CATHERINE THE LITTLE
THE whims of monarchs have created more romances in the history of women
than the fancy of the novelist has ever invented, and the story of
Peter’s wife and successor is one of the most piquant of these real
adventures. Although in the years of her prosperity she did not shrink
from the mention of her humble origin, the details of her childhood were
never confidently known and are a matter of endless speculation. It is
generally believed that she was the daughter of a Livonian peasant, but
she makes her first certain appearance as maid-of-all-work in the house
of a poor German pastor. Profoundly ignorant, plain of feature, coarse
in taste, this woman became in time the sole mistress of the Russian
Empire.
At the beginning of the Swedish war, in 1702, General Sheremetieff and
the Russian forces besieged Marienburg. The Swedish commander threatened
to blow up the fort rather than surrender, and the inhabitants fled to
the Russian lines. Amongst them, brandishing his credentials (his
Bible), was the Lutheran pastor of the town, with his wife and children
and maid. He was suffered to proceed to Russia, but the maid remained in
the camp. She was then seventeen years old, a lusty and vigorous
peasant-girl such as soldiers covet. The pastor had eked out his slender
income by taking lodgers, and it may or may not be true that Catherine,
or Martha, as she is believed to have been named at the time, was too
intimate with them, and had been married by the pastor for the
protection of her morals. She had no more morals than Peter. In the camp
she now gained rapid promotion. At first she washed the shirts and
shared the bed and board of a non-commissioned officer; then she had the
favour of General Sheremetieff; then the florid taste of Menshikoff was
attracted to her, and she was drafted to his household, and harem, at
Moscow. There Peter saw and appropriated her.
There is, as I said, little reason to seek some secret of her success.
She was of the robust sensual type that Peter preferred. But she must
have been at once shrewd and amiable to have kept his affection as long
as she did. His letters to her show, besides the link of common
coarseness and frank sensuality, a good deal of affection on both sides.
Peter took her to the cottage which he built on the banks of the Neva,
where her second boy was born. It was a small two-roomed cottage, of
rough-hewn trunks of trees, only about fifty feet in frontage and less
in depth. In one of the plain rooms, the walls of which were covered
with canvas, Peter planned and received visitors. In the other Catherine
and he dined, with an occasional intimate friend, and slept. In 1708 he
built a larger and rather finer cottage, more neatly furnished, but, as
in earlier days, he preferred to let Menshikoff keep a palace in which,
with all splendour of gold plate and powdered lackeys and an army of
cooks, he could give his banquets. In the cottage with Catherine he ate
his large coarse meals, drank his tea and gin and brandy, and smoked
great quantities of tobacco. He carried about with him his wooden spoon
and bone-handled knife and fork. Catherine darned his woollen socks and
washed his shirts--fine clean linen was almost the one luxury he
liked--and babies appeared with great regularity. Often when the
tramp of his heavy boots told that he was in a mood of fury, when
servants and friends fled, for he would hit out with fist or cane or
even sword at such times, Catherine took his blood-congested head in her
plump hands and ran her fingers through his thick hair; and he gradually
sank to sleep on her breast.
She was good to him, he felt, and he must provide for her and the
children. But he was now a great monarch, corresponding with all the
courts of Europe and visiting many of them. The idea of marrying her
must be given long consideration. There were Eudoxia’s sons, and there
were Catherine’s sons. It was a puzzling business, and Peter did not
attack a puzzling business when it could wait. In 1706 he seemed to
make up his mind. He took the whole company of “the girls”--Catherine,
and Anisia Tolstoi, and the two Menshikoffs and two Arsenieffs--to
Kieff, summoned Menshikoff, and told him that he must marry Daria
Arsenieff and become respectable. Menshikoff was not the man to be
restricted by vows of marriage, and he obeyed. But Peter did not, as
Catherine expected, follow his friend’s example. He was content to
make a will in which he assigned her and her four children an
imperial legacy of 1,500 dollars!
