[1] See the study in Baron Fr. von Hugel's _Mystical Element in
Religion_ (1909).
CATHERINE I. (1683-1727), empress of Russia. The true character and
origin of this enigmatical woman were, until quite recently, among the
most obscure problems of Russian history. It now appears that she came
of a Lithuanian stock, and was one of the four children of a small
Catholic yeoman, Samuel Skovronsky; but her father died of the plague
while she was still a babe, the family scattered, and little Martha was
adopted by Pastor Gluck, the Protestant superintendent of the Marienburg
district. Frau Gluck finally rid herself of the girl by marrying her to
a Swedish dragoon called Johan. A few months later, the Swedes were
compelled by the Russians to evacuate Marienburg, and Martha became one
of the prisoners of war of Marshal Sheremetev, who sold her to Prince
Menshikov, at whose house, in the German suburb of Moscow, Peter the
Great first beheld and made love to her in his own peculiar fashion.
After the birth of their first daughter Catherine, Peter made no secret
of their relations. He had found, at last, the woman he wanted, and she
soon became so indispensable to him that it was a torment to be without
her. The situation was regulated by the reception of Martha into the
Orthodox Church, when she was rechristened under the name of Catherine
Alekseyevna, the tsarevich Alexius being her godfather, by the bestowal
upon her of the title _Gosudaruinya_ or sovereign (1710), and, finally
(1711), by her public marriage to the tsar, who divorced the tsaritsa
Eudoxia to make room for her. Henceforth the new tsaritsa was her
husband's inseparable companion. She was with him during the campaign of
the Pruth, and Peter always attributed the successful issue of that
disastrous war to the courage and sang-froid of his consort. She was
with him, too, during his earlier Caspian campaigns, and was obliged on
this occasion to shear off her beautiful hair and wear a close-fitting
fur cap to protect her from the rays of the sun.
By the _ukaz_ of 1722 Catherine was proclaimed Peter's successor, to the
exclusion of the grand-duke Peter, the only son of the tsarevich
Alexius, and on the 7th of May 1724 was solemnly crowned empress-consort
in the Uspensky cathedral at Moscow, on which occasion she wore a crown
studded with no fewer than 2564 precious stones, surmounted by a ruby,
as large as a pigeon's egg, supporting a cross of brilliants. Within a
few months of this culminating triumph, she was threatened with utter
ruin by the discovery of a supposed _liaison_ with her gentleman of the
bedchamber, William Mons, a handsome and unscrupulous upstart, and the
brother of a former mistress of Peter. A dangerously familiar but
perfectly innocent flirtation is, however, the worst that can fairly be
alleged against Catherine on this occasion. So Peter also seemed to have
thought, for though Mons was decapitated and his severed head, preserved
in spirits, was placed in the apartments of the empress, she did not
lose Peter's favour, attended him during his last illness, and closed
his eyes when he expired (January 28, 1725). She was at once raised to
the throne by the party of progress, as represented by Prince Menshikov
and Count Tolstoy, whose interests and perils were identical with those
of the empress, before the reactionary party had time to organize
opposition, her great popularity with the army powerfully contributing
to her success. The arch-prelates of the Russian church, Theodosius,
archbishop of Novgorod, and Theophanes, archbishop of Pskov, were also
on her side for very much the same reason, both of them being unpopular
innovators who felt that, at this crisis, they must stand or fall with
Tolstoy and Menshikov.
The great administrative innovation of Catherine's reign was the
establishment of the _Verkhovny Tainy Sovyet_, or supreme privy council,
by way of strengthening the executive, by concentrating affairs in the
hands of a few persons, mainly of the party of Reform (_Ukazoi_ February
26, 1726). As to the foreign policy of Catherine I. (principally
directed by the astute Andrei Osterman), if purely pacific and extremely
cautious, it was, nevertheless, dignified, consistent and independent.
Russia, by the mere force of circumstances, now found herself opposed to
England, chiefly because Catherine protected Charles Frederick, duke of
Holstein, and George I. found that the Schleswig-Holstein question might
be reopened to the detriment of his Hanoverian possessions. Things came
to such a pass that, in the spring of 1726, an English squadron was sent
to the Baltic and cast anchor before Reval. The empress vigorously
protested, and the fleet was withdrawn, but on the 6th of August
Catherine acceded to the anti-English Austro-Spanish league. Catherine
died on the 16th of May 1727. Though quite illiterate, she was an
uncommonly shrewd and sensible woman, and her imperturbable good nature
under exceptionally difficult circumstances, testifies equally to the
soundness of her head and the goodness of her heart.
See Robert Nisbet Bain, _The Pupils of Peter the Great_, chs. ii.-iii.
(London, 1897); _The First Romanovs_, ch. xiv. (London, 1905).
(R. N. B.)
CATHERINE II. (1729-1796), empress of Russia, was the daughter of
Christian Augustus, prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, and his wife, Johanna
Elizabeth of Holstein-Gottorp. The exact date and place of her birth
have been disputed, but there appears to be no reason to doubt that she
was right in saying that she was born at Stettin on the 2nd of May 1729.
