Simon Dixon - Catherine the Great

Generally the preserve of foreigners, and provoked most often by the failure of a particular ambassador’s diplomacy at St Petersburg, such verdicts owed more to stereotypical assumptions about female rule than to the realities of Catherine’s reign. The political impact of her sex was felt less in her relationship with her favourites than in her treatment of her two grandsons. They were not, however, to be born in the way that she had originally anticipated when the pregnant Natalia was rushed back from Moscow in the summer of 1775. The grand duchess went into labour early in the morning of 10 April 1776, at the height of the crisis between Catherine and Potëmkin. At first there seemed no reason to panic, but when it emerged that the birth canal was too narrow—‘four fingers wide,’ as the watching empress subsequently described it to Frau Bielke, ‘when the baby’s shoulders measured eight’—the midwife left Natalia to writhe in agony for forty-eight hours before calling a surgeon. The unborn child, a large boy, may already have been dead before forceps were used in a vain attempt to save his mother. The cause of the obstruction, a deformation of her spine, was revealed only at the autopsy. Natalia died on 15 April, leaving Paul inconsolable for three days. Even the annual cannon salute to herald the breaking of the ice on the Neva was cancelled as a mark of respect. 19Dressed ‘very richly in white satin’, with her dead infant at her feet, the grand duchess lay in state at the Alexander Nevsky monastery, where mourners ‘might go and see them, walk up to the coffin, kiss her hand, and then walk round on the other side, but were not suffered to stop, and were obliged to go out again immediately’. 20Corberon, who blamed Catherine for Natalia’s negligent treatment, noted that she ‘gave the impression of crying’ at the funeral. ‘But I give no credence to her tears: her heart is too dry.’ 21

The empress certainly did not linger over her disappointment. As she explained to Voltaire on 25 June: ‘We are currently very busy recouping our losses.’ 22That meant finding a new wife for Paul and there was only one serious candidate: the sixteen-year-old Princess Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg, passed over in 1773 only because she was too young. Ruthless in a crisis, Catherine bought off her existing fiancé Prince Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstadt—‘I never want to see him again,’ she told Grimm—and cunningly soured Paul’s memory of Natalia by revealing her dalliance with Andrey Razumovsky. While Field Marshal Rumyantsev and Prince Henry of Prussia, visiting St Petersburg for the second time, escorted Paul to Berlin for an audience with his hero, Frederick the Great, the empress made arrangements to welcome Sophia to Russia. 23Having ordered twelve dresses and plenty of Dutch bedlinen, she turned her attentions to the apartments in the Winter Palace, marking out the position of new stoves on the plans and dictating a revised colour scheme for the furnishings: pink and white for the bedroom, with columns of blue glass; blue and gold for the state bedroom, with a new lit de parade and a drawing of Raphael’s loggias in the Vatican ‘which I will give you’; cushions for the sofa in the sitting room ‘in gold fabric which I shall supply’. All the rooms were to be hung with tapestries of a specified colour and type, and ‘the second ante-chamber should be decorated in stucco or artificial marble with ornaments as pretty as they are rich’. 24

When Paul returned with his new consort at the end of August 1776, barely four months after the death of his first wife, Catherine promptly declared herself ‘crazy’ about a girl who seemed to have everything Natalia had lacked. ‘She is exactly what I had hoped for: the figure of a nymph; the colour of lilies and roses; the finest complexion in the world; tall and broad-shouldered, yet slight.’ 25Whereas Natalia’s progress in the Russian language had been maddeningly slow, Sophia had already begun to master the Cyrillic alphabet in Berlin. Catherine sent a tutor to ‘lessen the task of learning’ on the journey. 26She need not have worried: re-baptised Grand Duchess Maria Fëdorovna on her conversion to Orthodoxy, Sophia was to prove the most dutiful of consorts. When the empress led the couple to the altar on 26 September, Grigory Orlov held a crown above Paul’s head after the Orthodox custom. Betskoy, now in his seventies, performed the same service for the bride, his hand trembling with the effort. Why had this honour been granted to such a grizzled courtier? ‘Because bastards are lucky,’ grumbled Corberon, who left the ceremony early finding the crowded chapel uncomfortably warm. Dinner was more agreeable, and much the same in form as Catherine’s own wedding feast thirty-one years earlier. Seated between bride and groom, she dined under a canopy with Alexander and Lev Naryshkin in attendance, facing four tables for statesmen of the first four ranks and their wives:

The gallery above was packed with people and occupied by the orchestra, to whom no one listened. The famous Nolly [the violinist, Antonio Lolli, who had given four public concerts to great acclaim in the spring] played well to no purpose amidst this brouhaha and the fanfare that followed the toast to Her Imperial Majesty. The tables were narrow and served en filet ; they were placed underneath the orange trees, which poked their rounded heads out over the guests and made a very fine effect. 27

In the tradition established by Peter the Great, there followed ten days of celebrations, including the obligatory firework display and a reprise of the opera Armida (‘I saw and heard little because I was talking,’ Corberon confessed, ‘but the music was feeble, so they say, and only one duet gave me pleasure’). 28For once, such public festivities were not the prelude to personal disaster. Only mildly offended by the tone of Paul’s written instructions urging thrift, regularity and obedience, his spouse devoted herself to the difficult task of pleasing both her husband and the empress. 29In time, the couple would irritate Catherine with their profligacy and her son’s eye would begin to wander. In the short term, however, his personal life proved noticeably less volatile than hers. As a waspish Harris noted in February 1778, ‘The great duke and duchess live indeed on the best terms, and offer an example they neither receive, nor can get imitated.’ 30

By then the Court had launched into another round of lavish celebrations following the birth of the couple’s first son on 12 December 1777. Potëmkin hosted a dinner reputed to have cost 50,000 roubles and the ambassadors were invited to inspect the table decorations for Catherine’s banquet for top-ranking Russians, ‘set out with jewels to the amount of upwards of two millions sterling’. 31There was more to this than mere magnificence. In christening her grandson Alexander, the empress associated him with both Alexander of Macedon and St Alexander Nevsky, the medieval warrior saint adopted by Peter the Great as the protector of his new capital. As Catherine explained to Grimm, Nevsky ‘was respected by the Tatars, the republic of Novgorod submitted to him out of respect for his virtues, he gave the Swedes a good thrashing, and the title of grand duke was conferred upon him thanks to his reputation’. 32At 8 a.m. on 30 August 1778, the empress solemnly initiated the infant as a knight of the Order of St Alexander and processed in her carriage to the monastery for the annual liturgy. It was not a ritual dear to Catherine’s heart—‘You stand there like a dog,’ she had once complained to Potëmkin, ‘and no one thanks you for it’ 33—but this year she had the consolation of laying the foundation stone for the massive neoclassical Trinity Cathedral commissioned from Ivan Starov in November 1774. He had set to work while the Court was in Moscow and in February 1776 Catherine had confirmed his designs with a budget of half a million roubles. For the foundation ceremony, a yellow canvas awning, emblazoned with the warrior saint’s monogram, had been stretched out above a wooden gallery, decorated by Corinthian columns, built out over the foundations. To the accompaniment of cannon and choristers, Catherine ceremonially lowered into the ground a silver shrine containing the remains of Peter the Great’s patron saint, St Andrew the First-Called, and a silver salver engraved in commemoration of the event. 34