, which had been a thick solid sheet, began to grind and tear itself into huge chunks that floated toward the sea. Quantities of arms and provisions, equipment and supplies were carted into the Petersburg barracks and stored in warehouses. Rumor had it that Peter intended to lead the Russian army himself, as soon as the warm season arrived and all the needed equipment had been delivered. It was to be his moment of glory, the chance the late empress had so long denied him, to prove himself on the field of battle. And he would be fighting on the Prussian side, just as he had always wanted to do. Some Russian units, it was said, were already being transferred to Prussian command.

As they made ready to follow a leader they detested into a military adventure they abhorred, the men began to talk openly of how much better things would be if the emperor's wife, a woman who knew and understood her adopted country instead of despising it, were on the throne. Some remained faithful to the man they viewed as their legitimate sovereign, however contemptible he seemed to them. But many hoped for change, and pledged themselves, in secret, to help to bring it about.

To the extreme disquiet among the soldiers was added the condemnation of the clergy when the emperor decided to augment his depleted treasury by seizing church lands.

Plans had been made in the previous reign to secularize vast amounts of property held by religious houses, but Elizabeth had not taken any steps to implement them. Now Peter revived the

scheme, and with a vengeance. He had never bothered to disguise his contempt for the Russian church, with its lengthy and intricate liturgy, its rich, sonorous vocal music and its panoply of saints enshrined in jewel-studded icons. In truth, all religion was distasteful to Peter; Catherine had once said of him that she had "never known a more perfect atheist in practice than he, though he often feared the devil and God too, and more often despised them both." Throughout his years in Russia Peter had continued to prefer the relative simplicity and aesthetic severity of Lutheran-ism to the coruscations and labyrinthine rituals of Russian Orthodoxy, and he had often insulted priests and pious worshippers when he deliberately interrupted services with loud laughter and impudent remarks.

Troops of soldiers were sent out into the countryside to take possession of farmlands that had belonged to the church for hundreds of years. Where they encountered resistance, they seized the properties by force. Though many of the soldiers found this work odious, they obeyed when commanded to break into the houses of priests and higher clergy and ransack their contents. No chapel, hermitage or monastery was spared; even the bare cells of the monks were raided and rifled.

Official protests on behalf of the clergy were ignored and in fact Peter seemed to be carrying out a personal vendetta against the priests, commanding them to cut their long hair and waist-length beards and to exchange their long black robes for the sober dark coats and breeches, linen shirts and tricorn hats of Lutheran ministers. Insult was added to injury when the emperor announced that the sons of all married clergy were no longer to be exempt from conscription, as traditionally they had been.

But the worst was still to come. Not content to attack the wealth of the church and longstanding clerical traditions, Peter began to make what many believers saw as an assault on faith itself. He summoned Archbishop Dmitri of Novgorod, the man who only a few months earlier had saluted him as autocrat and led the senior court dignitaries in taking their solemn oath

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of allegiance to him, and ordered him to remove from the churches all icons except those representing Christ and the Virgin Mary.

No greater blow to traditional Russian piety could be imagined. The icons of the saints were at the heart of Orthodox belief. Every day the faithful knelt to worship them, soldiers marched into battle behind them, every Russian home displayed them in the "beautiful corner," where a lamp was kept burning every hour of the day and night to illuminate the elongated, thin-lipped faces and glowing eyes of the holy images. In the marketplace, huge piles of icons were for sale and merchants in sacred art carried on a thriving business. Every Russian owned at least one icon; venerated icons were handed down through the generations and were among a family's most valued possessions. Especially revered images were believed to manifest miraculous powers to heal and bless. In churches large and small, holy pictures overwhelmed the worshiper, looking down from every pillar and wall, arranged in glittering rows on the tall iconostasis that represented the gateway to the holy of holies.

A cry went up from the faithful: their precious icons must not be taken down. The saintly images must not be desecrated. The emperor had finally gone too far. He must be replaced. And his obvious replacement was Catherine. In the streets of Petersburg and Moscow there was talk of the change that had to come. Seditious speeches were made, rebellious murmurs disquieted those with a stake in maintaining the present government.

"Everyone hates the emperor," Breteuil noted. "The empress has courage in her soul and in her mind; she is as loved and respected as the emperor is hated and despised." The hatred was spreading, but it was as yet impotent. "To tell the truth, everyone is cowardly and a slave," the ambassador added, not knowing to what extent the people he saw as cowards and slaves were already preparing to carry out a grand upheaval.

Baron Korff, chief of police, was well aware of the extent of the dissatisfaction in the capital. Throughout April and May his spies

brought him word of disturbances in every quarter of the city, of disloyal talk in the guards barracks, of grievances held by the police themselves. He knew that unless the police took immediate and forceful action, there might well be an insurrection. Yet he decided to do nothing.

For months the baron had been among the emperor's intimates, enjoying the benefits of Peter's special favor. He had been a frequent guest at the lengthy banquets at the Winter Palace, both a witness to and a participant in the debauchery that went on there. But then, suddenly, at the end of May, the emperor's favor evaporated. Capriciously, and most unwisely, Peter picked a quarrel with Korff, with the result that the baron ceased to be a welcome guest in the imperial quarters. Within days the baron was making himself a familiar presence in Catherine's apartments. He had chosen sides; he was betting that, when the emperor went off to war, as he was about to do, Petersburg would rise for Catherine. And he meant to throw his weight behind the winning side.

Early in June Peter gave a great banquet to celebrate the peace he had made with Prussia. Hundreds of guests made their way to the grand salon where long tables had been laid with fine white linen, shining golden plates and huge silver epergnes. Long white tapers set in gilt candelabra illuminated the vast room, though the evening, glimpsed through the long windows, was softly bright. The sun would not set until close to midnight, and above its blue depths the Neva reflected the warm orange and gold tints of the sky.

The salon filled with guests, the first courses were served. The emperor sat on a raised dais, with Elizabeth Vorontzov, her ugliness adorned with the late empress's rubies and sapphires, seated beside him. Nearby was the evening's guest of honor, the Prussian envoy. Far down the table, separated from the dais by hundreds of guests, sat Catherine, self-composed and sociable, conspicuously dressed in black for she was still in mourning for Elizabeth.