Her father, who succeeded to the principality of Anhalt-Zerbst in 1746
and died in 1747, was a general in the Prussian service, and, at the
time of her birth, was military commandant at Stettin. Her baptismal
name was Sophia Augusta Frederica. In accordance with the custom then
prevailing in German princely families, she was educated chiefly by
French governesses and tutors. In 1744 she was taken to Russia, to be
affianced to the grand-duke Peter, the nephew of the empress Elizabeth
(q.v.), and her recognized heir. The princess of Anhalt-Zerbst was the
daughter of Christian Albert, bishop of Lubeck, younger brother of
Frederick IV., duke of Holstein-Gottorp, Peter's paternal grandfather.
The choice of her daughter as wife of the future tsar was the result of
not a little diplomatic management in which Frederick the Great took an
active part, the object being to strengthen the friendship between
Prussia and Russia, to weaken the influence of Austria and to ruin the
chancellor Bestuzhev, on whom Elizabeth relied, and who was a known
partisan of the Austrian alliance. The diplomatic intrigue failed,
largely through the flighty intervention of the princess of
Anhalt-Zerbst, a clever but very injudicious woman. But Elizabeth took a
strong liking to the daughter, and the marriage was finally decided on.
The girl had spared no effort to ingratiate herself, not only with the
empress, but with the grand-duke and the Russian people. She applied
herself to learning the language with such zeal that she rose at night
and walked about her bedroom barefoot repeating her lessons. The result
was a severe attack of congestion of the lungs in March 1744. During the
worst period of her illness she completed her conquest of the good-will
of the Russians by declining the religious services of a Protestant
pastor, and sending for Simon Todorskiy, the orthodox priest who had
been appointed to instruct her in the Greek form of Christianity. When
she wrote her memoirs she represented herself as having made up her mind
when she came to Russia to do whatever had to be done, and to profess to
believe whatever she was required to believe, in order to be qualified
to wear the crown. The consistency of her character throughout life
makes it highly probable that even at the age of fifteen she was mature
enough to adopt this worldly-wise line of conduct. Her father, who was a
convinced Lutheran, was strongly opposed to his daughter's conversion,
and supplied her with books of controversy to protect her Protestantism.
She read them, and she listened to Todorskiy, and to other advisers who
told her that the Russian crown was well worth a mass, or that the
differences between the Greek and Lutheran churches were mere matters of
form. On the 28th of June 1744 she was received into the Orthodox Church
at Moscow, and was renamed Catherine Alexeyevna. On the following day
she was formally betrothed, and was married to the archduke on the 21st
of August 1745 at St Petersburg.
At that time Catherine was essentially what she was to remain till her
death fifty-one years later. It was her boast that she was as "frank and
original as any Englishman." If she meant that she had a compact
character, she was right. She had decided on her line in life and she
followed it whole-heartedly. It was her determination to become a
Russian in order that she might the better rule in Russia, and she
succeeded. She acquired a full command of all the resources of the
language, and a no less complete understanding of the nature of the
Russian people. It is true that she remained quite impervious to
religious influences. The circumstances of her conversion may have
helped to render her indifferent to religion, but their influence need
not be exaggerated. Her irreligion was shared by multitudes of
contemporaries who had never been called upon to renounce one form of
Christianity and profess belief in another in order to gain a crown. Her
mere actions were, like those of other and humbler people, dictated by
the conditions in which she lived. The first and the most important of
them was beyond all question the misery of her married life. Her husband
was a wretched creature. Nature had made him mean, the smallpox had made
him hideous, and his degraded habits made him loathsome. And Peter had
all the sentiments of the worst kind of small German prince of the time.
He had the conviction that his princeship entitled him to disregard
decency and the feelings of others. He planned brutal practical jokes,
in which blows had always a share. His most manly taste did not rise
above the kind of military interest which has been defined as
"corporal's mania," the passion for uniforms, pipeclay, buttons, the
"tricks of parade and the froth of discipline." He detested the
Russians, and surrounded himself with Holsteiners. For ten years the
marriage was barren, and the only reason for supposing that the future
tsar Paul (q.v.), who was born on the 2nd of October 1754, was the son
of Peter, is the strong similarity of their characters. Living in the
grossly animal court of the empress Elizabeth, bound to a husband whom
she could not but despise and detest, surrounded by suitors, and
entirely uninfluenced by religion, Catherine became and remained
perfectly immoral in her sexual relations to men. The scandalous
chronicle of her life was the commonplace of all Europe. Her male
favourites were as openly paraded as the female favourites of King Louis
XV. It may be said once and for all that her most trusted agents while
she was still grand-duchess, and her chief ministers when she became
empress, were also her lovers, and were known to be so.
