Peter the Great (152 page)

Phillipe, Due d'Orteans, Regent of France, was tempted. Poland would be a useful ally for France in Austria's rear. If the Emperor were indeed to use his power to put a French prince on the throne of Poland, it might well be worth marrying that prince to the Emperor's daughter. Philippe had certain hesitations: the Empress Catherine's obscure origins and the mystery surrounding the date of her marriage to Peter raised questions as to Elizabeth's legitimacy. But he overcame his doubts and even proposed that the French prince best suited to become the bridegroom—and thus the King of Poland—was his own son, the youthful Due de Chartres. When Peter returned from Persia and heard that de Chartres was being proposed by France, his face broke into a smile. "I know him and esteem him highly," he said to Campredon.

Unfortunately for the negotiating parties, there was an important obstacle over which they had no control: Augustus of Saxony, now fifty-three and ill, still occupied the Polish throne. Although he and Peter were now neither friends nor allies, the Emperor had no intention of actually pushing Augustus off the throne. His proposal was that the Due de Chartres should marry his daughter immediately and then wait for Augustus to die, when the Polish throne would become vacant. The French preferred to wait until the Duke was elected King of Poland before performing the marraige, but Peter refused to wait. What would happen, he asked, if Augustus should live another fifteen years? Campredon insisted that this could not possibly happen. "The King of Poland needs only a new, witty and vivacious mistress to render the event near," he said.*

Eventually, Campredon accepted Peter's view and tried to persuade his government to proceed with the match immediately. He wrote to Paris praising Elizabeth's qualities. "There is nothing but what is agreeable in the person of the Princess Elizabeth," he said. "It may be said indeed that she is a beauty in her figure, her complexion, her eyes and her hands. Her defects, if she has any, are on the side of education and manners, but I am assured that she

*In fact, Augustus did live another ten years, dying in 1733 at the age of sixty-three.

is so intelligent that it will be easy to rectify what is lacking by the care of some skillful and experienced person who should be placed near her if the affair should be concluded."

In the end, the affair was prevented by the objections of Peter's old enemy, George I of England. The Regent of France and his chief minister, the Abbe" Dubois, had made friendship with England the pivot of France's new foreign policy. So close were the two former enemies that, because England now had no diplomatic representation in Russia, Dubois sent Campredon's dispatches from St. Petersburg in the original to King George, who returned them to Paris with marginal comments in his own handwriting. George I had no desire to see Russian influence grow greater. Dubois accomodated him and refused for a while even to answer Campredon's messages. When he did reply, it was to say that England had raised objections and that his envoy was to await instructions. Before the close of 1723, both Dubois and the Regent had died and Louis XV had attained his majority as King of France. The Due de Chartres eventually married a German princess. Peter's daughter Elizabeth never married officially (although it is possible that the secretly married her charming lover Alexis Razhumovsky, whom she raised from a commoner to count); and instead of becoming Queen of Poland, she remained at home to rule as Empress of Russia for twenty-one years.

Peter's plans for his eldest daughter, Princess Anne, bore more immediate fruit. Years before, the fertile mind of Goertz had hatched the idea of marrying his young master, Duke Charles Frederick, to Anne. Goertz had mentioned the plan to Peter, with whom it had taken root. In the intervening years, the youthful Duke's fortunes had soared and plunged. He was the only nephew of the childless King Charles XII, who had kept the young man close to him, and many in Sweden still believed that Charles Frederick should have succeeded to the throne instead of his aunt Ulrika Eleonora and her husband, Frederick of Hesse. In 1721, Charles Frederick traveled secretly to Russia, hoping to win Peter's support for his claim to the Swedish succession and perhaps to seal it by marrying one of the Russian Emperor's daughters. Once in Russia, he nicely served Peter's purposes. Ulrika Eleonora and Frederick saw the young man's presence in St. Petersburg as an implied threat, and this further incentive to peace helped lead to the Treaty of Nystad in 1721, one clause of which was a Russian guarantee not to support the Duke's claims to the Swedish throne. Despite this disappointment, Charles Frederick stayed on in Russia. Catherine liked him, he had a place at all public celebrations and his little refugee court became a rallying point for a number of Swedish officers who had married Russian wives whom they were forbidden to take back to Sweden. Before long, as these homeless souls met every day to expand and refine their taste for vodka, the only nephew of Charles XII, who had fought at his uncle's side and wept at his death, was in danger of being reduced to nothing more than a tame poodle at the Russian court.

