Reign of Catherine the Great – 2

After Voltaire and Madame de Sévigné, came Montesquieu, Baronius, Tacitus, Bayle, Brantôme, and the early volumes of the Encyclopædia.

Continuing Reign of Catherine the Great,
our selection from W. Knox Johnson. The selection is presented in six easy 5 minute installments.

Previously in Reign of Catherine the Great.

After Voltaire and Madame de Sévigné, came Montesquieu, Baronius, Tacitus, Bayle, Brantôme, and the early volumes of the Encyclopædia. But her gay, expansive nature was not capable, for long, of purely intellectual or stoic consolation. In a moral environment such as that of Elizabeth’s court it was too easy for the reader of Brantôme to seek elsewhere the “love” romances had spoken of, but marriage had denied her. She was remarked by all in her day for her gift of fascination. To outward observers she seemed at this time a radiant and happy presence, as Burke saw Marie Antoinette, the morning-star of a pleasure-loving society, “full of life, and splendor, and joy.” She says that she never considered herself extremely beautiful, but “she was able to please, et cela était mon fort.” All contemporary testimony bears out this singular faculty of attracting others, rarest of natural gifts, but to a woman such as Catherine a very perilous one.

Not even those set to spy upon her could resist her personal magnetism. She could be beautiful or terrible, playful or majestic, at pleasure. At St. Petersburg there were few wits, and her intellectual superiority to those about her was sufficient to gain her the nickname among her husband’s friends of “Madame la Ressource.” Despite Peter’s difficult relations with her, he would refer to her in most of his perplexities, especially when political, connected with his duchy of Holstein. “I don’t understand things very well myself,” he would explain to strangers, “but my wife understands everything.” We observe in the Autobiography a fixed idea to “gain over” as many people as possible, to attach them to her interests; partly because of the opposition to the Czarina’s circle, which gradually came to characterize the “Jeune Cour,” but specially in the service of those vague, ambitious foreshadowings which from her first years in Russia had possessed her mind. Clear-sighted, with a keen sense of her husband’s inadequacy to his position, warned by the implacable hostility of his mistress Elizabeth Vorontsoff and her relations, above all with a passionate thirst to realize her presentiment of greatness, she was instinctively preparing for some emergency, she knew not exactly what. As for the more precise premonitions of the memoirs, they are what would naturally appear to her after the fait accompli. Ambition, calculation looking before and after, patience in adversity, quickness to note and use the weakness of those about her, a steady indifference to unessentials, a political intelligence unhampered by the keener sensibilities — these are the master traits of the Catherine of the Autobiography.

So far, then, of these earlier years, while we have the memoirs with us. We must now pass quickly over many things. The motto of the Romanoffs might be taken from Macbeth: “The near in blood, the nearer bloody.” * But in that somber history there is no darker page than the conspiracy of 1762.

[* Macbeth, ii, 3. That is, the nearer in relationship the heirs of power to the source of their inheritance, the greater their danger at the hands of bloody usurpers (like Macbeth). — ED.]

In January Elizabeth died and the Grand Duke ascended the throne, quietly enough, as Peter III. But the position of Catherine was worse than before. The Czar was completely under the influence of her enemies; he insulted her in public; and it seemed certain that his next step would be to divorce her, throw her into prison, and marry Elizabeth Vorontsoff. He had once already ordered her arrest, which his uncle had afterward persuaded him to retract. The very reforms with which he had begun his reign worked against him. He had made himself unpopular not only with the clergy, but with the Preobrajenski Guards, which, like the praetorians of the Roman Empire, disposed of the throne. He smoked and drank till three or five o’clock in the morning, writes the French ambassador; yet he would be up again at seven maneuvering his troops. He would order a hundred cannon to be fired together that he might have a foretaste of war, and his eccentricities in general were intensified by absolute power. The history of the coup-d’état is still obscure. A considerable party, however, formed round Catherine: the brothers Gregory and Alexis Orloff won over several regiments, and the princess Dashkoff gained adherents in society. Matters were precipitated by the accidental arrest of one of the conspirators; and although their plans were incoherent, the good-fortune of Catherine carried her through. At five o’clock in the morning of July 9th Alexis Orloff entered her room at Peterhoff, and told her to set out for St. Petersburg, where she was to be proclaimed immediately. She hastened there with the Orloffs. Three regiments, to whom vodka had judiciously been dispensed beforehand, took the oath of allegiance with enthusiasm; and others followed suit. Peter was thunderstruck. On the advice of Marshal Muennich he embarked for Cronstadt, where he was challenged, and demanded admittance as emperor. “Il n’y a plus d’empéreur!” replied the commandant, Talitsine. He hurried back again, and after agonies of indecision finally abdicated. “He had lost his crown,” as Frederick said scornfully, “like a naughty child sent to bed with a whipping.”

So far the revolution had been bloodless, but its darker hour was to come. “I placed the deposed Emperor under the command of A. Orloff, with four ‘chosen’ officers and a detachment of ‘quiet’ and ‘sober’ men and sent him to a distance of twenty-seven versts from St. Petersburg to a place called Ropsha, ‘very retired,’ but very pleasant” — so runs Catherine’s account to Poniatowski. On the 15th he was dead; of “hemorrhoidal colic,” said the official announcement; strangled, as Europe rightly believed, by Alexis Orloff with his own hands. It is hardly possible that this hideous murder was without Catherine’s at least tacit consent. She certainly condoned the crime. There was danger in a name; and her sentiment was doubtless that of Lord Essex when the fate of Stafford hung in the balance: “Stone dead hath no fellow!” Already, where the Neva turns toward the Baltic, one wretched boy-Czar languished beneath the melancholy fortress of the Schluesselburg. Two years, and he too, after having known the bitterness of life, will be violently done to death in his turn. But Voltaire wrote to Madame du Deffand: “I am aware that people reproach her with some bagatelles à propos of that husband of hers; however, one really cannot intermeddle in these family squabbles!”

Continued.

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