For some time after the marriage, the young couple were controlled by
the empress Elizabeth, who appointed court officials to keep a watch on
their conduct; but before long these custodians themselves had become
the agents of Catherine's pleasures and ambition. After the birth of
Paul she began to take an active part in political intrigues. Her
abilities forced even her husband to rely on her judgment. When in
difficulty he ran to her and flattered her with the name of Madame La
Ressource--Madame Quick Wit--which did not prevent him from insulting
and even kicking her when the immediate need of her help was over. In
1758 he endeavoured to turn the empress Elizabeth against her, and for a
time Catherine was in danger. She faced the peril boldly, and
reconquered her influence over the sovereign, but from this time she
must have realized that when the empress was dead she would have to
defend herself against her husband. That Peter both hated and dreaded
her was notorious. The empress Elizabeth died on the 5th of January
1762. The grand duke succeeded without opposition as Peter III. His
behaviour to his wife continued to be brutal and menacing, and he went
on as before offending the national sentiment of the Russian people. In
July he committed the insane error of retiring with his Holsteiners to
Oranienbaum, leaving his wife at St Petersburg. On the 13th and 14th of
that month a "pronunciamiento" of the regiments of the guard removed him
from the throne and made Catherine empress. The history of this revolt
is still obscure. It has naturally been said that she organized the
mutiny from the first, and some plausibility is conferred on this belief
by the fact that the guards were manipulated by the four Orlov brothers.
The eldest, Gregory, was her recognized chief lover, and he was
associated with his brother Alexis in the office of favourite. On the
other hand, there does not appear to have been any need for
organization. The hatred felt for Peter III. was spontaneous, and
Catherine had no need to do more than let it be known that she was
prepared to profit by her husband's downfall. Peter, who behaved with
abject cowardice, was sent to a country house at Ropcha, where he died
on the 15th or 18th of July of official "apoplexy." The truth is not
known, and Frederick the Great at least professed long afterwards to
believe that Catherine had no immediate share in the murder. She had no
need to speak. Common-sense must have shown the leaders of the revolt
that they would never be safe while Peter lived, and they had insults to
avenge.
The mere fact that Catherine II., a small German princess without
hereditary claim to the throne, ruled Russia from 1762 to 1796 amid the
loyalty of the great mass of the people, and the respect and admiration
of her neighbours, is sufficient proof of the force of her character.
Her title to be considered a great reforming ruler is by no means
equally clear. Voltaire and the encyclopaedists with whom she
corresponded, and on whom she conferred gifts and pensions, repaid her
by the grossest flattery, while doing their best to profit by her
generosity. They made her a reputation for "philosophy," and showed the
sincerity of their own love of freedom by finding excuses for the
partition of Poland. There is a very great difference between Catherine
II. as she appears in the panegyrics of the encyclopaedists and
Catherine as she appears in her correspondence and in her acts. Her
foreign admirers amused her, and were useful in spreading her
reputation. The money they cost her was a small sum in comparison to the
L12,000,000 she lavished on her long series of lovers, who began with
Soltykov and Stanislaus Poniatowski (q.v.) before she came to the
throne, and ended with the youthful Platon Zubov, who was tenant of the
post at her death. She spent money freely on purchasing works of art and
curios. Yet she confessed with her usual candour that she had no taste
for painting, sculpture or music. Her supposed love of literature does
not appear to have amounted to more than a lively curiosity, which could
be satisfied by dipping into a great number of books. She had a passion
for writing, and produced not only a mass of letters written in French,
but pamphlets and plays, comic and serious, in French and Russian. One
on the history of Oleg, the more or less legendary Varangian, who was
guardian to the son of Rurik, was described by her as an "imitation of
Shakespeare." The scheme is not unlike that of a "chronicle play." Her
letters are full of vivacity, of colour, and at times of insight and
wit, but she never learnt to write either French or German correctly.
The letters to Voltaire attributed to her are not hers, and were
probably composed for her by Andrei Shuvalov. The philosophers and
encyclopaedists who, by the mouth of Diderot, complimented Catherine on
being superior to such female affectations as modesty and chastity,
flattered her to some extent even here. She enforced outward decency in
her household, was herself temperate in eating and drinking, and was by
no means tolerant of disorderly behaviour on the part of the ladies of
her court. They flattered her much more when they dwelt on her
philanthropy and her large share of the enlightenment of the age. She
was kind to her servants, and was very fond of young children. She was
rarely angry with people who merely contradicted her or failed to
perform their service in her household. But she could order the use of
the knout and of mutilation as freely as the most barbarous of her
predecessors when she thought the authority of the state was at stake,
and she did employ them readily to suppress all opinions of a heterodox
kind, whether in matters of religion or of politics, after the beginning
of the French Revolution. Her renowned toleration stopped short of
allowing the dissenters to build chapels, and her passion for
legislative reform grew cold when she found that she must begin by the
emancipation of the serfs. There were exceptions even to her personal
kindness to those about her. She dropped her German relations. She kept
a son born to her shortly before the palace revolution of 1762, whose
paternity could not be attributed to Peter, at a distance, though she
provided for him. He was brought up in a private station under the name
of Bobrinski. She was a harsh mother to her son Paul. It seems highly
probable that she intended to exclude him from the succession, and to
leave the crown to her eldest grandson Alexander, afterwards the emperor
Alexander I. Her harshness to Paul was probably as much due to political
distrust as to what she saw of his character. Whatever else Catherine
may have been she was emphatically a sovereign and a politician who was
in the last resort guided by the reason of state. She was resolved not
to allow her authority to be disputed by her son, or shared by him.