By 1711 he let it be understood that Catherine was his wife, and he
publicly went through the form of marriage with her. Whether there was a
valid marriage or no is not clear. Catherine is said to have been
married at Marienburg, and Peter’s first marriage does not seem to
have been annulled by the proper authorities. Russia and Europe would
not inquire too closely. Catherine went with him everywhere, except to
Paris, and shared his long rides on horseback and his rough camp-life.
She never attempted to interfere in affairs of State; but she secretly
made large sums of money by getting favours or pardon for offenders. She
remained very friendly with Menshikoff, who taught her the security of
foreign investments.
Peter discovered her trickery, and a cloud came over their relations,
but the question of the succession worried him. The new complication was
that he was intimate with the charming daughter of Prince Kantemir of
Wallachia. The Prince had lost his little principality after Peter’s
defeat on the Pruth, and had come to St. Petersburg to seek
compensation. He knew the relation of the Tsar to his daughter Maria and
expected him to divorce Catherine and wed her. It was a very anxious
time for all. Alexis died, or was executed, in 1718; Catherine’s second
son died in 1719; and in 1722 Maria Kantemir, who was then at Astrakhan,
expected a child. To the relief of Catherine and her party, and the
violent anger of Peter, Maria had a miscarriage and nearly died.
Catherine now got the title of Empress, and in 1724 she was crowned.
Still Peter, although his health gave great concern, evaded the problem
of the succession, but he allowed Catherine a superb coronation. When
she showed him her magnificent robe, which cost 2,000 dollars, he
impatiently pushed it aside, but he let her have a crown made which cost
nearly a million dollars. And within little over six months she, by her
reckless and ungrateful conduct, forfeited whatever right she may have
had and barely escaped with her life.
We remember the giddy Anna Mons, Peter’s mistress for a time in the
foreign settlement at Moscow. Anna’s brother William was one of
Catherine’s chamberlains, and the whole court believed that they were
intimate. At length a letter which is said to have proved it fell into
Peter’s hands. He seems to have felt bitterly the ignominy of publicly
discrowning his new Empress, and for a long time he did nothing, beyond
torturing a witness or two to extract proof. They thought that he had
decided to overlook it, and both Catherine and Mons were at supper with
him one night in November. “What time is it?” he suddenly asked, and
Catherine replied that it was nine. He grimly took her watch, put it on
three hours, and said that, as it was midnight, everybody would go to
bed. Mons was arrested and tortured, and, after a few days, beheaded on
the ground of corrupt practices. His sister Matrena was knouted and sent
to Siberia. Catherine’s personal fortune was taken out of her hands for
administration, and officials were forbidden in future to take any
orders from her.
The iron nerve of the woman in those awful days proves that, in spite of
her origin and ways, she had a steady head and strong character. Peter
took her for a drive, and passed so close to the scaffold that her dress
almost brushed against the body of Mons. She did not flinch. He had the
head put into a glass vessel of spirits of wine and placed in her room.
She took no notice. When he angrily smashed a costly Venetian glass with
his fist, saying that he would so treat her and her relatives, she
scolded him for the waste. He still saw Maria Kantemir daily, and he now
professed to make a discovery which doubled his fury. He had the Greek
doctor who had attended Maria in 1722 “questioned,” and
Catherine was accused of having procured the miscarriage.
What his precise reasons were for not prosecuting and disowning
Catherine we do not know. Some think that he spared her out of
affection: some that, as he still sought a French prince for his and her
daughter, he shrank from the scandal. His mind was in a maudlin state.
Decades of terrific work and constant debauch had brought their
inevitable consequence, yet, with periods of enforced sobriety, he still
maintained his wild ways. The year 1724 had been one of reckless orgies
and much illness, and it was in 1725 that he caused the death of an aged
noble by making him sit for hours, naked, on the frozen Neva because he
would not join their licentious and childish revels. Peter was still the
man who, in 1715, had dissected with his own hands the corpse of his
aunt Apraxin to see if she was really a virgin.