Nevertheless, Charles Frederick persisted in his hope of marrying Princess Anne, who was tall, dark-haired and handsome like her mother. She was also intelligent, well mannered and high-spirited, and when she appeared in court dress with her hair dressed in European fashion and set with pearls, foreign envoys were impressed. Charles Frederick's chances improved greatly when a Russian-Swedish defensive alliance was signed in 1724. He was granted the title of Royal Highness and a Swedish pension, and Russia and Sweden agreed to attempt to persuade Denmark to restore lost territory to Holstein. The Duke's position was now thoroughly regularized, and in December 1724 he was pleased to receive a message from Osterman asking him to draw up a marriage contract between himself and Princess Anne. Part of the arrangement, it was understood, was to be the appointment of Charles Frederick as Governor General of Riga.

The betrothal ceremony was grandly celebrated. On the evening before, the Duke's private orchestra serenaded the Empress beneath the windows of the Winter Palace. The following day, after a service at Trinity Church and a dinner with the imperial family, the Duke was betrothed to Anne when Peter himself took rings from each prospective partner and exchanged them. The Emperor shouted "Vivat!" and the betrothal party moved on to a supper, a ball and a display of fireworks. At the ball, Peter, feeling ill, refused to dance, but Catherine, entreated by young Charles Frederick, danced a polonaise with him.

Anne lived only four years after her marriage and died when she was twenty. But fate used her and her husband to continue Peter's line on the Russian throne. They returned to Holstein, where at Kiel, shortly before her death, Anne gave birth to a son whose name became Karl Ulrich Peter. In 1741, when this boy was thirteen, his Aunt Elizabeth became empress. Unmarried and needing to designate an heir, she brought her nephew back to Russia and changed his name to Peter Fedorovich. In 1762, on Elizabeth's death, he succeeded to the throne as Emperor Peter III. Six months later, he was deposed and murdered by supporters of his German wife. This vigorous lady then seized the throne, was crowned Empress Catherine II and became known to the world as Catherine the Great. The son, grandsons and further descendants of Peter III and Catherine the Great occupied the Russian throne until 1917, all of them ultimately tracing their ancestry back through Princess Anne and Charles Frederick of Holstein, nephew of Charles XII, to Peter the Great.

Peter's efforts to marry both his daughters to foreign princes suggested that he did not envision either of them as his successor on the Russian throne. Indeed, no woman had ever sat on that throne. But the death of Peter Petrovich in 1719 left only one remaining male in the House of Romanov—Peter Alexeevich, son of the Tsarevich Alexis. Many Russians regarded him now as the legitimate heir, and Peter was well aware that the traditionalists looked upon the young Grand Duke as their future hope. This hope he was determined to thwart.

But if not Peter Alexeevich, who was to succeed? More and more, as he pondered the problem, the emperor's thoughts turned to the person closest to him: Catherine. Over the years, the passion which had first attracted Peter to this simple, robust young woman had ripened into love, trust and mutual contentment. Catherine was a partner of enormous energy and remarkable adaptability; although she loved luxury, she was equally good-humored in primitive circumstances. She traveled with Peter devotedly even when pregnant, and he often told her that her stamina was greater than his. They had bonds of joy in their daughters and shared grief over the numerous infants they had lost. They took pleasure in each other's company and were melancholy when apart. "Praise God, all is merry here," wrote Peter from Revan in 1719, "but when I come to a country house and you are not there, I feel so sad." Again, he wrote, "But when you state that it's miserable walking alone, although the garden is pleasant, I believe you, for it's the same for me; only pray God that this is the last summer we'll spend apart, and that we may always be together in the future."