As a ruler, Catherine professed a great contempt for system, which she
said she had been taught to despise by her master Voltaire. She declared
that in politics a capable ruler must be guided by "circumstances,
conjectures and conjunctions." Her conduct was on the surface very
unstable. In a moment of candour she confessed that she was a great
_commenceuse_--that she had a mania for beginning innumerable
enterprises which she never pursued. This, however, is chiefly true of
her internal administration, and even there it should be qualified. Many
of her beginnings were carried on by others and were not barren. Her
foreign policy was as consistent as it could be considering the forces
she had to contend against. It was steadily aimed to secure the
greatness and the safety of Russia. There can be no question, that she
loved her adopted country sincerely, and had an affection for her
people, and an opinion of their great qualities which she did not
hesitate to express in hyperbolical terms. Her zeal for the reputation
of the Russians was almost comically shown by the immense trouble she
took to compile an answer to the _Voyage en Siberie_ of the French
astronomer Chappe d'Auteroche. The book is in three big quartos, and
Catherine's answer--which was never finished--is still larger. Chappe
d'Auteroche had discovered that Siberia was not a paradise, and had
observed that the Russians were dirty in their habits, and that masters
whipped their servants, male and female. Her patriotism was less
innocently shown by her conquests. Yet it may be doubted whether any
capable ruler of Russia could have abstained from aggressions at the
expense of the rights of the Saxon family in Courland, of Poland, and of
Turkey (see RUSSIA: _History_). It does seem now to be clearly proved
that the partition of Poland was not suggested by her, as has been
frequently asserted. Catherine would have preferred to control the
country through a vassal sovereign of the type of Stanislaus
Poniatowski, the old lover whose election she secured in 1763. Poland
was incapable of maintaining its independence at the time of the first
partition (1772), and the division of the unhappy country was forced on
by Austria and Prussia. In the case of the second partition in 1793, she
did show herself to be very unscrupulous. Her opposition to the reform
of the Polish government was plainly due to a wish to preserve an excuse
for further spoliation, but her conduct was less cruel and base than
that of Prussia.
Catherine had adhered to her husband's policy of a Prussian alliance.
While Frederick the Great lived she was impressed by his ability. But
the Prussian alliance became hateful to her, and her later
correspondence with Grimm overflows with contempt of his successor
Frederick William II., who is always spoken of by her as "Brother Gu."
Her exasperation with the affectations of the Prussian king was
unquestionably increased by her discovery that he would not be induced
to apply himself to a crusade against the French Revolution, which by
employing all his forces would have left Russia free to annex the whole
of what remained of Poland. But at least she did not enter into a solemn
engagement to defend the Poles who were engaged in reforming their
constitution, and then throw them over in order to share in the plunder
of their country.
Catherine's Turkish policy was at first marked by a certain grandiosity.
When the Turks declared war in 1768 in order to support Poland, which
they looked upon as a necessary buffer state, she retaliated by the
great Greek scheme. For a time it was a pet idea with her to revive the
Greek empire, and to plant the cross, with the double-headed Russian
eagle, at Constantinople. She formed a corps of Greek cadets, caused her
younger grandson to be christened Constantine, and began the policy of
presenting Russia to the Christian subjects of the Porte as their
deliverer. In pursuit of this heroic enterprise, which excited the loud
admiration of Voltaire, she sent a fleet under Alexis Orlov into the
Mediterranean in 1770. Orlov tempted the Greeks of the Morea to take up
arms, and then left them in the lurch. When Catherine found herself
opposed by the policy of France and England, and threatened by the
jealousy of Prussia and Austria, she dropped the Greek design, observing
to Voltaire that the descendants of the Spartans were much degenerated.
The introduction into the treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji of 1774 of a clause
by which the Porte guaranteed the rights of its Christian subjects, and
of another-giving Russia the right to interfere on behalf of a new
Russian church in Constantinople, advertised the claim of the tsars to
be the natural protectors of the Orthodox in the Ottoman dominions; but
when she took up arms again in 1788 in alliance with Joseph II. (q.v.),
it was to make a mere war of conquest and partition. The Turkish wars
show the weak side of Catherine as a ruler. Though she had mounted the
throne by a military revolt and entered on great schemes of conquest,
she never took an intelligent interest in her army. She neglected it in
peace, allowed it to be shamefully administered in war, and could never
be made to understand that it was not in her power to improvise generals
out of her favourites. It is to her credit that she saw the capacity of
Suvarov, yet she never had as much confidence in him as she had in
Potemkin, who may have been a man of genius, but was certainly no
general. She took care never to have to deal with a disciplined
opponent, except the Swedes, who beat her, but who were very few.
It was the misfortune of Catherine that she lived too long. She
disgraced herself by living with her last lover, Zubov, when she was a
woman of sixty-seven, trusting him with power and lavishing public money
on him. The outbreak of the French Revolution stripped off the varnish
of philosophy and philanthropy which she had assumed in earlier years.