In the first month of 1725 he had a superficial reconciliation with
Catherine. A few weeks later, however, he caught a fatal chill, and he
died within a fortnight. Russia did not mourn. His great and real
services were such as only a later age could appreciate. His rugged,
vicious, cruel personality was known to all, and the cost of his work
had been heavy. One might say that there was in Peter the material of a
great man, but the Romanoff dynasty never produced a great man. The
material, in this one opportunity, was too deeply vitiated to develop.
Peter was an incarnation of the national vices and--except
indolence--the weaknesses he ought to have assailed.
The unsubstantiality of most of his work appears in the sequel. Before
he was dead there began the traditional squabble for power, the familiar
grouping and intriguing of parties. The great majority of the nobles and
clergy were in favour of Peter, the young son of Alexis and Charlotte.
Catherine was too closely identified with the dying Tsar and all his
hated schemes and reforms. But a few great nobles like Prince Menshikoff
and Count Tolstoi knew that their fortune was bound up with that of
Catherine, and they set to work as soon as the Tsar’s illness proved
fatal. The troops were discontented, their pay in arrears and their
limbs weary from the heavy constructive work to which Peter had put
them. Catherine was directed to appeal to them for support and promise
ample pay. The higher clergy who held power under Peter’s new
scheme of Church-government were equally interested in sustaining his
work. The palace was full of whispers and secret movements.
The Council met while Peter lay dying, and the spokesmen of the majority
confidently proposed his grandson for the throne. Tolstoi attacked them,
and proposed Catherine; and after a long and furious debate Catherine
was declared Autocrat of all the Russias. They found her weeping at
Peter’s bedside, and there was a rush to take the oath. Moscow was
mutinous for a time, but the army was won by generous treatment, and the
country followed. The guards were provided with new uniforms and pay,
and it was decreed that in future soldiers must not be employed upon
such work as the making of canals. For the mass of the people, too, a
great relief was afforded by the reduction, by one third, of the
crushing poll-tax which Peter had imposed; and a political amnesty
brought back thousands to their homes from the squalid jails or the
frozen wastes of the north and of Sibera.
Catherine gladly suffered the power she had obtained to pass into the
hands of the nobles who had fought for it. We may, in fact, dismiss her
rule, in its personal aspect, with the remark that she did not rule at
all. She had the wealth and security which she desired, and her one
concern was to retain them through all the quarrels and intrigues of her
court, and, if possible, transmit them to one of her daughters. As
trouble increased, she retired more and more to the privacy of her
luxurious apartments and sought oblivion in intoxication.
A half dozen nobles who had been trained in the school of Peter formed a
small aristocratic clique which governed the country and sustained some
of the late Tsar’s innovations. Of these Menshikoff was, naturally, the
most powerful and most prominent, and the haughtiness of the former
vender of pies rose so high that it is said to have even inspired him
with a hope of attaining the crown. He now acquired wealth without
restriction, and promoted rivals to distant employments or punished
critics as if he were already the Autocrat. The bribing of the army and
the reduction of taxation left the exchequer in a parlous condition.
Troops were disbanded, and superfluous officials removed, but the
treasury still cried for funds, and the corrupt tax-gatherers were
hardly checked.
A good deal of discontent arose, and it found a spokesman in one of the
most powerful prelates, the Archbishop of Novgorod. The prelate had
supported the election of Catherine, but he had expected her to show her
gratitude by reviving the patriarchate and entrusting it to him. Quite
possibly some such promise had been made. It was a world of consummate
knavery. Theodosius, therefore, when he saw that there was no intention
of reviving the patriarchate, discovered, and angrily declared, that it
was little less than a scandal to have a woman at the head of the
Russian Church. Menshikoff made short work of the hypocritical zealot,
whose ways were notorious. It was soon established that Theodosius had
appropriated for domestic use the gold and silver vessels of the altar,
and had melted down such ornaments as could not be put to profane use.
He was disgraced and banished.