It was during one of Peter's lengthy wartime absences that Catherine had prepared a surprise which had particularly delighted her husband. Knowing how much pleasure he took in new buildings, she secretly constructed a country palace about fifteen miles southwest of St. Petersburg. The mansion, built of stone, two stories high, and surrounded by gardens and orchards, was situated on a hill which looked back over the immense, flat plain stretching to the Neva and the city. When Peter returned, Catherine mentioned to him that she had found a charming deserted spot "where Your Majesty would not dislike to build a country house, if you would but take the trouble to go and see it." Peter immediately promised to go and "if the place really answers
your description," to build any house she wished. The following morning, a large party set out, accompanied by a wagon carrying a tent under which Peter suggested they might eat. At the foot of the hill, the road began to climb and suddenly, at the end of an avenue of linden trees, Peter saw the house. He was still astonished when he arrived at the door and Catherine said to him, "This is the country house I have built for my sovereign." Peter was overjoyed and embraced her tenderly, saying, "I see that you wish to show me that there are beautiful places around Petersburg even though they are not on the water." She led him through the house, finally bringing him into a large dining room where a handsome table had been laid. He toasted her taste in architecture, and then Catherine raised her glass to toast the master of the new house. To his further astonishment and delight, the minute the glass touched Catherine's lips, eleven cannon hidden in the garden thundered a salute. When night fell, Peter said that he could never remember a day as happy as this one. In time, the estate came to be known as Tsarskoe Selo, the Tsar's Village, and Empress Elizabeth commanded Rastrelli to begin a gigantic new palace on the site. The magnificent Catherine Palace, which still stands, was named after her mother, the Empress Catherine I.

Peter's respect and gratitude to Catherine had been deepened by her participation in the military campaigns on the Pruth and in Persia. He had acknowledged these feelings publicly by their remarriage and by establishing the Order of St. Catherine in her honor. She already carried the courtesy title of empress as the wife of the Emperor, but now, as he faced the future without a son, he decided to go further. His first step, taken in February 1722 before he and Catherine departed for the Caucasus, was to issue a general decree concerning the succession. It declared that the ancient, time-honored rule by which the throne of the grand dukes of Muscovy and later the Russian tsars had been handed down from " father to son, or occasionally from elder brother to younger brother, was no longer valid. Henceforth, Peter decreed, every reigning sovereign would have absolute power to designate his or her successor. "Thus," he concluded, "children or children's children will not be tempted to fall into the sin of Absalom." The new decree also required all officials and subjects to swear an oath to accept the Emperor's choice.

Revolutionary though it was, the February 1722 ukase was only a preliminary step to a still more sensational act: Peter's declaration that he had decided to formally crown Catherine as empress. A decree of November 15, 1723, declared that whereas

our best beloved Spouse, Consort, and Empress Catherine has been a great support to us, and not only in this, but also in many military operations, putting aside womanly weakness, of her own will she has been present with us and has helped in every way possible
...
for these labors of our Spouse we have decided that by virtue of the supreme power given us by God, she shall be crowned, which, God willing, is to take place formally in Moscow in the present winter.

Peter was treading on dangerous ground. Catherine was a Lithuanian servant girl who had come to Russia as a captive. Was she now to wear the imperial crown and sit on the throne of the Russian tsars? Although the manifesto proclaiming the coronation did not specifically name Catherine as heir, on the night before the coronation Peter told several senators and a number of important church dignitaries at the house of an English merchant that Catherine was being crowned in order to give her the right to rule the state. He waited for objections; he heard none.

The coronation ceremony was to be on the grandest scale. Peter, who was always careful about spending money on himself, commanded that no expense be spared. An imperial coronation mantle was ordered from Paris, and a St. Petersburg jeweler was commissioned to make a new imperial crown more magnificent than any previously worn by a Russian sovereign. The ceremony would be held not in Peter's city, the new capital of St. Petersburg, but in Holy Moscow, inside the Kremlin, according to the traditions of the ancient tsars. Stephen Yavorsky, president of the Holy Synod, and the indefatigable Peter Tolstoy were sent to Moscow six months early with orders to make the ceremony glorious. The Senate, the Holy Synod and every official and nobleman of rank was commanded to be present.