She had always entertained a quiet contempt for the French writers whom
she flattered and pensioned, and who served her as an advertising agency
in the west. When the result of their teaching was seen in Paris,
good-natured contempt was turned to hatred. She then became a persecutor
in her own dominions of the very ideas she had encouraged in former
years. She scolded and preached a crusade, without, however, departing
from the steady pursuit of her own interests in Poland, while
endeavouring with transparent cunning to push Austria and Prussia into
an invasion of France with all their forces. Her health began to break
down, and it appears to be nearly certain that towards the end she
suffered from hysteria of a shameful kind. It is plain that her
intellect had begun to fail just before her death, for she allowed the
reigning favourite, Platon Zubov, to persuade her to despatch his
brother Valerian, with the rank of field marshal and an army of 20,000
men, on a crack-brained scheme to invade India by way of Persia and
Tibet. The refusal of the king of Sweden to marry into her family unless
the bride would become a Lutheran is said to have thrown her into a
convulsion of rage which hastened her death. On the 9th of November
1796, she was seized by a fit of apoplexy, and died on the evening of
the 10th.
All other accounts of Catherine II. have been superseded by
Waliszewski's two volumes, _Le Roman d'une imperatrice_ (Paris, 1893)
and _Autour d'un Trone: Catherine II., ses collaborateurs, ses amis,
ses favoris_ (Paris, 1894). The original sources for the history of
her policy and her character are to be found in the publications of
the Imperial Russian Historical Society, vols. i.-cix. (St
Petersburg), begun in 1867; her private and official correspondence
will be found in vols. i., ii., iv., v., vi., vii., viii., ix., x.,
xiii., xiv., xv., xvii., xx., xxiii., xxxii., xxxiii., xxxvi., xlii.,
xliii., xlvii., xlviii., li., lvii., lxvii., lxviii., lxxxvii.,
xcvii., xcviii., cvii., cxv., cxviii.
CATHERINE DE' MEDICI (1519-1589), queen of France, the wife of one
French king and the mother of three, was born at Florence in 1519. She
was a daughter of Lorenzo II. de' Medici and a French princess,
Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne. Having lost both her parents at an
early age, Catherine was sent to a convent to be educated; and she was
only fourteen when she was married (1533) at Marseilles to the duke of
Orleans, afterwards Henry II. It was her uncle, Pope Clement VII., who
arranged the marriage with Francis I. Francis, still engaged in his
lifelong task of making head against Charles V., was only too glad of
the opportunity to strengthen his influence in the Italian peninsula,
while Clement, ever needful of help against his too powerful protector,
was equally ready to hold out a bait. During the reign of Francis,
Catherine exercised no influence in France. She was young, a foreigner,
a member of a state that had almost no weight in the great world of
politics, had not given any proof of great ability, and was thrown into
the shade by more important persons. For ten years after her marriage
she had no children. In consequence, a divorce began to be talked of at
court; and it seemed not impossible that Francis, alarmed at the
possible extinction of the royal house, might listen to such a proposal.
But Catherine had the happiness of bringing him grandchildren ere he
died. During the reign of her husband, too (1547-1559), Catherine lived
a quiet and passive, but observant life. Henry being completely under
the influence of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, she had little
authority. In 1552, when the king left the kingdom for the campaign of
Metz, she was nominated regent, but with very limited powers. This
continued even after the accession of her son Francis II. Francis was
under the spell of Mary Stuart, and she, little disposed to meddle with
politics on her own account, was managed by her uncles, the cardinal of
Lorraine and the duke of Guise. The queen-mother, however, soon grew
weary of the domination of the Guises, and entered upon a course of
secret opposition. On the 1st of April 1560 she placed in the
chancellorship Michel de l'Hopital (q.v.), who advocated the policy of
conciliation.
On the death of Francis (5th of December 1560), Catherine became regent
during the minority of her second son, Charles IX., and now found before
her a career worthy of the most soaring ambition. She was then forty-one
years old, but, although she was the mother of nine children, she was
still very vigorous and active. She retained her influence for more than
twenty years in the troubled period of the wars of religion. At first
she listened to the moderate counsels of l'Hopital in so far as to avoid
siding definitely with either party, but her character and the habits of
policy to which she had been accustomed, rendered her incapable of any
noble aim. She had only one virtue, and that was her zeal for the
interests of her children, especially of her favourite third son, the
duke of Anjou. Like so many of the Italians of that time, who were
almost destitute of a moral sense, she looked upon statesmanship in
particular as a career in which finesse, lying and assassination were
the most admirable, because the most effective weapons. By habit a
Catholic, but above all things fond of power, she was determined to
prevent the Protestants from getting the upper hand, and almost equally
resolved not to allow them to be utterly crushed, in order to use them
as a counterpoise to the Guises. This trimming policy met with little
success: rage and suspicion so possessed men's minds, that she could no
longer control the opposing parties, and one civil war followed another
to the end of her life. In 1567, after the "Enterprise of Meaux," she
dismissed l'Hopital and joined the Catholic party. But, having failed to
crush the Protestant rebellion by arms, she resumed in 1570 the policy
of peace and negotiation. She conceived the project of marrying her
favourite son, the duke of Anjou, to Queen Elizabeth of England, and her
daughter Margaret to Henry of Navarre. To this end she became reconciled
with the Protestants, and allowed Coligny to return to court and to
re-enter the council. Of this step she quickly repented. Charles IX.