A more curious rival of the favourite--a rival even, according to some,
in the affection of the dissipated Empress--was Charles Frederick, Duke
of Holstein, nephew of Charles XII of Sweden. He was an amiable,
mediocre youth who had lost his duchy in the European scramble for
fragments of the broken Swedish kingdom, and he had come to the Russian
court with a pretension to the Swedish throne itself. Catherine’s
protection of him gave great offence in England and embarrassed her
ministers. George I had no wish to see the question of the old Swedish
possessions reopened, and in all the courts of Europe his
representatives fought, and defeated, those of Russia. Indeed in the
spring of 1706 he sent a fleet to Russia, and the admiral insolently
announced that he had come to compel the Russian fleet to keep to its
harbours. The English had heard that Catherine was collecting troops for
some enterprise in the interest of her favourite. She--or her able
minister Ostermann--made a bold reply, and joined the Spanish-Austrian
League which confronted England and her allies. Fortunately, the
struggle did not reach the strain of war, or the loose and shifty
administration of Russia might have suffered.
Charles Frederick remained for the present at the Russian court and was
assiduous in attendance upon the Empress. He was made a member of the
Privy Council of six which took affairs out of the hands of the listless
Catherine, and on May 21st, 1725, he married the Princess Anne. Neither
Anne nor Peter had welcomed his offer, but Catherine now urged the
match.
The other leading members of the Privy Council, or the oligarchy, were
Count Tolstoi and the foreign minister Ostermann. Tolstoi was one of the
envoys of Peter who had enticed Alexis from Naples: a polished and
supple courtier, an astute diplomatist, and an unscrupulous adventurer,
who watched Menshikoff as one sharper watches another. Ostermann was one
of the ablest, and certainly the most conscientious of the group; while
a fourth of Peter’s men, Yaguzhinsky, a man of poor origin who had
attracted the late Tsar’s esteem by his vivacity and his extraordinary
capacity for liquor, was the most bitter and outspoken critic of
Menshikoff. Before Peter had been buried many days they quarrelled
violently, and Yaguzhinsky, who was drunk, went to the tomb of his late
master, during service, and dug with nails and teeth into the lid of the
coffin. He was not admitted to the Privy Council, which led to a fresh
outburst; and he may have felt some justification when it was known that
Menshikoff had invited his fellow-Councillors to a banquet before their
first sitting, and all had got so drunk that business was impossible.
Catherine was only forty-two years old, and a woman of robust
constitution, but in the second year of her reign her unhealthy habits
began to undermine her health and give concern. She, as I said, kept
apart, drinking in seclusion. Only Menshikoff and a few others were
admitted to the rooms where, her stout and somewhat bloated frame
dressed in heavy and tawdry finery, a bunch of orders and little figures
of saints dangling on her breast, she sank deeper into the great
national failing. She drank great quantities of Tokay. Her legs began to
swell. The eternal question of the succession to the throne was
reopened, and the violent quarrels and rivalries ran once more to secret
intrigues.
There was a growing party in favour of the boy Peter, grandson of the
late Tsar. Peter the Great had disliked the son of his rebellious son,
and had disdainfully thrust him out of notice. Peter had, in fact,
issued a pronouncement in which he claimed that the autocrat had the
power to leave his throne to whomsoever he willed. He had, we saw, never
carried out this intention and appointed a successor, and the hereditary
principle was still strong in the mind of Russia; while the nobles and
dignitaries still claimed, in effect, the right to choose between such
candidates as the hereditary principle seemed to designate. It was now a
question whether the throne should pass to the boy Peter or to one of
the young daughters, Anne and Elizabeth, of Catherine and the late Tsar.
The Duchess Anne, a tall and stately brunette, but quiet and yielding,
was not very popular. The choice seemed to lie between the boy Peter and
the Duchess Elizabeth, the younger and sprightlier of Catherine’s
daughters: a very merry and saucy child with pink cheeks and laughing
blue eyes and golden hair, and a forwardness which would very soon lead
her into mischief.