conceived a great affection for the admiral and showed signs of taking
up an independent attitude. Catherine, thinking her influence menaced,
sought to regain it, first by the murder of Coligny, and, when that had
failed, by the massacre of St Bartholomew (q.v.). The whole of the
responsibility for this crime, therefore, rests with Catherine; unlike
the populace, she had not even the excuse of fanaticism. This
responsibility, however, weighed but lightly on her; while her son was
overwhelmed with remorse, she calmly enjoyed her short-lived triumph.
After the death of Charles in 1574, and the succession of Anjou under
the name of Henry III., Catherine pursued her old policy of compromise
and concessions; but as her influence is lost in that of her son, it is
unnecessary to dwell upon it. She died on the 5th of January 1589, a
short time before the assassination of Henry, and the consequent
extinction of the House of Valois. In her taste for art and her love of
magnificence and luxury, Catherine was a true Medici; her banquets at
Fontainebleau in 1564 were famous for their sumptuousness. In
architecture especially she was well versed, and Philibert de l'Orme
relates that she discussed with him the plan and decoration of her
palace of the Tuileries. Catherine's policy provoked a crowd of
pamphlets, the most celebrated being the _Discours merveilleux de la
vie, actions et deportemens de la reine Catherine de Medicis_, in which
Henri Estienne undoubtedly collaborated.
See _Lettres de Catherine de Medicis_, edited by Hector de la Ferriere
(Paris, 1880, seq.), in the _Collection de documents inedits sur
l'histoire de France_; A. von Reumont, _Die Jugend Caterinas de'
Medici_ (1854; French translation by A. Baschet, 1866); H. Bouchot,
_Catherine de Medicis_ (Paris, 1899). For a more complete bibliography
see Ernest Lavisse, _Histoire de France_ (vol. v., by H. Lemonnier,
and vol. vi., by J.H. Mariejol, 1904-1905). See also Miss E. Sichel's
books, _Catherine de' Medici and the French Reformation_ (1905), and
_The Later Years of Catherine de' Medici_ (1908).
CATHERINE OF ARAGON (1485-1536), queen of Henry VIII. of England,
daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, was born on the 15th or
16th of December 1485. She left Spain in 1501 to marry Arthur, prince of
Wales, eldest son of King Henry VII., and landed at Plymouth on the 2nd
of October. The wedding took place on the 14th of November in London,
and soon afterwards Catherine accompanied her youthful husband to Wales,
where, in his sixteenth year, the prince died on the 2nd of April 1502.
On the 25th of June 1503, she was formally betrothed to the king's
second son, Henry, now prince of Wales, and a papal dispensation for the
alliance was obtained. The marriage, however, did not take place during
the lifetime of Henry VII. Ferdinand endeavoured to cheat the English
king of the marriage portion agreed upon, and Henry made use of the
presence of the unmarried princess in England to extort new conditions,
and especially to secure the marriage of his daughter Mary to the
archduke Charles, grandson of Ferdinand, and afterwards Charles V.
Catherine was thus from the first the unhappy victim of state politics.
Writing to Ferdinand on the 11th of March 1509, she describes the state
of poverty to which she was reduced, and declares the king's unkindness
impossible to be borne any longer.[1] On the old king's death, however,
a brighter prospect opened, for Henry VIII. decided immediately on
marrying her, the wedding taking place on the 11th of June and the
coronation on the 24th. Catherine now enjoyed a few years of married
happiness; Henry showed himself an affectionate husband, and the
alliance with Ferdinand was maintained against France. She was not
without some influence in state affairs. During Henry's invasion of
France in 1513 she was made regent; she showed great zeal and ardour in
the preparations for the Scottish expedition, and was riding towards the
north to put herself at the head of the troops when the victory of
Flodden Field ended the campaign. The following year an affectionate
meeting took place between the king and queen at Richmond on the return
of the former. Ferdinand's treachery, however, in making a treaty with
France roused Henry's wrath, and his angry reproaches fell upon his
unfortunate wife; but she took occasion in 1520, during the visit of her
nephew Charles V. to England, to urge the policy of gaining his alliance
rather than that of France. Immediately on his departure, on the 31st of
May 1520, she accompanied the king to France, on the celebrated visit to
Francis I., called from its splendour the Field of the Cloth of Gold;
but in 1522 war was declared against France and the emperor again
welcomed to England. In 1521 she is represented by Shakespeare as
pleading for the unfortunate duke of Buckingham.
These early years of happiness and of useful influence and activity had,
however, been gradually giving way to gloom and disappointment. Between
January 1510 and November 1518 Catherine gave birth to six children
(including two princes), who were all stillborn or died in infancy
except Mary, born in 1516, and rumour did not fail to ascribe this
series of disasters to the curse pronounced in Deuteronomy on incestuous
unions. In 1526 the condition of Catherine's health made it highly
improbable that she would have more children. No woman had ever reigned
in England, alone and in her own right, and to avoid a fresh dispute
concerning the succession, and the revival of the civil war, a male heir
to the throne was a pressing necessity. The act of marriage, which
depended for its validity on the decision of the ecclesiastical courts,
had, on account of the numerous dissolutions and dispensations granted,
not then attained the security since assured to it by the secular law.
For obtaining dissolutions of royal marriages the facilities were
especially great. Pope Clement VII. himself permitted such a dissolution
in the case of Henry's own sister Margaret, in 1528, proposed later as a
solution of the problem that Henry should be allowed two wives,[2] and
looked not unfavourably, with the same aim, on the project for marrying
the duke of Richmond to Mary, a brother to a sister.[3] In Henry's case
also the irregularity of a union, which is still generally reprobated
and forbidden in Christendom, and which it was very doubtful that the
pope had the power to legalize, provided a moral justification for a
dissolution which in other cases did not exist. It was not therefore the
immorality of the plea which obstructed the papal decree in Henry's
favour, but the unlucky imprisonment at this time of Clement VII. at the
hands of Charles V., Catherine's nephew, which obliged the pope, placed
thus "between the hammer and the anvil," to pursue a policy of delay and
hesitation. Nor was the immorality of Henry's own character the primary
cause of the project of divorce. Had this been so, a succession of
mistresses would have served as well as a series of single wives. The
real occasion was the king's desire for a male heir. But, however clear
this may be, the injustice done to Catherine was no less cruel and real.
Rumours, probably then unfounded, of an intended divorce had been heard
abroad as early as 1524. But the creation in 1525 of the king's
illegitimate son Henry, as duke of Richmond--the title borne by his
grandfather Henry VII--and the precedence granted to him over all the
peers as well as the princess Mary, together with the special honour
paid at this time by the king to his own half-sister Mary, were the
first real indications of the king's thoughts. In 1526, and perhaps
earlier, Wolsey had been making tentative inquiries at Rome on the
subject. In May 1527 a collusive and secret suit was begun before the
cardinal, who, as legate, summoned the king to defend himself from the
charge of cohabitation with his brother's wife; but these proceedings
were dropped. On the 22nd of June Henry informed Catherine that they had
been living in mortal sin and must separate. During Wolsey's absence in
July at Paris, where he had been commissioned to discuss vaguely the
divorce and Henry's marriage with Renee, daughter of Louis XII., Anne
Boleyn is first heard of in connexion with the king, his affection for
her having, however, begun probably as early as 1523, and the cardinal
on his return found her openly installed at the court. In October 1528
the pope issued a commission to Cardinal Campeggio and Wolsey to try the
cause in England, and bound himself not to revoke the case to Rome,
confirming his promise by a secret decretal commission which, however,
was destroyed by Campeggio. But the trial was a sham. Campeggio was
forbidden to pronounce sentence without further reference to Rome, and
was instructed to create delays, the pope assuring Charles V. at the
same time that the case should be ultimately revoked to Rome.[4]
The object of all parties was now to persuade Catherine to enter a
nunnery and thus relieve them of further embarrassment. While Henry's
envoys were encouraged at Rome in believing that he might then make
another marriage, Henry himself gave Catherine assurances that no other
union would be contemplated in her lifetime. But Catherine with courage
and dignity held fast to her rights, demanded a proper trial, and
appealed not only to the bull of dispensation, the validity of which was
said to be vitiated by certain irregularities, but to a brief granted
for the alliance by Pope Julius II. Henry declared the latter to be a
forgery, and endeavoured unsuccessfully to procure a declaration of its
falsity from the pope. The court of the legates accordingly opened on
the 31st of May 1529, the queen appearing before it on the 18th of June
for the purpose of denying its jurisdiction. On the 21st both Henry and
Catherine presented themselves before the tribunal, when the queen threw
herself at Henry's feet and appealed for the last time to his sense of
honour, recalling her own virtue and helplessness. Henry replied with
kindness, showing that her wish for the revocation of the cause to Rome
was unreasonable in view of the paramount influence then exercised by
Charles V. on the pope. Catherine nevertheless persisted in making
appeal to Rome, and then withdrew. After her departure Henry, according
to Cavendish, Wolsey's biographer, praised her virtues to the court.
"She is, my lords, as true, as obedient, as conformable a wife as I
could in my phantasy wish or desire. She hath all the virtues and
qualities that ought to be in a woman of her dignity or in any other of
baser estate." On her refusal to return, her plea was overruled and she
was adjudged contumacious, while the sittings of the court continued in
her absence. Subsequently the legates paid her a private visit of
advice, but were unable to move her from her resolution. Finally,
however, in July 1529, the case was, according to her wish, and as the
result of the treaty of Barcelona and the pope's complete surrender to
Charles V., revoked by the pope to Rome: a momentous act, which decided
Henry's future attitude, and occasioned the downfall of the whole papal
authority in England. On the 7th of March 1530 Pope Clement issued a
brief forbidding Henry to make a second marriage, and ordering the
restitution of Catherine to her rights till the cause was determined;
while at the same time he professed to the French ambassador, the bishop
of Tarbes, his pleasure should the marriage with Anne Boleyn have been
already made, if only it were not by his authority.[5] The same year
Henry obtained opinions favourable to the divorce from the English,
French and most of the Italian universities, but unfavourable answers
from Germany, while a large number of English peers and ecclesiastics,
including Wolsey and Archbishop Warham, joined in a memorial to the pope
in support of Henry's cause.