Ostermann, who had charge of Peter’s education and saw that he and
Elizabeth were attached, boldly proposed to marry them (when they came
of age--they were yet children) and thus reconcile the factions. But
Elizabeth was Peter’s aunt, and Menshikoff turned impatiently away from
the learned Teutonic arguments by which Ostermann sought to justify his
plan. Catherine, of course, wanted the crown to pass to one of her
daughters, but the feeling that Peter was the rightful heir grew in
strength. Anonymous letters accused Menshikoff and Catherine of usurping
power. The majority of the courtiers were looking to Peter. There was at
court a powerful body of old-fashioned nobles who had never been
reconciled to the innovations, and these were naturally disposed to
adopt the son of the pious Alexis, who had died for the sacred
traditions of Russia. They might then bring back the late Tsar’s
first wife, Eudoxia, from her convent and let her religious and
conservative influence rule the boy.
Menshikoff at length discovered, and informed Catherine, that the
feeling in favour of Peter was irresistible. He had a daughter, Maria,
and he had resolved to wed this girl to Peter and thus secure his own
position under the new regime. Ostermann, a decent and sober statesman
who sought the good of the country, adhered to this plan, and Catherine
was compelled by her favourite, and virtual master, to agree to it.
Count Tolstoi, however, violently opposed it. He foresaw that Menshikoff
would become more powerful than ever, and he dreaded the reappearance of
Eudoxia, as he had very strongly supported the late Tsar in persecuting
her. The Count led Catherine’s daughters to her room and made a stirring
appeal for them. The young women fell upon their knees and wept, as only
Russians could, imploring their mother’s protection against the
impending dangers. But the failing Empress could only murmur that
Menshikoff had decided, and she was powerless.
Tolstoi turned to the court and tried to form a party. It had little
prestige, though there were always a few in the Russian court who were
willing to gamble on the desperate chances of an outsider, and it in
turn split on the question which of the sisters ought to be adopted. The
struggle became more tense as Catherine’s health sank. In April, 1727,
she passed into a grave condition, and Menshikoff induced her, though
she made a maudlin demonstration in favour of Elizabeth, to sign a will
bequeathing the crown to Peter. This did not put an end to intrigue, as
it was a question whether the nobles would recognise this right of
legacy which had been arbitrarily created by Peter.
Toward the end of April it was thought that the Empress was dying, and
Menshikoff, with her will in his possession, carefully guarded her from
alien influences. At length her hour, apparently, came, and the whole
court was permitted to assemble about her chamber. Through the open door
the glazed eye of the former maid and washer-woman fell upon the
brilliant throng who waited, with intense strain, the opening of another
chapter in the history of the Romanoffs. The Duke of Holstein saw the
last chance of his wife’s succession ebbing away, and he nervously
implored Count Tolstoi to make his way to the dying woman’s side
and plead for Anne. Tolstoi shook his head. Menshikoff watched the play
with rapid pulse, counting the moments before the danger was over. And
suddenly his opponents were delivered into his hands. One of Tolstoi’s
party, Count Devier, was intoxicated, and he began to behave in a way
that certainly desecrated the chamber of death. Quick as thought
Menshikoff had the rooms cleared and Devier arrested. The ever-ready
torture-chamber was opened, and, under the lash of the knout, Devier
betrayed Tolstoi and his associates. Tolstoi and his son went to
Siberia, and Devier to the shores of the Arctic. And on the same day,
May 16th, 1727, Catherine laid down her sceptre and passed away.
Her will--or the document which Menshikoff had composed and she was
supposed to have signed--was read to the dignitaries and notabilities.
The son of Alexis and Charlotte was named Peter II, and there was little
disinclination to take the oath to a grandson of the great monarch. Few,
in the agitation of the hour, saw the possibility of a reaction from a
son of Alexis, and the few who perceived that possibility thought that
they had provided against it. The Privy Council, headed by Menshikoff,
was entrusted with the Regency; and Menshikoff would see that his
relation to the boy-Emperor would soon become more intimate. In the
event of the boy’s death the crown must pass to Anne: in case of
her death to Elizabeth. Never before had there been so clearly conceived
and far-seeing a plan of succession; yet within the next three years
there were to be two revolutions, with the usual terrible consequences,
at that court of greed and passion.