Meanwhile, Catherine, while the great question remained unsolved, was
still treated by Henry as his queen, and accompanied him in his visits
in the provinces and in his hunting expeditions. On the 31st of May 1531
she was visited by thirty privy councillors, who urged the trial of the
case in England, but they met only with a firm refusal. On the 14th of
July Henry left his wife at Windsor, removing himself to Woodstock, and
never saw her again. In August she was ordered to reside at the Moor in
Hertfordshire, and at the same time separated from the princess Mary,
who was taken to Richmond. In October she again received a deputation of
privy councillors, and again refused to withdraw the case from Rome. In
1532 she sent the king a gold cup as a new year's gift, which the latter
returned, and she was forbidden to hold any communication with him.
Alone and helpless in confronting Henry's absolute power, her cause
found champions and sympathizers among the people, among the court
preachers, and in the House of Commons, while Bishop Fisher had openly
taken her part in the legatine trial. Subsequently Catherine was removed
to Bishops Hatfield, while Henry and Anne Boleyn visited Francis I.
Their marriage, anticipating any sentence of the nullity of the union
with Catherine, took place after their return about the 25th of January
1533, in consequence of Anne's pregnancy. On the 10th of May Cranmer,
for whose consecration as archbishop of Canterbury Henry had obtained
bulls from Rome, opened his court, and declared on the 23rd the nullity
of Catherine's marriage and the validity of Anne's. On the 10th of
August the king caused proclamation to be made forbidding her the style
of queen; but Catherine refused resolutely to yield the title for that
of princess-dowager. Not long afterwards she was removed to Buckden in
Huntingdonshire. Here her household was considerably reduced, and she
found herself hemmed in by spies, and in fact a prisoner. In July she
had refused Henry the loan of a certain rich cloth, which had done
service at the baptism of her children, for the use of Anne Boleyn's
expected infant; and on the birth of Elizabeth and the refusal of Mary
to give up the title of princess, the latter's household was entirely
dismissed and she herself reduced to the position of attendant in
Elizabeth's retinue. A project for removing Catherine from Buckden to
Somersham, an unhealthy solitude in the isle of Ely, with a still
narrower maintenance, was only prevented by her own determined
resistance. The attempt in November to incriminate the queen in
connexion with Elizabeth Barton failed. She passed her life now in
religious devotions, taking strict precautions against the possibility
of being poisoned. On the 23rd of March 1534 the pope pronounced her
marriage valid, but by this time England had thrown off the papal
jurisdiction, the parliament had transferred Catherine's jointure to
Anne Boleyn, and the decree had no effect on Catherine's fortunes. She
refused to swear to the new act of succession, which declared her
marriage null and Anne's infant the heir to the throne, and soon
afterwards she was removed to Kimbolton, where she was well treated. On
the 21st of May she was visited by the archbishop of York and Tunstall,
bishop of Durham, who threatened her with death if she persisted in her
refusal, but only succeeded in confirming her resolution. She was kept
in strict seclusion, separated from Mary and from all outside
communications, and in December 1535 her health gave way, her death
taking place on the 8th of January 1536, not without suspicions of
poison, which, however, may be dismissed. She was buried by the king's
order in Peterborough cathedral. Before her death she dictated a last
letter to Henry, according to Polydore Vergil, expressing her
forgiveness, begging his good offices for Mary, and concluding with the
astounding assurance--"I vow that mine eyes desire you above all
things." The king himself affected no sorrow at her death, and thanked
God there was now no fear of war.
Catherine is described as "rather ugly than otherwise; of low stature
and rather stout; very good and very religious; speaks Spanish, French,
Flemish, English; more beloved by the islanders than any queen that has
ever reigned." She was a woman of considerable education and culture,
her scholarship and knowledge of the Bible being noted by Erasmus, who
dedicated to her his book on _Christian Matrimony_ in 1526. She endured
her bitter and undeserved misfortunes with extraordinary courage and
resolution, and at the same time with great womanly forbearance, of
which a striking instance was the compassion shown by her for the fallen
Wolsey.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--See the article in _Dict. of Nat. Biog._ by J.
Gairdner, and those on Henry VIII. and Wolsey, where the case is
summed up very adversely to Henry, and _The Divorce of Catherine of
Aragon_, by J.A. Froude (1891), where it is regarded from the contrary
aspect; _Henry VIII._, by A. F. Pollard (1905); _Cambridge Mod.
History_ (1903), ii. 416 et seq. and bibliographies, p. 789; _The
Wives of Henry VIII._, by M. Hume (1905). (P. C. Y.)